cold-yet-warm gratitude

i am grateful for:

1. yoga detox fun with sarah at om. a delicious, nurturing, stabilizing week. worth every sleep-deprived, up-at-6-am-in-the-dark-and-cold moment.

2. rob breszy’s phrase in aries this week: “a tender, lucid calm”

3. the way that phrase makes me relax

4. the 5-minute healing session free at aveda yesterday. yes, i would like a massage, thanks. and that she talked about breathing, just after i had been learning and blogging about breathing. but also not actually breathing. she placed her hands gently on my ribs and had me expand to fill them and it was hard. the knots in my shoulders hurt when i breathe in my belly. who knew? but so nice to have hands-on breathing teaching. “we don’t learn this in school,” she said. nope, we do not. we learn how to un-breathe, i think, mostly. how to go against our natural rhythms. how to go with someone else’s flow. so, helpful to really fill that belly with air. and let it go. and fill it. and let it go. somehow i think that’s like a little “i love you” we’re whispering to ourselves, a kindness to our creature. “i love you my body enough to let you really breathe.” kinda makes me want to cry–the way tenderness feels in the face of so much forcing, non-tenderness.

5. my beautiful chiquitas who send me text love and email love and remind me of my own beautifulness, which i forget next to the overflowing inboxes and things.

6. slowness. glowness.

7. my new phone, which i am almost knowing how to use. it’s the size of a small shoe, but current-day technology feels sort of reviving.

8. s’s pumpkin bread in spelt and gluten-free

9. doing my first almost peacock pose! off the ground! aloft! and then walking past the peacock in a window display and feeling oddly connected. yo, sup, peacock, i do your pose. or, well, a very rudimentary approximation of your pose that i never thought i could do.

10. aveda green science skin cream

11. the way winter snaps you to. that splash, that air that feels like water. i hate it but i love it.

12. bunnies

13. vanilla

14. cycles

15. thinking about what sounds inanimate objects would make. inspired by the german-sounding bike-lock.

16. tea