Close to my house is a bicycle shop. It’s a place where the owner and his friends fix up old bikes to sell, and teach folks who come in how to fix up bikes- it’s a place where people in my neighborhood like to hang out, and the owner has the rare breed of charisma that makes you feel welcome and at home but also extremely honored to be in his presence. I’m not a bicyclist, and mostly I admire this from the meager distance of passing that way twice a day to and from work, or in the second hand accounts of my friends, who really, really like the shop a lot. Going there is a bit of a local sacrament, among my environmentalist, bicyclist friends. Going there is a bit of an act of sanctuary. It’s a religion I don’t belong to, and I suppose I feel a bit of the things you feel when it comes to religions you don’t belong to and are drawn to, but then also nervous about- fascination, wariness, respect but also a reservation to that respect- all at once.
Once a week, the owner opens his shop to a woman who practises punk rock yoga. Punk rock yoga is a movement by yoga instructors who are trying to break yoga out of the cultural trap of provence of wealthy, skinny white woman (or those who aspire to get there); the notion is to create a space where a wider range of people can come to practise a deeper awareness of their breathing, their bodies, their community, their spirituality. My friend B introduced me to it before she moved away to a different city; I was nervous about it, having my fair share of body unease to begin with, and also being in the midst of a serious reluctance to try new things, but B made a gentle and persuasive pitch for it, and I wanted to go with her, so I did.
I go there, not regularly, but regularly enough that I’ve begun to feel a sense of familiarity replacing the initial sense of awkwardness. I go there to try to be mindful of my body, to try to get out of my head, because I have some vague notion of the virtousness of yoga (it’s perpetually on my list of “oughts”). I go there because afterwards I feel delicious. Or, as in the case of tonight, I go there because I’ve talked it up to a good friend earlier and, while the last thing I want to do when it comes to it is move my body through a series of challenging poses for an hour, the thing I want to do even less is stand up a friend.
I go there, but, in some fit of contrariness, I’m rarely ever really mindful of the place itself. I’m familiar enough with yoga, and flexible and pretty strong, so I can do a lot of the poses without thinking too much about it. So I tend to go there and, in direct contradiction to the purpose, spend that hour and fifteen minutes thinking about the things that fill me with anxiety- problems at work, stressful friendships, worries about family or money, all the things I don’t like about myself, etc. I leave yoga feeling physically exhausted, but not particurlarly spiritually refreshed. And I leave there feeling really, really guilty about that.
Today, for whatever reason (and I suspect that the reason exists beyond my peripheral vision), I had this moment in yoga where all of that just, suddenly, drained away. It was gone and in its place I suddenly felt extremely aware- what a blessing to be in my body! What a blessing to be surrounded by women concentrating on their breathing, on their balance and their posture- what a blessing to feel my breath leave my body and float around in the room to mingle with their breaths!
It reminded me a little of other times of sudden, communal sacredness. When I went monthly to a friends sweat lodge in Ohio. Youth group as a teenager. Listening to my friend P’s band perform my favorite song in a pub. Singalongs when my friend bring banjos and battered books of protest songs from the sixties. Chaperoning youth group sleepovers and that moment of impossible exhaustion and elation that comes at 3 in the morning on an August night. Sharing a train ride across the country with a recovering alcoholic and a lady lutheran minister. As I listened to the labored inhalations and exhalations of the women around me, and my own allergy induced weeziness, and as the musician this evening (a leather faced, thin boned, white bearded gentleman playing blues on a guitar, moaning along with his melodies) strummed and hummed, in a shop filled with bicycles and smelling of grease, and with just candle light and the light from the street lights outside to illuminate, and as I stretched my body, I felt such warmth and light, and such total delight. I felt such tremendous joy, such tremendous contentment, and also, paradoxically, such a pure yearning to follow that contentment and gratitude to the heart, to find God to thank him, personally.
I tend to focus on finding God in the midst of my mistakes (God is a very frequent visitor of my messes; God seems to be a lot more patient with picking me up and dusting me off than, well, I am), or of finding God in the tiny still details of my walk home (the sudden look of clarity in the eyes of a stranger, the oh my good lord too beautiful unfurling of leaves or soft snowfall or patterns of rain), or of finding him in the grace and silences of my most intimate relationships, or in the forgiveness and gentle forgetfulness of the same, or in the least of our brethern, socially speaking, who humble me every single day. It’s wonderful when God pokes me someplace I forget to look, and say “why, hello there, I like this yoga stuff too! Why hello there, isn’t it kind of incredibly, you silly girl, that you have a body that does amazing stuff, and that so do all these other people, and that you come together to be earnest and silly in the midst of these body moving machines”? I like finding God in the midst of that ohm. I have to giggle like Hafiz when God reminds me that from a certain perspective, it’s all so much play.
