A meditation on breathing and letting go from our newest contributor, Laurie.

I had a blocked morning. Sometimes I can't seem to bring up anything inside myself to write about. Sometimes I have these deep fears that my mind is a blank slate. Then I go and read what other people have to say and in the wrong state of mind it can make me feel even blanker, and untalented, and speechless, and dark.

"heart of darkness, shadow of doubt
sometimes I think it's good to go without
the guilt you wear like a crown
tears you up and wears you down"

Sometimes I realize that I have so much emotion in me that is suppressed, or repressed or otherwise pressed. And there's times that those feelings bubble up to the surface with a force that's like pure bottled rage, that's building up under my skin until I feel as if there's no place I can run to escape. There's a moment where all I can picture myself doing is smashing a window, shattering glass, bursting it all wide open and breaking the seal. Something sealed up inside, yes, something that needs to be let out into the air where it can gasp and reach for breath.

"biding time you wait for a vision
all the while you dream of the perfect condition"

Earlier I was talking to M. in the car after persuading him that we can afford to go grocery shopping today. You know you're poor when you're sitting around sniffling half the morning because you don't want to blow your nose because you can't afford to buy any more toilet paper after the roll in the bathroom, which is getting dangerously small, runs out. And even though the check I've been expecting for the last book I worked on didn't arrive today, we have a little bit of money in the bank — thanks to a few generous donations to our "feed the kitty" fund. I had convinced M. that we need to eat fruit and vegetables and that it might be nice to pick up a few little potted pansies at the grocery store (at $1.98 a pot). It's amazing how having flowers and anything green indoors during the winter can sweep the cobwebs from a depressed and discouraged mental state.

Anyway, I sort of had a meltdown in the car because M. suggested that I should get out and walk more, saying that that would help my mood. We have a fundamental disagreement about this. He is an indomitable cold weather lover and goes out for hour-long treks even when it's zero out. I'm looking at the thermometer as I write this and seeing that it's a steady 8°F at the moment, and I'm thinking about how glad I am to be inside. I'm thinking in fact about how it makes me feel like turning into a bear and hibernating until May.

I am fully cognizant of the fact that exercise is good for depression, for your period (before and during) and for just about anything that ails you. But this knowledge isn't enough to make me want to go outside with seven layers of clothing stuffed under my coat, waddling around in imitation of a polar bear, or that kid in the snowsuit in A Christmas Story ("I can't get up!!") And when M. brought this up to me and used that word....should.....it turned on all my guilt switches full blast and the next thing I knew I was screaming inside my head and out. And he's only trying to help.

We came home, I put the flowers on the kitchen table — violet, deep pink, and buttercup yellow — 3 pots all in a row. I lit some candles while M. went to take a nap. I stood around and hated myself for a minute. Then I turned on some lights, lit more candles, turned up the heat, and put away the groceries. I read the Sunday paper from Sheboygan (front page headline: "The area Christian music scene is making a joyful noise"). Then I started chopping vegetables for the frittata I'm making for dinner. I started chopping the carrots, first peeling them. Then the zucchini, the green pepper, the celery, the cherry tomatoes, the onion. I remembered that preparing and cooking food can be an art, a meditation. I thought of the first cookbook I ever bought, Tassajara Cooking by Edward Espe Brown. That book is not a book of recipes per se, but a discussion of the miraculous process of taking the bounty of fruits and vegetables and dairy products that we grow or buy, and transforming them into food that will nourish our bodies. It includes a lengthy discussion on caring for and using knives, as well as on different cooking methods. The book begins this way:

Cooking is not a mystery.
The more heart we put out
the more heart we put in.
To bring cooking alive
we give our life. Giving
our life willingly we don't
get put out.
Washington cutting cooking cleaning,
exploring ways to give life to our life.
Not knowing already how and what to do,
practice feeling it
out of what is not known
through the warmth and anxiety,
not sticking to a particular way,
insisting it is the only way
even though it is quite good;
open to feeling the various possibilities,
the tentative ways of giving life to our life.
To feel out our left hand, our back, our toes,
to feel out our breathing, our movements, our stance,
this is our freedom, this is our wisdom,
The mystery is that it is possible to do
what we don't know how to do.

"All your fears replaced by self assurance...you seem to shine when you stand in your best light."

There's never only one way to do things, but always multiple paths and many choices. And I forget that sometimes I need to take a deep breath and make a choice and see what happens. Let off steam when I need to but don't be always searching for different ways to fail.

Breathe and breathe and let go and let go.

"I'm looking through your heart of darkness
past the gray to the light on the other side
the truth can be hard to take
hard to believe and hard to hide."

Words to music by Syd Straw
Tassajara Cooking by Edward Espe Brown, Shambhala Publishing 1986.