Take A Moment, Breathe – lynn rankin-esquer

A Way Back to Wonder?

Posted on February 2, 2023February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

I remember being filled with wonder,

years and miles ago.

I believe there is a road back,

well, more of a path,

well, more of a faint set of tracks,

well, more of an inkling.

I sit very still and wait.

Nothing much happens, the world seems the same.

Silly, this, and yet I don’t move.

The hummingbird won’t land unless you are completely still. And even then, maybe just a fly-by, a whisper floated into the air near your ear as the hummingbird disappears into the magnolia tree.

That faint.

That is how you find an inkling.

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A Moment of Reverence

Posted on January 5, 2023February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

How do you show reverence for life? How do you not let all your attention land on the what’s for dinner decision, the who gets the car dilemma, the leaking faucet, the constant demands for attention to things that are of such low stakes you despair of wasting even a glance at them, and yet are forced into deep, intensely debated, agonizingly long discussions that suck out all your carefully collected energy?

I hear a smash, clearly broken glass, outside of my carefully locked study door.

I drop a stitch in the story I’m writing, my heroine abandoned mid-sentence. I hear arguments, wisps of the discussion float through. The bowl for a visiting cat, an unaware kick, an unintentional breaking. Yelling and ‘hold the dog’ and ‘grab the cat’ and ‘put on shoes.’ And then the sound of a vacuum cleaner. More arguing. Accusations made. Defenses offered. Me half out of my chair, ready to go help, and yet.

And yet.

And yet. I was showing reverence for life, just then. In my way.

So I sat down, fought my way back to my heroine, found the rest of her sentence. And then the next one.

Sometimes my reverence for life is to clean up the broken bowl.

Sometimes, though, my reverence is to not clean up the broken bowl.

“There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” -Rumi

Crooked is a feature, not a flaw

Posted on October 21, 2022February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

“Tree branches will grow to give the most leaves the most light, even if that means growing sideways… Part of the trade-off any tree has to make is between gathering light, staying stable in the wind, and succeeding against nearby competitors. So when branches grow crookedly, that’s part of a tree’s overall survival strategy.” (From EarthSky)

Maybe this is why people grow crookedly too, it’s a survival strategy. Bend away from the person who questioned why you like watching The Great British Bake Off. Bend towards the one who smiled at the way you added lemongrass to the stir fry. Know how running stabilizes you, how turning the phone off while you work is the portal to the magic, how the birds washing themselves in the shallow bowl of the Buddha fountain tickles your soul, how getting your writing done before anyone is awake allows your roots to be deep enough to withstand the winds of unexpected ride needs and homework needs and could-you-rub-my-shoulders needs and the insurance-will-lapse-if-you-don’t-get-this-paper-scanned-and-submitted-today needs.

Crookedness, when it comes to growth, is not a flaw, it’s a feature. Bend towards what roots you, what gets you the most light, what keeps you steady in the wind.

Midday Moment of Joy

Posted on November 17, 2021February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

Dash paused his zooming ever so briefly for a picture

I live a forty five minute drive from the ocean and took my dog for a walk on the beach yesterday and he was so excited by the beach that he pranced around, he zoomed, he darted. He chased the waves and ran into the surf and looked back at me like he couldn’t believe I was allowing this. He sniffed odd long protuberances of seaweed, he nosed and jumped at other dogs. His tail didn’t stop wagging, as if he was trying to get the words out: ‘Wow! Look at this! Look at this! Look at that! Ohmygosh, look over here!’

It was like watching a child on Christmas morning and it was exactly how I feel every time I get that close to the ocean. During the day it is mostly just me and Dash and I talk out loud to him so as I watched him dance his way down the beach I told him, “Same thing bud, I feel the same thing.”

Despite the fact that I was way behind on my To Do list for the day (week, year), in that moment I couldn’t be anything but completely happy. I had a figure-ground reversal, the To Do’s faded into the background, the joy took front and center. I could kind of, for a second, remember that the To Do’s are in service to the joy not the other way around.

A Back Door into Gratitude

Posted on October 12, 2021February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

Despite meditating every morning, I have a brain that pulls away from the present moment like a hundred pound lab on a leash who sees the dog park in the distance. Over there! That is where the action is! Let’s GO!

I’m currently reading a delightful book called Awakening Joy by James Baraz and he is reminding me, like so many others before him, that writing down things you are grateful for is a way to increase your joy, your ability to enjoy the moment, all the good stuff. I find the little abandoned notebook by my bed purchased for this very practice a year ago. I blow off the dust, open it and see that attempt lasted all of six days. I’m a better person now. I’m ready for this.

Almost two weeks later, remembering more days than not, I notice a certain predictability to my entries. One might even call it a rut. It is abundantly clear that I really love my bed and its smooth sheets. And my family of course. They make the list all the time. As does coffee and tea and cranberry biscotti and lemons. All good things but every so slightly repetitive.

Surely there is more.

And then in shower this morning I was thinking about how many things I take for granted. Which is a kind of back door entrance to finding gratitude.

The most obvious thing that I take for granted was literally hitting me in the head. I was in a warm shower! It made me think about people who lived in past centuries, before indoor plumbing and water heaters, before such a thing as a warm shower existed (or people who live in poverty now). What an absolute luxury that would be! Getting clean could not have been as much fun before someone figured out how to warm up water.

Here I am, in a safe, protected place taking a warm shower and I wonder what that would have felt like to say, Laura Ingalls Wilder (I was obsessed by her books growing up). I remember her describing a weekly bath, they had to heat the water in the fireplace and pour it into a big tin tub and then her dad went first, then her mom, then she and her sister. All in same water. Cooling quickly, no doubt. And here I am, every morning hopping in to the perfect temperature for as long as I want, fresh water, used by nobody else before me.

With good smelling soaps! I wondered who came up with soap and then who thought to scent it?

I never even think about my warm water or my good smelling soap and shampoo. More typically I step into the shower and I think about the HVAC insurance paperwork I need to fill out and getting my son’s senior picture submitted in time and whether I need to take the dog to the vet because he’s been dragging his butt again. I think about whether I’m going to shave my legs (shorts? pants? time available?). Mundane things. Future things. Not even as fun as the dog park but dragging me towards them nonetheless.

But today, I pretended I was from a different century and someone had given me the opportunity to try out this new, only for the very wealthy, thing called a warm shower and I was in heaven. It seemed like a miracle, this warm water raining down on me, these delicious smells rubbing all over my body, the chance to feel clean and warm and safe all at the same time. I sent up a little thank you prayer to all the creatives who came up with the elements I was enjoying.

I thought about how people have probably always wanted a way to clean themselves. Maybe starting in rivers (Cold! Maybe dirty. Maybe full of snakes and other critters nipping at the tender parts.) And then maybe rudimentary tubs with river or lake or rain barrel water. And then whoever figured out aqueducts and sending water different places. And then someone said, ‘hey! This would be so much better if it was warm’ and figured that out. And someone noticed, hmm if I rub this stuff on my body the dirt comes off easier and soap was invented/discovered. And then someone thought to add a good smell to that substance.

I could go research all this, see how true my imagining is, but no matter how it happened, people came up with ideas that added together to create a shower, something that would have been an unimaginable luxury to so many who lived before this was all invented.

And I step in there every morning, not even paying attention.

So yes, gratitude can be accessed by noticing what we take for granted.

Which, once you really start thinking about it, is just about everything.

I look around and realize that almost everything in my life, as mundane as it seems sometimes, is built from the magic of other people’s ideas. People who didn’t chase the wispy floating what-if’s out of their head. People who dreamed and made things and when they didn’t work made something else. Harnessing electricity, coming up with red means stop green means go to keep us all from crashing into each other, combining ingredients into something that makes a pancake, launching a tin can into the air filled with people and bringing them back down safely in another state. Individuals came up with ideas and put their ideas together with other individuals’ ideas and here we are, talking to each other through our watches and eating Toblerone infused blondies.

I have walked around this whole day filled with the happiness of this morning’s shower. All day I have thought about how lucky I am to have that shower in my house, available whenever I want it. It took the sting out of the butt dragging dog and the hour long wait on hold to sort out a medical bill and the ever-deflating what to make for dinner decision.

Tonight’s gratitude list is already taken care of. Warm water on demand. Scented soap. Privacy and safety whenever I need it (it never occurred to me to be grateful to be able to get clean without worrying about snakes but now this is my favorite thing about my shower, it is snake free).

I have a feeling tomorrow’s list is going to come pretty easily too.

Tethered and Adrift: A Small Summer Memory

Posted on August 18, 2021December 2, 2023 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

The house I grew up in had a large screened-in porch looking over the backyard. It was like an outdoor great room, on one side a long dining table, on the other side a white wicker couch and chairs with thick cushions covered in a white polka dotted kelly green fabric. It wasn’t the most comfortable piece of furniture in the house, not even in the top three, but it was my favorite. Ask me about summer growing up in western Pennsylvania and my first memory is not the tightness of chlorine dried skin or the one week at the beach or sunburns or running home when the last bit of light faded from the sky at night.

The first, the favorite, memory is that couch and the hours I lay on it reading, a book propped on my stomach, my head smushing the pale yellow accent pillows at one end, my feet propped against the wicker arm along the other end since it wasn’t long enough for a full stretch out. A bowl of fruit on the (also wicker) coffee table beside me.

The very best times on that couch were when it was pouring rain. Soothingly loud, drowning out any bickering from inside the house, background for whatever world I had disappeared into. The rain pulled nature around me like a quilt, an insulation, a cocoon. Like a companion, that rain, like a comforting grandmother humming, ‘I’m here, you’re loved, I’m here, you’re safe, go ahead and sail off to far away lands, for right now I’ll keep the world out, I’ll keep you both tethered and adrift.’

Midday Moment of Peace

Posted on February 22, 2021February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

I’ve read so many books on how to calm one’s brain, on meditation, psychology, self-help, brain structure. I studied it, got several degrees in it, taught it, have been paid to lead people through it. There is a big area of my brain devoted to the understanding of how to calm oneself.

Funny thing though, having the knowledge doesn’t translate into calm. You have to actually do the things.

I read once that if a psychologist was presented with two doors, one labeled ‘heaven’ and the other labeled ‘lecture about heaven’ the psychologist would choose the one labeled ‘lecture about heaven.’ We so often prefer to analyze something instead of just experiencing it.

I meditate every morning and sometimes the calm lasts as long as through breakfast. Nothing left of it by lunch and usually I just plow on through with the day. But today, for a few moments in the middle of the day I walked the walk. Well, I breathed the breath might be a better way to say it.

Put my phone in another room.

Did some deep breathing, the kind where your stomach moves in and out, not your chest.

Intentionally put my attention towards little good things. A cool breeze through the window at night. The birds tweeting to wake me up. Good coffee. My dog following me around the house all day. An unexpected compliment from one of the teenagers in my house. (“Mom, mirrors are weird. When I see your face in the mirror I see wrinkles around your mouth, but when I look straight at you, no wrinkles.”)

It was, for the moment, a comfy-cozy-smooth moment of peace. It was, for the moment, enough.

Friendship

Posted on February 14, 2021February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

Our lives can get crazy so fast and in the hustle to work and take care of your family and yourself and your house and your pets it is easy to forget what is really important. This quote reminds me to be still and being still reminds me what is truly of value to me. The picture is of Lake Tahoe in winter and I took it a couple of years ago while out on a dock with a dear friend, Karen Coane. Not much of higher value than a friend. Not too many things more worthy of your attention, your time, or your heart, than a friend.

Bending Toward Love

Posted on February 12, 2021February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

I’m sitting at my desk in the bay window at the front of our house, looking at the tree across the street. We’ve lived here almost three years and this is the first time I’ve really looked at that tree. It is winter and the leaves are all off it except for some clumps in two different V’s that look like nests. The morning sun, coming from the south, is shining so brightly on the whole left side of the tree, lighting up every branch, outlining them like a half halo. I’m enjoying this beauty, this light on the ever dividing smaller branches and then I realize something else.

Many of the branches, especially the ever-smaller ones, bend towards the left.

They grew towards the sun! It makes the tree seem even more alive, like it has a preference, a longing for the sun, like I long for God, like I bend towards love when I allow myself to perceive it. I can imagine a cell dividing as a tender little branch grows and it feels warmth in one direction and cold in another so it unfolds itself near the warmth. And then the next division does the same thing, cell by cell building towards light and warmth.

These days of pandemic fatigue and political unrest keep my brain always whirring, unpleasantly. But as I look at the tree, watch the sun shift around its branches, imagine the imperceptible but continual reaching of new growth toward the sun, the whirring slows, stops.

I am reminded of a quote from the novelist James Caroll:

“We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things… [but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.”

I watch the birds, moving in and out of the sun in the tree as they peck at its trunk for bugs. I watch an elderly man and woman shuffle by, masked up, heads facing forward as if they don’t see me sitting here in my bay window staring out at them. I see the man slip his hand into his wife’s hand as she takes an unsteady step.

Today, the breezes are whispering that we are all bending towards love.

Magic in the Midst of Upheaval

Posted on January 13, 2021February 23, 2024 by Lynn Rankin-Esquer

Not long ago I took this picture walking at the Baylands Nature Preserve, a protected marshland along the bottom side of the San Francisco Bay. It was just a normal day, the sun dropping in the sky over the Santa Cruz mountains like it does every day. It was dazzling, like someone tossed a handful of diamonds and fairy dust across the water. If it isn’t cloudy, this is what you can see any day of the year. Looking at it filled something in me. Even looking at the picture fills something in me.

Which is a good thing because this year has torn more than a few holes in me. Most days I can’t keep up with mending or filling them. But this day, looking over the water, watching the peaceful ducks who had no concept of politics or pandemics, I felt full.

Most of us are just hanging on, waiting for those moments that soften the jagged edges of this year. Realistically, moments are all I can get these days. I don’t expect long hours of peace, let alone days of it. Not yet, anyway.

But I’m finding that if I get myself out into nature, even if it is just walking in my neighborhood, I can remember that great W.B. Yeats quote:
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.