in praise of naked yoga

and your lost dirty word of the week

Some very dear friends of mine are going through a tough time. A health crisis, but one that unfolded in a particularly traumatic way, in a city far from home at the beginning of what was meant be a glorious family holiday they’d been planning and looking forward to for months but which ended up turning into a weeks-long nightmare involving weeks in a foreign hospital, haggling with insurers and a trans-Atlantic airlift. And it’s still ongoing.

They are on my mind all the time.

It’s difficult to know what to do when people you love are in pain, especially if you are faraway and can be of precisely zero practical assistance. You send them a note, obviously, but you don’t expect them to respond, you almost hope they don’t respond because of the energy you know will take for them to do so. You feel overwhelming sadness and deep empathy but you know it won’t help to communicate it to them. You know they know you are thinking about them, sending love, if they are able to think about anything apart from the crisis directly in front of them, which probably they aren’t, but it’s no comfort. You think about it all the time but try not to talk about it too much because it’s not about you, plus why spread the misery? You want to comfort them somehow but you can’t so you silently work yourself up into knots until you collapse, overwhelmed, in a tangle of competing emotions. In essence, you feel helpless, rudderless. Useful to no one including yourself.

I have a close girlfriend who lost her husband tragically last year — a kind of fast-slow-motion-death that sent shock waves through her large and loyal circle of friends and family. She’s an optimistic, empathetic and highly intelligent person —an open-hearted pragmatist whose favourite thing in the world is to throw a big fat dinner party and watch her friends stuff themselves silly.

Apart from the stark reality of the situation itself, she told me the hardest thing by far was having to bear the weight of the sadness and shock of everyone around her. She found it almost unbearable having to tell the story over and over again, not because she wasn’t thinking about it every minute of everyday but because of how sad it made everyone else. She’d dash out to the corner shop for mustard and end up having three tearful conversations with stunned neighbours on the way. She hated the anguished distress she saw in people’s eyes, the way their faces would freeze up then fall when they saw her, the way the laughter at the school gates would cut short like a needle being scratched across a record. She didn’t resent it, of course, she understood what was going on, that these swells of outside emotion crashing over her every time she left the house were real and kind and rooted in love — it was just exhausting.

What she needed wasn’t a good cry — she needed to laugh. She yearned for levity and silliness and brightness in a world that had suddenly become very, very dark. To her inner circle of friends she said this very directly: “Make me laugh.”

That was our job. So when we weren’t discussing her hellacious situation, we mostly talked about celebrity gossip. Or remodelling her kitchen. Or some ridiculous ad we’d seen on the school pinboard advertising a race horse for sale. (Who sells a £750,000 thoroughbred on a school pinboard? People in Notting Hill — that’s who!).

But this time, in this particular crisis, I’m too faraway from my friends who are in pain to talk about silly things. So I was wracking my brain trying to think of something to send to them, a gift that might give them some comfort or pleasure or just a good old giggle. The problem is, these particular friends, they’re very good at taking care of their own basic needs — even in a crisis. They’ll have all the delicious food and drink they need, all the books and movies and flowers and bubble bath and scented candles and scented face serums and massage therapists or whatever. They’re not the sort of people who go in for self-denial in times of crisis, by which I mean they are intelligent, high-functioning adults who know how to take care of themselves and each other. But I had to do something for them — I just had to! I was going round and round on this until finally Rob said to me, “Why don’t you just make them something?”

Of course! I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me before. So I walked straight out to the shed, cleared off my writing desk, put on some Jimmy Cliff, (who I’m going through a real phase with at the moment), and got out my watercolours — untouched since my mad, inexplicable obsessive art-making binge during the first lockdown. Then without pausing to think, I painted a four pictures of my friend, the one who will be the saddest and most exhausted of all, doing yoga naked.

Why naked yoga? Because it’s ridiculous and made me laugh. Also because painting clothes is hard.

She does do yoga, by the way. I’ve actually done yoga with her, but she was always fully clothed.

Watercolour is very forgiving — an artist friend once told me that and I have always hung on to it. I like any medium that can turn accident and imperfection into delight. Screwing up and going with it is sort of the whole point of watercolour. I didn’t go to art school, I just made that up.

I painted quickly. I didn’t labour or berate myself or think of Mr. Gillespie, my grade seven teacher at C.R. Gummow Jr. High in Cobourg, Ontario who told me I was “hopeless” at drawing. Nor did I give in to the temptation to watch six YouTube instructional videos then fill the waste basket with crumpled false starts. I tossed them off. It took me maybe an hour and a half at most. And after I was finished I felt much better, much more centred and clear, like I’d just gone for a long swim in a cold lake. I went out for lunch with my family and had a glass of wine and took Frank to the book shop where I let him choose the Minecraft sticker book he wanted instead of some whimsical reissue of a children’s classic I wanted him to want. Then because it was boiling out and Frank was cranky and tired of walking, I took him for an ice lolly in the park while Rob went home and got the car.

My point is that when you’re feeling helpless and bereft, especially on someone else’s behalf, it’s always a good idea to make something. Ideally with your hands. It can be something for them or something for you, it doesn’t actually matter because in either case it’s both. The thing you make can be as simple as a sandwich or as complicated as a sculpture. Making things, even little things, refocusses the ruminating mind and instead, give you a sense of purpose, of devotion.

It does no good to lay your suffering on top of someone else’s pain. So don’t.

All of which is to say, here are the rest of my naked yoga pictures. I quite like them. Tell me what you think! (Feel free to make fun of them in a good-humoured way if you like. I’m accustomed to gentle mockery as a form of affection. I live three Englishmen and a cat.) I’m going to deliver them to my friends with a note when I fly over to Toronto next week for my Canadian book launch. Hopefully they’ll make everyone crack up.

Also, before I forget, here’s your lost dirty word of the week from everyone’s favourite book, The Dictionary of the Underworld.

taking cake… A form of trickery known as “taking cake”. ‘Rigged up in a uniform cap he accosted railway passengers, offered to insure their luggage, money and other valuables, took articles away to be “assessed”, pocketed the premium, and informed his victims that he was travelling with the train,’ Francis Chester, Shot Full, 1938. since ca. 1910. As easy as taking — and eating — cake : ‘It’s a piece of cake ! '

Have lovely naked cake-filled weekend.

Photo by Takuya Nagaoka on Unsplash