Thanksgiving morning, and a choice for the whole holiday season: be the thermometer that matches a room's stress, or the thermostat that sets its temperature.

Breathe in and out through your heart as if it were a doorway. Hold one simple comfort, like a warm cup in your hands, until gratitude glows steady in your chest. Grow burnished-gold taproots from your feet through bedrock to the earth's core, and stand like an ancient oak while the day's noise swirls past like dry leaves. Weave heart light and amber light into a bubble of presence. Smell rosemary, sage and cranberry, find the blue at the base of a candle flame, and listen for your place in the living music of the room. Then breathe cranberry red into the root and rose gold into the heart.

The bowls moved easily between C and F, touched into E major and found their way to D. The masks fade, the presence remains.