Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. — Leo Tolstoy
Hello loves!
We have a few new people joining our little community (welcome loves!) so I want to do a quick introduction of me and this work.
Soooo HI! :) I’m Colby, a writer and yoga teacher based outside Washington, DC. This letter is an evolution of the meditation teaching work I began last year once COVID hit. After exhausting myself with too ambitious a live teaching schedule, I leaned on sending a regular email message to still provide words of hope and guided yoga recordings to support our small yet might collective. It was during last summer that I found bell hooks’ book “All About Love”, and I realized I had found the aligning principle for my work and my life. I reframed this newsletter as a love letter and designed the rather lofty vision of “researching love and related concepts as a way of living and critical framework for personal and global healing.”
It’s been ten months, ten letters, and I’m (we’re) still marinating on a single sentence in the book - the definition of love bell outlines, as both a word and a verb. And that’s where we’ll probably stay for a while as I delay the more academic pursuit in wise favor of living the definition myself. Of simply doing what I love - writing & teaching - and sharing it with all of you. I have many plans, even more ideas, and will likely change a lot and get my shit together a little. This letter is mostly to hold myself accountable, to document what I notice, and do the little I can to support the ones I love (all of you).
So each month you can expect love notes from the field so to speak, lessons from nature as our most powerful teacher, yoga practices to support you, some poetry (and access to my book(s)!), and a list of things I’m watching, reading, and listening to lately.
It does not escape me that your lives, inboxes, schedules are full. I’m always amazed anyone reads this, and am even more moved when I get notes back from you about how much it resonates. It means so, so much. So please, chat me anytime - I am right here on the other side of this email.
I’m really glad you’re here. Thank you. I love you.
(and now back to our regularly scheduled programming).
June, Baby
Welcome to (almost) summer. And month six of 2021. Somehow, we are already halfway through.
I’m finalizing this letter sitting by our apartment pool in the hot Memorial Day sun, the only sunny day of the long weekend. It poured the kind of rain that even the fastest windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with, heaving thunder and lightening during the storm on our drive from the Eastern Shore of Virginia back to DC last Thursday night. On Friday, I stood on our balcony and held my two small cacti out with extended arms into the light rain descending from the clouds, noticing how the raindrops pattered into the cupped earth so randomly yet consistently, specs of dark dirt sparking onto my hand. It drizzled as I took a chilly walk to the grocery store on Saturday, and without an umbrella I wrapped a thick scarf around my head. On Sunday, I watched the gray mist scroll across the invisible sky.
All this rain cancelled or at least impeded many of the plans Memorial Day weekend is always the backdrop for - pool days, barbecues, the dawn of summer. Mary Oliver calls summer a season of “luminous gifts”. She’s referring, I assume, to the buds that bloom, the plants that flower, the tomatoes that marinate in the sun all summer long and burst open in August.
But none of this would exist without water. Without the sea. Without rain.
So as I sat (happily plan-less) in my cozy apartment, I thought about how much I crave water. How summer is less for me about what’s happening above ground and more about finding a cool pool to dive into, to sink below and force open my eyes in the briny or chlorinated water like I used to do as a kid.
I’m one of those appallingly fortunate people who grew up in a storybook place - a tiny fishing town 30 minutes north of Boston called Swampscott. The Native American tribe who fished and hunted there in the 17th century, the Naumkeags, called it the "land of the red rock". There’s a red-brown algae called Pilayella littoralis that blooms along our beaches every summer with the most unique of odors (it’s known as “the smell”); it riles the nose with a sulfur stench but for me, I inhale deeply the scent of home.
There are at least three main public beaches in Swampscott, and probably infinite private ones - little inlets shoring up the many homes lining the water. My house sits on the second highest hill in town on Ocean View road, and indeed, one looks out the front windows and is faced with first the Swampscott Harbor, then the Boston one giving rise to the city skyline, with the Atlantic sweeping out to the left into an empty horizon. Every day of my life until I was 17, I stared at the ocean gleaming back at me. And every year since, I return.
Summer to me means not sun but water. It means the ocean. It means rain - the nourishment all the animals and food we consume depend on. Water is one of the few essential compounds that human beings (and all life) require to survive. On average, 60-70% of the human body is water. We find water in our environments restorative. Water, whether a warm pond as Darwin claimed or a hydrothermal environment, is the likely birthplace of all life on earth (and perhaps more than once).
This month and all summer I celebrate going home to water, where we came from and where we will always return.
So may you find a cool stream to wet your tired feet.
May we dance in the rain.
May you have enough clean water to rehydrate on scorching days.
May we share it.
And if you like me need to surround yourself with stunning visuals of the places you wish you could be permanently, show yourself and an independent artist some love and invest in one of nature photographer Wild Gina’s stunning portraits of water (or the desert or flowers or mountains or all the other beauties she captures).
On Love & the Liminal
We’re here. A new poll suggests that the U.S. could vaccinate at least 70 percent of the adult population against Covid-19 by the summer. COVID new cases and deaths (in this country, not in several others) are at their lowest since last year. The mask mandate has lifted for vaccinated individuals. Travel this summer is expected to soar - a very, very different picture from this time last year.
I keep referring to this moment as re-emergence. I feel like we are coming out of a deep, long, depressing hibernation and into the sun that at first is too bright for our eyes. It’s been blinding me, and as I lift my hand to shield the rays from my eyes, I see sunspots as I look around, and I keep blinking, trying to readjust to the light.
And I’m not sure what I see yet. I’m not sure. I know that this, that everything, has changed in some way. Some changes have been subtle like a third person joining me and a fellow rider in our building’s elevator for the first time in a year, and we all look at each other and chuckle in disbelief and camaraderie. Some changes have been so tectonic I don’t even try to understand them in totality yet. I feel one of those massive changes in my own self, in my own body. I feel like I’m stepping into the light having shed a skin somewhere in the dark cave of 2020, and I don’t know what new layer I’m exposing yet.
A New York Times briefing detailed results of their recent Fresh Start challenge that gives a glimpse into how people are approaching this moment of optimism, this new beginning.
The project leader, Tara Parker-Pope, noted:
I think the large lesson from the Fresh Start Challenge is that people are struggling, they feel gratitude and they’re longing for a sense of connection. And they’re very hungry for strategies to make their post-pandemic lives not just better than pandemic life, but better than life before things got crazy. I think people are saying, ‘I’m never going to take anything for granted, and I’m actually going to make my life better than it was before.’
This made me smile. Hopeful. I feel this way myself - as a person who navigated COVID safely at home with a full-time job, health insurance, and paid time off, in a city with tons of access to hospitals, doctors, food, water, in contact with healthy loved ones near and far - I’m never going to take these blessings for granted again. And it’s high time I get over my old bullshit, my self-loathing, and look forward with love.
But nothing happens overnight. There is a space between what just happened and what’s coming. Where we’ve been and where we’re going. We’re just at the beginning of this “fresh start”, and there’s no promise of what’s to come.
My teacher Cath introduced me to the word “liminal.” She wrote in an email:
Liminal comes from the Latin for "threshold."
It holds not only the experience of passing through, but also the qualities of uncertainty, even disorientation, that can mark the middle of a rite of passage.
When you no longer hold the old title and rituals of the former state but have not yet completed the rite, have not yet walked through the doorway into what's next.
An in-between place. A place of uncertainty, the place we exist in between here and there. It reminds me of how David Whyte described the word “Close”, this transitory place that is ultimately the truest existence of human beings. He writes:
Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals.
And I feel this more deeply than I ever have before. Perhaps that’s because I’m actually paying attention. But I feel like I have left somewhere. I have left a shore behind, and sometimes strain my neck to look back. Then the nostalgia makes my neck ache and I turn forward and see mostly emptiness, mostly vast ocean, and then a perfectly cut line of never-ending horizon. A close yet distant arrival. An unknowable end to a journey.
As always, there is a poem for this (there are many poems for everything). It’s one of the reasons I practice poetry; I believe it is good medicine.
This month, Rumi gives us a way to visualize the liminal as an open doorway.
The door is round and open as you walk back out into this world.
Rest, but don’t go back to sleep.
Practice
Yoga is a loving practice for me, as it is ultimately just a tool to come back home to ourselves - wherever we are, however we are. The most accessible form I’ve been practicing and teaching is pranayama, or breath work, the fourth of the eight limbs of yoga. Pranayama allows us to consciously manipulate our breath and therefore our nervous system; the practices I teach switch the nervous system automatically into the parasympathetic, or rest and digest, response.
Please enjoy this short morning breathe & stretch practice I taught to my colleagues recently.
And as always, feel free to explore our library of movement and meditation recordings to meet your needs.
Loving Lately
Reading
I binged Joan Didion’s “South and West”, a compilation of notebooks from two of the writer’s experiences in the 1970’s: a roadtrip through New Orleans, Alabama, and Mississippi, and reflections during the Patty Hearst trial. I’ve been soaking up all the insights I can get from writers about the writer’s life, their process, and Joan’s notebooks are gold. Her unfinished prose is also superior to most writer’s best work, and her insights about the South in particular resonate 50 years later even more profoundly than they did then. I bow down.
Also: I’m still reading Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” piece by piece and opening Mary Oliver’s “Dream Work” before bed.
Watching
One of the most well-constructed shows I’ve seen in a while is Amazon’s
”Zero Zero Zero”. Also: “The Current War” about the race between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to light up the country using electricity for the first time ever.
Listening to
My always-growing colby loves playlist, my go-to collection of favorites.
Next month I’ll be sharing our summer medicine playlist!
That’s all for me for now loves.
I’d love to know how you are!
Leave a comment, or simply reply to this email.
All love dears,
Colby