We Give Thanks

As the holiday season kicks off tomorrow with a turkey-induced food coma, we thought we'd take a moment to sit back and count our blessings. When we started LTIR almost two years ago (!), we weren't sure anyone other than our family and friends would read Rachel's and my individual and collective journies through food and life. Turns out people actually will and do, and we thank you. It is wonderful to have someone else respond to something we've written with a memory or recipe tip of their own, or to just say that what we wrote resonated somehow.

On a personal note, I remain awestruck by the wonder of the divine Miss M and how this newest addition to the clan continues to rock my world (even from a ridiculous 3,000 miles away, something I am decidedly NOT thankful for, but I will leave that for another post). She has centered me in ways I never even imagined possible and has helped provide me with a compass for further directing my life and that of my family's. And she did all of this before she even began to talk one word. Amazing.

I am thankful for my absolutely wonderful husband, Peter, who continues to surprise me even after 30 years and who makes me laugh more than anyone I know. He gives me space to grow and continually tries to grow with me. It is a full life of wonder with him.

And my children are on their own now. I marvel at who they are and who they are becoming, and feel thankful I can hang onto the coattails for the ride. In some ways they are exactly who I thought they'd be and yet completely different in ways I would never have imagined. I love that.

I am a lucky woman for my many friends, and feel especially thankful for the tribe of women I've met in my landing in Albany. (You know who you are.) The growth I've experienced with them has been a happy, happy serendipitous (fateful?) plus to a job that I generally love.

Family, friends, health — on the one hand, it's a thankful list that seems cliched, and yet it is really what life boils down to at the end. So thank you all.

-Janet

So, last year my mom and I endeavored a joint post of thanks, too. I kicked it off last year and she ended up chiming in and saying she had nothing to add. And now here I am with the exact same sentiments. Lovely, lovely words, Ma.

May you all have full bellies and hearts.

XO
R.

So, I've Been Doing Yoga...

Rachel here.

So, for a few months now I've been doing something. I haven't been talking about it, not wanting to jinx myself or proclaim commitment before it actually takes root. But, after surviving my first Bikram yoga class last night, I am here to announce that I have become an exerciser.

If you don't know me, you're probably unimpressed. If you do know me, though, then you know that I'll take an elevator up one story. I like sweat, but only the kind that comes from lying in the sun for hours and definitely not the kind that comes with a pounding pulse and heavy breath. Or so was the case for my entire life before this summer.

I'm not sure what happened exactly. Maybe it was the structureless-ness of not being in school and not having a steady job. Maybe it was having a toddler and realizing how intensely frustrating that can be and how that frustration can just build and build and build inside until I want to explode. Or maybe it was an existential desire to reclaim my body after pregnancy and the first year of motherhood, a nearly two year period that is both deeply grounded in the physical and also deeply grounded in the body of a different being. Whatever it is, something happened and, after myriad invitations from my friends Thea and Cheyenne to join them at yoga class, I went.

And I've kept going. I thought I would need markers to keep myself plugging along, but after I met my first goal/reward (go for a month and then you can buy your own mat and stop renting one from the studio and then daydreaming about what sweaty beast was facedown on it before you), something clicked. Yoga started to become something I genuinely looked forward to. I started to crave that feeling of having inventoried my body, of having felt it and been deeply connected to it. And then, a few weeks ago, as I lay on my mat in the darkness of the closing Savasana, my body ringing gently along with the singing bowl, I felt myself do something I had never done before.

I thanked my body.

I thanked it for the years it carried me despite my best efforts to deter it. I thanked it for carrying Maxine and birthing her, for healing while summoning the strength to sustain her life. I thanked it for marking pleasure and pain, for scarring, for slowing me down and pushing me along. I thanked it for bringing me to class that night.

And I meant it, in that deep, deep way where gratitude spreads out in an unending expanse, settling into every molecule, gently touching the component parts while simultaneously recognizing a glorious whole.

That was my first transformative moment with yoga. The second happened last night after my first Bikram session.

Bikram is brutal. In 110 degree heat, for 90 minutes, my body and I went someplace I would have said we would never, ever go and CERTAINLY never go voluntarily. But there I was--there WE were--body and mind completely committed, working together, vibrating in the heat. I have never sweated so much in my entire life. NEVER.

When I got home from class, I was still soaked through. My hair and clothes were completely drenched and I couldn't stop smiling. The breakthrough isn't the workout, though. The breakthrough came after I showered.

John very sweetly made dinner so it would be ready when I got home. When we sat down to eat and he put a heaping bowl of pasta in front of me, for the first time in my entire non-kid life, I didn't relate to it from a place of guilt. No, I dogged it.

Pasta has been one of the last hold-out foods for me from my years of struggling with eating. I have, for whatever reason, not been able to undo the equation that pasta=bad. I see it and cringe. I avoid it whenever possible. Pasta has been the stuff of straight-up nightmares for me for well over a decade.

So, as I sat there and inhaled the steaming bowl of pasta last night, the thanks that I started on the mat during Savasana a few weeks ago, was made complete. I happily offered my body fuel, a thanks for what it had just done with me and a launching of our next round of activity.