I’m back in Chicago, this time for a whole week.  It’s cold here.  Ye gods, is it cold.  It’s colder than Jim Webb in a tête - à - tête with George Bush. On an ice floe.

I was sitting in a meeting this afternoon when I felt my eyeballs drifting out of synch with one another.  My thoughts wandered into the realm of hallucinations. My head felt fuzzy.  I was coherent enough to think, “Good Lord, I’m having a stroke” before I realized what was happening: I was falling asleep.  It’s been so long since I’ve experienced that eyes-open-sleeping-at-work that I forgot what it felt like.  I think my sudden immersion in Winter triggered a massive hibernation reflex.  Normally, one would have all fall to get used to dropping temperatures and diminished sunlight, but I’ve been languishing in 60 degrees + since July.  (June, if I recall, was frigid.)

Since I have no child care responsibilities, I COULD have climbed into bed at 5:00 p.m., a prospect that seemed really appealing, but I decided to fight it.  I found the only yoga studio with an available class in a ten-mile radius and dropped in for a few moon salutations. (That’s apparently what you do instead of sun salutations when there’s a full moon.)

The studio, in a warehouse-like space in an office park, looked unpromising at first, but it turned out to be a wonderful experience. It was a much looser atmosphere than the usual yoga classes, which are sometimes a bit too disciplined for my taste. The space was huge, big enough for the instructor to have us stand in a circle with her in the middle.  She also played real music (rock, Sting, even some blues), and my practice did not suffer for lack of airy-fairy chanting and Pan flute.

There was plenty of the hippie-dippy to go around, though; at the beginning of class the teacher offered us one of her pile of stones for “positive energy.”  I took a blue-gray one and placed it on the front of my mat, where I came face to face with it about forty times as I went from plank to chaturanga to downward dog.  That’s the equivalent of forty pushups for you non-yogis.

I wonder what would happen if I tried the same thing at my meeting tomorrow:  “Everybody, take a stone for positive energy and place it by your computer.” I think we would have to amend the meeting ground rules to “No cell phones, no email, no throwing stones.”