Bridge: Making Connection

On Tuesdays, after dropping my kids at school and walking my dog, I set my Volvo’s GPS to navigate to Virginia.

I can’t quite parse the unease I feel when crossing a bridge from DC to Virginia. When confronted with those whirls of on- and off-ramps, and highways that lead to other highways, I tense up in the driver’s seat. It’s a familiar refrain, often repeated in a highly-stylized manner for a laugh across dinner tables on our side of the bridge. It’s ultimately a northerner’s secret terror at crossing the Potomac: if I don’t stay vigilant, I may end up in Richmond, or worse -- Alabama.

As I drive across the Potomac, I wonder whether there is more complexity to this collective discomfort. I know that my general sense of unease with Virginia goes beyond its roads to its Civil War battlefields, confederate statues, historic plantations, and open-carry gun laws. Perhaps by deciding that the river between us represents a divide between North and South, I get to act like my side’s heritage is less fraught.

My weekly trip across the bridge to Virginia leads to a unique place. I am going to teach yoga to formerly-incarcerated women. They represent a population both staggering in number and mostly invisible to privileged eyes. These particular women have, in essence, won the discharge lottery: they are released directly from jail or prison to a six-month residential reentry program. In their temporary suburban neighborhood, they navigate a unique border themselves, crossing from incarceration to freedom. They are free and yet forever enmeshed in the disparities of the criminal justice system, which has left them jobless, in debt, in pain, and - in the case of mothers - often working to re-gain custody of their children.

I arrive early to ditch the Volvo and join the group of 8-12 women walking from their group home to the church where we meet. On our walk, one woman carefully avoids stepping off the sidewalk. She’s from Newark. “You never know what’s hiding in the grass,” she tells me. “There’s shit hiding in grass.” I can’t help but make it a metaphor for all the crap littering their paths forward.

I also can’t help inwardly enjoying this moment of shared geographic discomfort (absurd, given that my tree-lined street looks very similar to this one and nothing like her Newark). But there is no getting around the distance between my life and theirs. They of course need precisely what I take for granted: a home of their own, food on the table, employment, the chance to be with their children. And yet, yoga brings us together and offers much. For them, as for me, yoga calms their mind and gets them in touch with their feelings, their bodies, their emotions.

As wary as I may be about crossing into Virginia, I do not feel remotely uneasy around these women. They -- Amy, Sheila, Holly, Dawn, Ashley, Tanita and others -- seem both bone-tired and heroic. They get on their mats, or sit in chairs, and we breathe and awaken together. They are engaged, open-minded, brave and funny. We see each other, we laugh about certain poses, we connect. They tell each other how good they look, or they gently rib each other about choosing a chair over getting down on the floor. They want to learn to stand on their heads. They ask vulnerable questions and get curious why their balance is off one week when it was so solid a week earlier.

Until recently, I didn’t know anyone who had been in jail or prison. That is my privilege in all its glory. But now I do. We spend time together, and this connection makes all the difference. One woman tells me at the end of our hour that she is going to buy a yoga mat of her own. I have an extra one right outside in the trunk of my car -- next to my son’s cleats and daughter’s SAT-prep book. Instantly, I am uncomfortably aware of our disparity. Should I just give it to her? I don’t know the answer.

I do know that when I leave the church basement where we’ve been practicing yoga, I feel a surge of both gratitude and guilt for my advantaged life and the ease of living that comes with it. I also feel immense gratitude for these students. They’re real, they’re direct, they make me think, they make me sad, they make me laugh. Bridges go both ways.

But these yoga students are not a means to teach me a lesson about myself. To open my eyes to differences. Rather, they are individual women with individual stories, on their path, as shit-filled as it may be. Their gift to me is the opportunity to connect and to let me show them what I love about yoga.

And as I drive back over the river toward the Lincoln Memorial, relieved that I have successfully navigated the loops of highway, I recognize that vilifying Virginia is also a way for me to make me feel better about where I live. I point across the river to indicate vaguely: “that’s the place where racism lives,” and I say it precisely to absolve my side of its troubled present and history. There is a lot of work to do to improve the Commonwealth of Virginia, but there is surely a lot of work to do across the river as well.

I return home, with a different sense of unease: unease around disparity and unfair laws and unfair advantage. I take a deep inhale and exhale, and in my mind, I feel my students doing the same.

** This post was written in May 2018. A documentary has since been released about the amazing women of Guest House entitled Guest House, directed by Yael Luttwack and Hannah Dweck. You can see it here: https://gooddocs.net/products/guest-house