Whatever happens today, breathe peace into it. When an event takes you out of body, breathe yourself back in. Put your feet back onto the ground which welcomes them with love. Be an Earthling for a day, admire the air for being available. Regard with attention, the life around you: avian, amphibian, ambient.

Let sovereign morning order your day. Just as the sun rises steadily into a sky ready to embrace it, let your day embrace you, offer you food, lay sustenance over you with abundance on top.

Bring forth what is best inside you – even if the effort seems false or lacking, or even a pretense.

For me, it is the habit of excellence I wish to acquire, and sometimes I need to start low while aiming high. I’d like to think it’s just a matter of skill & “beginnery” but it has been more. I haven’t been interested enough yet. I have professed interest & claimed interest & pretended it. Now is a time to practice it.

I have been alive a long time to just be finding out that I am so. I was a human being in many other life iterations just in this spacious lifetime. I was a student, a secretary, a mom, a wife, a food worker, a massage therapist. All seemed mutually exclusive, yet all were me.

Only occasionally did I choose time for self-care. Indeed, it is in my latter years that I’ve perceived self-care as a good idea. Now & here do I actually see in active tense; I observe with the intent of interaction. I admire, I enjoy, I watch, I smile & laugh about the activity that goes on in background to sustain me. I am humbled by the arrangement of the universe around my needs & my perceptions of both of these.

If I slip down a detour that looks promising & feels right for a moment, I still need to examine it for what I want to express with my life. If it does not meet this standard, I need to abandon exploration. I’m required to abandon the limiting thought for the next, better thought. In this way, I breathe my peace into it.

You get what you give. Make your habit giving & giving back. It doesn’t have to come with balloons, wine & roses or in a Cartier box. Turning over a lousy feeling for the good one underneath is enough. Smiling to refute a frown is a great beginning. Then look at what’s causing any frown. Smooth it off the surface even as you remove it from the elsewhere, wherever that is.

To tune into who you are, it is needful to tune out all the rest of it. Like emptying the lungs of even the reservoir pocket of air at the bottom of each exhale, it is scary, it can feel life-threatening. But just as the air is always there when you’re ready to replenish, your self, that which might be called your soul is always there when you reach for it. If you have lived a life in & of this country, you may have to talk it back in from a distance, or allow the organics of it to re-root in your psyche.

You need to put down the barriers & walk outside of the boundaries where you have been “saved” for so long… I minded less than others putting down my phone & turning my computer into a simple communications device. I lived a long time simmering in my own silences which are now familiar & comfortable. I am one of those old women walking along the side of the road chatting with themselves, given away by my gestures. But it’s a private conversation & I’m enjoying it. The definitions of mental health need to be enlarged to include all the tools we claim we live by, if you want exclude people like me. What’s crazier than un-inhabiting the exact speck of time you are standing in by partaking of the past that created it & the future which will spring from it, through media which is ultimately damaging to the physical construct it claims to support? In other words, when you are watching a crimson & light sunset, why answer your phone?

Getting back to some connection with Nature has been my impetus for conscious, focused improvement. I learn there is no other way to be & be self-aware. My boundaries have all shifted into another “place entire.” I am allowed now, freed from schedules. I find myself unrestrained by hours I do not arrange, to think & to be whom I have planned for all along – even when I didn’t know I was planning anything much.

Each time I breathe, I breathe peace into it.