Passive Pigeon

This is Pigeon Pose

This is Passive Pigeon

At yoga on Monday morning, the yoga lady said that I should not do yoga when I have my “ladies’ holiday.” I did have my ladies holiday (Three day blood cruise through pain town!) but since I was already there I got to lay around doing restorative yoga (the kind when you never get up off the ground) and the yoga lady taught me to do a pose called “passive pigeon.” Of course, once I knew what it was called, I was going to be down, regardless of what the pose was. I did passive pigeon for, like, ten minutes on both sides, which is a long time to do a yoga pose.

I have been getting cocky. I’ve been biking around and exercising and doing yoga and only talking to me, my bike and this ‘possum I got off the internet. It’s Lent so all I eat is kale seeds and all I do is not facebook. So I’m feeling pretty groovy. I’m surprised how much I like being alone. I never liked it much before. But I like it A LOT now, and just when it starts to get trying Rachel and Andrew let me watch TV with them upstairs.

Oh, man, but it is easy to get caught up in this focus on improving myself. At least I have some better tools than in back in the day when I made myself insane every morning trying to find the least morally offensive breakfast, and losing time at the bottom of the stairs as I rationalized the escalator when really there was little to no moral harm in the escalator. I just saw it as a weakness of character.

Stairs- You are Nelson Mandela
Escalator- You are 

I used to spend a lot of time reading Amnesty International reports and thinking that I needed to buck myself up for the day someone might torture me for my political activities, and that every decision was a chance to practice moral and mental discipline leading up to that possibility.

My fascination with China started with my constant reading of Cultural Revolution memoirs which led me to believe that every Chinese person was basically Nien Cheng. I mean, I guess I just ignored all characters in these books who weren’t the protagonists. Imagine my surprise  and disappointment when I got to China and everyone was just people.

So the endless stairs vs. the three escalators up  that I faced every morning at the Roosevelt Island station were a very high stakes test of character. I would stand there thinking “Nien Cheng spent 20 years in a Chinese prison, and you’re going to take the escalator?” Once I stood frozen on a Manhattan street corner trapped between three coffee choices and not sure in which one my three dollars would be the least ethically spent. I stood there for 15 minutes, then did not get coffee, harming no one.  I wish that were hyperbole.

The first thing I can remember ever writing in my journal was that I need to start waking up earlier, when I was, like, eight. I wrote that and endless other self improvement plans in my journal for about 20 years. Never quite started getting up earlier, though. Nor do I have a meditation habit, do yoga at home, know how to sew or ever practice Chinese. I’m really good at buying the equipment for resolutions, but it kind of goes downhill after that.

John Winthrop did this, too. His spiritual journal was a catalogue of countless infinitesimal moral failures, each one a likely indicator of damnation. But he was a Calvinist. Sarah Vowell pointed out that Winthrop’s journal looked like Gatsby’s notebook (‘be better to parents’, ‘read one improving book or magazine a week’, and of course ‘rise from bed- 6:00 AM.’) Gatsby was a Calvinist too, but just the parts we carried on and called American.

If I had put a dollar in a jar every time I resolved to ‘rise from bed- 6:00 AM’ I could buy this bed that was at the world’s fair in the 1880’s that had two of the legs on a timer so that at the desired time they would buckle and dump you on the floor.

It’s funny that although I’m far, far gentler with myself nowadays, I am just as passionate about self improving habits. It feels really different though, when you’re not trying to fix a mess. And it also feels different when the obstacles actually seem surmountable (thanks, medication!)

Of course, spiritual life plays a very important part in this. Lent and other periods for fasting and reflection make me aware of what is possible the rest of the time. And shine some light on what happens when I don’t restrict myself. The happy-but-not-really-happy in a bag of cheez curlz.

People in my yoga class

Me

But on the first day of Lent, when I rose from bed- 5 AM so that I could go to yoga, and then when I got there and everyone was all ropy and sinewy and tattooed and twisted up into pretzel balls, and when I leaned over to start a sun salutation with my knees bent looking like a dope and a drooped over flower instead of a jacknife because I can’t touch my toes, and when it was so funny what I looked next to the person next to me, and how much effort I needed to expend to fail so miserably was so hilarious that I cracked up, that was happy-really-happy.

Oh, there is joy in the right kind of failure. The Calvinists missed out. Or maybe they didn’t. The way they knew rapture in Grace, probably they got it. Their failure brought them closer to god- necessitated god and was therefore required.

The pigeon pose is when you put your one leg up front and your other leg to the back and then bow down on the ground. I guess sort of like a pigeon.

Passive pigeon is the same pose, but a yoga lady puts a blanket in the hole between you and the ground and a pillow under your face.

You can do passive pigeon. That’s ok.