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Category: perspective

Deep Breathing

Deep Breathing

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Though I try and clear my decks for a true meditation session several times a week, I consider myself a remedial student at best. Worse than remedial, because it seems like it was easier to avoid distractions when I first began than it is now. Not sure why that is!

But in one way this new habit has taken hold, and that is in the practice of deep breathing. My falling-to-sleep routine consists of deep, counted breaths, my falling-back-to-sleep routine too. I have more luck with the former than the latter, but in both areas, I’m definitely better off than I was before.

And then there are those moments. You know the ones I mean: sitting at a long stoplight or in the dentist’s chair. Waiting for a file to load. The small anxieties and trials of daily life. 

Since I began meditating — thanks to my former workplace, which still allows me to join their morning meditation group — I use deep breathing all the time. And it almost never fails to still my racing heart. I’ll be meditating again in a moment. My shoulders are dropping a notch or two right now in anticipation.

Still Life with Hay Bales

Still Life with Hay Bales

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Last evening in the golden hour of slanted light, I walked up the road a quarter mile to a field I’ve been seeing on our drives.  My goal: to capture “on film” a field of daisies. 

But the daisies were a little too far away and the traffic was whipping around me as I stood on the scant shoulder, so I made quick work of the shot. On the way back, though, I raised my phone to photograph another beautiful field, green grass studded with hay bales lit by the lowering sun. 

I’d actually crunched and marched my way across this field when I thought I could reach the daises on foot, before I discovered the rusty wire fence and the treed border. I’d taken some photos of the hay bales from that angle and found them lacking.

But up above, on the berm, I could capture the sunlight and the shadows— beauty on a larger scale. Proof, once again, of the power of perspective. 

Newborn

Newborn

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Happy is the day that dawns unexpectedly cool. The door that swings open into rare air. 

It is the surprise that matters, expecting heat and humidity in mid-July, unaware of weather reports, of fronts arriving or departing.

When you get something else, something altogether delicious and cleansing, it takes your breath away for a minute. 

The world is newborn. 

The Leveler

The Leveler

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It’s a flag-snapping, low-humidity day, the kind I was hoping to have all month long. Weeping cherry boughs are swaying in the breeze and the back door is open to the sounds of the day, which is strangely bereft of cicada song (more on that, or the lack of that, later). 

A walk took me through the neighborhood, up and down the main street and the cul-de-sacs, my new home route: longer, as befits my schedule, and slower, as befits my joints. 

Which gave me more time to ponder the grand equation, one seldom acknowledged but always there, somewhat akin to Newton’s Third Law — “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” with a touch of Ecclesiastes — “to everything there is a season.” 

In other words, there’s a built-in leveler that sees to it that we are paid back for sweltering humidity with perfect days like these. 

Discipline

Discipline

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What a solid word it is, the ascender and descender anchoring it to the line, the three i’s a constant, the other consonants rounding it out. Though it’s difficult to see the word without the lens of meaning, even its structure seems no-nonsense.

Discipline for so long my way of life, a particular discipline made for the paid workforce. And now, the freedom, intoxicating and terrifying, an end to the regimentation I chafed against for years.

And yet, some discipline still. In some ways even more, but of a different type, one that I devise and (I hope) enforce. 

Discipline so different it seems to require a new word. Not control, structure or regulation. None of those will do. Some word I’ve yet to come up with. 

I’ll let you know when I do. 

(A deer spotted up close on yesterday’s walk, which has nothing much to do with discipline but was a photo I had handy.)

Big Again

Big Again

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I have a habit of not wanting to leave the places I’m visiting, and yesterday I almost didn’t. Confusion about departure times meant we missed our original return flight. Luckily, we were re-routed to another airport and finally made it home — though six hours later than planned. 

The first hours and days back after a trip are always a strange time. Life is mostly as it was but with subtle differences. The old house touches my heart with its creaky floors and familiarity. I don’t have to wonder when I wake up, where am I now? I can tell by the placement of lamp and beside table, by the feel of the covers under my chin. 

But the trip has altered the house and the gaze with which I see it. The roses in Portland are part of me now, the walk around Lake Union in Seattle, too. The Japanese Garden and the Japanese American Museum, Cherry Street and Alberta Street — they’re all in there. The crusty bread and the little dogs. 

It has been almost a year with no travel. The world of house and yard were closing in on me. But now … the world is big again. 

The Details

The Details

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Sometimes all it takes is a short stroll to open the mind and senses to the day ahead. Today I took the long way around to the newspaper — out the back door, down the deck stairs, around the garden and through the gate and side yard to the driveway where it lay, double-bagged in orange.

The ground is hard and cracked, given two weeks without moisture, which made it easy for me to amble out there in my (sturdily-soled) slippers. Weather folks say we need the rain, but I say we need the dryness. The yard is finally not a lake anymore.

On my short expedition, I found several sticks that I broke over my knee and stuck in the bin for tomorrow’s yard waste pickup. I noted the fine pruning of the hollies, which no longer graze the garage. I heard the tiny peeps of birds fluttering awake in the azaleas. And I spotted swollen buds on the forsythia.

It’s a new day, these details said. Embrace it!

The Point of ‘PossibiliDay’

The Point of ‘PossibiliDay’

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Today is International Woman’s Day, one of the 31 days that comprise Women’s History Month, and one of many observation days we celebrate at Winrock International.

It is also a day I dubbed “PossibiliDay” back in 2017, when I’d been at my then-new job almost a year and was celebrating the freedom of my new work and an awakening to the power of possibility. 

This year, March 8 feels far more International Woman’s Day than “PossibiliDay,” a fact I attribute to almost five years in this position, the last one spent working entirely at home. 

But this is okay, I tell myself. Because the point of “PossibiliDay” is not to mark it every year. It’s to remember that possibilities lurk where we least expect them — and to take heart from that fact. 

Sleet!

Sleet!

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The fluffy white stuff we were (sort of) promised yesterday has turned out to be a bunch of crunchy ice crystals instead. It’s a sleet storm, not a snow storm, that’s greeting Fairfax County this morning. 

So what to do? You can’t sled on it, can’t walk through it, can’t drive in it, can’t even admire it as it falls. 

To put on my optimistic hat (oh my, it’s getting a lot of wear these days, since I only pull it out when natural optimism fails to respond), we are not getting freezing rain, which is what pelted us all day Saturday. Sleet does not coat tree limbs and bring them down. 

Let’s praise sleet then not for what it does … but for what it fails to do. 

(A photo of what we don’t have this morning.)

Seven Degrees

Seven Degrees

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If there are seven degrees of separation, then are there not seven degrees of isolation? I’m thinking about the world as we know it: working remotely, separated from friends, too cold for outside get-togethers … and now further set apart by rain, snow, sleet and an anticipated ice storm.

I suppose it’s easier in one sense. We now have multiple reasons for staying at home. But that doesn’t warm the heart when the heart is accustomed to the stimulation and richness of a life fully lived.

What is called for, I suppose, is seven degrees of patience: hoping, praying, reading, writing, baking, cleaning — and of course, dancing. You can’t forget about that last one. It’s the most important of all.