My Buddhist friends have good advice for me about living in the moment: "Breathe in; breathe out."
That's pretty much what I've been doing today: playing Scrabble; listening to Sirius Coffeehouse; shooting nefarious Bulbins and Keese on the Wii. I've been cooking, off on and on; we had something called Christmas sausage in the freezer, from a trip to Pleva's Meats in Cedar this fall, and we wanted to see what this was, so we had it for breakfast with home fries. (For any interested persons: Christmas sausage came in thin little toothpicked coils. It is very lean, mild and flecked with unidentifiable herbs, although we could perhaps pick out some faint anise or fennel flavor.) For dinner I chopped up a motley assortment of root vegetables from our excursion to Ann Arbor alternative grocery stores, browned some lamb shanks, threw everything in a casserole with wine and herbs and am braising it now.
I have been enjoying the smallest, homiest things: The way little Gertie sidles up and touches me with her paw, all day long -- "Hey." The way FT curls her toes when she's executing Scrabble strategy. The colors of the vegetables -- who knew, for instance, that you could grow a red turnip with radiating pink insides? REM harmonizing on "Fall on Me"; there's a point at which they all kind of hit their mark vocally, and it flows like honey, and you think, Yeah.
1 comment:
In my church, instead of a choral prayer response after the prayer, we often have a choral centering piece before the prayer begins. One of the pieces we often use has the men singing "breathe in, breathe out" in a low drone, and the women singing "when I breathe in, I breathe in peace; when I breathe out, I breathe out love" in a melodic descant.
It pairs nicely with Psalm 150: "Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord."
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