yoga practiced near children

Exuberant. Is it yoga?

















It's mid-afternoon and I've done exactly three and a half minutes of yoga today.

"Spare me the blow-by-blow," I can hear the reader saying.

But in the long run I hope to rummage some effulgence together out of precisely this sort of bloggy, earth-bound minutiae. That's seven half minutes of adho mukha vrksasana, face-down tree. Each handstand, that is, drawn out, with Western prissiness, to a count of exactly thirty. I don't go up, as I have seen teachers do, with both legs together in one seamless burst. I've found an archway in our kitchen where last October I learned to walk my feet up Spider-Manlike. Now I don't need the arch but I do the inverted vrksasana next to it, for old time's sake.

In inversions, the head which thinks, "I should have gone to law school," is upside down, as is the intrusive thought and its implications.

Today, these handstands are both yoga and that which keeps yoga at bay. By dipping in to a favorite pose like this, I am avoiding real time on the mat. There is some precise window of opportunity in the day when guilt at not performing a full round of Yoga Practiced Near Children is cancelled out by guilt at Ignoring the Children. Ten minutes ago, the children settled into lego. They have not yet begun to throw the lego. Get to the mat!