My Undoing

In order to practice asana (yoga poses) as a meditative path, you'll need to learn how to let go of habitual responses to physical and mental distractions during practice. This will allow you to shed unnecessary effort in each pose, which will ultimately lead you to the feeling of effortless effort. Developing effortless effort transforms your practice of asana from mere exercise into a yogic journey toward absorption into your true infinite Self. John Schumacher

I practice my own undoing early each morning before the sun comes up, the dog has been walked, the child fed. Yoga does my undoing through the release at the root of the tongue, the grip of the right ribs, the letting of breath into the torque of the left shoulders. Undoing the knots of resistance to (inevitable) change, uncertainty, loss, and kindness, allows the breath to flow more deeply in the lungs, makes me aware of space in the body, peels back layers of self-doubt, regret, and shame encrusting the Soul. In that final back bend of the morning, when the sky is taking up a steely light, I let loose the birds from my chest and join them in song and flight.

Know Your Hunger

If I do not know my hunger, how can I feed myself? If I do not know my emptiness, how can I know love? If I do not know my illness, how can I heal? There, in the quiet darkness, is where I find myself, my compass, my knowing, which shows me what to do next.

What She Thought of When She Thought About Going Home

It might have the anniversary of my grandmother's birthday the other day; we are not quite sure what year she born. She spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home.

When she thought about going home, Philly imagined walking up the back steps to the upstairs apartment with no pain in her knees. She carried a paper bag of groceries from the Start Market and entered a clean, if cluttered, kitchen. If she was tired, she could sit at the kitchen table and have a Kent, sip sweet coffee, soften a hard biscotti in the milk. The windows would be open allowing an autumn breeze to flow through the entire house; it was just the right temperature for making sauce. Not like the sweltering days of August when just turning on the front burner made her sweat.

The wist party at Knights of Columbus Hall would be starting up after the summer break. Philly, Carmela, and Nancy would go to Catholic Daughters meetings, once a month, to plan for the Halloween party, the holiday bazaar, the cape cod retreat. She would dress up as a Spanish dancer this year, long black veil made of lace pinned to her teased blond hair.

At home, she wouldn’t have to share a bedroom with a woman who groaned throughout the night or the one who snored whenever her chin dipped into her caved-in chest. She could move, effortlessly, in and out of the tub, up and down the steps, and look forward to preparing the salted cod for Christmas Eve dinner.

Hungry for a Blessing

Today I hunger for a blessing, a hand on my chest, forgiveness for my small mindedness. I bravely search for beauty in the brokenness, the ache under the ribs, the emptiness that remains. Can I be more like the oak, who gently let's go of everything that is dear to her even as the wind turns to winter and only the thinnest of nectar flows through her veins? She mourns the passing of paper thin leaves bursting with color as I mourn the bruised and fragile skin of my grandmother's shins. What did grandmother bless when she sat in the wheeled chair, a watch on each bent wrist marking a time that no longer existed for her; the wooden spoon to stir the sauce, the oil rising to the top, the stains on apron that would not be washed away?

What Remains

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have. Rilke


I see the leaves changing color. The reds merging into the green, leaf litter on the earth, cool mornings. After the fall and the first frost, after your love leaves you, the cancer ravishes, the storm passes, the sun turns to the moon, what endures? What remains after everything else has passed through your fingers, like sand, as it always does? The sky, the sky, the sky...the sky remains and it is all that you need.

The Inner Sanctuary of Autumn

"And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary." John O'Donoghue

Fall is a time for gathering, winnowing, turning inside and then back out to face a cold wind. It is almost impossible to walk through the beloved woods without getting bonked by a falling acorn, the squirrels are working so hard to build their winter stash. The grasses in the wetlands have stopped growing bent at the waist by the weight of seeds and red winged black birds. I am turning to the East later and later eager for the sun's breech. I gather wool and needles; knit shawls, hats, mittens of every color to welcome snow and dark. The wood is stacked high, the squash piled in the bowls, apples tart and hard just plucked from sister tree. The strength of the turning has entered my body; my bones harden, muscles flex, joints glisten with grease. I crave the poetry of John O'Donoghue, of lichens and cold granite and the trembling beauty of the cold wind. Know me I sing to the jewel weed, the beaver, the stiffening mud.

Where we come from

I was wondering today about how my father grew into the man he was, with views of the world so much broader than those of so many men of his generation and culture who clung to a small and narrowly prescribed role that was both domineering and scarred.

In part, I think, it was something about how his parents thought and treated him that allowed him to imagine a bigger life. I find this extraordinary because neither Louie or Amelia had a chance to explore much beyond the bounds of theirown Italian immigrant backbone. Neither had the chance for education, yet Mikey got his Master's at Boston University. (I was two when he graduated and have the pictures of daddy in his cap and gown holding onto a pouting me.)

Perhaps it was the way his mother read to him and took him to the library or the way Louie, a barber, allowed more for Mikey than life on the same block, in the same shop. Amelia, before she died so young, may have told Mikey about her dreams of an easier, richer life. She never had it easy, abandoned by her mother at 12, pulled out of school after the sixth grade to care for her father and brothers, never once taken on vacation. Imagining a different life took a kind of courage I can barely conceive of.