Friday faves, brought to you by Frankenshirts, Jack-o'-lanterns & Zen advice from unlikely sources
/Isaac’s jack-o’-lantern, carved entirely without any parental support. My one contribution was to suggest — when he was scrounging around for how to give the thing some “hair” — the industrial-sized bucket of roofing nails in the basement.
Still knitting: this is the second thing I've made from the guilt wool. Found the buttons in a funky store in Minneapolis on my recent road trip there. Packaging up to send out into the world, because I'm still having a love affair with snail mail.
My new “Pink Freud/Honda” Franken-tunic, cobbled together by AnnRocks Apparel from various recycled T-shirts. Seems appropriate for Halloween.
Yoga. I used to do yoga all the time but in recent years I haven’t practiced all that regularly. But this week was “Power Week” at the Body Mind Centre, and I bought a pass and did a bunch of classes, and my brain was all like, “Dude, why don't you do this more? Do you hate yourself?” So I’m going to try to do that more.
Right before I got pregnant with Rowan (a.k.a., in a different lifetime), I actually did a yoga teacher training program and taught for a while. The owner of the studio where I studied and taught was decidedly one of the most non-yogic people I have ever met: moody, capricious, self-involved, disorganized, late for everything, wildly sexy and entirely aware of it as she cultivated her own little cult of personality. A few months into the program, which had no curriculum other than what she felt like doing that day, the various students in our class finally decided to have it out with her, to voice our complaints about her style, her lack of organization, her unreliability, her playing of favourites, what have you. And I remember her sitting at the front of the room, on her mat, listening to all of us bitch with this dark, Cruella Deville, look on her face. And when we were finally done, she said, “I want you to take every single thing you hate about my classes and the way I teach AND DON’T DO THEM IN YOUR OWN CLASSES.” End of discussion.
It’s still some of the best advice I’ve ever received.