LET IT GO, SUMMER EDITION

Sweetpea has been here for several days, as we prepared for our company---simply by chance, our Best Man and his own Dearie (our friends Ben and Lil) are coming through town for a few days, exactly thirty years and one day since we all stood together on my parents’ shady lawn for our vows. 

Amongst all the flurry of cleaning and stashing away and making of Peach Tea and Paminna Cheese, she and I took a break for Yoga, in which she takes a fresh bathmat from the closet, installs herself beneath the huge glass-topped dining table with us each a pair of unconnected headphones, her little strumming-lyre, a pot of "tea" and a new addition:  three pink silk leis laid on the floor for "holes in the ground." (Which I later learned are to pour your worries and tiredness and anything else into and let it go). 

I'm too tall for the enclosure, and so I sit right outside on my own mat, closing eyes and touching fingers and humming the OMMMM at the indicated times, with my ears hushed by headphones connected properly to nowhere through a gaudy plastic goblet.  (And yes, I still sit even in my easy chair in Lotus Position sometimes---it's just comfortable to me).    Quite the useful and restful meditative time. 

And sometimes with my eyes closed and the whirr of fans and ear-swish of those modern versions of seashells and the tinkle of small golden notes in the air like perfume, I could swear I was kneeling in an ancient tea ceremony, with the faraway tones of a shamisen.

Would that all life’s troubles could be channeled away by a simple flip of pink flowers and a dollar-store glass.