Autobiography of an Abstraction

<p style=”clear: both”>Mostly at yoga I am not overcome by words. The words Dana uses to guide me, the custom images she fits me are tools, means to an end, and I feel released from words; I feel a little guilty today that I finish with her and grab a notebook to scrawl.

It is what it is.

The triangles of my knees and legs are fleshy and real, not Euclidean partless points, and this suddenly is not contemptible or sad, it is joyful.

Since my first reading of Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I was caught by her using the theological expression “the scandal of the particular” which I would carry around rolling it like a pebble across the tongue, how it captures some aspect of what it is to inhabit the body, to be particular in this way. This body and no other, this history and no other. That I have been uneasy with the particularity of body, grateful, perhaps not as much as I should be, that it is a healthy body, a strong body, that mostly I can forget about it because it is so serviceable, but that I am still prone to being fraught with issues of body image (happily, less so than I have been at other times and places).

There is the history of the body, the history of the ideas about the body, and there is the end of yoga today when Dana encouraged me to breathe into my chest. I was flooded with imagery like Catholic sacred hearts and the recollection of one moment when I drove around a curve and this treed hill and blue sky and perfect roll of landscape opened in front of me and I had this sudden awareness of joy as a physical sensation, the chest burst open, a sensation that has come back with music and really good conversation, and it finally hits me today that as the emotion created the sensation the body, I can be in my body to invite the emotion.

In another pose Dana tells me I look like a ballerina. I have tried explaining to Dana the growing up feeling graceless, uncoordinated, utterly unathletic. I played violin as if I did it with my brain and not my body, and she has laughed and told me I am more coordinated than I believe. One cannot play the violin without coordination.

Yoga has been a strange pathway into trusting my body. I believed yoga was something for people fundamentally different from me, with more balance and coordination and flexibility, plus, it always took place in group settings, so it was people willing to exercise with other people. I exercised, but privately. Pregnant, though, with my third son I was willing to try anything to keep my blood pressure from going up, keep from being confined with bed rest, so I ventured into prenatal yoga, and it was safe, it was good.

As much as I loved my midwife, I think the prenatal yoga was a huge part of how great the births of my third and fourth sons were because it had been about learning to trust my body, to understand what I could take, when I needed to listen to it, not push harder, to understand myself as being as strong and coordinated as I needed to be. Something said when I was in labor the second time made me fearful, made me think I just didn’t know how to push well and needed the doctor to explain to me better how to do it, and that was an idea that was just exploded in midwife-assisted births where I was listening to my body rather than some outside authority telling me when and how and for how long.

I still might not have pursued any sort of yoga in Portland, being secretly convinced by the friend three years ago who told me that all the yoga classes she had been to were basically meat markets, single men and women with beautiful bodies checking each other out. But Dana moved here this summer and was looking for students, and it’s suddenly this anchoring point for my week, the checking in, her enthusiasm and encouragement, and I feel GOOD, which is no small thing.

What is surprising is the nostalgia for the particularity my body when it was pregnant or nursing, which I know is at least partly my remembering selectively. I sat this morning in a crowded coffee shop to write and the weekday patrons include mothers of babies meeting for a playdate, delicately negotiating the needs, the considerations, that their babies come first, the friendship, as I remember it, which can be a lifeline, also is this fragile thing, one of the mothers has been kept waiting, and they both have a slightly exhausted, strained look to them. Another woman is there, hugely pregnant, and doesn’t easily navigate the chairs that clutter the pathways between any two points in the shop, which brings another memory flooding back.

Learning to negotiate the differences of life in Prague after life here, there was one morning when we were newly settled in our apartment there and I decided with some trepidation to get some of the small food items we needed at the little shop on our block rather than in the larger Tesco supermarket that would require a journey by tram and subway. Maybe I just needed to get out of the apartment, to see other human beings even if I didn’t have much hope of actual communication with them, because the hours Raven was at work were lonely. It was late summer, so I was hot and sticky as well bulky, and wore a dress, one that wasn’t even a proper maternity dress, as I remember, maternity clothes having seemed like an extravagance to be worn for only a couple months. When we left the States I was six months pregnant, not sure how big I would get, so I had hit Goodwill for just clothes a few sizes up. And as I walked the narrow aisles of the neighborhood market, the whole shop no larger than an average Czech apartment, the hem of my dress caught on a glass bottle stacked near the edge of a bottom shelf. This led to a total upset, another shopper pointing and getting the shopkeeper’s attention, yelling, she had to clean up broken glass and syrup and I think was quite anxious that I understand I still had to pay for it, we had no common language but the resentment in her face, the burning cheeks in mine, the language and currency all incomprehensible, the fact that at that moment I needed compassion as I never had in my life, and tears pouring out because what had we gotten ourselves into?

I was suddenly bitterly aware of the easier life I wasn’t living, had left behind back across an ocean and a handful months, where I had mastered how things worked at work, had been comfortable with my place at the university and in family life, and that here, I was overwhelmed by everything, marriage, the parasite inside me, the parasite I felt myself to be on a husband who worked while I failed at shopping, the parasite that the American presence in Prague and all our innocent good thoughtless intentions boiled down to. And the part of it that was most out of control was this alien body that I couldn’t even estimate how much space it would take up when I wanted to be invisible and take up no space at all.

And this is part of the story of my body just as much as yoga.

My story of myself, of my body, of particularity is open to a little revision.

This is what yoga does for me, I am surrendering to the poses, to the body. Reading this week has been about finally, really surrendering to the books, writing about surrendering to the words and images that come bursting forth, and here in yoga I surrender to my body.

One day doing morning pages I have music on and discover how grateful I am there are no neighbors’ houses positioned to see in the studio windows because I have to get up and dance, have to at first trudge in tribal circles around because I have to move, then, I lift my arms, I swirl and spin like a little kid, and finally my feet have to leave the ground. There is no dignity here, just mad joy of motion. Surrender to motion.

Another morning when it seems I am locked, trapped in the few cubic inches of skull, half an inch back from my eyes, I feel unreal, I fantasize about walking out and lying in the wet grass where I’ve been watching birds hauling worms from the ground and sorting among the leaves, birds whose backs are the same color as the damp winter remnants of leaves littering the grass so that one has the unsettling notion that it is the leaves, getting up and hopping around. As I go to stand at the glass door and watch them, disturbed, taking wing, I fantasize of lying on my back in the grass ad letting the rain soak into my body, taking a small quantity of dirt and putting it in my mouth just to be in my body, to be real, to be part of that scene.

I am no abstraction; mind and body are no duality. I take my particularity, hold it cupped in my hands, those parts of my body that hover, visible in front of me, on keyboard or with pen in them, holding the smaller hand to be led to school, submerged in dishwater, I listen to my breath escaping with a sigh, I release.