April 10, Yoga

I had left early because I did not know how long it would take me to get there. Turned out, the extinct cheese factory is a mere ten minutes away from our home. The yoga instructor had told me to come early so I'd have time to fill the health form.

She is petite, slim but very muscular, very well formed, as if the delicate miniature of a perfectly life sized person. Young but bearing the trace of something more powerful than herself - maybe some past sadness? maybe more simply the work at the farm, where all kinds of animals, among them goats, give birth at this time of the year ? maybe the cold and damp winter just behind us. She looks at me with a direct, frank gaze, yet cautiously, not sure what to make of such a client. 

The "cheese factory" is a large room with a few windows looking out upon the bushy landscape. The day sunny but crispier than one would have liked, with a nasty cold wind blowing through closed doors and windows. The two electric heaters have a hard time doing their job. I keep my socks. People of the north have a different threshold. I am spoiled by the ever-burning logs in the fireplace and have no tolerance for winter and cold any longer. Sit down on the chair waiting for me, fill the form, checking most that is wrong with me at the moment, but not all.

Karen comes back and we chat a bit. It does not take long before we switch to French. A master's degree in French translation, of no much use right now, but which explains her language: careful, cultured, faultless.

Besides myself and two elderly ladies on whom I count to keep things flowing nice and slow, a handsome tall woman came in, a caryatid carrying an authentic if casual aura about her. Turned out, she was the instructor's instructor, and did things better than right. I wished I had put myself in a position wherefrom to observe her without turning my head or peek from the corner of my eye in astonishment, impolite. I had to content myself with feeling her presence encompass the large, now resonant room, where Karen's words float soothingly and firm.

A week went by and today I was impatient to get back to the cheese factory/yoga studio. Kept looking at my calendar and counting the days. The day after the first class, I realized I had run into a very capable instructor. That next day, I woke up feeling the workings of my body in a way I had not in a very long time. I would maybe have to think back to when, as a child, I spent hours playing or swimming in the generously salty Black Sea, which offered the body and mind the freedom to float as they pleased. As if every part of the penitent incarnation that I have become had regained some right to say "I'm here and aware of what I'm here to do". Some parts only minimally, maybe, but working.

The first class, in the presence of the caryatid, had been dedicated to the theme of the tree. Which I, for sure, would have greatly appreciated a few years ago, when I kept complaining about the cement bareness, about the scarcity of vegetation in the big city, and that, in spite of Toronto's fare share of beautiful, strong trees. But since we live in the country, the tree is at the center of our life, the house built in the midst of oak trees who now grow in a circle around and hold it steady. So, when Karen suggested that we imagine a tree, I had some difficulty choosing which one of those.

Then she wanted us to imagine the place where we are at peace with ourselves and the world. I paraphrase, but I'm sure you know what I mean. The place one can call one's inner refuge. Like in the case of the tree, I found that difficult to do, since this place where we now live is supposed to be our refuge, the place where we, or at least I, have retired, willingly or not, from the world. Yet that place of peace cannot be attained, or I do not think it can, since one cannot live in that utopic place day after day. And since we are tempted to think of it as a place in nature, rather than in the city, I had to go to my next best place, which is a beach in Cape Breton. And maybe not so much to the beach, as to the ocean, that marvelous day when we went swimming, a few years ago, and everything, the water, the sun, the wind, the sand, was perfect.

Except, this beach went hardly along with the theme of the tree and rootedness, which I had, in my imaginings, replaced with floating and letting the waves take you wherever they would, body turned in the direction of the sun, eyes closed, volition renounced.

Instead of rootedness, there was the drifting with the current, instead of the meadow, on which we set eyes every morning, as we wake up, there was the beach and the warmth of the sand.

I knew I was not following as I should have, but the theme of the tree, related as it is to the vertebral column, marks that moment when my imagination wants to take a pause. In the hope that the upright, firm, well centered posture may be helped, if not replaced, by other forces, which may flow haphazardly. Yet kind and smooth enough to maintain, to lull the body back into some sort of joyful suspension.