Fireside Musings From the West
Dear Yoga LYFE community,
The last few months have seen great turmoil in our lives due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been extremely fortunate in Australia that the horrendous infection and mortality rates experienced in other parts of the world have been avoided. That is not to trivialize the trauma and fear for those infected and the sadness and grief of those families devastated by the loss of loved ones here too. Many people have lost employment, businesses have been forced to close and parents have been learning to juggle working from home with home-schooling their children. It’s been a really difficult time for most people.
I’ve been trying to maintain a sense of gratitude for how lucky my family and I have been. We live in a rural area, about 4 hours from Melbourne, near the SA – Victorian border. Like many others in rural and remote areas, the risk of infection with the Coronavirus is much lower than for our urban-dwelling cousins, due to the lower density of the population. In addition, those of us engaged in running farming businesses and support services to agriculture have not experienced the same impact on our finances or employment, as we are classified as an essential service. Despite all that, we have still been operating at a much higher level of anxiety than pre-Covid-19. We know that if the infection reaches our areas it could be very difficult to manage, as we have much poorer access to the level of health care that city dwellers have. Intensive care beds are few and far-between. Many of us also have friends and family that we are concerned about, either because they are medically compromised, or living in a much higher risk area. We have an employee whose wife has been undergoing treatment for cancer, and our own daughter is living in London, and cannot return home due to her employment. We are fearful for them, and for others in similar situations.
Despite all this, I do see plenty to be grateful for. Our country is not currently at war, and civil strife such as is currently tearing the USA apart, is not an issue for us. Our children and grand-children, although stuck at home, missing their mates and doing their uni studies or schoolwork in an entirely new way and sometimes driving their parents crazy (I hear you Denise !) are mostly safe with their loved ones, warm and cosy, and well fed. I remind my two grandsons regularly that children in Sarajevo, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the nineties had to dodge sniper bullets if they tried to go outside for any purpose, and young children in the UK in World War II were frequently evacuated from cities to the countryside, to live with complete strangers. Our two young fellas dare not complain about their lot when Granny Sue is around!
We are also blessed in other ways. The rapid advances in digital technology have enabled us to keep in contact with our distant family members and friends. How I wait excitedly for our long Facetime sessions with our daughter! Can I eke out that phone battery so that we can have more minutes of that amazing closeness that is our lot until we can next wrap our arms around each other?
But wait, there is more: this amazing technology not only allows us to converse with family and friends and run meetings online, but it also has given us LIVESTREAM yoga. For me, and I’m sure many of you too, this has been such a fantastic gift. I tried some other forms of online exercise classes, but until I made contact with Yoga Lyfe and the livestream Zoom classes, I felt disconnected and disengaged. Not anymore. I absolutely love the classes, and I have been doing as many as I can possibly squeeze in without my family making too many comments about me becoming a yoga junkie. I am a relative newcomer to yoga, only starting less than 2 years ago, and then mostly practising using an app on my phone. I remember attending my first “proper” class in Mlebourne, on a visit to the city to see my daughter Kate. I was so nervous that I would make a total fool of myself. I need not have worried, as everyone was lovely. Kate and I discovered Yoga Lyfe and immediately felt very comfortable. The instructors were so welcoming and friendly, and I felt safe. That is definitely important for everyone, but even more so for those of us who are the wrong side of sixty. That feeling of friendliness, welcome and safety has been carefully transposed to the online classes. The sense of community that has been created is just wonderful, and I look forward to chatting with the instructors and the other class participants every day. I have discovered connections that I would never have believed possible. Astrid and I both have family beach houses within walking distance of each other at Robe, in the south east of SA, and then we discovered that Jessica and Ainslie (who are sisters) also have spent much time in their childhood and teenage years there too. Then another link revealed itself – their dad, who is a vet with vast experience in sheep artificial insemination (AI), has been doing work for our merino stud for many years. It’s such a small world! We are now talking about getting together at Robe sometime after border restrictions have been lifted for a few days of yoga, art, and of course, beach time, talking, drinking wine, coffee, sharing good food, etc, etc, - all the social things we have been deprived of for so long.
Yoga gives us strength, flexibility, calmness, spirituality, and best of all COMMUNITY and FRIENDSHIP. Thank you Denise (and of course Brian), and all your gorgeous teachers. For me, and I’m sure many others, you have made the Coronavirus shutdown just so much more bearable.
See you at the next class. Much love to all
Sue Jarvis