Today.

I’m in Burlington, Vermont with my partner, staying at the home of her best friend Piper and Piper’s baby with two sweet sweet dogs and the most curiouswildsweet kitten anybody could ever find in her whole, big, human life. Everybody but me’s been kind of sick for days. The baby with croup, the mama with a cough and general exhaustion, my sweet love with a stomach flu she’s just begun to recover from. And then there was me, staying up all night reading and writing and sleeping deep into midafternoon (because everybody else has been doing so much sleeping and healing that nobody seems to really mind if I just laze about on my own schedule). I love this plan. Outside snow keeps filling the sky and any dinge which might have been is rendered clean and calm by the fresh, cold white.

As the only able-bodied individual in the house, I almost led Piper’s yoga class (Piper owns and runs a yoga studio in Burlington). She prepped me, as best she could and sent me off into the evening. Andre and I got to the studio (it’s gorgeous, so very very gorgeous, all brand-new hardwood floors and high ceilings and spaciousness and walls that curve), unlocked and set up. Picked music and turned up the heat. I pulled out a mat and began practicing movement. I’ve never taken a yoga class. I’ve never witnessed a yoga class. But I was feeling relatively unconcerned about these facts. I practiced movement that I’d learned in my 4 years of studying Martha Graham style modern dance, picked out stretches and combinations that seemed yoga-like (not that I know really what yoga is like) and ran through how I might teach them.

It was wonderful running that kind of motion through my body, which has been without it for the past year, now. It made me feel like I had actually learned something in all that time at Cal. You would think, wouldn’t you, that I’d be able to teach just a few combinations after four whole years of studying the movement 5 days a week, 1 and a half to five hours a day.

Anyway, I was getting into it. No students showed up. For which I was actually disappointed and considerably grateful, all at the same time.

Then Andre took me for a walk up Church Street, this gorgeous street, all snow and lights and Christmastime, that’s closed off to cars and is full of cute little shops and restaurants and friendly-looking people walking about. We stopped in this place called something like "The Peace Center," which was full of all kinds of progressive political information, handmade clothing and art, postcards, bumperstickers, music, and fabulous books. It’s lovely to be in a bookstore-ish place where every book you pick up you know would benefit your whole consciousness. Where it’s just a question of which book to read first.

I really wanted to pick up a book called 101 Ways to Help Your Daughter Love Her Body. It looked like a really good book, and was for sure a really good idea. I’ve been teaching this spoken word class to a wild group of 10-15 year olds who are in the Oakland Public School system, trying to create writing exercises that will bolster the students’ self esteem (trying to get them to use hyperbole, to talk about how cool they are, to write love letters to themselves, etc.) and I’ve realized that it’s just remarkable how strongly these young phenoms will argue against the idea that they’re anything special, that they’re intelligent or wise or beautiful or powerful or interesting or strong or wondrous. It blows me away. And freaks me out. Freaks me out that while writing this paragraph, I went online, found the book, and ordered it. I really want to learn more effective means of encouraging people, young and otherwise, to love themselves. Maybe it’s part of a practice that will lead me back to loving myself as fully as I like to love myself. (I haven’t been loving myself that way of late.)

On the shelf beneath the shelf that held the book about daughters were a few books (the titles of which I desperately wish I could remember) which addressed the topic of saving the emotional lives of little boys. They talked about the ways that adults—parents, teachers, educators, pop culture icons, etc.—affect (and harm and stunt) the emotional lives of little boys; and ways that we can change those patterns of behavior. I was like, yes and yes and yes and yes and yes.

Did I buy these books in that store today? No. But not because I didn’t want to. I feel like it’s somehow kind of important for me to not go overboard in the preparation for when I have kids thing. Because my impulse is—I must buy this now because I’ll need it five years from now and it doesn’t matter that I can’t afford it right this minute, nor do I have time to read it in the here and now, but at some point I’ll need it and what if I can’t find it or don’t remember to look for it then? Okay, so I just bought the little girl book. It was really necessary in the here and now, I thought. The thing is, my reading queue is all booked up. Because I did buy the following books (yes, at the progressive independent peace store—and you, too, should all support individual bookstores and progressive organizations wherever you can):

*Be Free Where You Are, by Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s a teeny-tiny little book, the title of which said it all for me, given that I’ve been having such great difficulty figuring out how to assert myself as an independent individual in the midst of this huge intense relationship that I’m in and to find some sort of balance between tending to the needs of my individual self and tending to the needs of my relationship and of my partner. It’s written by the most important spiritual leader in my life, Thich Nhat Hanh. One might say that the Buddha has been the most important spiritual leader, since he laid down all of this philosophy that resonates with me so strongly, though my practice is sloppy at best and non-existent at worst; but there are many tens or hundreds of thousands or who knows—maybe millions—of teachers who interpret and spread the Buddha’s teachings. Thich Nhat Hanh has been the one who has communicated the most to me, the most easily.

*An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life, by The Dalai Lama. In this book, H.H.—His Holiness—is supposed to be speaking/writing on the question of how one actually becomes a compassionate person and what the mechanisms are by which a selfish heart is transformed into a generous heart. Can we say right up my alley, right now? I’ve been feeling so selfish and petty and small in this last stretch of months. I feel at the same time like I need to figure out how to calmly rise up into a sense of freedom and take care of my own needs and yet and still open my heart to be more generous, more open, more loving, more compassionate, more kind. I thought this pair of books together might lead me there. And besides, any time I’m reading books on Buddhism (which feels like spiritual practice for me), I grow more calm, more centered, more rooted and balanced. It is very good for me.

*Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion, by Marshall B. Rosenberg, I must confess, I picked up at a different bookstore. But the progressive peace one didn’t carry it and I’ve looked for it in all kinds of independent bookstores. I won’t tell you the name of the place where I found it, because I don’t wish to advertise for them, nor to encourage you to buy your books there. But, anyway, I found it. And I read the first chapter of it to my partner tonight. We like it so far. We’re trying to figure out ways of being more peaceful with each other, because we love each other so much and yet we have the craziest, most painful points of disconnection. We’re now in therapy and we’re now reading this book, which so far seems like a really excellent idea. The book looks a little cheesy on the outside, but this guy really seems to know what he’s talking about and his ideas make sense on an emotional level. At least so far.

After I read Andre to sleep from Nonviolent Communication, I read half of Be Free Where You Are, thinking to save the second half for tomorrow. And then I came here. To write this exhaustive entry to you. And still there are parts that I haven’t mentioned yet, that I intended to mention right up front.

Kelly. Writes so exquisitely. I am perpetually in awe of her skill, her eye and her ear and her voice, and the heart which facilitates their use. I read only the third-grade version of her trip to Vietnam and was grateful for every word, image, line of mirth that her subtle, precise lips pronounced. I held tight to the colors and smells and sounds and the movement of the boat, underfoot. The way I held tight to the phone tonight. As she was telling me about the motorcycle accident that might have killed her today. My heart was a blur of tail lights and the bike flipping over and panicpanicpanic even though her voice in my ear was the evidence that her body was whole, mostly intact, and conscious.

Before we hung up the phone, there was a long, full silence. Kelly and I share silences with each other which are dense with exchange and communication, with question and answer, though you cannot always be certain what the one is asking and the other is answering, nevertheless, the energy is movingmovingmoving all the time. In that moment I thought I heard her waiting for me to comment on or asking me if I had read it, the entry she had written about me. I am Kelly’s Vietnam. Of course, I read it. (Though I suppose there isn’t any of course anymore, is there?) I left a long response in her guestbook, which I didn’t know if she had read, yet. So I didn’t answer the questions I perceived her asking, didn’t say anything about it, at all, but allowed the silence to hold me, let her read what she needed there. Perhaps I should have said it, just said soft (as I felt), "Yes, Kelly, I read it." I wanted to. I think it was at least in part cowardice that kept me from just folding my voice thick-liquid over the viscous silence. It may be that her silence was not asking an if question but a what else, what more, when are you going to step up to me? Maybe her silence was asking, "Do you have anything to add?" or "Why are you pretending you don’t know, Ariana, what I need you to address?" I didn’t know the question for sure, but I kept projecting answers and standing there, allowing the always-powerful charge between us to express what my voice would not say.