yoga diary - entry 17

Suddenly I am noticeably thinner.

The sun has made its way beyond the block of apartments that obscures my view of the whole sunset and is moving north now, a little more every day. Actually, we are, the earth is moving but I was raised to think of the sun rising and setting and sometimes it's hard to remember how we spin toward and away from it every day and change our angle through the year.

Yoga has been good for the last two days. Good enough that I considered altering or adding to it. I don't think it's time for that yet but it will be. I'm just not ready to alter a good thing, I want a more solid foundation first.

It occurs to me that the passage of time and my own observance of it might have been one of the things that made staying with the man in Texas so appealing.

Whether I understood it or not, when I was with him, waiting for our life together to begin and trusting him, I could hang on to the illusion of time standing still. It felt like he and I were the only things determining the movement of time. He said time had to wait, so it waited and I waited with it.

Of course that's absurd but think of how we're all raised to see Sunrise and Sunset - something big moves around us, we don't think that we could be moving around it. After all, aren't we always in the same place? Anyway, he wasn't really waiting, he was auditioning, tasting, feeding what needed to be fed and getting ready to move on. Maybe that's my fault. I'm not sure he understood how much of my life I allowed to hang in the balance waiting for the time when I could be open about everything and live in one place, fully belonging there.

It was a lovely dream and I have been interested to observe it's something of a family pattern. We bloom late and we only seem to bloom when we are married, if I'm honest I have to admit, I really don't want to succeed alone. That's one of the reasons I have done such a strange little dance with my own success. Success alone, to me, is condemnation to a life of solitude and that, honestly, is the very last thing I want - so here I am, living it. Irony = life I suppose.

We are moving from life to death. That's true every minute of every day. It's not a terrible thing, it is the nature of life and nature itself - we're part of that, it has to be ok.

So here I am, back in the flow of time, life spilling past the rocks and over the sluice gate and on to the ocean somewhere in the distance.

Here I am with the earth turning beneath me and the sun fixed overhead, we spin away and then turn back and each time we do it's just a little different from the last time. The pattern is called an analemma, there is an excellent explanation of it here at a blog called Field Notebook, written by Curtiss Clark, whom I do not know but who seems like a pretty smart guy.

So the weather changes, the sun has its arc and I have mine. And today I didn't think of anything but yoga while I was doing yoga. They call that being "in the moment", I suppose.

I'm doing it right.

That's the conclusion I've come to today. I'm doing it right and that's fine but coming out of years of doing it wrong, years that were then iced over with a layer of four years of being lied to, sometimes it feels like too little too late.

Here I am in frozen tundra-land trying to make some meaning of it all and I guess today the meaning is this. Look at what you're doing as you do it and do that thing right. It will have results but you might not see them for a while. In the meantime, it's not going to be fun and it's not going to be exciting, it's just going to be going through the motions and trying to remember, every step is a step toward the end and you are always moving.

Even when you're standing still.