Sun Salutations While Surviving A Short Stint In County Jail.
{Photo via Pinterest}
It must be about 4 a.m.
It’s past the vicious shouting at new arrivals, which usually happens at midnight or 1, sometimes 2 in the morning, I’m guessing from mere clock-worn memory. There is no time in jail.
It could be the yelling and pot banging that starts before 5:15 a.m. chow. No matter, one kind of clamor or another has jarred me awake from twilight sleep, the time of nightmares. I am up.
Despite the distant kitchen din, I am essentially alone among 39 other sleeping bodies bunked twenty by twenty in two rows. Only a few of the concrete ceiling fluorescent light strips remain lit, flickering dingy light befitting dirt and iron.
Time to sneak some contraband stretching.
Dragging the scratchy army blanket across my parched skin, I toss my legs over the side of the bottom bunk where I spent the last five hours of sleep — strafed by the nighttime hollering of hateful deputies, punctuated by the boom of locking cell gates, announcing admittances and releases.
I bend over to remove my frayed soccer knee socks, pull my folded smock from under my pint-sized commissary pillow and arm-climb into it.
Bare feet on the filthy, cold cement is not only risky for contracting unknown diseases but for unleashing the humiliating wrath of the screaming key holders.
It’s against the rules. But I have no choice.
The uniform dress code around here is state-issued pants, smock, panties, bra, socks and sandals. Infractions are committed for actions slight to severe, from hiding away bread from lunch to ingesting smuggled heroin. Full dress is required at all times except for sleeping and showering.
Seemingly a small infraction, no socks and sandals, the punishment is just as ferocious as punching an inmate.
Socked and sandaled feet slip on the dusty floor as my body v-forms into downward dog, so I strip them bare. Luckily, it’s early and all around me sleep; there is relaxed oversight of the dimly lit tank.
I begin. My first reach to the sun’s imagined peeking rays flicks on the electric heat of my awakening. I drop my outstretched arms ground-ward, hands on the cold cement floor, swooshing liquid cool up through my fingertips straight to my brain. I hang, eyes closed.
I arise again, a quick flash of my now open eyes left to right on the way up. Still no signs of life. Again I reach for the sightless sky, on tip toes, inhaling deeply a wide swath of dank air. This time my arms float to the floor like feather flight.
It’s the closest to light I sense in a 24-hour day of darkness. I savor the sensation in my mouth and pores, behind my eyelids.
The warmth now channeling through to my extremities, I step back, flatten my feet and hands to the ground in echo to my hands and elongate the small of my back pushed to the peak of the mountain that is me. I exhale.
In contra pointe, I invert my spine, concave to the convex, and arch my mind’s eye to the cabined sun’s unseen stare. I inhale.
I always start with sun salutations.
In this pit of despair, I yearn for sun salutations, as if I could beckon the sun to me with willed movement. I reach for the sun beyond the cement walls, iron bars and barbed wire, in my heart, in my outstretched arms atop a high lunge, with eyes closed.
And then, still with lids closed, I hear it — the slightest pit-pat of light-stepping feet. Unwilling to leave my blissful blindness and breath, I continue.
Folded forward, finger tips to the floor, I intuit the wafting warmth emanating from another body nearby, edging closer, one more step of those approaching feet… bare feet. I raise my arms to the sky.
She follows. I can almost hear the whooshing wind of her upsweeping arms.
She, like so many here whose only real crime is poverty, is a stranger to the practice of Yoga with all its concomitant benefits, but she is drawn to the peace in movement that communicates strength and equanimity, somehow sensing this hypnotic muscle movement, mystically performed with closed eyes, practiced in stealth, is important, and not just to me.
I can tell. Like others before her, she joins in wordlessly awhile and then quietly moves on, having brushed lightly against another’s spirit, a slight salve to the relentless dehumanization of this place. But some come back the next day, looking for stolen moments of breath and freedom.
Part of surviving a short, unfortunate stint in county jail — something unimagined in my safe, suburban middle class life — came down to finding a safe path, a negotiated space of compromise.
So much taken for granted like where to look, how to follow, what to do, feel, or think, and how to be alone but also connected in order to remain human, were always in the forefront.
My survival was in reading a lot, learning to close my eyes and listen to what could not be taken from me — my own thoughts and beliefs,practicing yoga, and eventually flipping the switch from hatred to compassion for my jailers.
Yoga taught me to reach, to find gratitude and light, something my fellow inmates wanted to touch even if just for a fleeting moment.
*****
Pamela Gerber is a blogger at In The Gaze Of The Other, a Yoga practitioner, and a college instructor of English in and around Huntington Beach, California, where she lives with and nurtures her husband, two teenage daughters, and parents.
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