When Yoga Grounds a Peripatetic Life
A Yogi’s Memoir in Pieces & Poses (Vine Leaves Press, October 2024, $17.99) is a welcome follow-up to her Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature. In the latter we got a visually creative and compelling view into the peripatetic life and mind of a Californian woman whose partnership, then marriage, to an observant French-born Jewish man with yearnings to move to Israel contributed to searing, existential struggles for rootedness both in the couple as well as in their home/location.
In Landed, the narrator now seems more mature and reflective, and as the title suggests, a Zen-like acceptance evolves in both narrative and character as part of an often physically challenging (through yoga poses) and psychologically/emotionally intense yearning to settle in with what life and marriage demands: choices, compromise, sometimes sweat and shaking-inducing, and a lot of deep breaths. Israel, in all its complicated, violent but also life-affirming beautiful intensity, is a vibrant/vibrating secondary character as the narrator wrestles with the country’s hamatzav, or “situation.” Over a period of seven years, from 2011-2018, we witness a story that bonds the personal and the historical: “…The Situation,” notes the narrator, is “a euphemism for political unrest, operation, war, suicide bomb spree, or general malaise du jour.” Tension like that of the hamatzav permeates the memoir, because it permeates the narrator’s—and all Israelis’—lives.
The practice of yoga serves as an apt metaphor for this existential dance between struggle and acceptance, with interspersed chapters named for yoga poses, such as Sukhasana Pose, Downward Facing Dog, and Warrior (“Warrior I isn’t about the physical warrior but the spiritual one…Am I warrior enough to live here? If terrorism resurges or war ensues, am I strong enough to soldier through it? If my children grow up and leave the country, is our marriage sturdy enough to anchor me?”). The twisting, bending, and stretching (and shaking!) of the narrator’s body effectively evokes all the sweat and exertion in the narrator’s journey. No matter how hard it is, how many interruptions happen, how many times the yogi must run to the bomb shelter in the middle of practice, she returns to the mat, to breathe, to begin again.
As in Places We Left Behind, Landed uses original visual elements that refresh the energy of the reader’s eyes on the page like big, black, whimsical speech bubbles with cursive writing for some of the narrator’s internal dialogue one-liners, lists, diagrams, and most intriguing, the use of a black-out square for her sibling (or Sib) with whom she has a fraught relationship, if one at all: “For the past two years, while watching Sib negate their roots and plunge headlong into Judaism, I saw an ugly, intolerant side of our religion.”
In the chapter titled “Downward Facing Dog,” a scene evokes the beauty and complexity of life in Israel: The narrator’s newly established yoga studio is blossoming and Ayat, an Israeli Arab, joins a class. “…she scans the room, lifts her lower body, and breathes loudly. I see her legs shake. When I expressed interest in teaching yoga as a language of peace for Arabs and Jews six years earlier, it seemed beyond my reach. But maybe, one day, it might materialize. ‘Is this right?’ Ayat asks. I smile. She whispers, ‘Hard, but beautiful’…Her words cleave my heart. A reflection of where we live, who we are. Hard, but beautiful.”
Landed is also a testament to what happens to our kids when we make decisions that affect them: Describing the moment when Lang tells her teens they are moving back to Israel, again, from New York, there is “Stupor. Silence. Shock” as her son “shrieked,” and her daughters reproach her: “Why would you make us do that again?” The narrator admits, “Guilty Mari and I were unable to agree on a country to raise our family. Sorry our children felt rootless. Responsible for their excessive vectors.”
In the end, Lang achieves something brilliant in that she successfully braids three unique strands of profound significance in her life (her family, her yoga practice, and her new homeland, Israel) to tell the story of a tender yet fiercely dynamic and probing journey of finding home: “In this teeny, tangled land, the personal and the political, the tranquil and the tumult, the creative and the destructive wrestle and wrangle every day. Just. Like. Us…And in that state of mind, I feel present and awake, alive and aglow.” If we can land in life and in ourselves and feel like this, we are doing something right that is worth holding onto. And I believe Lang knows it now.
Nina Lichtenstein is the founder and director of Maine Writers Studio and the author of Out of North Africa: Sephardic Women’s Voices and Body: My Life in Parts.
