Stuff

Cleaning out my office at work - so much stuff that I kept, thinking it might be important, that I needed it, that it was valuable.  Not right at the moment, of course, that's why it got put on a shelf, or filed in a folder, but someday I'd need it.  In the end, the vast majority had never been looked at again, and very had been important to keep.

What does this tell me about myself?  Filing something away is not putting it to use - it's setting aside - creating a latent store of stuff that only will require more time and energy in the future.  It's creating an obligation for my future self, do deal with things that I'm not prepared to deal with, or let go of, right now.

Keeping stuff creates a little sense of security - maybe I'll need it someday and then I'll have it - perhaps it's the same instinct that compels us to store food in times of plenty.  But keeping too much stuff begins to become a weight dragging me back.  Every minute spent sorting through old stuff, making another decision about whether to keep it or not, is a minute I'm not spending on meeting my current goals, or simply enjoying life in the present.

Before I keep the next item of stuff, I should ask a couple of questions - "Is this thing useful to moving ahead with my life right now?"  "Is there a reason to think it may be vital in the future, and is irreplaceable?"  If not, I'm better off to let it go right now.

Cardinals

Cardinals, or more properly, cardinal grosbeaks, are common birds in our neighborhood.  They are year-round residents, sticking around after the robins and other migrants have gone south to warmer climes.  This time of year they are establishing their territories and nests.  We had a nest in the shrubs at the front of the house last year, and I've seen a pair flitting around there again this year.  Yesterday, as I walked to work on a bright, sunny morning, a male sat on a wire above the street, trying mightily to impress a nearby female.  Resplendent in his bold red feathers and yellow beak, he flared out his tail feathers in a fan, strutting his stuff.

A Little Time Outside

It's a lovely day - 55 degrees this afternoon - but it feels warmer in the sun.  I did the first project of the year preparing to garden - rotating a bin of compost into another composter to finish it off.  It felt good to be outside, working, moving, feeling the warm sun and cool air.  The forsythia is in full bloom, and a female cardinal perched in the still bare tree and sang while I worked.

The fig tree is budding - I'm hoping for a good year from it after a hard winter a year ago that killed it back.  Across the street, one oak still holds onto brown leaves from last year, even as the canopy of tulip poplars above is beginning to green up.  There's still a lot of spring to go, but it's off to a good start.

Transition

Another Friday, another week checked off.  Three more weeks to go until I leave for a week in Colorado.  When I return, the last week of April, I'll have four work days before my retirement.  To some degree, these past few weeks have felt like biding time, as my work began to dwindle and my focus shifted to the next phase of my life.

I'm ready.  My career in fisheries feels complete, and I am much more energized about my yoga life.  I've described yoga as my retirement off-ramp.  When I decided to do yoga teacher training - it was the summer of 2013 - retirement seemed quite a ways off.  Now I've been teaching for a year and a half, and thoroughly enjoying it.  I expect it will be even better when the time I'm currently spending at work opens up.

I'm not planning to increase my teaching load much, but will be looking for the best quality opportunities and working on producing some yoga and meditation videos for my website.

Twenty more work days to go!

The Power of a Pause

I enjoy my walks to and from work, though my habit is to treat them as a commute, not a stroll.  Head out at a good pace, see how well I can time the traffic lights, and get to the destination in about 25 minutes.  One Friday afternoon in Spring a few years ago, I was walking home from work.  It was a pretty day - the sun was out, the sky the deepening blue of early evening.  The early flowering trees had been out for a few weeks, and were beginning to leaf out, pushing the pink and white petals off to fall to the ground.

As I walked toward a couple of large ornamental cherry trees, seeing the blanket of petals on the ground, I realized that the flowers would be gone by the next time I passed.  I stopped under the arcing branches, heavy with flowers and new leaves, and looked up through the thousands of blossoms backlit against the blue sky.  Deeply aware of my own presence, feeling my breath move in and out, I stood and soaked in the beauty for a while, then turned for the walk home with an indelible impression in my mind, and an appreciation for the power of a pause.

Today I walked under these trees again, stepping on some of the early petals that had already fallen.  Another year gone by, another cycle of flowers bursting forth for a few weeks after the dormancy of winter.  Another pause, to look up through the clusters of white flowers to the blue sky beyond.

Watching the World Turn

Sitting at my desk today, taking notes during a conference call, I noticed a pattern of ovals - light spots in a line on my paper from light passing past the curved ends of the partially closed blinds on my windows.

Grabbed by a spirit of doodling, I quickly traced the outline of each oval.   My attention was diverted for some time - but not long - tens of seconds, not minutes.  When I glanced down again I was surprised at how far the light spots had moved from the tracing.

Then I watched.  There was a tiny bit of motion in the blinds, so a tiny wiggle of the spots on the paper back and forth, but a discernible directional movement as well.  I've noticed this before, watching shadows.  The movement of the Earth, rotating 360 degrees in 24 hours, is right at the limit of what I can discern.  If I'm really focused I can perceive the movement, but at a more casual glance things seem to be still.  It's easier to be aware of the motion glancing back at longer intervals, because the accumulated movement appears as a significant jump.  In real-time, the motion seems incredibly slow.

Breathing

Feel your next breath come in, filling your lungs with air.  In the few seconds before you finish exhaling that breath, your body has exchanged millions of oxygen molecules for carbon dioxide that flows out into the atmosphere.

The motion of the molecules and the currents of the wind mix your exhale with that of all the other people and animals on the planet into the swirling layer of gas that covers the Earth.

Light from the Sun streams out into space.  A tiny bit of it reaches the surface of Earth, and a tiny bit of that is captured by chlorophyll molecules in plants and used to build sugars from carbon dioxide captured from the air, releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere.

A blade of grass in someone's yard; an ancient tree in a tropical rainforest; a phytoplankton cell floating in the ocean - any of these - perhaps all of these - have produced the oxygen in the breath that is entering your lungs right now.  Your exhale disperses molecules of carbon dioxide that drift and ride the currents of the wind to the ends of the Earth until they are captured once more by a plant, completing the cycle.

The Earth spins, ever turning toward and turning away from the energy streaming in from the Sun.  At any time, half the world is producing more oxygen than it is using, and the other half consuming more than it produces.

There is no way to isolate yourself from this process.  We take for granted that the air we breathe will sustain us,  but when we understand that the oxygen we need with each breath has been produced by another life form somewhere on the planet, and that our exhale will someday become part of a tree or a rice plant, a rose or a strand of moss on the forest floor, we realize our life is intimately connected with all life on Earth, through the process of breathing.

Morning Wildlife

My short run along Sligo Creek this morning turned into a wildlife viewing trek.  First up was a fox that crossed the trail, moving up from the creek, across Sligo Creek Parkway, and up onto the wooded hillside.  Foxes are very alert, and wary. I paused and jogged in place to watch it, and it paused on the hillside to watch me.  After a bit, it must have felt a little insecure, turned and moved a few feet farther up the hill, then turned to watch me again.

Next was a squirrel with a mouthful of leaves, scampering up a very small tree.  I knew it must be headed up to pad its nest in a taller tree, and stopped to watch.  It worked its way from one small tree to another, then out to the end of a branch for a leap through the air onto the side of the trunk of a tall tree.  I wonder how many trips it will take to get enough leaves for the nest.  Meanwhile, in the creek behind me, a pair of mallards swam downstream.

I ran on up the trail about a quarter mile, where there is a larger field as the trail and creek move apart.  There, three deer browsed and I stopped to watch.  They weren't close to the trail, but one in particular was nervous about my presence, and soon flipped its white tail up and trotted a few yards closer to the creek.  When I returned back down the trail a few minutes later, they had crossed the creek to a grassy field between the creek and the parkway.  I guess cars are less scary than runners.

Even More Signs of Spring

In the past week or so, cherry trees have bloomed, the magnolias are beginning to blossom, crocus and daffodils are up, and the forsythia tips are turning bright yellow.  I even saw a dandelion blooming on Friday when I walked to work.

At yoga class this morning, a dove was sitting on the window sill peering in at the people moving around.

I looked back at last year's blog, and it seems that spring is coming 2-3 weeks earlier this year, after a pretty mild winter.  Every day now will bring more color back to the landscape, as winter fades into spring.

More Signs of Spring

The daytime temperature rose into the 70s today.  It was cooler, but still nice at 9:30 pm as I walked home from teaching yoga.  There seemed to be two currents of air, doing a dance,  one cool, the other warmer.  As I walked along, I'd feel a swirl of warmth followed by a much cooler breeze, and this continued for the whole walk home.  As I turned onto Highland Drive, I spied Orion overhead at about the same instant that I began to hear the honking of a migrating flock of geese high overhead.  Perhaps they were navigating by the stars as well.  To the north, Ursa Major turned upside down as it pointed toward the North Star.

With even higher temperatures forecast for the next few days, there will be rapid changes all around us.

Territory

A crow cawed from the top of a large maple tree as I walked home yesterday.   Its call was answered from another tree several yards over.  What a different world it must look like from the crow's point of view.  Buildings spread out across the hills underneath all the places to perch.  Nothing in the layout of blocks, streets, building lots, houses, or title deeds matters - just that there are trees to roost in, and food and water.  I don't know what these neighborhood crows eat - they may travel for sustenance and just use these trees for nesting.  At any rate, they have no sense of, or respect for, the ownership that we claim to the squares of land.  They sort out their territories in their own way, singing from the tree tops.

Energy Fluctuations

Today oscillated between bursts of energy and wanting to take a nap.  The main event of the day was my first yoga photo shoot - getting some new photos for my studio bios and for use on my own website, which is under development.  The photographer is a professional, and also a friend of mine and a yoga teacher, all of which made it an an enjoyable and productive session.  (... all that optimism, and I haven't seen the photos yet...)

We also had a hunter-gathering (shopping) trip to three stores for household supplies, pet supplies, and groceries.  Saturday afternoon isn't the ideal time to be out.  I suspect most of the many, many other people who are out feel that way too.  But we survived the traffic and the long lines at the store, and made it home with everything we need.  We only have to go for the non-grocery items once every 2-3 months, so it's just an occasional ordeal.

In between the activities, I'd find myself sitting with a cup of tea, and perhaps a cat on my lap, thinking I should be doing something else, but not feeling the energy to get up and do it.  Eventually, after I had nursed the tea for a while, I'd gather myself and focus on another task from the to-do list.

Late Season Snow

Snow fell overnight, and I woke this morning to find everything covered with a layer of white.   The dogwood tree outside the kitchen window was like a postcard picture - every branch, every twig, frosted perfectly.

As sometimes happens late in winter, the snow came on falling temperatures after several relatively warm days.  When the snow came, it was a little wet and sticky.  Paved surfaces had enough heat that the snow melted on contact, but it coated the lawns, bushes and trees.

Beautiful to look at, while not causing any transportation problems.  That's about perfect.

Balancing Preparation and Spontaneity

Tonight was my last class of a busy yoga teaching week.  From last Friday through today, I taught 14 classes.  Until I counted them up, I hadn't realized how many there were.  I'm surprised I don't feel more exhausted, but now I'll have a break for a couple of days before Sunday, which is my busiest day most weeks, with three classes.

While teaching so much has taken up a lot of time, it also has made me a much better teacher more quickly.  Some new teachers barely manage to find one regular class a week to teach, so I have been very fortunate.  I also work hard at it, continually looking for new things to teach and trying new things in my own practice.  I keep detailed notes about every class I teach.  Perhaps one day I'll feel that is no longer useful, but I find it helpful to refer back to what I did previously for a class, or I'll use the notes for a particularly successful class as the starting point for the next class I teach.  But I've never taught two classes using exactly the same poses in the same order.

Teaching a class has a strong improvisational component - reacting to what I'm seeing and sensing from the students.  Of course, improvisation without sound preparation and structure is just chaos.  There has to be a balance of preparation and spontaneity in each class, and each class I'm trying to find it.

Late Winter

This time of year, one day can be warm and spring-like, and the next can be icy cold.  Today was clear, but with decreasing temperature and a biting, gusty wind.  Beautiful to look at, but a shock to be out in.  On the walk home tonight, I saw the first pink buds atop a magnolia tree.

In just a few days, though, it will be in the 70s.  Then, as each week passes, the chances of wintry weather diminish.  The cherry blossoms and daffodils will splash color across the bare landscape, and then the trees will begin to green.

Late winter will slide into early spring - there's no way to tell exactly when that happens.  But one day, I'll walk outside and know that winter is gone - until next year.

Crocus

March 1.  Blue sky morning, not a cloud in sight, and the sun is streaming down, stirring a cool, light breeze and lighting up the crocus that have emerged.  It seems too soon to call these early flowers of spring.  They are, rather, flowers of late winter.  We'll have plenty of cold weather, perhaps even more snow before spring arrives.  But along with the lengthening days, the crocus emphatically declare that winter's time is short now.