As you settle in,
Take a moment to feel.
Feel where you are connected.
Feel how you are held,
Supported.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
I recently had to grade 108 papers in 17 days.
To say this was the most difficult semester of my teaching career is like saying,
Dealing with COVID and these unprecedented times has been a challenge.
Which leads me to a picture of Santa that I took.
In my picture,
This antique stuffed Santa was face planted on my floor.
You could see the soles of his plastic black boots.
This normally jolly man who brings joy and delight looked as if he was on the losing end of a knife fight in an alley with drunk zombies.
If that's not an apt metaphor for 2020,
I don't know what is.
Well,
Except for we are all fruit cocktail trapped in jello.
That's a close second.
At least one third of the final research papers I graded talked about the dangers of phones and social media.
They argued that one of the most significant dangers of social media is often how we fall into the trap of presenting only posts about how wonderful our lives are.
The same thing can happen in conversation.
We put on a happy face and only speak about the good.
But here's a little secret.
My life is not always cupcakes and narwhals and I bet yours isn't either.
You see,
I took that picture of Santa as I laid on the floor one night before Christmas.
I was bone weary and sad.
My students papers convinced me that perhaps we all need to share these parts of our lives,
Too.
You see,
It's okay.
In fact,
It's imperative to name the ways we are hurting,
Struggling.
It is imperative because when we don't do that,
Those things weigh us down.
They fester.
So here's the truth.
Life can be amazing.
But life can also be so very hard.
And that's also why meditation is so important.
And notice it is not called a cure.
It is called a practice.
And maybe it's important to remember what that means when I hear the word practice.
I think back to my high school gym and Mr.
Wendorf,
My volleyball coach.
He would blow his damn whistle and make us run crushers during our practices.
And what that was is his whistle would blow off.
We would sprint to the first line in the gym,
Then back,
Then to the next line,
Then back,
Then all the way across the gym and back.
And we would do that again and again and again until we thought we'd die.
But we didn't.
And by God,
As we all walked back to the locker room to shower,
There was a pride and a strength no one could take away from us.
We showed up.
We practiced hard.
Sure,
Sometimes we'd miss the serve or sprain an ankle,
But I would give just about anything to be my 17-year-old self again and walk back into that gym and pick up a ball.
Yeah,
These past months might have felt like one long root canal.
But as they say,
Life is short.
It really is.
And yes,
Our bodies and our spirits will get hammered by life.
That is the nature of being alive.
Sometimes it's okay to lay on the floor and stare through tears at a face planted Santa whose arm might or might not be broken.
But I,
For one,
Don't intend to stay there.
So practicing meditation is a practice,
A chance to show up,
An opportunity to meet the pain,
To sit with it,
To lean into it,
To cleanse the wounds and heal.
Breathe.
Be.
Settle.
Live Light.
Live Light,
Y'all.
