Woven Together

This morning, with the smoke from Canadian fires still filling the air here in West Virginia, I looked out at the bright orange ring of sun through the haze. It was deceptively beautiful, like watching the sun inside a dream. The reality of it is more chilling. So much of life is understood only in partial truths and dreamed up realities.

This week, I found myself revisiting parts of my life that seemed to call me back to remember, or perhaps to heal, something. Doing so, felt like moving inside a spiderweb of sorts. Like I was moving over the sticky threads of my own creation that keep me in the same small circle of reality.

One thing kept echoing back—essential truth might get hazy, but it’s always part of the whole of who we are. It is that which can remind us to see past the haze, past the dream, to a more complete picture.

*[The following post was originally written 11 years ago]

I met a man named Michael recently who, with gentle, kind eyes, told me he has a brain tumor called a Glioblastoma, a tumor that means he likely has 9-15 months to live. He was standing outside the yoga studio in Winchester when I arrived there one late afternoon. I was alone and at first felt nervous of this man standing by himself, gazing in the studio door. Not for long, though.

He approached me and struck up a conversation about the score of a local sports game. I had arrived at the studio to set up for a Teacher Training open house and was carrying a platter of pumpkin pop tarts from Mellow Moods. Something reminded me to slow down, to be present with him.

We talked for a bit until he told me about his tumor. He can no longer work and some days he feels very down. But this day the sky was clear blue, the air slightly cool, and he’d met a new friend who gave him a pop tart. He said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day.” And he meant it.

A few days after meeting him I attended a cadaver lab with my own yoga teacher in Baltimore. As we reflected later, my teacher said the cadaver lab helps to remind her of something she manages to forget nearly every day: that we are going to die.

Yes, of course, we are, I thought, but if we think of nothing else, we may not ever get anything done. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Perhaps we’d spend more time like Michael, walking slowly, pausing to talk to a woman he likely won’t see again, marveling at the sky and the temperature and a delicious pop tart, feeling deeply grateful for all the little things that when paid attention to become the big.

My own form has shifted and changed so much and sometimes it’s hard not to rail against what I once was and had. Right around the time I met Michael, a little seed of bitterness had started to take root and grow in me. I was forgetting to see the blue sky and the lovely gifts abounding in my body and my life, and instead was laser focused on all I could not do and did not have.

My teacher reminded me of something from the cadaver lab: that under the skin there is a remarkable whole unit working together. A whole that is very difficult to separate one piece from another. It is difficult to separate the bicep from the triceps or the muscle from the fascia. Under our skin we are whole. The pieces that we call ‘us’ don’t make us whole. We are intricately made as such.

I’ve been trying to practice feeling this wholeness on the mat. I’ve been working to feel the way that my leg, for example, doesn’t begin or end at the top of my thigh, but instead to feel the sensation of the fascia moving all the way up toward my diaphragm and then that tissue hugging the side of my ribs, and so on, until I can feel my body working as a unit.

This often happens when I begin simply, moving with cat/cow to connect long lines of movement from the top of my knees all the way through my hips, pushing through my torso, up into my collar bones and all the way out of the crown of my head. It’s meditative movement that suspends time and helps me still my mind and be present with this simple act of feeling my whole body moving together with my breath.

Sometimes, I imagine life like this. Beneath the surface of parts and pieces, there is an intricately woven whole that we are moving in. That the pieces are woven and bound together by the sinewy connective tissue threading us all.

So, thank you Michael, man I likely won’t meet again, for taking time to remind me to be still with the day and treasure the piece of life I get. The piece of you that gave to me remains a gift that can’t be separated from the whole of who I am.

Shifting, by Christa Mastrangelo Joyce

Sitting by the river’s edge, the glint
of sunlight on the water where the heron poses
on an outcropping of rocks and the sky
a perfect backdrop for the artistry of clouds,
I imagined I could stay like this forever.

But as the light shifted behind the fullness of July
trees, and the heron took flight
and disappeared beyond the horizon,
I remembered, just for a while
just for a while.

Today I am this soft body.
But someday, I will be stone,
and then
wind,
and then
water.
And will I mourn for the vivacity of what
was, or rejoice in the vitality
of what will be?