Adjustments

Profound thanks to long time student Sienna Craig, who recently sent me this beautiful and astonishing poem. With her permission I share it below. It captures with such deftness feelings I have about the shifting sands beneath us, our processes of adjusting, and yoga's firm and grounding embrace throughout all of it.
Thank you, Sienna

Adjustments

It can be as subtle

as a fingertip grazing

the small of a back

or as radical as a

realignment of the

world: out to in,

cosmos to cell,

these adjustments

we bear and sometimes

even welcome;

the mat rests

as a foundation

for movement, itself

a pliant approximation

of earth; the block,

a stone or a book:

something to build

from – firm –

until it, too, is set

aside; to bolster

is to support, to

anchor and shore up

so that one might find

peace, as the body

exhales; the breath

makes its own

adjustments to being,

to sentience in this

time of solitude:

of holding in and

holing up in the hope

that we may regain

our center.

—Sienna Craig

Hanover, NH

March 26, 2020