Vantage

I sat on a rock by the river just before sundown, soaking up the unseasonably warm air. The water was rippled with movement and bands of soft luminescent color. I remembered, watching as the horizon turned an airbrushed peachy pink, that life is not so black and white as I've been seeing it recently. Life happens chromacolor: sky blue, mallard green, Autumn shades of yellow, gold, bleeding red and blazing orange. Life happens unexpectedly, and changes right before your eyes.

Life happens dove gray, I thought, looking up at the large bird in the leafless tree above my head, and then realized that the bird was more white than gray, way too big to be a dove, and staring right back at me with fiercely neutral black-ringed eyes. It looked like an owl, peaceful despite his penetrating gaze and proudly puffed up chest, but strong and predatory like a hawk or a falcon, mostly white with light gray markings, and those intense black patches encircling his far-seeing orbs. His beak hooked down in a curve, as if in deep self-contemplation.

I stood up from where I'd been perching on my rock, stepped back enough to take him in, and stared in wide-mouthed awe at the regal fellow up in his post looking down on everything below. He barely stirred, completely undisturbed by me. I couldn't take my eyes off of him.

When he finally took flight I heard him, felt him, take his leave. Even for his impressive size, he moved precisely, a few powerfully intentional dashes at the air with his enormous wings and he alighted, glided off gracefully, and left me staring in disbelief at the endless blue space he'd just crossed with such effortless ease.

I sat back down on my rock, alone then, under a bare tree, watching the rippling water and the slowly darkening scene all around me. A man strummed an acoustic guitar a little ways upstream, and as his song wafted over, I listened.

I swelled up full, like the river, reverberating with pleasure and flowing in tune. Perfection.

"What do yogis do when they're not standing on their hands?" a beginner to yoga asked me recently. The best answer is that when yogis aren't practicing asana, they live the adventure of being truly, fully, authentically present to life. Asana is just the warm-up, the stretch before the next leg of the journey. It's everything else once the mat is rolled up and tucked away that's the practice.

Photo by Andrew Schwartz

(Re)Collecting

I walked the beach this morning, collecting. I picked up an array of shells of varying textures, shapes and sizes that reminded me from where we humans draw our inspiration: a piece of scallop shell that looks just like corrugated roof; a snail shell with cathedral ceilings; a spiral staircase, the only remains of a conch. I found one smooth, grey wing feather. I ran my fingers across them one at a time as I walked. They got me thinking.

Everything is so intentional. The long, tapered wing feather is prepared perfectly for flight. The short, downy chest feathers are different; they have a pile effect to give warmth and create a buffer from the wind.

I bent down and snapped off a length of a large tree branch that had washed up from the ocean onto the beach at the shoreline. I walked on, touching the moss-like growth covering the smooth wood. I wondered how old it could be, if it had lain rooted down there for hundreds of years, perhaps once stood in the same piece of earth, but above water, or had been broken away from some other place and swallowed under for a time.

In any case, it had been down there and stayed put for an amount of time enough to have grown a furry forest of sea brush, become a landscape unto itself. From seed, to tree, to aimless log grown ecosystem turned epiphany, this stick has served its purpose.

Beginnings and endings happen simultaneously, not chronologically. There is no moment of pause to determine which causes the other. They occur at exactly the same moment, cannot be split apart.

Watch the ocean spilling and receding. There is no first movement, only movement. Look well at the shells along her foam moustache. Step on one firmly; it crumbles: sand. The life it had contained inside it has become food for the little scurrying pipers or the gluttonous gulls. Life feeding life feeding life feeding lifeedinglife.

The dead stuff, cast off, breaks down and becomes foundation for new growth.

Photo by Andrew Schwartz

I'm Just Me

My niece Ashlyn will be three-years-old in June, a fact she won’t miss an opportunity to tell you within seconds of meeting her. “When will you be three?” an uncle asked her when she told him the big news. “On my birthday!” she said.

Her twos were not so terrible as everyone said that they might be, though recently, toward the tail end of her second year, she’s developed what at first I interpreted to be an attitude. “That’s mine,” she told me when I picked up one of her toys. “They’re mine,” she said when she showed me her new fish, “It’s not yours. You can’t have them.” At first, I reassured her that I wouldn’t take her things, thinking maybe her new little sister might be making her feel jealous. After awhile, I explained that we all need to share things, especially things we like. Later, annoyed, I started to just ignore it whenever she did the mine and yours thing with me.

Loquita! (Crazy little girl!) I told her with wide eyes the other day when she was acting rambunctious. “No, I’m just Ashlyn,” she said back. I laughed thinking that because she didn’t understand the Spanish she assumed I’d called her some other name and corrected me, but another time I complimented one of her drawings by saying she was an artist and she said, “No. I’m just me,” and I got it.

Ashlyn’s learning a language and developing identity, figuring out what’s hers and who she is.

Thirty-two years from now I wonder if she’ll be trying to peel it all off of her Self too?

“Mine” is a word with a lot attached to it. More and more often I find myself working on unlearning it. Mine hurts, when it’s said to you by someone unwilling to share. It stings when others don’t see value in what you’re holding up as yours. Mine is selfish sometimes and draws boundaries around itself. Mine doesn’t play well with others. Mine doesn’t always endure.

But “me”, I think that she’s understood that one perfectly and I hope she doesn’t lose that. The older we get it seems to me we begin to wrap ourselves up in our “mines”. I am becomes I am a writer, I am employed, I am North American, I am a homeowner, I am married, I am beautiful. The more we try to identify ourselves, define ourselves, by the things we think we own the more complicated life becomes.

What do we really own anyway? More importantly, who are we underneath the shelter of all our possessions? Unfortunately we don’t come to that until we lose something big, which inevitably we all do.

If we could teach our children that nothing in life is really theirs right from the beginning, would we rob them of their lessons? What might the world be like then?

If entire languages can disappear across the ages, what would it hurt to drop a few words from our own?

Could we ever agree to just drop possessive pronouns and just be our Selves?

Photo by Federico Di Fresco

Aim True

Photo by Federico Di Fresco

Free will is tricky. Like anything free, it comes with a catch. It gives us the impression that we have some control over life when in fact the only control we truly have is over ourselves and how we choose to act.

Each second of our fleeting lives contains a choice. Some are huge decisions that can alter the course of one’s existence, while others seem insignificant, like what to have for breakfast or whether to call Mom now or later. Every action has its reaction, even if it’s not apparent right away.

We humans have done our best to concretize our control over life, paving, constructing and crafting our environments in such a way that the power of Nature appears diminished. Those in positions of power even assert control over each other. It’s as if we believe we’ve mastered the Universe as the highest form of life, but when Nature asserts her strength, takes herself back, we’re surprised and appalled at her fury, devastated by her "destruction" and disruption. Animals and those tuned to a simpler existence, “lower” forms of life by human standards, recognize the warning signs and find safety in many cases. Those of us pounding the pavement with iPods in our ears and texting on our cell phones, assessing our value by how many dollars we have in the bank or how productive we can be in one day, remain oblivious until it’s too late.

Seems like a pretty grave way to live, making such a big deal about every minute detail, but a lifetime can pass in the blink of an eye. It's important to be conscious of how you spend your free will.

Arriving back in the states after three years in the Third World was a shock to the system to say the least. I vowed to myself to maintain the simplicity I’d pared down to, promised myself I wouldn’t rush to keep up. In a matter of weeks, though, it seemed that not keeping up meant being in the way and at risk of being barreled over. Adaptation, I decided, meant moving at the pace of life, and so I sped up.

After a few weeks of doing too much and staying too distracted to notice, however, I found myself way off track. I got totally wiped out. Anxiety erupted in my chest like a volcano. Restlessness shook me out of good nights' sleep. Enjoying proper meals eroded to grabbing on the go. Before long, I felt like a disaster.

One afternoon, on the el train high above the streets of Philadelphia, on my way home from doing too much, exhausted, I looked above the rooftops and saw the sky, vast, infinite. I looked across the skyline to the sun glinting off the rippling river. I saw the cars jammed nose to tail, crawling on the interstate below. It dawned on me that places are created things one can choose or opt out of to any degree. Anywhere in the world you go, there is Divinity all around. The sky is the sky wherever you go. The rivers and seas are watery universes flowing alongside our own. The trees stand rooted and reaching out their message for hundreds of years, fruiting, offering, dying, and fruiting again. The sun and the moon shine an endless circle of light around us all.

Suddenly I realized that adaptation is not about moving at the pace of the culture around you. Adaptation is tuning into your own Truth and living according to that, regardless of what else is going on.

I chose to slow down.

Meditation has been a part of my whole adult life. There are still days, though, when I get caught up and bypass it. Drinking the morning cup of coffee and coordinating what to wear can seem more important when preparing for the day. Perhaps perpetuating illusion is less scary than facing reality. Thankfully, my practice has also taught me that chiseling away the falsities surrounding my core of truth makes life more enjoyable moment to moment. Meditation and asana are not just exercises. They’re tools for precisely this task: whittling ourselves to a sharp point.

And so came back to sitting, and rediscovered the best part about practice: it's immediate medicine. It doesn't take days or weeks to get through your system. It brings you back to now, NOW. Unfortunately whatever mess you've made in your absence does require tending to, and that can take some time.

There is a parable in the Mahabharata about an archery contest in which Arjuna, the story’s hero, partook. One by one, the town’s best archers came to test their skill. The target was a revolving wooden fish suspended from a tall tree above a pool of oil; the bullseye was its eye. The challenge was that the archers were to hit the mark by fixing only on its reflection in the pool. Each contestant arrived at his turn. To test his aim, before being allowed to shoot, the contestants were asked, "What do you see?". Each in turn replied, “The fish, the tree, the pool”, and was immediately dismissed.

When it was Arjuna’s turn to shoot, he was asked what he saw. He replied simply, “All I see is the fish’s eye”. He was permitted to shoot and hit the eye dead on.

Free will is a gift, a tool to be utilized with precision. We have the choice to wield it about like an octopus, flailing in every direction, but while we may accomplish many small things, maybe even hit close to our target, chances are we’ll lose sight of the mark.

A better use of our freedom to choose is to turn it on ourselves, to identify one by one the things that aren't true and whittle them away, like a sculptor revealing a work of art, or a warrior carving his arrow.

Let yourself be honed to a fine point (and trust that this may be an uncomfortable process!).
Aim true, and let yourself fly.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by
narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

Today is not the first time that my practice has calmed a crisis. Literally stopped it in its tracks.
Practice is a path, and I chose wisely.

Broken hearts are some of the hardest wounds to heal. It doesn't matter if broken by death, separation, or some kind of betrayal. It's a pain that eats you alive from the inside out and can't be avoided. It's deeper than any comfort can reach. Clinging to the pieces and trying to force them back together only prolongs the pain. There's no pill to swallow to dull the ache. Being self-destructive only compounds things.

Just about the only thing to do is be with it in all its shifting agony.

I cried tidal waves until I felt empty. I was shaking. I paced back and forth through the house. I took a long hot shower. I wrapped myself in cotton from feet to head. Turned on some music and got on the mat.

I found myself standing barefoot on a chunk of Vermont.
Outside, mountains and pine trees weighed down with snow.
Beneath me, another version of the forest outside, hardwood, firm and smooth.
All around my shelter, the same blank shimmer, sky the same color as the frosted ground.

Within, a similar dullness: flat, dead versions of life; a clean slate frozen in time.

There was no sense in sitting in what was already too still.

I stood.

Consciously expanded.
Emptied and released.
Conjured up some warmth.
Suppled myself.

Softly,

I planted my feet like a hero.
I praised.
I bowed.
I opened.
I embraced.

Finally, I laid down.

Reabsorbed.

The best cure for a broken heart is to wrap yourself around it like you would the person you wish you could hold.

Really it's that reflection that needs restoring.

The only medicine for loss of love is more love.