Sometime in September

The mala I've been waiting for are skulls wrapped around my wrist, and I watch them circle bone and wonder why Cusco sometimes seems to chew me up like no place ever has.

I sit most of the day on the cold stairs outside my bedroom wrapped in the wisdom blanket, learning new words from an ancient tongue. Here strange meteors are embedded with geometric patterns of molten rock, begging you to think outside the confines of this earth. At night I sprint home from Plaza de Armas, through the only city I've ever truly lived in. Under the balcony of the devil I dry my ankles, where the staggering cold has lapped up against my calves.

Time and again, though with wide spaces in between, I sink hips into frog squat: malasana, and pull hands into heart center, plug the thumbs into the chest and feel the ruddy, rounded red woman I sometimes can be, the soft give of the pelvic floor and the roots and the raw and the real.

There is still so much I care to release, to make way for the things and the people I crave to learn about, for the things I will one day tell only them, and no one else.

On Sundays I think about dinner for the first time all week and cook for the travelers who have become part of my home. Each of them an offering on my Sadhana. We play Rising Appalachia and shuck Choclo, like cartoon corn, and pick through wilted offerings of basil. Sweet potatoes rounded in the palm to hold you here, cabbage curling upward, and small, bright hot peppers that long to be dropped from the tree outside the kitchen. With pestle and mortar I crack peppercorn that beg boldly, bay leaves that chant crisply, and tender shoots of garlic. We are rounded and well women and here we sway with spices.

On Mancora

In Mancora I am soft about the shoulders, lilted in my speech. Here I tell them all about anchoring the tailbone in a language that is not my own, in words that I use to construct a semblance of what fully occupying the body means to me.  Instructing a bound twist in Spanish becomes a yoga of it's own, and I'm finding potency in my fingerpads- to use the spread of collarbones or the grounding of ankles in a correspondence that floats far above didactic. I've become laconic. I'm the intimate stranger sprinting spans of beach between each cue. Together we move away from the clench behind the jawline through an unspoken release of hips. In just one day, I've generated more cooling in the space below the navel than I've felt in the deep lakes of the past three lifetimes I skip stones across.

There's an eloquence unspoken of my sentiment towards the red sarong; it's become the scarf to keep ropy hair, brushed only by wind's fingers, in tow. The makeshift dress I wrap around the crease of hips and float across a sunken terrace. Should I ever decide to shower again, it will be my towel (but this is unlikely). Tying coins to the corners an
d slinging it across a sand speckled shoulder it becomes my knapsack. It's the yoga strap I weave across the the crook of elbows to spread open the back ridges and rounded pleats of heart. At night when I fling open the window to welcome in the waves, the sarong becomes my bedspread. In a world where everything is so new in it's presence and persistence, it has become my home.

Someone here told me he couldn't remember where he had left his shoes, and how happy that made him. We haven't felt anything but sand and waxed wood beneath our feet for days.

And what of coconuts? I consider any other form of prayer, save for the yearning and fulfillment of this most precious fruit, sacrilege. My most meditative experiences in the past week have been on the present moment awareness felt by savoring the curled flesh of a coconut, raised to my lips on a cold silver spoon that reminds me of tasting someone else. Alone, I laugh out loud because I don't believe I've ever felt such gratitude towards nourishment before; never knew something to be so whole in it's offering.

 I've said it several times, and think it even more, I count coconuts and blessings to be of one and the same. My time here has been the most blessed I can remember, both from this lifetime and the ones that came before it.