The Blessings of Zoom
I have a love/hate relationship with Zoom, and this blog post is devoted to one of the reasons I love it: I owe my regular yoga practice of more than five years almost entirely to Zoom.
Even though I had taken hundreds of yoga classes in my forties, circumstances had kept me pretty much off the mat for a long time thereafter. That all changed in February 2019, when two of my cousins were visiting me here in Florida – Tim and Doug are the closest I get to brothers. At some point Tim, a very committed and talented golfer, was complaining about the stiffness of aging affecting his swing and joking about needing yoga, and I said, “I’ll do yoga with you! We can do it over FaceTime; I can teach you.” This was a bold move, since I had no yoga teacher training whatsoever, but 30 years in the classroom had left me pretty good at describing how to do things, and I knew I could count on Tim not to hurt himself.
So after he went home to Newport News, we started FaceTiming one evening a week, and I would walk us through the basic Hatha practice I first learned, essentially just narrating aloud what I was doing. We discovered quickly that it hurt a lot less if we did it twice a week, and even less if we managed three times. My friend Veronica, a high school teacher who lived across the street and had taken loads of yoga classes herself, joined us during her summer break.
And then the pandemic landed. Suddenly Zoom was commonplace, and everyone had ants in their pants from being home so much. So when I mentioned our very amateur yoga practice to my dear friend and colleague Cindy, an experienced yogini who lives in Reading, MA, she jumped in, and then my neighbor Lisa up the block came aboard. Soon my goddessdaughter Sydney, in Philadelphia, joined us, followed by her brother John, in Rochester, NY, and my future RCE housemate Sue Battle-McDonald from Baltimore, and we had a Zoom yoga family. It was so much fun to introduce my favorite people, who had heard each other’s names for years but never met.
Now, five and a half years since my taking up that tossed-off remark from Tim, the practice is alive and well, with a constantly changing cast of yogis and yoginis, and I continue to be endlessly grateful to all the friends who practice with me. It’s been kind of magical: when one friend has had to step out, someone new has always stepped in. This morning there were three of us in two houses here on Anastasia Island, Cindy in Reading, and my friend Sue in Pittsburgh (not to be confused with RCE Sue). I am joined by friends for yoga on Zoom pretty much every day, and sometimes twice a day! It is one of the greatest blessings I have ever experienced.
Like most folks these days, I am sooooo sick of Zoom meetings, and I long for the face-to-face life that awaits us in Providence Heights. But I never stop being grateful for the connections Zoom provides, which, as Judy Robertson reminded me at a CLG meeting just last week, have been and continue to be so vital to the existence of RCE.
-Victoria Clements, Founding member and future resident of RCE, August 16, 2024