I was sitting here on this funny bench near Cross Plains, Texas last Saturday morning, meditating very briefly before breakfast. I hadn’t slept well. A strange bed, waking to pee, falling back asleep to dream, then waking again. It was all night like that and after Michael awoke at 5:45am to get up and drive 30 miles to shoot an abandoned mill in Santa Ana that he didn’t get a negative of he was happy with last year when we drove to west Texas, I slept in for a bit. Got dressed, coffee in my room, then out here for a few minutes. So quiet – the only sounds the birds, the wind around and in my ears and through the trees, and generators running an oil derrick in the distance.
We’ve been coming out here for three years now. I teach four yoga classes to parents and staff of Chase’s Place, a school that specializes in working with kids with developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injuries and neurological disorders. These are the kids whose parents will be caring for them forever. They will never leave home and live on their own. To spend time with these families shows us love through a different lens.
Three years ago a very generous donation came to the school along with an offer to have families come to this place for an overnight or weekend. The owners, a quiet cowboy husband and wife, don’t want to be named and they don’t want photos or video taken of the facility itself. Very few schools, groups or organizations are invited, or selected by the owners to come. Veterans groups, for one, in addition to schools like Chase’s Place.
They feel they are doing God’s work.
I was thinking about this as I sat in the sun this morning; already so hot, so bright I had to sit turned slightly away from it so that my eyes wouldn’t start tearing up behind my eyelids. I was thinking about generosity deriving from faith. We know so little about this very private couple, we’ve only guessed that this land – a vast acreage we’ve yet to see the full extent of, limited as we are to tooling around in golf carts – this land that sits on oil reserves is the source of the revenue that drives their philanthropy. And there are undoubtedly countless heirs to oil wealth whose more highly visible foundations work in much the same way. But this is the country; deep Texas Christian country. And this couple doesn’t want to be recognized. They want only to provide respite, a place for restoration, on their own private terms.
Signs and symbols of their faith are evident. Ceramic crosses, en-plaqued bible verses, a library of titles such as “The Power of a Praying Husband.” All seamlessly interwoven into a southwestern-meets-cowboy-kitsch design scheme that the urban snob in me really wants to deride but can’t, because I’m suddenly and constantly in the scrim of these families and the school and the mission of this place in the middle of nowhere to provide the essence of a retreat and community.
And I’m teaching yoga. To these parents whose daily lives assume a kind and level of heartbreak and stress I will never know. And to teachers whose skill in working with these kids is so humbling. I give them a couple of hours of self-care. Of attention directed inward, a window of time and space to get curious about breath and muscle and joint and then to maybe become curious about being curious. About their arms and shoulders that lift grown bodies into wheelchairs, their nervous systems on a higher, more constant alert than other parents and caregivers.
Here under this aluminum sided open-air pavilion on a concrete floor we are all deliciously comfortable. There’s only birdsong, hot wind, and a generator off in the distance. The low, twangy chatter of the equine therapy team finishing their lunch. And my voice, occasionally guiding attention back to this or that sensation. The feedback is always generous and surprising to me, how good they feel; at how surprised they are at how good they feel. This is how I most love to teach.
I’ve been ruminating on the question of my own faith for the last month or so. Trawling my earliest memories of the experience of religion (as distinct from religious experience). Church attendance didn’t last much past middle school. Ours was not a religious household, though my single mom wanted us to have a sense of God, a relationship or connection to something higher. Around graduate school I discovered the depth psychologists and their notion of soul and thought, “There it is.” The experience of being human as in its very essence, religious, without hierarchy of belief, or dogma. Soul not as something in need of saving or damning, but located right here in me, in the fabric of body and ineffable workings of psyche.
I suppose if I ever had to claim fealty to some form or variety of religion, that nature worship or something like it might come close. Getting away from my home in the city to a place like this is a chance to reset, to touch the cracking red earth, to spot a troop of deer (from the comfort of a golf cart), a herd of grazing cattle, some horses; to hear only wind and birdsong (and that ever loving oil derrick). It’s not an altogether easy symbiosis. There’s scary out here amidst the peaceful. The distances overwhelming, the sun and temperatures life threatening. We get off the interstate and my mind goes immediately to what it must have been like for all of the ancestors for whom all of this expanse was simply “unknown.” Wilderness to make a community in, or ride to the end of.
Certainly Christianity has been a part of the fabric of society way out here since forever of the United States. And I don’t have much concern that what I’m bringing or teaching in any way runs counter to anyone’s more mainstream faith. I don’t spout off about chakras or Hinduism; I’m very careful even with my use of the words “energy” and “namaste.” Part of me wonders what “they” – the staff of the retreat center but also the parents who opt out – must think of what we’re doing rolling around on the ground. But yoga is so much a part of the mainstream, there’s more familiarity and appreciation than fear that accompanied something that used to seem weird and esoteric. What we’re doing is probably seen as “that thing that supposed to be really good for your health.”
Is the faith of organized religion, and its imperative for “taking care of” different from the impulse to care – to compassion – that comes from self-knowledge? I’ve for so long been at odds with the exclusionary and hurtful, sometimes outright abusive practices that have accompanied the spread and expression of organized religion. I live in a very socially and politically conservative state, where even in Dallas it is widely accepted in certain circles to question a new acquaintance about what church they attend. Many of my students are regular church goers. They do good work as members of their respective communities. And we don’t talk much about it. But I see this place is an expression of that same goodness, the human impulse to offer care, clothed as it is in its Americana vision of 21st century rural Christianity. It’s an interesting and unexpected place to be teaching yoga, but perhaps less and less so. Maybe more blurring of lines around around care and the mainstreaming of compassion along with mindfulness will make differences between “systems” less important. I hope we’re still coming out here to do just this small, simple thing when that happens.