Wild Hearted Woman

I didn't have a great relationship with my grandmother, even though she was the only remaining grandparent I had left. We were never very close.

I'd built up so many bitter memories of missed birthday parties, piano recitals, gigs and school plays that my heart had no room to receive anything else from her.

She had grown cantankerous, temperamental in her old age.  I remember one afternoon I drove out to see her after she had cataract surgery, I took her out to lunch and spent the entire meal listening to her complain about her children, her sister, her grandchildren.  What a disappointment we all were to her. What a waste, her family had been.

Needless to say, none of that was fun to listen to, but I dismissed it.  In one ear and out the other; I had learned long ago not to need anything from my grandmother.  Not validation, not praise, not support, not appreciation- I knew better than to expect anything more.

We finished our meal, settled the bill, and drove back to her house. Hugs, kisses, "Love you, grandma,"  "Love you too, sweetie."

And then I drove away.

She passed away a few months after that. She took a very bad fall, and was unable to reach a phone.  She laid on the floor for several days before my aunt discovered her, and she was rushed to the hospital, very weak, very sick.

A week later, she died.

Her body was under complete attack from lung cancer, 60 years of nonstop smoking, an enemy that cannot be defeated.

I watched her breath her very last, surrounded by all of her children, their children, her great-grandchildren. Both of my sisters held my hands tightly as we watched her small chest heave and rattle and tears ran down all of our faces. Death is final, no matter what your relationship. I wish I could say that her passing had caused me to feel differently about our relationship, and that the finality of her death caused me to miss her in some ways.

To be truthfully honest, not much changed after her death.  I still felt angry about how our time was spent together, or rather, how our time wasn't spent together. After her memorial, life went invariably on, and I haven't really looked back since.

Except for today.

Today I found myself driving around the town she had lived in for most of her adult life, the town my parents grew up and went to school in, found each other and fell in love and got married in; the town I spent so much of my early childhood in.

Our family dentist operates out of that town, and there I found myself after an early morning teeth cleaning, driving around just to stir up memories.

It's a sunny, early spring day. The temperature is surprisingly warm, and cherry blossoms are just starting to bloom.  It's a year ago this week that my grandmother passed away, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been thinking about her a lot the past few days.

It started out as a drive throughout the downtown city square, listening to an old Tony Bennett CD from the 70s that had actually belonged to my grandmother.  I nicked it from a stack of CDs that my dad brought back from her house in the weeks after she died, when her kids tried to sort and sift through piles of her belongings and divvied up who would take what of the smaller, less valuable items.

Just something to remember her by, I had thought to myself as I tucked it away, under my arm.  I do actually remember running through the halls of her house as a child, the voice of Tony Bennett drifting throughout the rooms, warming the house from the inside out.

I kept the CD in my car, and today was only the second time I've listened to it since her passing.

Pretty soon, I found myself driving past the house she lived in most recently, and the house my grandparents shared when grandpa was still alive.  The house with the in-ground pool and a full-size entertainment bar in the back room.

Memories flashed back from driving up her driveway the night of her memorial, and of the slideshow my cousin's daughter had put together in her memory.  The albums and photographs we had all compiled and arranged into a sort of shrine to her life, the hugs and the strange feeling of gathering the entire family into her house without her presence in our midst.

I remembered summers spent in the pool out back, where I learned how to dive off a diving board, and where I graduated from water wings to diving goggles.

I remembered wind chimes.  I remembered her letting me help plant flowers in her garden.

When I got a little older, she let me put makeup all over her face and do her hair.

I remembered how the kitchen counters were always messy and how the dishes were never done.

I remembered the two separate bedrooms, one for my grandpa, and one for my grandma, and I remembered never understanding why they were never in the same room at the same time.

As I passed both of the houses, and continued on my way homewards, I could feel the sensation of emotions starting to well up, but no tears came.  I felt a little sad, a little nostalgic, a little sense of wonder, a little remorse for the fact that the past cannot be changed or altered.

My CD had run its' course, and I was hurriedly leaving that town far in my rear-view, so I decided to leave that moment in the past and switched out Tony Bennett for a little Taylor Swift and broke out my sunglasses.

As I drove, I couldn't shake the memories of my grandmother, though. I thought about her life, where she came from, what had happened to her, whom she had loved, how that had destroyed her, the children she raised, the children she hurt, the ones, in turn, who hurt her.

I realized today that my grandmother was a wild-hearted woman.

Circumstance and tradition and the century she was born into held her locked into one place, one lifestyle, one marriage, but what I remember of my grandmother the most was the look on her face when the sky shone down on her skin and the wind whipped against her frame, and everything about her was wild.

Her heart would sing in those moments. She longed to run wild with the wind.  She longed to pick up and go and never look back. I didn't see it then, but I saw it today in every memory of her face that I have gathered over the past 21 years.

When I would catch her staring out her kitchen window, lost in a world of thought millions of miles away, I saw it.

When her tone of voice would soften as she recounted the travels that accompanied her youth, always the stories were of her and my grandpa travelling together, but I saw how she wished she had adventured more, on her own.

When she would vigorously warn against falling in love, because men will break your heart ten ways to Sunday, and how she applauded women near and far for being their own captains.

 Her favorite people were the wild ones, the looser ones, the unpredictable ones, the loud ones.  She just wanted to run wild with them.

I believe that my grandmother loved her life, and her children, even though she was often poor at showing it.  I do.

But I also don't really believe that my grandmother ever wanted to be a wife, or a mother, or a grandmother.  I don't think she ever found a way to express that. I believe a lot of hurt was left in the wake of that failure of expression. 

Oddly enough, as I sped through old country roads, windows down and music blaring, I felt it was the best way to honor her memory. I felt as though if she were in the car with me, she would throw her head back and laugh, and stick her small arm through the passenger's window, to feel the breeze, too.  She'd say something unexpected about how much she liked that Taylor Swift woman, and she'd probably close her eyes and whisper, "Oh, let's just drive to the ocean."

I realized today that I'm a lot more like her than I ever realized, and as that realization came over me, so did a wave of tears that led to heavy sobs.

Today, a year to the week after her passing, I finally began to grieve for my grandmother, and for her wild heart.

"You can't make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that

And if he wants to leave
Then let him leave
You are terrifying
And strange and beautiful
Something not everyone knows how to love."

-Warsan Shire, For Women Who Are Difficult to Love.

Flight 383 With Service to San Jose from Portland.

My Pacific Ocean. Golden from this height, reflecting the light of the warm, magnificent sun. 

I reflect, as I sit, on the times I've spent driving the coastline it borders. Up and down, up and down. Caressed by it's cool breezes, transfixed by the voracious kelp forests that seem to spring out of nowhere, and yet go on for miles and miles; awestruck by the unique monoliths that have been carved by force throughout years of constant motion.

I thank God for the Pacific Ocean. It has cradled me from the time I was an infant, and it has carried me continually forward.

I have loved it deeply for as long as I can remember, and the call I feel I must answer to originates from far below its surface.

People look at me kind of funny when I tell them I want to be a shark biologist. "What do you do with a career like that?" 

Yes, I want to work with sharks. I want to study them, observe them, swim with them in open water, having learned how to control, not banish, fear as Jacques Cousteau would say. I want to conserve them and educate people about their importance and protect them and help others to practice respect for them.

But it's not all about sharks, not 100% of the time.

Mostly, I've come to realize that I'm here to help protect this ocean, and all the oceans around the world.

I want to cradle it as it has cradled me and I want to protect it from harm.  

Sharks, like all ocean inhabitants, must have a home, and I want their home to be healthy and safe. Strong, far from threat of depletion, stagnation, destruction, pollution.

Of course, the point must be made that nothing is new under the sun, to everything there is a season, God holds the entire world in the palm of His mighty hands. Amen and amen. Who am I to trouble myself over worries that the Creator is well aware of? God's got this under control, I realize.

But God also teaches us that He himself walks on the ocean floor, and He has instructed us to protect it, to safeguard it, to support the life that it sustains. 

Surely the Almighty doesn't need my help in keeping our oceans clean. Was I there from the beginning? No. 

 Did I witness Him stopping up the rushing waters to keep from flooding the earth? No. 

Do I know the names of every creature in every coral nook, in every deep trench, in every fizzling fissure at the bottom of every fault? No.

Will I ever walk on the ocean floor without protection? No.

But the Almighty does His work through humanity, doesn't he? Yes. 

I am to believe according to His word that I have a call on my life which He has foreordained that I must answer to, aren't I? Yes.

Surely He would not have placed this much of a stirring in my heart if it were not meant for His purpose? Yes.

Be good stewards of this earth, His command for all of us. For He has created all things, and He keeps them all in His hands, even numbering the hairs on our heads. He loves His creation. Every bird of the air, every beast of the field, every crawling thing, every living thing that swims.

I, too, love this creation, for it sings every day of the glory and love of God. I love this planet. I love this ocean.

How blessed are we to witness the physical outpouring of His creativity? How are we to honestly stand before His creation and not be brought to our knees by its beauty and the way every atom screams of His love, and His majesty?

All of us love in different ways, with different paths of communication and acts of service and declarations of respect. All of us are called to love this world in different ways. Some are called to protect human life, some are called to protect economies, religion, education, freedom. All of us are called to love one another and to be good stewards of the world we live in. 

As for me, I'll always be here, for the rest of my life, to help love this ocean, to help protect it. This is my home.

There's nothing so beautiful as the sun shining on the western coastline of the Pacific Ocean. 

Thank you Heavenly Father for this creation. For this ocean. 

You bless me by it every day. 

This Might Be a New Year's Post

Here's the truth:

When I try to put 2014 into words, I stumble.

when I think back on 2014, no words come to mind.  Just pictures.

Just memories.

It was one hell of a year, though- if I'm honest.

In late 2013, as I normally do, I predicted that the theme for 2014 would be summed up by one word: unity.

I can't begin to tell you how deeply that word has invaded my life over the past year.

Unity.
To live and breathe in unison, understanding and supporting and praying for each other.  This is something that my family has had experience re-learning over the past 12 months, starting in February when my sister and niece moved in with us, because her husband suddenly decided he didn't want to be a husband anymore.  Or a father.

One day, she came over to visit for the afternoon- and she never went home to her old life.

God has been merciful this year, and full of grace, as always, but there has been a heartache cast over 2014 that none of us predicted, expected, or asked for.

My family's hurts are just some of many that all humanity has experienced over the past 12 months.  I know individuals who have struggled far more than I have, and who have carried a far deeper hurt than I ever could.  Again, God has been merciful this year.

He has brought us back together under one roof, and as I reflect over the past year and all of the jagged ups and the rollicking downs it carried with it, I feel moved to tears by something that runs very deep within my heart.  When I think of the faces belonging to my father, mother, sister, niece, unity pierces my very being.  We are one.  We have sheltered storms.  We have broken barriers.  We have fought the enemy in many ways.  We are still fighting.  God has made us warriors, with the hearts of warriors, and we are united.

I love them more now than I have ever loved them before in my entire life.

2014 was not all struggle, though.

There's a good bit to be said for a lot of happy memories that I made in 2014 as well.

I belly-laughed more times than I can count, and I died my hair bright orange.

I  fell in love with this quote, " Wilderness is not a luxury, but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread." -Edward Abbey, and I fell in love with adventuring.

I watched my niece grow a little more every single day, and learn how to use her hands and mouth and to hear words come bubbling forth in tiny sentence spurts.  Now she sings at full volume "Let it go, let it go!" And she brings a smile to my face, daily. Her world is clouded, but she is a brazen beam of light.

I went to my first major league soccer game and I made new friends.

I met one of my biggest inspirations at a book signing of his in downtown Portland. His name is Chris Burkard, and he's the realest, most down-to-earth, insanely gifted nature and surf photographer/adventurer I've ever come across. A true pioneer. I got to tell him one of his trips inspired the Cali roadtrip Bek and I took 2 summers ago all the way down Highway 101 and Highway 1. He smiled like a little kid.

I ate a lot of really good food and took a lot of work trips to Bellevue/Seattle and got to spend a good portion of all those work trips playing with my friends.

I skated more this year than I have since I first learned how when I lived at the beach, and I taught myself how to disassemble and reassemble a skateboard.

I went to California a lot.

I saw a lot of amazing concerts, including my spirit animal Cher, and my not-so-secret crush, Justin Timberlake.

I felt the thrill of riding on the back of a friend's motorcycle for the very first time.

I watched my sister exercise the deepest amount of strength I have ever seen come forth from one person. She is a true warrior and I am humbled by her fortitude.  I am proud of her perseverance.

I spent my first ever cage dive surrounded by my three best friends and I stared my future directly in the face, and experienced that elusive moment of discovering exactly what it is you want to do with the rest of your life.

I climbed to the bottom of so many waterfalls, and stuck my feet in so many mountain streams.

I canoed.  I ran. I renewed my passport. I ignored all the signs that read "stay on the path."

I beached. I worked my ass off.  I painted so many walls. I celebrated a lot of weddings.

I took a lot of road trips with really fantastic people.

I flew to SoCal on a whim and saw One Direction live at one of the world's biggest stadiums with 90,000 screaming teenage girls, and I survived.

I watched Christian Hosoi's small son touch the sky at the Vans Skate Park in Orange.

I climbed 1,000 very old steps to watch a Hawaiian sunset from the top of a mountain.

I cage-dove with sharks, twice. Twice!

I drank a lot of smoothies.

I cliff-jumped off the side of a waterfall.

I bought a ukulele, and learned how to play it.

I crashed an ATV into a tree on a ranch in Hawaii.  I got back on. I raced around hairpin turns and figure 8s and I was good at it.

I met and hugged the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, New Found Glory, outside a tiny venue in downtown Seattle.

I rediscovered my long-lost love for the Ninja Turtles.

I spent my 21st birthday being rolled around in a wheelchair at Disney World by my crazy family.

I healed from a heartbreak that cast a dark shadow over most of 2013.

I fell in love with music again.

I rebuilt bridges that I had long since burned.

I learned how to feel comfortable in my own skin, again.

I rang in the New Year with new friends and also friends older than the flood- there was singing, dancing, glass-raising, hugging, and a love running very deep that can only be found in a group of people who have known each other for the longest time.

I spent the first day of 2015 back beside my favorite ocean, on my favorite stretch of northern Oregon coastline, with my closest friend and my sweet pup. The sun shone warm all day long, and the tunes were only the best of the best.

Unity happens in a lot of different ways. As I look back over 2014, I'm proud of the things we've all accomplished, and I'm excited for whatever journey 2015 brings to me. I'll gladly step out the door and get carried away on an adventure any day, and I hope that's exactly what 2015 will bring, a year full of adventures.

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice."
-T.S. Elliot.

Riverside Sitting.

Sometimes I wish I could float down a river, the way a fallen leaf glides through the ripples and follows the current down.

Effortless.

Bobbling.

No movement, no drowning, no struggle.

I think I would just lay flat on the surface.  Straight as a board, eyes turned up towards the heaven, watching clouds and branches and stars and birds pass in a continual motion; a never-ending forward movement.

I heard a question the other day:

"Would you rather loose all your old memories and only make new ones, or loose the ability to make new memories and live the rest of your life only with the old memories you've made so far?"

Right now, in this moment, I would like to make new memories and forget all the old ones.

I would like to just move forward.

I think we constantly underestimate the beauty of what it means to be a blank slate.

This life is sad, and I don't write anymore because I'm tired of regurgitating the feelings I've already felt.  Why make yourself relive the pain if the first time you felt it was bad enough?

Sure, there's flaws with this theory.  You could talk about catharsis, healing, training your mind to constantly be searching for inspiration which is a natural combatant for depression.  All of that is true.

For the past two years, I've felt like stopping my creativity has been a way to protect myself from a million and one tiny little hurts that have happened.  I don't regret that.  I laughed more, because I could put things behind me and leave them there.  I stressed less because I wasn't trying to turn my anxiety into art.  I focused on becoming logical and business-like and that grew me up in ways I can't begin to describe.

Today I come back to the written word with a heavy heart, which is ironic because I've been running away from writing every time I've had a heavy heart for the past two years.

But today, as I sit here, in my car by the river, 10 AM blaring from my dashboard clock, I come back to the written word.

There are lives caught in the balance today all over the world, the outcomes of which nobody knows for certain, but the resounding knowledge is that there isn't much time left. For cancer-wracked bodies, lives plagued by old age and terrible hunger. For you, for me.

When I watch the leaves float down the river, I am jealous because those leaves have all the time in the world.

For them, there is no cancer, there is no death.  There is no repression, there's no stopper in the flow of creative thought.  There's only the long outstretch of constant forward motion.

I know in the deepest center of my soul that God has designed everything for a reason, and I have had enough experience with the flat-out unknown and inexplicable in my life that I know full well trusting in Him is the only way to navigate through it all. "If you don't swim, you'll drown."

We're still intellectual beings, though.  He created us that way. And sometimes, even though in the deepest center of your soul you are trusting in Him, you find yourself sitting by the river watching Autumn unfold, repeatedly asking the question "why?"

Leaves never have to ask why.

Maybe that's the real reason I wish I could be one of them right now.

I can't promise that this is a return to writing for me, because I don't know that returning to writing will improve my life.

What I do know is that today I was moved to pick up my pen, and that movement was sparked by a very profound sorrow which has forecasted the remainder of today.

In which, instead of focusing on a million and one tiny little hurts, I will focus on sending up a million and one tiny little prayers for peace upon hurting people.

That is something only humans and angels can do, and that alone is reason enough to keep moving forward.

Crying to Ben Folds

Thursday morning. 8:49 am.  Stop and go traffic.

A song starts playing on your iPod, the intro unfamiliar, yet the voice so clearly penetrates layer after layer of your subconscious and strikes the center of your heart. Kill shot. You know exactly what this is.

This is a Ben Folds ballad. Doesn't matter which one, they're all good.

Briefly, your mind darts back to that one conversation around the dinner table you had with two of your closest friends when Ben Folds happened to come up in conversation.  "I'm not going to lie," you remember starting, "The man makes me bawl like a baby sometimes."

"Oh... I know," Your friend nods her head in agreement, then looks up sheepishly, "Sometimes, I just lie awake at night with my headphones.  And I don't even know why, I just start crying. I have nothing to cry about, but it always happens when I'm listening to Ben Folds."

Words cannot even describe the warmth that spread all over when you realized you were not the only one who experienced emotional trauma at the hands of a Ben Folds ballad.

As your mind turns over that memory, you find yourself thinking, "Don't start crying."

But it is too late.

Suddenly the words come crashing over you.

"I love you more than any man has loved before.
I love you more than all the stars up in the sky.
I think that we should settle down and live happily forever after
What do you think of that?" (One Down, Ben Folds.)

Boom. Water works.

Why?

Isolated, the lyrics aren't even that great.  Just reading them off the screen sounds a little lame, but gosh.  It's all in the set-up folks.  Preceding and following these lines is a song purely about meeting a lyric deadline, and complaining about whiny musicians in today's music industry.  Suddenly these lines hit you like a brick wall out of nowhere and it knocks you so far over that you have no choice but to burst into tears.

Or that's all that I was left with, anyway.

Needless to say, any morning started by a case of the cries while moments away from arriving at work is never really a good morning.  To top it off, a migraine has been a-brewin' all day long in this silly head of mine, so most of my workday was spent cradling my forehead in my left hand, feeling my temple throb in the most unholy of manners, while turning off all the lights in the office with my right hand because they are too damn bright and that is most annoying.

Brighter than the office track lighting, however, is the inevitable change that is coagulating on the horizon. Yes. Coagulating.

Suddenly, I'm being forced to actually plan my life farther than 6 months down the road and I'm learning some things about my decisions that have surprised me.  I don't want to give a lot away, right now, so forgive my vagueness- just know that it's a good sort of surprise.  It's kind of like finding something you didn't know you'd lost, but now that you've found it, you realized you've been missing it terribly all along, "Oh, there you are."

Still, the winds of change are starting to twist and turn and there's always that feeling of loosing your footing. I think, in a way, I'm looking forward to loosing my footing for a little while.

I can feel my identity starting to move forward into a new phase of life, and I'm running, breathless, to keep up with it.

There are still a few constants, however.  People that will always stand beside you, during every horizon of coagulation. I've been reflecting a lot over the past week about these people in my life and I can say right now that it's hard to find the words to express my gratitude for having them by my side.

They're the kind of people who know you better than you know yourself.  When you're tapping your foot idly, they know that you're frustrated about something because it's impossible for you to sit still when you're frustrated.  Then they confront you about it, and you vehemently deny it, and stop moving your foot- all the while not realizing your fingers have started tapping involuntarily in place of your foot.  With a gentle smile, they motion to your hands. Oof.  Point proven.

They're the kind of people who grab your hands on days when you are at your lowest level of self worth, and they force you to look into their eyes, while they proceed to tell you exactly why it is that you are special, and why you should love yourself better, the way they love you.

They're the kind of people who no matter how far away they are, you can feel immediately close to them by just spending an afternoon on the phone with them while researching international volunteer programs.  You don't even have to talk to each other. They're just there, at the other end of the phone, and you draw comfort from that.

They're the kind of people who love you enough to tell you the hard things, the gritty things, the things you don't want to hear, but you need to hear.  They're not afraid to kick your ass when it needs to be kicked.  Those are the people you need in your life.  Of course, if you're as lucky as I am, they'll kick your ass and offer you homemade cookies or lemon cake at the same time, because they love you and they don't want to see you hurting.

I've been blessed with a happy few individuals who have been there for me in immeasurable ways for the past four or five years. They have stood with me through the silt and the sludge of turbulent teenage years, and they have allowed me to walk beside them during their toughest moments, as well.

History is not something to be taken lightly, you know?  When you have years and years of memories compiled with people that you love, treasure that.  Take care of it.  Be good to it, because there's nothing worse than having to start over.  There's nothing worse than loosing those people because you've taken them for granted, or you've assumed that everything in your relationship is hunky-dory when it's really not, because they could be falling apart.  You could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and their world could be moving on without you.

They're the kind of people you love so much, that a silly song on the radio or a commercial on TV can catapult you into an emotional roller coaster of soaring joy and overwhelming love-that-is-so-deep-it-hurts because it reminded you of them, and their impact and their presence in your life.  Hold onto those people.

I plan on holding on so tight to mine.

My kind of people who will listen to Ben Folds with me on repeat and not only forgive, but accept my silent waves of tears caused by a silly adoration of a Southern pianist with a gift for sass and poetry.

Which, to bring this completely full circle, I just have to add that on my way home from work tonight I found myself crying, again, to Ben Folds, but to a different song this time.  Thus, for the second time today, I found myself crying to Ben Folds, and that, honestly, has to be a new record.

For those of you who have been there for me, rock-bottom and sky-high, thank you.  I love you.

Always.

June Gloom.

Hurts come in little waves.

Saturday mornings dawn earlier than desired, you're suddenly awake by 7:45am and you have a dauntingly wide open day ahead of you.

You've become so enveloped in work that you don't know how to weekend anymore.

People slip in and out of your life, like little clouds. They appear suddenly on the horizon, and then they lazily drift away once enough time has been invested into your relationship. You don't keep in touch with them anymore.  You don't let them know when you're sitting at the coffee shop minutes away from their house.  You don't text a "How have you been?" even though they're constantly on your mind.

You just stop trying, sometimes.

After two episodes of Freaks and Geeks re-runs and half a container of last night's Chinese food for breakfast, it's only 10am and you're already tired of today.  The weekend you were so looking forward to has become obsolete; now you're counting the hours until it's over and you can go back to work.

There's probably 300 books on your bookshelf, more than half of which are still unread, but you can't commit to any of them.  So you just keep buying new ones.

Kurt Vonnegut says "So it goes," and Salinger quips, "Very big deal."

There's a floor to mop and laundry to rotate, guitar strings to buy, and cash to withdraw from the ATM.

But what happens after you finish those errands?

Where do you go?

I miss the ocean today.

I wish I could see the swell.

I wish I could hear the thunder of surf instead of voices.

"You can't go to the ocean today," A voice whispers from the back of my mind, the same voice that whispered the same lie to me last weekend.  It's a voice that stems from fear.  Fear of being alone when I get there. "Your guitar needs new strings.  That card you've been meaning to send won't send itself."

In weakness, I surrender to this voice.

Maybe I'll get there next weekend.

My Yoga Mat

The smell my yoga mat carries is one of my favorite smells.

Though it spends most of its life rolled up and tucked away in the corner of my bedroom, next to my dresser, it carries with it a special thing called love.

I fling it out before me and it settles, unrolled, onto my carpet.

It is aqua blue with navy lotus flowers painted all over, and it sparkles with flecks of sand, still, even though the last time I did yoga on the beach was over two years ago.

During mat sequences, particularly during child's pose, I rest my forehead against the soft blue and breathe deeply in. Eyes closed, I distinctly smell every place my yoga mat has ever traveled to.  I smell the shampoo from the downstairs carpet in our living room, I smell a lingering, but faint, pine tree smell mixed with cigar smoke from when I used to visit Becca at her house in Washington.  I smell the clear, strong smell of sand, and I feel the granules stick to my arms. Easily, I smell the musty old house I lived in during the Summer of 2012.  I smell a tiny hint of pine-sol from the bedroom floor in the rental condo we stayed in when my family went to Disneyworld several years ago. I can smell various lotions and perfumes which have loosed themselves from my body and mixed with the fibers of the mat. Distinctly, my nose can pick out the slight burnt scent of sun damage from countless afternoons spent sunbathing in the backyard, using my mat as a cushion to soften the cement patio.

Bad things don't happen on yoga mats.  Did you know that?  I'm fairly certain it's science and can be proven indisputably.

Here's what does happen on yoga mats:

• Relaxation
• Strengthening
• Surrender
• Laughter
• Happy fingers and toes
• Sun Salutations
• Acceptance
• Renewal
• Yoga
• Stretching
• Learning to love yourself
• Becoming a Warrior
• Breathing
• Stress-Relief
• Steadfastness
• Prayer

Also, memories.  Memories are made on yoga mats, and they're the best sort of memories, because they're tied to nothing but good feelings which cannot be altered.

Tonight, I'm thanking God for my steadfast friend which has seen me through many phases of my life.  Still, after seeing me at my worst and best, it lies outstretched, always ready to help me re-group. 

"Not my circus.  Not my monkeys."
-Polish Proverb