For Carolyn

(This one is for Carolyn, because in the not-so-distant future, this will be a thing I’ll do with her. - Posted by Jennifer)

Thursday is yoga day. Michael works from home on Thursdays (and so do I) so that we can go to yoga together. We walk the kids to school, walk to the café in the village for a coffee, and then head a couple of doors up to St Peter’s Hall for yoga. I have never been to one of those magnificent yoga retreats where you do yoga on porches overlooking the sea or in rooms with glassed in views of snow-capped mountains. I have done yoga in big candlelit rooms in Arlington Virginia, in smaller, mirror-walled rooms in DC, in hotel rooms in Chicago and Dallas. And now I do yoga in what used to be a parish hall (but is now a little community centre) in Paekakariki. (Funny how writing that sentence still gives me pause.) I think I might like to try yoga on the sand or at the mountains, but none of it will ever compare with the full-on bliss of yoga in my own little magnificent village.

The hall is not elegant in a classic sense, but it has a New Zealand elegance that is more quiet and more rough than the louder American polish. The lovely teacher unrolls rugs over the bare wooden floor, lies yoga mats on top of those, and has a stack of thick fleece blankets to keep out the chill. And it is chilly. The class is in the morning, and the unheated hall doesn’t stand a chance of warming up until the afternoon. So we bring our breath into our bodies and try to cultivate heat with our stretches and we catch glimpses of green, sheep-studded hills out the windows. When we have moved through the class, breathed deeply through each nostril, and felt the twinges of muscles that we don’t even notice for the rest of the week, Michael and I roll up the mats and head home. Yesterday, walking through sparkling sunshine on the beach, we laughed at the idea that no matter how good yoga was (and it was good), it would never be quite as relaxing or magical as the walk home from yoga. On this crisp and relatively warm winter’s day, the sun made gleaming jewels across each crest of wave, and the sea foam that swept the beach was neon white (if such a colour exists). The seagulls ran in the shallows, and the tiny jellyfish shone like diamonds scattered on the sand along the waterline. Our charge throughout the morning had been to pay attention to our exhalations, and on the broad beach we could watch the world exhale, watch the sea move, an alive creature on its own, watch the sheep on the hills, the gulls and oyster catchers in the water, the tuis in the trees. “I can’t believe we live here,” the siren call of the kiwibergers, is so quickly followed, “why would anyone ever live anywhere else?”

Carolyn, we’ll bring a yoga mat for you, and you should leave Thursday mornings free for coffee, yoga, and a walk on the beach, you going south to your house, me north to mine. Each of us breathing in slowly, and exhaling deeply the wonder of a life that feels like this.