Breathing fast and slow

Today was the first official cross-country training day for my youngest who will be running this fall with the high school cross-country team. She dressed and ate and was out the door, water bottle in hand, just after 7:30 a.m. Not bad for a teenager who has been enjoying the later, longer mornings summer vacation provides. But she's not teenager enough to drive herself to practice and back again; so, I found myself grumbling as I headed out the door to retrieve her because I hadn't had the time to drink my morning coffee. My grumbling didn't last long. About a mile from where I was to pick up my daughter, I came to an abrupt stop. Traffic like this meant only one thing. An accident. And not a minor one. Up ahead, car after car was abandoning its place in traffic, executing sharp U-turns for a better way around the congestion. Now I was going to be late, I thought, but only very briefly because the thought that came next would challenge everything I took for granted as a

I am thinking of the peonies I bought at the market during the last days of spring--a couple of weeks ago now--their rich deep burgundy color defining for me, each time I passed them in their vase, something regal and majestic. But it wasn't simply the color that would force me to look at them again and again. It was the orchestrated way each bud chose to open. Swiftly at first, then a protracted unfolding, bending back on itself and opening so completely--like one's heart in urdhva dhanurasana (full wheel pose)-- that I was thoroughly convinced of the natural order of things. In the end, we become a thing of beauty. We have nothing left to do and nowhere we wish to hide. "Our being is silent," wrote the Trappist contemplative Thomas Merton. All the reason I need to feel a kinship with those flowers in the vase. Silent beings--every one of them--content in their stillness. Of course, Merton lived robustly before entering the monastery and finding his new freedom w