ROAD BLOG AHEAD

So we successfully made it back to the States last evening and are hiding out at a friend’s lovely place in West Marin County. We lost internet connectivity in Mexico on Tuesday and did not get it back while we were there, so no further posts and I’m waaaay behind on e-mail and organizing stuff. I mean waaaaaaaaaaaay behind! Overwhelmed, dazed, confused and feeling like I’m in the middle of some really odd novel that’s a collaboration between Tolkein, Stephen King and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wizards, pursuit by dark forces, lonely country roads, demonic possession, politics spanning several countries, drinks on the veranda with pretty ladies in summer dresses, the sound of the surf as the Pacific Ocean pounds the coast a few hundred yards away in the silence of the night… We’re so off the beaten track here that there is no DSL, wi fi or high speed anything. Probably a good thing, but I am really spoiled.

My cell phone only works part of the time, but it’s better than nothing. One of the humorous things is that, after all sorts of craziness trying to rescue things from the house, some of the stuff I really wanted never got out. My clothes for instance. Most of them. I have the stuff I took to Mexico - 2 pair of jeans, a long skirt and slinky shirt, two sundresses, some t-shirts and my swimsuit. Then someone grabbed 20 pair of shoes and boots and the chest containing my very heaviest winter sweaters. All my jewelry seems to have made it. And a small suitcase of my fetish wear. The femme in me is both amused and horrified. More shoes than shirts, enough costume jewelry for Mardi Gras, frilly underwear… Oh and it appears all of our toys and sex toys somehow got transported here, much to the amusement of our hostess. So yeah, dildoes and vibrators and whips and chains, but I don’t own a thing I could wear to a job interview or to go to court at the moment. Sigh.

My portable office made it out of there. Well, I took my laptop with me, but all the cables, the portable printer and scanner, etc. I now have. Still can’t find the cables that go with my camera so I can’t yet post pictures from Mexico. I’ll get a new cable if I don’t find mine soon. sigh

I should go and try and get a few more things done and a few more of the many many phone calls returned. I’ll be back when I can. I type that and feel like a cartoon character. Th..th..th..at’s all folks

Somewhere Above Utah…

On our way home. Or rather, on our way back to what used to be home. We’re on board a Continental Airways 737 and I am reminded again of the 10+ pounds I’ve gained over the past several months. It’s apparently all gone to the parts of the body that needs to wedge into an airplane seat. Six days of daily swimming may have toned me a bit. However, six days of Tom’s hospitality (including the vast hospitality of his pantry) has offset any gains… er losses. You get the point, I’m sure. Healthier but wider is my impression. Well, I’m still wearing the same jeans I came in so it can’t be that bad.

None of us wanted to come back to the life we were leading before Mexico. The idyllic existence of the past week lulled all of us into a different pace, a slower and more relaxed pace in which we, nonetheless, got done whatever needed to be done. Granted, there wasn’t all that much we HAD to do. Particularly once the internet connection cut out on Tuesday night. It’s going to make this week a lot more… interesting I’m sure. Lots to catch up on, lots of e-mails to send and receive once I’m back in the land of the live wire.

Just about two more months of this - two months of traveling and teaching, of trying to put our old lives to rest and make the choices that will lead us forward into the next phase. We’re pretty sure that there’s karma at work here, it feels a little bit like being herded into a chute where there are limited choices available and all of those choices lead towards the fulfillment of very old promises and commitments. Oh, sure, we could choose to do pretty much anything at this point - join a Carmelite order and take a vow of silence; move to Cleveland, get 9-5 jobs and buy a ranch style house; get a couple of camels and explore Mongolia. If that’s what we wanted to do, I’m sure we’d manage to pull it off from this vantage point since the horizon is so wide open.

But yeah, there’s this sense of being drawn along a path that we’d agreed to walk long, long ago, a path whose odd, rocky traces lead up mountains and into some pretty wild and wooly places. A path that, in our settled complacency of the past ten years or so, we had lost sight of. Now that complacency is badly shaken. Earthquakes, the rumbling of our environments, the falling away of the known, the secure, the comfortable, are rocking our world. And as those familiar things tumble off the edge of the world, as we suddenly turn corners and confront new vistas, that old path, that promised path, is suddenly revealed again.

I married a yogini, a traveler, a seeker after the true nature of Mind. That’s WHY I married her; those are precisely the qualities that made me fall in love with her. She married a writer and a shaman. She always wanted to be a fictional character and fell in love with someone who could write the tales of what had occurred - AND had the magic, the power necessary to summon the more fantastic of those stories into full being by writing both what had been and what WOULD be. We did it together. And, damned if she didn’t embody so many of the tales I’d written before I even met her - tales I thought were the product of my own farflung imagination! As I came to know Lena, I discovered that she had done so many of the things I’d conceived of in the name of fiction. Moreover, she promised to take me back with her to those places, to show me the people and the living myths and the magic hidden in odd corners of the world. To Tibet and Nepal, to Istanbul and the ancient Turkish baths full of women and other more dangerous nooks and crannies; to Marrakesh and Casablanca and Jerusalem and other names that I knew from books and she knew from having lived in them.

We’d only been living together a couple of months when Wangdor Rimpoche, the little Tibetan lama who has had such an impact on our lives, first appeared pretty much literally - and without warning - on our doorstep. He came on impulse that time, with the trust that Lena would be there for him. He was not mistaken. Smiling at me ruefully and saying, “I did say when we got together that I had a prior commitment that supercedes everything else. Well, here it is!” She quit her job and, for the next six months traveled, taught and translated with Rimpoche. He was one of the near fictional characters of her past, the key figure of the seven years she spent living in a cave in the Himalayas with the Tibetans who had fled the Chinese occupation of 1959. Except it was no fiction and the next six months were among the most interesting and intense of my life as I lived with them, learned from them and began the work and the commitments that have endured now for more than 16 years.

There were others who came during that time. Other lamas, yes a few, some of them quite famous, quite powerful, quite interesting. All lamas are not created equal by the way and some of these supposedly enlightened beings were quite disappointing or quite mundane. And there were other travelers, those whom Lena had met on the road to here or there or noplace in particular. Catherine and Gernot from Paris have been frequent visitors over the year, often using our place as somewhere to land while passing through the United States on their way to parts unknown. Ani Jampal, a round red-haired nun who is one of the only living women to have received the full set of ordinations, including those that are not given anymore outside of some remote regions of China. I’d been hearing of her for years, this small, relentlessly cheerful British woman who had disappeared into the jungles of Thailand during the late 1970’s and never been heard from again. She was presumed to be dead, eaten by leopards or killed by one of her many chronic ailments - until she turned up one day in Tso Pema - Wangdor Rimpoche’s community in Himachal Pradesh - and asked for Lena’s American phone number. Jampa was in and out of our lives for years after that as she wandered between teaching obligations in Brazil and her home on one of the remote islands of Hong Kong.

These are a few. There were many, many more. Oftentimes our dinner table would be full of gabble in many languages as one person translated for the next and on in turn. And Lama Wangdor turns up at pretty much regular intervals and we drop everything and go. From the beginning, it has been assumed that some day we would go and not come back. That we would use the momentum that happens during one of his visits and ride it out of our old lives and back into those unusual and remote corners of the world.

For awhile we were consciously waiting for our daughter to grow up sufficiently to be on her own. Well, that happened and we were… busy. Busy with the this and that of our lives. Busy with Lena studying Chinese medicine. Busy with work. A grandchild. Lovers. Friends. We had a life. We knew it was temporary. At least that’s what we always said. But, somehow, we never did put it down. Lama would come, odd things would happen, then we’d come back and settle into our routine. We had plans to go to his huge house in Nepal and stay there awhile. Then, a few years ago, Nepal destabilized politically and it became unrealistic to go there - most of the Tibetans were staying away; some of them were losing their homes, their property and postions in Nepali society due to the regime change.

My health got tricky. For a few years there I truly felt disabled, too infirm and susceptible to every bug blowing through to risk the dirty gutters of Kathmandu or the water in India. My out of the country trips were confined to places like Wales or Canada or Amsterdam. Lena managed Europe, but not farther. A few years ago she got summoned back abrubtly from teaching in Tuscany when I was hospitalized with a potentially fatal blood clot and infection. This was the time when I feared being away from access to sanitary facilities and modern medicine. There are so many things I still want to do and I really want to live long enough - and well enough - to do and enjoy them all!

I’m better now, the kid is grown and a mother herself. Even the situation in Nepal is more stable than it was and the big house with its marble floors and modern plumbing near to the Great Stupa is still there and available to us free of rent. In most places one wants to go, it’s housing that is the overwhelming expense. With that taken care of, travel becomes relatively cheap - particularly if one stays awhile in a place. And anywhere there is an English-speaking expatriot community there is opportunity for an astrologer and fortuneteller to hang out a shingle and make grocery money doing a few readings.

So yeah, travel. Mexico first, just because it’s cushy and comfy and available with no strings attached. But there are plenty of other places as well - Canada, Kathmandu, India, our friends in Paris and Tuscany, Taipei and Hong Kong as well as friends and family around the U.S. It’s too soon to tell where the next few chapters will lead and whether the journey will be a long one or a short interlude while we determine what’s next.

This is our last day here. At least for now. I so do not want to leave this place of warm breezes, clean water and friends. I’ve been away from my troubles for a week now and am just beginning to really relax. There is, however, lots of work yet to be done in the next two months so back we go to the Bay Area. We’ll be staying - at least initially - in Bolinas, which is also a rather remote place so I may not have the internet access I’m accustomed to for awhile yet. I’m likely to end up driving out at least once a day to a Borders or Starbucks or somewhere else I can access a wireless internet account to download e-mail, read and update blogs, etc. Of course first I have to rescue my truck from wherever it’s been parked for safety.

We didn’t get the temporary restraining order and are now debating about the wisdom of serving the papers to psycho landlord regarding the court date for the permanent restraining order. It was the temporary we really wanted to protect Nyondo’s safety while we were gone. Without it, she worked around the problem by never going alone to the house. Psycho is a sociopath rather than a true loose cannon and so he never does anything really weird when there is more than one or two people around. He knows enough to be calm and speak reasonably and pleasantly around strangers. Which has afforded some protection. It’s those times when one of us is alone or when it’s only two of the household members that he really gets threatening. And he has tried, consistently, to play us off against the other. Fortunately, we’re a strong enough unit that that tactic has never worked.

So what is really wanted now is to basically get our stuff out of the house and write it off as a loss. Not everything even, just some stuff we could use or resell. Most of the truly important things are out already, but I’d like to rescue some of my other clothes, some books and a few things that have resale value. I have some fiber tools stashed in the basement, some yarn, etc. that I’d rather retain if possible. However, with the crucial stuff out, we can simply start looking at the whole question of “what next”?

So we’re couch surfing for the next while. I’ll have the phone forwarded to voice mail which we can pick up via cell phones and the mail sent to a friend’s house. We can couch surf awhile between a few people who have enough space. Lena and Lama are traveling extensively anyway and I join them for much of it. Nyondo is negotiating with a mutual leatherdyke friend who is currently without a roommate to take her on temporarily as a rent-paying roomie so she can be close to her jobs.

Casa Lorena
San Miguel de Allende
GTO, Mexico

I’ve taken pictures over the past few days, but discovered that, in all the chaos of leaving abrubtly, I forgot the cable that attaches camera to computer. Tom doesn’t know if he has a card reader so probably not, which means that the pics will stay in the camera until I can get home and locate a cable or a reader. I hope they convey some of the beauty of this place. I’ve got pictures from here at the hacienda as well as some of the views from town when we went yesterday to do a bit of exploring.

San Miguel is a fair sized town of about 60,000 in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato (GTO.) We’re up between 6-7000 ft. elevation - just enough that I’m only now acclimating so I don’t get winded walking fast or climbing stairs. There’s a sizeable expatriate population of gringos from all over the world which is growing rapidly. Lots of Americans of course, but also Europeans, South Asians and many other nationalities as well as a prominent indigenous population. It’s an interesting mix of very traditional and cosmopolitan. The guy next door is a Japanese jazz guitarist of apparently some fame. At some point, Tom plans to introduce us to the gay male American couple who live a few houses down the road from him. They’ve been here awhile and should be able to tell us about whatever passes for a gay community down here.

It’s hard to tell with people sometimes. Tom’s friend Jane was over the other day. She’s a Texas femme who has lived here for 3 years. I find it hard to be sure about some femmes of Jane’s type whether they’re straight or gay even in San Francisco. Jane made a very clear point, when we were alone for a bit, of telling me that the town is run by the women. And then, with a dramatic pause for emphasis, she said “the SINGLE women”. With a big smile. So. At least letting me know that our being dykes and feminists is not going to cause much conflict in San Miguel. Just a couple more eccentric gringas.

This place is a paradise in many ways: luxurious, comfortable, beautiful. The hacienda itself was rebuilt over the last few years along traditional lines using the original solid frame. Most of the furniture and décor was made locally - Tom being a great patron of local artisans. The most beautiful copperwork and wrought iron. Being a metalworker myself, I am breathless at the quality and size of some of the lanterns. Here and there throughout the garden are hung multi-pointed stars of pierced copper nearly 3 feet tall. At night they turn the cobbled paths and twisted mesquite trees into a fairyland of lights. I will try to take a picture and hope it does the place justice. I’ve got a shot of the wrought iron lamp that hangs in the center of our bathroom about 12 feet up. The side panels of the glass are pure cobalt blue. Much of this place has cobalt blue accents, both in the paint and the tiles. It’s a perfect contrast to the terracotta and paprika coloring of the hacienda itself.

I feel as though I’ve fallen into some kind of novel of my own creation. How often does one flee one’s home and land in paradise? It’s unnerving in a way, amusing in another way. To go from a psycho landlord who stalked us and listened in at the windows. Who hassled us about our garbage and complained about virtually everything. Now we’re in a grand place where the walls are a foot thick and privacy is a matter of drawing closed the heavy woven curtains. The maid may gossip, who knows, but she’s pleasant, helpful and discrete to a fault as she makes our beds, brings us a stack of towels that weigh more than the entire contents of my linen closet at home and washes the tile floor. The garbage is not only not an issue, but it vanishes invisibly, whisked away by one of the other 3 servants who tend to the house, pool and gardens. Tom’s cook is back at his estate in Seattle so we’re on our own with food, but Tom himself is an excellent cook and with a housekeeper to take care of clean up, meals are decadent and easy and come and go with no labor on our part. It is truly a strange sensation for this girl to find herself lolling about in a spring fed pool surrounded by bougainvillea and azaleas of all the brilliant colors, chosing where in the pool she will hang out depending on the temperature of the water. Margaritas are served in saucer sized glasses by a pleasant young man who is trained to make no eye contact while, nearby, a gardener prunes and rakes and keeps it all in a state of perfection.

The light here in Central Mexico is pinker than that of the NW United States. There’s a softness to it, a touch of rose that flatters people and warms the colors it illuminates. The air here is dry. Yesterday, the humidity was only 20%. So, although the weather is warmer than I’m used to, it’s quite pleasant even into the low 90’s. There’s almost always a breeze. Granted, that breeze often brings a pungent whiff of the dairy farm up the hill a ways. There’s no mistaking the smell of cow. But I don’t find it a bad smell - it fits in here along with the constant birdsong and the crowing of the roosters next door that goes on all day long. It’s not a silent place, but it’s nonetheless quite peaceful. Particularly after the stress and chaos of the past couple of months back in California.

My Spanish is coming back a bit at a time. I’ve done okay communicating with the staff and asking questions in town. As long as I stick to present tense, I’m pretty competent! There’s still the collision between the language track in my head that contains both Tibetan and Spanish as strong second languages. Sometimes I get pretty confused when we’re all sitting around talking and I am the only one who speaks both of those and English and it garbles up. The other day the son of a friend of ours in SF who lives in San Miguel came out to the house with his wives and baby to say hello. And, at some point, I ended up alone with them and Rimpoche. The girls only spoke Spanish so I was carrying on conversations in Tibetan, English (the boy spoke it well) and Spanish with the wives. I ended up laughing hard because I couldn’t remember which language I was using for simple stuff .like yes and no - I was fine with more complex stuff, but I kept saying “Re” to the Mexican girls - which is Tibetan for “yeah”. We laughed a lot. I enjoy being able to make people laugh no matter which language we’re using. I knew that my Tibetan had gotten better when I managed to make jokes that actually conveyed and got laughs.

It really is fun to have more of the local language than Lena does for a change. She’s the family linguist with six or seven languages to her credit at least. Spanish doesn’t happen to be one of them, so she had a helluva time requesting extra towels from the maid. Had Maria in stitches with her pantomimes. At first she thought that Lena wanted her to bathe her. No no. Lena found that between being fluent in French and having a sprinkling of Italian, she can understand a lot of the Spanish, but can’t make herself understood. A few months down here and she’ll have the basics.

5:30 P.M.

Tom came back from a quick trip to town with a gift for me - an exquisite package of chocolates from the local chocolatiers. Muy delicioso! He really is a sweet and thoughtful human being - the better I get to know him, the more I like him. I see why he and Lena have been friends for over 30 years despite such vast differences in their life circumstances!

I’m cleaner than I think I’ve ever been in my life. We’re spending an average of 2 hours a day in the water and my pores have never been so soaked free of the slightest trace of dirt, sweat, grime or just life. And it’s pure spring water, full of minerals and reputed to be curative for all sorts of ills. Personally I’m sure that just having the opportunity to loll about it a warm bath for days on end would cure anyone of anything! We generally swim for awhile in the huge cool pool to get some exercise. I’m doing an average of 8-10 laps a days which, considering that the pool is as enormous as it is, is some good workout. Water is my element anyway. I’m one of those people who can literally float in 12 feet of agua for hours, happy as a… clam… without touching bottom or needing to come out. A fair swimmer, wouldn’t win any competitions, but I can hold my own better there than on land. When we’re tired of swimming and horsing around, we go into the hot pool and soak. Today I think we spent about 45 minutes in the bath. Mmmmmm…. Then a cappuccino and perfect chocolates. Maybe a short siesta before supper. Ya know guys? Life is pretty good at the moment. Extremely weird, but good.

10:30 PM

Slightly tipsy. Went out at dusk to sit on the patio and Tom kept refilling my wine glass. This is one of those places where there are cocktails before dinner, wine with dinner and gin and tonics in the heat of the afternoon. I’m not much of a drinker and the altitude makes one more susceptible so I pass on most of it, but this was a particularly mellow cabernet so I allowed myself 2 glasses and I suspect, what with the refills, it may have been more like 3. So I’m in that shape where, like the list member from Florida, I can shrug and say “quid me vexari?”

Talked to my daughter in oregon tonight and there are odd explosions there as well. Her current spouse has two kids from a previous marriage, a boy and a 5 year old girl. Their mother lives nearby with her boyfriend. Well, this past weekend the kids revealed to mom that this boyfriend has been inappropriately touching the little girl. To the mom’s credit, she got them all out of there so fast that the kid’s shoes got left in the driveway. Boyfriend is now in jail. Kid is now is counseling. Family is rallying well. No one (except the mom) every trusted this guy at all and, fortunately, everyone believed the kids and didn’t try to bury this in the least. That speaks pretty well of the family that the kids did feel safe enough to say something. But it still sucks and will be a major situation for them all to deal with for some time to come.

At present, it looks like the game plan is going to be to get as much of our stuff out of that house as we can and put it into storage. We’ll have even more storage space once I take things up to my daughter’s house in Oregon. That should happen mid-May. I’ll load up a uhaul with things that we want her to keep or that she really wants and take them up to her area. They’ll go into storage there until she’s got the space for them - they’re hoping to buy a house this next year. So she’ll have the family valuables and heirlooms and memorabilia safely stashed away. Of the rest, we’ll keep what is most important, what we need to get by, and sell or give away the rest. We’ve accumulated waaaaay too much as it is. Some of it is nice stuff, but there’s far more than we need or want to own at this point in our lives.

So, while Lena and Lama go first to Santa Fe to teach the second week of May, I’ll start packing up the uhaul and drive up to Salem, OR. I’ll spend some time with Roni and her family and then, from there, fly up to Canada, to Vancouver to see Silva for a few days - a few days I am looking forward to very much. Then I’ll cross back into the States, probably flying into Seattle, but maybe by bus to Bellingham, WA where I’ll meet up with Lama and Lena who are teaching there. Back to Seattle and, from there, to Spokane, to a place called Padma Ling run by a lady lama, Lama Inge, where they will teach for a day or two. Then back to Seattle. I’m not sure about going to Spokane - I think I’m likely to stay in Seattle after Bellingham and visit some leatherdyke friends for those days they’re gone. When they return there’s a Seattle teaching and then a night or two at Tom’s Edmonds, WA estate. From there we’ll begin a slow drive towards what used to be “home” and is now simply a place where we have scheduled ourselves to be awhile: the SF Bay Area.

First stop is Portland. Lama has an old friend there Drupju, a nice guy, whom he’ll stay with. We’ll visit Roni again, teach one night and then drive down to Mt. Shasta for an intensive weekend meditation teaching and ceremony. Shasta is one of those amazing power points where we get invited back repeatedly. After Shasta, we go to Garberville, CA a rather rural area where a leatherdyke friend has arranged with the local Buddhist group to have Lama teach one evening. From there we head back to the Bay Area for a last set of meditation teachings. After that, sometime in Mid-June, we leave for Hawaii. It’s unclear at this point whether we’ll be in Hawaii for one week or two. We’re committed to a center in Kona the 3rd weekend of June. However right before we left for Mexico, some old friends contacted us about the possibility of setting up a teaching on Maui the weekend before that if they can muster the funds to make it happen. We should know in a few days. If so, we’ll fly to Hawaii the 2nd week of June, teach in Honolulu, fly to Kona, teach the 3rd weekend and then Lama will leave for Delhi from Hawaii while Lena and I stay at a friend’s house in Hilo for a couple of extra days before heading back to the Bay Area again on the last day of June 2005.

At least that was the planned return before our lives blew up. And yeah, we’re likely to try to go back to Oakland and sort through and sell some of the extraneous stuff we’ve stored. But it won’t be home anymore. It will be one of a few places we have some sort of base. Because we have many friends in the area, we’ve got options and places to stay while we figure out the next step. Mostly it’s important that Nyondo decide what she wants to do. She’s the one with the steady job right now, she’s the one who needs the stability. Lena has a job to return to at the women’s clinic in the city. I have clients. But we’re not locked into this. In fact, we’re pretty much at loose ends once Lama goes back to India. So the question becomes: What do we do next?

Jet Lag
Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:52 am
[ Mood: Sleepy ]
My body clock is still 2 hours behind local (Central) time so my sleep schedule is very different than everyone else’s. Lena and Lama are on Eastern Time by now so they’re 3 hours ahead of me and 1 hour ahead of local time, slightly easier to adapt. I’m the sluggard, staying in bed until 9 or 9:30 a.m. (7 or 7:30 by my body’s time sense) and not being sleepy until the wee hours. I’m sure that I’ll adjust just as we’re ready to leave.

It’s a morning for trying to deal with stuff. Not bad, just lots of details. Having no actual home base at the moment is very weird. I mean, I’m not sure where to tell people to mail things (psycho has access to our mailbox) and can’t easily pick up our phone messages because the book with the instructions for doing so is packed and stored somewhere and I don’t remember how to do it remotely! My cell phone doesn’t work all the way out here, though it supposedly should once we get into town at some point - though at great cost per minute.

Thank heavens for Tom’s internet connection here. He’s got a satellite system which enables us to get a decent connection at all times. It’s slowish but not awful and is more reliable than the phone system here. I’m still shaking my widdle head at having jumped out of the flaming frying pan and into a pot of jam.

One thing about a crisis of this magnitude: you really discover that your richness can be counted in friendship more than money. So many wonderful people have rallied around and each offered a piece of assistance so that no one of them has to bear too great a burden, but neither do we. What I need next is a vehicle with a working air conditioner that we could use to drive down here to Mexico in the summer. My truck is adequate for the trip but is black and not air conditioned and would be utterly miserable to drive in the summer heat here. Lena’s Toyota is 25 years old and in no condition to drive down here. So we have to look at our options in that way.

Then there is Nyondo who needs to decide what she wants to do for the next short while. She’s holding down the fort quite admirably, but is under tremendous stress and deserves a big cookie at the end of all of this. However I don’t know that she’s ready to chuck it all and spend the summer in Mexico. Hell, we’re not sure we’re going to do that either, it’s just nice to know we have it as a potential option. We also have potential places to stay in Santa Fe, Seattle, Portland, etc. as well as the Bay Area so that’s all good. I’m beginning to think that the vehicle is the next thing to consider at this point. But I appear to just be thinking out loud at this point. So much yet to decided and do and come to terms with, not the least of which is Lena’s job that she’s supposed to return to in July, my many clients that deserve at least a phone call letting them know how to contact me, our cats, Nyondo, our many friends who I don’t just want to leave without a word.

And yet I’m excited. This is the new beginning we’ve wanted for quite awhile, the clearing out of the old deadwood and the opportunity to travel, to stay open to possibilities, to have the lives we really wanted to have all along. Now that the kidlet is grown and the bodies in at least reasonable states of repair, we can contemplate being flexible and doing those things that make us happy and fulfilled rather than being dutiful servants of the mass consuption culture. I see myself finally being able to do some of the major writing projects I’ve been dabbling at for years, completing things that are partly finished and beginning others.

I turn fifty this year. Perhaps the second half of my life will be even better than the first half. Which has been pretty damn good so far.

The roosters begin crowing before I can see the morning light coming through the curtains. It’s not only first thing in the day that they crow - any little stimulus sets up a cacophany of cocks (couldn’t resist a bit of alliteration there) but they do have the decency to be silent at night. I’m experiencing a bit of jet lag today. It’s central time here. My body is still on Pacific Time so when I awoke at 6:00 to the critter noises, all my instincts said, “what the hell are you thinking girl?!” and I rolled over and went back to sleep for a few hours.

This is a place where much of life is lived outdoors. Partially because of the climate, partically because of the way Mexican haciendas are built. There is a central courtyard with a long shallow pool tiled in deep cobalt blue surrounded by flagstones. The rooms run single-file along each side of this courtyard with the main house on one side with kitchen, dining room, living room, tv room and the most wonderful study (which is where I’m sitting now). The other side has all the bedrooms, 5 of them by my count. At the back of each bedroom is a huge bath with doors leading out to a tiled walkway/patio there. Outside of the beautiful beveled glass and ironwork doors on the main house side is another tiled patio, this one with comfortable furniture, a hearth and all the amenities of a pleasant sitting room. From this patio, the land falls gently away downhill. There are wide tiled steps leading down to the springs, perhaps one or two stories below. On that level is changing rooms and baths for the spa.

The hot spring is not so terribly hot - slightly less than a hot tub, but still incredibly pleasant as a nice warm bath. It flows into two smaller tubs which then overflow into an olympic sized pool of mexican tile. This runs tepid to cool depending on closeness to the source - the median being the equivalent of a perfect heated swimming pool. We spend most of yesterday afternoon lolling in the healing waters. The “cure” from this place was reputed to be three immersions a day. Not sure if three hours of soaking might be the equivalent of three separate baths, but it sure felt wonderful! I’m a water sign and love swimming. With my bad knees, the weightlessness of water means I can flex and exercise my legs without the strain of impact. I’m sore today from overdoing that a bit (it’s been awhile since I’ve swum laps in a pool this big) but I suspect that, if I do this every day, it’s really going to help.

We may be coming back here later this year. Tom spends summers at his estate in the Seattle area, tending to business and such up there. He doesn’t like the winters up there so has this Mexican estate to escape the cold and rain in the PNW. This is NOT a fiercely hot climate apparently, generally staying between 70 and 80 degrees farenheit for most of the year, with nights in the 50s and 60s. But he has to be in Seattle sometimes for his life and affairs up there so late spring and summer is it.

He doesn’t like leaving this house empty however. And when Lena, joking, said, “well, since we’re homeless, we could come and housesit for you,” he said, “Yes. Do that.” So we’re going to discuss it further. I mean, the idea of spending the summer in this place is… grand. We’ll see if other things can be put on hold long enough to make it do-able. Lena needs to study for her national Chinese herbalism exam in October and was figuring to be a bit of a hermit for awhile while she crams. I have writing and study projects that I would dearly love to have the time to do. With no rent to pay elsewhere it just might work. And the chance to swim every single day means that I could really get my body back into shape. This is also a good walking area as well as horseback. So who knows, perhaps we’ll end up here for July and August after Lama leaves for India! I can certainly think of worse ways to spend my summer! There is something to be said for this homeless business!

My breakfast just arrived: an omlette of mushrooms and avocado, a few strips of turkey bacon, corn tortillas, frijoles negros and fresh mexican papaya with lime. This is a bit of a hard place to be allergic to tomatoes and peppers and potatoes, but we’re working around it pretty well! Tom is feed us rather too well - I have to watch my consumption or I’ll need to swim 12 hours a day just to burn it all off! And Tom has promised me a trip into town to a chocolatier who is apparently legendary. Oh dear

One of the aspects that make this such a comfortable place for me is that it is scaled well to my body. I’m a big girl - 6′1″ and varyingly hefty. So often people’s furniture seems diminutive and fragile to me - particularly “nice” furniture or antiques. Plane seats jam my knees again the seat in front of me, I feel perched on the edge of spindly chairs. Tom’s a big guy - 6′4″ and built like a linebacker gone to seed. So his furniture is substantial. I can flop on the couches and curl up in the chairs without concern for either something giving way beneath me or being pitched over backwards. He’s got the “big executives” desk chair that I’ve long lusted after but didn’t have the thousand bucks to even consider buying. It’s as comfortable and sturdy as I imagined. Mirrors are place nicely for me. Lena and Apu, Tom’s adopted Tibetan son both have to stand on tiptoes to see above their necks. I am not accustomed to comfort scaled to my height and it’s a real and unexpected delight.

Well, should go and be social. I still hope to take pictures of some of the beauty around me and post a few to a blog entry. Manana perhaps. This is, after all, the land of manana. No rush to do anything right now.

Fabulous doesn’t begin to express it!!! I must take pictures and post them. There is a burro grazing on the public grassland beyond the wall that boundaries the property and tropical birds calling in the mesquite trees that ring the hot springs pool. This is by far the most beautiful setting I’ve ever had the good fortune to stay in. The morning sunlight making shadows on the white screen covering the wall of windows into the huge bathroom this morning was… art. Just shadows of an arched window and some leaves but in such perfect proportion that I literally wept. Worth the trip all by itself and it’s just one of the incidentals.

How incongruous, eh? Here we are, suddenly homeless and I am sitting in a palace with servants (yes, servants to fetch and carry and clean - well paid and honored as Tom has always done - he tries to support the local village and to employ people at a high standard and does well.) A driver fetched us at the airport and drove us in. The houseman, Trini, met us as we drove through the gates into the courtyard and took our bags to our various rooms. This morning a maid cleaned up and made our beds and put fresh towels in the bathroom. All genuinely pleasant and happy, smiling and giggling and seeming quite at easy - no sense that they were in any way being taken advantage of. Tom has a reputation: he hires good people and treats them like gold and expects his guests to do likewise. You can get away with a lot but NOT being rude or abusive to his staff. You simply won’t be invited back. Otherwise, he is a most gracious host with amazing taste (I am not mentally redecorating this place as I often do even in nice settings.) He’s genuinely NICE person with a huge heart and tons of compassion for everyone. He just happens to be a multi-millionaire by birth. He spends much of his time helping refugees, not unlike my own work only on a more personal scale - he has brought a number of young people over and given them education, business start ups, legal papers, etc.

So yes, this is an excellent omen to have fled our house and now be relaxing in great luxury in a tropical paradise in a palacial hacienda with no greater responsibility than to choose between red wine or white when we’ve done with the margaritas.
There will be responsibilities, but not just in this moment - we’re trying to get our balance and catch our breaths before moving forward.

Tom has a satellite hookup for internet which my ThinkPad was happy to hook up to. So I won’t have withdrawal. yay to all of it!

We made it and this place is fabulous beyond belief! Tom has his own hot springs here. Uh huh. This used to be a healing spa twenty thirty years ago. His place is beautiful, elegant, graceful and words that barely convey the reality and the luxury of this place. It’s been a while since I stayed in a hotel this lovely much less a private home! Um, the bathroom attached to our bedroom is as big at least as our bedroom at home with a shower the size of my bathroom and cathedral ceilings. I will try to take picture.

I’ve had a few very funny moments when my language circuits got jammed. I’m the only one of us who speaks Tibetan, English AND Spanish with any fluency. The others have either or of 2. I’m not really fluent in anything but English, but usually enough to get by. But I reach for my non-English circuits and end up with a mishmash of Tibetan and Spanish which, of course, nobody can understand!!! But my Spanish has at least been intelligible to those I’ve spoken it to and, despite several weeks of not using it, I was able to immediately launch into conversation with Rimpoche when we met up in Houston. So I’m getting by.

Mostly I need to sleep. Will try to post more as I can. I’m writing this on Tom’s satellite internet connection. Slower than the wi fi dsl I’m used to but not too bad. Better than internet withdrawl!

Sitting in SFO waiting for an airplane

So we made it out fine this morning without alerting the psycho that I’m leaving for awhile. We want him to think I’m still around - or might be around so that he doesn’t know that Nyondo is the only one home for the next week. I really don’t think that he’d do anything violent - this guy is actually very scared of physical violence - it’s why he’s so passive agressive and verbal - he’s quite a wimp physically. But we don’t want him to corner her and harass her again. The restraining order should do that, but we’d rather not even have to test it. So letting him think I’m around somewhere is good. Moving my truck occasionally, stuff like that.

Anyway, I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee and so relieved to be out of the mess for the moment! And, in just a few hours, I’ll be in Lena’s arms again!!! That is perhaps the very best part of leaving for Mexico - rendezvousing with my loved ones who I haven’t seen in weeks! If I weren’t so exhausted, I’d be really excited. As it is, I’m just happy and feeling a little sleepy now that I can relax. I didn’t fall asleep last night until 3 a.m. and got up at 5:30. I went to bed early but couldn’t quite doze off soundly. You know, I haven’t slept with the lights on since I was a really little kid, but this week we’ve left lights on. Sigh. Well, we’re moving forward and all will be well now.

Nyondo and I loaded my luggage for the morning in the car tonight under cover of darkness ( we don’t want the psycho to know I’m on a trip and she’s here alone so we’re going to try to cover it up by leaving not looking like a traveler, with just my shoulder bag that I always carry.) Then we drove over to a fast food drive through (yeah I know, it’ll kill me but we haven’t had any inspiration to cook for days and we’ve both been forgetting to eat until our blood sugar is so low we’re incoherent.) I paid out of money I’d taken from our household food budget.

We got home, ate our food and I got up to go to the bathroom. And realized I didn’t have my wallet in the pocket of my jeans. Now it was a warm evening so I didn’t wear a jacket and we were just going out for a few minutes so I didn’t take a bag, just my wallet and keys. So there was no place else for it to have gone. And we wanted to leave quietly in the am and Nyondo’s car is a tad bit noisy on start up so we’d parked it around the corner and walked home.

To say I was freaked out is putting it mildly. First, I’m going on a trip tomorrow and needed my ID. Second, my wallet has my credit cards, insurance card and various and sundry other stuff. Third, and scariest of all - there was nearly a thousand bucks in it at the time.

And, in fact, that may be the first and only time I have ever left the house with that kind of money in my wallet. I do not generally carry a thousand dollars around. I do not generally *have* a thousand dollars to carry! But I had pulled all the various cash sources around the house together in order to leave Nyondo money to pay for the restraining order (almost $400) plus to leave for Winna to rent a uhaul and hire a couple of laborers to schlep stuff. Plus the couple of hundred for traveling expenses and whatever odd change had already been in there along with my hidden $50 emergency money that always lives in the secret compartment. All told, it came to almost a thousand dollars. And it had been in the wallet that was NOT in my jeans pocket anymore.

I guess the past few days have used up my quota of adrenaline or something. I did break out in a sweat, but I didn’t feel remotely like throwing up or anything. Maybe what Winna said to me yesterday, about “you’ll never be this scared ever again” was really true. Anyway, I told Nyondo that my wallet was missing and did she remember seeing it. And she said she’d go check in her car since we knew we’d had it there as I’d paid for our food at the drive thru. So, while I turned on lights and moved the chair I’d sat in to eat and looked in corners, she went to check her car. I had no luck and so just sat down and listened to the sweat trickle down my forehead. I was really pretty calm considering.

She was gone for an awfully long time I thought. Long enough to make me think she hadn’t found it and was now slowly retracing our steps along the darkened street to see if perhaps it was lying in the grass. Maybe it really wasn’t that long, but it felt it.

And then she came in and put the worn black leather folder in my hand. Whew!!! The relief was almost stronger than the fear had been. So I gave her the money that I owed her and carefully enveloped and hid the money for the uhaul and now I feel much better knowing that there isn’t such a big chunk in one place to get lost again.

Although, you know, $1000 just isn’t what it was 20 years ago…