Breathing fast and slow

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...