for tiff: a love letter

Hello you,

I’m writing to you from my front porch, this morning, while I watch it rain through the sunshine. After six days, I can finally smile about Tiff without doing it through the tears. What a metaphor.

Tiff was my friend, my mentor, my teacher. She was the only person allowed to keep me on the phone for three hours in a row, and she was the only person willing to spend part of that time workshopping yoga poses and troubleshooting transitions with me. She commanded your time, and she commanded excellence within it; but it was never without great reward. Infinite, sometimes surprising reward.

One week ago, her fifty-one month fight with cancer ended. Many of you knew her, and if you didn’t, your life was impacted by proxy. I can say this, indisputably, because if you read my words, they are infused with her teachings, in the same way that they are infused with the spirit of others with whom I’m intertwined.

Since last weekend, one of the most repeated assumptions made to me has been that I’m going to write her story. Several times, over the past four years, she has talked to me about helping her write it, but it was with such vagary that it never came to be, and, now, without her guidance, I don’t feel like it’s my story to tell. One day, I’ll pen the wildly imperfect and beautiful friendship we shared, but likely not until the sting of her loss softens.

I need time.

We need time.

You see, I’m not special in this. She loved and was loved by many, and that is what I will speak to, today: community. Tiffany was, irrefutably, a skilled yoga teacher - one of the literal best - but her other great talent was cultivating a sense of community.

Every action, every reaction was rooted in her desire to make people feel special, to foster a sense of connection. There were moments that she felt impossible to match, but she believed it (whatever the current ‘it’ was), possible, so it was. She tried so damn hard. Always. And that is precisely how we were able to fill the studio in celebration with only forty-eight hours’ notice.

On Friday evening, we gathered in the space that she developed with a curious blend of precision and whimsy. We hugged, we flowed, we laughed, we cried. We told stories and passed Bella around. We wrote on purple balloons and watched them soar into the clouds.

It was ceremonious, like how a new ritual begins. She would have loved that.

I didn’t sneak glances at anyone else’s balloon and I was quiet with my own message, but the words came easily and the promise in them was resolute. No, it is resolute, and I know this to be so because I’m part of this great community who will unknowingly ensure that I uphold it.

That’s the thing about community, you see? The inherent support of its members fluctuates only in deliberation. Some days, like Friday, it’s very on purpose. Most days, it’s just there, like a wall to catch your handstand when your balance has been thrown off. Some days, like Friday, you feel it in your bones. Most days, it’s indetectable, like the air that surrounds us. There is a sort of furtiveness to it.

Community is funny that way. When you accidentally land in one, you notice it until you don’t - unless you’re Tiffany, of course, and noticing community is precisely and relentlessly what you do.

With love always,



Adi