Idle and Blessed

I like to be prepared for things. I like to know I'll be good at them before I try. When I was little my sport was soccer (well, first it was tee ball, but I'm not sure that's a sport in itself). I remember doing drills in my front yard over and over with Dad, making sure I'd be able to stop that ball when it came at me from the feet of another team. The games mattered so much. The technique mattered so much. But it was the practice that mattered the most. When I learned Russian I didn't speak much until I knew complete sentences. At the end of my first 3 month trip, Slavik said, "How did you go from knowing 3 words to saying everything? I've never seen anything like it." I like to know I'll be good at things before I try. It doesn't mean I don't love a good challenge. A marathon in the driving rain, 50k of Appalachian terrain, getting a Masters degree, living in Russia…I thrive on challenges, but these are my cha...

There's always a foreground and a background in life, and most of the time we pull only the biggest events to the front, like on our Instagram feeds. The noise and the laughter and the glitter jump forward, and we ignore the rest. Do you remember the 20 minutes you spent in the car going home last night? Of course not. We forget the spaces in our days, if we ever noticed them at all. Yoga teaches that we should pay attention. That we should pull the spaces to the foreground and let some of the busy things fade. There are downward dogs and warrior 2's but there are also the transitions between them, and they're harder. It also teaches us to notice the spaces between the breaths we take. We know there's an inhale. We know there's an exhale. But there are also spaces in between, where we're all empty or all full, and maybe we don't ever notice that, but we should. Because in our frantic hurry, our raging consumerism, our constant need for stimulation, we a...

What if the best things in life are quiet? There's a current running through life that pulls us when we let it. It doesn't talk about goodness, it just goes there. I think a lot of our angst would cease if we let our feet lose ground and go with it. There are times for revolution. There are revolutionary times. There are times when the protesters must march and the preaching must start and the mourners must grow loud, but there is a time to be moved by the current. We are pulled along. The birds and the dirt, the faithful growing of the trees, the mountains' celebratory stance say "from Eden to Eden" and go. They know the earth's cycles. They know their purpose is small. They know the simple goodness of being what you are, and they go with it. They're quiet. My generation has a lot to say. We don't know how much there is to hear, when we stop our chatter. The first question is, "what do you know for sure?" and I say, "the incar...