Delights: February 25 to March 3

February 26: Maybe because I actually drank my (decaf) coffee before leaving the coffee shop, I saw a pair of lions. High overhead, they are a bit of trim on an early 20th century theatre. I smiled at their smile. At last, they seemed to say; we’ve been waiting forever for you to look up.

February 27: Sunset long past, I bent my entire body into the fierce wind that chilled my walk home. I pressed around the corner, and the wind broke. Released, I lifted my head — and saw a gleaming crescent moon and a snowy planet just a finger’s length away. The moon’s lopsided grin drew the planet in. They trembled there in the tension and equilibrium of a pair of dancers. Then I turned the corner again and lost them to a different sky. When at last I found them, at rest above my own home, it was my turn to smile.

February 28: “Find your mountain.” Standing tall after a particularly vigorous flow, I did. My hands fell to my thighs, my shoulders relaxed, my chin tucked a bit to straighten my neck. Whole, grounded, in peace. “Now halfway lift.” The other two women and I snapped out of our revery. So deeply did we each savor our Mountains that we had all missed the next two cues. Teacher and students laughed. Later our teacher guided us to a nice long Mountain, because she knew we would take it anyway.

February 29: I marvel at things in neat stacks: my dozen new journals, arrayed and waiting by color; the bright chevrons of metal and wood in the frame shop, like a military dress parade; same-size carryon suitcases, lined up overhead with handles out, in the colors of airplane connections, waiting to serve again.

March 1: Los Cabos San Juan greets us (amid the airport bars and spring break crowds). Kevin and I and a handful of other couples clamber into a van for the 45 minute ride to Prana Del Mar Retreat and Wellness Center at the tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The sights from my window astound me: Hills like a graveyard of giants, if the giants’ heads and ribs pushed up and outward and their knees and feet fell away out front. Arroyos wider than boulevards winding among the hills, dry and inviting to ATVs. Wood and wire fencing: for cattle or for wanderer? A pyramid of smooth boulders tucked among the dessert brush. Water: a tiny rivulet in a miniature canyon seeking a way under our van’s highway. Goats! Skinny and confident among the thorny wood and cactus clusters. At last I see the ocean, indistinguishable from the sky just like at home, if at home both were blazing white.

March 2: I stepped into the predawn darkness and was filled with the sounds: the thunder and rustle of Pacific Ocean waves, which had lulled me to sleep; the rooster reminding me that back home I’d be on the train by now; the shushing wind through the dessert brush; the wind around and against my ears, which makes an entirely different sound. The heavens are an inverted colander with each hole a star and each star a constellation. As I write, a solitary bird calls sharply as the rooster still crows. Now I await the dawn.

March 3: I approached what looked like an olive tree and fingered the tiny evergreen needles sparking like fireworks from the twigs and  branches. The limbs flowed like rivers. A pruned cypress? Or the right-sized mayor of this small town, where the streets are sand, the houses sagebrush and the corner conversations are made of wind and birds and sea.

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