Birthday Envoy

Hello from the last moments of my birthday.

I wait a long time between these because whatever it is I have to say, I always wonder if you might be better suited discovering it in your own life (and then I could kick back and read your newsletter instead). I also find personal essays sort of severely grating to write because you have to commit to being an authority, and in this case, an online spiritual person. Poetry is much easier. Everyone writing a poem is pretending to be God, and isn’t ashamed of it.

Setting aside the strange anxiety of my & others’ bodies decaying, I’m generally glad to be older. I’m glad to have experience. I’m glad to know how to get a stain out, and apologize, and teach. I’m glad I understand others more. I’m glad to know how to take care of myself. I remember wandering around from 18 to 23 like a traumatized animal. I’m glad to not be chronically drunk or high, and not to live in the morally gray world that came with it.

And I’m glad to spend my days like this. When I was a kid, my timeline was something like married at 25, baby at 27 (I remember these were my M.A.S.H. settings, which we played incessantly on the hour-long bus ride from school). Also publish a book and be a famous actor. I’m glad to do what I do now, which is mostly attend to my mind and try to help people. I really don’t do anything else, except watch TV. Don’t be impressed—for all the hours I put in trying to think of others, I should be a master by now! But I’m patient. Once I make watching TV a way to help people, I’ll really be on my way. Watching Secret Lives of Mormon Wives will be an ecstatic act of love any day now.

I’m glad to not be so angry anymore. It takes a long time to undo that, many years for me. And it’s not just time that does it (actually, I don’t know if time does much at all). I feel more and more grateful for people from my past. I’m grateful for Debbie, my first grade teacher, who taught me yoga for the first time. We would lie on our backs in a circle and wheel our feet around, imagining we were biking somewhere beautiful. There was a local artist whose house I’d go to for “lessons”—we mostly played around with her supplies, and she’d make us toast with spray-on butter. In our group of regulars was a guy named Phoenix or Wolf or something like that. Sometimes, the teacher would take us for rides in her rickety van and find a speed bump to go over really fast so we’d fly up in the air. I had a lot of artists in my life, and people passionate about life. Dancers, writers, school administrators, musicians, actors, rabbis, Christian moms, community organizers, camp counselors, therapists. There are hundreds of people like that who shared a little of their hard won wisdom with me, probably thousands.

It didn’t always seem like that to me. I believe that I begged for answers long enough that I became a good listener, and that’s why people appear as teachers to me now. Each one polishing the stone. A little bit of diamond here and there. Thank God.

There’s plenty I don’t know. You really can’t know something until you’re ready to. I try to become ready to know something.

I’ve started teaching yoga, which is one of the bigger shifts in my life since I stopped drinking. I was never disciplined, or wholesome, or elegant enough to be a yogi, I thought. Sometimes I leave clothes on the floor, or eat takeout at midnight. I could definitely still drink a Monster energy, and I could probably even enjoy it. In the end, I’m grateful I learned the philosophy before studying the physical practices deeply. It’s safer, in my opinion, to develop ethics and then let yoga help you do that better, versus getting really good at ritual, diet, asana, and still being unkind (and maybe not knowing it). It has been an extremely beautiful and rewarding experience.

Yoga teacher, NYC cafe operator, online spiritual person. All strange titles to me, as inside, I am and have always been, an abstract mass of private introspection, and sometimes a town bard. However, I’m becoming willing to let love turn me into anything.

All my best,

Rachel