Tricycle | Awake in the World

I fell in love with yoga sixteen years ago, when I was twenty-three. I was living with two massage students in an adobe cabin on the southern border of Santa Fe, out where the art galleries and million-dollar villas disintegrated into a tattered fringe of vacant lots and trailer-home parks. Our cabin smelled of mouse droppings, a comforting smell reminiscent of the gerbil cages in second-grade classrooms. There was a wood stove in the kitchen, and an abandoned chicken coop in the yard, and an enormous teepee out by the woodpile, where my roommates and I used to gather to bang on congas and rattle gourds while incanting visualizations of our futures: “If it is for my highest good,” we’d begin, “I create a reality in which . . .”