by Jill Frayne
On the same level as the house there’s a guest cottage with a tiny kitchen and bathroom, joined to the house by a stone path. In the woods below, three circles have been cleared for tents. I choose a site full of pure yellow leaves under an arbutus. There’s a blue tent already pitched, waiting for me, with a foam mat laid out inside.
AUGUST 21
Maureen met Bruce twenty years ago, when their children were grown up. She came to yoga through dance and he through a desire to understand how mind and body merge. He is a doctor in Vancouver, statuesque and silvery, with crinkly, mica-coloured eyes that don’t quite focus on you. He might have fallen in love with Maureen for her yoga. She is a natural teacher, who doesn’t intellectualize, who understands yoga perfectly in her body and can bring other bodies to understand it. She runs the classes, calling on Bruce in a fond and flirtatious way to provide anatomical insight to the lesson.
Having a prescribed routine to the day imposes mental quiet; that’s the theory. We sign up for house chores—dusting, meal preparation, gardening. Someone walks about with a bell to signal the shift from one activity to the next. Our routine over the two weeks is this:
6:30 RISE
7:30 MEDITATION
8:00 SILENT BREAKFAST
9:00 MINDFUL WORK (CHORE)
10:00 WALK
11:00 ASANA (ACTIVE PRACTICE)
1:00 DINNER
2:00 OUTINGS, FREE TIME
5:00 QUIET PRACTICE
6:30 SUPPER
7:30 GROUP TIME
Today, the third day, I choose gardening. Weeding is human nature and I’ve been picking in the thyme beds, but Maureen sends me to clear off arbutus leaves that have scattered on the paths and shrubs. Something humble and symbolic about this chore appeals to me, the waning female cleaning up after the young, fertile one. I get absurdly involved in the zen of my chore. How many leaves to remove? How many to leave? Stem up or down?
Next in the day comes an hour’s walk, the idea being to raise energy after three and a half hours of communal silence. The runners in the group go out on the paved road below the house and sprint off. I sit beside my tent in my circle of fallen leaves, doing nothing.
My favourite is asana practice. If my body could stand it, I’d do yoga all day. It’s the great escape, the great quieter of fuss and bother.
I WENT TO MY FIRST CLASS eight years ago on the say-so of a friend, having no experience and no preconceptions. There is a yoga centre in Toronto, up a steep flight of stairs on Yonge Street, in operation since the early seventies and presided over by a sixty-year-old mother of six, Marlene Mawhinney. We spent half an hour that first class jackknifed over our knees, clenching our quadriceps, while Marlene, in a loud voice from the front of the room, exhorted us to “lift the knees.” I had no idea how to do that without using my hands, but the internal concentration, the activity of intently and undividedly instructing muscle, willing muscle to obey, was the most refreshing thing I’d ever done.
Yoga is precise. It is directed action, verb and object. There isn’t anything else going on except the mind, deep in its cave, telling the body what to do. The command in a pose to “reach into the fingertips” is everything you are doing at that moment. The effect is euphoric.
It sounds psychological more than physical, and perhaps it is. Or it’s both. Mr. Iyengar says, “Don’t run, don’t get massage, don’t see a psychiatrist, don’t do aerobics—practise yoga.”
On the physical plane, yoga stretches the muscles and tendons so that you have more range of motion. You can look further over your shoulder, you can get your arms straight above your head, you can bend from the hips to tie your shoe. It’s the antidote to aging. It counteracts the body’s natural bowing and tightening. The more you stretch muscle and tendons, the more the bones ease into alignment. When a bone moves into its proper place after years of being infinitesimally askew, there’s a release that can make you cry. I’ve burst into sobs in warrior pose more than once, my sacrum shouting hallelujah.
Inversions, the upside-down poses, give the organs a rest and allow gravity to coax them the other way. Twists tone the kidneys. Back bends stretch the intestines and gut as well as reverse the bend of the spine and let it breathe. The postures ply and stimulate the organs and work on the nervous system in ways I don’t understand, but there are effects and emotions associated with the poses that are predictable, that you can bring to bear to alter your state of mind. Headstands and back bends raise energy. Blood into the chest, as in shoulder stands and the doubled-over poses, calms and steadies.
Slowly, slowly, the muscles tone, the skin starts to come alive and glow.
Because practice is rigorous, enjoining you to push muscle and bone to the farthest edge the tendons will allow, because you’re taken up, the brain is quiet. You can’t fidget or plan a meal in a back bend.
Maureen is good at imparting the idea that yoga is personal; there’s no standard. There is the assumption that regular practice is desirable, but how one performs the postures is a long continuum. There is “correct action” in every pose, a direction it must tend, but where each body locates itself along that direction is different and doesn’t matter. In class Maureen demonstrates the pose and says all she can about the experience of it. The choice of words is important. Poses are always done from the inside out. Your focus is inside your body—there in the hip socket, in the sinew at the back of the knees—not out in the room, looking on. Images can help you enter the joints where the movement is: “Spin the leg bones outward.” “Press the palms on the floor like suction cups.”
When she’s said all she can, we work the posture on our own. Maureen and Bruce and Anna, their assistant, come around to make adjustments. They study our effort in the pose, correct with their hands or words, always following the trajectory, the direction of movement, so there’s no jarring.
TODAY WE WORK the standing poses and I have my usual discouragement at not being able to reach my extended back heel to the ground. I’ve tended to walk on tiptoe all my life, and by now my Achilles tendon is past remedy.
In the mornings Bruce leads us in pranayama, breathing practice. I find it excruciating. It is nearly impossible to sit perfectly still for half an hour supporting your own weight, keeping your mind “quiet” while your legs go numb. In the sixties, when everybody meditated, I remember seeing people at weekend workshops folded pallid and waxy on gymnasium floors, their chests hardly stirring, vanished to some other zone. I try to guess, of my present companions, who has a quiet mind and who, like me, wanders and returns, wanders and returns, listens to the birds, grasps at straws, daydreams.
It’s something we don’t discuss. We’re just supposed to get the hang of it. Like having orgasms. There is a ban on revealing pranayama failure. We have a self-imposed seriousness about sitting every morning, I don’t know why. Possibly we’re saving face, showing that we’re good retreatists and can put up with going numb.
I never miss sitting practice in the morning. I come for the wrong reasons. I love the gloom in the room and the aesthetics of the rough blankets we drape around ourselves and the increasingly idiosyncratic arrangements of pads and bolsters we devise to prop our spines. I like the ping of the brass bowl Bruce taps with the little padded wand and the collective sigh as we begin. I like meandering along the moments, falling into landscapes and pursuing a visual thread over open ground, giving way little by little to panoramic views, to full-out northern tripping, gliding over tundra and icefields, then recovering myself, like falling through a crack, and minutely straightening my back and beginning once again. Morning pranayama comes to be a time for gorgeous outings, illegal and unimpeded.
AUGUST 22
The orderliness of our life thrills me. There is the illusion of purpose in these measured activities. I find myself planning a routine to live by when I get home:
10:00—11:00 GARDEN THE WOODLOT
2:00—3:00 GOOD DEEDS (E.G. LAND CLAIMS)
A drawback of the tinkling bells a
nd healthy food is a raging appetite for sex. I’m on spikes no matter what I do. I crave a lover. I wish Bill had been less enervated when I knew him. Really, he was about done in by the time I showed up.
AUGUST 23
I’m writing from a pile of slithery arbutus leaves, propped against a fallen log in shifting light. A cool, still morning gave way to sun this afternoon, and everyone’s gone horseback riding. Maureen is trying out her new hose, watering the arbutus and impatiens from the rain barrel. Bruce is at some task, crinkling his eyes at me as I pass, absent but friendly. My grove blooms with cobwebs.
I set the thousand images of the north before my eyes whenever I’m alone, absorbing and leaving them over and over, like endlessly kissing someone goodbye. If I went back … there’s no going back. The days are shorter now. Caroline, my pal from Whitehorse, is no longer living in her tent, Bill has gone to Carmacks or somewhere. What I’m so attached to isn’t there. I feel wistful looking at the cobwebs. Not resisting any more, not distressed, but sad.
And menopausal to boot. Intense sweats several times a day. I don’t like the heat, metallic and bitter. And there’s some emotion too, some tumult. If estrogen is on the ebb, how much does estrogen have to do with me? What if it’s a substance I really need? What if it’s part of confidence or generosity, or an ingredient in humour? What part of me is dying?
I have a hunch it’s sex, that dear snake in the grass I’d hate to lose. There’s a sinewy, yearning kind of sexuality that’s mine, and when I think of it gone, I can’t imagine who I’ll be.
AUGUST 26
I’ve been reading a book of Bruce’s about Ayurvedic medicine. Prakriti is an ancient Eastern system of prescription suiting certain diets and lifestyles to constitutional types. I love its physicality. Constitutional types are defined by the quality of skin, hair and nails, how much you sweat, what your shit is like.
Instructions are very specific. For Veda types: “Limit raw foods. Astringent fruits should be baked or stewed. If you must eat legumes, first soak them and throw away the soaking water. Cook with turmeric, cumin and coriander. Garlic and ginger are especially good. Always use a little oil, for insulation. Of nuts and seeds, almonds are best, sesame products ruin tone in the digestive tract.”
Such confidence. Thousands of years of human observation. All we Europeans brought to the New World was cannons.
I read, “Anything can be a meditation, as long as it is sincere and heartfelt. Meditate on the rising sun. Wash the body before meditation—at least the sense organs and the feet.”
I revise my planned routine:
RISE AND WASH
SIT FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES
BREATHE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES
HAVE TEA AND BREAKFAST
DO MINDFUL WORK
DO YOGA
SLEEP WITH HEAD TO THE EAST
It’s normal for yoga retreats to produce introspection. I’ve tried valiantly to recall one detail about who attended this particular retreat, but except for a couple I already knew who run a restaurant in Toronto, I remember nothing about anyone. I was out of it, hoarding myself. There was something I was trying to hold on to that I thought socializing would drive off. I was afraid the whole love affair with the Yukon would dissipate and float away—the images, the sense of myself as intact—if I let myself loll in a deck chair and chat with somebody.
AUGUST 27
The workshop is ending. I’m not sorry to go. I woke up with a sore throat, catching sick being around people. I’m worried how I’ll do with Bree. She’s a lot of company all at once. Maybe I’ll be ready. This morning, for the first time in pranayama, my mind did not speed to the Yukon. I could bear seconds at a time in empty space.
The clutter of Birkenstocks at the front door gradually dwindles for the last time. We haul our duffles to the van. Maureen has covered her head in a gesture of parting, and I’ve patted the arbutus leaves in my tent circle goodbye.
I have two days with friends in Victoria and then Bree.
Nine
GOING HOME
We have our first fight on the ferry to Victoria. It’s about who was supposed to bring rain gear for her.
“You said just bring yourself.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Bree.”
She hates my irritation and is uncanny at detecting it. We do this after every separation. It’s like a blister on the live skin between us that starts swelling the minute we’re together. Or maybe it’s just the rough, big-mammal way I lick her off and claim her.
I was thrilled to see her at the airport, arriving on a night flight from Toronto, tanned and glamorously dishevelled, fragrant of stale air and Body Shop and Trident gum. A young man in a rower’s jersey who sat next to her on the flight moves off wistfully. She grins and shrugs.
I’ve met Bree off a hundred public conveyances—off trains all through high school, when she went to boarding school in the Eastern Townships, off camp buses every summer, off planes now that she’s older. It used to be she’d billow through the Arrivals door already talking or crying—effusing, one way or another, even in her teens. I liked that. It bridged any awkwardness or strain her absence might have accumulated. Now she’s nineteen and has sprouted antennae I would never have predicted. She advances smiling and composed. “Mom, you look so well.”
Gathering her things and heading out the sliding doors, I don’t know what to do with all the space she’s left me.
Jeremy and Dalla have lent us their van for the trip to the airport so we’ll have a place to sleep. Bree’s plane arrived too late for us to catch the last ferry back to Victoria. I park on the causeway at Tsawwassen as far from the fluorescent lamps as possible and we crawl in back under some limp quilts their old dog sleeps on. When I hear Bree sigh with contentment, I recognize her. This girl doesn’t mind where we bed down. She’s never minded.
As a baby she’d stand in her crib in the morning in an icy diaper, crowing with delight. When she was four and I’d take her camping, she’d come undone somehow in the night, ease out of her sleeping bag and off the sleep mat. By morning she’d be sprawled, coverless, under the sagging tent wall on the bare floor, nose tilted, breathing frosty puffs.
I snug beside her in the van, hoping we’ll be fine.
AUGUST 30
I’m on one of the famed beaches in Pacific Rim National Park, the sun back at the road, not yet arrived. There’s no one here. Bree’s up the road in Tofino, asleep in the motel.
The drive was fine. It was consoling to return the fumy van to Jeremy and reclaim my old Mazda. My car has been our living room for years, the place we’re most at home. Bree fed the tape deck, we bought figs and rolls and Jarlsberg cheese at the halfway point, and stopped for an hour on the highway farther on, in Cathedral Grove, an old stand of Douglas fir, straight and fragile as the Parthenon.
When we reached the coast the weather turned rainy, and we gave up camping on the beach and went on to Tofino to a motel.
MOST OF THIS last precious swath of temperate rain forest is now parkland, edgily protected by conservationists. There is always the threat of encroachment, and Tofino, a fishing village at the top of the park, is regularly down a few citizens who’ve gone to jail for protesting. Confrontations with loggers are viewed as part of the town’s upkeep. When we drove in last evening, the town’s feisty spirit seemed subdued. It’s the end of the season and raining, just a few restaurants and guest houses open, desultory proprietors stirring around like tired hosts after a party.
I CREPT OUT to the beach this morning over a jungle trail. Sea air and rainfall on this side of the island nurse the trees to outrageous size. Ferns and shrubs grow in an uproar. The cedars look like Amazon rubber trees drooping tropical lianas. Sitka spruce raise monstrous trunks against the spraying sea.
I’ve been dying to show Bree, but she’s asleep. I left her this morning, dim and muzzy in the motel bed. I forget this detail about our reunions, that she spends the first two days asleep. I should plan for it, move us both int
o a cave for forty-eight hours to acclimatize. Instead, I have a list of things I want to show her: this Sitka, its fish-scale bark glowing purple, this enormous skunk cabbage, these banana slugs the size of … bananas.
The tide is out, its roar way off as I start to walk. I’m ruminating about something Barry Lopez wrote in his book about the North: the idea of being connected—not just associated, but deeply in conjunction with the physical world. He was intrigued by the Inuit he stayed with in the Arctic. It seemed to him they have a simple, concrete relationship with their world that does not analyze or interpret, that is released from what a thing “means” to what it “is.” He thought the Inuit did not distinguish between animate and inanimate. For them, all things are composed of the same jumble of living matter, in one arrangement or another.
I am struck by a culture that orients more to non-difference than to difference, that perceives of a small boy, say, as a variation on a fox or an ice floe. A natural relation for human beings with land, I think. Natural and yet unusual, because our urban North American power of discernment is overdeveloped. Our brains teem with the activity of ruling out, eliminating, selecting, discriminating, a habit we practise a thousand times a day that gives us the false idea that the objects of the world are separate from each other and from us. We think a bear is not the same thing as a human or a skunk cabbage. Yet physical science, if you don’t like New Age, tells us that we are in fact all one. A bear and a skunk cabbage are much more the same than they are different. What would it be like, I wonder, if our first thought, regarding anything, was to perceive the kinship, the non-distinction, rather than shorting out to the difference between things?
