The winter solstice is always significant to me. There is something powerful that happens when the Earth stands still. Darkness and light face each other as equals—the longest night and the shortest day. After the winter solstice there are only longer days to anticipate. I celebrate with friends, fire, food and poetry. On this long, dark night we burn the regrets we want to leave in the darkness and manifest the dreams we want to amplify in the coming light.
A few years ago I started marking the solstice by doing 108 sun salutations at the Yoga Experience. The practice helps me to cleanse, embrace courage, and to clarify intention. The number 108 is significant to diverse disciplines and cultures ranging from mathematics to religions and spiritual practices. With all of us packed into the studio like sardines and facing each other across the room, we take a journey of presence and flow, moving and breathing together. Our teachers mark the completion of each sun salute by dropping a glass bead into a ceramic bowl.
In the days leading up to the winter solstice I doubted that it would be possible both mentally and physically for me to do 108 sun salutations. I thought about sitting this one out. Then I recalled all of the fears I faced in the last year to when I turned my world upside down to learn organic farming practices in California. I left this place I have called home for the last 20 years, left a great job that paid well, left all my friends, and a burgeoning love to pursue a dream—one that everyone kept reminding me promised a life of physical and financial hardship. My last stop on the way out of town was the yoga studio to grab my mat. I felt better facing the long list of unknowns ahead with mindfulness. And I would certainly need to stretch.
As an apprentice at the farm, I approached everything with a beginner’s mind. I harnessed myself to the rhythms of the Earth and learned how to grow beautiful food, flowers and community. Every day was filled with motion; digging compost into garden beds, bending down harvesting vegetables, and washing, sorting, packing, lifting and selling them. All day I existed on my feet tending to the needs of plants. Each day I grew stronger witnessing them grow and thrive. I was thankful for moments on my yoga mat, which helped transform me from a stiff, wooden doll to a human being again.
I learned that just like anything that seems impossible at first, you take it one step, or sun salutation at a time. Back on the solstice yoga mat, my mind drifted off to all the people and moments I was grateful to experience this past year—because I took that leap of faith.
I dedicated my first 39 salutes to my fellow farm apprentices, one glass bead at a time. Each person taught me something essential about courage, believing in the world and myself. When you leave a community where you are known and loved and start over, you might think you can disguise yourself. Living, working and learning (not to mention showering, cooking, brushing your teeth) with a diverse group of passionate humans reminded me who I am and helped me embrace that person. As the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell said, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
Since most of the farm apprentices were on a tight budget, a small group of yogis found a student, Nicollette, who taught free classes at the UCSC student center. We went every week and brought her a bouquet of flowers from the farm. When classes for the students ended we convinced her to come and teach at the farm in exchange for veggies, flowers and a meal. She fell in love with our farm yoga studio—a wooden platform that looked out on the apple orchard and strawberry field, flanked on one side by a fig tree, and honeysuckle vines on the other.
I saluted our teacher and each of the farm yogis; I was thankful for those moments on the platform throughout the season, watching the day slip away while our practice healed our bodies and hearts. Nicollette’s teaching, chanting and harmonium music deepened our experience with the place and with each other. Yoga helped many of us befriend our own minds and bodies, lessons that will last us a lifetime.
Before I knew it we had completed 108 salutations. I settled into child’s pose, bowing forward with my forehead pressed on the floor, arms outstretched, grateful for the work of my body and mind, which allowed me to take this incredible journey.
With each breath in I inhaled loving images and each breath out I dispelled the fear in the same way I had approached the uncertainty of the last year. I am grateful for all of the possibilities that manifested in my life, which I could not imagine a year before. We need the darkness, like the seeds need to be underground to germinate. And like the seeds, we need to embrace the light when we meet it so we can grow and change and become who we are.
Kate Watters is a plant enthusiast, writer, artist and musician. She has been a resident of Flagstaff for almost 20 years, and recently took a hiatus to Santa Cruz, Calif., where she was farm apprentice at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. She is now armed with hand pruners and a harvest knife and intends to apply her newfound knowledge and passion to growing all kinds of plants in northern Arizona.
