THANKFUL FRIDAY

I am obsessed with this picture I took last week. I just sit and stare at it and try to count all the dew drops. My favorite part is that tiny line of spider webbing that stretches across the top of the tulip, decorated with teeny drops of water. It’s like a string of lights around a backyard patio or a spectacular circus show of tightrope walkers. There is a whole universe here where the bloom is the sun and dewdrops are the planets. And because I have looked at things under microscopic lenses, I know that many of those dewdrops contain life. It is equal parts fascinating and overwhelming.

The opening scene in Contact begins with close up view of a receiving dish somewhere on Earth. Then the camera pans out. You watch the dish get smaller and disappear as the scene continues to zoom out and out. The scene moves out and the Earth becomes tiny and then the solar system gets tiny. It zooms out past our universe and leaves us staring at the vastness of space. When I saw this movie in the theater, this scene almost made me fall out of my chair. My chest grew tight and I struggled to breath. The emptiness and vastness was too much for me to mentally handle. In fact, writing about it now makes me slightly breathless. Yet the opposite, the zooming in on stuff, fills me awe.

It is all the same thing.

The tulip in this picture is a galaxy in the universe of this garden. Our bodies are walking galaxies in our universe of communities. It just goes on and on and it is complicated. The more you ponder this, the more complicated it becomes. I like to hold a magnifying glass up to life because it feels less complex. It is my way of simplifying the infinite galaxies. The vastness of this life is untethering, but these small little galaxies right here in our own backyards, make me grounded and present. Today I am grateful for small galaxies.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The room where I usually do yoga at work has been occupied this week for online conference viewing. So I had to find a temporary yoga space. Because the weather has been so nice though, I decided to take my practice outside. Every day this week, I have unrolled my yoga mat in a shady spot and have had a lovely practice outside. Each time I have left my mat feeling like the inside space between my brain and skull has been scrubbed clean and slightly expanded, which sounds like it would be uncomfortable. I can assure that it is far from uncomfortable. It is in fact a rather nice feeling. It sort leaves you feeling light and floaty.

I read a paper recently that was published this year in Environmental Research (because sometimes I read scientific publications for fun). The paper was a study on mental health and the effects of indoor versus outdoor greenery. The study found that students isolated at home during the COVID pandemic experienced better mental health when exposed to more greenery. This could be indoor plants and gardens or outside green spaces. It didn’t matter. Plants and green spaces make us feel better. For me, it is and has always been outside spaces, mostly because I am not good with keeping indoor plants alive. This, I am sure, stems from a childhood spent outside climbing trees, flying kites, or reading books while lounging on a blanket, in the tall grass forte I’d built for myself in the pasture. I would wander in around dinner time, scratchy and dirty, with that same light and floaty feeling.

I had forgotten about that feeling or maybe I just took it for granted. Maybe I didn’t realize it was missing from my life because it was a constant for so many years. For so many years, I didn’t need that feeling. I am living a second life now and it is a lot different from the previous one. Last weekend, I spent most of my time sitting on a covered deck and staring at a lake. I did yoga on that deck in the early morning hours while a light rain fell. I watched large herons swoop down and skim the water. There was even a bald eagle that flew across the water and at one point looked like it was going to land on the railing of the deck. It was this time spent at the lake that encouraged me to take my yoga practice outside this week.

I am a scheduler and I am working on scheduling more moments of light and floatiness into my daily life. I signed myself up for a restorative aerial yoga class next week and I’m thinking of making Wednesday evenings roller skating evenings. Every day, weather permitting, is going to be outside yoga day.