According to the laws of geometry, when I sit on the rocks in the morning I can see approximately 12 miles away. When I am at sea level standing on the beach at Hull Bay I can only see a little over 2 miles away. Whether at the beach or 100 feet above the ocean, the only thing that greets me besides the birds is one long indigo seam that contains the ocean and grounds the sky. I will watch the clouds and note the peachy glow that spreads with the expanding sunlight. I will take in the activity of the waves and swells, white caps and stark stillness. Earth, wind, water and fire meet my gaze with an invitation to gain perspective, to meet the vastness and embody awareness with daybreak's flourishing. Some days I feel equal and one with the view before me, aligned and whole. And there are other days where my smallness seeks comfort in the expanse but never finds it, isolated and imperfect. But it is within the practice of my own stillness and internal listening that I find the compassion to meet wherever I am.
And, voila! Here I am mid-life (at least I'm planning on living into my eighties). Dave and I are down to one child who lives at home, we have officially been residents of the USVI for a year, and on 10-10 Dave and I celebrated 22 years of marriage. Over the last few weeks I've been finding my footing with new forms of acceptance, more space to breath my own air and time to sit with what has felt both abundant and uncomfortable. And now I see it- I am on an uphill climb. As beautiful and glorious as this island is, my roots have not quite taken to her rocky soil. Over the course of our marriage, Dave and I have moved 14 times and this one ranks as one of the hardest (and steepest). The challenge may come from the warmer climate, the slower pace or just the fact that this middle time of life is hard in ways that you simply can't prepare for; launching children, aging parents, unanswered longings and could have beens. It's all of the above and sometimes just a morsel of irritation that has me scratching my head wondering where the heaviness comes from.
What I have recently turned to is my trail of breadcrumbs that helped me through our past moves and life-changes. Some therapists will call these breadcrumbs a "toolbox," I prefer "drawing board". As an artist I've always loved the left over palettes/sheets of paper where I blended colors, cleaned my brush or played with shapes and sizes before I put them on the canvas, and I usually keep them as their own works of art (or use them as wrapping paper). All of these little dabs of color and shapes of no particular meaning in the moment are all a part of my process for getting from A to B, a map that I didn't realize I was charting. Using this drawing board technique literally and figuratively- be it through meditating, writing, painting, exploring or just going through the film reels of my mind- this higher ground perspective offers a vantage point to some untended seeds, the meaning markers, that I had forgotten I'd planted- a few breadcrumbs I'd thrown onto my path on past journeys.
One of those little seeds planted many moons ago was yoga. It started when we lived on Centre Street in NYC and I joined a gym to play squash but instead found myself attending yoga classes morning and night. The sweat and the stretching was a salve to my varsity training days of endurance and sprinting. Here I learned to get in touch with my breath and see where it took my flexibility. It wasn't exactly spiritual, but there was something that existed in the room of hot headed New Yorkers seeking strength and stillness that I could relate to with curiosity. When Dave and I moved to the south of France I found a woman who taught a form of kundalini yoga (though I didn't know it was Kundalini yoga until years later) who lead us through the same class each week. I was the youngest by at least 20 years who attended the class, but you'd find me allongé aux maximum (stretched out to my max) listening to the instructions in french and contorting myself in sync with my breath. After France there was Portland, and it didn't take me long to find a fellow entrepreneurial spirit and join her burgeoning yoga studio on the third floor above Exchange Street. Here's where I started to realize the essence of yoga, a means to a quiet I could access through a movement based meditation. I started reading books and buying props to practice at home. I began to recruit friends to join me for classes. This was a time when I could physically see my progress which inspired me to keep expanding my practice, sparking an inner understanding of my body, mind and spirit connection. I was 26.
Fast forward a bit through another move back to NYC, the birth and raising of my babies, and planting ourselves in rural Wilton, CT, as one friend likes to call it since he had the impression that we were in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. (Note to reader, this move is the other hard move on our list of moves.) There were many reasons that living in Wilton was challenging (I don't need to go into detail) but what remains true is that out of that difficult time I got my 200hr yoga teacher certificate. That the teacher training course at SYJ held a huge part in how I survived those intense 4 1/2 years and prompted me to move our family to Rowayton, CT.
It's funny how you can simply go blank (ie; forget your tools/drawing board) when you arrive in a new place during a pandemic. I had totally forgotten about yoga, or at least the community of yoga, when we moved to St. Thomas. Sure, I did online/on demand classes where I could see the teacher but the teacher could not interact with me. Yoga was not something I was turning to to get me through the challenges. From where I stand now, after this last year of an uphill climb, I meet the realization that as long as I have had a yoga community, I have had a home away from home, a focal point, a kula, a hearth to warm my heart and toes when things feel cold and lonely.
Just a few weeks ago, I was invited to a ceremony of other yoga teachers after I had casually mentioned to a friend over coffee that I used to teach yoga and was starting it up again. There I was in a room up on the hill breathing, chanting, and rubbing cacao on my 5th chakra- feeling welcome and like a part of something familiar and also completely new. And since then my (yoga) world has opened, not just with my practice and weekly teaching, but with friendly faces. Fellow yogis, teachers, healers, and light seekers are showing up in abundance. And with this growing integration of community, along with my more solitary body/mind/spirit practice, I've found a rope to help me up the hilly and rocky terrain. A home away from home, away from home, away from home... with seeds falling out of my pockets, taking root and soon to mark the territory with flashes of green and possibility.
Where do you turn when things feel steep? How do you mark your landscape and find footing on new terrain? Where do we look when our worlds feel tight- the horizon, our feet, the sky? I'd love to know...
Namaste,
St. Sunshine
I love this. Oh, how I hope we both find our roots in this rocky soil. But until that day, my outlets are writing and time with you, sweet friend. The islands have been challenging but they brought me you and I'm better for it.
Love, love, love this! For me the importance of a consistent physical practice “of something” is so important. I feel off when I’m not physically engaged. This is a beautiful reminder of how crucial it is to our mental health and well-being! 😘 It’s amazing how we forget and then come back to what heals us!