Week 1

I lived alone this week. Alli has been gone and so has Jonah, and I am not good at living alone. I stop cleaning. I stop shaving. I forget there are people in the world who care about me. I get sad. Reading, then, and the inward turns I took because of my reading, became my primary focus. Thank you, Thich Nhat Hanh: I learned how to shop for groceries while I was hungry. Thank you, Gary Snyder, for reminding me that this world matters beyond only the space I live in. Thank you for reminding me that the world contains sadness outside of just missing my family.

I learned how to breathe this week, which helped. In the shower, I sat down, allowing the hot water to fall all over me, and I breathed in and out, slowly, the way Thich Nhat Hanh explained it. This made my body move slower, and helped me reconnect with awareness of my physical self. There is a story of my uncle in Ecuador, a master of martial arts, who, after a horrible motorcycle accident in which no one was around to help, slowed his body’s heartbeat and stopped the bleeding that should have killed him. He got up and walked himself several miles to the hospital. I heard this story when I was young, and though I believed it (since when you’re that young you believe anything your parents tell you), I did not understand the story quite like I do now, until I slowed my breathing this week, until I showed myself that the body can and should be slowed, focused on, given over to, listened to. I have meditated before, of course, for I am a lover of the old Christian mystics, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Anthony, and some of the contemporaries, Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and these have taught me to pay attention to my soul speaking. They have taught me to listen to my anxiety—then utter a word: perhaps “Father,” or “Help,” or “Need,” or “Love”—to recall myself to the center. So I did. I have had years of practice. Still, despite my experience in this area of quiet listening, I have never spent so much time listening only to my body, feeling my body expand and contract, feeling my belly rise and fall, and my lungs fill with air so that I could picture everything inside them move, could feel the blood become healthy and strong and clean.

I lay down sometime in the middle of the week, like Thich Nhat Hanh described, and I counted my breaths. I am thankful for this time, since it made me thankful in the moments—thankful for the moments—thankful that in these times I was not suffering for loneliness. I was only breathing, only existing, and this is as close I have come to obeying God’s command, Be still: know that I am God.

Did this help me write? It should have, but I did not write much this week. Okay. I did not write at all. I have yet to fall back into writing since Jonah’s birth, because I haven’t had the time, space, energy. This week without him should have given me space, I know, but I suffer from loneliness, and the breathing only helped me escape that feeling—it did not fix me completely. Hopefully I will write next week, even after Alli and Jonah return. Forgive me.