3 Ways of Practice

I am returned from my trip!

I did not write while there...my apologies. But, I am delighted to see that I have new readers here in Shanti Town in the meantime...welcome! I love you! (Seriously. I love you.)

My practice was minimal while away...a few stolen moments in the mornings at P.'s parents house, a beautiful vigorous practice on the cold wet deck of a shared house on the Oregon Coast (thank you, Heidi), and another on a different deck, this one shaded with fat green trees, watched by a white cat with wide eyes, in a beautiful house in Seattle. This last practice may have been my favorite...the air was warm but full of breezes, music quietly seeped from the outdoor speakers, and I felt--on the warm plank wood of the deck--that I was both indoors and out, and with P. and Jos working just on the other side of the windows, both solitary and with company (this, like taking a nap in the middle of the day when someone else is home and awake) being one of my favorite kinds of feelings...and every time I bent backwards, I could look up to see the sky covered with trees...

The trip, like these three practices, was broken into three major parts: A week at P's parents house in Eugene (where I stole bits of practice before the house was awake), several days on the Oregon coast (where Heidi and I practiced in the damp air of the morning), and our last week in Seattle (where I did backbends on the deck in Seattle with its fat cat and fat trees)...and I have to wonder if the practice matched the place...?

Perhaps it is right that the quiet solitude and spaciousness of the house in Eugene--itself standing solitary amidst acres of farmland, down a long dusty road to the peace of it--inspired a silent solitary practice, stolen on the gray rug that carpeted our bedroom. I remember how much my back ached that first day when I bent forward into a gentle seated practice, how I could feel all the muscles around all my vertebrae begin to stretch and call out, and how much patience I felt I had for my practice...the space to lean forward and rest my head in the cups of my turned out ankles...bereft of my usual need to push and move and accomplish, I spent a good portion of an hour rippling the waves of my aching back. And so it was at the house, where every morning P and I watched birds gather in the grass as we drank our coffee, and the buzz of New York slipped from our ears and the backs of our shoulders, a little more each day, as we took walks and ate long lunches and generally reee-laxed.

Perhaps it is right that on the coast--where for most days the sky was luminous gray and the air so cold both P and I had to go to the local outlet store and purchase jackets, where we were suddenly away from the solitude of the country and in the arms and eyes and conversations of a large group of friends, all gathered in pending celebration--that my practice became not just shared, but spoken aloud, as I led a chilly (but soon vigorous warm) practice on spread-out beach towels on the deck of our temporary coastal home. The addition of another yogi made my practice come alive in a way that I find difficult to achieve when practicing on my own. I wanted it to be good, damnnit! And we sweated and moved and bent and twisted and inverted, so well my legs quivered after with the exertion of it. (What is it about company, that can so easily obliterate distractions?)

And perhaps also it was right that in Seattle--the place of my youth and late-youth (heh), a place which I feel I am rediscovering, now as an adult, and which also swells with memories and nostalgia and my own longing to live in a place which is beautiful--that I practiced in a new house in a new neighborhood, but in a city I know so well, outside beneath the trees, with my love just on the other side of a window, and the smells of Lake Washington spilling over the dry leaves around my feet, and that the trees and the height and the space of the deck forced a kind of improvisation to my practice, and that the past, after so many days of family and friends and childhood neighborhoods, was deeply present, but also, after the revelry of a much-anticipated wedding and the silent reclamation of a city I have long loved, and, more importantly, the appearance of a Self--more grown, more solid, more flexible--in all these places of old, meant that the future was there with me as well.