Parinama

  “That’s the question this week, friends. Tell us about how you spent a day, and then tell us about what that day knows about how you spend your life.” Padraig O’Tuoma How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.   While the rhythm of my days has changed over its seasons, there has also been something steady in the drumbeat.  There are the mornings fresh and spacious, when I have the most hope, calm, and clear focus.  I rise early before the sun to stretch this time out.  I linger in mornings now.  No child to care for, no long commute into the city.  As the sun surely rises, I sit with hot sweet tea in my easy chair to read snippets of theologians, poets, philosophers and then journal, what does this all mean to me?  Then, I move to the mat for my daily yoga practice.  What and how I practice has changed over the years, but the intent, to feel myself breathing, to touch the inner ground, has remained the same.   What the ...

When I was younger, joy and sorrow lived in separate places.  Joy on the mountain top, sorrow in the muddy fields.  Each day, my task was to scrape my up to the mountain top, clawing to the top with fingertips and toes, tying myself in with a rope if I made it so that I might live in that bliss, that expanse, that height.  By days end, midday if I am honest, I was already sliding back down into the muddy fields, doubt, failures, misunderstandings and pain prying my bloodied fingers from the rough granite, hopes dashed in the slam back to the ground. I thought that if I could find the right job, the perfect lover, the beautiful body, that I might live on the mountain with joy my constant companion. The inevitable (daily) failures were demoralizing but not entirely.  Like Sisyphus, each bright morning I made my way back up the mountain with the hope, courage, imagination. Except on those days when I couldn’t get out of bed. The spiritual journey of my life, these last ...

End of summer swimming is the most precious kind of swimming for me.  Because of the way it feels.  Because my last swim of the season is approaching. The lake is colder now, the air chilled, the sun lower in the sky each evening when I swim. Visits to this lake are no longer about relaxing at the beach, watching the children play, cooling off on long swims out to the middle of the lake. My attending more of a pilgrimage, an ablution, ritual preparation for the upcoming season of darkness.  It is harder to get into the water.  I am all goosebumps and shivers until I commit to the cold, welcome the chill into my body. Oh my! The cold overtakes me in those first glides and pulls until the movement warms me from the inside out. The water is silkier and thicker this time of year flowing over my skin like a robe, enveloping me in soft embrace. After, I am infused with vibrancy and aliveness.  All that cold so hard at first makes me feel so alive after.  It is th...