"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"

During my last couple years of high school I took independent study art classes from our art teacher we affectionately called "Lab." My art during these late teenage years generally consisted of sketches and intricate inked designs intertwined with poetry--of my own and of others. Lab noticed my love for the power of words, quotations, books, and poetry, and gifted me upon graduation and a couple years later, two poetry books: News of the Universe, poems of twofold consciousness and Risking Everything, poems of love and revelation. The time I spent deep inside my own heart and head in high school writing and reading poems has helped shaped who I am today. Today during Savasana in my yoga class, with the rain pouring down on the glass ceiling, our instructor read a poem that nearly brought me to tears. It was a poem about what it feels like to be living. What it means to be alive. When you walk through a blustery winter day with your hair whipping in the wind and your face chapped, but you feel it all because you're alive. With all the bad news of the last month, all the death, all the grief and problems that seem to be floating around the universe, I think about what it means to be living. And I am grateful for ever feeling pain, facing challenges, being fearful, feeling love, and for hope. Because it means I am living.

A couple of those poems from Lab that remind me of such things:

"Sweet Darkness" by David Whyte
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.


When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.


Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own. 


There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.


The dark will be your womb 
tonight.


The night will give you the horizon
further than you can see.


You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.


Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.


Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn


anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive


is too small for you. 


"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
or grief. I come in the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.