Lessons from a Spider

By Jen Whinnen

This past summer I relocated and now live half the year in Portland, OR.  The costs of living and the proximity to family made the “half NYC/half Portland” idea make sense and so here we are, embarking on yet another lifestyle experiment.

So far I have found that Portland is a city very interested in what’s “in season” and what’s coming up “next season,” which is kind of ironic, because Portland doesn’t really have seasons. It’s a temperate climate. It has two seasons; rainy and cold or sunny and warm.  Coming from New York where the weather is like the extreme mood swings of a toddler, the relative calm of Portland doesn’t exactly scream “seasons” to me. But, perhaps that is why people are so interested in seasons here. They like to imagine that talking in variables will make noticeable changes in their environment.

Whatever the reason, one of the seasons we have experienced thus far is Bug Season.  August is spider season. It comes after wasp season and before stink bug season. Of all the seasons, Bug Season has been my least favorite. And of the bug seasons, spider season ranks last. In August spiders were everywhere.  In bushes, in trees, between trees, on the grass, in the flowers, on our ceiling, in the corners, on the car door, in the sink, in the tub, hanging mid air from who knows where, if you can name it, a spider had claimed it.

One morning a spider spun a web between the posts of our front porch and I came within an inch of getting a face full of web and squiggly spider. I was an inch away from panic attack level screams of “get it off me!” hysteria when I noticed this little punk tiger striped arachnid sitting there upside down in middle of his web staring at me. Just sitting there watching and waiting.  He must have thought he was pretty clever.  Why build a web in the rhododendrons and blackberry bushes when you can bag a human? He must have thought “enough of this small time game hunting! Capture bug, ruin web, eat bug, fix web, and capture another. What a waste of time.  I’m gonna kill a person and be done for the season.”

It had been like this for days so it was not a surprise when, outside my window, I saw a spider spinning a web one morning. I’ve seen spiders spin webs before, or rather, I thought I had.  I know I’ve seen it on nature shows.  But, until that morning, I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched a spider work.

It was fascinating.

The web she was making was huge. She’d picked a spot between two large tree limbs that were pretty far apart so the circumference was about the size of a garbage can lid.  And this was a little spider. She was about the size of a nickel. That something so small could make something so big was quite a feat of engineering.  How many times did she leap from one branch to the other before she got it right? If she fell to the ground, would she climb all the way back up and start all over again? And if she made a lot of attempts, did she go back to that same spot?

And the way she worked was so interesting.  There was so much power in her. It looked like she was hovering in the air; flying from one end of her invisible web to the other, spinning line after line in an intricate, specific pattern.  She was deft and fast and worked with clean precision. She knew exactly what to do next, which direction to go. She’d make a line somewhere and then double back to the center of the web to reinforce it and then head back out again.  Her long, fuzzy, little legs would make the minutest adjustments to the thread, making the web stronger, more exact.

Her life is basic: catch and kill, eat, survive, reproduce. Wash, rinse, repeat.  She works away, busily engaged in the practice of just doing what she’s doing.  She’s not straying from her task she’s just at it, busy and focused. It’s cyclical and repetitive, but it’s leading towards something.  Completely focused on the task she was a great example of controlled concentration.

Yet, she is so fragile. She’s literally hanging on by a thread.  This fine line of invisible stuff, if I wanted, I could wipe it down with one finger.  On the other hand, it suits her needs.  Her web is as weak as any other spiders, but unlike the ill-planned web of my would-be captor, she’s built it well.  She’s picked a great spot; high in the trees near the fruit where bees and bugs will fly by.  It’s partially covered under the eaves of the house so it’s sheltered from the wind and the rain.

Watching her work made me wonder, “Is my life really that different from a spider’s?”  Life is fragile and cyclical and ultimately, it is redundant.  We do the same things over and over again. Our bodies do the same things over and over again. It is amazing and fascinating, but it is not unique.  It is mundane. This kind of plodding focused, dogmatic dedication to her work isn’t really that dissimilar to mine.  When I pay attention to how I deal with the mundane it guides me towards a life I want.  Likewise, I’ve noticed that when I act like the spider on the porch, making poor choices and living a disconnected life, regardless of how beautiful the dream is, will draw me further away from what I am seeking.

Sitting there watching that spider I realized a well balanced life is mundane.  A balanced life is not a string of passionate love affairs, but a monotonous cycle that helps draw me back to the middle.  It’s about how I spin my web. When I live on the fringes of it, when I over extend, spin too wide, spin to small, when I lose focus or pick a bad spot, people walk through it, the bugs avoid it, the wind rips it to shreds and I go hungry.  When I focus and am consistent, when I do the work of learning how to deal, life begins to reveal itself, it lays out a pattern. It tells me where to go and reminds how to get back, it reinforces the learning.

For good or for ill, it is not the grand gestures that make us who we are but the mundane.  The routine itself reveals the Self.

With this idea in mind, I embarked on an experiment. My goal was to cultivate a more consistent meditation and writing practice. I am not very good at either, but both are important to me. When I meditate it helps clear my head and I write better. When I write it’s a form of meditation.  So, I decided I would meditate and write every day for 45 days. My plan was to get up in the morning, meditate for 30 minutes and then sit down and write for 30 minutes.

Like any well made plan, it was a good one.  It was the new car of plans; shiny and bright, I was excited about it and I wanted to take my New Plan out for a spin as soon as possible. But, just like a new car, the New Plan lost 20% of its value as soon as I drove off the lot. I found that a new plan gets banged up pretty quickly when you are in the middle of a move.  It is also really hard to keep a New Plan going when you have children on summer vacation who want a lot of your attention.  And of course there were just the days.  Days when I was simply too tired, sick, stressed or distracted, days when I sat there and nothing came and nothing worked.  And there were days that I just didn’t care anymore. Like my little friend’s web, my link to my process is fragile. It is tenuous and slips out of my grasp quickly.

But, I keep at it. Sitting as often as I can and writing as often as I can after. It’s becoming more and more a part of my life.  It’s almost, almost a routine. I have learned through the mundane process of just getting up almost every day and doing it, that even if there is a break in the routine; I am laying down the foundations for what I am seeking.

The “holiday season” just ended and now we’re in the season of resolutions and new beginnings.  We are constantly inundated this time of year with messages telling us that now is the time to make those changes you’ve been wanting to make! So often we start off the new year thinking “yes! This year gonna be It!” only to get frustrated and disappointed when the days come that don’t turn out to be It.  We lose faith in ourselves and the process.  Whether you start a New Plan today or next month doesn’t matter. What matters is starting over.  And then starting over again. And then starting over again and again.  My New Year’s resolution is the same one I’ve had since I started this project six months ago. To be routine. To go back to the process again and again. To stick to the practice.

The results will take care of themselves.

this post was taken from Jen’s personal blog “The Year of the Spider” on 1/2/14. To read more, click here: http://yogajen.blogspot.com/

The Birthday: My Advice on How to Better Enjoy Getting Older

by Jen Whinnen

I turned forty years old this year. Forty. It’s weird being forty because forty is supposedly nothing these days. Forty is the new thirty! People live to be 110 and have babies in their 50s. I can pump my face full of Botox, veneer my teeth and pretend I am young until I’ve got one ancient foot in the grave.

and yet… I think there is a point when, regardless of how you spin it, we all know that we are no longer young. There is a point when we have to face facts. Time waits for no one. Forty is pretty much that point.  It’s the threshold to Old Age. Forty is “young old”. Forty’s got lots of good years left, but let’s face it; retirement is closer than our high school graduations.

I remember when I realized my mom was 40. She seemed like the oldest woman in the world.  Who lives to be 40? It was a number I could not wrap my mind around. I knew in some vague way that my grandma was older than my mom, but that didn’t really mean anything. My grandma wasn’t a person who did stuff.  She just made really good pickles and showed up for recitals and holidays.  My mom, on the other hand, lived at my house. She was the librarian at my school. She bought my groceries and did my laundry. She was a real person. And she was forty years old. How did she live with stretch marks and wrinkles? Wasn’t she embarrassed? How does she live through ever day knowing that she’s so. very. old?

Then I realized my dad was forty and that was terrifying.  At forty he had a bad knee and ankle and walked with a slight shuffle, he was missing his middle finger on his right hand and had severe arthritis in his arm, he was overweight and basically blind without his glasses. How did these two geezers get into my house?

Suddenly it dawned on me….my parents were going to be really, really old one day. Like Grandma old. And some day they were going to die.  My teen brain made calculations and realized once you hit forty you were basically dead. You were just a few short moments away from standing in line at the gates of Hades.

Happily, my parents made it past this mythical landmark and lived to see me graduate college. It was the first time they’d come to see me in New York and I was excited. I was 22 years old, living on my own, living in NYC and full of pep and vigor and vitality. One of the first things we did was go for a walk in Central Park. As we sat on bench taking in the view of people and trees and squirrels, my dad let out a big sigh and said, “You know I envy you. You wake up every morning excited about the day.”

I felt a little awkward, guilty even. I wasn’t sure what to say so I mumbled a feeble, “Yeah I guess.”

And then he said, “I remember that feeling. When I close my eyes I am where you are. I feel young. I forget some times that I don’t have that body anymore. It’s confusing. It’s confusing to be in this body when my mind is still young.  In my mind I am still 22, but in my body…. well, I’m not.”

My dad was 48. He was only eight years older than I am now.  If I take his experience as an indication of the aging process I can expect that in less than eight years I will be looking back on my life and sighing.

and yet…  I cannot relate to my dad at all. I simply do not look back on my youth wistfully.  I have fond memories, but I don’t long to go back there. I’m wrinkly and fatter now but, I don’t feel disconnected from my body or my mind.  In fact, I feel quite the opposite.  I am calmer, more peaceful and much happier than I was in my youth.

Youth is a temperamental, moody brat who is never satiated.  There is never an end to her need or want. She is a swirling, dive bombing carnival ride of insecurities, a vain, silly bimbo who will never, ever love you back. Youth is the ultimate gold digger.  She is only using you for your time and once it is gone, she will leave you.

Age can never be enjoyed if we are chasing after Youth. Age is like getting off the ride and gaining our equilibrium. Our lives after we leave the carnival. It’s walking back to the car in a quiet parking lot full of stars holding your lover’s hand and enjoying the sounds of the carnival in the distance. It is wisdom and grace. It is deep, rumbling laughter. It’s the time you have to think and be alone.

One of my teachers is working up to being able to hold plow pose for an hour. She wants to do this so that when she “is old and no one wants to talk to her anymore” she can be with herself and be interesting to herself. That’s what aging is all about. It’s about finding out how to be without. First people lose interest in you and then you lose interest in the world so that you can go in and get interesting. Youth takes everything from you and asks you to give it all away, Age gives back and restores.

But, it can only give what we are willing to take.

Now, I normally shy away from “lists of things that you can do to make your life  happy” kind of writing, (I’m pretty sure life’s lessons can’t be summarized in pithy little bullet points), but I do have this list of reminders I keep in my head and so far it’s been working for me.  And so, since I am crossing into my golden years and it’s my birthday, I’m going take part in the time honored tradition of old women everywhere. I am going to give away some unsolicited advice (via pithy little bullet points).

My Unsolicited Advice on How to Better Enjoy Getting Older:

1. Find old people to teach you how to be old. This is the biggest one. I recently had a conversation with a friend who is training to be a lactation consultant. She was saying that breast feeding in many ways is a lost art because it needs to be handed down from mother to mother. Since we lost two generations of women to formula feeding, we’ve had to relearn how to do it and how to teach it. I think the same can be said for aging. In a country where we glorify youth and vilify aging, we’ve lost some basic common sense how-to. Seek out wise, funny older people and make them your friends. Listen to their advice and do what they say. (side note: I highly recommend “mature” yoga teachers, especially if you are a woman. Nothing is more inspiring that seeing a spry, intellectual, spiritual woman on a regular basis. It’s one of the greatest gifts you will ever give yourself.)
2. Meditate or pray or do something contemplative. Besides the fact that it has proven to increase gray matter which will help your brain stay fit, it’s also the best way to get acquainted with the internal landscape of your mind and spirit.
3. Read. Trashy novels, classic lit, medical journals, magazines, kid’s books, e-books, hard copies, it doesn’t matter. Just find stuff you like and read. (One caveat: do not read fashion magazines. That’s toxic at any age.)
4. Find something physical you like to do and do it regularly.
5. Enjoy your food. Do not be a glutton. Do not starve. Enjoy your food.
6. Find things and people that make you laugh and keep them around. Seek out the laughs.
7. Help others. Be generous with your time and disposable income. Be helpful.

Birthdays are a reminder that we were brought into this world to participate in it. Youth is not your last chance to contribute so do not limit you experience by believing that all possibility has passed with the passing of time.

The Practice of Contentment

by Jen Whinnen

Many, many years ago my grandparents bought a cabin in the woods near a lake in northern Idaho to commemorate one of their wedding anniversaries.  They paid cash. I think my grandma said they paid $5,000 for it. It was a summer cabin, just one step up from tent camping and small; about the size of most modern suburban living rooms with a small alcove off one end that could fit two twin beds, one along one wall and the other at its feet along the opposite wall.

It didn’t have a heating system and wasn’t insulated. It sits high in the mountains where, even in the middle of summer, the temperature can easily dip down into the 40s. My grandpa was a furnace repairman so he built a wooden stove out of sheet metal and this was the cabin’s sole source of heat.  The only other amenities were a kitchen sink with running water, electricity, a hot plate and a refrigerator.

It did not have a bathroom. There was an outhouse. The outhouse was smelly, dark and creepy. As such, it was a constant source of fascination and repulsion to us kids. We hated it, but couldn’t seem to stay away from it. We found seemingly endless ways to tease each other over it.

There was the time my sister and my cousins convinced me that a chicken had fallen in and that we were gonna have to send down the skinniest kid (me) to save it. Or the time my uncle lined us all up under a tarp and made us stand in line in the rain while everyone peed before going to bed. Or the countless times we took flashlights in so that we could stare down into the pit of poop. If you were trying to do your biz, there was a 99.99% chance that someone would materialize outside the door to tease you saying things like “don’t fall in! Wipe fast and don’t look down!” or promise you that something creepy was going to come out of the ooze and drag you down with it.

I am pretty sure I spent most of my early childhood summers constipated.

My grandpa eventually built a “bathroom” in the cabin. He installed a little toilet and sink off the side of the miniature bedroom. It was the size of a broom closet. Being a frugal man, he refused to open up additional fields of the septic system. To this day no one in my family can quite grasps the logic of this choice or how it relates to being frugal, but in doing so, everything made the little toilet back up. You could sneeze near this thing and it would need a couple of hours to settle down.

My grandpa was obsessed with the toilet. It was as if he felt like he’d spoiled us all by putting in this small piece of modern plumbing. What was the point of a toilet when there was a perfectly acceptable and useable outhouse 20 feet from the cabin? He simply did not want anything to go to waste. Not even an outhouse. Therefore, the toilet came with a set of very specific rules:

1. No Pooping in the Toilet Until Night Time. If you had to do #2 during the day, go to the outhouse.
2. No Peeing in the Toilet Until Night Time. During the day, use the outhouse.
3. If You Pee in the Toilet at Night, DO NOT FLUSH. Wait until morning and flush everyone’s pee at once.
4. If You Poop in the Toilet At Night, You May Flush the Toilet ONCE. Any left overs could wait with the pee for morning.

Basically it was a nocturnal toilet.

These rules created a weird sneakiness among my family.  I am pretty sure, although no one has openly admitted it, that everyone at one point sneaked in and used that toilet while the sun was up. I definitely remember slipping into the cabin after everyone had gone to the beach, making a mad dash, praying that no one would catch me and that damn thing would fully flush.

But, despite the hassle of the Nocturnal Toilet, the cabin itself was a bright, cheery, cozy little haven. White washed pine walls and gingham curtains, a large red kitchen table, a huge oval red and grey rag rug and a front porch with two rocking chairs and a little hibachi. It was homey and sweet and simple. Everyone was welcome (provided they only used the toilet at night) and everyone had fun.

The cabin was the sum total of all my summer vacations. Every summer we went to the Lake. We’d play cards, read, swim, hike, pick berries, build bonfires, roast marsh mellows, skinny dip, have epic pillow fights, put on vaudeville shows, eat piles of junk food, laugh until our sides hurt, see moose, deer, elk, bear, rabbits, squirrels, collect bugs, rocks and pinecones.

Looking back now I realize how lucky I was to have the cabin, however, at the time I felt like I was missing out. The cabin was small and cramped, it wasn’t on the water, we didn’t have a boat, our beach was communal and not private, we had the outhouse and the Nocturnal Toilet. I wanted Disneyland and Hawaii, a European vacation or even a trip to Yellowstone. Something I could take back to school and say “THIS is what I did on summer vacation!”

When my mom inherited the cabin she opened up the septic fields, put in a full bathroom, a washer/dryer and built a small bedroom. She knocked down the outhouse, put a shed over it and filled it with water toys and bikes. And now, I take my children to the lake lake every summer. It is the sum total of all our vacations. We hike, swim, pick berries, play cards, eat junk food and have a great time.

We are very lucky.

One day while we were at the (public) beach, I was struck by the unbelievable beauty of the lake. I was overcome with sweet childhood memories and a wave of gratitude. I couldn’t believe how amazingly fortunate I was to have grown up coming to a place like this and that I was now sitting here with my own children.  I felt like my heart was going to burst from pure, uninhibited gratitude and joy.

And then, I had a moment of contraction. Suddenly I was struck with a numbing fear.  We were going to be leaving soon. I may never see the lake again. I panicked. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to lose this moment! I didn’t want it to end!

But then it occurred to me, it’s already gone.

The minute I started to panic, it was gone. The depth of my gratitude, my peace and tranquility were gone. And I did it. I was the cause of both my peace and my panic.

And then I had one of those moments that comes when you are truly lucky. I realized that contentment is something you can actually practice.

This is revelatory to me. Up until this point I have always thought of contentment at something you achieve, something you earn. Work long days, put in hard hours, study and keep your nose to the grind stone and some day you will get to retire and spend all your hard earned money contentedly sitting around. It never occurred to me that contentment is something I could actually practice right now.

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the second of the “observances” (Niyamasa) is Santosha: contentment. The Sutras say that in order to become enlightened one must  practice being content. I am sure oft over-used yoga catch phrase of “acceptance” could be used as another way of saying “contentment” but to me that would be incorrect. Acceptance implies a kind of acquiescence, a rolling over and letting the world pass over you. To practice contentment means that you are actively choosing to engage in the world according to your own terms. It means acknowledging when you have enough and being satisfied with it.

In conversations with my friends and students the question of being depleted and being dissatisfied has been coming up a lot. And while I am by no means above the fray, I can’t help but wonder, how often do we think our needs are not being met when in fact they are?  How often do we actively practice being discontented and how drastically would our lives change if we did the opposite? Americans are constantly being encouraged to crave, to be dissatisfied, to hunger so that we keep consuming. The fabric of our economy seems to depend on us remaining discontent, believing that we are too fat, too ugly, too old and too poor.

But are we? What would happen if we didn’t believe that?  What would it look like if we looked at our tiny cabins, and our outhouses and nocturnal toilets and said things like “Wow, this place is perfect. I get a respite from my life and time alone with my family. I need to take a crap and here is a place to do it. It satisfies my need. I am content with that.”

this post was taken from Jen’s personal blog “The Cabin” on 7/19/12. To read more, click here: http://yogajen.blogspot.com/