Just a few more days and it will be solstice, says my dear friend and yoga teacher.
Her room is a holy place. Take off your shoes, pad softly across the floor, roll out your mat, sink into peace.
Here is order and ritual, timeless as a Japanese tea ceremony. Sit cross-legged in this space and leave the chaos of the world at the door; whisper a hush to the low factory thrum of thoughts in your head.
A holy space. Her words fall soft as prayer: “Breathe in, breathe out, savour the silence.”
I’m at the beginners’ class because in yoga, we are always beginners.
She has taught me the joy of order – a well-folded blanket, a straight mat. She has taught me not to judge this body, and she has taught me that vital life lesson: keep your eyes on your own mat, don’t look around, don’t compare yourself with others.
And after we have stretched and twisted – cat and down dog, triangle, child pose – she says: “Chair shoulder pose, your favourite.”
Upside down, I set the world to rights. This is where I find the deepest peace. And then at the end of class, we bow. The words unspoken are: “The God in me, bows to the God in you.”
All down the years, in this space I have learned to let go... of the young woman who stood in the middle of the room on her head for half an hour; of the mother who skipped the nappies and the baby bath to find head space with my friend and teacher.
I have learned to love this body, even if it is cantankerous now – the shoulder twinges, the creaky hips, the damn 4am wake-up calls for the toilet.
This winter finds me falling through time tunnels. Time whips me up from the peace of one room to a long ago room from far away – the principal’s study from primary school.
She was a nun with a wimple, a coarse black habit; a clonker of rosary beads around her waist and a birch cane. She had a poster on her wall that said: “The darkest hour is just before dawn.”
I was eight, I didn’t understand, but the words followed me through the years. In dreams I return to that primary school with the gold line up the corridor where we walked in a straight line, fingers on our lips, to the canteen where I was forever trying to hide the beetroot under the potato. And to the playground games of Dusty Bluebells and battles with friends.
But let us return to the yoga room and the dark of winter.
I have learned to love this body, even if it is cantankerous now – the shoulder twinges, the creaky hips, the damn 4am wake-up calls for the toilet
In a few days it will be solstice, says my teacher. “Not long now,” says my sister.
By mid-January, she said that her husband would greet their children coming home from school at 5pm and it would be light outside again. So not long now.
The darkest hour is just before dawn, said the nun’s poster on the wall; this too shall pass, said my mother.
The words of our fathers and mothers echo down the years. They follow me out of the yoga studio and into the madness that is Christmas.
Sometimes, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself, wrote the poet. This prayer is in the everyday – our son’s laughter as he chats to his friends; the first coffee of the morning, dark and warm on the tongue; the twinkle of lights on our late nights walks through our streets.
Somewhere, long ago, on this solstice, a druid lit a holy fire on a mountain top and sat staring into the flames in a dark cave.
Now we sit and stare into our own fire… There is holiness in silence; we treasure the gift.