light at the end

I had this thought that I’d publish another story before we tiptoe into 2021. Well, it wasn’t my thought so much as it was someone else’s, but when he spoke it to me, I quietly stuffed it in the back of my mind where it faded as neglected thoughts do. And really, it wasn’t so much a neglected thought as it was a temporarily-abandoned-until-I-can-think-of-a-story-worth-telling thought, because thinking of a story worth telling is a considerable challenge at the moment.

The longer you write, the harder writing is. That’s great paradox in the craft. Or, perhaps that’s my paradoxical experience in the craft. In any case, my next story is coming without a deadline, which is to say it is coming in its own time.

2020 would feel unfinished, however, if I didn’t share something, and I think we all can agree that 2020 needs to not remain unfinished. So, I’ll leave you with this: a highlight of this year; a time-lapse of events; a goodbye to humanity’s most shitstorm year on record. And as I employ sarcasm, here, understand that it’s to infuse humor, and it’s to acknowledge that so many of you had the actual worst year of your lives.

I see you. I feel you. I love you.

That wasn’t me, though. I’d survived 2019, a span of time where breathing felt like something I had to remember to do. You see, my worst year torpedoed me into this stretch where the loss of greats (looking at you Kobe Bryant, Alex Trebek, and RBG) was replaced with a devastating pandemic, societal upheaval, and murder hornets. As the world was tilting sideways, I was just starting to stand upright - a timely postural shift, as most of us masked up and learned to recognize the act of smiling by the way someone’s eyes crinkled.

My eyes are crinkling as I write this.

2020 in review:

Books
The very first day of quarantine, I picked up a book that had been on my nightstand since the previous fall and read it cover to cover. I loved her authenticity so much that I immediately purchased the kindle version of her sequel (for which I had to download a kindle app) and read the first half. Nine months later, the virtual bookmark is reliably in its place, but I’d give it a semi-solid thumbs up if you’re needing some motivation to be exactly who you are. Glennon Doyle’s Love Warrior and Untamed.

Also on my 2020 reading list:
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn - This is my all-time favorite book for twenty-five years, now, that I reread periodically, especially when I recommend it to someone.
- Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch - This is one of the better books I’ve read - ever, really - and depicts a god I can get on board with. It’s also been the topic of many bourbon-soaked discussions. I touched on that here.
- Never Broken by Jewel - I love her more than some relatives and will read anything she ever writes. Ever. And always. And it doesn’t even have to be good.
- Life Will Be the Death of Me by Chelsea Handler - Sometimes you just need some comedy, and she brings it. It made me wish I was one of those five-minutes-at-a-time readers, though, as in large doses, it starts to feel negative.
- The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg - I read and loved her first two memoirs years ago and then forgot about her until this book popped up in an email. Loved it. All of it. Her story, her writing, her wit, her honest confusion. p.s. She’s from Oklahoma City.
- A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost - Funny. Entertaining. Feels like you’re reading an SNL episode because of course.
- Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey - I am actually not finished with this one yet. I borrowed a copy, and a friend suggested I listen to the audiobook since he narrates it, so I am waiting for my turn from the library. As of this weekend, I was the 176th person in line, so it should be any day now.
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood - This is the second fiction book on my list, and despite my affection for nonfiction I loved it. The show is also great, if you haven’t seen it.
- The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth - I was going for another book, the name of which I can’t recall, but someone else had already borrowed it. There was value in this accident. I can’t say that for the next on my list.
- Big Friendship by Animatou Sow - With no exaggeration, my friends are my family, so I had high hopes for this one. I abandoned those along with this book without hesitation or regret.
- Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan - Read this book. Watch the documentary. Be grateful your brain isn’t actually on fire. This. Was. So. Good.
- Philosophical Thoughts by C.S. Lewis - If you’re a chronic overthinker, this one is for you. I am. It was for me.
- The Book of Joe by Jeff Wilser - This was pure celebration that we voted Donald Trump out of office. It turns out, President-Elect Biden is a little funny, and I’m a sucker for a little funny.

I have a short list of professional reads that I’ll include for my yogis. Whether you teach or not, there is benefit in each of these:
- Living the Sutras by Kelly DiNardo
- Revolution of the Soul by Seane Corne
- Teaching Yoga by Donna Farhi
- Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses by Sage Rountree

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Movies
It’s been said that I’m not a movie person - a sentiment repeated as recently as yesterday. The truth is that I’m not a sit-still-without-a-book-or-glass-of-wine-in-my-hand person. The other truth is that I get emotionally involved in them, which is to say that I feel whatever the characters are feeling, and it lingers long after I hit the off button. I had the great luck of befriending a film connoisseur at the start of 2020, though, and leveraged his knowledge to take a few cultural steps toward the rest of society. My opinions of the following are strong, but I like art that makes me feel something.
- Fight Club - Loved it. The dialogue was so good, I could’ve just listened and still loved it.
- Shawshank Redemption - Entertaining. Enjoyable. I don’t need to see it again.
- Joe vs Volcano - It was oddly endearing and one I’d never have given a second glance to without the recommendation. And anytime a movie can use the word flibbertigibbet, it’s got my attention.
- 12 Angry Men - This one knocked my top two favorite movies down a notch, and I can’t see it budging from the number one spot. Ever. It’s old, black and white. It’s also dialogue-driven, but it’s just the sort of movie that reaffirms your belief to always stand up for whats right - even if you’re standing alone.
- Field of Dreams - Speaking of standing up for what’s right, Annie Kinsella is my hero forever and ever, amen. It’s feel-good and sweet and uses baseball to talk about the realities of family relationships. It works, but I think baseball is feel-good and sweet and can be a metaphor for many things.
- Collateral - If you’re a guy, watch it. If you’re a girl who is killing time while in the midst of a 48 hour run challenge, watch it.
- Drive - No. I watched the first half through the spaces between my fingers before finally turning it off. Unless I’m a neurosurgeon, I just don’t need to see someone’s brains - particularly when they are splattered about a room. Just no.
- When Harry Met Sally - I’ve seen this one a million times, but I needed to erase Drive from my mind. Incidentally, it was number one until 12 Angry Men came into my life.
- His Girl Friday - Another old black and white one, this movie is full of fast talkers with quick wit. I liked it.
- Contagion - And no, I’m not kidding. It was suggested, partially in jest, but here we are. Also, it’s worth the watch. Later, though. Once we’ve had a little distance from the real life story.
- The American - George Clooney is reason enough, but I’d have loved it even if he weren’t so pretty.
- To Kill a Mockingbird - This is up there with 12 Angry Men, and I can’t believe I made it halfway through my life without seeing it. It is as good as the book, which, incidentally, is my second favorite book of all time. Consume both. It is time well spent.
- You’ve Got Mail - I was inspired by a friend, and I’m grateful for the inspiration. Kathleen Kelly is my other hero.
- National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation - Never, ever will I let a holiday season go by without seeing this one. Also, I love it so much that I will big, fat watch it in July.
- A Time to Kill - Like Shawshank, it was enjoyable, but it was, of course, very John Grisham. One book of his is enough, and I imagine that one movie adaptation is, as well.
- A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - I loved Mr. Rogers as a child, so I was excited for this one. I loved the movie, but my affections, here, lied with the journalist’s character. So, so good. Tom Hanks was excellent because he is excellent, but it was hard to see Mr Rogers instead of Tom Hanks.

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Speaking of art, 2020 brought three new writers into my life.

Jayleen Gerace and I met on Zoom during a business brainstorm meeting at the beginning of quarantine. She tells big stories in small poems and is carving her own path in the writing world. Her website is befittingly named Courageous Mantra. She’s a yoga teacher and a dog lover and we would regularly drink too much coffee together if it weren’t for the half a country between us.

Tom Junod is a man I will likely never meet, but he’s on my “if you could have dinner with anyone” list, and I’d want to have it in Italy, where dinner lasts the entire evening. He writes about athletes and celebrities and people nobody has ever heard of, all with equal brilliance. He is probably most known for The Falling Man and for his article that inspired A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His storytelling is soft and direct, and his skill for making simple feel brilliant is unmatched. He was dropped into my lap by the third writer in my list….

Mark Brown. MarkBrownPT. Contagion. We met over his journal bonfire, again over yoga, and again over bourbon. The bourbon solidified the friendship, as it does, and now he is one of my people. He blogs bravely and prolifically without borders to his ideas. His stories, infused with charm and humor, are relatable, familiar, affecting. His stories, charming, humorous, and affecting, are him, which is to say that to read him is to know him. I borrow his bravery often.

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And on the topic of writing, I did a lot of that, this year. Well, I do a lot of writing every year, but I wrote bigger and louder, which is to say that I dove into myself and shared it with the world instead of putting it back into the drawer to hide with the previous years’ journals.

I kept detailed quarantine records for the first six weeks and have published many of them here. They are salty and funny and sometimes sweet. They are real and there is no better display of my internal dialogue than the Covid blog.

I also wrote in the Isolation Journals Project - a quarantine journaling project started by Suleika Jaouad, a New York Times columnist and leukemia survivor. I hated most of it, but largely because it challenged me to write at a different level from a different angle - a necessary and valuable endeavor that was good for me. It was the broccoli of writing exercises, an analogy that would be much more appropriate if I disliked broccoli. In my favorite entry, I wrote a letter to the Curbside Chronicle guy who is stationed along one of my running routes.

On August 4th, I published the first story that I was truly proud of. It marked the 25th anniversary of a car wreck and the first real bravery I showed in writing, equally. That bravery - borrowed, of course - would carry over to writing about my experience with religion and learning to cook from a prostitute.

Four months later, I submitted an op-ed to the Washington Post. Really, it was a furious, sarcasm-ladened rebuttal to Joseph Epstein’s op-ed in which he criticized Dr Jill Biden for using her earned honorific. I knew it wouldn’t be accepted, but I wanted to experience the process and sent it, anyway. And, there may have been wine involved. I regretted my letter. I don’t regret the sentiment, rather the delivery of what I felt. It was unkind, inexorable, stooping. It was part of my writing year, though, so it has a space here, shameful as it may be.

Covid has blurred time a bit, but somewhere in the midst of quarantine, I was accepted as a writer for The Creative Cafe. I only contribute nonfiction, however, as writing fiction is not my strong suit. At all.

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Earlier this spring, I was a podcast guest for a second time. Karli Blalock - friend, colleague, OYC teammate, most-informed-person-on-social-issues-I-know - launched Red Dust Rising. Despite having known her for over a year, at that point, she astounded me with her interviewing skills. In those frozen moments, she would carry the conversation effortlessly, quietly offering a brief reprieve so my mouth could catch up to my mind. I wrote about her microphone magic here. Even at almost a generation younger than me, she inspires me to do better, to be better. Isn’t that how it should be, though? We do our best while making room for those younger to show us how to expand that.

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Where Spring meets Summer, complacency met activism. People of color found new volume to their voices, and I joined them. Wendy and I joined them. Along with her daughter. Along with her daughter’s best friends. Along with thousands of other Oklahomans who were tired for these people who’ve endured centuries upon centuries of pure hatred and warrantless killings. I’m a lifelong activist who has supported many social issues, but I had never experienced anything so horrifically and wondrously moving as this BLM protest. The story is here. Of course the story is still going because we have a lot of work to do, but the story of that day is here.

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Even after 2019 - the year of the stress fractures - and even after a three year break from racing, it turns out that I’m still a runner. And this year has plunged me into the sort of unplanned, adventurous runner that I used to be. I spent the first weekend of quarantine doing a 4x48 challenge, in which I ran four miles every four hours for forty-eight hours, an endeavor I decided upon less than twelve hours before go time. I ran eight of them alone, which is usually my preferred way to run, but I had company for four of the sets:
1) Wendy and Jared, who were also doing the challenge, met me for a jaunt through Midtown.
2) Jason, my night time trail running friend, met me at Bluff Creek for some trail time by headlamp.
3) Suzanne, my friend who is in a constant state of wonder about endurance running, joined for the Nichols Hills miles.
4) Mark, my writer/movie/bourbon friend, met me at Scissortail, where we tacked on a few extra miles peeking into abandoned buildings and following old railroad tracks through downtown.

In July, I complete my first race since summer 2017. Wendy and I drove to Robbers Cave for a night time 25K, where it stormed so badly we were navigating mud as well as boulders and roots, and we faced the very real possibility of being struck by lightning. We crossed the finish line shortly after midnight, changed clothes on the side of the trail, and were just entertaining enough to sidestep a speeding ticket at 1:30am in the tiny town of Hartshorne, Oklahoma.

In October, a friend of mine turned 43, and we celebrated by running 43 miles. I had a small, but powerful glute med attachment issue, so I called it at mile 21. At that point, my car was 9 miles away, so I ended up with 30 miles that day - my longest distance in almost three years. Kristi, the birthday girl, ran better than I’d ever seen. She was a metronome, making us swell with pride. Happy birthday, indeed.

Because humans crave other humans, and because Covid makes indoor gathering unsafe, we gathered outside. We gathered outside with trail shoes and hydration vests and wonderfully weird snacks, and we explored new places. We adventured to Lake McMurtry in Stillwater, St. Crispins in Shawnee (or is it Seminole?), Thunderbird in Norman, and SCIP in Midwest City. All of them are my favorite.

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In September, Anna - longtime student and new teacher - and I decided to camp. We would drive to Sedona, Arizona and sleep on cots with no tents to block our view of the stars. It would be 60˚ at night, 90˚ during the day, and cloudlessly perfect for new experiences. We were just east of Amarillo when I realized that the wildfires closed the campgrounds out west, and when I suggested we reroute to Leadville, she was an easy yes. We turned north. Next stop: Hope Pass.

It was 25˚ out, so I slid hand warmers into the bottom of my sleeping bag. Leadville’s night sky is so stunningly beautiful, I wouldn’t have wanted a tent, anyway. We spent three days drinking coffee at the campfire and climbing mountains before packing up for an impromptu trip to Taos. I didn’t bother to tell anyone where we were until after I was home, showered, and unpacked.

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Last month, I finally made it to Sedona. I hiked and ate guacamole and visited a Stupa. It’s a place that rivals Hope Pass in both magic and peace, and the rituals offer a sense of calm, even to skeptics like me. I circled the Stupa clockwise three times as a silent offer of hope and prayer to a friend in the throes of cancer. It was a curious feeling to experience wild waves of love and compassion from such tiny movement. I didn’t want to leave.

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Yoga. Gosh, this has become my life. Eight years ago, it started as a distraction while trying to heal from a torn calf muscle, and now it is my career. I’ve had some big changes this year - the biggest being my departure from Yoga at Tiffany’s/FLO State Studio. I didn’t depart from the people, there. That place was my home, after all. No, I still talk regularly with my students and my teachers, but, to employ one of the most clichéd clichés available, everything has a season. Leaving has created space for newer teachers to have a home, and it has created space for me to find new challenges elsewhere.

More significantly than my schedule shift was the postponement of YogaFest. I purchased the festival in 2019 and created a business around it. We were a week away from the event when Rudy Gobert poked the covid bear and tested positive while staying at 21C Hotels, our festival venue. To be fair to him, none of us knew how bad the virus actually was at the time. To be fair to the rest of the yoga community, yeah, I was frustrated, too. I didn’t worry about it, though, and I still don’t. Globally, we’re making progress with the pandemic, and I trust that I’ll be able to reschedule the event and all of the events surrounding it. We were given the gift of time, which is a phenomenon that sneaks up on you. It snuck up on us, and now we have more of it to make the festival even better.

This year, I learned that teaching via Instagram Live or Zoom is exactly as scary as it sounds. I also learned that it’s not impossible, and that it’s important to both brush your hair and move further from the camera when you’re demoing yogic squat. I learned that our community has wicked dedication to the practice and reaffirmed that the teacher-student relationship is truly a symbiotic one. My students, you are also my teachers, and my gratitude for you is endless.

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2020 showed me:
- that the action of trying really is what matters most
- perfectionism is the biggest roadblock
- hitting pause is necessary, and so is spending an entire day in your Star Wars PJs
- good coffee can improve any morning, good tequila can improve any evening, and sometimes the reverse of that is true
- with the right people, walking can be as much fun as running
- I can actually do a box jump and not need medical attention afterward
- doing 1000 steps wearing a weighted vest is exactly as much fun as it sounds
- day planners are essential for keeping my shit together, even when the days are blurred by a virus
- it’s okay to say no
- it’s okay to say yes
- hugs and love are the actual best things the universe has to offer
- it’s never a good idea to wear flip flops instead of clips while riding a bike, no matter how short the distance
- it’s important to not do dances that require any real coordination, particularly when the dance has both feet off the ground at once
- it’s important to have solo dance parties in any room at any time in your house
- acknowledging fear or sadness or frustration makes it better, not worse
- sometimes people are assholes for the sake of being an asshole
- most people are kind for the sake of being kind
- Donald Trump is still an asshole, and Mr Rogers remained relentlessly kind
- the world has far more comedians and artists and angels than we ever knew
- Duolingo isn’t the most effective way to learn to communicate in French; however I can now read my shampoo bottle effortlessly
- happy hours over Zoom are fun
- cold beers on a hot afternoon in overlooked outdoor spaces are also fun
- when someone matters to you, make sure they know it before the opportunity to tell them is gone

I’ve loved all of the moments of this year - even the impossible ones - because there is value in each of them.

Light at the end, right? Always, there is light.


p.s.
I feel compelled to explicitly thank those who have become my chosen family, a choice I made out of necessity, but also out of great love, respect, and connection. So, Wendy, Elena, Karli, Suzanne, Kathryn, Gina, Stacey, Tiffany, Johnny, Greg, and Mark, thank you.