My heart is like a singing bird.

Me, Rebecca. After our first swim. We both felt great to be swimming again and swimming together. Like we did when we were kids and again in our 20s.

My friends, I fell last week and bruised my ribs — it is as painful as people say, but it will heal. It is presenting some added mobility challenges especially as I go into treatment for breast cancer. The cancer diagnosis also happened last week. This too shall pass, as my wise mum often says. The other notable thing that happened last week was an awesome swim with my friend, Lynne, a breast cancer survivor and also a former young swimmer. I swam eighteen laps of front crawl and walked myself all the way from the car into the pool and back out again and to everything in between. Up until now I’ve needed help to get to and to use the lift into the pool. When I started out six months ago with Rebecca, she wheeled me to-n-fro with a transfer chair. Eight months before that I could swim for two and-a-half minutes in a physiotherapy infinity pool. For International Women’s Day, last week’s swim felt very appropriate, especially as I am surrounded by strong, supportive, caring, amazing women. I will keep that swim as a beacon in the days ahead.

My post today is about gratitude and as I wrote it, a really spectacular photograph came to mind. Not of women or gratefulness, but because of how it evoked gratitude in me. It was passed around social media feeds in 2021 and it likely will resurface to get passed around again because it resonates with some deep truth. (This is why we still watch shakespearean plays and listen to Mozart.) It’s an image of a bird singing in the morning light on a cool day. Simple. Commonplace. But the temperature, the light, and the timing of the photographer coalesced to capture the brief cloud that the singing bird’s warm breath made in the cold air. You might have seen it! And doesn’t it evoke a shock of realization: a bird’s breath fogs in the air the same way mine and yours does when it’s cold. I mean, of course it does, but who’s ever seen it let alone photographed it, or contemplated that fact? Ornithologists, photographers, sure, sure.

I meditate on the breath nearly every day and sometimes it gets very subtle, such that it’s no longer my breath coming in and out, or my body receiving the breath and releasing it. All the movements of body and air coalesce into a body of breath that defies regular concepts. It can then expand to be the whole earth and all her creatures breathing in and breathing out. Even insects and plants process air in some way though we might not call it breathing. Watch this time-lapse video of Earth breathing. One hemisphere is dropping leaves that, as they decay, release carbon dioxide into the air, while on the other hemisphere spring is happening and green leaves begin their processing of carbon dioxide into oxygen. This “breathing” happens in time with Earth’s movement around the sun, in time with a universal dance completely beyond our scope. It’s kind of beautiful when scientific understanding approaches poetry and spirituality.

Take a moment to be supremely grateful for each breath of air that keeps us and all of life alive. It is keeping time with the universe.

Gratitude was the focus of a recent meditation evening I attended. It had a profound effect on many of us to contemplate, in a dedicated way, all of the supportive circumstances that exist in every moment. There is the breath. There are all the elements – earth, fire, and water in addition to air, that provide the ingredients for every manifestation. Early in our lives and beyond, there were parents and caregivers, family and extended family, friends, teachers and role models who cared for us and showed us the way. Always, there are workers in the food supply chain, medical services, transportation, and the list goes on. People built your house, your car, the device on which you’re reading this (or the machines that built them). Government, however problematic, maintains order so the millions of us have minimum wage and healthcare.

We can be grateful even for difficult circumstances because they’ve provided the opportunity to grow and to learn where we are stuck. Difficult circumstances have a way of shocking you into clarity and gratitude for the simple act of breathing. Then if you sit with the enormity of all that supports us and life — it tends to loosen the barriers once erected in anger or defence. It’s softens and opens, making room for love, beauty and joy. We could be swimming in gratitude.

I laugh when I hear the fish are thirsty. — Kabir

There is a poem that often comes up for me when I’m feeling gratitude, I mean really intentionally noticing how much there is to be grateful for. A birthday by Christina Rossetti:

My heart is like a singing bird
                  Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
                  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
                  That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
                  Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
                  Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
                  And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
                  In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
                  Is come, my love is come to me.

Gratitude makes the heart so full it has the generous bounty of an apple tree in the fall to which deer and bear and farmer alike are drawn to for its nourishment. This heart has the depth and richness and luminosity of a pearl. The sea it’s in is not just serene, it’s halcyon – which means serene and also every other synonym you can think of for serene. (Halcyon might be my new favourite word.) The heart sings like that bird, her song not just heard; also seen and deeply felt by the photographer and the rest of us.

And more, raise this upon a dais layered in elegance and luxury, softness and richness, beauty and festiveness. This love Christina Rossetti wrote of so gorgeously was Christ’s love and it so filled her heart and suffused her being that it spilled beyond the boundary of herself. Only these lavishly embellished painted words could come close to capturing this feeling for her. Gratitude, practised with dedication has this degree of love and joy. It is boundless and indescribable and this poem, which at one time I would have thought was ridiculous and unnecessarily profuse, is now a treasured nugget in my brain. It captures well that which words cannot adequately describe. To which awakening is like a birthday, emerging from something that might’ve been cozy, nourishing, or necessary. The epic effort and pain of a birth is also a softening and opening to whatever comes next. The hardest things have a way of raising the littlest things on a dais of silk and down.

~

Please watch Stefano Ianiro’s video of early morning bird song!

These blogs may become a little random over the next several months.

In addition to support from some wonderful women, my husband, Michael is readily doing double duty to help me. We’ve had a lot of laughs, actually. I’m one lucky gal.