Read.Eat.Listen: Mom

Today would have been my mom 80th birthday, which is as hard to believe as it is to think that she passed away more than a decade ago. I don't know there is a bigger 'life learning event' than a parent's death. Any notion of permanence goes out the window; an awareness of the hows and why's of one's attachments becomes abundantly clear and no matter how old you might feel, you realize more than ever that you're responsible for your own reactions. And as the years go by, you realize anew how much you owe to your parents.
Read: Sometimes, all I have time or inclination for is poetry. More from Jane Hirshfield:

For What Binds Us

By Jane Hirshfield
 

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

 

Eat: Mom, dear Phyllis Jane, wasn't much of a cook or baker, but she occasionally whipped out a killer angel food cake. I loved watching the whole process of her separating eggs and whipping the whites into a great soft mound of goodness to lift and leaven the batter. Plus licking the bowl of its sweet sugary residue after the cake was in the oven was as much a treat as the finished result. As an adult, I don't keep white sugar or white flour in the house, so I searched around for a healthier equivalent and found this raw vegan version from Real Raw Kitchen  (It sounds deliciously coconutty albeit is nothing like what my mom made); and this Gluten Free (but sugar-ful) version from Gluten Free Mommy. Bon appetit!
Listen: While my song"Adding Water to the Ashes" is about faith and lost love more than anything, it owes a ton to my love for my mom.  I've been playing this song for years but finally have some live footage from the show last week at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.
"Adding Water to the Ashes" from the 2008 Cd of the same name.

Mom on yoga

Not my mother's yoga book but nonetheless Hittleman's 
books were influential to many!

It dawns on me as Mother's Day approaches that I owe a lot of my appreciation of, and dedication to regular yoga practice to my Mom. She was a stalwart believer in basic physical fitness and had a daily routine with little yoga in it, albeit she didn't call it yoga (she didn't call it 'working out' either).  Most of what she did was Jack LaLanne-inspired exercise routine performed daily sometime between making four kids breakfast, school bus stops and lunch. This was the day of three channels on the TV and a similar number of radio stations. There wasn't any video not to mention the Internet. Looking back, you'd think we were on a different planet, pre-Google, when you learned either at the source, via word-of-mouth, at school, from books or what little TV programming there was. Along with LaLanne, mom followed instructions in a small paperback exercise book featuring photos of a woman in a white unitard and white tights. Again, it wasn't a yoga book, but there were pictures of the woman in in shoulder stand and halasana with accompanying directions.
Between LaLanne on TV and the paperback, my mom followed suit in the living room, albeit in loose jeans and a cotton shirt.
I didn't really get it. I was a kid. Once in a while I'd try something she was doing, but I considered LaLanne a little too strange in his jumpsuits and big cheer, and the woman in the unitard in the book a little too uncool to follow at that time. So like most things about parents, my appreciation for my mom's discipline comes late in life.
I've heard that a propensity for yoga is attributable to interest, or practice, in one's previous lifetimes, so it intrigues me that my mom, despite her European descent and pious Catholicism, quite naturally gravitated toward exercise and yoga. It grieved me she didn't develop a yoga practice when she had opportunity later in her life, but I'm nonetheless grateful for the role model she provided for taking time each day for a practice of self care.