There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world.....

[Lisa Walford]

Most of us consider our every day lives and living as adequate. We do good where we can, we attempt to figure it out when things seem to go awry, we hope for the best and prepare our survival - be it health, financial, family, or social services. Most of us live to the best of our abilities, or so we try. Yet... there are always times when things fall apart. 

I heard a moving podcast with the writer Katherine May in the On Being series hosted by Krista Tippit. Katherine May experienced sever depression which she came to call wintering. As a writer she was able to track her journey and decipher the silver lining. While Ms May was propelled into "Somewhere Else" (see below), we need not fall into wintering. We can find this "Somewhere Else", the condition of mind, consciousness, and heart that abides by a different state. In Yoga, we might call it the "M" in AUM, the silence after the most subtle of experience. I believe that pranayama and meditation can access this "Somewhere Else" consciously.    

….“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open you, and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. And Somewhere Else” — which is now capitalized — “Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.”

from Katherine: a lot of Wintering is about my love of winter and my affection for the cold and even the dark, that wintering is a metaphor for those phases in our life when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come at any time, in any season, in any weather, that it has nothing to do with the physical cold. So it was very useful from a narrative point of view to be able to start with what indeed happened, which was, on an unseasonably sunny day in September, just before my 40th birthday, when my husband fell very suddenly ill

Pema Chodron: 

"The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened." - Pema Chodron