Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Help me. Help me. Help me.

This morning I resumed meditation. I sat myself down on my meditation pillow, which has been kindly waiting for me for too long. Months. I listened to a Buddha lesson as my meditation. It’s a new app. I know. I know. Not exactly meditation. But I have to ease back into it.

I have the kind of energy where, when I start something, I’m all in. I’m enthusiastic. My mind is present. I have every intention of seeing whatever it is through. And when the project or discipline gets going—gets routine—that’s when I start fading. My mind drifts to something else and forgets to do the very thing for which I was once all in.

Or, the intention is there, but I feel like cement is hardening around my ankles, preventing me from moving towards the thing.

Or I get whiny.

After meditation, my hands flung and unfurled my rolled-up, dusty yoga mat onto the floor. I resumed the twenty-minute yoga routine that my sister and I began, long-distance, during the COVID pandemic. We know it so well that I don’t need to follow the video anymore. I have the routine in my bones. And I also like to improvise.

My mind goes to the monks walking from Texas to D.C. while chaos unfolds in the U.S., particularly in Maine, where I live, and in Minnesota. The monks are quiet and steady while the rest of the country swirls in fear, anger, heartbreak, love, and hate.

I see them when I’m scrolling my phone, looking for the latest ICE-related atrocity, in their golden-tan robes, walking through sunny days and snowy days, in footwear not from REI, not made for this kind of walking. I see them daily, and they give my scrolling a moment of peace. My heart finds a moment of rest. And then I always look at their feet, amazed and baffled by how they are managing—on concrete, no less. My mind cannot wrap around how they are doing it.

I would have been whiny and quit long ago.

Next, I'm in child’s pose—the gentle, resting pose—seated back on my heels, folded forward. Knees apart. Forehead resting on the mat. In the stillness, a smile cracked across my face as I heard my inner voice say Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, remembering my yoga teacher from teacher training long ago saying, In yoga we only have two prayers: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And help me. Help me. Help me.

I'm grateful today is a thank-you day.

After that, I moved into more active, twisting poses and thought, I’m all in. I’m enthusiastic. My mind is present. I have every intention of doing this every morning.

Fully aware that this kind of energy will not sustain me every morning after this one, I know I’ll have to find other means of staying committed. Because I am sixty-one years old, and this is not my first rodeo. This is my pattern.

But today, the sun is shining on this midwinter day in snowy Maine, and I am thankful to feel alive and present in my body. It might be as soon as tomorrow morning that something lures me away from morning meditation and yoga, instead of making a second cup of coffee and scrolling on my phone.

Maybe the awareness is enough.

Enough to be gentle with myself and simply know this morning’s meditation and yoga were good for me. A gift I gave myself.

Choosing, this morning at least, to be like the monks.