From the category archives:

motion

Careful What You Google For

August 14, 2008

About a week ago I googled an old boyfriend. The one I thought I’d marry but didn’t.
It wasn’t a stalker sort of thing. It wasn’t, amazingly, a raging case of misplaced nostalgia brought about by panic over finding myself a work-at-home mom living on a neighborly street in Asheville, North Carolina. I [...]

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The Friendship That Doesn’t Change When You Do

August 12, 2008

I took my dearest friend — Kali I’ll call her and she knows why — to the airport this morning. And I started crying — again. Not just because “Carolina in My Mind” was playing on the radio. (That song makes me cry every time, dammit, and not because I live in [...]

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Forget My Mind — I Lost My Cell Phone

July 24, 2008

Actually, “lost” is mother-of-a-toddler code for, “I left my cell phone in the pocket of the shorts I wore to the pool with Jake and ran it through the washing machine.” Raz-r phones, I probably don’t have to tell you, do not like being run through the washing machine.
When Mike first announced that he [...]

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MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path

July 11, 2008

Sometimes there are good reasons you don’t have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don’t mean “good” in the “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun.
I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog [...]

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I’m Really Here, Now (Even in Wal-Mart)

June 23, 2008

What surprised me as I stood in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina, was not so much that I was standing in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina. The exigencies of a Blankie left far behind at school can leave one in some pretty surprising places. What surprised me was [...]

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Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

June 16, 2008

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio.
Immediately, it was 1982. [...]

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Geez, I Haven’t Had the Hip Replacement Yet, or Thoughts on Age and Youth

May 14, 2008

Something occurred to me yesterday in yoga class as I observed the places where I feel just a tad tighter and achier than I did before my pregnancy.
“Maybe,” I thought with a rush of horror threaded through with an unsettling warmth of acceptance, “I’m just getting older.”
For the past couple of years I’ve had these [...]

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There’s Something Bigger Than Forgetting to Buy Antibiotic Ointment

May 9, 2008

It was plainly my fault. Because, I feel deeply, anything that distresses my boy is.
Bath time, these balmy spring evenings, has been a tad more fraught than usual. Mike has been arriving home right around when Jake and I sit down for his dinner. So we all head out for the deck, [...]

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Fixing Everything, Even When You Can’t, or How I Learned to Diffuse My Energy

May 7, 2008

Today my acupuncturist spent a lot of time diffusing my energy. And it got me thinking.
I was probably not thinking what you are — Acupuncture! Therapy! Yoga! This gal spends an inordinate amount of energy searching for the mindfulness in motherhood! And is maybe a little bit crazy to boot. But, [...]

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Respecting Your Body (and, of course, your child’s) in a World That Doesn’t

April 24, 2008

Boy, you think you’re a careful, concerned parent doing everything anyone could to ensure that your child will never contract autism or cancer or any of the other scary diseases that seem to lurk everywhere in our toxic world, and along come abundant assurances that you could be doing so very much more. It’s [...]

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How Being Kicked in the Face by a Baby Reminded Me that Energy Is All Around Us

April 16, 2008

I’m really tired right now. And not just because I spent most of the night being hit in the face by my baby.
Usually, when Jake wakes up crying at night, the family engages in a practiced shuffle. Mike and I drag ourselves out of bed. He heads for the daybed in the [...]

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Facing Life’s Daily Detours Like Bamboo

April 12, 2008

Yesterday I planned on writing a YogaMamaMe entry even though I really didn’t have time for it.
As a result, I found myself with 10 minutes to go before yoga class began as I threw myself into the car and marveled yet again at how it always seems to be 5 minutes later by the car [...]

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What the Friday Morning Bothered Blues Can Teach You About Time

April 11, 2008

“Is this the kind of day I’m going to have?” I whined as I pinched my fingers in the buckle of Jake’s stroller while rushing to get him to school.
YES! boomed something much bigger than me a few minutes later, when Jake dropped the windshield scraper he so loves to carry to school on my [...]

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Honoring Where Your Heart Has Taken You

April 7, 2008

I was sitting at the local ball park with Mike and Jake yesterday, enjoying the spring day and the buzz of peanuts and beer and baseball gloves, when “Here Comes the Sun” came over the loudspeakers.
Normally, I resist writing essays built around a song that someone else has written. (I haven’t ever written [...]

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How Getting Knocked Off My Feet Helped Me to Grow

March 25, 2008

Yesterday I surveyed the field of unexpected obligations suddenly stretching between me and my YogaMamaMe website and declared myself okay. Getting published, I realized, had become too much of a goal, and I should feel deep gratitude to the Universe for throwing a bunch of other things at me as a reminder that I [...]

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Why Waiting for What You Want (and Maybe Not Even Getting It) Is a Gift

March 24, 2008

So, I’ve been working on this being a writer thing more or less steadily since I quit my teaching job in 2003. And, not for the first time, I feel like I’m on the verge of it actually panning out. All I’ve got to do is finish my YogaMamaMe book proposal, get the [...]

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How Not to Start Out as a YogaMama Blogger

March 19, 2008

Yoga and my life frequently seem to be at cross purposes.
Yoga is about slowing down, being in the moment, focusing on exactly what you are doing and nothing else. It is about not pushing, about slow and steady change, respect for one’s limitations, and gratitude for the beauty within us all. It is [...]

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