200

(Ekphrastic image from a quilt by Cheri St Cyr)
It's Friday. I've spent the week paring down my email inbox, which overflowed with last semester's emails, cleaning out, fixing pipes and lawns, wrestling with a tight back. Now, today, at the end of the week, I turn my eyes toward a weekend of teaching, followed by a week of being taught. What a blessing.

200 posts. A few of those Prayas wrote back in the beginning, almost 5 years ago. Before I began teaching. Just after being on writing residency retreat at Vermont Studio Center. Before I met Dylan. Back then. Eventually, Prayas moved off to another blog and over the years, this has become a practice for me, a mix of teaching myself and sharing what I have been taught or am teaching others. As the byline says "opening inside spaces." How I had no clue back when I wrote that, which is probably what I will say another 200 from now.

Gratitude today to yoga teachers and pregnant friends, the sun and my cats, my partner and visiting friends who give me the night off to do what I want alone, to my students-to-be of tomorrow and the day after, my students of the past. To my teachers, Natalie and John, and the other participants in the Taos intensive I am about to return to who offered me more rides to the workshop than I could take in one lifetime. To the planes that will take me there and the planes that will take me home. To back pain, which reminds me there are many times I am not in pain.

Goodnight sweet world that often hurts, you beautiful, sharp earth. Let us wake tomorrow with eyes open wide and let in all of you we can handle and still survive.