Breathing fast and slow

Yoga is a river, writes author Rolf Gates in his book Meditations from the Mat . It is not difficult to make the same observation when I practice regularly. The analogy is apt. Today, my practice is easy; everything is flowing. Today, my practice is stuck; must be a mud flat I hadn't noticed. Today, it feels as though I will never reach the surface; the undertow is ruthless in these parts. I have had to navigate all of these river stages in my practice. And I will continue to do so, arriving at familiar shores only to discover something that was always there but hidden to me before. Another breakthrough; another Eureka! evoked. And so it goes. You were right, my dear Mr. Vonnegut. The river goes; life goes; things happen; we move on. There is a river constantly flowing, and we need to step inside the stream, the flow, the flood, onto the dry patch. Gates uses the image of a canoe for the purposes of all of this navigation. Get into your canoes and push off from the shore and see...

Robert Mapplethorpe once wrote in a letter to Patti Smith a confession--Smith's word--about what it felt like to create his art. "I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." You see, to me Mapplethorpe's "confession" sounds like an act of prayer. Drawing was his religion. When the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says that our life is a work of art, I think he is saying what Mapplethorpe saw clearly, that our life--what we do with it--is a never-ending prayer. This is why we try to write poems or paint pictures or take photographs or bake cookies or sew clothing or raise children who then want to create crayon-colored pictures of their own. Every act is an act of prayer because our actions, all of them, if practiced mindfully are that beautiful, that powerful, that divine. "Your daily life is your temple and your religion," said The Prophet to the people of Orphalese in Kahlil Gibran's book by the same title. So says many...