Category Archives: Yoga

One More Sun Salute (7)

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I am baffled by this thing of getting better, of becoming myself again. How do I get there? Will I know it, recognize me when I do? I am just past the simple laying down of small acts now, trusting they will become a path. But my premise remains the same. Do these four things every day: my morning writing, yoga, qi gong, some kind of exercise. Still a layering of small acts but more focused now. I used to do these things, believed in them. If I return to them, I am thinking, they’ll take me to myself again. Renewed vows based on faith, on hope, on prayer. Lead me home, I ask. At the same time, I know it’s unlikely I’ll be who I was when I find myself on the other side of this. How could I be? Sometimes I’m afraid there is no getting to the other side. Will these four things work their magic? Or am I only grasping at straws, their plastic weak, bending under my thumbs? I shake my head, as if I can knock doubt out my ears. One more sun salute, I tell myself, and I’ll be finished with today’s four things. I grab faith in my fists and bow forward.

I Have a Dream (53)

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I spent Wednesday at a local resort, “day use” there my treat for spring break. I drank coffee and did my qi gong and my yoga on the cement beside the hot tub. It was warm from the sun, and I lay on my back and watched the fan palm leaves bend and bristle in the wind. I stood beside the wall of cloudy glass bricks, alone in my corner of that public world, and I kicked my legs forward and backward, punched the air before me, stood still at the end of the series, the dragon stands between the heavens and the earth. In between I floated in the hot water and let the tension leak out of my body and felt a dream emerge in me. The “Travel” section of the Sunday Times was about Mexico, and I read it greedily. It was focused on Mérida, a city in the Yucatán. Just like that, the desire to visit was alive in me. And somewhere in the midst of doing my qi gong in that hidden section of the resort, of floating in the hot water watching the San Jacinto mountains peeking out between the palm trees, of feeling the sun-warmed cement beneath my back, against my thighs while I twisted my spine and stretched my hips, a vision grew in me of a neighborhood in Mérida and a part I might play there one day. I dreamed a fountain and good food, a plaza garden, a co-op, a milpa, peace.

The Waxing Light (41)

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I am lying on my back on my yoga mat. I’ve come late to my practice today, so I’m on the living room floor, chased inside by the cold air. I move my head, and I can see the last light in the sky through the window, still visible in contrast against the darkness of the bougainvillea leaves in the late dusk. The white of the sky is a soft glow, like muted neon or dimmed florescence. I turn my head back, and my eyes sweep the little row of snow globes on the windowsill. There is something peculiar about them this evening, something caught in their curved glass. I check the sky again. Are there clouds up there, still lit by the sun long lost to our edge of the valley here beside the mountains? Sometimes the clouds are lit golden. But there are no clouds, and it’s too late really for them to still catch and hold the sun’s light from their heights. And then I realize what I’m seeing. It’s the Christmas lights I have woven around the bougainvillea trunk and branches. The green and blue and red and amber lights are showing up in my snow globes, five strands glowing there in miniature. I’ve always loved them, I think, in part because they’re little worlds, and they’ve never felt more like that than this moment with these tiny strings of lights alive in them.

Five colored lights against the stepping stones

Glass bird in window with white feathers

I think of the lights I laced along the curtain rod in my Ajijic apartment, looping down into the windows so people would see them from the street below. I remember the white glass bird hanging there, a photograph somewhere, the white tail feathers floating against the window screen. I think of the rounded yellow bird so like that white one, that hung on my shower rod with three glass hummingbirds in Santa Rosa, and the shock of the crash when the rod gave way that afternoon, nothing but glorious shards left in the bathtub. I think of the new glass rooster on my patio table, sunlight through the red glass of his comb, his tail, his wattles. It is my love of color and light that leaves me always reluctant to take down my Christmas lights. I left them up late in Ajijic, too, though I felt self-conscious about it there. Would this be another mark of my crazy estadounidense self? Here I don’t seem to care what my neighbors think of me, the solar lights still sharp and vivid in the hedge beside the gate at night.

two tall palm streets strung with white lights

But I was glad all out of proportion to see two people in my neighborhood who still have their lights turned on, too. I asked Ana about it once, if people in Ajijic ever left their Christmas lights up despues del año nuevo, after the new year. She told me some people wait until after Candlemas to take them down. Candlemas is the Christianized name for one of the main pagan holidays on February 2nd. The Catholics call it the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But as I understand it, we celebrate the waxing of the light. I told Ana I liked that idea, a kind of sanctioned extension of my pleasure in the lights. What better way to honor the growing light than with these bright colors in the dark? When I finish my yoga, I move on hands and knees to the windowsill, stare deep into the small glass globes. It is a wonder, I think, these tiny strands of light that stretch within them, sharp and clear and luminous. I bow to the light in each and every one of us. Namaste, indeed.

Seasons (26)

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I’ve heard the mockingbird singing from the top of the fan palm three mornings in a row. Today when I was lying on my back in the courtyard on my yoga mat, I listened to the verdin’s sweet three-note call. I pictured him sitting in the pine tree, his bright yellow cap and cheerful eyes hidden among the long green needles. Last week, both the hibiscus and the apricot mallow began to bloom again. The crickets have woken up, too. In spite of still mostly three-digit temperatures, they all recognize the secret signals, a heady mixture of the fewer hours of high heat each day, the angle of the sun making its way south, the nights in the seventies. And they aren’t grumbling like I am–tired of the heat, my tolerance used up–though they have more reason to than I who could escape it. They don’t indulge in weariness–they bounce. They celebrate in song, in bloom.

Apricot mallow with the sun shining on fuzzy leaves and one bloom

And their festivities cheer me on. I relish the feel of the cotton sheet over me in the early hours of the morning, the occasional weight of Sofia against leg or hip, missing for months now, a welcome surprise. I look forward to the day when I’ll be seeking the warmth of the sun on the patio when I do my yoga instead of hiding from it. I’ve lived in California most of my life, and still I bristle when someone tells me there are no seasons here. They are subtle but marked. Do not tell me otherwise. Soon the long clusters of green berries on the fan palm will ripen, and the starlings will feast, scattering in shiny black chattering when I walk outside. The days will grow shorter, the blue of the sky deeper. Riding my bike will become sheer bliss. Sometimes I think our desert, where some claim we have only two seasons, may mark the changes in the year more clearly than other parts of the state. Though I realize the changes are less visual than visceral. Here in the fall we begin to reawaken. We return to a state of grace, of ease in the outdoors.

one red hibiscus bloom, cropped

The seasons were subtle in the places I lived in Mexico, too. But they were undeniable unless you just weren’t paying attention. In Todos Santos, the summer rains made for muggy heat, a boon for bugs, biting and otherwise. But it washed the dusty desert clean, changed the color of the world, the lush plant life made new. In winter you could go barefoot in the warm dry days. I remember sitting in my third-floor roost in La Casa Azul, my feet propped up against the rebar railing, marveling at being barefoot in the middle of January. You knew it was winter there by the nights. In Ajijic, jacarandas trumpeted the burgeoning spring, their lilac blossoms littering the cobblestones. The “rainbirds” were the harbingers of the summer rains, not birds at all but insects, a kind of cicada, I think. You could mark the onset of the rains on the calendar from the date you first heard the rainbirds sing. Autumn there meant a world of green, the hills bathed in all their new-growth glory after months of nightly rain. And fresh, sweet corn was everywhere.

Manna from Heaven (9)

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It is April, my first spring break in ten years. I am indulging in yerba maté this week, and my first cup of tea is exquisite. I walked with my lime umbrella this morning, neon green against the bright clouded sky, the rain a gentle rhythm against the fabric, the storm clouds clinging to the rims of our mountains. It made me wish I had my camera. Now the sun is shining and the barest spattering of rain is coming down. My father told me there are Native Americans who believe when this happens, this joining of rain and sunlight, a new moose is born. Today there are two new moose. My empty teacup beside me on the patio table, I open my notebook to write. A small white rectangle of paper drifts out of it, falls into my lap. Auntie Christel’s old cell phone number is scrawled on one side. I turn it over and see it is the tiny flyer for yoga classes in Ajijic. At first, I just stare at the little slip of paper in my hand, dumbstruck. It may as well have fallen from the sky, I think, than to flutter out of my composition book like that, a piece of the world I left behind.

cropped image of the yoga flyer

My mind begins to work again. It must have slipped in the other day when I was using my notebook as a table, writing thank you cards against my knees, paying the dentist bill, when I had my pathetic address book out, stuffed with a crazed fat pile of other little scraps of paper collected over the last handful of years. I remember I picked up the flyer at the health food store in Ajijic, the one next to the nursery at the bottom of my hill, on the frontage road beside the carretera. I bought big bags of yerba maté there from Argentina, the best I’d ever tasted, and the herbal tincture for Sofia’s urinary tract issues. I read the flyer now, surprised I don’t know all the words. When I lived there, I wasn’t really working to build my vocabulary, was just trying to keep up from day to day. I’d understood the gist of the words on the flyer, and that was all I needed. But now I am struck by the language, and I remember the woman wasn’t in practice for the expatriate community there. Indeed, if she had been, I think, the flyer would have been in English. She taught the Mexican community, maybe Mexican tourists, as well. I look up “bienestar,” well-being. “Come and recover your vigor, health and physical well-being.”

I have returned to yoga at last after long years of abandoning it, and now I wonder what it might have been like if I’d returned years earlier. What if I had acted on the longing that awoke in me when I picked this up that day in Ajijic? Would my life have moved differently? I remember the woman taught out of her home in La Floresta. It was in a neighborhood south of the highway, a block, maybe two from the lake on an east-west street. I saw a sign for yoga on a wall there in one of my wanderings. I loved the feeling of those streets, the oldness, the buckled sidewalks, the moss on colored walls, the big trees, the birds, the quiet. The sign for yoga was on a nine-foot painted wall beside a metal gate, a bell. There were huge old trees that canopied the yard behind the wall. I remember standing outside admiring it all. I ached to return to yoga there, to let the peace of that place permeate me. But I didn’t get myself there, and then I moved away.

wall with fuchsia metal door

“Hatha yoga is a discipline that teaches the natural way to live,” her flyer says, and I am struck by that now, by how simple and how true it is. I’m grateful I’ve returned to the practice after more than a decade. And holding this slip of paper in my hands, stroking the Spanish words, evidence of my life in another world, I am struck again by the generous nature of the universe. How many many times are we offered these gifts, these chances to be supported? If I had stayed in Ajijic, would I have made my way one summer morning to Evelia Lara’s home behind that wall, my body eager to return to the practice, the cobblestones wet beneath my feet from last night’s rain? I wonder, and I rub my thumb across the scrap of paper from another life. I marvel, too, at the way it fell from the sky today, manna for All Things Mexico.