Vernal Equinox Practice Together
In many ways, from last spring to this has felt like one continual winter for us, and perhaps for many of you. Although I went for long walks in the heat of the Texan summer (which I love, as you…
How is the body?
“How is the body?” my (gifted!) meditation teacher asked of us on our Zoom call this morning, as a prompt for our circle council. How is the body? Her use of an article and not of a possessive opened up…
Convergences
On January 20, at the end of a long, emotional (Inauguration!) day, I got a text from a friend, that he had heard there were leftover and expiring COVID-19 vaccine shots being administered on a first-come, first-served basis to those…
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
It seems absurd, really, when you’ve grown up in Alaska and lived in Chicago—among other northern and wind-chilled places—to feel that ten days of a hard freeze seem interminable and that they’re shutting down normal life, even “normal” pandemic quarantine…
Mon Coeur
Valentine’s Day, 32 years ago: My romantic life was mostly a disaster (see earlier “Toast” post for some oblique details—things had continued along those trend lines), but I love love, and Valentine’s Day always feels a bit like Thanksgiving to…
The Razor’s Edge
Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir—I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death—is a wonder of attention, of interest, of expression. Through the intensity of her calm and compassionate focus on the 17 events and her curiosity about their emergences and…
Temperature Scales
My husband and I were in Brisbane, Australia, for a few months near the end of 2017. Although he worked in a downtown office full-time Monday through Friday, we used the weekends to explore as much of the east coast…
“Somehow we do it”
It wasn’t the only time I was the target of bullying by that particular group of boys, and it wasn’t the worst incident over the years, but that summer day (was I 10 years old? 11?), as I rode my…
You Were Just Here
Making the bed in the morning soon after waking is a deeply pleasurable and renewing ritual for me, a direct and physical engagement with the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness for my beloveds and me. I love making the…
Dangling for Peace
It’s been nine days, and on every single one of them, I’ve needed to spend five minutes dangling to lower my heart rate, elevate my perspective, and offer the connective tissues of my entire body—head to toe—a sustained opening and…
Toast
My middle son and I spent Wednesday afternoon glued to NPR, circling around each other in the kitchen, as horrified as we had been on 9/11—although then, I sheltered him from all the details of destruction, distracted him with activities…
A New Year!
Blessings for 2021! I love all the new beginnings: the calendar New Year, my birthday (conveniently located—for the pacing it allows—in May), the start of an academic year (August/September, here in the U.S.), including new books and unmarked notepaper, maybe…
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
After hearing an interview on NPR with Wintering’s author, Katherine May, I listened to the audio version during my 3-mile treadmill walks. I was so enraptured by May’s emotionally and tonally wide-ranging memoir that I planned to share her little…
Perfect. Moment.
We have a thing we do in our family, a thing we name: Perfect. Moment. The way it works is that we’re going along, and then all of a sudden, there’s a crystallization of time, of sweetness, and we call…
Focus on the Flame
The hours of daylight are shrinking in the Northern Hemisphere, and the sunshine that does reach us comes in at a cooler, weakened slant; the temperatures are sinking; the holidays across faith traditions are marking the season with lights: If…
Marsupial Mammals
In addition to being (clearly) a placental mammal, I may have a latent marsupial gene—if not in actual fact, then certainly in sensibility. I carried all three of my children well after their overdue gestations; we strained the weight limit…
Tenable Program Available in January
2020 has been a challenging year by so many measures, one of them the balance between our desires for health and our cravings for pleasure in response to the uncertainties, anxieties, and new burdens this year has presented. An article in the…
Wrinkles in Time
When you’ve used your dining table as a desk and your kitchen counter to process the incoming mail, then you have company over for dinner (in the years Before Coronavirus) or the least-excuse “holiday” to celebrate, and you dump all…
Getting and Spending
I’m kind of amazed at and mystified by people who head out into stores (well, especially this year, in terms of in-person efforts) or even online to shop, shop, shop their way through an entire day of the deals of…
Creative Inspiration
In my perpetual desire to expand my understanding, taste, and skills, I’ve read hundreds of home design books; of all of them, Erica Tanov’s Design By Nature: Creating Layered, Lived-In Spaces is my current favorite. It’s a treasure trove of…
Giving Thanks
If this were a normal year, similar to the past seven years or so—obviously, it’s not, but let’s imagine for a moment—all my family members who live in Austin would gather at my husband’s and my house for the Thanksgiving…
The Real Scoop
My husband and I raised three sons, all in their 20s now, and we’ve been quarantining since mid-March with our middle and youngest ones. Living again with three men—all six feet tall or above, all athletic, all non-picky, hearty eaters—has…
Wise Trees
Reverence and wonder are two of my favorite states of being. Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, in their gorgeous Wise Trees, elicit both conditions in their textual and photographic portraits of 50 trees around the world which/who are remarkable, not…
What a Sledgehammer Taught Me
Immediately after I graduated from college, I joined my general contractor dad and one of my sisters on a construction site in Atlanta. My dad and his team of us two young women renovated a space at the edge of…
Making the Most of It
A Bradford Pear is considered a junk tree, short-lived and brittle, prone to breaking in unpredictable ways. We had one, planted by the original owners of our house nearly 20 years ago when it was built, and what a glory…
“If you don’t stretch, you won’t know where the edge is.”
Back in May, I was listening (as usual) to NPR by way of KUT here in Austin and heard an article about Sarah Little Turnbull, who immediately became a new hero of mine for her life-changing, life-saving, wide-ranging accomplishments (the…
“When someone shows you who they are . . .
In the words of Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Today, Friday, October 30, is the last day for early voting in Texas; Tuesday, November 3, is election day. It’s not complicated:…
Green Soup
Samin Nosrat, goddess—of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which I consumed in whole-book form right after it was published—just gave me a glorious upgrade to my standby green soup (from Anna Thomas’ recipe in Love Soup, which I have loved and…
Breath
“I’d gotten a fair share of gasps from friends when I told them about the experiment,” James Nestor recounts, in the first chapter of his most recent book, Breath. “‘Don’t do it!’ a few yoga devotees warned,” me among them…
Rough Places Made Smooth
When we purchased this home of ours, five years ago next month, the sheet-rocked walls were heavily orange-peel textured, in most rooms painted the old-school Ace-bandage color of a pinkish tan, builder grade (which is to say, cheap and prone…
Gathering
Our gathering via Zoom a month ago—for an Autumnal Equinox yin yoga and yoga nidra guided meditation—was a soul-satisfying delight. We said goodbye to the hot/pitta season of summer and welcomed the windy/vata season of fall with our grounded practice,…
“I could offer you a warm embrace”
We set the air conditioning in our house at 80 degrees during the summer, and even then it’s too cold for me. Since our equipment is almost 20 years old and wasn’t high quality to start with, we have an…
Food Coloring
Among all the colors that food can be, my favorite is green. For the 30 years (as of this week!) that I’ve been married, I’ve been preparing and plating meals for my beloveds—first my man, and then our three sons, and…
Gen Hope
In the past few years, there has been an anti-bullying effort in schools. When I was a substitute teacher—often assigned to stand in for the instructional aides who work one-on-one with special education students when they’re integrated into a classroom—I…
H-O-L-D F-A-S-T
What does a (fictional) grizzled sailor on a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars have to do with yin yoga? In the movie “Master and Commander of the Far Side of the World” (one of our family’s favorites for its…
Our People
There’s a lot I don’t understand about what it means to live someone else’s life—especially when differences include a divergence of hundreds of years of social history—but I’m committed to continue listening and learning. One small thing I do know…
Counting to 100
Sometimes I feel as though I’m still coloring with the big crayons. Big crayons, that come just five to a box, that give you the most limited spectrum—nothing like magenta or cerulean blue or chartreuse, the names of which I…
Delicious
Elisabeth Tova Bailey, in her treasure of a slim volume, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, recounts her fascination with a snail when she was forced by a mysterious illness into extreme isolation and stillness. She heads her Prologue…
Birthday Presence
Today is my middle son’s birthday, and mine. For the past couple of months, my husband has been asking me what I want for my birthday, but I haven’t been able to provide him with any useful ideas, because here’s…
Easing into Yin
Yesterday was full of a variety of sorrows, and when I woke up this morning, I could locate exactly where in my body the residue of those feelings was stored: under my right shoulder blade, running up over my right…
Notes on Nidra
Yoga nidra is a guided meditation that follows a specific pattern, which encourages and allows your body, mind, and spirit to relax, restore, and renew at a profound level that is difficult to achieve otherwise, even through the most restful…
Far Away from Anywhere
Our oldest son attended college in Hawaii and fell in love with the state, which is ridiculously easy to do. When I dropped him off there (the second hardest separation of my life thus far, but that’s another story), and…
Love Nesters
Today is our oldest son’s birthday; his youngest brother’s was exactly five weeks ago, and their middle brother’s will be exactly four weeks from today. With this universe-aligned schedule, their birthdays are on the same day of the week every…
Reflections
The first time I remember looking at myself in a mirror was when I was twelve years old, after returning home from a weeklong rustic girls’ camp in the middle of the southeastern Alaskan wilderness near my home. The camp…
90% of the Problems, Solved
Maybe you disagree with me on this, but my theory is: In the absence of mental illness, at least 90% of behavioral problems can be solved when we have the right amounts of well-timed good food and good sleep. I’ve…
Yin
I love learning from experts, and when they use their time and courage to write beautiful books, I’m grateful in effusive and sustained ways. Thank you to my authorial teachers and guides in the development of my yin practice: my…
Yin Yoga and Yoga Nidra
“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.” Rumi
Reading List
“The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.” George Eliot
Sacred Spaces
“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.” Joseph Campbell
Nourishment
“Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.” Maya Angelou
