Recently, all creative juices have been aimed at setting some basic life practicalities in place. This morning I come to the Archives with no cream for my coffee and feeling a bit inspirationally tapped.
Then I come across a photo taken by Jeb.
There does exist a well without end.
It sources somewhere between the notes of a song or the lines of a poem.
It courses through veins of arms that embrace.
My seven year old son has captured flow in motion.
Ahhh…the cup that runneth over!
“Best breathing yet.”
My yoga instructor tells me that my breathing has been good today. It’s been said that if you’re in a posture but not aligned with your breath, you’re not doing yoga, you’re just stretching. Today I conjured Vader. Tomorrow’s practice, who knows? Every day is different.
Every day is a yoga practice of sorts. Metaphors abound on and off the mat.
I’ve been given new postures to practice. A completely new and unexplored realm, the dynamic inverse world of shoulder stands. Ee gads! Hesitant, I told my instructor that I was nervous. Not sure I could get my legs up in the air properly.
“After everything else you’re doing in your practice…this is easy,” he says.
He was right. It wasn’t that bad. Just new and unfamiliar. New positionings for me to attune to.
Speaking of positioning. Besides being blessed with the addition of new postures in my yoga practice, it seems my feathered friends would also like to bestow their gifts upon me.
Post shoulder stands and beach time, I rolled up to a stop sign with my window down to the tropical air. Suddenly, it felt as if someone had thrown a fistful of wet sand at me. A damp and grainy splat had hit my bare leg and smattered the inside of the car door. With a closer look, I realized that this was not sand, but rather a large deposit of fresh bird poo. What are the odds?
Bewildered, I stuck my head out the window and looked up, seeing nothing, of course. My bird friend was swift in flight and long gone. Amazed at the angle needed to achieve this perfect aim to reach me, I took the droppings as a sign of good luck. They say bird poop is a blessing and that offering seemed destined for me.
Someone taught Jeb the Italian slang for feces. For the rest of our car ride home – me with drying bird doo on my leg, Jeb in the backseat – he goes bilingual. In some allegorical call and response, he delightfully announces “turd'”with a rolling ‘r’ and an Italian accent. Then follows it with “stronzo!”
There we are, driving home. Shoulder stands and bird shit. Me, I’m still breathing. Deep in the excrement and smiling. Somehow feeling blessed.
“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.”
~Frank A. Clark
It was a sixth grader yesterday that introduced me to this quote. He chose these words to reflect his sentiments as he gave his graduation speech, marking the passage from elementary school to junior high.
He understands the depth of their meaning more than my 38-year-old self. Having spent his youngest years in hospitals with leukemia, he is a living example of perseverance. He describes times during his illness when he would lie in bed and repeat over and over in his small head “I have the will to live. I have the will to live.”
Now, completely cured, he stood before the crowd of parents, telling us that he still loves a good challenge. That he embraces the difficult, inspired to find his way through adversity. He welcomes this, knowing the treasure to which this path leads.
He has traveled terrains I cannot fathom. He knows depths I do not understand.
Yesterday, I heard this twelve-year-old state with simple clarity: “I love life.”
I’m following his lead.
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