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Head, Hands, Heart

Hands:
Your hands are firmly placed on a yoga mat these days. After a hiatus of nearly two years (during which you injured your sacroiliac joint twice, had one bout of the flu, and two tussles with bronchitis), you are stable enough in body and mind and lung and muscle to return to your practice.

Twice a week, sometimes three times a week, you drive to the next town over, park in the lot, and make your way to the studio, mat in hand. Though you've only been to this studio a handful of times, you feel at home on your mat. And really, all you need is a floor upon which you can place your mat, something solid to push against, a small spot on the earth to hold you up, and the air around you to breathe.

There on the mat, you are balance and strength and clarity. You are connected there, whether mountain or tree or warrior or crow. You become one with the world around you, even as you stretch your boundaries while stretching your body. It feels good.

Head:
Paint is on your head, or at least on your mind. Weeks ago, you decided that the bathroom must be painted -- and it would be painted in wide black and white stripes. When the Gingerbread Man found a most desirable shower curtain, the Periodic Table, you dithered over the decision to paint stripes. While black and white stripes would probably be fine with a colorful Periodic Table shower curtain, it's not quite the look you were aiming for. So you consider painting a black and white mural. Or a stylized checkerboard. Or something.

In the meantime, you rip out a rickety storage cabinet and allow the bathroom to descend into chaos, in an attempt to push you forward into some sort of decision, some sort of progress. You begin priming the walls, which are currently a very saturated Mediterranean blue. Almost as soon as the paint hits the wall, you realize that you have the wrong primer. This primer is for new drywall, not finished surfaces. The paint beads up on the surface of the wall.

Tomorrow, you say. Tomorrow you'll return the primer, get the right primer, and someday soon this bathroom will become functional again: primed, painted, shelved.

Heart:
You seem to be full of the wrong words. You type the wrong words into messages. You say the wrong words to friends. You think the wrong words. You're mired in wrong words. You don't trust yourself to show up anywhere in the coming days for fear of popping your size 6 1/2s in your mouth yet again. Even when you say nothing, you're certain it's the wrong thing. You wish you could just send out a giant apology to the world: an airplane spelling out "Sorry! So, so sorry!" in puffy white contrail floating across the sky. You only hope that some small good deed done in time past will make up for your verbal ineptitude, and that someday soon the right words will take residence in you again.

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