Get Born, Keep Warm
Recently I learned that in Japan some Japanese people, especially Japanese artists, view nature through a perspective called, aesthetic of change. Aesthetic of change is a recognition of one’s forever changing surroundings, the understanding that a deep appreciation of nature, and one’s own felt enjoyment of natures echoing beauty, stems from its inherent impermanence. Plants grow, they flowers buds and bloom with vibrancy, then they wilt and die, and become nourishment for regeneration- for rebirth.
Mother nature lives, dies, transforms, becomes, and is reborn again and again before our very eyes; and in recognizing the changes in nature, and the impermanence of our surroundings, we open up to accepting and honoring the aesthetic of change within ourselves.
Life changes us, it has to; life itself is change. Dip your toes into any spiritual practice, religious philosophy, or scientific research and you will see that impermanence is the foundation life grows from. The inevitability of change is what makes us who we are. Change makes beauty precious, and sorrow endurable. Through the darkness of disaster and the ripe dawning of a miracle, we become more human, and more alive, through the myriad ways we change.
And I think we become stronger individuals and more connected to the whole of life when we honor these stories of change, when we share who we once were and who we have become.
This story begins on a Monday.
I don’t need to flip back in the calendar to know that, I remember.
The day seemed ordinary at first glance: I woke up at 5am, drank two cups of black coffee, changed into colorful yoga clothes, and headed off into the work day. It was a sunny Spring day, but the air, oddly, felt cold; like an invisible fog had just rolled in off some distant cosmic ocean, blanketing the world in confused mystery. On the surface everything still appeared normal, but the air had a strange heaviness to it. I know now it was the heavy weight of uncertainty, the coldness of change, the air was ripe with it, and the warmth of normalcy was beginning to droop and sag under its weight.
I walked out from teaching the 11:15am class, checked my phone, and saw in a text message three words that would come to define the next year of my life, of all of our lives.
The text message simply read:
“Shelter in place. Begins tomorrow.”
“What the hell does shelter in place mean? “ I blurt out, quizzically.
The message read like a code, I knew it was important news, but I couldn’t decipher what the new actually was; the meaning of the words was slippery, and it moved like flowing water through my fingers. Maybe I was already too afraid to understand; or perhaps I was resisting or avoid my own ability to understanding because of my fear; I don’t know. But it’s interesting to look back and see how such small insignificant words came together to add up to monumental meaning.
I stood in the doorway of the yoga studio for a long while anxious and glazed with confusion. I reread the message, again and again, hoping that repetition would eventually lead to comprehension. But it didn’t. Change was tracking me, the wild unknown was following my scent, like a skilled predator hunting its oblivious prey.
I learned, as we all inevitably would, that shelter in place was a polite way of saying lockdown, and that lockdown was a curt way of saying everything stops, save for essential businesses. But even those words were like moving water through my clenched fist.
I stood in the doorway for minutes -hours? days?- straddling the gaping chasm of change that was cracking open beneath me, one foot planted in the certainty of the past, the other in the uncertainty of the future. My nerves fluttered like dark winged butterflies, as my eyes desperately traced Zack’s message;
Shelter in place. Starts tomorrow.
Hanging on the wall of our spare bedroom - which we use as a gear room/art studio/yoga practice space/ office - are two large hand painted posters; both are brightly colored and psychedelic looking inspirational paintings. One has the Grateful Dead lyrics ‘ I will get by, I will survive’ printed in bold across it, and the other is branded with the phrase ‘gratitude is stronger than fear’. I painted them in the first week of the shelter in place. For a few months they hung from the trees outside our apartment building, facing a busy thoroughfare. They became totems of inspiration, and reminders, mostly to me, that creativity suffuses even in the toughest of times. And with the passage of time, as they’ve hang on the wall, they’ve become tokens of the creative wisdom that has been guiding me through the past year. They remind me that change is a spiritual opportunity more than it is a painful curse.
These pieces of art are talismans to the wisdom that can arise from the depths of confusion; recognitions that destruction and creation are somehow two sides of the same coin; that beginnings and endings hang in balance somewhere in the sublime; that when somethings is lost, something new is gained.
May we all remember that gratitude is stronger than fear; and may we encourage each other to create more than we destroy.
Later that evening I taught the last in-person yoga class at Yogaworks San Francisco, and probably one of the last in person yoga classes of Yogaworks as a company. And as I reflect back, I think some part of me knew that I would not be going back here again. Some deep part of me understood that memories can take us back to the past, but time never will. The feet of humanity face forward, and no amount of control can make those feet walk back.
As I walked into the practice space one last time, I let myself take in every detail of the experience. For over a decade I’d been deeply nurtured by the prayers and practices that unfurled in those rooms, wisdom seemed to cascaded down from the high ceilings and drop directly into my head, down to my heart, and into my soul. I could see all the ways in which I’d grown and transformed through the wise teachings that those walls contained and protected. I closed my eyes and opened my soul, and felt thankful that the walls had been such a cocoon of wisdom. And then I said a little prayer in the privacy of my mind; I prayed that I absorbed some of that wisdom, and that as the wings of change grew that I be granted permission to carry that wisdom close as I charted the next journey.
Months later, when the studios would publicly announce their closure and file bankruptcy I returned to the other studios locations one last time. I was allowed to take the props and sacred objects I wanted. As I gathered bolsters and the sacred statues that so peacefully adorned the practice spaces, I thanked those spaces too, but the rooms weren’t teeming with energy, in fact, after months of locked doors the rooms felt empty of energy, lifeless. And that’s when I realized that the wisdom was inside of me. Had it been with me all long without my knowing?
Those props and sacred objects now sit in the specialness of our spare room along side my paintings. The room has become a kind of shelter from the storm, filled with tokens of what I’ve learned, stories of who I am, the journeys of where I’ve been, and the wisdom that will I’ll ride to wherever I’m heading next.
Even sad endings give rise to new beginnings. Parts of who we are die each year, each month, each week, each day, each moment, each breath; only to be reborn once again. We are each of us continually dying to the person we use to be, transforming into wiser beings, and being reborn through that wisdom. The cocoon of transformation is around us and it dwells within us. Wisdom isn’t certainty nor permanence; wisdom is understanding that change is life, that life is nature, that nature is in a constant state of transformation that is outside of our control. The process of transformation is the truest truth of who we are. Some of our transformation can be seen, some of it can only be felt. It’s not a matter of if we transform, it’s a matter of when.
That final class I taught was quiet and gentle, as it always had been. The faces looking back at me were an array of familiars and strangers. It was an utterly ordinary class, unremarkable in every possible way, memorable only now because it was that last breath of calm before the storm; the warmth of a goodbye kiss that lingers on your breath long after you’ve parted.
When the class was over I walked out the door and back onto the deserted city street; I would never return; and that knowing was both scary and comforting. As walked to my car I felt another layer of ordinary eroded away, another spool of resistance unravel, and I plunged into the chasm of change; like Alice from Alice in Wonderland I marooned between certainty and mystery, falling down the rabbit hole of the underworld with shards of wisdom and treasures from my past floating in the air around me.
As I drove back across the great Golden Gate I watched the sun sink to the west, casting its warm reflection across the cool blue sea. The reflection reminded me of me; I was both a reflection of myself and something not yet myself; the edges of my identity were soft, wavy and rippled.
When I got home I made myself a cup of tea, gave my dog a treat, and sat in a spell of shock for a minute, an hour, a lifetime. Then, after hours of falling, I hit the bottom. And when I did, I called my dad and cried into the phone. I cried tears of sadness, of loss, of relief, of wisdom and transformation.
Who am I if I am no longer that yoga teacher zipping around busily and happily from, one fulfilling class to the next?
And when I release control, and release my attachment to job, relationships, behaviors, habits, talents, failures, dreams, and expectations, who remains?
What remains?
A year ago I didn’t have answers to those questions, and perhaps I never will, but I’ve learned that it is important to my mental health, spiritual health, creativity, to my relationship with myself and my relationships with others that I explore them, and that I allow myself to transform through that exploration. Parts of who I was, am, will die, and parts of who I am becoming will l be born.
That first week of the shelter in place was a tornado of emotions and tiresome thoughts; hours, minutes, days, and what would become months, rife with degrees of challenge that somehow felt nerve wracking and mind numbing. Chaos and emptiness came together, like two hands of the same body- right and left, wrong and right, good and bad; fingers of opposition tightly interlaced.
Joan Didion once wrote, “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.” It’s a guttural truth that so many of us, myself included, were so good are ignoring and avoiding. Alan Watts so beautiful wrote, “The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” We can’t out run or out live the cosmic dance of change; but we can accept it, explore it, transform through it, and be reborn anew from it. Tibetan Buddhism teaches that in every moment of our lives we are capable of wisdom and confusion. The degree to which we understand our own impermanence and transience, and witness the aesthetic of change, is the degree to which our confusion will become our wisdom, and our wisdom our instructions for life.
As human beings we are collectors of stories, we all carry wisdom stories, they’re stories of our transformation, deaths and rebirths; some of our stories can be seen, and some are only felt. Our wisdom stories aren’t always our triumphs, they are often the stories of the painful changes we’ve endured; how normalcy slipped away, the moments we learned to let go, the richness and loneliness of solitude, the times we’ve been buried by loss and the death of people we love, and all the small wisdoms that seem to unfurl through the slow passage of time.
One day we are here, one day we are not. With time, with life, with loss, the most ordinary becomes extraordinary, and what appears stagnant and permanent turns to ash and disappears into the winds of time.
I suppose that might sound scary, and before the pandemic I think it would have sounded scary to me; but I’m learning to let go of my fear of uncertainty, and with compassion and empathy that I encourage you to do the same. I think our world deserves less of our fear and more of our wisdom. Don’t you? Don’t we owe it to each other to live with wisdom, and in a very special way, don’t we owe it to the memory of those who have died?
Our wisdom stories remind us that life is change, and that change is precious. And when we remember that, when we pay attention to the preciousness of change and impermanence, we honor the beauty of what is; and that beauty of what is opens us to the deepest kind of wisdom that echoes through eternity.
May we all remember that every ending is a beginning, that in all death there exists so much life, and in every change there is the wisdom of transformation.
Thank you for reading.
Please send your comments to me directly at erin@erincookston. I love hearing from you.
Photo and Words by Erin Cookston