They say that talking to
Plants helps them grow,
That the exchange of
Voice (regardless of tone)
Encourages broader bloom.
I believe the same works
With each other: That
Brighter, bigger, more beautiful
Growth rides the waves
Of our thoughtful voices.
Talk to them. Talk to them all.
Build base for understanding:
For learning, for seeing, for hearing,
And for loving.
It’s all so fast today.
It’s all just so fast.
The days are more
like minutes, the Sun
Racing to set and
Leave long, cold
Darkness: bones in the
Cool, dark Earth.
It’s us left to protect
Her warmth. To
Store within ourselves
And let shine her
Healing light.
It’s us who must
Carry her torch in this
Long, deepening dark.
Keep them safe, her
Shards of sparking light.
She’ll come back for
Her shining, broken pieces
Soon. Soon.
So soon.
It’s not quite dawn and the only sound I hear is the low buzz of the running refrigerator from the kitchen. Peering out my front window which has two, furry moths on it side-by-side, I’m watching the blackness beyond my front porch, waiting for the spaces between the trees that I know are there to fade into orange as the sun comes up. Right now, it’s darkness. I remember a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog called “It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn,” and here I find myself again in the deepest part of the night and in the deepest part of my mind, waiting for the sky to fade into light.
One of the moths stuck to the window rotates and flutters its wings—a morning stretch, perhaps. In a few minutes, I’ll be hopping online to lead a guided meditation with a group of friends which I do three times a week. I find meditations to read aloud or I write them myself sometimes. There’s accountability in having a group—all of us just people wanting to slow down from time to time, but always finding excuses not to. Today, we’ll be doing a meditation that focuses specifically on healing. I sip my coffee.
There are many things on my mind right now (as is the case with everyone I know) and lots that I feel I want to say…but on this deep, dark morning, the quiet is comforting. It is still utter blackness outside and I want it to stay that way for a little while longer. Maybe just today, the sun can wait a few more minutes before silhouetting the trees in her warm, orange glow.
Moments like these, I feel like silence becomes more than just a lack of sound. Right now, it feels like silence is sitting next to me on the couch, watching me reach the bottom of my coffee cup. Silence is like a stranger without a voice that perhaps makes us uncomfortable because she never responds when we ask her questions or throw ideas her way—but as I’m sitting here with her, I actually think that’s her beauty. Shadowy silence is fine to just sit there and keep me company. She’s there to surround me and always eager to blanket the busyness of my mind when my thoughts start swirling too quickly; I just have to give her permission. She never judges, she never expects…she just is.
Beyond the trees, I can see the faintest shift in the darkness. A graying is opening up behind the trees and soon, I’ll see the shapes of the leaves. That’s what new sunrises always deliver: shifts, changes and opportunities to see a little more clearly. I take the final, cool sip of coffee sitting at the bottom of my cup and then place the mug on the table—a loud knock in this gravitational silence. She accentuates everything.
Deep breath in. Hold it. Sigh it out.
Deep breath in. Hold it. Sigh it out.
Both moths quickly flutter away now, leaving an oddly clean and bare window, and a truck drives down the gravelly road outside—its tire-crunching and engine rumble flooding in the fading darkness. Silence no longer sits curiously on the couch. She, along with the night, fluttered away on the backs of those two, furry moths.
I take another deep breath and ready my notes for today’s meditation. The gray will soon be blue and it will be a new day. Whoever you are reading this, I hope that this day brings you some peace even in the chaoses that life can carry. If you get the chance, invite silence to join you for a little while. There’s profoundness in company with whom you can just sit, not saying a thing.
NamasBRAY.
A poem for peace from my heart, through my Remington, and to you.
I love you.
Jess
Yesterday, I studied the date on the donkey calendar that hangs over my desk for more than a moment trying to recall why August 2nd was significant when it finally hit me: six years ago on August 2nd, I had heart surgery. It wasn’t open heart surgery with a cracked open chest but instead, a procedure where they went in through my femoral artery to travel into my heart with heated instruments whose mission was to cauterize the ends of several rouge nerves that were misfiring around my struggling heart. The real kicker of the surgery was that I had to be awake in order to have my heart behaving in her most natural way. It hurt like hell.
I’ve talked in my blog before about my heart surgery, so I won’t go into more detail about that particular day, but what I am reminded of everytime this date rolls around is just how important it is to properly care for your sweet heart and just how great the strength is of that little ticker. Dr. Seuss said that you’re “stronger than you seem” and I’m pretty sure that kind of deep-seeded strength comes from your ole beating heart. I got to know my heart pretty well that day—that day when I learned what it felt like to have your heart literally touched. I ached when she was burned over and over but you know, I’ve never met a person that didn’t have scars on their heart. It’s universal. It connects us.
Beating hearts. This world is full of them. I’ve sometimes thought that if I could have a superpower, I’d like the ability to hear other people’s heart beats from a distance. I think of how many times my heart has thudded so heavily that I could hardly hear anything over its thumping in my ears and I wonder if other people’s hearts do that too and to what extent. Like when you see something or meet someone that makes your heart leap around like hyper harlequin, wouldn’t it be comforting to know if other hearts were just as frantic in that moment? I think if our hearts could move like it, they’d respond to situations in the same way dog’s tails do: wagging when happy, hanging when sad, tucking when scared.
I also truly believe that if everyone would stop, even for a split second, and think about how everyone…everyone…has a little beating heart inside their chest that’s capable of being happy and timid and terrified and brave and every shade in between, then maybe we’d be less likely to be so cruel to each other. If we could imagine the uncharted and infinite depths of our potential kindnesses that are hungry to be explored and embraced, then maybe we would actually start to know peace.
I love hearts. I love their complexity, their strength, their sounds, and their endurance. I love that there is fortitude in their vulnerabilities. I love that they have chambers opening and closing and flowing with rich blood because that image is just the coolest scene to imagine. I love that they can be burned, literally and figuratively, and still continue to beat strongly.
Anyway…here’s to continual heart health, y’all. The heart in me honors the heart in you. Badum, badum, badum.
Moments ago, I began writing a new blog post describing a late night scene from around midnight last night—moon high and air still—when I wondered why I go outside so late so often? Many of my posts have started off with something along the lines of, “It was hovering around midnight when…”
I thought on it for a bit and I think I figured out why I find myself out in the pasture with the donkeys most nights when the only sounds are crickets and distant coyotes:
It seems to me that when I finally settle into that sweet spot in bed where the blanket is tucked up under my neck with just the right amount of tension and my right, lower leg and foot are sticking out of the covers at just the right angle…when the height of the pillow is neither too high nor too low…when the temperature in the house has finally settled at that perfect 72 degrees…that’s where my ole’ pal anxiety wakes up.
“Psssst. Hey. Hey you. Did you lock the doors?
…I don’t think you turned off the stove top…
…Is Little Foot breathing?
…I bet you forgot to turn off the hose that was refilling the donkey’s trough earlier and now your entire property is flooded…
…What did so-and-so mean in that cryptic text message earlier?”
…and so on.
Fight as I might, reassuring myself that yes, I did and checked and figured out (or let go of) all of those things, anxiety just won’t sleep unless I check again. Even my anxiety is anxious. As such, most nights I wander out into the pasture in my jammies and my boots to do one last check on the hoses, the chickens, and the donkeys. The donkeys have come to expect my late night visits—their eager ears perked at their gates when I inevitably show up with a flashlight.
So last night, I stood outside for sometime in the company of my sweet donkeys three as I stared up into a clear sky. It was a half moon and I studied her perfect halfness until she began to look like a cream colored button poking out of a black sky. The stars wandered in and out of focus about her and after I cleaned the smudges from my glasses with my shirt, I spotted a wandering satellite gliding across the sky.
After some time, I bid my donkeys sweet dreams and came back into the house, my anxiety mostly satisfied with my having triple-checked.
Wide awake at this point, I decided to tinker with my new, 80-year old Remington typewriter that was so graciously gifted to me by King Ranch on my birthday over the weekend. It is a beaut, this typewriter: bright red with yellow keys that have years and years of stories stuck beneath them.
I unlocked its case, set it on the kitchen table, slid in a piece of paper and began to press down what my mind had not yet finished seeing from the outside. I click-clacked over the keys, careful to line up the margins with every line break and to try to spell every word correctly the first time and sometime later, my mind had fully transferred her thoughts onto paper.
I studied my new poem for a proud moment before placing the cover back on the Remington and heading back to bed. Once resettled, (blanket tucked, leg out, pillow perfect) all I could imagine was the way the keys felt beneath my fingers. Click-clack, click-clack, sliiiiide. Click-clack, click-clack, sliiiiide. The keys are surprisingly heavy, giving my fingertips a challenge. I love that the Remington isn’t sensitive; I’ve got enough fragility elsewhere in my life. The Remington is strong and steady, demanding of my awareness.
I slept so well last night. I slept heavily and deeply: my dreams wandering down rivers and through trees and I seem to remember a blue backpack and wings.
I won’t jinx it, but perhaps my anxiety who has anxiety has found a new manager named Remington.
Above soaring, jagged rocks
The world’s weight tugging
Heavily on your bones;
Her mouth open wide and
Ready for an easy meal…
Wind whipping and howling
With voices from deep underground,
Voices that you swore were buried
Beneath stone and time,
Their smokey doubts swirling about…
Above bird songs where
Clouds roll with secrets;
Air streaming thinly through
Your rising and falling lungs
Quickening with the thump thump thump of your heart…
There, plant tightly your tired feet,
Steady your scattered soul,
Reach deep into your gut, raw and rank
And realize the horizon-reaching,
Broader and more complex view within.
Realize that you are riddled with rolling secrets, too
And with beauty beyond written words
With often old voices shaping your moves.
Realize that the universe within you
Is worth beholding, worth admiring,
Worth travelling far and taking risks
To see and feel and inhale deeply into.
Realize that and
You, my love,
You, my friend,
You, my stranger,
You,
Will set your sweet soul free.
In addition to doing my part to rescue donkeys, I am also a yoga instructor. In fact, several years ago, I quit my cush job in oil and gas to chase a dream of teaching yoga full-time. So far, it’s worked out, although I often wonder if the corporate Grim-Reaper will come knocking one day to call me back to the cubicle.
I love teaching yoga—I love it because there are few greater social joys to me than providing a space in which class attendees can unplug and de-stress. I’ve talked at length about how donkeys have served as a major component to my ever increasing awareness (and quest) to slow down and enjoy the simple things in life but yoga, too, has aided in that journey. People tell me often that they’re “not good at yoga” or they’re “not flexible enough to do yoga” and to that I always ask, “What is being good at yoga?” I rarely get an answer, but a half-laugh with a tiny light bulb that I could swear appears over their head.
The fact is, there is no such thing as being good at yoga, there is only continual practice of trying to be better in the way you treat yourself and others with a bonus of strength and flexibility gaining along the way. It’s a healing process of body, mind, and soul. It’s focusing on your breath because think about it: you can’t breathe two minutes ago and you can’t breathe two minutes from now—you can breathe in this moment. Focusing on your breath and making it slower and deeper pulls you to the present and away from phone notifications, that argument you had last week, and the worry over that meeting you have next week. It allows you to exist right now.
There’s no doubt that we live in a frantic world—one that moves faster and with more fury than I think any of us are fully equipped to handle and I think it’s become really easy to withdraw behind walls in our minds in order to cope and behind those walls, no matter how many friends you have, you’re alone there.
Here’s the thing—you’re NOT alone. Everyone you’ve met and will meet has experienced pain. We’ve all had our hearts broken, we’ve all made mistakes, and we all have something in which we’re self-conscious. Nobody has all the answers and isn’t that grand? That means we still live in a world with mysteries and magic. We can still wonder if there are beings in the shadows that watch us or even guide us when we’re lost. We can still imagine that there are brilliant energies that surround us on a light spectrum that our eyes can’t see that cause us to gravitate towards one another resulting in serendipitous meetings that can’t quite be explained. We can wonder what peers down at us from the billions of stars and galaxies that blanket our night skies—sometimes so brightly that you swear you could just reach out and grab a few to place in your pocket. We can look into the eyes of animals and see whole worlds within their pupils and imagine that they see things about us that we will never know and isn’t that badass?
Our oneness as a society comes from our communal exploration of the worlds around us and within ourselves. Try this: place your hands over your heart and close your eyes. Search for your heart beat. With every inhale, your chest will rise and press into your hands and with every exhale, it will fall. I’m doing it, too, and in that, we are connected—your heartbeat and breath and mine. We all breathe the same way and we all breathe the same air. We all have hearts that are stronger than we know that endure so much so slow down and listen to it for a while.
I teach yoga because I need yoga, too. I need blocks of time where my focus is the moment. I need to remind myself not to compare, to break down walls, and to love from my insides out. I hope you’ll try it, too. At the very least, try to breathe a little more deeply today when you think about it. Look deeply into someone’s eyes—even if they’re your own in a mirror and see the way the light dances off the colors like the sun reflecting off the ocean—a million diamonds. As Neil Gaiman once said, “People carry worlds within them,” and never has that been a more profound realization than now because we live in a world with so much division and we don’t even quite understand our own selves. How can we expect peace if there is no peace within?
…And if you’ve never gone to a yoga class because you don’t think you’ll be good at it, maybe give it a shot. You might be surprised.
Namaste. Or rather, NamasBRAY.
There’s a place in the world
Where fairies exist.
They perch on yellow petals
Watching pollen float delicately
Around them like floating, golden halos.
There’s a place in the world
Where magnets are stronger.
Pebbles and rocks roll together into
Flower-like shapes and brilliant, infinite stars
With a million, trillion points in a million, trillion directions.
There’s a place in the world
Where the animals go—their wide eyes
Eager to feel the pull of the Earth. They’re
Neither hunted or hunting but shining
An ethereal glow of calmness: alabaster and neon.
There’s a place in the world
Where you can’t help but cry
But not because you’re sad or you hurt but
Because the air and the water are
So pure and clean that breath simply vanishes.
There’s a place in the world
Where the walls have crumbled into glitter—
The same glitter that I wear on my eyelids
When I’m dressed up to go see
Everything with you.
There’s a place in the world
That was born on this day—the same
Day as you. It exists because of you
And sustains because of you and there
We are safe and we are thrilled.
There’s a place in the world
That pops up only once a year and I
Am travelling far and fast to get there—to get
Lost at sea and watch the way the sun
Bounces off the water in a million, trillion pieces.
There’s a place in the world
That together, we’ll be in soon: in our
Blue kayaks with cheap champagne and hopefully
Gardetto’s—but only the dark, rye pieces. And
You’ll tell me about your day and I’ll hang on every word.
There’s a place in the world
Where we celebrate not because birthdays are so unique,
But because YOU became YOU on this day
All those years ago and never was
The world the same. Not in this place, at least.
There’s a place in the world
Where you were born. And it was this day.
And I’m headed there now, King Ranch.
We’ll paddle out on the water, you and me
To this place that exists only today.
I relaxed my back against the coolness of the wrought-iron chair in which I’d been sitting and leaning forward for the past half-hour while pulling my smudged glasses from my face. On the desk in front of me, I closed the large, three-ring binder that is packed full of printouts of guided meditations that I use in my yoga classes from time to time. I moved it to the floor and picked up my cup of coffee that no longer steamed.
The sun was only barely beginning to rise outside the small window to my left. It was a gray sunrise behind heavily hanging, weather-changing clouds that are bringing a cold-front our way. Bowie, our youngest rooster, crowed twice. I know his crow from the others—it’s softer and shorter. It’s not very confident compared to the others. I suppose he’s still trying to find his voice.
Also on my desk was our county’s newspaper that gets delivered to us weekly by mail, folded into quarters and the side that faced up had two advertisements on it. The first had a headline that read, “Choose to Change Lives” and the second, a headline that read, “Every Abused or Neglected Child Needs a Caring, Consistent Adult to Advocate for His or Her Well-Being.” I sipped my cool coffee.
The night before this, I’d gone out to remove our newest donkey, Tink’s, prosthetic boot and wrapped gauze. His wound is healing, but still needs time to air out at night when he’s less active. Oxygen, indeed, is the greatest healer. After I removed his boot and unwrapped the gauze, I sat down in the dirt next to him and rubbed his wounded leg. I pressed my thumbs firmly around his joints and ran my fingers up and down the muscles between them. When I do this, he softens his eyes and lowers his head: a signal to me that it feels pleasant. Oddly enough, that’s what my guided meditation was about this morning: equanimity between pleasantness, unpleasantness and neutrality. It spoke to the fact that we often cling to pleasantness, condemn unpleasantness, and space-out during neutrality and in that, we miss out. We let moments pass us by. We live based on experience and not based on the present.
Donkeys do this, too, I think. They can often seem to cling to experience to protect themselves.
The wind whipped around the sides of the shed last night as I sat, massaging TInk’s leg. I could see the black clouds unfolding and collapsing as my two remaining adoptable donkeys, Fireball and Fluff, cautiously wandered into the shed, their heads low. These two donkeys are very shy and although I have no concrete information, I get the sense there’s pain in their respective backgrounds. I continued to massage Tink’s swollen leg, humming my favorite James Taylor song (Close Your Eyes) when Fluff took two more steps closer to me. I continued to softly sing and he took one more step to where now, he could reach my face with his nose.
I turned my nose to his and he exhaled twice. So did I.
Behind him, Fireball stood timidly and with his eyes wide. Fluff took two more steps towards me, his neck and head above me now, and rested his chin on the top of my head. Under the pressure, I continued to hum.
Tink lowered his leg and leaned his weight into my side and I started to struggle beneath the weight of both Fluff and Tink but I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want them to snap back into experience. I wanted, so badly, for them to be in this moment with me experiencing trust.
Being at the bottom of a two-donkey pile, I hadn’t noticed that somewhere during this time, Fireball was no longer in my line of sight when suddenly, from behind me, I felt an exhale rush past my ear. I exhaled, too and he didn’t run away. Baby steps.
I placed my cool cup of coffee back down on the desk and looked at the headlines of our county newspaper again. I wondered what other people thought when they saw these headlines about changing lives and advocating for abused of neglected children. I wondered at all why someone would ever abuse or neglect a child. I began to feel very upset, thinking even of my own Little Foot and how I could never, ever imagine hurting him and as I did this, I pushed the newspaper away and looked back out the window.
But in that moment, I condemned and pushed away unpleasantness, just like the meditation said and I got to wondering, how different would our world be if instead of running away from the bad, we all worked together to “Choose to Change Lives”? To, instead of moving based on our experiences, moved in the present? Together?
I’ll admit, I don’t always trust or know what I believe. I simply think too much. But what I do know is that we all belong to one another—human and animal alike. It is our responsibility to care deeply for one another—to not push away the unpleasantness because we’re scared but to instead, pick each other up even when it hurts or the pressure is too high. It’s our responsibility to not turn a blind eye because we don’t like it or to space out because we don’t get it. We need each other. All of us.
All of this easier said than done, of course. But I think it’s worth trying…especially if it means that someone might feel safer or more loved.
The sun was up now, although the light trickling in was cool and gray. The few, remaining leaves in the trees twinkled in the wind and once more, Bowie crowed. I’d be heading out soon to re-wrap Tink’s little hoof and put his boot on and I’d probably brush him and the other two donkeys if they’d let me. I would go to the other paddock and spend time with Bunny and Tee who need to be reminded that I love them unconditionally, too. I’d come in after that and make breakfast for Little Foot and hold him in my lap while he drinks his milk. We’d probably read a book, too. I’d call King Ranch to tell him I love him and that I hope he has a good day at work and then I’d probably call my mom just to see how she’s doing.
We belong to each other. All of us, big and small, rich and poor, strong and weak. We can choose to change lives. We can advocate for one another. We should.
