Ode to Snow

Philadelphia got many inches of snow last night. Snow day. Too messy to go to school for baby or Mommy, and so the fact that Nature is giving us no choice but to snuggle in together makes me so glad for it. Daily I struggle with the blessing and the heartbreak of a beautiful job and a small child who goes to a wonderful school each day. She has adorable friends and nurturing, patient teachers. But, ohmydearLord, I miss her so much. It isn't a complaint as much as it's a wish that our schools were in the same place, and that we could visit throughout the day and then go back to our learning and teaching. That I could go steal a kiss and a squeeze whenever I want, or watch her playing with friends or listening to a story...or, damn it, read the story myself. But this is selfish, isn't it? Maybe she's perfectly okay with this set-up. But, you know, if she ever missed me in all of the excitement of singing and reading and playing with friends...I sure would like to be right there.

Back to the snow day. She surely felt the bliss that filled our house this morning, and she and I softly orbited one another in the sweet space of our living room. We read books, played with Legos, sat in front of a giant bowl of snow and spooned it into and out of cups. During her morning snack, she dipped her raisins in the snow to see what it might taste like, and she shared her raisins with me, "Here, Mama."

"Do you want to run?" I asked her. Oh, yes. And we chased each other back and forth from the kitchen to the living room. She always spills over with glee when I catch her and tickle her. She rode for a bit on her wooden giraffe before suggesting, "Mama's turn," and she watched ecstatically as I made silly noises and bent my knees way up to get my feet to the floor on the wheely toy.

And soon it seemed like a good idea to switch spaces, and so up to the 2nd floor we went. She wanted to play on our big bed, and so we read more books, lying on our backs: "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?" Lately I read and leave out each animal: "I see a red ____." "Bird!" she says. "I see a purple ____." "Cat!" she says. She sat almost all the way through Pinkalicious, but also wanted to stand and then fall on the bed. And do "Criss, cross, applesauce," and hear me sing "Down, down, baby...down by the rollercoaster." More, she says. "Shimmy, shimmy, cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy rock." The sun came through the window — "Sun," she said, and squinted. And she watched the snow hang on the big tree in front of the house.

Lunchtime. How do four hours pass so quickly? She ate the peanut butter sandwich I had originally prepared for her school lunch today, and she fell asleep as I rocked her before her nap.

She is sleeping now. And I am watching her on the monitor while I work, knowing that at any moment I could just run upstairs and steal a kiss and a squeeze.

I'm the mommy, I remind myself. Her one and only mommy. And I thank the snow.

Parivrtta of Mind

Why do we revolve our poses? The revolution of asana twists the internal organs, eases openness into the joints, helps the feet to find the earth, elongates and cleanses the spine...

But it also brings us around to see the opposing iteration of a pose, the opposing forces of a stance, the muscles opposing those that held the body up while facing the other direction.

Perspective.

One of my mentors has a saying that sticks with me. When she is trying to show me the light of a situation, she soothes my ego by reminding me that awareness and lack of awareness might be "no farther apart than two sides of the same coin." Trikonasana and Parivrtta Trikonasana depict this paper-thin space between two spaces of awareness beautifully.

My dear teacher once told us that one of the many powers of yoga is its ability to bring our awareness to those emotions that oppose the ones we're having. It's not to discount or smother what we feel, but rather just to allow us to become aware of the other side.

Synthesizing his words with those of my mentor, and beginning to understand the revolution of asana in a more holistic way, I discover something new, something that challenges mainstream suggestions that the way out of hardship and heartbreak is linear. It occurs to me that it may sometimes be possible to get to the other side of a dark place without necessarily having to set out on a long arduous journey of slogging through our pain. In other words: though we may not be able to bring ourselves out of fury or sadness right away, we might be able to see that the other side of anger and sorrow sits quietly very, very close by. In this way, parivrtta of the mind may help to soothe and open the heart.

The Progymnasmata of Practice

In her book, Yoga: A Gem for Women, Geeta Iyengar writes, "Yoga...is the art of knowing oneself and knowing the eternal truth" (9).

These days I am teaching a course called Classical Rhetoric to most junior and senior university students. In this past first week of the course, we discussed the constraints that modern education place on the pedagogy of composition. These constraints too often give students a series of elements that must be in or shape their text, like a rubric, but do not offer much in the way of helping students to understand how the composition of that text will transcend the boundaries of the classroom, how it will help them in other texts, other contexts. Ancient rhetoricians believed, however, that students should have copia, a wealth of skills and strategies to select from, so that in any rhetorical situation they can access the appropriate tools for making a case. They believed that the arrangement of ideas in the form of an argument was not a formula, but an art, and they asked students to engage in progymnasmata, or "preliminary exercises" in order to cultivate a great strength and flexibility with rhetorical knowledge.

As a professor of English, teacher of yoga, and yogi I see more and more connections between the teaching of writing and the teaching and practice of yoga. I used to see yoga as a formula. Put hand here, tuck tailbone, put foot here, inhale, exhale, move foot to here...there, doing yoga! Well, it does begin there, but the spirit of doing yoga is not about the what as much as it is about the within.

In Ashtanga, the art can become hidden in the sequence, in the edification of poses over time, in time, with breath, with the progress forward. Practice and mindfulness and — yes, conversation — about what happens to us as individuals in the practice helps to resuscitate the art. What it means to be in the practice and in the poses is what Iyengar is talking about when she insists that yoga is about "knowing oneself." The postures become tools — like words, like the progymnasmata — for excavating the many layers and corners of self. While the practice heals, preserves, chisels, and cleanses the body — indeed, I have seen that empirical evidence in my own body — the delicate, whimsical, dark, blundering, forceful art of who we are in the practice is the precious thread that is so hard to find, pick up, hold on to. Yet we learn many, many asanas — and relearn, and reshape — so that we can turn toward a pose as we might turn toward a path in ourselves.

As with writing — that is, the art of articulating what is in our minds — the art of connecting to ourselves in practice is less visible to the eye than it is visible to the heart. It has a kind of energy. And yet, we might know it when we see it.

Works Cited

Iyengar, Geeta. Yoga: A Gem for Women. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 2005.

Another Post About the Jellyfish

We emerge from the holiday season, and from our journey home to the place where we grew up, a lighter and more mindful family. But it is only through this morning's practice that I can say that and mean it.

The post-holiday letdown is always heavy. For me, especially in moments when I am rocking my daughter — oh, how clean and honest those moments are! — I see and feel the weight of how fast time passes. How astoundingly quick her learning is, how difficult to remember as viscerally as I want to the belly of the day between its beginning and ending. The speed of time makes my heart sink. I don't want it to go by so fast...all of it, any of it. I can say to myself: in a blink another holiday season will be upon us. And I will be right. And I wish it were not so.

But practice is a saving grace, for it slows down time. Drawing the mind toward the innermost spaces of self quiets the fury of activity and noise in the ego and outside the body, and the stillness makes the moments long and deep.

Moving from asana through vinyasa to asana, I see the diaphragm as a jellyfish, the way my teacher has explained. Inhale, the jellyfish flattens; exhale, the bubble of its body lifts and opens. Watch jellyfish move, imagine the unchanging stretch of their evolution over millennia, and you will see how slowly time can pass. And then upon coming home, kisses and cuddles and words of soft sweetness, lightness buried in the work day, the strangeness of scenes we see over and over and over, and the will to find peace in the next morning's practice can become part of an easier passing through life. Maybe with less worry. Maybe lighter, longer, and with more space in the mind to remember it.

Work Cited

Jelly Fish. 28 April 2008. YouTube. Web. 2 Jan. 2011.