My dog has long legs! It’s a long drive from DC to California. June days are as long as December nights. The 90-year-old longs for her youth, while the 12-year-old longs for adulthood. Just a few examples of the descriptive possibilities offered by the word long. The common thread here is that long acknowledges the existence of space, whether anatomical, geographical, chronological, or emotional. The distinction between these examples is that the space in question can be a difficult challenge or a great gift, and sometimes both at the same time.
those are some loooong legs!
Consider the body, and the work we do with it in yoga postural practice. What we call stretching is the work of elongating a muscle from one joint to another. We seek to lengthen muscles and the connective tissue around them so that there’s more space between the bones and more functional ease in every system of the body. And we stretch, in fact, so we can be strong. Contrary to urban legend that says flexibility and strength are opposites, in fact, a strong muscle is one that can readily expand and contract at will.
But more than that. Creating longer distances within the body includes the opportunity to examine how that distance became shortened in the first place, and how it may get filled once created. Is a perpetually contracted chest the result of years of depression or self-defense against a broken heart? Does the one who dares to open that vulnerable stretch from shoulder to shoulder, across heart and lungs, do so in the hopes of breathing new life into the long reach from loneliness to belonging?
“Blessed be the longing that brought you here / And quickens your soul with wonder,” writes the poet John O’Donoghue in To Bless the Space Between Us. It’s not wrong to long for something, and flexibility isn’t weakness. A gaze at dawn from the shoreline to the ocean’s horizon humbles us into accepting our inconsequential physical form, and it can just as well inspire us into imagining how great a distance we may travel in a lifetime.
The Sufi mystic Rumi writes in “Love Dogs” of the man who was shamed into silence by a cynic who noted that his nightly cries to God were never answered. That night, a wise voice visits the man’s dreams, and reminds him, “This longing you express is the return message / The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.” The moment we notice a lack of space, or feel a contraction in who we are or how we want to be, is the selfsame moment that we size up the distance between what’s true right now and the truth we aspire to in the future. This longing for space, or for change, is our soul’s way of charting its course toward its own destiny, where we discover that there is no distance after all between our quotidian existence and divine, loving presence.
— Annie Moyer