In yoga, there are always things some bodies can't quite do every time. Traditionally, one might substitute variations, or sometimes keep trying, and laugh. There was this one form from my yoga past that involved making a V with your legs and holding on to your feet while balancing on your rear. Maybe it has to do with center of gravity, but I almost always flopped forward or back, and the few times I got it, I wobbled without grace.

Tonight, in kundalini yoga, there was a breath exercise involving whistling. There was a series where you whistled on the breath out, and then there was whistling on the breath intake. I can't whistle worth beans. A flimsy, thin-pitched noise came when on the out whistle exercise, and nothing during the breath in whistle. How do you whistle breathing in???

But, there are gifts in every situation, and because my whistling was silent, I got to hear the other participants making a continuous sound by alternating the timing of their breathing and whistling. These rich, long notes -like from an organ, or from an exotic place in space - filled the candlelit room with its windows looking out on trees at dusk. A bird outside started to sing, with fine timing, contributing its own melodic warbling in the fainter spaces of the continuous chain. I listened in ways I couldn't listen if I had been more capable. I was the audience to something extraordinary, a spontaneous cooperation, a symphony of human and avian sound. It was beautiful.