Yoga Blocks
"I am mine to hurt." — Bruce Shaw
Yoga blocks stand 3 inches high (by 6 wide by 9 long, if you’re wondering) and they’re usually made of firm EVA foam with enough nub you can stack them fairly securely.
If you’re smart, you use a yoga block to provide stability. Maybe you want to touch your toes but you can’t get there, and you feel wobbly hanging forward unsupported, so you place each hand on a yoga block while you bend more securely into your forward fold.
If you’re dumb, you stack yoga blocks up as a support for your foot (or calf or inner thigh) while you work your split up past 180 degrees.
Leave your yoga blocks in a room full of dancers and you’ll find out just how dumb we humans can be.
Let’s say you get your split so open you look like a human butterfly knife. You can practically turn yourself inside out. And you don’t have the muscle to support that kind of sprung joints (it’s okay, most of us don’t) and then one day your muscles receive two conflicting signals right on top of each other and your joint is loose enough that it lets you GO THERE while your brain is hollering at your muscles, too late, “Y’ALL BETTER NOT GO THERE” — then you might tear your hamstring.
And then after you’ve spent six or seven years rehabbing you see the blocks standing in the corner. They’re dusty pink and dusty violet, same colors as SweeTarts.
That’s okay, it’s like seeing cigarettes in the store. You’re not going to buy them. You’ve gone cold turkey, right?
And then there’s some kid playing around with the blocks like the world was built for her to do splits in. That’s when you smell someone actually smoking and boy, howdy, that’s all you can think about.
Your joints tell you: open, OPEN. Let’s DO THIS.
It’s like holding back a yawn.
A physical challenge, even a silly one like this, is a question. You’ll only discover the answer if you take the challenge, right? So you try that third block. You try that 1,000-foot abseil. It’s a constitutive dialogue — it’s how you know yourself and the world. (And maybe the third block says BITCH PLEASE and you hurt yourself again. It happens.)
The kid’s not making eye contact because she wants to look like she’s cool, lost in her own world (you’ve done that) and also because she knows when she does glance at you, you’re going to beckon at the yoga blocks and jerk your chin up a tad, like: “Bring a couple of those over here.”
Her: one eyebrow.
You: little shrug, nod. Yeahhh.
Same thing with walking rail fences. I cannot leave a rail fence alone.
No reason you should listen to ole C.S. Lewis, he’s into hierarchy and all those moral perils, but he did write something apropos:
Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by “my Teddy-bear” not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but “the bear I can pull to pieces if I like.”
And that goes for bodies, too, Lewis says. Our bodies aren’t really ours.
Delightful chap. Seductive, isn’t it, belonging to someone else?
In 2022, how many women were sent home from hospitals in the midst of a miscarriage because doctors, fearing the power of the state to enforce its ownership of those women’s bodies, refused them medical care?
Oh, this is boring, isn’t it? Strained? A little — what’s that word I’ve heard? — shrill. A little shrill. Morality is always so brutal, so dull. So shrill.
The foundational value — you’ve been told wrong, my friends — the foundational value is courage, because without courage, how can you put your pretty ideas into action?
The foundational value is Beatrix standing in the clergy line in Charlottesville pulling up her skirt, turning her hindquarters and waving her bloomers at a bunch of armed Nazis. She’s just one of many folk in that line distracting the enemy and protecting the triage center in the church behind.
Beatrix is tired and she hasn’t slept all night and when she did lie down, trying to sleep while eight other women tried to sleep all around her and none of them did, her back ached and the hotel carpet smelled like mildew. She’s awake on gas station coffee and a pack of Little Debbies. She’s big, disabled, diabetic — shall we make her diabetic? this is becoming a theme — and starting to feel sick. Also, the crowd distresses her neurodivergence almost to the breaking point. Bees in her head. Lights spinning. But she keeps her eye on her enemy, her mirror, her opposite. She isn’t backing down.
You don’t want your daughter to grow up like Beatrix? You’d rather she stay in the studio, looking pretty, making fun of her schoolmates only halfway behind their backs?
Well, let’s be pretty again, let’s be dancers, let’s be vain little minxes, let’s keep our eye on the mirror, our enemy, our opposite, our best lover, our truest interlocutor —
Let’s grab that left heel and pretend to be lost in our own world, keep our pelvis in alignment, body lifted high out of the working hip socket, and pull that side split up, up past 180, let’s put our left foot behind our head (switching left foot to right hand) and heck, toss our left arm out in a flourish —
Watching our alignment, frowning critically, twitching our turnout more fully open, sternum flowering —
and assert that if we’re driven into the last corner —
even though we’re mean girls, gossips, vain, myopic, whose greatest goal is never to crack 100 pounds —
— if there’s ever only one way left to open the knife —
We’ve been practicing our whole lives.