The Limits of Kindness

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Shawndra Miller

A list is circulating social media, offering ways of tipping the balance toward the good in fraught times. Such as opening doors for people, offering a smile, letting other vehicles in a long line of traffic.

I have often written of small acts and their power. I believe that these kind of kindnesses are true and useful and so so needed, and I believe that every small act has resonance beyond its immediate impact. I am a fervent believer in the power of kindness.

And I see the limits of kindness. There is also a need for intervention. Making room for others in our heart is a great thing—and may it nudge us to stand for justice.

“The heart and the fist,” is how activist/visionary Valarie Kaur puts it. Rage, she says, at least maternal rage, is a “biological force that protects that which is loved.”

Photo by Eliza, via flickr.com Creative Commons

What this looks like in practice, I’m still figuring out, but one thing’s for certain: The coming years will not relieve the need for the heart and the fist. I want to be part of the movement toward a better future, where all are valued, respected, and safe, and no one is targeted for being Black or brown or immigrant or trans or female or poor or any other scapegoat status.

In thinking about the violence at the Capitol, it helps me to anchor into the big-big picture. First remembering that this small human body is truly, ultimately safe, always one-with-Source—realizing energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Then seeking to understand:

Are we seeing the last gasp of the dinosaurs, as Octavia Raheem’s beautiful post suggests? Is this the patriarchy making a final last stand? Brene Brown has said of this ugly era: “Last stands are violent and desperate and scary, and know no boundaries and no rules, and do not follow any protocols.”

Kaur uses a birthing metaphor, saying we are in a stage called transition: “It feels like dying, but it is the stage that precedes the birth of new life.”

I’m struck by what these stories have in common—their implied faith that something better is on the horizon. I am a proponent of hopeful narratives, and yet I know that nothing is assured. That is why Kaur says transition is a dangerous time, and calls us to labor. To embody what she calls Revolutionary Love.

She advocates a fierce brand of love that asks us to “see no stranger,” as she learned from her Sikh faith. (Note: Read her book by this title and you will never be the same.) To Kaur, everyone is a brother or sister, an uncle or auntie. Instead of “otherizing” those who think/live/look different from us, instead of dehumanizing any member of our human family, she takes the attitude: “You are a part of me I do not yet know.”

That is how she looks at everyone, even those who do egregious things. This isn’t about being a doormat, and she’s very clear that if you are the one who is under the knee of the oppressor, your job is not to attempt this transcendence. Your job is to survive, then tend to your own trauma.

This is where community comes in. Those of us not in immediate danger must step in and do this work. It’s hard. Empathy and kindness are not necessarily the starting point. Wonder can be enough to start, says Kaur. To wonder, for example: What are the life experiences that lead to violent white supremacist attacks?

To support this hard work, she has conceived of The People’s Inauguration as a way to recognize that we are the leaders and healers our country needs. Set for Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration, it is a pledge to help heal and rebuild America as an anti-racist, equitable, sustainable nation. For 10 days thereafter, supportive teachings will be offered online. I have signed up. Join me if it resonates.

Learn more through this Sounds True podcast.

What the Cat Knows

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

What do we do when we don’t know what to do? That question was posed in a mindfulness class I took years ago, and it has stayed with me.

Do I reach for my phone, open the fridge, queue up some distracting media?

Do I reflexively find some busyness to occupy myself, so that I won’t have to dwell in an uncomfortable moment of not-knowing?

Or do I open to the possibility that not-knowing can be a rich place, and give it some space, bring it some breath, honor it with a pause? Maybe I need to roll on the floor, look out the window, have a good cry, go for a fast walk, or…

This has been a year of many-times-over not-knowing. I have done all of the above. And I have learned so much from watching my cat, who never falls into a quandary of not-knowing, who always expresses his full nature, which is to say Feline. Or a mix of Feline and Divine, I would say. Just as you and I are a blend of Human and Divine.

Here are seven of the many things Eddie the cat knows:

Seek always comfort. Lie in the sun as often as possible.
Observe everything. Stare out the window or into the eyes of another being or off into the middle distance. There is much to witness.
If sick, be alone and sleep the day away, eat minimally, listen inward.
As much as possible within the constraints of your life, control what you can. If you want to be in a room, shove the door open and enter (or register your displeasure if the door won’t yield to your head-butt). If, five seconds later, the room does not suit your mood, leave. Reenter as the mood strikes. It is your prerogative. You need not explain.
When the urge hits, tear through the house. Life is your playground. Also, you never know what new unexplored cranny you may discover.
When you want a catnap, take it. Who’s stopping you?
Know that, over the course of the day, you can stalk your prey AND expose your soft underbelly. You contain multitudes. Radiate your essence, always.

Of course, life in a human body is not as simple as all that. There are deadlines, obligations, not to mention a cerebral cortex that creates dramas, commentating the livelong day. Still, my cat knows how to bring the essentials into focus. The warm lap. The windowsill. The purr and the yowl and the occasional growly hiss. The sprint and the snuggle, the nibbling at plants and batting at breakables.

The supreme catness of him, no apology or rumination needed. No asking, “what should…” “what next…” because there is only now in this meow.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go loll in a patch of sunshine.

The cat exploring a recent kitchen reno project

It is Your Life

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

A poet I admire, Mark Nepo, says we should only write while fully centered in the heart. His counsel: If your mind dominates, drop the pen, still the voice, turn to another activity until the heart can take the lead again.

From a recent podcast:

“I want to enter timelessness. I don’t want to plan to finish a chapter because of some deadline—then the expression is an ‘it,’ a product. I’m no longer in timelessness; I’m controlling.”
Mark Nepo

So much feels out of our control these days. Speaking for myself, I sometimes find that my itch to control whatever I can infects my creative work and daily life in unconstructive ways. I tighten up and end up with a headache or a sleepless night.

But, like Nepo, I want to approach my work (and my life!) from a place of expansion, not contraction. A simple invocation at the start of a writing session can reconnect me to that space.

When it slips away, as soon as I remember, I reconnect to the biggest possible frame—to who I am and what I’m about and why I’m doing whatever I’m doing. I want to contact the biggest why possible, which is always to be more fully aligned with my Divine nature.

So: to move into that spaciousness, to call in that alignment, is a way to enter timelessness, to reenter heart space.

And this is not just about writing. It’s about how I practice yoga, how I do my workity-work, how I connect with friends, how I steward my money. I have the choice to treat everything as a thing to get done or as a big-big-big picture action.

Doesn’t everything go better and feel so much more timeless when I first remember what it’s all for?

As an inveterate list-maker who also skews mystic, I have made a study of the intersection between getting shit done and falling into spacious/timelessness. I don’t thrive without timelessness, but I operate in a time-driven world. And I do want to finish and publish my book, keep in touch with loved ones, stay on top of bills, and show up fully at my workplace.

I am starting to see that moving with ease through all these arenas is possible. It’s not about following a strict list or schedule. Nor is it about floating in the ether every moment.

It’s more about reconnecting on the regular to this big-big-big picture. Often that comes through movement, or stillness, or breath, while consciously invoking the love that’s all around. The fact that I am love, made of love, made from love.

The more I hew to my truest “who”… the easier it is to stay in my heart.

And if, as soon as I look at the clock and think what’s next, I lose this feeling, it’s OK. Because I know how to find it again.

In my notebook, I commune with my inner Wisewoman, who says things like:

Breathe deeply, this moment is not a thing to be gotten though, a task to complete. It is your life. What is coming into your senses right now? What is your body experiencing? Hold it all.

To which I say, Thank you.

Real Safety

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

Someone suggested to me that a thing I’m involved in is sketchy. It’s an experiment that admittedly looks mad from the dominant worldview. A project based on generosity, reciprocity and trust—making something our hearts know, that we are all One, tangible in the way we give and receive.

I have felt incredible support and uplift from the experience, almost a magical boost catapulting me—no, sustaining me—in this expansive place of possibility. Extreme self-responsibility—taking nothing personally—is the watchword.

Then I tumbled, with the questioning comment. I felt my ego rise up. Don’t let someone think ill of you! Defend! Explain! (Take it personally!!)

I had a visceral shift, lying in bed after this deflating exchange, in which I could feel my constriction melting and my consciousness merging with the All. It’s hard to describe, but I felt that I was expanding out beyond a fear mindset to a transcendent place that makes both suspicion and defensiveness irrelevant.

I still had trouble falling asleep. The ego does not go down lightly.

The ego talks my ear off all night, tightens up my body, obsesses over all my to-do lists. It’s all about proving itself right, and hiding vulnerabilities, and being in charge.

I know you are terrified, I tell the ego, but I am going to let another/greater part of me take the lead now.

Perhaps this is a microcosm of the wider world, in which the dominance model we are living under is not going down lightly.

I’ve been listening to interviews with Elizabeth Lesser, who wrote Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes. She referred to the “death rattle of the patriarchy” that we are experiencing as a collective. We see this globally, as the old guard hangs on tooth and nail to a way of life predicated on subjugation of people and planet.

Brene Brown, writing in 2016, predicted a “last stand” of this dominant worldview, and foresaw its messy, violent, chaotic trajectory. Last stands are desperate.

These systems live in me, and in each of us. My own desperate ego, afraid of dying, mirrors that death rattle. What will happen, yells my ego, to all my specialness, all my control, all my plans, if you move about the world in some kind of transcendent state? How will you stay safe if you change the story and make me irrelevant?

Real safety, I respond, comes from knowing who I really am, which is a part of the All in All.

If I holler back at the ego and make it bad and wrong, if I try to vanquish it with its own tools, it only deepens the chasm I’m trying to heal. But if I can speak kindly to that ego (while redirecting with both compassion and firmness), might it help to melt those systems of control—not just in myself but in the collective?

Well, even if it is just a moment here and a moment there, the experience of Oneness creates a template that has its own resonance.

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
—East German dissident Rudolph Bahro

I’m so there. How about you?

No Matter What

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

I cried already this morning when walking Opal on the golf course, where the line of voters snaked out to the street and the overflow cars were parked on the green. No matter what happens, no one can say the populace is apathetic.

Most of my friends are on edge today, fervently hoping for a particular outcome of the election, worried about what comes next. It struck me this morning that it might help to look at what I can count on, no matter what.

I know that no matter what, there will be major healing to do, and being a bystander is not an option for me.

I know that I will always be a person whose heart lifts with the kingfisher’s rise over the creek. I will always find comfort in my furry companions who will always love me (in succession; I know these particular friends won’t be around forever).

I will always thrill to the sight of birds flocking and wheeling across the sky in great numbers, as they do this time of year, even if it is “only” starlings. I will always be a person whose face defaults into a smile for random strangers. Who wells up to see humanity in its marvelous shapes and forms and shades, feeling our oneness even in our division.

I will always care deeply and seek to be fully alive to everything, even the hurt.

None of that says all that much about me… except perhaps that I have been extraordinarily lucky.

This birthday card from my sweetie …

The inside of this card starts out, “In a world that can be a little rough around the edges, you soften the lives of those around you…” Cue the awww.

All I can say is, may it be so.

Force ≠ Power

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

Everyone’s working so hard these days, trying to figure out how to parse the new COVID-19 reality, trying to deal with massive uncertainty and upheaval.

A long time ago, an intuitive told me that “trying harder”—my usual tactic for getting through difficult things—was a habit that didn’t really serve me. I cut my teeth on the Mennonite work ethic though, and it’s a hard one to let go. Even now, knowing that it doesn’t really help, I’m not too long at a task or goal before my eyeballs get all squinched up and I hold one shoulder tighter or squeeze up my right thigh. It’s natural, right? I’m working hard!

We did an experiment in yoga class that showed me how truly unhelpful this pattern is. My teacher Gaynell had us swim our arms through space, bounce at the knees, forget about holding a certain posture. Get a little playful. Then she directed us to feel our “energy ball.”

You can do it right now just by shaking out your hands, rubbing them together, shaking them out some more, and then holding them a little bit apart. There’s a staticky feeling, a sort of fuzziness, between them—you feel it? That’s your own energy field.

So we have this energy ball and we’re playing with it, expanding the space and closing it, in touch with flow, and then Gaynell has us CLENCH EVERY MUSCLE IN OUR BODIES. You can do it right now. Really go rigid. Tense everything up completely. Your face, your toes, your glutes, everything. Then: Feel for your energy ball. Where did it go?

Mine collapsed. I mean, I couldn’t feel it AT ALL.

In the same vein, I once saw a demo with a personal trainer who tightened every muscle in her body… and was measurably weaker on a strength test, vs. staying loose and using only the muscles needed. This surprised even her.

These experiments tell me that force ≠ power!

Photo by “orangemaniac” via Flickr Creative Commons

True power is quiet humming fuel, the life force underlying everything. Forcing, clenching, pushing, driving… these are all things I’ve been enculturated to do when my energy runs low. Just push on through. But, what if I’m just making life harder for myself and everyone around me?

What if there’s a way to reconnect to that hum every hour of every day, and use it to fuel my endeavors, instead of listening to the busy mind that overrides every small signal and tells me to press on? To drop any unneeded “efforting,” as yoga teaches us?

What if, indeed, this energy source is key to transforming this messed-up world from the inside out?

If I were to stand in my energy, could I listen more deeply, engage more fully, relate more authentically, even with people who push my buttons?

Could I have access to inspiration, innovations, and solutions that get cut off every time I tighten up?

Could I, through an easeful resonance, alter the energy of any place I enter?

I’d like to think so. Remembering to remember to remember… that’s the key.

Gratitude: Where would I be without yoga, my yoga community, my yoga teachers? Clenched-up, lonely, and snappish, that’s where. I’m especially grateful that some classes are now offered outdoors. If you need some support, check out Irvington Wellness Center for virtual classes and—if you’re local—for select in-person offerings. (I also offer Soul Realignment via Zoom, and you can book through IWC.)

Tip of the Day: If you read through my post but didn’t try the experiment… try it out now!

Resource of the Day: How to rewire the fear response through love. Check out this article by happiness specialist Arthur C. Brooke (four tips at the very end).

Both/And

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

I admit to some shame after my last post in which I wrote of the blissy aspects of this bizarro time, as I experience it. Of course I have also shared heavier stuff in previous posts. I experience the gamut of emotions and I am open to all of them moving through me… and I want to live in the present and in my body (where all is well just now) as much as I can.

But the mind will have its say, and here’s what it said after that post: You are insensitive to go on about joy when so many are suffering. Last night we drove down the “main street” of our neighborhood last night and it was a ghost town. Seeing our sweet small businesses close up shop really hurts, especially knowing each such street all over town—all over the world—represents untold financial hardship for countless families.

Also, in the last few days I’ve had conversations with people who are closer to the economic impact of this worldwide shutdown. An urban farmer brought up his fears about the food supply, and whether he would be able to protect his crops if things went really bad. A friend in South Africa spoke of the immediate need all around her, with people going hungry right now as they live in a veritable police state.

Also: 2000 deaths each day in the U.S. alone. And no real plan or social cohesion to get through this ongoing crisis.

It’s frightening, sad, and angering to witness the leadership void at the top worsen the situation for regular folks (even while yes, I am glad for relief packages and stimulus checks).

Joy and worry, shame and gladness, fear and hope: I’m feeling “both/and.” These words from Daniel Foor really resonate:

I am concerned about expanded government abuse of power and I support the shelter-in-place directive right now.

I abhor the exploitative aspects of the global economic order and I am deeply concerned about it just falling apart.

I want systemic measures to truly address climate change and I feel uneasy about a rapid jarring halt on the ability to travel.

I am not afraid of death and I don’t want to die. OK, I’m a little afraid, but not so much. Mostly I love being alive here today.

I am open-minded and not inherently trusting of any source, and there are also facts and knowable things.

I want more nuance, play, and irreverence in the collective and also I want people to submit to facts and what is knowable.

I am truly gut-level worried about where we’re headed and also spacious, relaxed, and in touch with levity.

To quote a true American patriot,
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.”

– Walt Whitman

So, what to do with all this? (Surely there must be something to do, beyond airy-fairy being.)

This creek holds raw sewage during heavy rainfall events. That concrete structure overflows with it. It’s the way our city designed the sewage system years ago, an unsustainable combined sewage overflow setup (which is being updated in recent years). I love this creek. Shit and beauty exist side by side. Love abides no matter what.

Unable to steer an entire culture or country, I return to the small ways I can have an impact. I create more space in myself to be more present to possibility. I come back to the guidance of my Wiser Self, as Ellen Meredith calls it, in contact with the big-big picture. I write things down in case they speak to someone else’s soul.

And in the practical arena, I’m giving in ways I can, since I feel amply supplied. In that giving, I don’t want shame to be my motivator any more than I want fear to take the driver’s seat. I want to give my courage and gratitude the space to lead, even as I realize that this attitude is itself a measure of my (largely unearned accident-of-fate) good fortune.

Gratitude: I’m grateful for a Zoom call with my family members last night, for belly laughs and shared concerns. Also grateful for a heritage of Mennonite thrift that helps me stretch resources, so there’s a sense of abundance, more to share, etc.

Tip of the Day: Speaking of Mennonite…It’s soup-stock-making day! I save veggie scraps like onion skins, carrot tops, mushroom stems and celery trimmings in a freezer bag. When it gets full, I make a pot of veggie stock. I add it to this recipe, but it would also work on its own to make a mineral-rich and tasty soup starter. Using up items that would ordinarily be immediately compost-bound makes me feel so smart and thrifty. (Bonus tip: don’t put anything too strong or bitter in your scrap bag, such as broccoli trimmings, and don’t put anything that looks questionable, like moldy onion skins.)

Resource of the Day: I usually send you to an online resource here. But in keeping with the last post’s theme of cutting back on screen time, how about considering inner resources, instead of outer? What are your special resilience superpowers? Maybe your sense of humor never quits (mine certainly does), or you always know how to bring comfort to a friend in need. Mine include the frugality mentioned above, but also a spiritual framework, a strong creative drive, and a willingness to turn toward whatever is passing through me.

If you’d like to post a comment about yours, I’d love to read it! We inspire each other.

Season of Renewal

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

I’m sure I’m not alone in how much I live for signs of spring right now. We’ve had several freeze warnings this past week, prompting me to go out and snap some flower photos for posterity (though the flowers actually did make it through for the most part).

Serviceberry blooms last week (they’re browning now, right on time)

Even through the windiest, shittiest weather (snow? really?), I’m amazed that the blossoms on my little serviceberry still cling on. Well, until it’s their turn to fall.

I had in mind to write something about how the magnolia blooms turned brown and fell, and how the little tree next to it took up the mantle of holding beauty, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Though I do like the idea of taking turns—sometimes I’m shining, sometimes you are, sometimes we take a turn down in the dumps.

That doesn’t seem quite right though. Not the correct metaphorical use of a cycle that renews itself every year, fallen blossoms spreading seed, feeding soil. Just doing what they do.

I’m more thinking in terms of resurrection, redemption, rebirth. I started to noodle on this last Sunday, which was Easter in many traditions. Orthodox religions will mark the day tomorrow. Passover takes the theme of renewal as well. Whatever the faith tradition, this time of year fairly screams resurrection.

Vibrant.

Easter and Passover are not my holy days (though I have fond memories of pancake breakfasts and Easter dresses). But of course people began celebrating the season of renewal long before these traditions.

As a half-assed gardener and a sometime forager of spring greens, I feel more in tune with nature’s awakening than the religious rites that have been overlaid on those ancient rituals.

Quick funny aside: When my young cousin, raised on a green and vibrant Caribbean island, came to Indiana one winter on a visit, she couldn’t help but notice all the bare trees. She finally asked my dad: “Why don’t you cut all those dead trees down?”

Having never experienced that cycle of apparent death and rebirth, she had no concept of waiting for the greening.

The yearly miracle

Maybe it takes a bit of faith, or simple experience, to know that renewal is just beyond the horizon of darkness. To understand that what looks like a death might be, instead, a state of deep rest.

What’s more of a resurrection than the annual opening of a bulb left seemingly lifeless in the ground?

The thing about renewal: It only comes after a deep, dark place of quiet that can feel so deadly to a culture accustomed to going/doing/racing/running/grabbing/shouting.

Even while spring bursts forth all around us, many of us are curling inward to that space of quiet, being asked (or ordered) to stay in one place, curtail our social impulse, limit contact. In a time when our forebears gathered in celebration of surviving another winter, we can’t join hands and sing, or pass the glass between us.

My Virginia bluebells look delicate but they’re hardy.

Recently I’ve had a recurring dream of a street fair, neighbors pouring out onto their sidewalks laughing, talking, feeding each other. There’s music, light streaming from windows, kids on tricycles. A feeling of joyous conviviality.

I do feel that some sort of resurrection is on its way, and it could well be a massive reordering of all that we think we know. We have been so impoverished by a culture built on acquisition, greed, exploitation. Even those of us who live comfortably have a hard time finding peace in a world marked by massive injustice. And for the people and places that get squashed by such a system, there’s no question that the dominant societal narrative isn’t working.

The writing’s been on the wall for a while now: Business as usual is not a viable prospect.

How long will we need to gestate before the (re)birth? And what will emerge out of this inward-coiled time?

Gratitude: I’m grateful for the generosity of nature this time of year. For our salads I’m picking pea shoots from a bed sown last fall, baby lettuce I set in earlier this spring, plus accoutrements from my perennial chives, salad burnet and sorrel plants. Not to mention wild ingredients foraged from my yard and nearby: basswood leaves, trout lily leaves, violets, dandelions, chickweed, and redbud blooms. Everything but the olive oil-lemon dressing coming from within 100 feet or so of where I sit right now.

My “100-foot salads”

Tip of the Day: Uh, go outside, if you can. Spring is poppin’.

Resource of the Day: Local folks, check out this offer from local herbalist/forager Thea Newnum, who will accompany you into your yard for a social-distanced foraging lesson. She’ll help you know what to safely harvest from the undiscovered wild edibles growing there. You will never look at a weed the same way again.

Touching in the Time of…

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

Strange days indeed. When a hug or handshake could be, I guess, lethal? When what human comfort we long to give, we must give via pixels?

In this time of COVID-19, when “social distancing” has become our norm, I wonder what is being ingrained into the minds and energy-bodies of today’s children. Everything is a potential threat, particularly the hands of others. Any surface we touch could potentially be contaminated. We must be on high-alert at all time.

Sign at the entrance of my father-in-law’s funeral.

This is starting to be ingrained in me as well. How strange it is that now, when I see people interacting on a TV show, I’m conscious of how close their faces are? Back up, I find myself thinking. Droplet alert!

I don’t know what to think about all this. But it makes me sad. Isolation is not a healthy state for any human, and I can’t imagine living alone right now (or living without furry companions).

What I do know is that there are more ways to touch than through the physical realm. When a friend was barred from seeing her dying mother because the nursing home closed to visitors, I texted, “I believe that you can contact your mother by getting quiet and reaching for her in your mind and heart.”

Maybe this time of physical distancing will shorten our learning curve (as a species) for connecting through other means. I don’t mean Zoom or FaceTime, though those are a godsend.

I mean: Think of someone, put them in your heart, and part of you is with that person in that moment.

I mean: Connect by touching the same earth, reaching for the same sky (as a recent EmbodieDance class explored).

I mean: Feel how we are each more than our molecules, bigger than our bodies, part of the All in All. Meet me there.

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Gratitude: A snuggly nap with my cat, Edgar (Eddie).

Tip of the Day: See if it’s possible to replace worry with a heart-connection, or prayer, or spiritual delegation. Send the object of your concern a lighter energy than worry. (But don’t be hard on yourself if you do worry. Lord knows these are worrisome times.)

Resource of the Day: Meditation teacher Tara Brach is offering a free online mindfulness class to improve sleep and address anxiety. It is free until March 30, so check it out soon. You can download it and take the course later.

Wishing you expanded awareness during this contracted time!

Routines, Supports, New Delights

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Shawndra Miller

How are you finding comfort and stability in this wild new world we find ourselves in? Are there humble routines that bring you some sense of normalcy? Support systems in place to bolster you? Surprising new delights of any kind?

Just now the dryer is spinning my sheets dry, the supper dishes are in the drainer, and my sweetie and I are super-relaxed from a restorative yoga class offered via Zoom. My yoga studio has taken its offerings online, and I’m so grateful. Even in life pre-COVID, my nervous system benefited from the regular reset of a good yoga class. I would say it was a nonnegotiable before, and about a hundredfold more so now.

I can practice at home, and have restarted that this week, but there’s something about communal practice that takes me deeper. Even when the community is remote, it’s still very nourishing to be in a virtual “room” together.

As far as new delights, let’s talk about another kind of community. I have never seen so many people out walking the neighborhood. I have never taken so much time to stop and chat while I’m out walking Opal. I always had to hurry home to get my shit done.

I still have plenty of that drivenness, which is a blog post for later. But it seems so important to stop and smile and chat with strangers, and catch up with neighbors.

It does feel like this collective experience is already turning everything upside down—what we thought was so important…is maybe not.

Gratitude: See above. Plus: a hint of sunlight this morning!

Some blue sky this morning.

Tip of the Day: This one is courtesy of Gaynell, who taught yoga last night (thanks for the good night’s sleep, Gaynell!) A practicing Buddhist, Gaynell reminded us of the transitory nature of… well, everything. Observing what is occurring—giving it space—allows connection with the wider awareness that everything is impermanent. So this is the big tip: Instead of thinking “I am anxious,” (as I sometimes do), try: “What is it like, this experience I call anxiety?” Then notice, allow, bring compassion. An excellent and timely reminder. We may feel fear or anger or confusion or grief, but we don’t have to turn it into an identity.

Resource of the Day: This is a spiritual resource. I love Nichola Torbertt’s conversation with redwoods about coronavirus. “What if this virus brings you to your knees so that you have to admit that you don’t really know how to move forward? And then what if you started reconsidering how you’ve been living? And then reaching out to each other—especially to those most at risk—and talking about what you long for and noticing the redwoods and the daffodils and talking to us, too? What if?”

See the whole post, it’s worth a read, and the photo is gorgeous.