Before the alarm even sounds, the percussion of raindrops on the roof awakens me. I stretch, listening intently, pleased. This is no paltry shower but a bonafide downpour. It's perfectly rainy. Soft and gray, ideal indoors weather, perfect for curling up with a book, it's the kind of morning I love. Maybe it's the Irish in me.
I hunker over a mug of steaming tea, my morning ritual, marveling from the window at the velocity, and satisfying splatter, of torrents that dash themselves from the roof to the stone patio below. And because I'm only half awake, and because the cascade lulls me into meditation, the raindrops on the roof begin to whisper, "shaktinipata-anusarena shishyo'nugraham arhati." And then I'm gone. Just like that. Lost in memory.
I think I've always been a seeker but it took me a while to hit my stride. When I was young I went to public school. My parents, whom I adore, sent me, with the very best intentions, every Wednesday for religious instruction. The instructor, let's call her Mrs. B, did not take lightly the precarious position of our immortal souls. She wore a helmet of perfectly shellacked hair, nary a one foolish enough to venture out of place, and two perfectly rouged circles on her cheeks. She had a penchant for blouses that tied in a prim bow at the neck. She invariably looked flushed, I'd guess now from hot flashes, but at the time it appeared she'd come fresh from battle with Satan himself.
How can I best express it? Mrs. B and I did not see eye to eye. She was uncomfortable with my questions, any questions, really, and wore her disapproval like a mantle. She was the immovable object to my unstoppable force. Simply put? I loathed her. I thus devoted the entirety of my not inconsiderable creative abilities to ensuring that she enjoyed our time together even less than I did. Looking back from the light of maturity, I can't say that I'm proud.
Ironically, Mrs. B ultimately became exactly what she set out to be, a formative figure in my spiritual evolution. Eventually, my petty personal dislike and adolescent petulance gave way to an authentic longing to find something that I could honestly turn toward. I went looking. Rather than reflexively turning away, which is what I'd been doing, I began to read voraciously. I didn't yet know how to be discriminating and some of what I got my hands on was pure drivel. But some of it? Some of it was magic. I devoured authors like Starhawk who opened my eyes to a concept of the sacred that could take all forms, the feminine included. I read Jung. I got my first taste of Eastern philosophy.
I did a lot of that early reading in the bathtub of the house where I grew up. I didn't understand all of what I read but I was deeply curious. On this particular occasion I'd been reading about non-dualism, which I didn't really get. It was about raindrops merging into the ocean, or something. The bathroom was steamy, my head was full and I set the book de jour aside and began to drift off. Head back I let my eyes rest, unfocused, on the tiled wall where clouds of steam condensed into individual droplets. Drowsy in the warm water, I watched the little drops grow bigger and heavier, then slip down the wall into the bathwater below. Drip. . . drip. . . drip.
The idea formed as slowly as the condensation before my eyes. It was all the same stuff, all water, the clouds of steam, the droplets and the bathwater. Both the beginning and ending were undifferentiated. In between was a single luminous drop. I saw myself. I saw it all. We're merged, we emerge and we merge again. We fall into form like rain, and then dissolve back into an ocean of formlessness. From formlessness to formlessness, with a human lifetime in between.
I don't know how long I soaked like that but well past prune territory. Perhaps it was not a particularly original revelation but it was my own. I've never forgotten it and find it beautiful to this day. I didn't know, then, that years later I would meet a teacher who would teach me that Grace pours down like rain. I didn't know I would meet someone who would teach me a verse from the Kularnava Tantra that means, "By entering the current of the Divine Shakti's descent into the heart, the true disciple becomes capable of receiving grace". I didn't know then, that I would come to teach yoga, and that Anusara Yoga, the kind of yoga I teach, would take its name from this verse.
I didn't know that I would meet someone who would tell me that I have, indeed, fallen from grace, but who would mean something entirely different by it. And so I have come to believe that we are, as my teacher says, book-ended by eternity and that, in between is this time spent in embodiment: ephemeral, luminous and perfect. I have come to believe that we fall from grace, to grace, as the very form of grace itself.
What teaching could be more joyful than this one that claims grace is your very own nature? It might seem easy to take to heart, and it is. It's as intuitive as breathing in and breathing out. But it's hard too. While most days I see grace falling all around me, I must confess that sometimes I take a hard look in the mirror and find it difficult to believe that grace looks like what I find staring back. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I need a reminder.
And then I smile, back in the present, as I lift my head and turn from morning tea toward the torrential downpour just outside my window.
So, apparently, I'd been holding the map upside down. "Trout Brook Valley" is not an address that my GPS recognizes and it's already been established that I'm navigationally challenged.
Thank god for Tim. Somehow, he always knows exactly where he is and how to get where he's going. He calmly points the car in the exact opposite direction I'm insisting we need to go, and five minutes later we arrive at our destination.
That's right. The shameful truth is that this is all happening five minutes from our house. Go right ahead and insert joke about paper bag at your convenience.
The jeep bumps along a wooded dirt road that ends abruptly in an open field. Ah, this must be the place. I recognize it by the utter lack of identifying signs. These beekeepers are tricky like that.
(This isn't a post about bees or beekeeping. Not for the most part, anyway. But about that bee thing? Have I mentioned that on my personal coolness factor scale it rates super ridiculously high? What's that, you say? I have mentioned it? Oh, um, okay. Right.)
It's a perfect day. We find ourselves standing in a meadow under the bluest sky imaginable. The grass is impossibly green and flecked with wildflowers. It rolls out to meet the horizon, climbing a gentle slope to touch the sky. It bows in the breeze, and in it I can see the unseen, that same invisible movement I feel against my cheek, the breath of the universe.
The trees rustle and toss their heads as I look up into the silvery undersides of their branches. They sound like the sea. To the left is a blueberry orchard. Did you know that blueberry flowers are fragrant and white? I didn't. A cheerful sign emblazoned with a potbellied blue pig gives a friendly admonishment not to pick more than 2 quarts of berries at a time. Up the hill lies a grove of mature apple trees, improbably graceful for their gnarled branches. The local beekeepers group have been asked to place hives here to support the orchards and this has become the home of their pet project, the rearing of heartier queens.
Astonished, I feel like I've tumbled out the other side of the wardrobe into Narnia. The earth beneath my feet is part of a thousand acre land trust. It's less than five minutes from my house, it's ginormous, and it's utterly concealed behind a busy road. I'd driven past it a thousand times without ever knowing it was there.
In the midst of this wide open space I begin to soften around the edges. My heart becomes a terrain that's as expansive as the one around me and, suddenly, I can really breathe.
Have I stepped inside The Secret Garden, a favorite childhood book? Do you remember that story? I read my copy until the pages fell out. Sullen and jaundiced, the newly orphaned Mary Lenox is sent from her home in India to England, to live in her widowed uncle's care. Inevitably, she finds her way past a locked gate and high walls into the garden, which is, or course, a metaphor for her own heart, which has been locked away since the death of her parents. Of course the process requires a community, or a kula, and along the way the whole coterie of maladjusted misfits learn to flourish in the garden of self-discovery.
What I find interesting is that the flowering of the heart requires each of the characters to see past the walls, past the limitations of their own construction. They must look outside themselves to see within themselves, they must venture beyond what is comfortable and familiar to regain entry into the inner chambers of the heart, a place one from which one could never truly be denied access at all. And, of course, the story reminds us that there are undiscovered territories without and within and that yoga is a process of discovery.
So, I ask you, what undetected realms might be no more than five minutes from your own front door? What domains lie unexplored within your own heart? And what the heck are you waiting for?
Utterly gratuitous bee photo is used with the express permission of photographer Tim.
Usually, when I travel, it's yoga related. I've heard John Friend say that studentship, often referred to as adhikara in sanskrit, is like chili peppers. Some students are mild in their motivation and some are of the medium variety. Me, after close to ten years with my teachers, my curiosity is still scorchingly hot and my sadhana has led me far afield. I've followed teachers through snowbanks in blizzardy Rochester, NY, and sweltering jungles on the Osa Peninsula. My travels have led me to India and back. The majority of stamps on my passport signify a deep thirst for the teachings that are so close to my heart.
But the last ten days in St. Barth? Just a plain old vacation with my husband, thank you very much. Sorely needed, my aspirations for this trip were no loftier than lazing on the beach and drinking something fruity and ridiculous that came served up in a coconut shell. I would award myself extra points if it had an umbrella in it, or was a vile color, like blue. "A real vacation," I told my friends before we left, with wonder in my voice, "just like normal people." Instead of packing notebooks and yoga props, I packed flipflops and paperback novels. (And if one was about The Mahabharata, India's famous epic poem, well, I'd never tell.)
The island was everything you'd expect it to be and more. Pristine Caribbean beaches nestled into sheltered coves. White sand. Benevolent ocean breezes and aquamarine seas alive with sunlight . The whole nine yards. There were the obligatory palm trees but in addition was a landscape more vivid and flamboyant than I'd yet seen in my travels. My whole being began to exhale, even as my skin and heart opened to breathe in the soft salty air.
Thumbing through a magazine provided by the hotel, I discovered that St. Barth is a volcanic island and was amazed to learn that there is no source of freshwater on the island. On an island where rain is collected in cisterns and saltwater is evaporated, one drop of water is a drop of gold. But how could such an arid terrain support this extravagant array of flora? It seemed impossible but I was seeing it with my own eyes.
Because it found it astounding, I began to pay close attention, and so bore witness to a peculiar phenomenon. I found myself participating in a process of discovery in which every day I saw more than I'd seen the day before. I noticed a gaudy palm reminiscent of a Vegas showgirl's headdress. Halfway through the trip, I paused outside the reception office of the hotel to startle at succulent magenta flowers, half concealed but enormous, and hanging heavy from laden branches. I'd walked this route at least ten times daily for the last week. It amazed me that I hadn't noticed sooner.
The next day I observed that the thornbushes at the beach, the ones I'd been wary of, with the cheery yellow flowers and the two inch barbs, had tiny nests in their branches. They were ingeniously lined with wild cotton. Again, I marveled. What teensy birds made such a cozy home and found protection in such a thorny place?
Once I opened my eyes, each day was full of revelation. I began to ask myself, obsessively, how many days would I have to spend, how long would I have to be here, before the wonder wore off? How long would it take until my eyes glazed over and I forgot to be amazed by this unlikely landscape? That led me to query, how much do I miss at home? At what point, collectively, do we fall asleep? How often are we so preoccupied that the miraculous passes unseen before us? How much of our lives do we miss and how much bigger might the world be with a bit more awareness?
Returning home, everything is familiar but a bit different too. The house doesn't fit in the precise way it did before. Our suburban backyard is greener and everything is just a bit sharper, like getting fitted with a new pair of eyeglasses. I'm heartened to think that if we sleepwalk through our lives, then yoga is the process of waking up, slowly but inevitably. It seems I can't take a vacation from yoga after all. Not even for ten days. Turns out, it's not so bad.
