Santa Fe, Part 6

It's monsoon season in full here. I don't think I mentioned in the last entry that we have had extraordinary forest fires here in New Mexico this year, which is why the air quality had been poor, and a lot of the parks and trails had been closed. I think they have now been re-opened, although there is a new risk of being hit by lightning or landslides during a rain on a hike. It is often hot in the middle of the day still, although much less frequently.

As one of the rune stones in my reading stated, I have reached a period of prosperity and achievement. High tourist season is in full force, and I have also been getting some significant private business.

After the last entry, I decided to commit myself to learning something new about massage before each shift at the spa, no matter how small, so that I can keep my practice fresh, and feel like I am improving. I read a lot, and I watch a lot of Youtube videos. One day, I pretended I was a masseuse in an ancient Roman bath house. Roman bath houses were a huge center of networking and sociopolitical commerce, and massage and bathing/hydrotherapy were of central importance to Roman health and their way of life. It was a fun meditation, and I felt like I was tapping in to an ancestral lineage and memory.

Anne Marie, my acupuncturist and healer, has been putting me into what looks like a space capsule, which radically increases and decreases air pressure. It works out my inner ear, aids in detoxification by literally pumping all the cells in my body, and is supposed to condition me to high altitude. It's the lazy version of aerobic exercise. My head feels a lot more clear and I feel uplifted after I leave her office. And I am finally doing more regular stretching and energetic exercises. I did a full three-day weekend at the spa last week, and with three private clients the day before, I basically worked on 14 bodies altogether. Half of them were not the easiest types; high body mass or very dense body mass, and in a few cases both.

I biked to work, also. I can, without a doubt, attest to the incline in the direction of the plaza after this, as my heart nearly burst riding TO work, but I coasted almost the entire way going home. Sick and tired of huffing and puffing, I consumed a lot of Chlorella and even a product called Chloroxygen, by a local company. I inhaled a lot of Eucalyptus. These helped quite a bit, along with a few aspirin, ibuprofen, and hot Epsom salt baths. And, oh yeah, I did stretch at bedtime. I was amazed that I wasn't more exhausted and sore in the following days, but I guess it was a sign that I did something right.

When I mentioned to Anne Marie that I was experiencing mild depression (as mentioned in my last entry), she brought up a Buddhist meditation which has been helping me a bit, too, called the Maitri meditation. Maitri, or Matreya, roughly translates as "Unconditional friendship towards oneself", and the practice, as far as I can understand it, with the limited research I have so far done, is something like saying to oneself, "May I be free from all suffering, and the root of all suffering." Eventually you move on to saying this to someone or something you love unconditionally, and all the way to your worst enemy. And you go through the same process by saying, "May I know all happiness, and the root of all happiness." Check out this great 5 minute talk by Pema Chodron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-rRMUl04I

I occasionally use this as a prayer before my bodywork sessions.

Loic and I made a two day road trip for the first time last month, going North on the High Road to Taos. Taos itself is not terribly impressive to me, but the land in between Santa Fe and Taos is beautiful. And one of my favorite things on the trip was a slight detour to Chimayo, which is a popular pilgrimage destination, and the one which Loic walked to overnight during Holy Week in the Spring. We encountered a few people selling some local chile, and we were given an extensive tasting, similar to winetasting, which we also did on the trip. I have come to fall in love with chile. Whereas I used to use Cayenne, Paprika, and something simply called "Chile" for the common beef and bean soup so prevalent in the United States, I now use all varieties of a pepper known only as Red or Green, but sometimes referred to as Anaheim, for it's propagation in Anaheim, California. It is the equivalent of having only been familiar with Gallo wine from a box, and then being exposed to different varieties of Bordeaux. I am eating it and cooking with chile almost every day.

I continue to have wonderful adventures, both in-town and on the road. And lately with my new friend, Eve. Eve is officially a resident of New Mexico, works during the tourist seasons in Angel Fire (north of Santa Fe), and technically lives with her husband in Boulder, Colorado. Originally from the Chicago area, she frequently drives to visit her mother there. Luckily, Eve loves driving. Lucky for me, too, because I've gotten to see quite a bit of her this year. Ironically, I get to see more of her then many of the locals that I've attempted to develop friendships with.

Eve is a wonderful photographer, videographer, artist, former DJ, and I recently discovered, a fantastic Feng Shui consultant. On her last visit to Santa Fe, she offered to "Feng Shui" our place, which I eagerly accepted. Although this did not thrill Loic, since we decided to keep it a surprise, and move the house around while he was working. Later he said that it didn't feel like his place anymore, although I think he is warming up to it now. I was sorry to make him so upset, and really should have involved him in the process.

But I have to tell you, this has had amazing results for me. Moving the bedroom has had astounding results, and I feel safer and sleep so much better now. And I am certain that Eve's intention to improve the area of Career has influenced my current prosperity and achievement, as I stated earlier in this entry.

Eve also got me to finally put up the hummingbird feeder that Mom brought to us when the family came for the wedding last fall. It's placed right by the front door, in the window facing our dining table. These fairies of the bird kingdom showed up in less than 24 hours, and continue to grace us with their presence. I have never before had such close interaction with hummingbirds, and watching them, hearing them, is so delightful.

I visited Angel Fire with Eve last weekend, close to the Colorado border. It's a wealthy resort mountain town created for Texas oil barons, where people like Reagan would fly in and do covert business while skiing, hiking, hunting or fishing. That's about all one can do there. For the first 24 hours I felt pretty miserable and couldn't do much of anything anyway; combination of even higher altitude (8500 feet) and lots of changes in barometric pressure -- even more rain in the mountains! It's beautiful though. Very green and lots of pines. I'm discovering that there is a lot of New Mexico that is very green, and not desert at all. I was wishing that I had brought a sketchpad and watercolor/ paper. The water is very pure, the air smells piney and very sweet. And at night Eve had a pine wood fire going in one of the vacation rentals that she stays in while she is managing other rentals. Oh, one other thing the Texans do there-- they watch the elk and the resident wild bear. As soon as Eve drove us up to the house and parked in the driveway, a small herd of elk (males and females) crossed the road into the woods surrounding us. And a minute after, the local bear crossed the road in the other direction. My first sighting of elk and bear! And I must be attracting hummingbirds naturally now, because Sunday morning I went out onto one of the decks to make a call, and a female broad-billed hummingbird was flying around my head, checking me out. The most fun thing was the drive home. We spent time at an alpaca farm, and took a lot of photos of the spectacular cloud formations with Eve's professional camera.

So, I'm still pretty tired and lethargic, although in general I am feeling so much better. I feel that I'm heading in the right direction, although I'm not always clear about what direction that it is, or if it even means making Santa Fe our permanent home, and I'm ok with that.