The fjord-side bend
On a single hip-and-side-body stretch I do at the small wooden bench at the end of the fjord path — and what the changing light has taught the body inside it.
There is a bench, weathered grey, at the end of the small dirt path that runs along the western side of the fjord. The path is not much used. The bench is rarely occupied. From the kitchen door it takes about twelve minutes if you walk slowly. I go there most days at some point — sometimes mid-morning, sometimes after lunch, sometimes in the early evening when the light off the water is the colour of pewter.
I do, on the bench, one specific stretch. I sit sideways on it, with one leg folded under, and reach the opposite arm over the head, sinking the side body into a long, slow lateral fold. Three minutes one side. Three minutes the other. Then I sit upright for a minute or two and watch the water. Then I walk back.
Why one stretch
Because that side body — the long line that runs from the hip up the ribs and into the armpit — is, in my own body, the line that holds most of the accumulated tension of an indoor working day. The shoulders compress, the ribs collapse, the side bodies shorten. By evening I am, structurally, smaller than I was at breakfast.
Three minutes of slow lateral stretch on each side, three or four times a week, undoes most of that. The ribs lift back up. The breath, which had become shallow without my noticing, has room again. The whole upper body feels, on the walk back, taller than it did on the walk out.
On the light off the water
Different every visit. In November it is dim and short and you have to do the stretch in something close to dusk. In June it is the kind of strong slanting light that turns the bench warm to sit on. In February it is grey and the water has small pieces of ice in it. In May the water is the colour of dark green glass.
The light is not the practice. But the light makes the practice memorable. Each visit has become a small distinct thing in my head — the November stretch, the June stretch, the day in March when a heron was standing motionless on the far bank for the whole six minutes I was on the bench. The practice has been happening for six years. There are many hundreds of these small memorable visits, and they are the closest thing I have to a journal of being in this place.