Savasana

Over the past strange and unsettling year, I’ve felt that my yoga practice is teaching me: love what is dying.

 

Love this warming earth home, in her broken-hearted changing.

Love her in the inevitability of her decline.

Love her even as she hurts you in her hurting.

Love her tender, powerful vibrating hereness. 

Love the assuredness of her presence, even as she lets go of who she has been.

Love this ever-loving moment of creation.

Love the fleeting nothingness of this life,

the expansive allness of what it rests in.

 

When we dig deep within, there is a strength: we have done this before. As our bodies unfold into pose after pose, we rediscover the familiar, and remember that there is no story untold. My dust-body knows what this love is; they have seen, heard and know the way birds sing bravely into the rising, warming sun, here for it.

Always here for it. 

 

Are living and dying the same, then?

Savasana: the yes, the let go, the love for the ending, uncertain unknown? 

I’ve learned not to love something unless/until it is assured, but that cannot be life. This past year has shown me that nothing is assured, and yoga has reminded me that nothing ever was.

 

I’ve begun to wonder if faith is not believing in what we cannot see, but the courage to believe in what we can. The courage to believe in the reality of a virus, and still take deep, long breaths. To believe the science on climate change, and still wake up the next morning. 

Which are ways of saying: yes to the end, yes to a life of letting go.

 

Yes, I love – even when told I cannot. If love is productive, merely a way of ensuring linear growth and clinging to the myth of legacy, then love says no to endings. No the possibility that production and preservation are not what we’re here for.

 

This is the song of my body: yes to this moment. Yes to this isolated, frustrated, terrifying moment.

This reckless love isn’t chaos. It just is.

 

Savasana is a way of bringing this love into my body, of yessing the way death is interwoven into my life. Savasana asks me to let go of creating myself.

There, I say yes to vibrations. The bottom of my feet shimmer, my lower intestines groan, my pectoralis minor muscles spin through the cycle of tension and release. It is good here, where nothing comes of anything.

 

Here, on a shattering planet, amongst immense collective trauma, yoga is teaching me: healing is not about getting further from death, for we cannot get further from death without getting further from life. Healing is not about becoming productive, or preserving ourselves, extending our clinging.

Healing is learning to live in the yes to what is,

beginning to see that endings are just an exhale,

remembering that dying is not a chaos that must be contained.

May we fight for livability because it’s what we know to do,

and may the fight not contradict what the trees already know:

that being,

exactly what these vibrating cells can never not do,

has always been enough. 

 

 

 Kayla Drudge