Mother’s day flew past in a whirlwind of doing. Our major fundraiser at work on May 3 was the most successful yet. It required considering the “what ifs” and “what happens when,” reams of paper with seat assignments, thinking through processes of pledges received and acknowledged, of financial reports to file and contracts to sign. I was drained by the time Tom and I got away to celebrate a strange new mother’s day without our mothers or anyone around to mother. But the doing kept us moving forward — there was packing, driving, friends to see, the beach, the great new restaurant in town…then, back at work to refocus on website redesign which has been left too long, teaching more classes than normal, Emma’s homecoming, a weekend workshop with Tias Little at Sun and Moon Yoga Studio…and today, the inevitable wall. Thud.

My body has told me that I must undo the effects of charging my adrenal gland up to the max. I must un-do and non-do.

So how ironic is it that on my day of non-doing, I am pulled to the studio to the 29 blocks in our laundry basket, awaiting transformation? I painted this facade today, inspired by the poem by Wendy Videlock, written for her mother:

Flowers

They are fleeting.

They are fragile.

They require

little water.

They’ll surprise you.

They’ll remind you

that they aren’t

and they are you.

I’d found the poem about a month ago when the flowers for Dorothy’s funeral were fading and I took pictures to remember them. Today, as I painted this facade, I lost myself in the process of painting — in the color and the line. Even though I was doing, I was undoing — undoing some of the sadness of my mother’s and Dorothy’s passing, of the exhaustion I feel today and other negative emotions that have been stuffed and packed in nooks and crannies of my body, mind and spirit. There is no tomorrow and no yesterday. Just this moment, this brush stroke.

As Tias explains in an article he wrote for the Sun and Moon newsletter, in the Taoist tradition, non-doing is “wu-wei,” a highly esteemed way of living life. His workshop helped us instinctually understand that we are “doer devotees” and that this approach is antithetical to yoga. The first session of his workshop started with sitting in meditation, listening for the deep thunderous silence rumbling. Today, I heard a moment of this silence as I became a flower.