Tag: beauty

The Pause

When I catch myself pushing on and on, from one task to the next, I’ve intuitively begun to pause in between and do nothing. A few silent seconds of breathing and gazing at whatever’s in front of me changes everything. Then I carry on with greater equanimity and mindfulness.

Teaching yoga, I bring students back to a neutral pose between more challenging ones,  revisiting tadasana between warrior poses or dandasana between seated twists. In stillness and symmetry, we can feel the aftereffects of the previous asana.

Pausing my run for a sip of water at the top of a hill, I discovered the clouds in the north were no longer distant but moving in and thundering, bringing the imminent blessing of rain to the desert. A multitude of yuccas’ spikes of bell-like blossoms stood out, green-white against the blue-gray sky.

The space between each breath, neither inhalation nor exhalation; the space between each thought, neither this thought nor that; the airborne space between each running step; the pause between lightning and thunder; the line breaks in poems, the rests in music; the dark sky between the stars, the blue sky between the clouds. Sacred space.

One Perfect Day

Spring in New Mexico is pretty rough. The humidity feels like it’s below zero and wind averages twenty miles per hour, day after day. Some days are windier, and things fly around that were never meant to fly, along with a lot of dust and sand. It started early this year, in mid-February, cutting off a good two weeks of our beautiful, gentle winter.

Suddenly, a winter day appeared in March. Fifty-nine degrees. No wind. When I started my run, there was hint of petrichor in the air, the scent of rain. None fell, but it was a sweet moment. The clouds parted, the sun beamed warmth between them, and spring beauty I tend to overlook when distracted by enduring the wind emerged to my attention. Small green plants pushing up in the desert despite lack of rain. Quail and doves and roadrunners calling out to their kind, and quail darting across the trail. A little beige ground squirrel running at full speed, its tail flying out behind it.

Every step and every breath was pure delight. Neither hot nor cold. No strain, no suffering. Just bliss and beauty. The touch of the sun brought pleasure with no “in spite of.”

Then I did my plant care chores as no chore at all, watering fruit trees and garden plants for neighbors who are often away. The plum tree was in full bloom. Bees buzzed in it and in the blossoms of the cottonwood trees. Spring-like pleasure without the stress of normal spring. The wind was due back the next day, and knowing this, I basked in every second. One perfect day.

Can I cherish every day the same way?

Listening and Light

Listening silences my inner noise. Running on a winter afternoon, I hear my feet. The sound- textures change from hard slapping on dried-mud clay to near-inaudible thudding on soft dust and sand to crunching on gravel and pebbles. A crow caws in flight. A flock of doves rises from the desert brush with alarm calls as fluttery as the rush of their wings. Hikers converse in amiable tones, too distant for me to make out their words. Rather, I receive their voices as part of the music, harmonizing with the cheep of a solitary bird, the hum of something mechanical at the New Mexico Veterans’ Home on the hill above the trails, and the crow of a rooster somewhere across the Rio Grande.

Listening seems to sharpen my vision, enhancing my inner stillness and conscious presence. The light behind cacti brings out gold in the thorns on tall green prickly pears and red in the thorns on little purple pancake cacti. Their flat purple pads soak up the light. A female desert cardinal is little more than silhouette in a mesquite tree. Each pebble stands out like a sculpture. Each crevice in the now-dry rain-cut earth is wrinkled with deep shadows.

Thoughts slip in, but I let them go and come back to listening and light.

 

The Rainbow of My Dream

I dreamed bright colors. Bands of yellow and green. No story, just colors and a feeling of joy. The following day was sunny and sixty-six degrees. Excited for such a perfect December day, I hit the trail in Elephant Butte Lake State Park. I knew it would be a little windy, but the sand was still damp from two days of steady rain, so it wouldn’t be flying in my face.

After I’d run less than a mile, the wind grew chilly and blew in clouds to cover the sun, and the temperature dropped. I wished I’d worn gloves. This was not the run I’d imagined. I persisted, though, knowing I’d feel like a wimp if I cut it short. The clouds were dramatic, and the weather kept the normal winter tourists off the trail. It was all mine.

Still, as I committed to the final mile, I asked myself, why is it so important to keep going in the cold? There’ll be plenty of warm, sunny, windless days all winter. As I finished the last stretch, the sun broke through in the west. Golden light flooded the sand and the desert junipers, and half a rainbow woke up in the clouds to the east. It set its jeweled foot softly on the ground and arced into the gray, its trajectory unfinished. My endurance was rewarded: the rainbow of my dream.

Blue Grasshopper

The opening chapter of Work as a Spiritual Practice features a shiny blue grasshopper landing on the head of a statue of the Buddha. I read and reread the book often and finally gave it away when I retired and moved. Since then, I’ve reflected on its lessons, such as awareness of the task itself as meditation, being present to one’s steps and breath even when rushing, and keystroke meditation. But I never saw a blue grasshopper until today.

Silvery blue and coral pink against the gray of a monsoon season sky, it struck me as too beautiful to be real. It also struck me as sign, a reminder to make all my work—writing, yoga teaching, community volunteer work, housework, my to-do list, everything—more of a spiritual practice.

Monsoon Season

The gray on the horizon isn’t wildfire smoke anymore. It’s rain. Heavy, thick clouds bearing blessings. Everything is new. Everything has changed. Turtleback Mountain wore a double rainbow this week instead of a brown haze, and every wrinkle in its rocky skin was visible when sunset sliced through the clouds, painting the mountain gold.
The sand in the desert is damp, dotted with the footprints of raindrops, marked with flowing rivulets and the slender tracks of snakes. A humble puddle is a miracle. A wet lizard clings to a rock, trying to get warm. I feel a bit sorry for him. He looks grumpy. But I’m joyful. Monsoon season. It’s always a cause for gratitude and awe, and this year even more than ever.

Spontaneous Serenity

When I finished a long run at Caballo Lake State Park, I was so reluctant to leave the bliss state of immersion in nature, I did my yoga practice on the small brick patio behind the visitor’s center. Its adobe-brown stucco walls and an L-shaped stone bench were my props. Balancing poses in the wind became open-skill activities, challenging and unpredictable. The views of the mountains and a cute little cactus with bright yellow thorns provided a change from the familiar views of my apartment and my outdoor teaching space, making my inner space feel different as well. Savasana on a hard stone bench, listening to the wind, was deep peace.

Then I took pictures. While I may never be much of an artist as photographer, the effort makes me appreciate even more the work of those who are, and helps me reconnect with the extraordinary serenity of that moment.

 

Whoo!

About once every two years, I encounter another runner on the trail. Mostly there are dog-walkers in the fall and winter, and no other humans in the spring and summer. Last week, the rare runner approached, and he didn’t just say hi and pass, he grinned and whooped.

He wasn’t a kid—there was gray in his beard. I guessed he was visiting from some snowy place. He wore a tank top while I wore long sleeves and gloves. Escaping to the sun and the desert, he had to be in a state of pure delight. We passed again on the next lap of the loop—at almost exactly the same spot, going in opposite directions at equal speed. He whooped again, raising his hand in a high-five. “Good job!” My cheering section. “You too,” I said.

His exuberance got me thinking about joy. About letting go into the moment. Not taking for granted this experience I have four times a week that was such an exhilarating treat for him. And he celebrated our mutual awesomeness as senior runners still at it. As I ran on, I slipped into my inner “whoo!” zone.

I’ve done it since even without his cheers. Yesterday, I spent two laps mentally fussing with my volunteer work’s to-do list and was about to stop early to deal with it. But then my inner whooper turned around and ran for another half hour, dumping the to-dos and choosing freedom. Then I went back to town and dealt with it all. Today after I taught my outdoor yoga class, I watered the plants (that’s how I pay rent for my “studio”) and instead of going home to get on with the endless list, I gave in to the urge to do my own practice before I even rolled up the hose. I’d only had time for a short warm-up before class. This long, spontaneous practice under the brilliant blue sky was bliss. More om than whoo, but a good bit of both.

Kindness to the Earth

Ezra picked up a plastic bottle from the grass, tire-crushed litter blown in from the road. “I hate this … People trashing everything. Like, what do they think is sacred? The earth or the inside of their cars?”             Ghost Sickness, Mae Martin Mysteries book five

On Thanksgiving Day, I saw a post on the T or C Litter Pickers Facebook page from a man who said was he passing through and had collected twenty bags of litter on the road between Truth or Consequences and Elephant Butte. He wondered who he should call to collect it. Our members let him know there was no one to call, but several of us drove out and picked up the bags.

For the entire holiday weekend, our roadside angel kept cleaning. He posted that he was camping in his van and had no room to transport trash in it. We kept finding and collecting more bags.

The scenery on the steep, two-mile hill he adopted is subtle but beautiful. An expanse of brown desert with cacti and thorny shrubs, a small reedy pond where migratory waterfowl spend the winter, and a view of mountains in the distance. At night, it’s a place of stars, with no streetlights and little traffic. To some folks, though, it’s a convenient place to toss cans, cups, bottles, plastic bags, straws, foam shell food containers, and other junk they can’t tolerate keeping in their cars until they get where they’re going.

The roadside angel filled over thirty bags of litter. A couple of days into his project, one of our Litter Pickers members finally met him. The angel is a visitor from South Africa. I’m in awe of him. How many tourists leave a place better than when they first arrived? Does he travel the world, being kind to each patch of earth where he stops to camp? Or did he feel some special pity for our abused roadside land, for the snow geese and ducks and pelicans who visit the pond?

Such kindness to the earth can change how we see it. Stopping near the pond to put some of the last few bags into the trunk of my Fiesta, I had a moment of closeness to the silver-blue water, the rusty-colored plants poking up from it, and the ducks gliding on its surface. I’ve often wanted to stop and contemplate the pond, but I’ve been On My Way Somewhere. This time, I slowed down. In gratitude to the angel.

 

Bee-ing in the Moment

The purple asters in the yard of my apartment building are as tall as I am and full of pollinators. I invited a neighbor to admire the pollen party. The guests were four kinds of bees—big furry bumblebees, honeybees, tiny bright green bees, and one enormous black bee with iridescent wings—and three kinds of butterflies. Though I’ve seen other species, this day’s visitors were a Western Pygmy Blue (the world’s smallest), a green butterfly with yellow spots on its wings, and a black one with white trim. In a ceaseless and seemingly random dance of wings and petals vibrating, they changed flowers and sought nectar again.

My neighbor and I became entranced, neither of ready to move on. He said, “They’re so busy, I feel a sense of accomplishment just watching them.”  I said I felt the opposite way, that I was doing nothing at all but watching bees.