Since learning that yoga is not, in fact, a sinister cult but a really useful way of caring for my back, I regularly breathe out deeply. This is something I've done both in classes, and in front of 'Yoga with Adrienne' and her free YouTube videos.
When younger, I did breathing exercises for wellbeing by default when playing the flute. A lot of my lessons were spent with my teacher encouraging me to develop breath and diaphragm control. I had no idea how useful a life skill this was as I channelled a column of air into a top C.
More recently, I exhaled deeply on opening a box of copies of Festival in a Book - A Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival. I had been holding my breath for two weeks: between the moment of pressing send on the final proofs and lifting out the first book. I breathed even more freely when Anna Dreda, Festival Founder, said she loves the anthology created in honour of her Festival and its legacy.
It has struck me since that the publication of a book of poetry is, in some ways, an exhalation, a letting go. A breathing out of thought and word and music into the world. Breath and word. The word made paper. It can't be taken back now. And it will become part of other people's breathing, internal and external, when read.
And so, here she is: the editor, not the book, breathing out, relaxing on the festival's famous knitted poem of Carol Ann Duffy's "The Bees" knitted a decade ago by a large number of volunteers and still as vivid as it was then (photo by Emily Wilkinson, poem now resident at the Poetry Pharmacy, Bishops Castle).
The poem makes a wonderful yoga mat.
To buy a copy of Festival in a Book, a Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival edited by Liz Lefroy, please email 904press@gmail.com Cost £15 plus p&p (2nd class UK = £2.40)
Here's the line up you can enjoy:
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