Homecoming

Arriving in a place that's both strange and familiar

[Jump to this week’s song on repeat]

I’m feeling very much at home here in Bellingham, which is a huge relief. I don’t know what we would have done if we got up here and thought, uh oh. Right now, Ben is working on his bike in the garage and Otis is snoring on the other end of the couch. I’ve got the window open and it smells incredible. When I look outside, all I see is green. Deep, layered shades of green. I can hear either a frog or a bird, my untrained ears can’t always tell the difference. There’s still a lot to do, but it feels right. It feels like what we’ve been missing — home.

I was thinking about this over the weekend as I lay on my mat at the end of a yoga class — oh yeah, I started going to yoga again. It was a big part of my life for a solid decade and then 2020 happened and then it wasn’t anymore. But in my quest to be less lonely, I started looking around for a studio as soon as we got settled. I found one last week that felt right immediately. It’s down by the ocean, the studio is all wood and no mirrors. The last class I went to was built around a sequence I’d never done outside of my own advanced training. I knew I missed it, but I didn’t realize just how much.

It’s interesting because my practice now feels both the same and totally different. My body both is and isn’t the same body. Some things are harder, as expected after a few years off the mat. Some things, surprisingly, feel easier. But it goes beyond the catalog of physical changes. Who even was I in those months before the pandemic, which was the last time I had a consistent practice? I was me, I was just a little more lost than I am now. It was a time when I was noticing conflict everywhere I looked in my life. My drinking, my job, my body, my general life trajectory. None of it felt right but I didn’t know what to do about any of it. So I did what I do and I fled.

Ben asked me (gently) a handful of times over the intervening years if I was going to get back into yoga or teaching. He asked me (gently) what happened, where my love for it went and what changed. I never knew how to answer beyond a general, I don’t know. Part of it, at least, was I just kind of got sick of the hustle and the whole wellness industry. My body hurt and when we moved I lost my community. I didn’t find a studio in SLC that clicked (likely a me problem, there are good teachers to be found everywhere).

A bigger part of it was that I’d lost sight of what it meant to be a student, first and foremost. I couldn’t step on my mat without a running narration in my head. Thinking, thinking, thinking through a pose and how I would teach it, how I would cue it, how I would sequence it, how I would photograph it for Instagram. I couldn’t just do it. It was a performance and I needed a break from myself.

I was really sad about it. I grieved the loss of my community and this practice that provided my life with so much meaning and structure. But I knew not to rush it or force the issue.

I tended to neglected muscles — physical and otherwise. I let myself be lazy and sleep in (or what counts as sleeping in for someone who can’t really sleep past 6). I let myself have just one job for the first time since high school. I practiced loving and accepting my body as I lost definition and got a little softer and started to notice gravity having its way with me. (If that sounds to you like a silly thing to have to practice, be grateful.) I drifted, I floated, I treaded water.

Pavamana mantra

I think about death and aging and mortality a lot, I always have. One of my favorite meditations is a 30 minute contemplation of death, introduced to me in my advanced teacher training. It can be intense if you’re not in the right headspace and so it’s not one I tend to recommend to people. But I find it very comforting and grounding and expansive. I come out of it with a renewed sense of appreciation. It’s like when you go through a rough patch and then one day it’s over and you’ve got your bounce back and the way the wind moves through the trees makes you want to cry because life is so beautiful and you’re so lucky to be alive.

I think about aging more than I used to, though…like as a process that’s actually happening…to me…not as an abstract, distant-future concept. I’ve decided (for now at least) to try not to cling too hard to the physical markers of my youth. The gray hairs, the deepening fine lines — I’m trying to be interested in it. I’ve had some gray hairs since grade school, but only recently has a good chunk of my bangs started going. A couple years ago I plucked my first gray eyebrow hair. A few months ago, my first gray chin hair (lol).

No judgment to those who make more of an effort, I just know that I — with my personal hang ups and control freak tendencies — better start working on accepting all this change sooner rather than later. I feel like I just came out on the other side of a quarter-life (third-life?) crisis, I’m not eager for another one in just a few years. Also I’m simply too lazy and cheap to maintain a beauty routine that involves hair dye and filler. I’ve gotten on the retinol and sunscreen train, but trimming my bangs every few weeks is about as high maintenance as I can reliably handle. (I reserve the right to do a complete 180 on all this. If I get a boob job and tasteful facelift at 50, that's my business!)

Now firmly in my 30s, I’ve found myself feeling the reality that there are some things that you just lose with time. Some things don’t come as easily or you don’t bounce back as quickly, if you bounce back at all. Some experiences you’ll never get again. Some experiences you’ll never get at all, having missed the window. It makes me a little sad (and a little scared, tbh) and my knee jerk reaction is to fight it and cling to what I used to be able to do, how I used to be able to move, the paths that used to be available to me. 

But I’ve also been thinking about how it’s possible to live your whole life yearning for the version of yourself from 5 years ago and what a waste that would be. For so long I was stuck in a spot where I constantly beat myself up for not having started earlier — a physical practice, a creative practice, a professional change, a lifestyle change, you name it. I longed to go back in time and make different choices and then, a beat later, would fantasize about an unrealistic future. Anything not to inhabit my current moment. 

Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that my time away from my mat was, I think, necessary. This week as I’ve attended classes, I’ve been enjoying the sweet contradiction of how simultaneously familiar and strange it feels. It’s a homecoming, to a place I’ve never been. That’s kind of how this whole move has been, so far at least. 

The past is the past — a different time, a different place, a different me — but it’s where I’m from and so the past is also home. It shaped me and defined me and then kicked me out, told me to grow up. Eventually there comes a point when we don’t get to go home again, not really. Or at least not the old home. We have to figure out how to build a new one which, in time, we will also inevitably outgrow. It’s a lesson I’m sure I’ll forget and relearn a hundred more times, if I’m lucky.

For now, though, it feels very good to be building this version of home.

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This week’s song on repeat

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Last night I told a stranger all about you