Mango yoga
Yoga at 7 a.m. under a mango tree in a Balinese garden. ( I
know... go ahead and hate me now.) Well, those of you who know me can
laugh about the 7 a.m. part but the yoga was a truly beautiful
experience. Our Slovakian teacher led us through the gentle deep
breathing yoga that I love. But this was Mother Earth yoga. I kept flicking
insects - both familiar and unrecognizable - off my mat. Surprisingly
though, no mosquitoes. It was hot and even more humid, even at 7
a.m. Back home, this would be sold as hot yoga with Mother Nature
supplying the sauna.
Our teacher encouraged us to settle our feet into the ground,
feeling the earth beneath us. Moving into triangle pose, I found myself
looking up into the sunlight filtering through the mango tree above me.
Roosters were crowing as we moved into corpse pose. Lying quietly, I
remembered that nature isn’t still at all. I could hear the birds
calling raucously, roosters crowing, dogs barking, insects humming. Dirt
from the garden dusted my ankles and arms from their moments off the mat.
As we finished, the garden’s owner, dressed in a sarong and kabaya, walked
quietly past, carrying morning offerings of rice, fruit and flowers for the
Hindu family altar at the front of the garden. It was a moment of deep
connection with life, lying between earth and sky, under a mango tree.
**AF**
Softening Up
They should put
warning signs up at Ye Ole Fashioned. The banana splits there could feed a
family of four, thank goodness and bless their hearts. This is a treat I
splurge on in summer. I don’t know why. They are good anytime of the year, but
somehow in summer when life seems a little slower and afternoons get hazier and
hotter, the treat takes on more of an irresistible appeal.
I ignore what I know
about glycemic index and sugar addictions and dive in to enjoy with a friend.
You can’t eat these alone. Well, you can, but it’s more fun to share the guilt.
The words from a yoga class drift back to me: “Soften in poses, in life, in
effort.” Because I have a deadline-driven job, I often am cracking the whip on
myself to get tasks checked off. At home, I have a child with a disability. It can take amazingly large amounts of energy and motivation to deal with those
needs. Sometimes I’ll come to a stop in the day and realize, it’s OK to just
be. To stop pushing. To stop caring.
And, yes,
occasionally, dip into a split.
Last
weekend, I went home for my childhood best friend's wedding. Even as I type
that, it doesn't feel right. Harlan, KY is where I spent the first 18 years of
my life, but is it really "home" anymore? Maybe Mount Pleasant, SC,
where I now live, is home. The truth is, since I left Harlan, I have made my
home in ten different places on two continents. In most of those I eventually
felt some sense of belonging, sometimes even more so than in the town of my
birth. And yet, something stirs in me whenever I drive back across the state
line and I see the mountains, the same ones that stood sentinel over every
moment of my childhood.
In college, I remember reading Scott Russell Sanders' Staying
Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. His words have stayed with me ever
since: "One’s native ground is the place where, since before you had words
for such knowledge, you have known the smells, the seasons, the birds and
beasts, the human voices, the houses, the ways of working, the lay of the land,
and the quality of light. It is the landscape you learn before you retreat
inside the illusion of your skin. You may love the place if you flourished
there, or hate the place if you suffered there. But love it or hate it, you
cannot shake free. Even if you move to the antipodes, even if you become
intimate with new landscapes, you still bear the impression of that first
ground." No matter how far away I go, even now at the edge of the ocean, I
still stand in the shadow of those beautiful, familiar mountains, and I guess I
always will.
**SS**
