Breathing fast and slow

Posts

Lotus as narrative

Books on desk that are not quite full but no longer blank . This morning, like many mornings before this one, our teacher speaks softly to us and calls us back from savasana. "Lightly brush your thumbs across your fingertips. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Come back to your body." Now it is time to roll up our mats and to take our practice--what we learned from it today--out into the world. Now, atha , is a very powerful word in yoga. It is, in fact, the first word of Patanjali's yoga sutras--the first bead on the thread of the sage's teachings. According to Patanjali and his fellow sages, a human being is an island of excellence. Imagine that. As such, now is always the time to begin to cultivate and perfect that excellence. Actually, now is always the time to remember because the excellence is ever present. Atha . Now. Therein lies our innate wisdom. Past, present, future. All are represented and interchangeable as now. Atha . On Valentine's Day 1990, as

Aftermath

Firm ground is not available ground. --AR Ammons "Dunes" When Tomin Harada returned home to Hiroshima from where he had been fighting in Taiwan at the end of World War 2, he found nothing to greet him. No family. No friends. No ruins of any sort to indicate that Hiroshima once existed, and that once upon a time Harada had a life there. Instead of leaving, Harada stayed and became a doctor and participated in Hiroshima's rise, literally, from the ashes. He dedicated his life to restoring human dignity to the survivors of the atomic bomb. Throughout his career, he watched more than 3,000 of his patients die. In the midst of so much death, Harada decided that he needed to cultivate beauty and fill his small corner of the world with it. So, he grew roses.When he died in 1999 at the age of 87, Dr. Harada's Hiroshima roses had been sent to peace activists and citizens in the United States, China, Germany and other parts of the world. At the time of hi

The open roads of light and storm

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. --Mary Oliver Fact: At higher elevations, the Earth's atmosphere becomes thinner. Compared to the air at sea level, the air at altitude is less dense, which means that all of the atmospheric gases--like oxygen--are more spread out. The body's tissues need oxygen to aid with performance. This is what makes hiking at altitude a breath practice. Truth: "We breathe, and wildness comes in. We don't control it." Jack Turner, Exum Mountain Guide and author Early in the planning stages of my hike up Mount Whitney, one of the women I had invited along asked me if I wanted to attend a Mount Whitney training workshop she had discovered on Facebook. Politely, I declined, explaining to my friend that I wanted to retain some of the mystery of the late summer adventure we were planning. In other words, I was not interested in having all of the answers. At best, they would merely approx

Let the immeasurable come

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come. Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine. Let the wind turn in the trees, and the mystery hidden in dirt swing through the air. from "Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith" by Mary Oliver As a single woman, I could not sit still, which I recognized as a problem. At the same time, I was drawn to solitary ventures like writing and snapping pictures, or reading and watching people as I savored every last drop from a cup of coffee. For many years, I vacillated between movement and reverie. I ran the trails and streets, and occasionally the high school track, of my beach-side community. Luckily, my 500 square feet of home was in a canyon. The setting forced upon me an intimacy with the grand scale of the universe and, sometimes, in the smallest of things. From time to time, I understood that the universe would patiently reveal its secrets to me if I could but stand in one place. But the canyon

Moving into stillness

At night some understand what the grass says. The grass knows a word or two. It is not much. It repeats the same word Again and again, but not too loudly... from "Evening" by Charles Simic During my student years, which, really I must confess, persist after all this time, I made paper by collecting weeds from the sides of the roads. Although they did not look like weeds to me, but tall slender grasses toasted to a golden wheat color by the sun, delicately, and on all sides, like the way a good baker rotates her baking sheets when her wares are in the oven so that the golden coat is even. It was summer and hot and the grasses were sentries that stood between the highway gravel and that other world that begins with dirt and goes on beyond time. I marveled at seeing these grasses transformed into paper. It bordered on magic and myth, like learning Rumpelstiltskin's trick without the bargain or the temper. Depending upon the grasses I collected, the paper w

Dása

In his book about his journey to the Himalayas to see the snow leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes most often about elusiveness. Perhaps to make sure his readers understand the essential quality of that which cannot be grasped, Matthiessen calls his book--a journal, really, of his days of expedition during the fall of 1973-- The Snow Leopard in honor of the cat he did not see. But, of course, not seeing the snow leopard was at the heart of all he was otherwise able to see. When I finished this book, I was in a strange state for days. As though I, too, had been on expedition high in the realm of those mountains--mythic as their height and distance render them--at once appearing and disappearing into their mists and snow and terrain. Before embarking on this journey, Matthiessen, a practicing Buddhist, sought counsel from his Roshi who told the trekker poised for adventure to go without expectation. This counsel proved pivotal to the pilgrimage. Like the mantra it was no doubt intended