The nature of things.
This, too, shall pass.
Jackson’s predictably unpredictable weather has our moods rising and falling in synchrony with the barometer. Slips of brilliant, clear sky and simple sunlight play with our emotions, throwing bread crumbs of hopefulness. Each day brings its own creative forces to the sky’s slate, sometimes changing color from light to dark, dark to light, in a matter of hours. Sun and fresh air make normalcy and steadiness seem within reach.
I’m in the mood for a “paint by numbers” spring, the kind where we’d empty the paint pots full of yellow, green, and sky blue. Just hours ago, I walked through the neighborhood with my mismatched pair of dogs, sun warming everything. Now I am reaching for a jacket, huddled at my laptop, glaring back at the sky, gone gray with my mood.
I was in my late twenties before I could heed the advice to “go with the flow.” I came out of the womb with the disposition of a crusader, indignant about any perceived injustice. Being the third of four children, I had a long list. Nothing was ever fair enough or right enough, so I doubled down, swam upstream, made a lot of noise.
Lots of things are worth fighting for -- the people you love, clean air, health, the people other people love. But fighting with no mercy, no mindfulness, is just fighting. It’s effort with no purpose.
We are weathering a global storm with very real dangers and unfathomable losses. Thankfully, the extent of damage we feared in Jackson in the early weeks has not come to pass. But we must still hunker down and orient our lives to a new landscape that thwarts our schedules, cancels our celebrations, threatens our financial security. It feels so big, so beyond comprehension.
Will we ever meet in coffee shops again? Hug people hello? Send our kids to school? Can we make ends meet? Will we have to move?
As the sun returned (thankfully, just as I ran out of people to call with my ruminations), I was reminded of something. We've been practicing for this massive upheaval since we inhaled for the very first time, since we completed one half of the breath that taught us our first tiny lesson: always, something comes and something goes. Beginnings have endings. Days, years, eras, plans, hopes, and dreams -- our very lives flow in a constant cycle.
This week, give yourself the mental space to pause and take stock of your place in this cycle. Prepare to participate wholly in what comes next. And remember that, despite stormy skies, the sun is still there. In a time of so much uncertainty, take comfort in what you know: Spring will come. And this, too, shall pass.
This week’s pocket practice: three deep breaths
Exhale completely and empty your lungs of air.
Inhale, feeling the depth of your inhalation.
Repeat three times.
This week’s 16-minute guided meditation: Nadi Shodhana (Alternate Nostril Breath)
Breath is the most familiar of all cycles. Thank you, Deidre Norman, for sharing this practice with us.
The Morning News
by Alberto Ríos
Seasons will not be still,
Filled with the migrations of birds
Making their black script on the open sky,
Those hasty notes of centuries-old goodbye.
The clouds and the heavens make a memo book,
A diary of it all, if only for a day.
The birds write much, but then rewrite all the time,
News continuous, these small pencil tips in flight.
They are not alone in the day’s story.
Jets, too, make their writing on the blue paper —
Jets, and at night, satellites and space stations.
Like it or not, we are all subscribers to the world’s newspaper
Written big in the frame of the window in front of us.
Today, we wave to neighborhood riders on horses.
We hear the woodpecker at work on the chimney.
There is news everywhere.
All this small courage,
So that we might turn the page.