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April 23, 2009
I saw a glacier for the first time yesterday. It was amazing, huge, cold, many thousands of years old at the core. There was a beautiful blue pattern running through the white ice, the really old ice is blue, and I read somewhere that it’s so hard if you tried break it with a sledge hammer you’d break your arm.
In the dip between two slopes there was a river of ice that once poured toward the sea but it has not moved for millennia. It spread out as it neared the water until it was as wide as a football field and probably many times as deep. We knew we were getting close to the glacier because we could see pieces of it floating past the boat in the channel, melting and headed out to sea. The closer we got the more chunks of glacier there were. They break off and drift away as it melts. The water is cold now and getting colder, but it’s not cold enough.
The irony of how I arrived at the glacier juxtaposed against the fate of the glacier is not lost on me. After the ship took the detour through the Sarmiento Channel - a long detour - to see the glacier, turned full circle slowly so that everyone could see it clearly even if they didn’t want to walk up on deck, and set a crew into the water to film and photograph the glacier, all the while serving drinks on the helipad, they fished a chunk of it out of the water and put it on the deck for people to take pictures of, touch, even taste if they wanted to. It was a piece with blue ice in the middle. I didn’t go to that part even though I really wanted to touch the blue ice, to feel it against my skin. But I didn’t because it seemed, in a way I can’t explain, icky to poke it and ham next to it for pictures.
A ship like this uses a lot of energy to get this far and not just to move the boat. It takes energy to make fresh water and to heat it, to cook and clean up after so many people, to wash our clothes and flush our toilets and chill our beer. I cringe a little every time I see someone using three pool towels to dry off after the sauna or throwing away plates full of food. There is so much waste and the trash has to go somewhere. They don’t throw it in the sea, but it has to go somewhere...
As an American I have lived in a country where for very little money I can buy oranges from Brazil, lotions from Italy, wine from Australia and lamb from New Zealand. I never gave a thought to how much energy it took to get that stuff to my table. How much to keep it at just the right temperature, ship, truck it, store it. I drove a Mercedes spending many miles a week just to run errands and eat at the restaurants I liked best or shop at my favorite stores.
Living in Buenos Aires has taught me that I can live more simply and do more to minimize my impact than just recycling. I used to use the excuse that I couldn’t manage without my car or that I couldn’t cook without all those well traveled ingredients. Now I know I can. I can use public transportation, I can buy local and organic, I can walk, ride my bike and compost. I have even learned to recycle at home, using things more than once and finding uses for ‘used up’ things. I am still learning about how to have the least impact on the planet and live a quality life. A survey of 99 people would likely find 33 who think I’m obsessed over nothing, 33 who think I’m doing a great job and 33 who think I could do more. I have to decide what matters to me and how to live in a way that I can live with. I find I think about it often.
I am glad I got to see that glacier before it is all gone. It is much smaller than it was a few years ago if the ice in the channel is any indication. No picture can express, really, how magnificent it is when you see it up close, when you feel it in the hard, biting cold air that edges out from it, when you hear it crackle as it breaks a little at a time. I have seen some beautiful and wonderful things on this trip, but the glacier is the thing that has moved me most, and given me the most to think about. 
“It’s not a yoga perfect, it’s a yoga PRACTICE”
Karen Abbott, my first yoga teacher
It is ironic that I came to Buenos Aires to open a yoga studio. Having decided not to, and there being no other Bikram yoga studio in BsAs yet, and my being a Bikram disciple (in other words I don’t believe other forms of yoga are as beneficial as Bikram) my life in BsAs has been an ongoing journey in finding a space and the will to practice.
In the past year I have practiced yoga in 17 US states, in 3 temporary apartments in BsAs, in bathrooms heated with space heaters and tubs full of hot water, On a patio outdoors in the sun, in AC free rooms in an old run down gym near Congreso, in a couple of rented spaces where I also taught a little. Most of the past 10 months has been a challenge to find a suitable space.
The issues I have encountered have run from a lack of sufficient heat, to boredom with my iPod recordings, from lack of motivation to a dusty terrace full all day with workmen. I have not managed to practice daily, though I have not gone a week without practice. I have made improvements in my practice even with out a teacher and I know I have lost ground in some areas as well.
This week aboard the ship has brought me a new perspective on all of this. The ship is pretty cold and the weather as we head South is getting colder by the day. I knew it would be so. Day one I investigated and found that there is a place, a “Thermal Spa” that is not air conditioned and has heated floors and stone lounges. There is also a sauna and a steam room. Bikram is practiced at 105-115 with 40% humidity. The steam room is too hot, 180 or so and way to humid at 100%. The dry sauna is too hot at 200 or more and no humidity at all. The thermal spa is about 85 degrees with normal humidity, but, it’s better than the air conditioned gym just upstairs. More meaningfully for me is that the thermal spa has a glass wall that looks out to sea and I can watch the waves as I practice. At sea we have the whole day to do as we please and what pleases me is to spend the whole morning in the warmth of the heated lounge chairs and doing my yoga in that room. I am up earlier than most and so it isn’t usually until the end of my practice that anyone else comes in.
The sea of course, moves. As it does the ship moves with it. Heading South the waves get bigger and the ship rocks more. The standing series, the first 45 minutes of a 90 minute practice, is much about balance. Standing with one foot on the floor, the other pointed toward the ceiling, arms stretched from back to front, head upside down, gaze directed backward, hands under my feet, and so on. It is challenging on any day and particularly on a moving floor, rocking from side to side with no predictable rhythm. Just as I think I’ve got it the ship will pitch in an unexpected direction and I’m starting over again. I try each posture, again and again, trusting that in falling out I am learning about how to balance, even if I don’t make it for 60 full seconds. I reach for the wall, something I imagine I would never do in a studio in front of other people, then I think to myself, maybe I would. What if something changed about my balance, my body, my mind. What if I had to? There are some for whom every practice feels as it does for me right now.
I realize that this last year has taught me a great deal. I have learned to tune out the repetitious words of 4 lovely teachers who dutifully talk me through yoga every day, but still hear the corrections and feel their caring as they push me through the postures to do my best. I have learned to not “let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good” as I have only 2 choices, practice in less than perfect circumstances or not practice at all. I have learned that seeking balance in constantly shifting conditions is as worthy a pursuit as finding balance on a steady surface. I find that while I look forward with gusto to the day when I will join a community of yogis in a hot, steamy room in BsAs and hear the voice of a teacher I have never heard before, that I also treasure the energy I have marshaled for myself these past months and sight of the rolling, pitching, frothy waves, deep blue and white stretching out for miles in front of me as I kick up in floor bow.
As I have carried my years of practice and the voices of my teachers with me through this period, I hope to hold the sight of these beautiful waters and the sense of fragile balance into my classes for years to come.
15 April 2008
Jimmy is calling it “the Southern Loop”. Whatever you call it we are finally traveling in South America. When we arrived here last year we were looking to start a business, we bought an apartment that needed a lot of work. We have spent most of our time here doing functional things and often noticed that we’ve managed to miss the romance and wonder that some of our friends feel for this part of the world.
It often perplexes me when my friends talk about South America with dreamy eyes and voices softened by enchantment. I feel none of these things. I may not feel them when I return from this trip around the bottom of the world but I will have given it an honest chance and I will have a real idea of what this part of the world can be. I still won’t know it all and life in the city will likely continue to tire me. This trip has had a wonderful beginning though.
We began in Buenos Aires, of course, and then headed for Montevideo, Uruguay. We’ve been meaning to get over to Montevideo forever, having heard it is like BsAs but smaller, quieter, cleaner and kinder. All was verified and we spent a lovely day walking, taking photos and people watching in the park. Our next stop was Punta del Este Uruguay, the Ibiza of South America where the beautiful people go to see and be seen (though they are all elsewhere now as “The Season” is over). On our way over to the shore we met a couple from BsAs and found them again at the car rental. They offered to share a vehicle with us, we agreed on an agenda and off we went to explore the island with Pablo and Ignacio. We went first to Casapueblo the storied home of the famous Uruguayan artist Carlos Vilaro. Aside from having art in every corner, built into every wall and bursting from every room, the home, and now hotel, sits on a bluff overlooking the mouth of the Rio Plata and it is beautiful! I forgot, almost, how much I love the water, the waves, the rocks and the breezes from the nearby sea. For just a moment I could have been standing on the shore in La Jolla. I never wanted to leave, but leave we eventually did, and to find the Atlantic side of Punta del Este (Point of the East) where the Rio Plata meets the Atlantic Ocean. We drove around admiring the big beautiful beach mansions and stopping here and there to take a photo or touch the waves. We had an amazing lunch in a restaurant on the beach. Actually the restaurant was on the other side of the street, just the tables were on the beach, so that the waiters had to cross traffic with your food. It was a wonderful meal and nice to sit in the quiet of a popular beach town in Autumn and talk with interesting people and feel the warm sun as an unexpected but welcome dining companion.
Back on the ship Jimmy and I watched while we turned slowly from the shores of Punta del Este toward the open ocean on our way to Puerto Madryn, Argentina and then on through “the Southern Loop”. We’ll have a day at sea tomorrow, a good time for a long hard work out, some reading and a nap. More from Puerto Madryn, Ushuaia and beyond...
