Reality Instructors
Inverted like a tent, palms of my hands on the floor in front of me, feet flat and legs straight behind me, I listened to the yoga instructor at the head of the class. She’d started us out doing cat-cows and now we were moving on. Downward dogs.
“The life nerve starts in the thumbs, travels up the arms and down the spine to the hips, along the legs and ultimately to the ankles. Feel as though you are stretching your entire life nerve. According to yoga, when you lengthen your life nerve, also known as the sciatic nerve, you are lengthening your life. Let’s see if that’s true. Maintain down-dog for five slow, deep breaths.”
The way Kima cited yoga as an authority (“yoga says,” or “according to yoga”) made me think of the birding guide on the birdwalk I’d gone on during the spring migrations, when she’d said, referring to the author of her Birds of North America guidebook, “Rutherford says the Ruby-breasted Grosbeak sounds like a Robin that’s taken voice lessons.”
They all cocked their ears and listened, binoculars around their necks on straps. The song lasted about six seconds, and had as many as twenty syllables. A very lovely song, as lovely as the bird itself, the bright splash of red at its throat. One of the few bird species that sings while sitting on its nest, I recalled the instructor telling us. The man had thumbed through his dog-eared manual until he came to the underscored passage about the grosbeak, and he’d smiled a private smile of satisfaction. I wanted that smile for myself. Enlightenment, it declared.
“Now relax the breath, lie on your stomachs, and come into Sphinx pose,” Kima
commanded.
Sphinx pose! I loved the mild backbend, my arms on the floor in front of me like a dog or a cat, nose in the air like a Carolina Wren giving its full-throated call: Video! Video! Video!
“Now sit back on your heels and stretch. Come up into bowl pose. Raise your upper body off the floor and hold onto your heels, balancing, in effect, on your navel.” Kima walked around the studio correcting and adjusting. She touched my ankles, which I wasn’t able to grasp. “You can cross your ankles and clasp your hands behind you,” she whispered to me, like it was our dirty little secret.
“Yoga says that navel power is personal power,” she told us, after she’d returned to the front of the studio. “Instead of being a slave to circumstance, you decide.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Balancing on my tummy gave me the power to make decisions? I didn’t get it, but then, it was supposed to be mystical, or something. It reminded me of the mnemonics the bird guide had given us for recognizing various birdsongs. Yet I couldn’t hear those suggestions when he said them. The Barred Owl? OK, that was easy to hear: Who cooks for you? But you didn’t really need a mnemonic for the Barred Owl. There was no mistaking a Barred Owl, unless you thought it was a howling dog. Or maybe a Mourning Dove. The Phoebe’s Fee-bee was pretty easy, too, but the Goldfinch? Potato chip. Potato chip? Sorry, I just couldn’t hear it.
“Robertson says the number of ‘dees’ the chickadee makes indicates how alarmed the chickadee is,” the bird guide had said, “communicating his warning to the others.” Chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee…
But to the Ojibwe, the chickadee says jigjigaaneshiinh…. That’s how they heard the bird’s call. Who was to say?
“Now sit cross-legged with your arms outstretched and your middle fingers pointing and move your arms backward in a big circle while you do the breath of fire.”
The breath of fire was a rapid panting breathing, shallow, and we all started breathing that way while we rotated our arms behind us.
“Put your back muscles into it,” Kima told us, “and your shoulders, shoulder blades down the back. Just like a bird doesn’t fly with just the tips of its wings but puts its whole body into it.”
And there we were, full circle, back to the birds. One thing I was glad about? There weren’t any grades in yoga or birdwatching. Just reality staring at us straight in the face. And laughing.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. Another poetry collection entitled Transcendence has also recently been published by BlazeVOX Books and a collection of flash fiction, Presto, has just been published by Bamboo Dart Press. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? will be published later this year by Kelsay Books.