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virginia woolf

Guest Posts, exercise, Humor

If Virginia Woolf Had a Peloton

June 15, 2022
Peloton

Last week at the New York Public Library I saw Virginia Woolf’s walking cane displayed among other artifacts of the literary world. The cane shows her to be a real person, who walked regularly and needed support.

I used to only think of her scribbling in a solitary room, and her call for other women to have “money and a room” in order to be creative thinkers. But she was also a person in motion, who sought the means to move independently, something as rare for the women of her era as a room of one’s own.

A dark brown curve of bamboo, the cane bolstered her after she wrote a note to her husband and headed to the Ouse river, picking up stones on the shore to fill her pockets, and then deciding to breathe water instead of air. Leonard Woolf found her cane floating in the river. It was all the evidence left until her body washed up three days later.

The cane was unremarkable. When my son leaned in to read the card about it, he quickly moved on. If it had been Tolkien’s, he might have lingered. At nineteen, he’s lucky not yet to need to think of frailty or ways to find stability in a rocky world.

Seeing the cane, I recognized my own search for a merger of movement and mental space. Lately, I find it on a bike that goes nowhere.

On my Peloton, I leave without leaving. I climb switchbacks in the Alps from a corner of my home that used to be part of the garage. Over the last five years, I’ve pounded away hundreds of miles without fear of falling or being smeared on the asphalt by a careless driver. I lose myself in the steady rotation, in the music, and often in the encouraging guidance of an instructor who gets me to push that little bit further. These wheels of my own give me an immense sense of freedom for something so stationary.

If Virginia Woolf had a Peloton, I started to imagine walking down the library’s massive steps, she could have let herself sweat. She’d have had a bike of her own to push back at the heavy world, one pedal stroke at a time. “An immense pressure is on me,” she wrote in The Waves. “I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries.” With a Peloton, she could have spun a fifty-pound wheel with her own two feet. She’d have watched the miles, and those burdensome centuries, roll off her shoulders with digital ease.

If Woolf had a Peloton, she would have ridden it in the room of her own she built onto Monk’s House, the sixteenth-century country cottage that was her escape from London. To her specifications, the room only had a door facing to the outside. So if she had a Peloton, she never would have disturbed Leonard if she rode without headphones and belted out “Minnie the Moocher” or crooned like Fred Astaire to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” during an Epic-Sing-Along ride.

Even with Woolf’s infirmities, she could have built up strength, starting slow with low-impact rides. After a time, she’d conquer high-intensity intervals and hill climbs. Perhaps she could have freed herself from that cane altogether, never allowing it to have been the vehicle that supported her on her way to the riverbank that day.

And if Woolf had a Peloton, the exercise endorphins could have mollified her moments of extreme self-doubt. Endorphins are far superior to the barbiturates and force-feeding she endured, a more natural balm for the horror she internalized. Some Woolf scholars claim she didn’t suffer from mental illness but that she failed to find a way to cope with a world gone mad or find a place of calm within it.

Any dispiriting feelings Woolf might have had of failure or mental exhaustion on a Peloton ride would end simply with calories burned rather than a conflagration of her soul. And she had so many possibilities for an awesome Peloton leaderboard name — ToTheFuckingLighthouse, WoolfWhistle, InSheepsClothing, WoolfPack, RedRidingWoolf.

Though she didn’t live to see it, I think Woolf would have found this bike that goes nowhere far preferable to a bike that goes somewhere. Though many of her peers likened the bicycle to an optimistic element of the modern world, Woolf called it one of the “common objects of daily prose” – along with her distaste for the ever-present, noisy and gas-belching omnibus. The bike was not fit for poetry, she chided.

Woolf preferred long walks. She only cycled to and from the train station for convenience.

But if the quotidian bicycle was too proletariat for the queen of the modernists, then surely she would have embraced the Peloton, with its four-figure price tag and its air of privilege. (One also needs a permanent residence, wifi, cycling shoes, and dare-I-say padded cycling shorts, the likes of which can cost a hundred bucks if one doesn’t want seams that chafe, and Woolf certainly would not have wanted seams that chafe). Even at the Peloton’s cost, Leonard could have supported it to save her from dangerous solo wanderings.

Peloton rides are both solitary – and not. I can be motivated to climb on the bike by the connection to a community of other cyclists doing the same thing in rooms across the globe and by the inspiration of a favorite instructor. But more often what keeps me pedaling is the quiet ability to listen to my breathing. I enter the roads of my mind, the miles spilling out like a Jackson Browne ballad.

I can ride full of joy, shaking my shoulders with Lizzo or swinging a sweaty ponytail to some throwback Van Halen. But in these last several years I am more likely to unburden the kind of raw emotion that sweat and adrenaline release. Freed from the cacophony of the other minutes in my day, and even from concern over balance itself, I let myself blubber on a tough hill climb to that song from the Pretenders that makes me ache for my dead mother in a way no other combination of chords can. When the song and the guided ride ends, I press down on the red lever to halt that fifty-pound wheel. I wipe my face, feeling stronger in all ways, and better able to consider Woolf’s challenge. We have to “face the fact,” she wrote, “for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone.”

I dare to counter that in our era we need rooms of our own and rooms of connection. And if we need to cling to an exercise machine – well, dammit, let’s cling. We need bikes that can carry us to trains to ride into the larger world – and ones that are stationary, that exercise the wheels of our psyche as much as our physique.

If Virginia Woolf had a Peloton, I think it could have been one small way to free herself from the cage of her mind and strengthen her body from the inside out. If I were her contemporary, we could have given each other Peloton high fives while riding intervals to swing tunes from Guy Lombardo or Bing Crosby. We could share in that particular freedom I find when I pedal furiously on a bike that carries me forward, even when it actually goes nowhere.

Deborah Claymon, a recovering business and technology journalist, is working to crack the code on her own fiction projects. She’s a reader for Zoetrope: All-Story and her work has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Mercury News, Salon, Forbes, National Public Radio and more.

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Guest Posts, Self Care

Mine Alone

January 17, 2022
shed

by Pamela Cravez

The first afternoon in my shed it is impossible to write, even though that is why I am here, sitting on a folding chair in front of two end tables stacked one on top of the other to bring my computer to eye-height.  But I am so distracted all I can do is breathe in the smell of rough cedar and look through the eight-foot-long windows, one in front of me and the other behind. It is 40 degrees outside, but the shed’s propane heater is keeping me warm.

The second day it is dark outside when I walk to the shed in the morning to turn on the heater. The temperature has dropped below freezing. It is fall in Anchorage and there is no turning back from the colder and shorter days to come. I am delighted when the motion sensor light pops on in the shed. I turn the igniter on the heater and a little blue flame appears. On my way back to the house I look back at the shed. It shines against the dark, looking cozy and warm among the trees. When I return an hour later, I set my computer on the table and begin typing but my nose and fingers are cold and so are my cheeks and my feet. Chilled to the bone and frustrated, I turn off the heater and carry my computer to my warm home when I spend the day working.

The third day, I wear a headlamp on my way to the shed and turn on a small fan to blow the heat around. I wait for an hour and a half in the house before walking back to the shed with a thermos of hot coffee. It feels warmer and smells good. An hour into writing I feel my body relax and realize I’d been willing myself to work through the cold that has finally subsided.

The fourth day, the temperature has fallen again, it is single digits, and the moon is full and bright. I can easily see my way to the shed without a headlamp and turn on the heat.  Two hours later, I sit in my shed wearing a down jacket and a soft scarf, along with gloves cut off at the fingertips and watch the moon as it slips through the trees of my backyard, luminous even as the light from the rising sun brightens the windows at my back. By the time I lose sight of the moon, my shed is warm.

It is the morning of November 1 when I see the full moon, a blue moon. It is the moon that has brought me to the shed this morning, brought me outdoors when I might have preferred to stay in the warmth of my home. The lakes are beginning to freeze, but there is still no snow on the ground. When the sun shines it means colder weather not warmer. Other years, my retired friends would be leaving to spend time outside of Alaska, some place warm. But this year, the pandemic year, everyone is in their home.

I keep track of how long it takes for the propane heater to make the space comfortable enough to work, when the propane tank needs to be replaced. I drape a fleece sweater over the back of my folding chair to cover the cold metal trim. I order two narrow tables from Amazon, long enough that together they stretch ten feet, just two feet shy of the length of my eight by twelve foot shed.  My son, Josh, forced home from college by the pandemic, helps me carry a stuffed armchair from the house into the shed so that I have a place to sit and read.

From the window of my shed, I see long gnash marks on the side of a willow left by a moose scraping the tree with its teeth. I am wary in the dark mornings, letting my headlamp sweep over the tangle of black spruce, willow, and birch before I set foot on the path to the shed, looking for a solid body, an ear, a broad snout. The idea that I might run into a moose on the way to the shed or be trapped in the shed by a moose, is just one more challenge to wade through these first days in my shed, challenges that are dwarfed by the desire to have this place of my own.

The desire for a place of my own to write has been with me for as long as I can remember. That idea of a room of one’s own translated to a room in the public library set aside for writers, a spare office, a friend’s apartment when she was at work, a spare bedroom in our home, and the landing of our chalet style house while our children were growing up. When our eldest son left for college, I transformed his bedroom into an office for myself. I boxed his model cars, moved in bookcases, and filled the closet with drafts of books and essays. I bought headphones to block out the noise from my husband watching basketball on television or listening to music in the family room below. From that room I looked onto the trees of our backyard. Not a large yard, but one that had become wild with mountain ash and Mayday trees competing with aggressive willows and bushy shrubs.  I gazed out at the tall white birch that curved toward the mountains and watched the sunrise along its trunk. Both my children were out of the house, but I was still here, with a room of my own. I had it painted, put art on the walls, yet when I walked to the backyard I wanted to be here, outside of my house, I longed to escape. I wanted a shed.

A friend began to send me pictures of sheds. Beautiful she-sheds with colorful interiors open to lush gardens. But it was the photo of a shed in the snow, an extension cord from the house providing electricity, the doorway framing a writer sitting at a desk, that was the image I held in my mind. A practical place, a working place, my own space. I began to watch where the sun fell in the backyard behind our house and put a chair to read there on summer afternoons.  The year I learned I was going to be a grandmother, last year, I had dead trees removed so that it was possible to walk to the old swing set. I stopped among a group of black spruce gathered in the northeast corner, felt the warmth of the sun and a quiet stillness in the air, and thought this would be the perfect place for a shed.

“You control all the space in the house,” my youngest son, Josh, observes. He has returned from college for spring break and just learned that he will be having to complete his classes virtually. “Dad just has part of the bedroom and the bathroom. You have control over all of this space,” he is standing in the middle of the living room and looking through to the dining room and family room and kitchen.

“Your dad doesn’t want control. He hates buying furniture or appliances, anything having to do with the house.” I know I sound defensive. “And he has his own office downtown.”

But this is more. I never think of myself as in control of the house, just responsible, a division of labor that has come down to me. With the pandemic, though, I am the one to figure out who will work where. This is what Josh is observing. I set up a home office for my husband in our bedroom so he has the privacy he needs to see clients. Josh’s bedroom is right next to my office. The wall between us is so thin that he can easily hear the tapping of my computer keys. I set up a workstation for him on the landing, the same place I used while the children were growing up.

I have the only real office in the house and need to reassure myself that I deserve this space, that I should not consider giving it up, though I do want to give it up. I want everyone else to have what they need in this house and I want to leave. I recognize these feelings, that feeling of wanting to escape, that it is impossible to have the space I need to think and write without worrying about the needs of people around me. “You have control of this space,” my son said, and I knew even as he said it, that I did not want the responsibility of control, I wanted autonomy. I wanted my own space.

The day Josh started his fall semester classes virtually from his workstation on the landing, I called a contractor and asked him to build me a shed in the backyard.  A shed with insulation and electricity, one I could use year-round. One with lots of windows in the spot where I stopped and stood in the sun the year before the pandemic, the year that I became a grandmother.

I kicked at the dead leaves on my way to the shed this morning. There is still a wet patch from where the snow melted last week, but the rest of the path is dry. When I opened the door to the shed, I reached for the remote control, and turned on a small electric heater, replacing the propane heater that broke. The temperature in the shed is 42 degrees according to the heater. I’ve programmed it to warm to 60 degrees, which will take about a half hour and make the shed very comfortable for working in a sweatshirt. It is May and buds are beginning to form at the end of tree branches, it will take no time at all for them to spring into leaves. This will be the first year that I will see spring and summer from my shed, something completely new to me.

New to me, too, is this room of my own. Not carved out, not moveable, mine alone.

Pamela Cravez is a writer living in Anchorage, Alaska who has worked as a reporter, communications director, and editor of publications including Art Matters and the Alaska Justice Forum. In a lifetime before children, she was a public defender and did an oral history of lawyers who practiced before Alaska became a state. Her book, “The Biggest Damned Hat, Tales from Alaska’s Territorial Lawyers and Judges,” was published in 2017.  

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5 Most Beautiful Things, Jen's Musings, travel

Musings & Ramblings from London.

February 20, 2014

By Jen Pastiloff.

London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets. ~Virginia Woolf.

Hello from London. I’m at a bookstore in Putney that I like to come to when I am in town (Waterstones.) They are already wiping down tables and stacking chairs but it’s quiet. All the moms (mums) with their babies have left and only the hardcore bookstore people remain (read: a woman reading a tabloid, a young girl staring off into space, an older man doing crosswords and man with a shiny face listening to his cell phone and nodding as if he’s getting directions.)

Today's beautiful things in London.

Take the guy on the train, for instance. He must’ve felt some peace with that Rubik’s cube in his hand, some comfort must have been derived from all that furious twisting. He didn’t even look down at the cube- didn’t have to. He recognized the colors, as if by touch it seemed and it must’ve put to bed some anxiety he had. Whereas just watching him gave me anxiety. I hated those things in the 80’s. Still do.

Or maybe it was just a habit he had. Maybe he liked to twirl the Rubik’s cube on trains- maybe that was just his thing? That’s the beauty of it really, what I am getting out with today’s beauty seeking. How we all have our thing.

How just looking at the Rubik’s cube from across the aisle of a train sends me back to 1983 (a particularly shitty year) and reminds me how bad I am at some things (puzzles, Rubik’s cubes, board games, math) and yet it appeared this guy was in no way anxious. In fact, it seemed that the multi-colored cube relaxed him. How beautiful is that? This guy, sharing a pancake from a plastic package labeled PANCAKES with the girl next to him was utterly un-phased by something that, for me, would have given me hives.

photo

Everyone engaged on their devices and cubes and pancakes and I thought how beautiful it is that we all find comfort in different things. Thank God. Because imagine if we all twirled Rubik’s cubes all day long, if we all had to constantly be reassured by the words, “It’s going to be fine?” Imagine if everyone had to masturbate to relieve stress all day, every day? How tedious our train rides would be.

The guy with the pointy little moustache and the plastic cube wouldn’t even be a thing to behold- it would be that ordinary.

I guess the beauty is in how weird we all are in our own spectacular pancake eating Rubik’s Cube way.

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I was saying something as we were walking in Chelsea which ended with the word “love.” I can’t remember what I was saying exactly, and I guess it doesn’t matter, because the word love appeared right then over a doorway. A pink doorway with the word LOVE written in white above it. I thought about the person who lived there taking taxis and what they would tell the driver.

“What’s your address, Miss?”

“Love.”

Or having a party and telling people, “When you find Love, you know you’ve arrived.”

Love lives here. And there love was. There was love. What you speak is seeking you. All these things popped in my head but mostly I thought, “cool fucking door,” so I snapped a photo and instagrammed it. It did very very well. It got many, many likes. Which gives me insight into what people are looking for-not that I didn’t know really. I guess it never ends, does it? The search for love. The amazement at having found it. The knowledge that oftentimes it’s right over our head.

I wondered what kind of personality lived there because I really couldn’t imagine coming home to my husband splattered in pink paint and saying, “Pasti, look what I did. I painted the door pink and wrote LOVE at the top.” (Although while I was away for two weeks in the fall lecturing at Canyon Ranch and leading a retreat, he did in fact paint the kitchen a kind of burnt orange.)

photo

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Without people you’re nothing. There’s a truth in that.

Right?

Portobello Road, Notting Hill (would you believe I have never seen that movie?)

220px-NottingHillRobertsGrant

I stopped and snapped a picture of a painting etched onto the side of a building of a man playing guitar and singing.

photoThe background was yellow and he stood in a sort of relief away from the yellow and red circle with the star inside of it. The quote said, “without people you’re nothing” and then his name and the dates he lived and died. I assumed it was his quote, the guy painted  in black who white wore a patch that said Ignore Alien Orders. Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash.

I Googled it later and found out that it was indeed his quote.  There’s a truth in the fact that we need people. I mean, Hey, I love to be alone. More than being with people quite often, which is a mixture of being an introvert (despite leading retreats and workshops, the core of who I am is an introvert,) not being able to hear well, and lastly, the writer in me. (Can’t write when you are in a crowd of people talking.)

But so much of what I teach and what I believe is based on this quote, so thanks Mr. Joe Strummer. Thanks, Joe. Can I call you Joe?

I suppose you could live on an island alone and be fine, for a while. Or if you like to read, you could be the only one on the planet in a sea of books. But after awhile you’d want to die from loneliness. Truth.

Speaking of living on an island alone, did you see the latest celebrity mean tweets? Celebrities read mean tweets people have written about themselves. It’s hysterical. Tom Hanks read one that says “”Whatever. Tom Hanks is a whiner. Oh boo hoo, so you have a tropical island all to yourself. Fuck you. You. I have a turtle sandbox, bitch.”

Yea, you need people. We all need people.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1iErgBrDQ]

That painting and the quote struck me as beautiful. It was kind of a stark day and then all of a sudden this burst of yellow appeared with a true sentence. I had just been trying to write and thinking of Hemingway’s quote “write one true sentence.”

I couldn’t even think of one. And there it was. Right there. So I wrote it down.

If somebody ever mean tweets about me (which I am sure they have and they will. I am at @jenpastiloff if you want to!), do you think Jimmy Kimmel will have me on the show to read it?

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I was talking to my friend who’s recently moved out of her huge house. The house she’d lived in was one of my favorite houses. I spent a lot of time there sitting at her big kitchen table looking out into the yard. I asked her at dinner if she missed her old house and she said she didn’t. I dipped my chip (French fry for my America brethren) in mayo and told her I envied her a bit for that because I couldn’t even let go of the house I lived in while I was in high school.

How do some people break attachments? How do you let go? (How how why why how how?)

I it was all a bit too many hows and whys for dinner in a pub so we ordered gin and tonics (and that was a beautiful things because I thought I hated gin) and we talked about Dallas Buyer’s Club. I still can’t get over that movie. She hasn’t seen it yet so I went on and on and oh, as it turns out I don’t dislike gin. Maybe I did at one point? But I don’t anymore. I won’t say I love it but I enjoyed my drink and our dinner. Maybe people change.

I haven’t seen her new flat, but the description of it, especially the way she described the light coming in and how the Thames looked from her balcony, was enough to sustain me. I am a sucker for the way light falls on desktops or slants across the room. Give me light or give me death, I will proclaim when buying a flat or a home.

Watching someone gracefully move from one space in their life the to the next without the kicking and screaming that so often accompanies change is a beautiful thing. Easing into the phases of our lives as opposed to clinging to what we had, well, I’ll drink to that. Cheers.

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I see lone shoes a lot.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one seeing them because, come on, how often are people dropping their shoes? Don’t they notice? Does it fall off their foot? Out of a suitcase? Maybe it’s a sign meant only for me, but I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be a sign for.

I see lone shoes a lot and mostly they are baby shoes. I don’t know anybody else that sees as many single shoes on sidewalks or in the middle of the road. Today’s lone show in the gutter in London was not a baby shoe. It was an ugly white tennis shoe that frankly, I would’ve also abandoned (although I would’ve dumped the right as well and not just the left shoe.)

In Battersea, outside the French café where my husband and I had walked in the rain to get coffee, the storyteller in me came alive. Whose shoe is that? What happened to him/her? Maybe I could write a whole short story around the white shoe in a puddle? Would I make the shoe the main character? Or maybe like the common thread in a book of short stories, the one thing that connected all the stories, or all of life?

I came home and tried to write one true sentence about the shoe.

I came up with a few.

There was only one shoe. A single solitary shoe for a left foot.

The mouth of the shoe was stretched out as if maybe the person who wore it had wide feet.

The shoe was ugly.

Wait, what if that’s not true, that it’s ugly? That’s not the truest truth of the shoe. What if the others things weren’t true, as well? What if everything could be looked at in this way, as if we studied a thing for clues about what it meant about our lives? About truth?

What if every shoe had a story?

What if we were all storytellers?

(What if what if what if why why why how how how.)

Part of me wanted to pick it up because it made me feel lonely seeing it there by itself.

I came home and thought shoes don’t have feelings. But then I thought if they did have feelings, they would tell us to stop moving, that they were tired, and felt like they had no say in the matter. They would say they were hurting.

Point is, if you look the right way, everything has beauty. Even a wet shoe without its mate lying in the street.

Even that.

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Jen will be back in London Feb 14th, 2015.

Jen Pastiloff is back in London for ONE workshop only Feb 14th. Book by clicking poster. This is her most popular workshop and space is limited to 50 people.

Jen Pastiloff is back in London for ONE workshop only Feb 14th. Book by clicking poster. This is her most popular workshop and space is limited to 50 people.

 

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

Contact Rachel Pastiloff for health coaching, weight loss, strategies, recipes, detoxes, cleanses or help getting off sugar. Click here.

Contact Rachel Pastiloff for health coaching, weight loss, strategies, recipes, detoxes, cleanses or help getting off sugar. Click here.