Truth be told I started this at the beginning of January when I thought I would be writing every week as a promise of a fresh start, a resolution, of sorts. It’s long past that now, and I have tried to write something else (thinking that the date on this had expired), but I can’t leave these thoughts unfinished. And so, I begin.
I finish the practice and lie on the mat for an extra few seconds, feeling gravity tug gently at my muscles and invite me to remember the earth, the miles of solidity beneath me. When I sit up and open my eyes, the light is almost too bright. I settle into the evening, to this blank page, and it hits me that it is a new year.
I’m not one to mark the night turning from one to another. Once in middle school I was a mother’s helper for a group of children at a party - my best friend at the time and I drank sparkling grape juice and watched the ball drop, kids sleeping in the room next to us, sprawled with blankets and pillows and the remnants of juice boxes and cheese puffs. It felt momentous, and the house felt cavernous, the sounds of the adults far away. I wondered what it would be like to dress up and toast with champagne, to collect sleeping kids from neighborhood babysitters and tuck them into car seats and then into beds. It all felt so unreal at the time.
As the years have gone forward I have only ever marked the year occasionally, and usually I’m asleep as the midnight turns.
The yoga instructor said something that anchors in my brain, a weight, a pull to revisit. She talked about being compassionate with yourself, to be a compassionate observer of your body. She said we should thank our bodies at the end of the practice, and my first thought was, “for what?”
What does it mean to be compassionate to your self? I think perhaps I could root this writing in a study of the word compassion, to parse it, to dissect it like a moth’s wing under a microscope. Then I think I could delve into my history, and tell the story of the time I went on a run and felt something like triumph, which I mistook for love.
But now I think about the wood floor under the very back of my skull, how it cools my hair. I think about how every time I lie down on the floor, I picture the earth miles and miles beneath me, pushing me upward. The invisible forces, the push of gravity, the pull of the earth, or is it the other way around? I feel small again, and my breathing slows.
In these moments I want to ask someone to teach me self-compassion. I’ve been a good learner all my life, a lesson plan, a set of topics and facts to master. I could write a dissertation on it if someone would tell me just what it is I need to research or remember.
The horse moving under me as I struggle to keep time with him, to respond in my body’s quiet whispers and not her loud shouts. The reminder from my instructor to try again, to keep loving the act of trying itself. He moves forward, I coax him to a walk, to a halt, I keep still. Can he feel when it’s time to wait, and time to move? Can I?
I keep thinking about what holds me up: the solid earth, the moving horse. They are compassionate in how they hold me.
May I mirror their compassion in how I hold myself.
I love your use of imagery in your writing. It’s stunning and grounding!