by Sara Flitner

Sitting in a conference room under dim lights, I had just finished guiding a “metta” practice for our local police. With the Chief of Police at the head of the table, flanked by burley officers on all sides, and another participant Zooming in from Star Valley, the session was part of a year-long “train the trainer” program the Jackson Police Department is piloting with Becoming Jackson Whole.  

Having already learned the core principles of mindfulness practice, our officers are now biting off a big responsibility: to broaden mindfulness and resilience training to reduce stress and turnover, and to learn effective ways to manage focus, mental health, relationships, and workplace performance. It’s a commitment that begs tough questions, asking significant introspection of our frontline peacekeepers. 

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by Sara Flitner

To witness something with full attention is to make it holy. To observe a thing’s details, its place in the world, its circumstances is to make sacred the thousands of mundane and miraculous ways that our daily lives start anew, flame out, begin again. To see and know something, to know it through paying attention to it, is one way to keep a thing alive. Because, if the essence of something goes unnoticed, can it survive?

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by Sara Flitner

On perhaps my last morning in my home of 24 years, I watched a hummingbird land in the tall aspen trees behind the house. I had decided to rent out my home and try on something different for a while, and as I watched the bird, I felt fully the possibility that I may never do it – the watching, there – again. The trees, planted as saplings, are now taller than two stories, and that morning the leaves were still green, branches full. 

Birds mean something to my two sons and me. Hummingbirds carry the energy of deep connection, because they delighted and uplifted our close friend, Shelley, as she watched them from her hospital bed in the last days of her 49 years. Over this past summer, my yard had been full of hummingbirds, and all the other messengers. Tanagers (family), lazuli buntings (beauty) grosbeaks (persistence), finches (delight in the ordinary)…The home is full of memories, created together and enclosed in our beautiful neighborhood on the creek, in my yard, in its walls, the aspen trees. 

At 11 a.m. sharp, a calvary of competent and caring women showed up at my doorstep: my college roommate, friends from the baby years, the working years, the last handful of years. Grandmothers, dog mothers, artists and executives, divorced, single, married, undecided. Four decades of ages represented. One by one, they backed Suburbans, trucks and Subarus into my driveway, and 59 minutes later, the things I loved and would carry with me were sitting in my new condo, waiting to usher me into a new era.

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by Sara Flitner

You know that friend who, when asked how things are going, always answers, “If I were any better, there’d be two of me?”    

I am sure you are a good person, but say your dog just threw up in the unfortunate path of your bare foot. Or maybe you just learned you must replace the freezer, which is expensive, and also means weeks and weeks without ice cream. So, it would be understandable if the first idea that popped into your head was to get a giant roll of duct tape and figure out how to shut the two of them up. 

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by Sara Flitner

“Let me wear the day
Well so when it reaches you
You will enjoy it.”

- Sonia Sanchez

This is haiku, a style of poetry that reaches into the present moment, the natural world, the heart of the matter. I love its brevity, its force, its directness. I love that I can submerge into it without drama or a big commitment. I can wear it.

Agnes Bourne, a writer, poet, designer, creative, and spreader of joy, will lead our July “Everyday Mindfulness” program at Teton County Library (9 AM on July 9). She will teach us how to use haiku as a mindfulness practice, a creative way to develop attention in the moment, and to really have some fun together.

It’s a perfect time to introduce a few weeks of Daily Acts that are inspired by haiku, by the power of short, intentional phrases to lean on through our busy summer days. At Becoming Jackson Whole, our team is always curious about ways we can pivot, or refocus, or share something we’ve been helped by, in an effort to bring more ease and balance into your busy, unique lives.

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“Catastrophic road failure” said the newspaper article, as if the road itself had let us down. Overnight appeared a crack in the facade, sprouting Medusa-like tendrils out and across the highway, more just beneath the surface. The highway proctors noticed right away and began a pantomime as old as the unstable dirt. A patch, a hopeful work-around, a brave finger in the dike against the mighty force of nature. For a few hours, it held, and people from the towns on either side of the crack sighed relief and went home to dinner, family, sleep.  

Overnight, the crack deepened and widened, its appetite for progress growing until it split and fractured and sent off new fissures, a long run-on sentence diagrammed by nature, sending messages and meaning. “Pay attention,” it said to canyons and cars in all directions. “It’s time you listen.” 

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When I saw the front bumper dangling low to the ground, threatening to detach entirely, I braced myself for the story and wondered how my friends had managed to make it over Teton Pass with the wounded metal hanging by a bolt. Mike eased the truck to a stop and didn’t utter a word as Maureen flung open the passenger door. 

“He just about backed over me in the garage,” she began. “I screamed bloody murder and dove for the floor, but with the engine running, he didn’t hear a thing.” 

By now, Mike had slumped nearly to the floormats behind the steering wheel. This trip was nonnegotiable, I knew—they both wanted to be here for the milestone we would share – but it seemed unlikely that the bumper – or Mike – would make the return trip without collateral damage.  

“I’m so glad you’re both OK,” I said. “But what happened to the front of the car, if he was backing up?” 

Maureen’s eyes narrowed. 

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“Is it really a problem that we have so little control? Is it a problem that plans altogether are written in water?” Pema Chodron

I have taken leave to the desert, a good place to probe opposition. As good as any, I realize, to think about water when I’m walking in an ecosystem thriving without much of it. Part of what pulls me in is that it constantly surprises me. I expect scarcity, but am rewarded with three, four, five different birdsongs, a coyote, a handful of jackrabbits, deer,  horned toad, two hawks in flight above. Every living thing I see reminds me I fit into something I can only take in in fragments. Crystalline blue sky, lemon yellow poppies, saguaro cactus open-armed but armed with a clear message: don’t get too close.

We belong, but to what? We’re here, but why? Is the point really to find answers?

I have a wise friend who said the damndest thing recently. “You ought to try to just trust life,” she said. “What if you just assume that everything is working out ok?”

First, I secretly checked her pupils to see if they were dilated. …

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I have always counted things: books I’ve read, antelope on the horizon, calories, miles to go, ideas, vertical feet. In early adulthood, I counted credentials, promotions, vegetables, the “Big Five” for my kids to bring to elementary school, homework assignments. As I got older, I counted billable hours, votes, days on the mountain. 

I counted things as if I were casting spells, a sorceress conjuring safety and security for myself and my loved ones. The lists and spells and additions in my head meant a constant whir of noise that actually distracted me from the clarity that underpins satisfaction. 

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My son pulls out of the driveway, flashing two fingers and a grin as he heads back to school for his final semester. The sun’s blinding brilliance does nothing to move the temperature, which stays at a stubborn minus 11. I grow increasingly restless as my mind jumps from the weather and road conditions to the list of things I need to get done—the list of things I can use to distract myself from this terrible knowing that each time my sons leave, my heart divides itself and lives uneasy. Fractured into pride and panic. Motherhood, for all its stretching and expanding, is also a lifetime sentence of farewells. I wasn’t prepared for this part; since the arrival of my oldest more than two decades ago, I am no longer autonomous. I live with the truths and possibilities of them in bones, blood, heartbeat.

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