No one can help us now. It is December and we are standing at the center of a compass gone whacko, the arrow whirling and whirling, trying to settle on direction, on destination.
All day we pass people blowing past, around and off each other. The frenetic energy of the season propels them like marbles spun on ice. Loudspeakers are singing. The parking spaces are gone. Our list of things to do has blown into a brown puddle, and it’s cold outside.
Some nights we go to bed and instead of sleep we pick through the bones of the day — the dirty coffee cups on the desk, the lost keys and books, the broken lights we need to replace, the car on the blink, and then there are the presents to buy, buy, buy. And, the money-juggling, and our aching arms.
In the morning, the piles on the counters loom and seem to have grown wild throughout the house. We are tired and trying to hold on to what we want. Joy. Gentleness. Peace. Spirit.
I have a gift for you. It’s a picture for your imagination. Take it slowly. It is this: winter. You are alone. You walk to the edge of a lake. The surface is almost frozen. Your breath hangs white in the air. Somewhere you hear a deer nudging dried stalks of prairie grass — the snap and click and reed “hush” noise rides the slight breeze.
Beyond you, the foothills rise around the lake, wind-printed with sage and rabbit brush. You stare toward the boatless center of the water and imagine fish weaving below the ice, conserving their strength with slow and careful movements.
The geese sweep by. They fly low over the fog, making their way together, direction clear in the yellow-black of their eyes. They call constantly to hold form, to track each other, to stay together. Their arrival comes year after year and you realize that geese are never voiceless or without breath. As you watch them land and gather their feet in the nearly frozen green puddles, you breathe slowly the cold air and feel yourself grow lighter; the creak and bend of your bones is suddenly familiar.
This is a deep breath you can recall at will. This is a breath you remember, and it fills you. You are still suddenly, without swirl. You are pneuma — the Greek word for breath, for wind, for soul, for Spirit. It is already in us, this holiday spirit, this breath of life. We are never without it. In asking for it, in seeking it, we have found it. Each time we are still, we can find it in a single breath.
The geese move suddenly and shape the air into curves as they fly up, their collective voices rising like bells in the sky around them ringing. You turn to go and carry the singular tone of them with you into your day.
At this time of year, any day can still have us in full tilt. We can’t help it. But unlike spinning compasses gone mad, we can recall our own breath, and direction, at will. If only for a moment, the crazy circles will calm, and we will feel the grounding of the Spirit. It begins in the deep breath — in the timeout, the soft moment, the refocus, the stop.
It is a gift — a birth present, our very breath — and in it lives the Spirit of God. It’s present, already fundamentally ours, already found. Just breathe it deeply.
You can’t find it in a candy cane latte, or the perfect gift, or in working longer hours. You can’t be sad that it is gone or that you are too depleted to find it. It was never lost. It lives in you, bone-deep and to your core. Be still, pray a small word: joy, gentleness or peace. Then move on into the whirl, strong and lovely and alive.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
