Breathing Room
How to anchor during wild times
In Iceland, thick patches of lupine stretch along the roadside. Cones of purple-blue flowers, each tipped with a fleck of white, like small proud flags reaching as far as the eye can see. It’s a lupine invasion, a friend says.
May the whole world be so invaded, I reply.
There are places where the Earth insists you pay attention. Kauai is one. Years ago, a few miles from Mount Waiʻaleʻale, one of the rainiest places on Earth, her magical power brought me to my knees.
After walking to the Kalalau Lookout, high above the Nāpali coast, the clouds parted and a rainbow appeared. Something in me cracked open, not unlike the smelly skin covering the noni fruit I was eating. A habitual resistance to the beauty around and within me — for we are of this Earth — melted into pure aliveness along with the impossibly sweet fruit pudding in my mouth.
Iceland sears past my normal defenses too. Driving from the airport to the Blue Lagoon, you can feel the massive weight of the rolling dark brown lava fields, only a few months old, against the older volcanic land masses — covered with sage green moss and lichens. While the billowing steam above the milky blue water thankfully obscures the many tourists from view, we drop into a dream reality. Back on the road to Reykjavik, the sunlight seems filtered through a diamond prism — charged with a sublime note, as if a god had rung a bell echoing through the sky.
The day before my birthday, we hike to a hot spring river, past steaming waterfalls and a boiling gray pool of liquid lava, like a witch’s cauldron, to the crest of the mountain where a shallow river gently weaves its way through the bright green valley. As we walk up the river, the water becomes too hot for even a toe to enter. So we meander down, testing the flow as we go, until enough cold from another nearby stream mixes in, allowing us to recline along its sandy bottom. Soft wisps of white clouds dance across the green skyline, like children playing on their mother’s breast.
We forget the annoying black flies from the ascent. They seemed to prefer the men though we all had to continually brush them away, hands fluttering before our faces, until at the top of the hike, the wind did the job.
There’s a term I heard years ago that I love: body smiling. For hours we delight in the pulsing hot and cool streams of water washing over our sun-kissed skin — and every cell of my body smiles. I could linger here forever in the midnight sun. But hunger and friends back in Reykjavik call for our return.
A part of my soul anchors in that river like a soft, heavy stone. My body remembers — I feel the blend of hot and cool streams in my veins. After this trek, I am more at home: in my body, on this earth, in this life.
I like to consider the fact that all the most beautiful places we’ve ever been to continue to exist. Every waterfall that’s ever graced our faces with mist. Every beach that beats with the rhythm of the tide. The wind breathing through the tall pine forests. It’s all still there. The waterfall misting, the waves crashing, the pines standing tall.
At least, unless we humans have had our way pillaging, cutting, and extracting resources from this precious Earth body. Unless the pine beetles, now with two or more life-cycles a year (because the winters are not cold enough), have sucked the blood from the heart of the pine forests.
Unless it’s a National park that Trump is teeing up to auction off to the highest bidder.1
Some things cannot be bought or sold
The engine of breath: This one just leaving. This one I feel deeper in my belly, releasing with a grateful sigh. There is no cost for this cubic space of air in my lungs. Capillaries meeting it in their magical exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Then ferrying that charged nourishment to my cells, muscles, organs. This brain, somehow knowing how to type these words on a metal keyboard, on a round wooden table, with peach colored begonias on it.
This city (I am now in Stockholm), populated by people from around the world. Couples with babies (I’ve seen so many of them — it’s a baby bonanza here!) are everywhere. A gruff waiter brings eggs shakshuka to me in the grateful rain — heart breaking over the wildfires displacing hundreds of thousands in France, Spain and beyond.
My friend, Ann, who we playfully named the queen of Sweden in the Mistressmind group I met her in two years ago, is now my elegant guide. I stayed with Ann before coming to my current home at Unity, a modern workspace/residence a ferry ride away from downtown Stockholm. Her home, just a few more minutes south of here, is filled with art — including a life-size, garlanded orange cow she purchased from a public art-prize that placed cows in Europe, Chicago, and Tokyo.
Ann is an inspiration. She’s a few years older than me and can deadlift twice her weight. Her serene royal-blue eyes gaze on the world with a sparkling equanimity. She is a woman who has made a life of beauty and purpose — even without a man, a job (she’s retired), or a social media account. I’m encouraging her to get back on the dating apps because I know the way she throws her head back when she laughs will delight a man who would be so enriched by her presence.
In a few hours she’s picking me up to take me to Drottningholm, to look at dresses of the real queen of Sweden. We’ll walk the palace grounds and she will teach me the Swedish names of the flowers we encounter.
I am not “on vacation.” I am working, tending to my online business, helping a woman back in Boulder birth an inspiring book, managing credit card debt, and Airbnb payments, flights, and bikes, and scooters, oh my! I am happily #homefree and exploring Europe to see if I can plot a path out of the USA — as the clownish nightmare continues to pummel my country in a dizzying cacophony of corruption fueled by propaganda, hate, or indifference.
To be out of the mindfield of the US is a relief. It’s one of my favorite parts of traveling: Before you leave the airport or step off the train, as you touch down in another country, you can sense this subtle yet palpable shift.
The human race has created thousands of different languages and customs, foods and cultures…traveling allows you to feel how other people live differently, from the inside out. People don’t struggle in the same ways you assumed everyone did. There’s a different air everyone’s breathing. Sometimes, quite literally — the perfumes I smell wandering in the shops in Stockholm have a pleasing refinement I haven’t encountered elsewhere.
It reminds me of a subway ride I took in New York last month. We were heading uptown to see the American Ballet Theater’s premiere of Don Quixote at Lincoln Center when a man got on our subway car with such a noxious cologne I almost choked. In minutes, the entire car filled with a sharp, putrid scent. What company thought bug repellent was something to model in a man’s cologne? And how the hell do they sell it to unwitting men?!
I am following a different scent…a delicate calling like a siren’s song daring me to the depths of my unremembered dreams. I am allowing myself to simply breathe. To ride the inhales and exhales like the waves of an ocean…
Isn’t it incredible how much we hold our breath? Sometimes, before I fully awake in the morning, I sense my breath as it is when I’m sleeping. Relaxed, heaving exhales like waves effortlessly releasing on a pebbled shore. Expansive inhales gliding into my lungs like a 747 lifting me into dreamland.
How I wish I could breathe like that consciously! But my breathing quickly returns to its more stilted, waking rhythm. I find myself prying it open, time and time again, reminding myself to simply let the air in, and let it go, freely.
To allow my jaw to soften. To lower the sides of a bony bird cage my little one inside had to construct around her fluttering heart for protection. To throw my head back and laugh like the queen of Sweden, whose reign is just beginning.
We are all kings and queens — sovereigns of our own domains. And we are the servants of our true desires.
Sovereignty is a devotion. It is a practice of deeply caring for oneself, first of all. And growing up is full of so very much we need to learn how to care for. Yet self-care, soul-care, is a prerequisite for the ability to care for anything at all.
This cathedral of bones,2 this swelling ocean beneath my feet — made of emotion, hormones, sensation, molecules of thought — this pulsing hub of possibilities in which we all live.
I am grateful, body smiling, turning 60, and learning how to hallelujah.
Notes:
The Trump administration could eliminate or weaken protections from more than 175 million acres of U.S. lands — larger than California, Florida, and Georgia combined. This breaks down to removing protections from 88 million acres of public lands and weakening species protections across more than 87 million acres of wildlife habitat (Center for American Progress).
A cathedral of bones is a term I learned from my beloved mentor and embodiment guide, Gabrielle Roth, dancer, musician, and founder of the 5Rhythms movement practice.
Prose as layered and evocative as the music video you link to. Hallelujah indeed.
Beautiful and makes me want to travel/work with you!