morning loura

After teaching the 6:30 yoga class this morning I stopped by to visit my friend Loura, 78 and sassy.

She had fallen down on the bus yesterday, slid down the aisle on her back. She laughed as she told me how she jumped up and yelled at all of the men who tried to help her "I'M OKAY!" she yelled. And when they wouldn't leave her alone with suggestions to go to the hospital, she screamed, "I'm a fitness instructor!!" A pretty hilarious non sequitur, but then on further reflection she realized, "Well, this is why we do it. This is why we take care of ourselves, so we can handle stuff like this. We have to go through things, we can't get away from that. But if we take good care of ourselves then we can handle it better." So smart. So wise.

I wished I could have stayed all morning. She made me breakfast (red lentils, quinoa, and vegetables) and served me her homemade bread toasted up. We drank jasmine tea and talked about her living in Turkey (she sent me home with Turkish lentil soup that she had made) and Indonesia, I helped her to download some opera onto her iTunes, I looked at her watercolor paintings of bodily organs (a still life of liver and flowers, a kidney with a Yeats quote on it, a really beautiful inner ear) and she told me about her computer tutor on whom she *almost* had a crush.

How fortunate I feel this morning to have spent the first four hours of my day playing yoga with two students and learning from this wise little sprite named Loura.