On gratitude, mutable grief, and the alchemy of gathering.
Hello everyone! I’m so glad you’re here.
The weather warmed again overnight, unsurprising for late August in New York. I’m writing from the café window today, watching a pigeon tip-toe across the floor of the local laundromat ahead. How are you?
This morning while teaching my zoom class, I am suddenly choked with grief. The students are in Savasana, only a few minutes left of practice, their familiar living rooms and yoga mats a virtual diorama on my screen.
I feel Robin’s presence there in the stillness, or rather, the weight of her absence.
Since early 2020 when I began teaching online, Robin had always been a background fixture: on my bed, on the floor, poking in and out of the frame, one time fishing an empty chicken container out of the garbage and carrying it back to her bed while I demoed a crescent lunge.
If you sift through my three year library of online videos, you are likely to hear me get distracted mid-teaching to compliment or kiss her, then jokingly apologize to my students that I just can’t help myself she’s so damn cayuuuuuuute!
Her presence in class brought levity and comfort. She nearly always fell asleep halfway through.
So this morning when the students are in Savasana, when I am paging through the small notebook I keep on my coffee table full of favorite transcribed poems and words, I come across the poem sent to me by a friend on the day of her passing-
What Can I say? by Mary Oliver
What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.
It is the same poem I read to my students my first class back after she died. I barely got through the first stanza.
Suddenly she is there in the room with me, her shadowy figure on the bed to my left. I can practically smell the toast of her, hear her heavy breathing.
But she is not here. Our near decade together is now a blink in the grand scheme of the rest of my life. This realization guts me; how brutal it all seems that time only moves forward when I would give anything to make it go back for a few seconds.
I bring my students out of Savasana but it is too late- my voice is cracking. I no longer try to suppress what is inevitable.
For whatever reason, teaching always makes me feel Robin, I tell them. On Robin, my voice goes up an octave. My words are like gravel, garbled and raw, the sound of grief.
These last few months have been some of the most difficult of my life. I continue. The things that have gotten me through are not material, but art, music, poetry, yoga, food, community. These are what carried me in the most challenging times, what continue to carry me every day.
It’s true. Art activates aliveness.
I look at my students on the screen, so gracious and open and kind. Some of them have been practicing with me almost as long as I had Robin. It is only because of their graciousness that I am able to let myself unravel.
I make a joke about how I haven’t cried on zoom in awhile so we were due for it. They laugh and cry with me, their hands over their hearts.
I can’t hear them but they are in the room with me.
I can’t hear Robin but she is in the room with me.
*
Standing at the kitchen counter after class dicing tomatoes and onions for my omelette, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I am so lucky to have a career that makes me feel awe every day. Eleven years in I am still figuring out the financials and sustainability of it all, but I wouldn’t trade it.
I feel like a broken record sometimes—-but. For all of the classes I have felt burnt out or tired or not in the mood, there are a hundred more that have mirrored goodness to me. For all of the moments I have doubted myself, there is a room full of students allowing me to guide them.
Teaching has made be a better person. Witnessing others do the difficult work of self-inquiry and reflection makes me want to do that work myself.
I suppose this is becoming an unintentional love letter to anyone who has ever taken my class. Especially you long-haulers. Your studentship means the world to me. Your willingness to see and be seen is inspiring. Thank you for passing the torch over and over again.
*
I spend Friday afternoon sunbathing at my student Lil’s house, where she stealthily snaps the above photo. Lil is the best host. She always has food and appealing beverages like ice cold lemonade. I say yes to everything she offers me because I love being served delicious things.
She lives in Riverdale, just a short uber ride from my apartment, on a grassy knoll overlooking the Hudson River. Her complex has a beautiful pool that barely gets used so when she invites me and my student Alice over for the afternoon, we happily oblige.
We talk about dating and marriage and the aesthetics of body hair removal. Lil insists on bringing sangria down about an hour in. I drink from a cute plastic cup, sucking up the pert green grapes at the bottom with each sip. To our delight, a water aerobics class has started in the pool. The instructor is as ripped as a beef roast, and years younger than most of the participants. I imagine there is mutually beneficial energy happening here. I opt to stay in my chair, happily watching from the sidelines as rows of wet arms lift weights in and out of the water.
On Friday night I head to Brooklyn after teaching to attend a 40th birthday party. Jake is married to my friend Kira. He’s the type of friends’ husband I’d actually want to hang out with. The party is at a beautiful bar full of good, friendly people. I know a few people there, and many who are strangers, but there is no milling around waiting for someone to talk to. Everyone is warm and full of curiosity. I order a dirty martini and strike up a conversation with a neuroscientist who is also a musician. We are discussing matters of spirituality and science, deciding how much common ground we have (a lot, it turns out) and the negative extremes that each side can easily revert to: narrow-minded arrogance, or flaky magical thinking.
They need to stop being ORs and turn into BOTH ANDS! I’m a little drunk, apparently. He buys me a glass of orange wine and then I am definitely drunk. His wife comes over, this gorgeous Italian woman named Francesca who is warm and whimsical and literally takes the earrings out of her earlobes when my friend Katie mentions that she likes them. Here, have them! They make my ears sensitive anyway!
We all chat and I marvel at their relationship- two scientists who also believe in astrology, who both happen to be Scorpios, and clearly adore each other. I leave by 11. I can’t risk the L train losing its fucking mind.
Saturday my friend Sarah comes to class. She has been on tour with a show and just returned to the city after months away. I give her the amount of adjustments I give to any of my friends who come to class (lots!) and we head to Brooklyn after to meet up with our friend Hannah, who used to be our neighbor uptown but has since moved to Bedstuy with her partner.
Brooklyn twice in one weekend, even.
It is a beautiful afternoon. The three of us catch up over farmer’s market tomatoes and three different kinds of cheese then head out to eat more at a local Italian restaurant. By the time I return home that night, I am bloated to the brim, but I’d do it all over again if given the chance.
*
I am sweating now as the sun roasts my chest through the countertop window. I teach in a few hours, then back home to do it all over again tomorrow.
In a few weeks I will travel to Bar Harbor with my mom, and then Portugal in November for my retreat. I can’t believe how quickly time has moved, though I wonder if that’s a sentiment I will ever stop remarking upon.
Life lately is steady, quiet, a bustling future looming in the horizon. I promise to keep writing about it all, if you’ll have me.
I leave you with one more poem, because why not-
LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
*
With love,
Emma
for a few hours every afternoon before the sun goes down, my plants get bathed in light
this peanut named Charlie on the subway last night, then in the elevator again. Her dad said she hates the bag but tolerates it because she gets lots of head massages
lolllllllll. As I always say to new students, we were all beginners once. Werk.
I was having a good skin day
Miss you every day, bubs.
*
Have a beautiful week!
ps- I am going away for a month (eep! more later) this January and subletting my beautiful apartment. If you or anyone you know is interested, please send them my way. I have made a permanent highlight reel of photos and info that you can find on my instagram page here.
A note: This newsletter has a new look!
Everything is staying the same, mostly. You will be still be able to read Tuesday newsletters for free each week. For those of you interested in a paid subscription that supports my writing and includes one additional special monthly essay, you have the option to subscribe.
Ultimately, your readership is what means the most to me. That alone is what I truly value. However you have shown up, I am thrilled to share this community with you.
I would love to hang out with you in the Azores November 2-7! Deadline to register is September 1st! That’s this Sunday!! Yoga, hiking, hot springs, community and more.
I have 1 ROOM LEFT that could be made into a single or double. Is it yours? All info HERE.
Washington Heights community:
Heights Meditation and Yoga is now using the Hebrew Tabernacle space to hold classes until we move into permanent residency. The space is big, quiet, and candlelit, (and classes are starting to get really full again so it feels like a budding community!)
Come join me on Monday nights for 630 vinyasa and 745 restorative.