Oh Love

The merging of my policy & yoga selves

This past weekend was the pre-launch for an organization I'm helping found to train teachers to teach yoga in schools.

It's the confluence of my education policy self and my yoga self and I am so excited about it!

Tonight I attended my first of the weekly group meetings held by the organization, and before the meeting I went with one of the other founding members to a yoga class near her apartment.

It wasn't my style of yoga -- heated room, powerflow -- but the instructor was awesome. At one point, I stopped to rest in child's pose and he came over and pressed down on my low back and then ran his hands up my spine to my neck.

It felt incredible, and after class I thanked him for that gift and told him I knew I loved him from that moment. And I'm kinda serious. He may not actually be my next love -- he has a girlfriend, for starters, and there are many things I don't know about him -- but if he isn't, he is a beacon for the kind of man I want to be with. Super present. That's at the top of my list.

Here to help me mark my return to love are my pals from Green Day:

Oh Love, oh love
Won't you rain on me tonight?
Oh life, oh life
Please don't pass me by
Don't stop, don't stop
Don't stop when the red lights flash
Oh ride, free ride
Won't you take me close to you

Far away, far away
Waste away tonight
I'm wearing my heart on a noose

Far away, far away
Waste away tonight
Tonight my heart's on the loose

Oh lights and action
I just can't be satisfied
Oh losers and choosers
Won't you please hold on my life
Oh hours and hours
Like the dog years of the day
Old story, same old story
Won't you see the light of day

Far away, far away
Waste away tonight
I'm wearing my heart on a noose

Far away, far away
Waste away tonight
Tonight my heart's on the loose

Talk myself out of feeling
Talk my way out of control
Talk myself out of falling in love
Falling in love with you

Oh love, oh Love
Won't you rain on me tonight
Oh ride, free ride
Won't you take me close to you

Tonight my heart's on the loose...
Tonight my heart's on the loose...

Yes it is, and the freedom feels so delicious after so much time in a noose!

Someone Belonging to Someone

Today I started listening to the book The Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown. I think I've posted her Ted Talk on the same subject before -- it's totally worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch it. But the book is really interesting too, and it really got me thinking. She talks a lot about worthiness, and people who believe they are worthy of love and belonging.

Listening to it, I realized the incongruence of me feeling like I am someone who is worthy of love and belonging, and staying in a relationship where I feel, at the moment at least, pushed away.

It feels like the opposite of belonging - - just ask the Bee Gees:

I know how I feel
Lonely in the black of night
There can be no love for me now
Nobody listens when the words ain't right
And you get into someone else
It's hard for me to know
Who's lovin' who
And where do I stand
What did I do it all for
There's no one I could love more
I did it for your heart alone
All that I try to be growin' inside to me
I can be strong if you're there

And there is someone belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me
I live in a world where the face of an angel
is all that a fool can see
You got the power to find me whenever I'm lost
Where are you? Who are we?

These are questions that I would've thought we had the answers to by now, but a particularly stressful time in my New Englander's life has brought the "where are you" question back to the forefront:

I believe in time
Can eat away a heart of stone
And baby if I leave you too late
It's just a feather and the bird has flown
It's colder when the fire dies
With all the trouble I'm in if I lose you too

Then what is my life
If I don't wanna go through
Anything without you
Couldn't be life at all
I could be lyin' on
You are the only one
We didn't make it by chance
And there is someone
belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me
I'm caught in a world on
the edge of tomorrow
It's all that a fool can find
I don't belong in the arms
of a love that is lost
Nowhere to cry
There must be something we
can say my love
Something except goodbye

I thought and hoped that he could find a way to lean on me, but it isn't working out that way. Some of my friends have talked about the good things that can come from hitting rock bottom. I know that to be true from my own experience, but so far, it ain't producing anything good for us, which leaves me feeling like maybe there isn't an us after all:

And there is someone belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me