Saturday, August 11, 2012

Art is art, everything else is yoga.

I'll start with an anecdote. This is about me. When I was 17, during my last summer in Colorado before college, I was cuddling in the grass beneath the trees with my then boyfriend when he was startled by something he felt on my back. A bird had relieved itself on my light summer jacket. This was the first of at least seven times that I can count that I have been targeted by the birds in twelve years- Indiana, 2001, hair and shoulder; Masada, Israel, 2002, leg; Indiana, 2004, shoulder; Marseille, France, 2006, shoulder; Aix-en-Provence, France, 2012, hair and shoulder; Montpellier, France, 2012, hair.

I had a few free years in the middle in which I thought that period of my life was over, but just last month I felt a heavy drop on my head while walking on a sunny day.

 My husband has a very logical theory for why this happens so often to me. Simply, I walk slow. Very slow. I move slowly in most everything I do. I am used to it now and though it obviously has it's drawbacks, I embrace it as a way to take in each experience to the fullest. That is my art.

In English, we can use the term "artist" loosely. Anything can be artfully done and anyone that does something well with attention and intention is an artist in that craft, from folding laundry to fixing automobiles.

I was once issued a warning at a restaurant in New York where I worked as a waitress that moving faster would be crucial to keeping my job. My manager, who had been watching my every, very slow move, described to me that when i placed a glass on a table, I moved my arm around in a curving motion instead of moving it straight to the table top. I ended up getting fired and found a job at a smaller restaurant where my graceful and interesting way of moving was better appreciated.

I found a job that better suited me in yoga teaching, where moving quickly means as much as a law degree from Bolivia while living in France.

Over the past few years, being slow has even become a trend, from slow food to slow travel. That makes me not only à la mode, but ahead of the times. For once, I am ahead.

As I become deeply entrenched in the yoga universe in which I work, the word "yoga" is used much like the word "art", to describe everything. The way in which we react to a traffic jam when we are already late is our yoga, sharing a disappointingly small portion of ice cream with a friend is our yoga, even missing yoga class due to an unexpected obstacle is our yoga.

In order to understand the difference between the way in which our lives become "art" and the way in which they become "yoga", I came up with this analogy: The way we choose to do things is art, and the way we deal with things we don't choose, that are out of our control, is yoga.

 As everything we choose to do will evidently have it's share of unforeseen happenings, yoga is imperative to the survival of any artist.

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