You ever meet someone you wish you would have known when you were a child? Just a little more time to share? I'm not sure when this photo was taken, but I'm guessing somewhere around 1980, or just before.

It's difficult to walk around with so much indignation towards the world around me, yet have so much love for another human being, in my heart of hearts. It's a constant maintenance. I typically start by stretching my neck out. We hold a lot of tears in there. Then I take a deep breath and ground my energy just below the navel, as if I were about to sing in the choir. You can go pretty far with breathing exercises, but that's the basic gist of it. We can't allow people to stop us from breathing, to intimidate us in such a way that our neck becomes taught and drawn in. When we do that, our heart begins to ball up like a fist, and it doesn't help the situation at all. I also practice a little yoga from time to time. Probably not as much as I should, nowadays, but it helps.

These are the sorts of things that I would explain to Kristin, when we first met. I would make her do a grounding exercise with me, called the "Small Heaven," that I learned from a Sufi Shaykh named Ibrahim. Another thing that helps is, of course, to look at a photo of Kristin. We shared many, over the Winter of 2018/19, while I was here in Onion Creek. We talked about our childhood quite a bit, I remember ... agreeing that Starburst was still the best candy.