On Sunday morning, I attended an outdoor yoga class in an open field. Strands of wild, wet grass poked around the sides of my mat. The ground was dimpled and soft, a welcoming cradle for my child’s pose. A dog, clearly a field regular, nosed around his kingdom. The instructor, Tanya or maybe Tonya, was timid as she coached us through our forward folds into our tadasanas. The sun ticked across the sky, warming the air until it became almost too much but then a cool breeze would blow, and the relief was sweeter than if it’d been there all along.
Halfway through the class, I pitched my hips up and back, settling into downward dog, and I blinked through the sweat in my eyes and looked — really looked — at the sky, now inverted. Normally, one could argue, a sky is not worth remarking upon because it’s the sky. Everyone knows it well. Any import is watered down by its ubiquity.
But on the opposite coast, I knew, the same sky was alive and hostile. Choked with ash. Dunked in orange. Smothering.
That morning, in Washington D.C., my sky was clean. The blue startled against rooftops and tree tops. Something common was revealed to be rare and before I turned right-side up again, I said a small thank you.
Yoga
When I saw the morning sun here in Michigan looking like a peach in an ash filtered sky on Monday, I felt grateful that that was the extent of the fallout and guilty that I could not do anything to stop it.
Well done.