slouch

You don’t even know that you’re doing it: shoulder humped, chin lowered. You’re slouching. So, is this a bad thing? 

Hold on -- this isn’t what I woke up thinking. Let me go back a bit: I woke up thinking that Ed and I are in the middle of a conversation that hasn’t come to any reasonable conclusion. People do that. They dance around points that are being made and avoid reaching agreement because they know that the only way out of the stalemate is to say something like -- oh, all right! I’ll do it your way, but I wont like it! And neither wants to say it.

The question remains – who is going to say this? Him, me, both of us?

I also woke up thinking that I had wasted over an hour watering flowers last night only to find that we were due for severe storms. This is what happens when I get busy with work: I forget to check the weather report.

(slouched flowers after the rains)

The key here is that I woke up early. And I thought, too – I could surely use that early morning for Yoga – there’s a class offered that goes under the label of Peaceful Flow. It’s described in this way: You'll expand your breath, open your body, and rest your mind so when you go back into your world you'll be fully aware of your inner peace.

Before breakfast, before work, before Ed fully awakens, I go to Peaceful Flow.

I ride Rosie out to the Yoga studio and yes, indeed, it is heavenly and very stretching, strengthening and soothing, all by the fields of prairie flowers...

And if I take anything with me it is the realization that I live in a position of “slouch.” At my computer, riding in on Rosie, eating a meal. And here is this morning’s yogi guy telling us that if you just lift up your chest, chin, pull back your shoulders, uplift your face into a smile, you’ll have all this positive energy flowing.

You have to put up with this sort of stuff when you have a chatty yoga instructor.

But the fact is, he isn’t altogether off base. And indeed, his stretches and poses and movements and breathing instructions are so helpful that they stay with me even as I leave the studio, even as I mount Rosie and we travel home. So exuberant and up-lifted am I that I nearly fly off Rosie, though perhaps that's just my imagination soaring.

The fields never looked so golden.

The truck farmers are tending their crops -- you can see them, here, just to the east of our crumbling barn...

It continues to be a beautiful morning.

We eat breakfast on the porch...

I grab a ripe pear to stick in my backpack...

....and I go off for a day of classes. Campus is busy in the way that it gets on school days.

And, predictably, I am tired when I get home. Ed and I have reached a travel compromise and he is the one who has packed up his ideas and put them aside, though we’ll be doing some independent trips in the interim so that neither feels as if she or he has been short changed. More on that as we actually get closer to time off. Right now, I am so far away from time off that it seems odd that I should even be thinking about it.

Ed bikes tonight and because we’re nearing the end of the grocery shopping week, I eat whatever is left, with, of course, tomatoes.

He comes home with a Subway footer and I'm tempted by that too.

You can’t feed me this stuff! I don’t need another meal after dinner!

He grins and floats the sandwich nearer to me. I take bites – one, another, and another. He laughs.