Mind Body Mama: Love Letter to Seamus

My entry into Momalom’s Love It Up challenge: a love letter to my on-again/off-again martial arts training buddy Seamus who leaves for a new life in Tennessee (what the--?) this week.

Dude,

I know you are leaving soon and I have fairly spectacularly failed to say goodbye. I could blame it on a lot of things, like the fact that we just don’t fit into each other’s worlds in any kind of way that makes sense. (Seriously, do you see me fitting in at your karaoke goodbye party?) But the truth is I’m just not dealing. Jender asked me the other day how I felt about you leaving and I said, “I’m sticking with really, really pissed off.” So, there you have it.

The truth is that we stopped hooking up a while back, but so long as we both still resided in this neck of the woods there lived the possibility that on any given Wednesday night we’d be locked in a sweaty embrace, desperately trying to knock each other down. Or kicking each other across the floor with teeth-rattling power. Or practicing joint-locking pain-compliance techniques.

And laughing, always maniacally laughing.

When I met you—damn, I was jealous! You were this hot young phenom and you remembered everything they taught us. I had ten years’ training on you and just hoped to make up in depth and principles what I lacked in straight out memorizing. But then you started coming to my Saturday morning sparring class—hung-over—and I realized what a total goofball you are.

Somehow, along the way, you became my go-to person to practice anything with. The stick fighting that confused me, the falling that scared me, and the kicking that makes me love my life. I wanted to do it all, but I wanted to do it most with you.

I have trained with a lot of women in the past twenty-two years, and I have grown to love and trust many of them, but I have never had another training partner like you. I have trusted you with my body more than I have ever trusted anyone other than a lover—and if I’m honest I have to say I’ve had lovers I trusted less.

At the School of Love we say that training can bring up strong feelings, and that’s okay, but it’s one thing to say it and it’s another thing entirely to see someone else’s badass ugly rage and not want to run screaming off the scene. You and I always knew that our snarling snarkfest had more than a grain of actual anger running through it. And that was really okay because we were strong enough to hold it for each other.

Who would have thought to put the two of us together? I arrived in town with my wife in tow and my wild days a safe and distant memory while you were still stomping around in your army boots doing the Big Dyke Around Town thing. I bought a house and I’m pretty sure you slept in your truck, before it got towed. I had a baby and took her to story hour while you studied auto mechanics.

But it worked. I can’t think of another way we could have been friends but for the sheer delight we found in slugging each other. Maybe if we’d been really young together in the same city we could have squandered our connection on a drunken one night stand and a few months of really tired drama and bad poetry, but that would have been a flat-out waste. What we’ve had is the perfect dojo love story.

Did I ever thank you for everything you did for my black belt test? Like dying your hair Spike-blond, and reminding me not to punch you with my right arm after Strawberry almost broke it? Not to mention the months upon months upon months of loyal practice. That was your test too, I hope you know.

I love you like that bruise you get while sparring that doesn’t bloom until two days later and you smile when you see it because you remember how goddamned much fun you were having.

I love you like that predictably stupid fake somebody throws that still works after all these years.

Like the sneaky uppercut to the ribs,

like the way your wrist cracks in the hanging lock,

like the irritating sweep that takes your foot right out from under you and lands you on your ass,

I love you, man.

Safe travels. Don't forget us.

mind body mama: My Storybook Life

Earlier this week one of my favorite clients cancelled the third session in a row. When I called to see if I needed to stage an intervention she said, “I’m sorry—those last two were unavoidable conflicts. But the first time, I was just feeling overwhelmed. When I hung up the phone from cancelling I just lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes.”

There are times when I might have thought, “Wow, do I need to make a mental health referral here?” But this week I just thought, “Damn, why didn’t I do that?”

Because I’m fairly sure I crammed thirty seven extra errands into that found hour before I screeched up to my next session. The to-do list just keeps getting longer, and it’s not just the Christmas machine. In fact, our organization, restraint and foresight on the Christmas front seem to have bitten us in the butts. We only have a few things left to do for the holidays, which is why it’s seemed reasonable to say “yes” to untold other things. Somehow I ended up at the School of Love Monday as well as a record three times on Tuesday, and then we rescheduled a meeting for Wednesday night that got bumped by the funeral a few weeks ago. There were flu shots in there, and a session at the radio station recording some of my blog posts, and a spate of emails with the afterschool enrichment program to see if we can get Small enriched even though she’s above grade level.

It’s been the kind of week where, when I call BirthPie to see if she can watch Small for an unexpected hour she says, “Sure, but only if I can do it at your place because Frisbee’s working the overnight and has to sleep all day.”

So I say, “I gave the last extra key to the AM babysitter, I’ll have to hit the hardware store to get you one.”

And she says, “While you’re there, could you get a few extra copies of my house key for my cat sitters?”

It’s a turning of the screw kind of week: every errand leads to another; nothing is ever actually finished. I shed belongings like skin cells: my lunchbox is at the college gym, my sunglasses are accidentally left in my glove box, I can’t find a clean sports bra. I wake up in the middle of the night hoping that it is morning so I can get back to the races, my to-do list scrolling through my brain like movie credits. But it’s only two am so I pass the time making a mental inventory of my January invoices until I fall asleep again.

But it is almost over. Christmas Eve, when I will wrangle the seventh graders into an assertive and cordial team of ushers and Small will read a portion of the nativity story to the congregation, is almost here. (Note to self: must purchase 40 AA batteries for the electric votives, per order of the War Ship.) In just a few hours our Christmas week will be upon us and we are hell-bent on doing a whole lot of nothing but eating, sleeping and enjoying one another for nine long days.

***

In case you haven’t got a visual yet for why I really, really need a vacation, here’s how my workout went yesterday:

It went great, thanks for asking. I had time to work out because I had another cancellation (different favorite client) and I had the foresight not to cancel the AM babysitter. So after a surprisingly good night’s sleep and two cups of coffee I found myself tearing it up on my favorite elliptical machine. I was having so much fun sweating to Dead Prez that I cut it very close to my next appointment.

Which is why when I discovered that I didn’t have a towel with me—after I’d already gotten naked in the locker room, natch—I didn’t have enough time to get dressed and run back to the gym to borrow one.

I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to dry off with the workout clothes I’d just taken off. Eeww! Is right. And double eeww to the fact that workout clothes are now made to be moisture wicking instead of moisture absorbing so rubbing my dirty clothes on my clean body wasn’t even going to make me much dryer.

I showered very quickly. Maybe I thought a brief shower would make me less wet?

I was drying my face with a random clean sock I found at the bottom of my gym bag when I accidentally caught my earring and pulled it out of my ear. I heard it bounce all over the tiled shower stall—the earring headed in one direction, the butterfly clasp in the other. Since I don’t wear my glasses in the shower I couldn’t see where anything went. So the next thing I knew I was naked, and wet—with no chance of getting dry—on my hands and knees, crawling around a public shower, looking for my favorite earring, and late for work.

If this does not make me the poster child for mamas who need a vacation I don’t care to know what I’d have to do to qualify.

***

The AM babysitter, name of Deborah, is an absolute treasure. I worried about inviting someone into the chaos of our lives and the detritus of our decrepit house, but it has been an unmitigated success. Deborah not only makes it possible for me to work two early mornings a week, she loves and knows my daughter. Which is what I most deeply wish for when I put my child into another’s care; that the caregiver will really see her: her quirks and foibles, her gifts and challenges.

I got Deborah a downtown gift card as a year-end thank you. “Small,” I said, “please write a message to Deborah on this card, but don’t make it a Christmas message. Deborah doesn’t celebrate Christmas.” I was thinking along the lines of “Happy Holidays” or “I love you” or “Thank you for playing alien fighters with me.”

When I opened the card to tuck in one of Small’s school pictures I saw the message she wrote:

“Be ready for anything.”

In all fairness, this is the message I should have given Deborah when I hired her.

***

At dinner last night Small wanted to role-play being a lawyer. We’d been talking about how lawyers fight for people’s rights.

“What’s something that you believe in?” I asked Small.

Small drew up her most solemn and imperious self. “I think that gayness—I mean, being gay, like you guys—is OK.”

Sweetie and I looked at each other. We rarely use the words “gay” and “lesbian” around here because there’s no need to draw that strong a line between our family and other families. There are lots of different kinds of families. If it’s necessary of a conversation I might say, “There are boy-boy people and girl-girl people but most people are boy-girl people,” and Small will fail to even look up from what she’s reading to acknowledge my description of the world as she already knows it.

“Um…ok.” I stammered. “But where did you learn that word 'gayness'?”

“Akbar and Jeff’s Guide to Life.” Small grinned delightedly.

I am really not as terrible a parent as it seems, I swear.

***

After dinner we googled Life is Hell and found out it had been reissued as Life is Swell in 2007.

Small said, “Life is Swell is even funnier than Life is Hell. Because in that comic, life is definitely not swell.”

I caught her up in my arms. “Small,” I said with the deepest parental admiration, “that is called 'irony' and you have never said anything that made me more proud.”

“You’ve said that before,” came her muffled voice from my stifling hug.

“Yeah, but I mean it,” I declared. “I’m even more proud than when you said you were a feminist.”

***

When I tucked Small in last night she said sleepily, “Do you know what a bad comparison is? It’s when you say something like, ‘It was as loud as a loud noise.’”

“What’s a good comparison?” I asked.

She pondered. “‘It was as loud as a wolf’s howl’,” she said. “You have to use something that’s a loud thing. The other one is just too obvious.”

“You’re getting to be quite a good little writer,” I observed.

“You too,” she said, snuggling down. “Have you heard the saying, ‘it’s in the blood’? It’s like that. The writing.”

There it is: my storybook ending.

Mind Body Mama: Dispatch from the School of Love

Just before I left for karate camp, the School of Love promoted our very first teenage black belt. It is impossible to describe the grace and dignity of this young woman, or her enormous martial skill, or what this test meant for our school. But I must try to record the gift she gave me—a gift of healing and of hope.

I have reminded women preparing to test for rank at the School of Love, “It’s not as if we’ve never seen you do karate before.” I mean to say, "Do not be afraid to stand up in front of us. Your teachers love you and we have watched your progress. No one is trying to catch you in a mistake or set you up for failure." Quite the opposite: our leader, Janet Superhero, is consummate at creating tests that set students up for success beyond their imaginations. It is thrilling to train and prepare for an event both athletic and spiritual, both physical and emotional, both solitary and communal, and to triumph at it in ways that you never anticipated.

But I’m lying to my students. Because a test—especially a black belt test—is exactly like we’ve never seen them do karate before. What comes forth from students on tests is so consistently surprising and amazing that it’s as if the art is created anew. We watch each other practice every day but on every test we see something we have never seen before.

Karate is an art that exists only in the minds and bodies of its practitioners. It is a sculpture manifested in the bodies of its players. Our bodies are instruments of rhythms that sing only so long as we move in our forms. “Karate is a folk art,” one of my early teachers said. “We are the folk.” In an empty dojo, there is no thing that describes the art: no book, no picture, no video can capture the practice and the teachings. The only way that it is passed along is by teacher to student, in the teaching and the doing, and the art is both maintained and transformed through the heart and mind and body of each practitioner.

Karate is a giant game of telephone, spread over centuries and cultures and language, where the essence of the message miraculously endures even as the individual expression varies.

I have not even mentioned the nuances of karate style. Like dance, there are hundreds of styles and genres of martial arts. It is wonderful to see someone dancing, someone practicing martial arts. But to see someone doing your dance—replicating the style of your art—is to see your people, your history, and perhaps your legacy. You think, we move our arms to strike like that, we hold our hands in those positions, we stand in those stances, we put that sequence of moves together into that combination. I have seen people from other countries practicing forms I know, and though we could not speak to each other, we have moved together in a common language.

So we promoted this girl on the cusp of womanhood. And those of us who have been in the art for ten or twenty or thirty years got to see it reinvented in a young and flawless body. We got to see our teachings move through her, we got to see her hold and move her body in the ways that mark her as one of us: we move our arms like that, we stand in those stances. We got to see her mastery of the basics as she broke forth into brilliant improvisation, making poetry of the simple alphabet of our style.

But that was not the most remarkable part of the test.

It has been a hard year at the School of Love. Last August, we lost one of our own, a black belt twenty years in our community, beloved by all. Over the winter we faced a new challenge—the sudden departure of another beloved student in circumstances of rage and regret—made more difficult by our grief. We asked each other for help, and we showed up with our whole hearts, but our hearts were broken and our best efforts could not always make everything right. Our black belts developed wanderlust and travelled to Germany, Mexico, Israel, South Africa, and China.

Someone was always leaving. Someone was always angry. Someone was always crying.

We tried not to put too much onto the narrow shoulders of the young black belt candidate, but at the end of that winter, we were desperate for hope and light. It was time to come together without recrimination or regret, to let down our pall of sadness. It was time to love each other, to laugh. It was time to live again.

I have felt especially broken this year, caught in one of those folds of time that had me wandering the saddest parts of my own history. Small went off to Kindergarten days before my 40th birthday, and I felt five again: scared and lonely and smart and stressed out. Over and over I had to remind myself that her story is not my story, that she is resilient in ways I was not. But motherhood has been described as letting your heart go walking outside of your body, and Small’s vulnerability was nearly unbearable to me, bent as I was with grief.

Somehow, I also got snagged on another moment in my history: when I was seventeen, in the throes of clinical depression, trying to come to terms with my lesbianism, in a coercive relationship with an older woman. Perhaps it was because the student who left the School of Love was of a similar age; perhaps it was because depression folds in on itself like an accordion so that no single episode stands alone, but is magnified by every sorrow that has come before. I felt that moment of my life a lot this year, a moment when I should have been on the cusp of my life, but I was so sad and broken that I could not reach for the gold ring. Some days I could not get out of bed.

There were days this year when I was consumed with regret for the opportunities that passed me by that adolescent year and in the years that followed, when my best energies were devoted to figuring out how to live. Not how to build a successful career or make a great life, but simply how to stay alive: how to keep from getting shipwrecked by sadness, how to choose people and actions that would nourish rather than deplete me. I felt cheated for having to give my youth to this endeavor. I felt ashamed that I had not applied my intellect earlier to professional or financial concerns.

And then: the test.

I did my black belt duty for the first hours, observing and writing comments about the student’s technical strengths and weaknesses. But eventually, the poise and joy and ease and trust of the young woman who was testing overwhelmed me. I was crying more than commenting, and I closed my feedback with a final observation:

“This is a girl who is not broken.”

Too many women I know were terribly broken at that tender age: depressed or suicidal or being sexually abused. So many of us were unable to come into our lives with clear hearts and open spirits. There was a time in my life that witnessing a bold, beautiful, strong young woman would have roused my adolescent envy: why does she get to live in the light? What about me?

But I am a mama now. And the hope that a girl child could grow up confident and capable with her spirit unbroken is all that I want from this life.

And something else. I hold an image of forgiveness from an essay by Anne Lamott in which she is angry at a child who unintentionally hurts her son. For a while Lamott seethed at the kid, and then suddenly she “made the radical decision to let him off the hook.” She says, “I imagined gently lifting him off the hook of my judgment and setting him back on the ground.”

Sitting in the promotion circle, I jolted into understanding that it is not my fault that it took me this long to find the wholeness that some girls wear like a birthright. It’s a shame that I did not have it in my youth, but it’s not my shame. I thought of all the people who might have helped me back then and the ways that they fell short of what I really needed. And I thought, what if they were doing the best they could? I thought of our long clumsy year of grief and leaving and getting in one another’s way and I thought, what if we were all doing the best we could?

I felt myself lifting us all—but most of all myself—off the hook of my judgment. A judgment born of misguided belief that I could have and should have made things turn out any differently than they did. Katy Mattingly told us at the self defense instructors’ conference that when survivors of violence blame themselves, they are often seeking control. “If only I knew exactly what I did wrong,” the logic goes, “I’ll make sure to never do it again.”

If only vigilance could keep me from slipping down the rabbit hole of depression or having conflict with people I love. If only it could keep my friends from dying or ever being hurt. If I could take away a fraction of the pain that is carried by the women I love, I would never close my eyes again.

But we can’t be one another’s wholeness. We can only be each other’s students and teachers and sisters on the journey. We can only act as if we love each other. We can only do the very best we can and have hope—the shining hope of a brave girl becoming a triumphant woman—that it will be enough.

Source: Anne Lamott, “Why I Make Sam Go to Church.” From Travelling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Anchor Books, 1999.

Mind Body Mama: Raising a Strong Voiced Girl, How To

Last week, I ventured forth from the School of Love to our National Women’s Martial Arts Federation for a week of teaching and learning. The theme of our camp this year was Unity Strengthens, Diversity Transforms, and it came true for me during the two day self defense instructors’ conference and subsequent four day martial arts camp. Over the next weeks I’ll be unpacking what I learned and discovered from working in this diverse and intensely skilled community around issues of women’s empowerment, violence prevention, anti-racism, and support for survivors of violence. Not to mention the jolt of inspiration and energy I received from sweating and laughing with my friends from near and far. My clients and friends at home are saying things like, “I’ve never seen you so happy.”

In a perfect world, I would have left you this column to peruse in my absence. But since I channeled most of my pre-travel anxiety into trying to determine how many pairs of panties I needed to bring (two per day—Birth Pie knew the answer all along, but she didn’t tell me until she got to Ohio) and fighting with my computer, I was not able to build an effective alliance with technology and schedule the post to appear on the right day. Therefore, I bring it to you now.

I’ve been in a self-defense state of mind lately.

A good portion is the inspiration I’m drawing from the work of my colleagues in the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation (NWMAF) and beyond. This year Janet Superhero travelled to South Africa on an arts exchange spreading her message of healing and violence prevention through words and movement; Lee Sinclair and Carol Middleton taught women in refugee camps in Kenya that they’re worth defending; Joanne Factor created more safety in Seattle; and Erin Weed taught girls to fight back on campuses all over the country.

The other portion is the warm reception Raising a Strong Voiced Girl received from colleagues and other mamas. It validates my intuition that this parenting work is a vital element of our self defense movement. But I don’t see many mamas writing to the experience of modeling and teaching self protection skills to girl (or boy) children. It’s hard work—one of the hardest pieces of parenting for me, and indivisible from the other really hard stuff, like walking a spiritual path and teaching about death and god and ethics.

At the School of Love and among the NWMAF-certified self defense instructors we understand self defense to be holistic, complex and far-reaching. Yehudit Sidikman says it well: “Women's self defense is not just about punching and kicking. It's about knowing that you are worth defending."

So just how do you raise a girl who knows she’s worth defending? I’ve started cataloging some of the principles Sweetiebabyhoneyliciuos and I use around our house. It’s a partial list, I’m sure, but it’s a snapshot of our philosophy in action.

We covenant with our kid that:

All feelings are OK. We swear by the teachings of Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. When I first read it I almost cried remembering myself as a little girl who faced exasperation, mockery, and dismissal in response to her feelings—and this from really great and committed parents who were unfortunately illiterate in the language of emotion. We follow Faber and Mazlish’s advice to name feelings (“Sounds like you feel angry/sad/disappointed/etc.”) and then address them accordingly. Because despite the fact that all feelings are ok,

Feelings can’t make you do things. We always have more choices than we think. Small learned that we can feel sad and still have fun when a beloved friend died but life went on. She learned that she could feel anxious but calm herself down with yoga when the cat got badly injured and her mamas had to take care of him in a hurry. And I hope she learned that her parents could be out of their minds with frustration and anger, but she could still be safe and loved, when she cut her hair (and lied about it!) three times in one week. A mama at the end of her rope said in a strangled voice, “Go to your room” before yelling or worse ensued. Because we believe:

Anger is not a justification for hurting yourself or others. I work with a lot of teens who say they “had to” physically assault someone because she or he “made me so mad.” It’s hard for them to understand that you can be mad and still have volition over your actions. I don’t work in law enforcement but I imagine that prisons are full of young people learning that distinction in the harshest possible way. It’s hard for me to understand that anger doesn’t justify action, and I’ve been practicing mindfulness and anti-violence for two decades. Raising Small to be a peaceful warrior is my greatest inspiration for continuing my spiritual work around anger.

Everyone has things they are “good at” and things they are “working on.” Small is working on speaking up in class; Mama is working on calming down when she’s angry. There’s no shame in not being good at something. We are all perfect exactly the way we are and we are always striving to be better. This is how we live the Unitarian Universalist affirmation of the dignity and worth of all people.

Deep breaths are a great way to calm down. Small was able to handle blood draws early on by practicing deep breaths. She’s gotten more resistant to my advice of late—part of the contrarian nature of six, I suppose—but I’m thrilled to see her bow her little head to practice seiza mokuso (seated meditation) at the dojo. Connection to breath is a centerpiece of spiritual practice and the first step of practical self defense. If you’re breathing you’re thinking, and if you’re thinking you’re exploring your choices of how to respond.

Your body is your own. Small toilet trained late which gave us an opportunity to talk about who was allowed to touch her under her diaper—a short list—and why—to clean her up. She knows now that all the parts covered by her bathing suit are private. But moreover, she knows her whole body is her own; she has her say about all manner of physical contact and she can expect the grown-ups to listen. If a grown-up outside our immediate family swings her into a surprise embrace or plants a kiss on her silky cheek she hears a mama asking right away, “Is that OK with you, Small?” It’s my hope that will translate into an internal voice that helps her check in with herself; I hope she knows much sooner than I did to ask, “Is this OK with me?”

Call your body parts by their names. It’s my understanding that predators are put off by children who know the anatomical names of their body parts. Even if that weren’t true I’d believe that women should know the proper name for their genitals. Small has wielded the word “vulva” since she was very tiny.

Surprises are OK, secrets are not. It’s fine to have surprises but Small knows that she can tell us anything. We don’t have secrets from each other. We’ve role-played a situation in which another kid had a big problem and told Small but asked her to keep it a secret. Without prompting or hesitation Small responded, “I’m sorry, but you need help and I’m going to tell somebody.” That’s the friend I’d want to have if I was dealing with abuse, harassment, or bullying.

We expect you to stand up for yourself. In kindergarten, Small struggled with unwanted attention from a bossy but well-meaning special needs student who could not fathom that Small does not want to play her game at recess. As heartbreaking as it was to see my kid challenged in this way, I’m secretly glad that she had this benign opportunity to practice what we call Strong Voice. Every day she had to tell this girl that she didn’t want to play her game, she wants to play “Dog Pound” instead.

We expect you to stand up for others. At the School of Love and the NWMAF we subscribe to a feminist empowerment model of self defense which understands a complex framework of violence. I’ll talk more about this in coming columns, but our bottom line is a shared belief that racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ablism, and other systemic inequalities conspire to put people at different risk for violence dependent upon their privilege and position in society.

But even that explanation is not simple enough for a six year old. So we talk about the Unitarian principles that “Each person is important,” and “Build a fair and peaceful world,” and we role-play interrupting racism. “I’m not going to play with her, she has brown skin.” I said in the role of a playground bully. “People with brown skin are just as good as people with our color skin, and we’re not going away until you play with us,” said Small. The role of white ally is one that I did not even know existed until I was in my twenties. That my daughter might have this skill from childhood gives me incredible hope for our future.

What about you, gentle readers and lurkers? What competencies do you value for your girls’ and boys’ safety? How do you nurture and support those skills?

The Container and the Practice

This week I had the privilege to teach Modern Arnis to the beginner class at the School of Love. I was invited to teach a partner blocking and striking drill we call Trapping Hands Special. Like much of Modern Arnis, this drill can be desperately confusing. It is a complex, repeating pattern and as such it is as difficult and as simple as any other complex, repeating pattern. The exercise is just a little too long and has just a few too many elements to easily hold in one’s mind. Because it’s a pattern, as soon as one piece slips away from either partner, the whole exercise flounders. It’s a challenge similar to remembering the stitches in a long row of counted cross stitch or doing long division in your head. Odds or evens, right hand or left hand, what you did just before, what your partner’s doing, and what you’re about to do next all play a part in figuring out what your move should be.

The trick with Trapping Hands Special is to break the code, learn the pattern, and then allow your body memory to hold onto it. We often say to one another when practicing Arnis, “Don’t think about it; just do it.” This is what makes Trapping Hands Special especially difficult to teach: once we’re able to reproduce the pattern without thought, it is awfully hard to take it apart again.

I developed my (fairly crackpot) method of teaching it over an entire summer. I wanted to teach the pattern to my girls. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious was having a rough time with her joints that season, so she spent a lot of time on the sofa watching TV. I’d pose her right hand in one of the positions that my partner might feed to me and explore my various response options. Each evening’s practice was limited by the strength of Sweetie’s deltoids or the extent of her patience. I endured a fair amount of eye-rolling and she endured a fair amount of holding her arm up in the air. Eventually I developed a method of explaining the exercise that makes sense to me. Not the only way to teach it, by a long shot, but something I can reliably reproduce and something that it helpful to some number of students.

I thought I’d stop by the Tuesday class for about fifteen minutes to run through the pattern with folks, but of course it took forty-five minutes. I should have stayed another forty-five to do it properly, but Small was needing her dinner and bath.

In the midst of the practice one of the Senseis who regularly teaches this class asked me a question about the quality of the blocks we were using. Do we block with the hand or the forearm; is it a pinning type of block or a redirecting type of block, etc. And it came to me that my lesson for the evening really had no martial arts quality about it at all. I wasn’t asking students to attend to any of the things that develop their martial skills: targeting, or speed, or power, or technique, or foot-work, or posture, or breath.

The whole group of us—from a very first day karateka to a motley crew of karate, kung fu and tae kwon do black belts—were pouring enormous energy into memorizing where to put our hands when.

I was working really hard teaching and my students were working really hard learning. What we were working on was not the practice itself but the container into which the practice will enter. Next week, or next month, or next year when these students have confidence in the Trapping Hands Special pattern—when it enters their bodies and their minds let go—we’ll be able to fill that container with the qualities of our art.

Of course I know that this is a false dichotomy on some level—the room was fairly vibrating with kime (focus) and filled with camaraderie, laughter, peer leadership and beginner’s mind. So the practice was present as it always is in that sacred space. But it reminded me with a jolt that the container sometimes takes a tremendous amount of work, just to hold the space where our practice can commence.

For Unitarian Universalists, our container is made of committee and annual meetings, budget deliberations and ministerial searches. In family our container is house and home, childcare and lawn care, dishes and laundry. And as a woman the container of my life is right livelihood and service to my community which manifest as an endless “to-do” list of phone calls and emails.

I’m going to be pondering this for a while: the container and the practice. I often want to give the container short shrift—squeeze that pattern into fifteen minutes before dinner, so I can get to the heart of the work. But sometimes the container is the heart of the work—it gives us the opportunity for kime and connection, and what else is there? And sometimes it is just a to-do list—but it is a hard to-do list, full of worthy tasks.

Things don’t get easier—they don’t retreat to muscle memory, as it were—without the hard work up front. What if we were to admit when something was hard and give it its full due—a summer of independent inquiry, a whole long evening of practice?

I started showing Small Trapping Hands Special last night. She is delighted by the speed of my hands and dissolves into hopeless laughter, a balm to my black belt ego. Moreover, she is intrigued by the puzzle of the pattern. I see the martial arts hunger in her. “Mama,” she says, suddenly serious. “I want this form.” She doesn’t know if it’s hard or easy, confusing or simple. She knows her mama is fast like laughter and we are weaving a pattern together with our four hands.

Mind Body Mama: World of Hurt

For one who’s been finding her truest voice in the keyboard of late, I’ve been awfully silent the past week. I’ve been in a world of hurt. It was either a rib poking out of my chest wall or referred pain from an undiagnosed cervical disk problem, or a complex intersection of both with a little neck/upper back/shoulder girdle de-stabilization thrown in for laughs. At any rate, it hurt. Every time I took a deep breath it felt like someone stabbed me in the chest with an ice pick. And sometimes my hands went all numb and tingly.

In my typically more-geek-than-jock fashion, the injury came more from writing about karate than from doing karate. (A client who blew his knee out on the slopes last winter deadpanned, “I never write about skiing.”) It’s a classic keyboarding injury for me and one I saw coming when it was just a teensy light at the end of the tunnel the weekend before last. That’s when I settled myself into the inadequate desk chair, in front of the too-high folding table, to type non-stop against a pressing deadline. I knew I was strapping myself onto the tracks but I couldn’t help myself—the passion to write and the pressure of the deadline were too great.

So for a long while there was that stabbing pain; now I’m rationing my keyboard time and I’m on the bench at karate. But that wasn’t even the fun part. The pain—or perhaps the lack of oxygen to my brain because it hurt too much to breathe—scrambled my ability to think more than one step ahead of myself. It was like a crash course in mindfulness. I couldn’t organize myself well enough to think of the future or remember the past. My to-do list became rudimentary. “Snack, shower, Tylenol” I wrote one day. Those are the kinds of things that usually don’t even make it on to the list, I just do them—but suddenly they were the main event.

As I was navigating through the pain-haze, Birth Pie reminded me that I was confused because pain had shot my brain’s Executive Function to hell. Birth Pie is a trained doula so she knows something about pain and its effect on intellect and personality. But the real reason Birth Pie was tuned in to Executive Function, and lack thereof, was that hers was shot to hell too. She’s been missing a lot of sleep because of sick kids, and holding stress on behalf of her family in the way of all mamas.

This was mildly alarming because I tend to think of Birth Pie as my other wife. (If you’re the type of person who finds it odd or offensive that a nice girl like me has a wife to begin with, you’re reading the wrong blog. No hard feelings—please move along.)

But this isn’t about Sweetiebabyhoneylicious, my crabby old honeybunch. This is about Birth Pie without whom I could run neither my business nor my home. I’ve heard that other women have taken on parenthood without having a woman friend like this, but I wouldn’t want to try it. I’ve also heard that other women have sisters and mamas and aunties and cousins who play this kind of role—babysitting back and forth without keeping score, washing each other’s dishes, making casseroles. My family is too far away and they probably would balk at that kind of intimacy anyway. We just don’t do that.

The last time my Executive Function took a gainer due to illness, back in October, Birth Pie came over and made me some to-do lists. “Call clients—cancel appointments, ‘So sorry,’” reads one. Another: “Read a poem. Hug your kid. Drink tea.” Then she washed all my dishes and sent her husband over to the school to pick up all the kids. The last time illness hijacked her Executive Function on an overnight flight from the west coast, I let myself into her house to steal her phone list and organized a week of meals to be delivered.

So last Tuesday when she mentioned that she still had dirty dishes from Sunday, it occurred to me to go over and wash them—but the impulse was vanquished by the next ice pick to my clavicle. And somewhere between the next few punctures I realized that things could get bad, very bad, if one of us did not shape up soon. On Wednesday the two of us had trouble herding four kids home from school, and that is a not a bad ratio—but one kept dropping his book, one kept lagging behind, and one kept running ahead to look for a puppy. It was only a matter of time before they realized that we were not on our game, and then all hell would break loose.

Except it didn’t. Two chiropractors worked some magic, and I rested all weekend, and no more stabbing. It’s more like someone poking their index finger into my chest, and while that makes me irritable and I’d like to punch whoever is poking me, I can think again. Birth Pie’s less stressed in general, although she still has some stuff on her mind, but when she stopped by on Monday I had time and breath to listen to her and offer some council. On Tuesday she brought me a pork chop. Things are back to normal, and not a moment too soon.

Mind Body Mama: Beginner's Mind

A Unitarian Universalist I love posted to her Facebook page a few weeks ago, “I hate how I make mistakes when I’m doing something for the first time.”

“Beginner’s Mind, Grasshopper,” I quipped.

At the School of Love—the feminist karate school where my spiritual home, family-of-choice and fierce movement discipline come together—we just love beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is free of expectations; beginner’s mind is open to all possibilities. Beginner’s mind is not clouded by prior experience; beginner’s mind is not attached to outcomes; beginner’s mind is in the here and now.

Beginner’s mind is a hell of a lot harder than it looks.

The Small One mastered the fork this week, to the great relief of her parents. It was not that long ago that we realized that we had completely forgotten to teach her how to use a fork. In our defense: not every kid needs fork handling broken down for them. A good number figure it out by mimicry; one of our sweet friends had it nailed at age two. But Small squandered her precocity on reading. I have no idea how she did it but she taught herself her letters at two and by four she was plowing through Little House on the Prairie and leading dinner time discussions on various textual themes. “Did you know that it was very different for boys and girls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time?” she might ask. “For example, girls could not wear pants and boys could not cry.”

Having plucked the skill of reading out of the ether, seemingly without effort, Small continues to excel at all things word-related. This apparently includes the bulk of the kindergarten curriculum. “What is work-time?” I asked her recently, demonstrating appropriate, if belated, interest in the K-kids’ daily schedule. “Work time is when they hand out papers that I already know the answers before I even glance at them,” she told me wearily. Despite an incredibly fabulous and responsive teacher Small is getting reinforcement for the fact that a lot of things come easily to her.

We know that Small is not good at everything and we’ve always talked about how everyone has things that they’re “good at” and things that they’re “working on.” Recently we realized that she was not really “working on” her fork handling—she totally sucked at it and required a hard-core intervention. This was after she nearly drew blood biting herself, finally bringing Sweetiebaby-honeylicious’ and my attention to her incredibly maladaptive hand position. Mealtime occupational therapy immediately ensued, replete with lots of bargaining: “You can eat all the green beans with your fingers if you eat all the tofu with your fork.” And also lots of tears.

One day Small just looked at us and said, “It’s not fun to practice something you’re not good at.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” is what my parents would say to such truth-telling. It was one of those statements that should be accompanied by the ping of the meditation chime: “Pay attention to this one, it will come around again and again if you open your eyes to it.”

And that has been the case. In the same week I had a streak of personal training clients who refused, or forgot, or just didn’t feel like doing the exercises I had prescribed to strengthen the weak muscles in their bodies. Each cheerily reported practicing their favorite exercises instead—naturally, those that worked the the already strong parts of their anatomy.

Life Coach Jillian—one of Small’s godmother’s and one of my favorite people in life—offered me some coachy jargon on the same topic, which came down to this: it’s easy to have beginner’s mind when you don’t know that you’re clueless. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t care. And it feels great to to have such mastery of something that you don’t even have to think about the skill. For example, being able to think about dinner at dinner-time, instead of thinking about how to not bite or stab yourself. Or being able to teach a kick-ass karate class at a moment’s notice because you have a black-belt – or two – and teaching has become as familiar as breathing over a decade’s practice.

But what feels crappy is knowing that you don’t know something: practicing something you’re not good at. We were straight up with Small that everyone has “working on” things, but we didn’t exactly say how scary it can be to work on them, how little and unsure and uncomfortable you can feel, and how much easier it can be to retreat back to your comfort zones.

And you know I didn’t say anything about making mistakes. That’s not somewhere I ever want to go. I was proud when one of my business advisors recently told me, “You are the most risk-averse person I’ve ever met!”

This whole blogging exercise I’ve set myself upon feels like an opportunity to practice beginner’s mind. My risk-averse self is freaking out at having been launched into something without complete control and mastery. What if I make a mistake; is it OK to forge ahead without knowing everything; can I put myself out there without being perfect? And in fact, I’ve already made a mistake. Close readers will notice that the original title of my column was going to be Black Belt Mama—until the brown belt who blogs under the name Black Belt Mama smacked me down and asked me to back off her territory. I had discovered her a while back, when I was securing the domain mindbodymama, but I forgot about her when I moved along to this project. So I had to concede that she was right; I had to admit that I had made a mistake when I was doing something for the first time.

I hate that.

The great thing about beginning something new at midlife is how it much bigger it makes your life. The passions of my middle life—mothering, my second career of personal training, and now writing—were unimaginable a decade ago. It is as if I am a new person and that is exciting and joyous. But the hard thing about starting something new at this advanced age is that I have lots of experience at being good at things, so I feel the difference acutely.

To keep myself from going crazy, I have to give myself lots of breaks to rest in the things I do well— like kicking practice and menu planning— the way Small spends a portion of every day visiting Laura Ingalls in the pages of her nine-volume memoir. The sanest path tiptoes between risk and comfort, between white belt and black belt, between awkward and awesome. Between the fork and the fingers.

Worship: Readings to Accompany Fear and Grace

My family lit the chalice for this service, and Alice recited the chalice-lighting words from memory, because she is an odd and fabulous little kid. They are from the Sufi mystic poet Jelalludin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

For the opening words (read responsively) I chose a excerpt from the Reverend Victoria Safford’s meditation Map of the Journey in Progress, from her book Walking Towards Morning:

Here is where I found my voice and chose to be brave.

This is the place where I said NO, more loudly than I’d ever thought I could, and everybody stared, but I said NO loudly anyway, because I knew it must be said, and those staring settled down into harmless, ineffective grumbling, and over me they had no power anymore.

Here’s a time, and here’s another, when I laid down my fear and walked right on into it, right up to my neck into that roiling water.

Here’s a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more than once and fallen. I don’t know yet what to learn there.

On this site I was outraged and the rage sustains me still, it clarifies my seeing.

Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen with my own ears and sing my own song, shakey as it is.

The first of the two readings was a story from the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron from her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with Fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and Fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and Fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward Fear, bowed three times, and asked, “May I have permission to go into battle with you?” Fear said, “Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission.” Then the young warrior said, “How can I defeat you?” Fear replied, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.” In that way the student warrior learned how to act, not controlled by Fear, but with an understanding of Fear that leads to greater respect and compassion for oneself and others.

The second was a definition of grace from Christian author Anne Lamott found in her book Travelling Mercies:

…grace in the theological sense… [is] the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

For the closing words, I used a meditation written by Alice:

Courage Instructions

Make the wisdom of your hope.
Don’t be afraid.
Help yourself to whatever you must do.
Help the world and do your best.

Sermon: Fear and Grace: Lessons from the Martial Arts

Sermon delivered at the Our House of Worship, July 13, 2008.

“The first principle of a warrior is not being afraid of who you are.”

Several months ago this congregation had a meeting to discuss the Society’s budget, as we often do. A proposal had been put forth about which I knew I had very strong feelings. My partner and I talked about the proposal at great and dramatic length (the word “ranting” comes to mind); I fell asleep or woke up more than once thinking about the issue; I sometimes talked to myself about it when I was driving alone in my car. But I didn’t really know how strong my feelings were until I got up to speak at the meeting. When I started to talk, I discovered that I was terrified. And adding to the simple challenge of speaking clearly to a complex issue, I was also crying. I honestly can’t recall any words going through my mind as I realized that I was going to weep through my entire turn at the microphone, but I can sum up the familiar feeling of tenacious surrender with this phrase: “Oh well, here we go again.”

This summer I will celebrate my twentieth anniversary as a student of Okinawan martial arts, and a month later, my 40th birthday. My martial arts practice is, in a very real sense, the story of my adult life. It is the place where—among many, many lessons— I learned to accept Fear as the great teacher that it is. And it is where I experience, again and again, the incredible Grace that comes of being present to Fear, of walking “into those roiling waters,” and coming out whole.

It might be reasonable to presume that the scariest thing about being a martial artist is the fighting part—the “getting hit” part, and maybe also the “hitting other people” part. The recent growth of the extremely violent spectacle that calls itself “mixed martial arts”—which I hesitate to even call a sport—enhances the perception that martial arts practice is about the exchange of body-damaging blows. My practice could not be more unlike this brutal combat activity. In practical terms, the two karate schools at which I have studied practice ju kumite or “soft sparring.” Light contact and control of one’s own body are respected skills which students work hard to master. Sparring practice is playful, joyous and often full of laughter. What then, is there to be afraid of? In a word—everything.

Karate practice asks us to be present—in the stillness of the meditations which begin and end classes, in the learning, mastery and repetition of movements which are simple but rarely easy, and in the partner work where we witness one another’s human, physical vulnerabilities. Karate practice requires that we inhabit our own bodies more fully than mainstream culture ever allows, in ways that few adults remember how to enjoy. And karate practice can be very, very quiet—the rituals of bowing and standing and following instructions leave lots of space for what the author and life coach Martha Beck calls “squirrel brain”—that relentlessly nattering self talk so richly fueled by Fear—to get completely out of control.

For the very confused and sad 19-year-old that I was when I began my karate training at a feminist dojo (the Japanese word for “training hall”) in Brooklyn, NY, this call to be present was nearly unbearable. I couldn’t have told you then, but I understand now, that the dominant fact of my life at that time was Fear. My life terrified me. I was trying to come to grips with being a lesbian, I was trying to go to college—the first in my family to do so—I was trying to grow up, find my way out of a painful and lonely adolescence. On the street, the roar of my own Fear was drowned by the New York City din; the racing of my pulse and my squirrelly thoughts were matched by the City’s relentless pace. But when I entered the quietude of the dojo, I was alone with my internal brew. And I—a classic overachiever, a stereotypical Virgo who loves order and ritual and rules—could not handle the simple routines of a beginner karate class. The first year I studied, I cried in every single class. I rarely lasted for an entire session and I always left abruptly, failing to bow to partners or teachers as I tore out of the building. This didn’t lead to me feeling terribly successful about myself as a karate-ka, a practitioner of the art. Despite the admonition that “each of us is on our own path,” I constantly compared myself to the other students. I realize now that most of them were only in their middle twenties, but they seemed so old and poised and sure of themselves at the time. They asked questions, they never cried, they practiced karate at home. I just came to class and wept. But: I kept coming back.

I have been a karate teacher for a long, long time now and I am still in awe of my first teachers’ incredible depth of compassion and acceptance for the girl who couldn’t last a single hour without tears. Beginners are hard enough to teach. I appreciate now the comedy of knowing with certainty that one of your students is going to flee— but getting to be surprised each time by the exact moment that she does. My teachers, and through their example, my sister students, held a space for me where I could be present with my Fear. Some exercises puffed Fear up and made it seem even bigger and more powerful—the “hitting each other” parts were tough for me, despite our focus on control and contact, as were the “falling onto the ground” parts. But as I found power and skill and happiness in my own body, much of my practice helped Fear to quiet and move away. Kicking has always felt to me as close as the human body can come to flying—it is purely joyful. Although I think this word is overused, it is true in the most profound way to say that I was empowered by the brand of self-defense training I received—which is rooted in an anti-violent, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, socialist feminist polemic of great practicality and deep moral purpose. The moving meditation of simple karate strikes, blocks and kicks taught me to access reserves of calm from within myself— reserves that then became available to me as I moved through the challenge of “getting a life.”

It was a great relief to outgrow the screaming terror of my late teens and early karate training, and settle down as an adult growing into greater happiness and serenity. This process was incredibly gradual and of course, totally incomplete—“squirrel-brain” never really goes away, and Fear is always lurking just around the next life change, big or small. After twelve years in New York City and ten years at the dojo, the time came to move on. When my partner Liz and I decided to move to the Valley we knew two important things: there was vibrant Unitarian congregation, and a well known women’s dojo. It was clearly a reasonable place to live.

Now, I want to stop a moment and tell you what we mean when we talk about “styles” of martial arts. One of the summer reality shows I enjoy watching recruits dancers, most of who are trained in a specific style of dance such as hip-hop, ballroom or tap, and challenges them to compete in dances completely different from the ones that they know. I love this show; I really can’t get enough of it. As a viewer, you know that the hip-hop dancer who’s trying to do Latin dance is much, much, much better than you would ever be. Their training in form and rhythm and choreography is immediately useful as they learn the new dance. And yet, to the Latin dancer on the judging panel—it’s just not quite right.

This is how it is with martial arts. My New York school and my Valley school teach two different styles. Both come from Okinawa, and share influences of both Chinese and Japanese martial arts history. We like to say the styles are “cousins” and that two schools are “sister schools.” But like the hip-hop dancer trying to do a perfect Rumba, the student who switches styles is going to be “not quite right” a good amount of the time.

This is the challenge I faced when I arrived here in 1998. When we first moved I thought I would take some time off from karate, explore other types of moment and recreation, or just eat dinner at 6:00 like normal people instead of being at the dojo until 8 or later. But only two weeks after moving here I showed up at the dojo for a visit, and felt so immediately at home that my commitment to training there was inevitable. After a few months of being a welcome guest, I tied on a white belt and began the process of training through the ranks of a new style.

One of my new training sisters, a newly minted black belt at that time, said to me then, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.” I think she meant the re-learning, the willingness to be “not quite right” so much of the time, after ten years of dutiful study, of having been a teacher myself and having earned a black belt rank. And my friend expanded the compliment by saying, “And you do it with so much grace.”

I recall thinking at the time: “Is this woman nuts?” Because just like my first first year of karate training, I felt anything but graceful. Grace, I thought, meant cool self assurance, poise, reserve. All those things I thought I had seen in the older, wiser, twenty-something beginners of my first go-round. Grace must be the Virgo part of me, the part who could smile serenely, arrive on time, and follow instructions. I didn’t run out of quite as many classes the second time around, but I did sit in the car and weep instead of going into the dojo to practice when the enormity of loss and change was unbearable. And I was crabby a good bit of the time, with dashes of bitter and sullen thrown in for good measure, and my squirrel-brain was having a field day.

But what if doing something “with grace” doesn’t necessarily mean doing it “gracefully”? When I looked up definitions of grace I found words like “acceptance” and “approval” or (this one I especially like): “unmerited divine assistance.” Unmerited: which is to say, unconditional—like the compassion extended to me by my teachers and sisters at both dojos. There’s certainly room in unconditional for crying, and for squirrel-brain; for Fear, for clumsiness, for self doubt. Or how about Anne Lamott’s definition of grace as “the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way.” The martial arts come to us from cultures which honor ancestors, and we call our teachers, “those who have come before.” It has been my great good fortune to practice in schools where the teachers who come before us offer great love to their students, unearned, that we might learn to extend the same kindness to ourselves and our students in turn. To rise to a challenge with this kind of grace is just to show up.

And this is the secret core of my karate practice: there is no secret, I just show up. I am tenacious in the work of karate, and not just in the hard sweaty practice of it, which I also really love. From the beginning I somehow knew that karate required surrender—not to Fear itself, but to the presence of Fear. Any time I’m at the dojo, there is a possibility that I’ll leave in tears— but I have every tomorrow to try showing up again. What I knew from the beginning is still true: to do karate, all you have to do is do karate. I just keep putting myself in it, and some days it will flow like poetry, and other days it will stick like mud, but it will always be the same path.

I keep hoping that Fear will leave me alone, and Fear keeps coming around. A few years back, when I was in the home stretch toward earning my second black belt, I wished for a smooth and graceful path, but it kept getting interrupted by physical illness, insomnia, and moments of irrational, ungrounded terror. Trying to pull myself together, I recalled the night before I went into labor with my daughter Alice, when I got lost in the maze of Holyoke Hospital and sank right down against a wall and cried. When grace, in the guise of caring professionals, brought my partner and my midwife to me, the midwife—a member of this congregation—said, “If you weren’t freaking out right now, I’d be worried. You’ve got to freak out if you’re going to do this thing.” This is awfully close to what another member of this congregation said to me when I told her how scared I was to be delivering this sermon (this is the clean version): “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”

I really needed to deliver exactly this sermon, exactly this weekend. Because staring down my fortieth birthday has stirred up a whole new bout of squirrel-brain, and new irrational terror about the next chapter of my life. Once again, I find myself pretty scared, pretty much most of the time. But this time I know Fear for what it is: a travelling companion, a some-time opponent, a teacher, a party to the human journey. I can respect it, I can even listen to it—but if I don’t do what it says, I’ll be fine. And I know who my people are, the community who will help me find my next chapter—they’re the friends who say to me in word and deed, “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”

For years I longed for a stronger connection to this congregation, a sense of undeniable belonging. And wouldn’t you know that crying in front of a room full of Society members at that budget meeting did more to create that connection than anything I had tried before. Committee meetings, small group ministry, making coffee—too easy. I had to love this place, and its members, and my family’s home here so deeply that it frightened me, and then I had to step into the roiling waters of that Fear and tell you all about it.

When I birthed my baby, tenacious surrender in the face of Fear turned out to be my greatest strength. I didn’t fight what my body was trying to do, and only because I had wept and raged the night before. Maybe grace requires that acting out, maybe grace can’t be achieved gracefully. I wish the spiritual path, the martial path, the path to greater connection with this community, the path to my brilliant mid-life transformation, could be walked with decorum and order, maybe with a little light piano music in the background and without ever falling down or crying. But, like childbirth or earning a black belt, the path toward grace is often scary and messy, with long stretches of hard, hard work and a pile of dirty laundry afterward. Fear’s not going anywhere soon, and I’m resigned to its squirrelly incarnations. My path, in the dojo and outside, has shown me that grace abides on the far side of Fear, if not as gracefully as we hope, as abundantly as we ever need.