Savasana...Resting Pose

My cultural legacy—though it may be a legacy of necessity having been exiled from every nook, cranny and community for centuries –is to wander. My mind. My speech. My body. A state of perpetual unknowing. Movement. Searching..for something. Home. Place. Peace.

Since I haven’t changed my physical landscape for sixty-plus seasons, I am in a state of constantly regenerating. Like a worm cut in two. To regenerate, you yourself have to come up with the missing piece if you want to live, (in the case of the worm, the piece is the head, I think). You are your own reserves. You are your only chance at survival.

So maybe that’s quite possibly why I like the birds—they change the landscape…mine and theirs. They, most of them, unlike me.. migrate. Switch it up. They are just like, “This cold shit is whack and I’m takin’ flight—for warmth for where stuff isn’t dying, like Detroit, like manufacturing or unions, or an era. I’m going to fly my little grosbeak self to the south. For safety. Survival.”
In birdspeak, of course.

I travel but don’t leave, wander but don’t risk... though I’ve tried the last several years –but mostly through dreams…dreams of another life in work, in love.

One foot here, half a body elsewhere. Hoping that another place often catalyzed by the possibility of love--mostly self-generated and initiated—-would be my promised land. A Canaan of sorts. Sure, maybe I could migrate elsewhere, find some flock, but it seemed so elusive –so overwhelming to fly alone.

Maybe because of the ease..or the reality.. or something less tangible, I stayed in this terrain—found a new window to look out and in—and it opened up worlds within worlds, making that which was old, tired, toxic--‘poison from standing water’ (Yiddish)—newer… shinier …sunnier. It didn’t lift me out of loneliness, but it has lifted me a little, so I could lift up some others.

And in the midst of new windows, new terrains…a constant.

Some birds are here year round -- they stay, sure maybe they change sub-divisions, move from a spruce to a new sexier sapling, or squat in some others' nest from another season but they are here. Rooting. Building. Being. Becoming. And in some cases, just a flock, a feather, a friend, a mat away.

If you are always looking to fly West or East or South you may miss what nests here, what breathes beside you.

This constant, cardinal-like, striking, chiseled, and thus a slight anomaly in a class of sparrows & starlings sat beside me for months as we stretched, held warriors and pigeons, balanced in trees and eagles, up-dogged & down-dogged, fell and got back up.

We (the constant) spoke slightly—he telling me of impending flight from his current life/wife- and me mentioning a return (to my childhood) home.

“It’s interesting you still call it home” he says to me.

Before we closed restaurants, chirping and chatting for all hours, before we kissed in the car like teenagers, before he emblazoned a freebird on his body, before I had a dream of him straightening up my bedroom for me, before he sprinkled and showered my everyday thoughts, we are at rest.

Our mats next to each other… it is rest, savasana.

...maybe his thoughts are no thoughts at all –or maybe it’s when he wanders most wondering, how did I get here? Or maybe it is just a moment a reward for moving beyond perception and capability to ability...to touching toes, to reaching the impossible.

…and me, sometimes I wander to far off places and people, other times I recognize my own body and breath—but this one time—I sensed something else—

I knew this man with the blue mat, and the brown eyes would be a constant in my life. That we somehow were right for this space, and place and time. That maybe we had wandered far…found ourselves in rooms without windows, worlds without warmth, but here at the intersection of past and present …we breathe.