Breathing fast and slow

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

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

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

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

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

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

I say the number 9 is my favorite number in the same way a child labels a number lucky. Nine is my favorite lucky number. My birth month falls in the 9th calendar month of the year. The number that marks our home, makes it stand out in the neighborhood, is nothing less than good old favorite number 9. In a book I once read, the protagonist is a young math teacher and her every daily encounter is replete with numerical reference. One of her students thinks the number 9 looks like girls playing in the grass. I like that and how its fine round body sits on a sturdy slanted stem. Oblique in that way, neither parallel nor perpendicular, but inclined. Inclined: It slants toward possibility. I once met the book's author and she signed my copy while we talked about our favorite numbers. Guess what? She is a 9-lover, too; and into my book she placed the number 9 with an exclamation point at the center of a hand-drawn sun. And I thought, anything IS possible. Yesterday, a

The journey of slow development is the way of transformation. Quoting Dögen, "It leads everywhere." From duty to freedom, the yamas to samadhi. Eight rungs, like the steps of a ladder; eight limbs, like the branches of a tree: This is raja yoga--the royal path. There is no difference between cooking and the Buddha's way, says Jeong Kwan, a Zen Korean monk, a nun who is not a chef but prepares her temple meals like one. Her journey of freedom is contagious. Even better, she says it is available to all. Her story is a balm for the seeker's soul. It includes heartache and loss, human labor and boundless creativity. I learn that trust in the universe does not require certainty but presence. Curiosity and a playful awareness are essential to taking ownership of the phenomenal world. Jeong Kwan says this is freedom.

The Ambitions of the Cedar We bought our house unaware of the ambitions of the cedar tree in our front yard. With ease, it dwarfed all of my own--prone as I am to the ideal--quadrupling its size in seven years, or 28 seasons, beginning with the summer we moved in, until now, this winter, when we had it cut down. In a few more years it would have threatened the foundation of our home, the arborist told us, clearly a man who knows his trees and loves them. None of us wanted to remove it, especially this season when the rains had returned and plumped up its base and its color and its dense green branches after it had made do with so little water so long. Already, a hummingbird had made its nest deep inside the branches. Earlier still and much higher up than last year, this mother bird returned and placed her nest and her faith in the resoluteness of this tree. Cedars by nature are known for their durability as sometimes people are not--fickle as we have proven to b

What is truth now? Once upon a time, my mother was a seamstress. I saw the labor of every stitch expertly delivered, and how she seemed to create from thin air time she did not have to devote to this task. It takes time to do a thing well, and to love a thing well--or a person--takes time, too. This, I learned from my mother who sewed even our Catholic school uniforms. From scratch. Like a cake. Like the architect who has to get the math right first before ordering the materials, my mother made her calculations, considering all the angles of measurement while bent over patterns she had pulled from drawers. Meanwhile, I was pulled immediately toward the fabric, the thing that sparkled. Eventually, I learned about patience from this time I spent observing my mother during her years as a woman who sewed. It taught me the value of slowing down, how to take one thing at a time, and how to devote oneself entirely to the task at hand. This is how she folded time or str

At the corner of Cypress and Pine Streets in Santa Ana sits this tree with a hole in its trunk like Boo Radley's tree in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout and Jem, Atticus Finch's children of the novel, lived next door to Boo, making them all neighbors. Except, as happens in neighborhoods and communities and the world, Scout and Jem were warned to stay away from Boo who, they were told, was strange as in different as in not right in the head. He could not be tru sted with scissors.  In the end, of course, the children trust Boo with their lives. He saves them when they need it, and by saving the children, Boo makes the neighborhood whole again. Meaning safe. What was different is given permission to participate in what has always been the same. Isaiah House sits a few houses down Cypress from this tree, and for 20 years Dwight and Leia--two Catholics working in the spirit of Dorothy Day and her boss on the cross--have been feeding and clothing and

For many years, in the earliest days of my practice, I breathed and stretched in the dark alongside many beautiful and hard-working yogis at a studio where we had to sign our names on a piece of paper left at the door of our practice room, the rest of the studio not being open at that hour. Students, we were, of a different classroom, signing the attendance sheet, attesting to our presence. Bearing witness, silently, and in ink, to our commitment to ourselves, making our way into our place in the lineage and the world. A pattern began to emerge, I noted, with respect to this sheet where we were to write our names. Often, the lines were numbered, and on these occasions, the line for student number four was always left blank. From time to time, I took that open spot, accommodating the rules of order. But, in time, I came to leave it blank as well in honor of the ritual of the yogis who respected that particularly numbered line. In a little more time, it dawned on me t

Trini After class, I drop into conversation, and this dear woman who gathers up much more than our names, tells me I have found my truth. She is a mother, and older, so I listen. She hears my confession with such marvel and attention that I am not moved to tears at all, but to something more certain. Faith, then. Or trust. I have told her only that I know something in me broke--opened, it must have--and my practice shifted. The path behind me having been wiped clean, for mont hs I took tentative steps in a new direction. Even when it did not feel good, it felt right. She told me some people go to their graves never learning their truth. This one, she said to me, you trust. "Every creature has a religion," St. Thomas Aquinas wrote. "Every foot is a shrine where a secret candle burns." Many mornings, I left behind in my home so much that was holy in pursuit of what I believed was even more so. For a long while, this pursuit fed inward fires; tha

Dve, exhale When your child is born, this is what you watch. Her breath. It lives roundly and soundly in her belly. So content she is, the world of events waiting for her to happen have not yet interfered with the peaceful, abiding fullness of her belly breathing. All is calm. All is bright. The rest of our lives, we spend trying to get the breath back to our bellies. Contentment a memory an attentive parent once saw in us. When my father breathed his last breath and finally surrendered his all to this world that asked so much of him, I was not there to see it. I wonder. Is our will active at the very end? Does our breath leave us or do we let go, willingly, into that final ultimate exhale? Who takes the lead in the dance right then?

Ekam, inhale This is what we do first. We breathe. When we are born, our first breath sounds like a cry. Ekam, inhale, says the universe, and we come flopping out from a liquid home world into the air. Perhaps it's the lightness that startles. Or its vastness. I am trying to recall the Periodic Table. Which is lighter? Hydrogen or oxygen? Water or air? Difficult to separate. When I was snorkeling in Maui with my family for the first time, I understood, finally, that it was possible to live in a liquid realm. I understood the allure, in an instant, of freediving, wanting to get as close to survival in water as possible. No mechanism other than breath. Then, of course, there's all that silence. Which is it that makes that happen: hydrogen? oxygen? Ekam, inhale. At the age of 12, after having watched a demonstration of ashtanga yoga by Krishnamacharya, Pattabhi Jois left his family and presented himself to the yoga master for lessons, for a life of practice a