People say that life begins at 40 but a week before my fortieth birthday, life as I knew it ended when my husband left us. And the morning after my forty-first birthday, after a wonderful meal and a good night’s sleep, I woke up feeling as if the end was waiting impatiently right outside the door. I was in absolute and utter agony. My back ached as if I’d been carrying bricks up mountains and my legs cramped every time I tried to move. Clearly, decrepitude had set in overnight.
After an hour of trying to sit and work at my desk, I gave up. Sitting was impossible, lying down didn’t help and so I finally decided to go a take a yoga class. Maybe a little exercise would help and there was a studio right across the road that ran classes during the day. I had often meant to go but never made the time, another of those good resolutions that went out the window due to laziness and lethargy disguised as lack of time.
As soon as I walked into the studio, I felt better. There was a lovely scent of orange blossom in the air, it was cool, and a soothing music issued forth from behind the reception desk, something lilting, with tinkling bells.
“Hello. You’re just in time.”
A short, dark-haired woman popped up from underneath the desk.
“Am I?” I asked, somewhat bemused.
“Yes. Maeva will take you for your private class now. Just go on through. She’s waiting for you.”
Shaking my head, I tried to explain that she must have confused me with someone else, that I’d just decided to come on the spur of the moment.
She frowned and looked down at the appointments book.
“So you’re not Margeurite Tabberet?”
I looked at her with surprise.
“Yes, I am. But how did you know my name …”
She smiled at me, a touch of mystery dancing in her eyes.
“No time to explain. Just go on through to Maeva. She’ll sort you out. Off you go.”
She made a shooing gesture with her hand and so off I went.
I walked into the practice room and stopped. Sitting on the floor, cross-legged, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She appeared to be meditating, and every now and then, she clicked a tiny pair of cymbals in her hands, in rhythm with the ethereal bell music I had heard out in the reception area.
It felt rude to stand and stare, but before I could leave, she opened one eye and smiled at me, a glorious flash of white teeth against her golden skin.
“Hi. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been wondering when you’d come.”
She stood up and stretched her luscious body, flashing a perfectly taut stomach under her short white tee shirt. I looked at the inscription across her chest. “Angel” was emblazoned in sparkling diamantes. Of course.
And then I realized what she had said.
“I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else. I only decided to come and do a class a few minutes ago. I don’t know how you got my name but…”
She laughed, a tinkling sound not unlike the bells.
“Oh no, there’s no mistake. I knew you’d be here sooner or later. All the signs told me.”
She gestured to a chair in the corner.
“Put your things down and then we’ll get started.”
I decided to let it go. All I really wanted was to stretch out whatever kink was making me feel so old and sore, although now that I thought about it, everything hurt a whole lot less.
Maeva put me through some very basic salutations, touching me gently every now and then to adjust a position or incite me to breathe into a posture. After a few positions, she stopped and smiled at me.
“You know why everything hurts, don’t you?”
I laughed out loud.
“Yes. I turned 41 yesterday. I’m a single parent to two kids. I’m broke, exhausted, I work more than fulltime and barely have a moment to breathe, let alone exercise and sleep. My husband left me for a teenager. I think it’s called stress,” I finished somewhat sardonically.
She shook her head and tutted, “No, no. That’s just the rationalization. The real problem is that you’re holding on too tight.”
I suddenly felt furious.
“Listen. Thanks for your analysis,” I said crisply. “If you mean holding on too tight to my sanity, I couldn’t agree more. I think a little stretching might help, so could we get back to the lesson?”
“Of course,” she smiled sweetly at me, not at all perturbed. “That’s why you’re here. The lesson.”
We spent the next hour working through a variety of positions and breathing exercises until I began to feel the knots in my spine unravel. Every time I came up against a block, unable to go into the stretch, she placed her hand on my solar plexus and told me to take a deep breath.
Finally, she stepped back and looked deeply into my eyes.
“OK, one more exercise. This is designed to open your chest, to remind you to really breathe. Most people think that breathing comes naturally, but it doesn’t. We tend to forget that air is the life force, the one thing we cannot live without, and yet we are so cavalier about the way we breathe.”
She stopped and grinned at me.
“Now that’s a lesson, isn’t it? It’s so easy to become blasé about the most essential things in life, to take them for granted and just assume we are owed them, unless we stop and really think about them. It’s one of the great sins, Pride. Not stopping to give thanks and focus on what’s really important, like breathing. Or love.”
The sparkles on her tee shirt seemed to get brighter and “Angel” flashed at me like a neon sign. She moved to stand behind me, and hooked her arms softly under mine until her hands were resting on my shoulders and her elbows lay against my hips. I could hear the bell music getting louder and suddenly the scent of orange blossoms filled the room.
“Now, when I tell you to breathe in, I want you to take a slow deep breath from your belly.”
As I breathed in, my eyes closed, she gently pulled my shoulders back until my rib cage felt open and my lungs as if they finally had the space to fill up on the scented air around me. We repeated the exercise three times and each time I felt a little lighter, as if I were somehow being freed of the weight of being me.
“OK, good work. I think that is enough for today.”
I stretched again, for the sheer pleasure of feeling my body work. It seemed that I hadn’t felt so at ease in twenty years.
“Thank you so much. That really did me the world of good. I haven’t done any exercise at all in the longest …”
I stopped as the bell music grew louder.
“What is that music? It’s so peaceful.”
“Do you like it? It comes from my home. If you like, I’ll make you a copy.”
She smiled at me and the “Angel” flashed at me again.
“Come on, I’ll make you a cup of my special tea while I burn you a CD. It’s a good thing to hydrate after a lesson anyway. Water and air, two of the essentials, right?”
I followed her down the hall and into a small kitchenette. She grabbed a CD from a pile next to a computer and slid it into the machine, clicked on a few buttons, and then switched on a kettle.
“So where are you and the music from?” I asked curiously. There was something exotic about her, but I couldn’t place it.
“Well, this time around, I was born in New York, but I am actually from Bali. From Ubud, to be precise.”
She poured boiling water over the mix of herbs and spices she had spooned into a ceramic teapot decorated with Asian designs.
“How did you get from Bali to New York? Or vice versa?”
She poured the tea into two matching ceramic mugs and breathed in the scent.
“Oh, that’s a long story, my journey. A beautiful one.”
She passed me over a mug and shot a look at the computer.
“The CD isn’t finished yet. Shall I tell you my little tale?”
I took a sip of the tea and nodded.
“Wow, this is really good. What’s in it?”
“Green tea, for
cleansing. A little star anise for longevity. Some ginger to warm the blood and for courage. And cinnamon to stimulate and open the mind. Actually, this tea is part of the story. My father showed me how to make it.”
She looked pensive for a moment.
“Did you ever feel like you were missing something important, that even though your life was good, there was something essential that was just out of reach?”
I thought back to my married days. I had love, material comfort, plans for the future, but in retrospect, I realized that I’d always been looking for the next big thing, as if what I had wasn’t enough, or not to be trusted. I nodded.
“Same for me. That’s how it all started.”
She giggled.
“Well, the tattoo helped too,” and lifted her tee shirt to show me a small dragon just above her right hip.
“You see, I grew up in New York in rather comfortable circumstances. My parents are wonderful people, very loving, and because I was an only child, I was totally spoilt. I went to great schools, made some amazing friends, and when I left university, my mother helped me to get a job as a junior stylist with Vogue magazine.”
“Wow. From stylist to yoga instructor. That’s quite a fashion leap.”
Maeva nodded enthusiastically.
“I know. I loved being a stylist. I loved the clothes, the people. And New York is a great place to be in the middle of it all. I probably would have stayed there forever if my parents hadn’t decided to get a divorce but out of sadness come blessings. You see, when they told me, I was devastated. Not just because of the divorce, although that was pretty difficult to swallow. Apparently, one of the reasons they had divorced was because my mother had finally told my father about, well, about my real father. As it happens, she went on a trip to Bali a month before her wedding, to relax, and when she was there, she had an affair with a Balinese guy. And that guy was my biological father.”
I looked at her sympathetically.
“That must have really upset you.”
She burst out laughing.
“Upset me? Understatement of the century. I went nuts. Stayed out every night, slept with anyone who asked. Took a lot of Class A drugs, drank far too much. Classic reaction of a spoiled brat trying to drown out the fact that everything she’d believed in was a farce.”
“So what happened then? I’m guessing you went to find your father…”
She shook her head.
“Not willingly, that’s for sure. I hated him, sight unseen, for sleeping with my mother. Which is pretty funny, because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here, so it was like hating myself.”
She reached over and filled up my mug.
“I probably would have gone on self-destructing forever but one night, in a fit of absolute fury, I decided to get a tattoo. Mostly because my parents hated them with a passion.”
The CD popped out of the computer, making me jump. I watched her take the CD and slide it into a clear plastic pocket.
“So that’s how you got the dragon?”
“If only it was that simple. No, but from the minute I walked into that tattoo parlor, my life began. My real life. I thought I was so cool, so hip, walking into that place, but the minute I set foot in the door, three big Hell’s Angels bikers – Ulysses gang members, as I recall - started making fun of me. I brazened it out and started looking for a tattoo of a dragon in their catalogs, when a drawing leaped out at me. Not a drawing, really, but a name. It was ‘Ubud’, in Carakan, the ancient Balinese script.”
I thought about the three hairy bikers in my tattoo shop making fun of me. Maybe it was part of the international tattoo experience, some kind of rite of passage.
“So how did you come to get a dragon?”
She touched the dragon gently.
“I didn’t get a tattoo that night. When I showed the tattoo guy the word I wanted, he sat me down and explained that it wasn’t a drawing, but an instruction.”
She laughed merrily.
“That’s where being drunk and more than a little stoned was a benediction. If he’d told me everything when I was sober, I wouldn’t have believed a word. Not to mention the giant talking unicorn! You see, what I learned that night is that the book of tattoos is actually some kind of oracle. I always thought that oracles were set in stone, but it’s very important to know that messages and signs appear where we are most likely to heed them, and in the form that is certain to get our attention.”
She paused in her storytelling to take a sip of tea and I thought about the unicorn I had seen in my tattoo shop. If I saw one, maybe it was because my daughter was so passionate about them, that I was certain to take notice.
Maeva continued.
“And that’s why ‘Ubud’ appeared to me in the book of tattoos. Because I had to go to Ubud to begin my journey, and if anyone had told me to go, I would have ignored them. But when a unicorn tells you, well, you just have to do it, don’t you?”
I nodded nervously, uncertain as to whether or not I should tell her about my own unicorn story but before I could speak, Maeva touched me gently on the arm.
“I know. That’s why you’re here. But let me tell you the end of my story.”
She leaned back into the cushion.
“The next day, I packed a pair of jeans, a tee-shirt and a bikini, and I got on the first flight to Ubud. I had no idea what I was going to do, or even if I wanted to find my father. So I just got on the plane and ended up sitting next to a man who owned a resort just outside of Ubud. He needed a waitress and I needed a job and a place to stay, so I went with him. Not far from the resort, there was a yoga school. I was still pretty lost, and so I decided to try some yoga.”
She paused, and looked over at me seriously.
“As soon as I set foot over the threshold of the yoga school, a man came up to me and hugged me. He called me ‘daughter’ and told me he always knew that I would come. And I knew he was my father because he had he exact same dragon I had wanted, tattooed on his right arm.”
I looked at her in disbelief.
“But how could you know? And how did he know that you’d come? Or that you even existed?”
“Good questions. I asked them too, even though I knew in my heart that it was him. It took me a long time to understand that just as he knew, I had always known, even though my mother had never told either of us. I began doing the yoga every day, and spending a lot of time at the centre, until finally I quit my waitressing job and moved into the dormitory at the centre, in exchange for some secretarial work. I spent three years there, learning to listen to my mind and my soul, through my body.”
She pointed to an embroidered picture on the wall.
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” Buddha. It means that if you don’t really live an experience fully, you cannot learn from it. And it goes further, because I had to live through the destruction of every foundation I’d ever had in order to learn who and why I was, and what my life’s purpose was to be.”
Maeva gazed at me for a long moment.
“When you came here today, it was because you were looking for answers to the questions that have been haunting you for a long time. Your body hurt you until you were forced to take a step along the path you must travel. You know what is your life’s purpose. We all know, and then we forget, until we are reminded that our life force depends upon it.”
She stood up gracefully and offered me a hand. I stood too, feeling more limber than I had in years.
“The Balinese believe that the secret to a long and healthy life is stretching the body and mind. The two go together. If you stay flexible and continue to be aware of your outer being, to gently push it to new limits, your body stays strong and capable. Same thing with your mind. And if you do both, then you open a pathway to enlightenment.”
The light caught her tee shirt and once again the word “Angel” shone up at me.
Maeva saw me looking at her tee shirt and grinned.
“Glitzy, isn’t it? Not what I normally wear for teaching but an old friend from my stylist days sent it to me a week ago.”
I looked at the pictures of her around the reception area, showing different poses and wearing natural earth tones of taupe and beige.
“So what made you wear it today?” I asked.
Maeva laughed and handed me the CD.
“Well, how else would you have known who I was?”
6
Cigarettes, sheepskin
and love