Ad for Yoga Walks in the Wye River Valley, Wales. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Away from the heat, there must be some winds that wish to cool the earth. Some that carry the scent of wet stone and violet. Some that reach the Welsh mountains still fresh.
As a friend wrote last week, “This is why I build in the mountains with my own water sources and plenty of wind and solar.”
In Wales, I gather people have their yoga mats at the ready again. Last year, the two teachers running this one particular retreat would have looked upon running it together again as a matter of course.
But it will only be the one.
The teacher who began these events—in France, Portugal, Italy—fell critically ill. Though living in Switzerland, it happened while meditating in Wales.
It must have been dramatic. Not tranquil, I am sure.
A red air ambulance lifted our man into the vast Ceredigion sky. After a long slog in hospital, he was placed on what remains a private road to recovery.
Months of gruelling rehabilitation continue. He has had to relearn balance, fight to get movement back, and slowly piece together both language and senses.
For a man who loves words, someone versed in everything from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding to Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, the loss and recovery of language must carry a particular weight.
But Yoga depends, it seems to me from the outside, on patient attention to the tiniest increments of progress.
Now he is having to use those same tools to recover the life he once had.
Good news arrives that he has made it back to the floor again.
Let me explain.
For the first time since the emergency, he has lain flat on his back and tried a few familiar poses.
He has intimated to friends that this is a homecoming of sorts—the first time in months he felt close to his former self.
Something is happening with his speech therapy, too. The moment he began demonstrating a few weeks ago how to teach yoga, words began to flow more naturally from him again.
He also records breezy voice messages for friends, full of recovering oral gymnastics.
Over the course of the next few weeks, one simple goal is to regain enough confidence to get down onto the floor and back up again. Alone.
I hear he even spends some sessions guiding his own therapists through simple yoga movements and postures, as if turning the tables on them.
For everyone who knows him, there are reasons for relief. And in Wales, something he helped build will continue without him.
His former student, now fellow teacher, will be running it. Without her, the annual retreat could have disappeared this year. Instead of cancelling, she has chosen to lead.
“How the body reveals the habits that keep us separate,” she explains as one of the lessons. “And how intimacy begins as those habits soften.”
She has not made a grand announcement of this. She has said little of stepping into anyone’s shoes. There is no fanfare—just a quiet acceptance by a brilliant mind that a shared responsibility has for this year become hers.
So it will be about more than yoga.
Painted lady butterflies will no doubt drift through the meditations, oblivious to who is teaching. Bees will bury themselves in lavender with the same quiet focus as any summer.
And the mountains, indifferent yet consoling, will hold their own retreat just as they have always done.
The absent teacher, meanwhile, will not be forgotten. His influence will be in some of the teaching sequences, the corrections and moments of stillness.
Recovery for him will continue elsewhere, measured not by dramatic milestones but by patient, daily work.
In Wales, the mats will be laid out again. The wind will continue to move carefully across the land. The retreat will go on.
Not because nothing has changed, but because everything has—for now.
