Joe Trees

When I was a very little kid, my parents would take us to the forest to hunt for our Christmas trees. We’d go sledding and my dad would build a fire so we could roast hot dogs. We’d drink hot cocoa from a thermos. It was all very classic, very perfect, very wonderfully Christmas. 

Those trips ended after my parents found themselves in a double bind of sickness and financial straits; they couldn’t go tree hunting and they couldn’t afford to buy a tree off a lot. 

Luckily, my dad’s friend, Joe, came to the rescue. He offered to cut a tree down for us. Joe was a kind, but gruff, practical outdoorsman man with no sense of style or aesthetic appreciation. And so, the tree he cut for us was hideous. It was the alpine equivalent of heavy drinker who’d been in a lot of bar brawls. It was the walk of shame of trees. This tree had a hard life and stories to tell. It was tall, but also squat, like a bridge troll with a shrunken head. It had weird, gnarly branches that stuck out in every direction like hooks, yet somehow it also managed to have large bald patches everywhere. When we tried the “ol’ turn the bad side to the wall’ trick, we discovered we couldn’t. Every side was a bad side. 

My sisters and I were devasted. This was the ugliest, meanest tree we had ever seen. How could this be our tree? We told our dad, “Forget this tree!” but he wouldn’t hear it. He knew it was a generous gesture, given out of love. Even if it was horrible, he was grateful and there was no way we weren’t going to keep it. We were stuck with this Joe Tree. 

My mom, sisters and I decided to make the best of it. We were going to Charlie Brown this tree! We’d love it into the tree we knew it could be! We bought fancy tinsel garlands and pretty bows. We made paper chains and added extra baubles.

It didn’t work. It just made a prickly, grumpy tree a shinier, prickly, grumpy tree.

The tree was embarrassing and we tried to keep our friends away. When they came over, we’d joke about the tree, ridicule it, make fun of it, our dad, and Joe. The tree had, in many ways, become a representation of the life we were living behind closed doors. It was a life that we still desperately wanted to be “perfect,” but was in fact being turned upside down. 

Joe continued to cut trees for us for several years. Every year the tree was a utilitarian nightmare. Every year we’d beg our parents to buy a tree, but they were struggling to make ends meet so it was Joe Tree, or no tree. And even a Joe Tree was better than no tree. So, every year we put lipstick on that pig and made the best of it. 

Over time Joe Trees became our inside joke. They became less and less about what others would think and more and more about what we knew to be true; Joe was a friend, and he was trying to be nice. And Christmas and families are messy and complicated. And those trees were horrible. 

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Of all my childhood holiday memories, the Joe Trees stand out because they are an endearing gesture of love that were ultimately harmless, and, in hindsight, very funny. 

Joe Trees are now the standard by which my younger sister and I gauge our holiday prowess. We almost instinctively look for the messy part of our holiday preparations and share them with gleeful pride. The lights we never finished hanging, the food we burn, the gifts we forgot to send, the party fails; they all get a Joe Tree award! We tend to celebrate each other’s awkward attempts at saving, and ultimately messing up, Christmas more than we do our successes. And I love it. It is one of my favorite parts of the season. 

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This time of year, with the conflicting dynamics and pressures to make it special, can be overwhelming.

As you head into this last week of the year, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, I hope you are able to extend grace and love to yourself. I hope you can revel in the stupid messiness of it all and just give yourself a break. Just accept your Joe Trees; it’s OK. 

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Normally at this point in an email I would talk about all our offerings, but instead, I am going to leave you with this very Joe Tree worthy holiday carol I made-up last night. I hope it gives you a little cheer!

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Warts and All 

Friend, may you experience grace and the space you need,

For you my friend, are an expression of the universe, 

Warts and all, warts and all, warts, and all!

Friend, may you have support and moments of peace,

For you my friend, are perfect star dust,

Warts and all, warts and all, warts, and all!

Friend, may you find joy and know your beauty.

For you my friend, are worthy, 

Warts and all, warts and all, warts, and all!

My friend, you are invited,

Warts and all, warts and all, warts, and all! 

Because you, my friend, are loved, 

Warts and all, warts and all, warts, and all! 

Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!

Small Footprint, Big Impact

This past weekend I had the pleasure of working with our engaged, enthusiastic, incredibly supportive and dedicated 300 hour students. Spending time with them is truly life giving - they fill the cup! 

One of our conversations was about the idea of “success” and our ability (or perceived inability) to make a significant impact. What constitutes success as a teacher? Is it the teacher who has 10k+ followers, one who has a thriving private practice, or the studio owner? Is it the teacher who “quit their day job” and now teaches full time? 

Success is, of course, subjective. Not everyone wants the same thing. What is successful to me is not necessarily successful to someone else. But when we look at the prevailing narrative of what a “successful” teacher is, it generally boils down to, “the one who makes the most money is the most successful.” 

Now, I’ve been training yoga teachers for 23 years and I assure you, this is not true. I have always felt that any student who comes through a YTT wants to teach, they just don’t always want to do it in the same way. And while I do have students who teach full time, who’ve opened studios, who are “yoga famous,” I also have students who use their training to help them be better leaders, teachers, nurses, police officers, friends, parents, etc. I have students who don’t have a clear idea of what they want out of the training, and I have students who have no desire to teach at all. I even have a student whose only goal was to learn how to teach yoga to their mom. No one else, just their mom. Are any of these reasons less lofty, less worthy than the other? 

No, they are not. 

In a world where we are bombarded with messages that reaffirm success as one note, one image, one path, it is absolutely subversive to do things without traditional ambitions or goals. 

Take TSY for example; TSY is a “micro business,” meaning we are smaller than a small business. In the twelve years since we opened, we've trained less than a thousand students. By the “most, biggest, best” standards TSY would not be considered very successful. But I know we are impactful. I see how much the training means to people. 

I know my footprint is small, but my impact is big. 

Meaningful impact as a teacher happens when you get people to congregate and communicate, when you connect with another person and share. You can be intentional, devoted, good at what you do and be relatively unknown, uncelebrated and still be successful. The people in your orbit are important enough to care about and extend yourself for. It doesn’t need to be more than that. 

If you are interested in teaching, you should. You may have a small footprint, but that does not mean you cannot make a big impact. 

Hope

Recently I had an opportunity to walk with my 16 year old through Central Park. The day was perfect; mildly warm and sunny and it made us feel very “swoony” because we are both shamelessly in love with New York City.

Jack’s experience of the city is very different from mine. He is a teen growing up in the city under the protection of loving parents, while I am a mother trying to protect, provide for, and raise a young man. Nevertheless, a shared love, even when experienced differently, is still shared. Thus, we swooned. ;)

As we strolled along my son said, “I love seeing buildings under construction! Buildings are a testament of how much we can accomplish when we work together. Not one of these buildings is the work of one person. They are all products of people working together. They are like beacons of possibility. And they are everywhere! Sometimes I look at a building and the way the light hits, I dunno it makes me feel something.... It’s hard to explain.”

I felt like I knew what he was trying to articulate. He was talking about hope. The hope that a city like New York inspires.

I moved to the city when I was 18, limping into adulthood as a raw, wounded human who had been psychologically kneecapped by a traumatic childhood. New York’s roughness, the grime, the dirty messiness, the need to be vigilant and aware, the weirdos and the expense juxtaposed against all the beauty and possibilities felt so… validating. City life channeled my energy. It felt like my insides experience outside my body. It was liberating. And that freedom and autonomy was a wildly ecstatic, foreign feeling.

That feeling was hope.

Hope was something I was so deeply unaccustomed to I didn’t even know what it was. The odd sense of getting away with something, the longing mingled with happiness... it confused me. It took me decades to pin down that pining feeling that made my insides feel warm and a little giddy was in fact, hope.

I’ve been told hope is something we shouldn’t indulge in, that it makes us careless, keeps us from acting in the now. But for me, hope is a wildly wonderful indulgent gift. It is a source of comfort and joy. It buoys me up and propels me forward. It keeps me trying. Without it, I would be utterly lost.

Hope comes to us with a bouquet picked just for us. It is tuned to our specific needs and circumstances. Hope is New York City to me, but New York City isn’t necessarily a hopeful place because what makes it feel hopeful to me, will feel hopeless to someone else. But I think, now more than ever, we each need to find spaces where we can tap into hope. It may be a place, or an activity, or an internal space, but we need to have something that connects us to our creativity and our longing, something that gives us back a sense of wonder and possibilities.

I told Jack, “I think you are feeling hopeful. It’s a good feeling isn’t it?”

He said, “Yes, that’s it! That’s how I feel. You know, someone told me life is just misery punctuated by hits of dopamine and the dopamine is what we call happiness. But really all we are doing is chasing dopamine hits to keep the misery at bay. But why does that have to be it? Can’t it be the other way around? I think it can. I think life is happiness with hits of misery in between. That’s what I think.”

Kid, I hope you always feel that way.

Love you!