Super Blue Moon Yoga

Irregular tufts of grass in the lawn at Spring Garden Park lend my yoga mat the texture of bubble wrap. Given this surface, I wonder how I will find balance. At least the lawn isn’t wet.

It is a midweek evening in late August, 2023, and the sun is starting to angle above the neighborhood behind me. As a permanent resident of Eastern Oregon, I’ve never been to southwest Portland before. When I arrive on Southwest Dolph Court, I climb a few concrete steps to the top of the hillside. Looking down past the playground to the north, I scout for other yoga people, hoping I am in the right place. Once I see rolled mats emerge from parked cars below, I drive around the block and repark. Now seated in what will become the first row, I am the signal to others that they have arrived.

Ancient South Asian yogis were known for renouncing public life and instead wandering the landscape, meditating, teaching philosophy, and performing magic and acrobatic tricks. Students learned from their gurus in private. From this partnership, practitioners developed and transmitted a shared culture, mostly oral and secretive, outside of mainstream public arenas.

This historical image of yoga contrasts significantly with the contemporary American yoga scene, where post-pandemic yoga teachers supplement income from in-person classes with carefully curated instructional videos, photographs of their pretzeled bodies, and social-media marketing gimmicks. Today’s yoga is hyper-public and more capitalistic than contemplative.

I take a few deep breaths and feel the Earth gently revolving beneath me. Fellow students arrive in spandex tops and leggings, unroll their mats, kick off their flip-flops, and scroll through their phone feeds. Some have brought old-school journals and pens, as instructed by the event’s publicity. Teachers roll in utility carts, unloading a sound system and their yoga equipment before they begin distributing wireless headsets. The event promised disco music.

A blue moon has come to mean the second full moon in a given month. According to NASA, blue moons happen every few years because the moon’s cycle of phases is slightly shorter than the calendar month. A super blue moon occurs when the second full moon is at its closest point to the Earth in its orbit. Super blue moons appear on average every ten years.

The application of the term “blue moon” to the second full moon in a given month actually arose from an error. A 1999 New York Times article reported that folklorist Philip Hiscock traced the etymology of the phrase back, starting from a Trivial Pursuit question in the 1980s, then to a children’s almanac, a 1970s radio broadcast, and finally, a quiz in a 1943 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. The writer of the quiz had apparently misinterpreted an almanac’s definition of a blue moon as the third of four moons in a three-moon season to mean instead the second full moon in a given month. The earlier meaning of “blue moon” refers to a rare event or occurrence, a definition that doesn’t fit with the second full moon in a given month, which happens every few years.

This etymology illustrates how language operates like a handshake: we gift words to others, and the meaning of those gifted words is confirmed between us when we are understood. As a word repeatedly intersects with a meaning, meanings become public, assumed, taken for granted, shared.

I am on sabbatical in Portland. Sabbaticals are governed by Oregon Administrative Rule 580.21, which permits leave from teaching duties at 60 percent of one’s salary in order to pursue scholarly research and writing. Sabbaticals represent an investment in an academic workforce, providing opportunities for scholars to engage in deeper, more extended learning and thinking, to produce new scholarship that advances their fields of study, and to separate from the public sphere of the university in order to return to their students refreshed and rejuvenated.

In relocating from Eastern Oregon to my 92-year-old dad’s small condo in the Pearl District, I removed my body from physical relationship with most of my typical public life. I zeroed out my work email, I no longer run into my colleagues and students at the grocery store, and I don’t contribute my attention and expertise to meetings that will improve my community. I try to recover from deadlines and overwork.

I’ve doubled-down on a private introspection comprising reading, writing, library visits, and research travel. I’ve become a kind of yogi disconnected from public life, living in my head. Because I know so few people here, even my public activities are mostly private. I wander daily through this urban landscape, listening to research-related podcasts, attached by a leash to a big dog. Occasionally, representatives of Portland’s 652,503 citizens will comment on the size of my dog. Otherwise, I stroll unobserved and more alone than I am in a population of 13,026 in La Grande. When I do interact with people, like my writers’ group, it is often via Zoom. This aloneness is a mild echo of the pandemic, without the polemic of vaccines or the terror of death.

When the yoga event begins at 7:30, there are maybe forty people wearing headsets and sitting on mats facing the teachers. As shadows lengthen, headsets glow blue. The blue light gives us a sense of community, marking each of the others around us. We meditate, breathe, and set intentions. We raise and lower our arms, bend and straighten our knees. Disco and yoga instructions arrive through the sound system. I imagine the ghostly movement of bodies and blue lights is almost silent from the perspective of outside observers. Though we are having a private sensory experience in our bodies, participants gather and move in common. Within this shared flow, I am balanced enough to keep up.

We often think of the private as objects and actions that belong to individuals or occur “behind closed doors.” Understanding the public as an antonym of the private, we can assume the public is objects and actions that belong to groups or occur outside or in common interior spaces. According to Hannah Arendt, Classical Greek culture considered private space to be constrained by basic needs like shelter and food while public space provided (particular social groups) the freedom to speak and act. Human culture today still builds community through public words and acts. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf argued that creative individuals need private space for their ideas to blossom, “a room of one’s own.” A combination of these views suggests that our effective contributions to public culture demand privacy for reflection, and we can imagine a reciprocal flow between sheltered ideas, tested in public, shaping public culture, which in turn affects the ideas we internalize and harness to our thinking.

This reciprocal flow undermines the binary: we can have private moments in public spaces, and our private thoughts are shaped by public conventions. Furthermore, if we assume that reality exists only in our minds, as neuroscientists like Anil K. Seth attest, the binary collapses completely. Everything we perceive exists only in our unique neural connections, and it is through those perceptions that we construct our ideas of the world. Public life becomes a product of private imaginations that are triangulated by confirmation from others, assumed, taken for granted, shared. As Seth argues, recognizing “the diversity of experienced realities scattered among the billions of perceiving brains on this planet” can help us build shared public spaces that are welcoming to all.

The practice of yoga similarly challenges the private-public binary: the focus on breath in yoga emphasizes the connection between inside and outside. Really, all the cells of the body breathe, with only a permeable membrane separating public and private. In my experience, yoga poses are a kind of meditation that occurs through my body. As such, they operate like a private pathway joining my body with the energy or spirit that animates the universe, that spark inside my body that is echoed throughout the cosmos. Thus, the act of doing yoga in public, in the company of forty other blue-lit headsets, is a microcosm of that stellar dance.

At the end of the event I sense the web of nerves and veins in my body twining under my skin. I feel their energy respond to the Earth beneath me, spinning on its axis and rotating around the sun. I know myself to be aligned with the universe, as in N. Scott Momaday’s “The Delight Song of the Tsoai-talee”: “I stand in good relation to the earth [/…] You see, I am alive, I am alive.”

As mats are rolled and headsets stowed, the super blue moon rises, tangled in trees. Just big, not blue. The group disperses, packs up, drives away. On my ride back to the Pearl, the moon hovers in my rear-view mirror. When I arrive, Dad and I go out onto the street to see the moon as it launches into full glory above the city rooftops.