Three Ways of Looking at a Headstand

This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.

—Prospero, Act V, Scene i, The Tempest

Headstands are easy for you. This is what they feel like for me. By the time the yoga teacher tells her class to prepare for head-stands, the sweat is rolling down their foreheads and forearms, and the lungs fight against the steady inhale, exhale of breath. Sweat glistens on everyone, whether from the heat, the number of people in the class, or the intensity of the last 40 minutes. She says don’t stop breathing, and in sync with her, the class echoes her exhale, sounding like a hurricane in a thousand conch shells. On the island of my mat, I trace the sweat’s journey from my temples to the tip of my nose, where it hovers like a choice. A gentle sweaty smell builds on the many recycled-cotton-Lycra tank tops and tree-friendly rubber yoga mats in the class. Trace scents of patchouli, lavender, and tea tree oil linger in the thick air and in the clothes of the instructor. She watches, speaks, and adjusts our spines laterally and vertically all at once. And then she tells us it is time for inversions.

Sweat drips off our noses into splatter patterns on the mat as we bend onto our forearms, preparing for a journey upside down. We lift into dolphin, a down dog on our forearms, then tip-toe towards our elbows. I try not to look at the grandmother lifting into an easy headstand or the athlete moving through scorpion—a variation on a headstand that involves balancing on the forearms and dropping the feet onto the crown of the head. I am still trying to practice what I do not know. What I do not know is how to shift my center of balance above my head, and I have not known how to do this for a long time. I always want to stop before the place of falling down. I flex my abs, trying to imagine today it is possible, and put one leg in the air. I would be happy to stay here, but the instructor stands behind me, asks for more weight on my shoulders and that I try again. Every time I manage to hold my hips over my shoulders and put two legs in the air, I feel giddy, like a god.

Balancing in headstand is not really like climbing Half Dome. Yet it made perfect sense that the limber twenty-somethings following us up the cables in Yosemite decided to celebrate their summit with some acroyoga. While the marmots, chipmunks, and a circling pair of ravens looked on, these climber kids from Colorado braced their torsos against each other’s feet and flew over the person holding them up. Sometimes they chose to bend their legs into lotus or tree pose, but mostly, they looked like college students playing airplane. While they initially resisted climbing Half Dome with the cables down, once they were on the wall they sang out “Good!” and “Doing great!” to our guide’s questions about their progress. They weren’t scared of anything but a change in weather, a cumulonimbus cloud somewhere in the sky.

I was terrified.

To climb Half Dome is like flying in an airplane the first time, writing your name the first time, undressing for another person the first time, speaking the unspeakable, sprinting through your wheezing gasping fatigue, and standing on your head the first time. To climb Half Dome you must have already confronted gravity for three hours, step after inclining step. At some point you must have already fought a marathoner’s muscle fatigue, taking deep breaths and expelling bad ones, remembering to eat, drink, and rest at appropriate tree trunks and waterfalls. To do everything to get up to the wall of Half Dome, you have to just keep going. I can always just keep going.

But to get from the bottom of Half Dome’s wall, where they say 95 percent of climbers stop, to the top, I have to grab a heavy metal cable...