Yoga Moves Outside Next Week
What a crazy whirlwind the past week has been. Before the enraging and horrifying leak confirming my worst fears about women's diminishing rights over our own bodies, I had a long, euphoria-inducing hike in the UV dam. Before my feelings of rage and helplessness, joy and discovery.
The Spring Ephemerals often make an early appearance in the UV Dam, especially along the West branch of the Ompompanoosuc, and my hiking friends and I were treated to Spring Beauties, Hepatica, Dutchman's Britches. These lovely and opportunistic flowers do their entire life cycle in a matter of weeks: sprouting, blooming, reproducing, then storing energy for the next cycle. All of that happens after the snow is (mostly) gone and before the upper tree canopy leafs out. Their life cycle is transitory and fleeting; strategy meets miracle. They are a perfect showcase of life's glorious impermanence.
Now, as I look toward Mother's Day, I find I am at a bit of a loss as to how to honor and celebrate it. I am enraged over what is happening on the Supreme Court. I am in awe over what Mother Earth is beginning to share with us. I am fiercely missing my own recently re-fledged young adult offspring. (Empty Nesting 2.0). After I teach on Sunday, I will spend time with my beautiful and vibrant mother, an artist and has always been my champion through the hard stuff. I will think on the many, many maternal beings who have mothered me, including dear friends, some now gone from this earth. I will touch into the ways in which I have my own maternal stirrings quite often when teaching yoga, and feelings of love and protectiveness that sometimes catch me off guard and take my breath away, when yoga brings vulnerabilities to the surface during class.
I have no clever conclusions, no tidy sound bites. I have only these conflicting feelings as I go through my day, and through my week.
Next week, temperatures will soar into the 80's. And while it is a little disturbing, another example of climate change sending us into turbulent weather fluctuation, my inclination at this moment is to take the win—to schedule a couple of classes outside in our yard, and celebrate Mother Earth's resilience, and the bountiful power of the sun. To celebrate the opportunistic life cycle of Spring Ephemerals. To put my bare feet on the earth and soak in the warmth.
Perhaps we should also celebrate Mother Earth's wicked sense of humor, when the thermometer ticks past 75 degrees and we gleefully tuck our boots away and dig out the flip flops.
Because, as we all know, we could be in for snow the week following.
Be well, all.
Happy Mothers Day to the Mothers, the Mothering, the Mothered.
Love, Leslie
