I'M IN by Marta

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-435020087790887201.post-52022023160126224172007-12-09T04:29:00.000-08:002007-12-09T04:30:35.020-08:00I'M IN by MartaI didn’t like my first yoga class with Natvar that much. It was too easy, I thought. It would never keep me thin. I would have to keep looking. I was trying to find the best yoga class in all of Manhattan, one that I cold love as much as the one I had left behind in Los Angeles. That class had been like a mysterious drug, one that made me happy and excited just to be there, even though I didn’t know anyone. It was something about the sunny large high-ceilinged hall, and about how the people who taught the classes seemed. They were all good-looking and young. They all seemed to be friends. And they did mysterious things like travel to India. But Natvar’s class wasn’t at all like the big sunny one in California. His was in a small narrow carpeted room where the lights were kept very low most of the time, and when they came up they came up on dimmers, and there was bamboo flute music playing the background and Natvar stood up front facing us, his hands clasped above his head, the breath sometimes snorting out of him as he led us from one movement to the next. But I liked him a lot that first class. I liked the way he started the class. The lights were up and he spoke to us first. Very naturally. Something about his day, maybe something that had happened on the subway that he had noticed, that had meant something to him. I sat on the floor, cross-legged, tidily next to and behind a couple of women – there were a couple of men seated on the other side of the narrow aisle that ran down the center of the room, marked off with masking tape on the black low-pile carpet – I saw with my back very straight, really listening. It was like opening a book at random and finding someone speaking your story. There was something about how he spoke – gentle and strong at the same time – the way he noticed the old lady on the subway and how it reminded him of his grandmother back in Athens when he was growing up – that made me feel I was with someone who thought and felt like I did, but someone who could speak it. I could never speak from the place where I felt things or noticed things. I could only be silent when things were important. Things always seemed too important for words and I had spent many years in a kind of silence. People who knew me probably didn’t think of me as quiet, but I felt frustratingly silent, unable to say most of what I wanted to, unable even to think most of it. And there was this man with alive brown eyes and a smile just speaking and speaking things I knew I could have been saying, those words could have been mine. It had never happened to me before, hearing someone talk for me. I went back to Natvar’s classes haphazardly, still going over to other classes, still looking for the perfect class, venturing back to Natvar’s now and then – until I just quit all the others. Natvar’s class was the best in the end, not because it was vigorous enough – he said it was all in the breath not in how much you pushed – but because something happened there that didn’t happen anywhere else. I did not feel anonymous when I stepped into Natvar’s school It was not a place of bland yoga-class conversation. No, Natvar was really there. Him. Not just a yoga teacher trying to be pleasant. But a man with an accent I couldn’t identify who was joyful to see me, who called my name and told the pretty old lady who seemed to work for him to make me a cup of tea with boiling water and pieces of fresh ginger. MartaSzabohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07554422492794060801noreply@blogger.com