09/21/2024
We live in the fast lane but wonder why it can be hard to relax.? Hard to remember to take a deep breath. Or to get up from our devices to walk around every hour as our watch instructs us. We embrace the technology from dishwashers to recording movies that save us time, downloading documents and other items so we save time mailing or taking them across town. It is brilliant and isolating.
We save so much time that we don’t always know how to use it.
In years past lifestyle and culture involved more necessary time and effort in gathering, preparing and serving food, keeping our houses clean, clothes in good shape. We had to do all this or things would not be there when we needed them to be. There would be no bread, no milk or eggs. There would be no time to catch up. Daily life may have involved chopping wood, finding food, gathering eggs, sewing our clothes, building a fire to heat the house, tending to animals and our backyard gardens. People moved their bodies all the time out of necessity and even seated had busy hands. You might imagine these activities as meditative, they likely did not. To focus on one thing exclusively, intently set our breath to a a slower pace. We softened into the task. These were built into the day, putting a child down to sleep, scrubbing pots, tending to animals, gardens, preserving food.
I have some of my grandmother’s cooking pots, with copper bottoms. I can remember her cleaning the surfaces, not scrubbing hard but using a sponge in a circular motion over and over, as more grime and grit disappeared. The shine of the copper slowly rose to the surface, it was there all along but covered by debris. They shone when done, hung back on the hook . Chances are small that my grandmother ever thought about this activity as settling her mind or anything mindful. They all had lots of children, little money and saved everything. One of her sons was hospitalized with tetanus for 9 months in the 1940s and she would ride the streetcar every day to visit him in the city, carefully timing the trip to be home for the children being let out of school. No one spoke much about those months and all the family photos show a smiling family at the beach, picnicking or together with aunts/uncles. My grandfather’s cherished rose bushes always in the background, his own way to settle down after working as a stone cutter in the Navy shipyard during WWII. He cultivated beauty in red and pink roses.
Cleaning the cook pots today, I felt my breath align with the circles I was making to clean the copper bottom, over and over and over. Soothing in its simplicity and releasing me from distraction.
I will lead The Art of Breathing on Oct 5 at Skys the Limit Yoga Studio, join me to see where we can find this spaces of quiet, this natural ability to change the pace of our day and to reconnect with source.
