As the numbers of dead and missing in Japan rise each day, I find my thoughts turn to this ill-fated nation, undone so quickly by earthquake, tsunami and radiation leaking into the environment.
What would it be like to wake up into a normal day and by the end of it, your world turned upside down?
It happens every time that someone sits down with a medico and gets a terminal prognosis. It happens when a defendant goes into court and is sentenced to a prison term.
I came across this passage in Muriel Barbery’s  The Elegance of the Hedgehog today:

…beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
…does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.

Is there anything in yoga practice that will cultivate the equipoise between beauty and death? Perhaps just the awareness of one breath dissolving into the other. Inhale into exhale into inhale into exhale. The breath turning like a ferris wheel, where one breath slides into the other with the Self as a witness.