Thursday in the Negev

  This morning I got up wanting to do some yoga. I was getting ready to do some standing poses in the sitting room (there's a paradox for you!) when the phone rang.
 It was Helen, Mickey's nearby friend who lives down the street. She invited me to accompany her to yoga class.
It wasn't an Iyengar class (the variety of yoga I generally do), but a fusion of several different sorts of yoga. But I said I'd like to go and she let me borrow a mat/ The class was composed mostly of seniors.
The teacher, who was clearly well trained, though not in the manner to which I was accustomed, nimbly switched back and forth from Hebrew to English to Sanskrit, naming the poses we were going to do, demonstrating them, and adjusting students. She several times put her hand on my neck and shoulders, which were tense, as usual. and I let go of them, or endeavored to do so.
After the lesson, I read a few of the poems from my yoga chapbook, Balance, even though not everyone in the class understood English. And I gave the teacher a signed copy of the book.
Later in the afternoon, we headed back outside the town to the village of LaQiya (or LaKiya), which I have already mentioned in a previous post.
On the way, we passed many sights I wish I had been able to photograph, but they went by too fast--shepherds with their goats and sheep, ramrod straight men and women in flowing robes and dresses carrying sacks on their heads, or in white flowing headdresses.
The fields gleamed green against the rocks and sand of the desert, and horses grazed on the mustard flowers that reminded me so much of the fields in California this time of year. I hoped at that moment that rain had brought them out there as well.
My first impression of the village itself was olfactory. After a long, bumpy ride down the street of the town, we finally reached the store where the embroidery done by the town's women was sold.
We parked directly over a sewer, so it was pretty pungent. Somewhere, a rooster crowed.
The embroidery workshop resembled a garden--bags, belts, change purses, all of them covered completely with hand-done designs. There were also pieces of jewelry, hand blown and painted glass and semiprecious stones.
There were lots of things I wished I could buy, but couldn't, but I finally sprung for the prettiest necklace in the place. I told myself I would give it as a gift, but I probably will keep it, if the truth be known.
At the end of our visit, we stopped at the weavers' studio, and in one of those odd coincidences that happen because the world is so much smaller than we imagine, the salesperson at the counter, a young college student, told us she was majoring in English in a University at Hebron, a place where the passions run high, and there is frequently violence.
She was going to have an exam on Saturday, and asked if any of us could help her with a difficult passage she had to summarize for this exam.
It was about the Neoclassical period in poetry, and was written in tremendously convoluted syntax. So I gave her a huge extended explanation of the whole idea of the Neoclassicists, who they emulated and why, and I think she felt much relieved by the time I was finished that she had a handle on this passage.
The universe frequently gives us exactly what we need, and this is one of those cases.