I’m sitting on a roof deck overlooking the tailored grounds of a Twelfth Century pillared building, lit by a street lamp below me. Roses and geraniums adorn it’s entry, leading into one of numerous art museums in Winterthur, Switzerland. At 1:27 am, it is closed.
It is not because of jet lag that sleep eludes me. That has come and gone. After days of cycling through the Alps, I’ve adjusted to the time switch (which is now 2:00 am, according to the magical gong of Swiss church bells).
This body exhaustion-brain wired state of insomnia reflects the strongest of my PD symptoms. Travel tends to feed into it even more.
But I’m not willing to give up exploring the land, culture, food of different places. No, PD takes too much as it is, I’m handing over the old bell tower that was our inn the night we rode into Sedrum, nor the winding trails though sheep pastures walled by peaks that spike into the clouds. Every village we pedaled into featured buttery pastries; each town spire chimed the time.
On the trip over, there was a girl two rows back who launched into wails and kicking. The screaming did subside, sometimes for only moments, sometimes longer.
Travel with PD is a bit like boarding a plane with a toddler. They cry. They cry at home, too. So why not travel? Try to keep them comfortable and enjoy those quiet moments between screams that are filled instead with the sound of church bells.

Additions to my gratitude list:
- crickets at night
- gum
- charcoal pencils
- fiddlehead ferns
- the sparkle of last night’s raindrops in early morning sun
- the clusters of four-petaled white-flowered weeds sprouting up in my yard, and how they’re always surrounded by others, never just one out there alone.

Just saw a new one to me (and I like it):
Parkinson’s is a word not a sentence.

For years,  I’ve been a fan of Gary Kraftsow’s work with therapeutic yoga. I borrow from his books to share poses with students in my classes.  His workshops sound so appealing, so targeted  to my personal practice as well as to my teaching. Unfortunately, they tend to take place on the other coast.

Imagine my delight when I discovered he’ll be on this side of the country, offering a three-day intensive for teachers at the Yoga Journal Conference. I pored over the description for the course. While every joint in my body knew this would be a good match for me, those same joints reminded me that three full days would be too much for them.

How  ironic that an intensive on the healthy benefits of yoga would be too intense for my PD body, putting my health at risk. Ahimsa, I thought.  Be compassionate toward that PD body and find a path.

I pored over the brochure again and settled on one day. I emailed Lyn, who works with Gary Kraftsow, and explained my situation. She replied that Gary had no problem with me attending for just one day.

The reply from Yoga Journal was not as understanding. We’re not set up for that, the email stated. Try back again in a few weeks.

I wrote back a few weeks later.  No answer.

I phoned.  Same response. If the workshop fills up, the woman said,  and I’m signed up for only one day,  it’s not fair to someone who wants to sign up for three days.

Why is it fair, I wondered,  that I wait to sign up for one day to see if an able-bodied person signs up for all three? Who is to judge that what I’d bring back to my students with movement disorders after one day is less than what someone  would glean from attending all three?

Satya, I thought. My mind didn’t want to go there. But I couldn’t help but wonder if the truth for YJ – what’s not  “fair” to them – is they’d would miss out on two-day’s fees if I were to fill a slot for one day.

I’m left with a melancholy seeping throughout my body. The top-selling publication on all that is yoga is, pun intended here, inflexible. And possibly untruthful. And just as possibly in it not for the sharing of ideas but for the profit.

The more I dip into my paints and,  more recently,  mark curves and shadows in charcoal,  I’m learning that art is about observation.

In the class I’m taking,  I and five other students are sketching nude models. But actually, what we’re doing is observing, noticing light and curves and how parts of the body relate to each other in space.  It’s like yoga on paper.  And, like yoga, I’m learning that it is in the  interpretation that beauty emerges.

I came across an article about Leonardo da Vinci. The great artist and observer of anatomy watched people and wrote his perceptions in notebooks.  In one  entry, da Vinci’s words describe people with what is considered today to be symptoms of Parkinson’s:

“Those who . . . move their trembling parts, such as their heads or hands . . . without permission of the soul.”

Leave it to da Vinci to interpret so beautifully.

Is this night’s blue moon
an uncommon year-ending
or a rare new start

The weather here calls for clear skies on December 31, all the more reason that I’ll step outside and take a look. Breathe in the night air and simply observe.

On this last night, this first night, the moon waxes to its extreme, the second  time  this month. It occurs once, well, in a blue moon. That calculates out to about once every three years on the calendar.

I will bear witness to it, perhaps even honor it with the moon series inserted into my daily flow of asanas.

Oh, it’ll happen again. But it may be cloudy next time. And it’ll certainly be another lifetime before this lunar phenomenon appears in the space between toasting the old and ringing the new.