It snowed yesterday, a lot.  And a lot of snow means a lot of shoveling.  Just so you know, I love to shovel, I don’t know why, I just do.  Maybe it’s the meditative nature of the solitude, the push and scrape of the shovel on the ground, the strength I feel with every shovel full I flip onto the ever growing pile of white.  But even I, the intrepid snow shoveler, after an hour and a half, was kind of over it and I was very thankful my nephew came with our community snow blower to finish the job. At bedtime, it looked like it had stopped snowing, and the weather predicted a sunny day today, but in New Hampshire, you never know.

Thankfully, we woke up to a sunny, not snowing morning.  Preparing a truck for driving after a snowstorm includes cleaning off the roof, the lights, the windows (of course), and then shoveling out the bed.  I’m pretty short so that means climbing into the back of the truck to reach all the snow, and the roof of truck.  Now, I’m totally warmed up, and sporting soaking wet pant legs on my way to yoga class.  The only two dicey moments on my way were leaving my driveway, and turning into the parking lot at class.  Other than that, the roads were really quite clean and passable.

That’s where the easy ended.  Class today seemed to focus for me on that old classic adage, you can’t always get what you want.  We were all about shoulders today, which after yesterday’s shovel-paloosa, should have been just the ticket, but for some reason, I just wasn’t connecting to our instructions to move our outer shoulder blades up while moving our inner shoulder blades down.  Grounding my lower body while moving my rib cage up.  Pushing my inner thighs back while lengthening my thoracic spine forward.  It all makes sense intellectually, like, I get it, yup that would be good to do all those things, wouldn’t it?  But, today?  Nope.  Wasn’t happening.  I mean, I was using my beginner’s mind, I was thinking that the breath is now, I was experiencing what I could today.  But I have to be honest, I was kind of grumpy about it.  I couldn’t feel the difference when we stood on the strap to root ourselves.  My knees hurt when we did our lunges.  And don’t even talk to me about how I needed to use blocks to support myself in a split.  If you had told me I would have to do that when I was a kid I would have dumped grape soda on your head.

So, what’s a sore and grumpy, sick of winter artist to do?  Well, after grocery shopping and all the errands; you come home.  You fill the bird feeders.  You take your dog outside.  You breathe.  You create.  You realize that all of that was part of what today had to be to able you to see the amazing that you have all around you.

You also realize that maybe, just maybe you’re a little stressed (in a totally awesome, you can’t believe it kind of way), because you got a call from the art gallery telling you you may want to bring more items because you have already sold a bunch of things and you haven’t even had your opening reception yet.   Yay!!!  Arghhhh, but yay!!!!