Just the radio in the corner and the heater blowing. The year winds down. We had so much rain this week they compared it to the floods of 1990 but this week was worse. I stayed in all day, no morning walk. Tried doing yoga for the first time in years: forward bends, spinal twists, corpse pose. The relationship between our minds and bodies, the soul. Our world and the real world and where the two intersect.

Where we go on the interior and how far it goes. I dipped into the year 1985, taken there by a record released then and scant memories from that winter. Every Christmas I get it out and try to go back: U2’s Three Sunrises EP. The band digging down, reaching out to another level. Trying to place myself in that bedroom just turning 15, my parent’s record player. The singer evoking a deep-down source and me doing the same.

You can get up at 5 in the dead of winter and it takes hours for the light to come on. I’ll drink coffee until I can’t sit still and try doing yoga in the bedroom with my wool socks and blanket. When you go inside yourself it’s surprising how good it feels. To pull the shades on the outside world and fold into your own.

I go back to every yoga practice I ever did from 25 years ago, all my teachers, what they said. I’m with my wife again in the early days of our dating at an Iyengar studio in North Seattle. I loved hanging upside down from the wall and getting fresh blood in my head. You can get the same feeling just doing a standing forward bend, too. (Took me 25 years to learn that.)

I will often walk to get out of myself but then discover something leading me back. But to sit in meditation and cleave off the outside world forces a reconciliation between the mind and body and what’s happening inside. I can go long spans of time ignoring my body, but to sit in silence with it is a real union, a reunion.

My favorite sequence is the sun salutation poses, and I’ll do them from memory as the light comes on outside my window. Today there are no walks, just more rain, but soon the sun eases its way up again and I’ll have this day to live once more.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Diary

Tags: yoga, Memoir, spirituality, pacific northwest, Creative Nonfiction