The wall of fog looks periwinkle next to the pink sky above it. It’s the view from my bedroom window right now, as the sun is setting somewhere over the Pacific.

It caught me, one of those moments of awe. Where I feel above and beyond myself. Humbled, outside of my head and even my body.

The wind coming off the western fog bank blowing the tree branches, now thick and full of their leaves, in a gentle sway back and forth and back again.

All of these elements working in concert. A symphony listened to and watched out over my backyard.

An old co-worker, a friend, really, but one I haven’t seen in years has a deep meditation practice. I think of him often, and did just now, and recall this scene in my mind. Casually, over the bright green recycled glass countertops in the work kitchen one day, me dipping a tea bag in hot water and him cradling a steaming cup of coffee. He said, “if you pay attention, really pay attention, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, and even divisions of a second, our lives are on a roller coaster up and down and down and down and up up up up up up and down fast and up again. Constantly.”

We hear from a friend that the surgery didn’t go well. We trip up the stairs. We spill this cup of coffee down our favorite shirt. But then it cleans up instantly. We get cut off in the parking lot. But the cashier genuinely compliments our smile. We can’t find a ripe avocado. We pass two mentally ill people suffering on the street and keep walking. We burn the muffins and nail the chili. Our chosen politician loses. Our hometown sports team pulls off a nailbiter. We witness a child being born. We behold a tunnel of wildflowers after a pause in the drought. The list goes on and on and on. All in a given day.

He was making the point with me that is what meditation is teaching us. To notice. To notice all these things, the good and bad and how they brush up against each other and look each other straight in the eye and hold hands and sit on a see saw and sometimes are even so intertwined it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other starts.

I thought of this today, as I had read a meme (do we read memes?) about how the fight or flight response did not evolve based on receiving a snarky email. I know this, but, still, when that email comes up from that one person who is a jerk, an excess, an agitator, I still feel it creeping up my face, distracting me from all the other things that in that one moment are good news. I’m breathing. The air quality is clear. The native honeybees are multiplying in the frontyard. The snap peas are ripening on the vine. The polls are promising. The addition of herbs freshly cut from the raised beds – the fennel, tarragon, and thyme – brighten up any salad. The construction is going to start in December at 18^th and Mission. The celebration of my mom’s 75^th birthday today is joyful. The spruce tips I foraged in Alaska just made a beautiful pesto.

Downs and up and up and up.

I always think of that opening Mary Oliver line in the “Wild Geese,” about not having to be good, not having to walk on our knees, dragging ourselves through the pebbles and dust of the desert, dehydrated, hallucinating, apologizing over and again for being deeply feeling humans in a deeply heartbreaking world. All because we are paying attention.

I still don’t meditate. I still don’t take a deep breath when I get the email. I still don’t take a step back and notice how the protons and neutrons are held together, make atoms, elements, things, places and people, rotating on a dense ellipsoid, revolving around a ball of fire in the middle of nothing…and everything. All together, at the same time.

But I’m trying.

And the branches keep swaying as the sun is now fully gone home for the night.