Haiku 2023–178

sun salutations

any day I get back up

is an okay day

— -

The river that is our lives consists of ebbs and flows as we make our way to the sea. After a bit of an ebb, I’m trying to get back into a flow portion of my life. Part of my strategy includes scripting my morning out… and when I say ‘scripting’, I mean it literally. I created a bash script I run on my computer that does everything from timing my meditation practice to asking me to put certain data I’m keeping track of in a spreadsheet. A recent add to that script has been a prompt to do sun salutations.

I was first introduced to sun salutations in my twenties when I took a yoga class. If you’re not familiar with a sun salutation, it consists of a series of yoga poses which take you down to the floor and back up again. If you’re familiar with a burpee, it’s close to being a sun salutation except the former looks to develop power while the latter aims for developing flexibility while being just a touch more complicated. Whenever I felt the need a bit of movement in the morning, these seemed to fit the bill. Now, however, I see them in a slightly different light.

The fifth posed (actually called an ‘asana’) of the sun salutation is called ‘ashtanga namaskara’ or ‘catepillar pose’. If you’re doing it right, you’re almost, but not quite laying face down on the floor. Getting down to the pose is relatively because… you know… gravity. Getting back up shouldn’t be difficult and isn’t… but for how long? Remember the river flowing to the sea? As it grows closer to its end it will eventually meet the tides and be subsumed by them. Age will eventually do the same thing to me, but as long as I can knock out at least one salutation in the morning it’s an okay day. This haiku wants to preserve that notion.