My body is not my temple

You hear it all the time: my body is my temple. But a temple cannot be home. The point of temples, shrines, churches is that they offer a place away from the ordinary business of life, somewhere to withdraw for reflection.

Life is - and must be - just full of things not generally acceptable in temples: eating breakfast, going to the bathroom, doing the laundry, laughing immoderately, falling in love, falling apart, falling asleep. Step away from this and reflect, sure, but then (and this is important) step back again into the fray.

The idea that it would be good thing to keep ourselves, and our lives, permanently temple-pure is poisonous because it recoils from engaging with the complex muck and magic of existence. While there is value in withdrawal and reflection, it is there to season a life, not to replace it. Just as monastic traditions season their supporting culture rather than offering a complete alternative.

We need to engage with all of life, perhaps especially with those of whom we disapprove. There's no other way to understand them or to make ourselves understood in turn. We are all standing together on this increasingly small world, and it does no good to judge and turn our backs. The people and behaviours we judge are still standing right there behind us: if they extinguish species, poison the seas or start wars, we don't get an exemption from the consequences.

We cannot sweep away the dirty world but we can infect it with our own outlook, if we get off our soapboxes. We need the courage to wade through a somewhat compromised life, putting aside the comforts of purity and blame.

Can we please drop this impossible aspiration to the temple? Without someone to translate and interpret, your temple life of purity and good example is unintelligible, unattractive, unattainable. Irrelevant.

Breath and tide

We are tidal creatures, all of us on this planet. Tides come in many kinds: a tide of light flows from day to night and a tide of warmth flows with the seasons. The tide which describes how we fit into our world is: the breath. In, out; eat, excrete; listen, talk.

A strong hunger for air, food, information, drives our in breaths, and those of us living in the comfortable strata of the developed human world tend to find these hungers easy as well as pleasurable to satisfy. I know I'm not the only person who regularly devotes hours to a snack-food-and-information combo on the sofa. Intake intake intake. It's a real privilege and I love it.

The out breath is often more problematic. I'm sometimes aware of a sensation of being mentally over-full. My mind jostles with ideas and projects: things to make, things to write, new techniques to learn, new experiences to have. I can't do - or even think about - all of them, and pulled in too many directions at once I'm quite likely go to bed and sleep it off. In the morning I'll be hungry, ready to breathe in again.

But breathing out is essential, and to do that we must - just for a minute - stop breathing in. The out breath of the lungs stimulates the calming, rest-and-digest responses which is why pranayama yoga breathing patterns tend to spend longer on the out than the in breath. The mental out breath is creativity and communication.

Having taken in a day's worth of new sensations and concepts, we must breath out again by making, dreaming, thinking, communicating. We hold our breath for fear that the contents might not be up to standard, but that's not the point. The point is to breathe out, so that you can breathe in again, and out again and in again. Waves wash to and fro: some are beautiful, some just wet, but each one is part of the next. They are all needed.

Breathe out as well as in: so that you can ebb and flow with the tidal life of this little world.

Balancing act

I'm writing this ahead of time, just after the equinox: when day and night are roughly equal lengths. There was an instant of equality, but it hurtled past.

Today is going to be four minutes longer than yesterday, and by this time next week the daylight will have grown nearly another half hour. On the other hand, the day after the winter solstice was less than a minute longer, and even after a week it had still only grown three minutes.

We rock from day to night like a child on a swing. At the solstice we seem to hang suspended in a moment of weightless, timeless astonishment before gravity breaks in and rushes us back to, and then past, the ground.

Equinox isn't a peaceful balance between opposing forces: equinox isn't stillness. Equinox is speed. The energy gathered up in the long night propels us through equinox towards the longest day, where we will hang motionless again for a charmed instant. The solstices are our homes and we stop a moment to refresh our inner and outer worlds. Balanced at the extremes, we pause before changing direction.

The moment of equal night and day offers no such pause: the road is clear and we thunder by. Everything is pulling the same way. Equinox is no destination; it is a milestone. It says 'Take heart: we're on the homeward stretch'.