Sitting and Breathing

First off, I'd like to share a picture Farmer Boy took with his new I-Phone last night while we were at my favorite running place. He was fishing and I was walking, rapidly.  Farmer Boy thinks I look amusing when I walk rapidly.  Farmer Boy didn't catch any fish last night.




This morning I got up early.  The sun was just beginning it's dance in the eastern sky.  The leaves were gently whispering, the birds were crazy with song, a new day.

I looked out my window and took it in.  I felt still amidst the dance and the singing.  I had my journal on my lap, pen in hand and bible beside me but I didn't do anything but sit.  Sit and breath.

My asthma has been acting up this year so I've been deliberate about my breathing.  Do this with me - take a deep breath in through your nose, take the air past your lungs and deep into your belly.  Watch your belly expand.  Hold for a second, now push it out, using your abdominals.  Ahh.  I think that feels so good.  It feels like my cells are getting the oxygen that I've been depriving them of.  If you want you can do it again, and again.  Maybe you could simply sit and breath, nothing else.

While you're sitting and breathing, you might want to think about these words I love.

I'm still reading "Traveling Mercies" by Anne Lamott, well, actually I'm reading it again.  It's like a cool drink.  Her irreverence speaks to me.  It's like a whisper of freedom, of God's true love, of relationship and community, without all the lists and rules.

In a chapter she wrote about getting older she said, "I want time to learn to enjoy what I've always been afraid of - the sag, the invisibility, the case of understanding that life is not about doing."

One of my favorite books is "Christy" by Catherine Marshall.  In the scene where Christy glimpses her mentor's home for the first time (help me out here, I completely forgot mentor's name), Catherine Marshall writes, "in both the woman and her home there was an effortless beauty, never a straining for effect, a harmony that seemed to come from having one's roots down in the place where the roots were meant to be".


Do you think Anne and Catherine came up with those words while they were sitting and breathing?