Where Seas and Fables Meet (10 page)

She was becoming a tree.

The yoga teacher stood in a balancing position in her back yard. She lived in the country near a small town. She stood in the tree pose, perfectly poised. In her large yard, there were apple trees, maples, willows and birches. Like the trees she swayed slightly. The wind stirred. In her practice she knew it was good to follow the currents. So she concentrated.

Laura was rooted on her left foot, with her right foot cradled in the side of her thigh. She stood almost still, wavering, back arched, hands in the air, leg pushing out, her hands turned to face one another so that energy would pass between them.

Now she was the tree. She was still and then she swayed. Laura reached high cupping her hands in a temple of grace over her head. She closed her eyes and stayed in her posture.

Suddenly she felt a warm blow to her right cheek. She stumbled backwards. Gasping she lunged forwards. She wobbled, opening her eyes. This had never happened before. Now she was toppling over. She crashed heavily on the ground. Laura moaned, wincing in pain.

She stared at her legs. Her right leg was bent in a tortured position beneath her. She squirmed. She heard a brittle snap. It sounded like a dry twig being broken by someone's heavy step.

“Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,” Laura cried out.

Her leg was broken.

How was this possible? She was flexible from her practice. She ate well – and took careful notice of her vitamin and calcium intake. She was young (in her early forties). She was happy in her life and work (one son, eight years old, a husband, a second marriage that was working). Her bones shouldn't be brittle.

“Help,” she shouted. She screamed for George, her husband (she always called him G). She cried out for Pete, her son. G came running from the house, Pete dashing along after him.

“My leg,” she groaned. “It's broken.”

“How did you do that?” G knelt beside her, stroking her forehead.

“I was standing in the tree posture when something hit me and I fell over...” It hurt to talk. The pain in her leg was shooting up into her neck and face.

“You fell from a tree?” Pete asked.

“I was a tree,” his mother said, trying to swing her leg out from under her.

“You were in a tree and you fell and broke your leg?” Pete insisted.

Laura was in too much pain to explain anything more. “G, take me to the hospital. You're going to have to carry me to the car. I don't think I can walk.”

At the hospital, in the nearby city, the doctor in the emergency ward asked how this could happen to a well- known yoga instructor.

Her son answered: “She fell out of a tree when she was hit by a comet.”

Laura was stretched out on the ward bed. George was beside her. They exchanged glances.

“Really...?” The doctor smiled.

“Pete, don't tell stories,” his father said.

“It's alright,” Laura said. “I like his version of what happened better.”

“I do, too,” the doctor said.

“She was standing in a tree and she was hit by a comet and she fell down and broke her leg,” Pete said breathlessly. He was enthusiastic about this story. His mother was in pain and he wanted to do something to make the pain go away. He hoped his story would help.

“Pete, why are you saying this?” G asked. His voice was brisk and sceptical.

“I saw a light go across the sky. It went into our back yard and there were sparks flying everywhere.”

“Really,” his father said.

“Yes and it knocked my mom out of the tree.”

Laura yelped in pain. The doctor soothed her, stroking her forehead. He said: “Don't worry. We'll get x-rays and put you into a cast. I'll get a nurse to give you pain killers. It'll be alright.”

“You were hit by a light,” her son said.

Maybe what Pete said was true. She'd felt something warm graze her cheek. It had been enough to throw her off. “Don't be silly, Pete,” G said. He was exasperated by Pete's exaggerations and his penchant for daydreaming.

“But she was. She was hit by the light.”

“Sweetheart...,” his mother gasped.

George turned to the doctor – who was standing close, listening, amused, while he gently felt around Laura's leg, feeling the swelling, concerned that there might be more than one crack – and he said: “She fell over backwards, that's all. She lost her footing.”

G was (he admitted to himself) curious about how his wife could lose her balance. She was, after all, very fit.

“Well,” the doctor said, “there'll be no yoga for a while.” “My mother grew into a tree and a star from God hit her,” Pete said. He was truly trying to find a way to make everyone smile. “This story is getting more interesting,” the doctor said. “Your son has quite the imagination...”

Later in the evening, after Laura had the cast applied, the doctor came to visit the three in the outpatient sitting room. They were sipping juice and munching on sandwiches. The doctor smiled at them and said: “Here's something interesting to tell you. I heard on the radio news just a few minutes ago, when I was in my office, that there was a meteor shower today. It was visible in your part of town. So, you see, Pete may have been right. You could have been hit by the piece of a meteor.”

“What's a meteor?” Pete asked.

“It's like a comet,” his father said.

“That's not possible,” Laura said.

“Nevertheless,” the doctor said. “There was a meteor shower. It happened around the time you fell.”

“The sky was full of falling lights,” Pete said. “And my mom was touched by a bit of it! You see it's all true! A comet came to visit you.”

Laura hobbled around on crutches for three weeks. She was unable to show others how to become a tree.

Pete told his version of the story at school, in the play-yard, to his friends and their parents, and in happy blurts to the checkout people at the grocery store when he was there with his father.

Throughout the town Laura became the woman who'd been hit by a comet.

It took many weeks before Laura became strong enough again to unfurl her arms like branches and stand on her feet as if they were roots in the earth.

She told her yoga students that she'd fallen from a tree when she went reaching for a red maple leaf. This was the version she liked to tell. She told it because she'd recently read that a maple leaf was a love token.

Canadian settlers harvested red maple leaves to place them at the foot of their beds for good luck. The red maple leaf was said to have the power to fend off demons. The red leaf was a protection against misfortune. First nations' peoples believed the red leaf encouraged intimacy between lovers – and after, a deep restful sleep.

The red maple leaf was a sign of welcome and peace.

She thought this version of what happened might help explain why she was reaching high that day.

But her students had heard Pete's version, too. They'd heard it through their children, or through the checkout women at the grocery store.

Her students gently teased her about the comet that struck her.

“Maybe,” a woman said, “you were being told to take a rest. You work very hard.”

Yes, Laura thought, maybe this was so: she found it hard to sit still, even with all the yoga and the meditation that she did.

It was one of her secrets. She found resting hard. And the tree pose was a rest posture.

One day while snacking on peanut butter sandwiches in their kitchen, Pete asked his mother why she wanted to become a tree.

“What good does it do?”

He had such a keen mind, his mother thought. She was proud of him.

“I'm not sure if becoming a tree does much at all. It certainly doesn't hurt.”

“Except when you fall,” Pete said.

“Yes,” she said, “except for that...”

Pete considered what his mother said for a time, and then said: “A tree grows to find light... Is that so?”

“Yes, that's true.”

“That must be why the comet hit you.”

“Why?”

“Because you wanted to find a light... When you climbed up, a light came down.”

“That seems simple enough.”

“It is.” And he smiled.

“You're a very wise young man.”

“I'm your son. But you know sometimes I just see things.” “Would you like to become a tree with me?”

“Yeah!”

“I'll teach you.”

He smiled and immediately stood on one leg in the way that he'd seen her do.

“See,” she said. “You've made a start.”

Soon after this conversation Laura opened a school of yoga just for children. She smiled to see her son and his friends and the other children who came beginning their tree poses, first on one leg, then on the other. The children giggled and swayed. Often they toppled over and rose up again, glowing with smiles. Sometimes a child called out: “Look, I'm a tree.”

Laura called her school “Comet Yoga.”

She never again mentioned the time when she broke her leg. When she thought of her accident she had to admit that she could never believe that a fragment from a comet had struck her. George was a sceptic anyway, and would have agreed that the fantasy had spun out of control. She could say to him, or to her son, or to her students, or to the children at the new school that she had for one fragile moment hesitated.

Laura had stumbled.

Pete saw something else.

He carried the idea that you could grow upwards towards light; and when you did, another light would meet you. He didn't know what to do with this information.

But he'd surely think of something.

Years later, when he was a teenager at high school, he went to the art show that the art-class hosted in the lobby-entrance of their school. There were paintings and sculptures everywhere, some of them of an outstanding quality.

He saw a painting of a tree drawn upside down. It roots were in the invisible, up in the air. Peter (so he now called himself) asked the girl who'd painted the image what it meant.

The girl said: “I don't know exactly. I just saw a movie recently that was really weird. But I liked it. And the movie's title made me think of this. So I drew it.”

“What was the movie called?”

“
The Tree of Life
. I didn't understand it but I painted this tree.”

“My mom's a yoga teacher,” Peter said. “And she once taught me how to stand like a tree.”

“I've heard of that. It's the tree pose. Cool. Anyway. This is what I painted. Do you still practice?”

“Not much. Maybe I should. I told a story about my mom being hit by a comet when she was trying to stand like a tree.”

“Wow. That's a wild one.”

“I thought it was true.”

“A bit like this image... I thought it was true.”

He asked her out for a coffee after classes that day. But she said no thank you, I have a boyfriend.

If all else fails, read the signs.

If you can't read the signs, then read the instructions. If you can't read the instructions, then call up the instructor.

The prospect of living each day should concentrate the mind wonderfully.

Heart for heart's sake.

In Boris Pasternak's novel,
Dr. Zhivago
, Yuri says: “This is the living language of our time...” The poet-physician was describing the wind.

This means: you may run out of your momentum of words. History may run its course, the imperative exhausted. But the world never runs out – its voices speak –

Zhivago's friend Misha says at another point in the novel, when we are born of the heart, “there are no nations, but only persons.”

This is why Zhivago runs afoul of the Structure's resurgence in the guise of Leninism.

“He [Zhivago] understood that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future. He both feared and

loved that future and was secretly proud of it, and, as though for the last time, as if saying good-bye, was avidly aware of the trees and clouds and of the people walking in the streets, of the great Russian city struggling through misfortune – and he was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better but was powerless to do anything.”

The poet-spirit in Zhivago impels him into exile with his wife, Tonya, and his family. Once he becomes Lara's lover, he reignites lyricism in himself, recalling beauty: he writes poems of Beatrician devotion. The Lara poems are his signature, the symbols his soul left on the track of inexorable history. They're counters of passionate protest set against the Leninist entity. But when he writes, hungry wolves howl outside his room.

You are remembered...

The most heartfelt words, the words that speak directly to your soul...

I'm remembered by...

When you're closing in on the end of your life, it's these words that may come to mean more than anything.

These haunting words: remember me,
I remember you
. You may not become wiser, in life's unfolding, but you may hold out the hope that someone, somewhere, will not forget you.

Even in the greatest and most accomplished of people there is this longing: to be remembered, even if it's only by your children.

I remember my love, my children, my family, my friends: every day, no matter what ecstasies or tragedies or foolishness or crankiness may occur, I remember your presences in my life, your blessings.

Ascent by a rainbow; on the bridge of mists...

The rainbow in mythic terms: you're not forgotten by the cosmos. This promise was made: the covenant that you will be remembered, your name imprinted on the scroll of creation.