A weekend of magic and dandelion fluff

Grace and I got to Kripalu on Friday afternoon and almost immediately headed down to the labyrinth.  This is a quiet, holy place, a maze I’ve walked before.  You follow the winding path into the center where there is a post that says “may peace prevail on earth” in several languages.  Grace walked in front of me and after a few minutes she turned to me and said, “does this really lead into that middle?”  You could see the post in the center, with offerings of beads and buddhas at its base, but the path wound around and around and it did indeed seem hard to believe we’d ever get there.  “Trust the path, Grace,” I said without thinking about it.  And she did.  And I did.  Once in the middle, I turned to find this:
Later friends arrived, and Grace met Abby, the daughter of my dear friend Denise.  They hit it off and spent the weekend giggling and exploring.  Other friends from the ether who were there were Lisa, Christine, and Sarah.  The sessions with Dani were extraordinary.  I’d gladly travel the world over just to be in her presence.  The fact that Katrina was there, assisting, just made it all that much more magical.  It gave me goosebumps when, over the course of two days, Dani shared many quotes that I love dearly.  Two of them I’ve written about before: Pain engraves a deeper memory (Anne Sexton) and You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way (E.L. Doctorow).

In the afternoon, Abby, Grace, Denise and I walked down to the lake that you can see from Kripalu’s hilltop location.  At the shore of the lake the girls played in the sand and we sat and watched and talked, our hearts expanding.
Everybody’s eyes opened a little this weekend, I think.  I imagine that Denise, like me, was hearing Dani’s words about paying attention in her head.  We noticed a black turtle sunning himself on a log in the swamp.  The girls blew fat white dandelions and the fluff floated around us like snow, or like grace.  We stopped to gaze at the word “love,” spelled out in little rocks on a large flat boulder.
At dinner Katrina joined us and I felt again the immense comfort and gratitude I’ve felt in her gentle, keenly intelligent presence since the first time we met, a not-coincidence that altered the current of my life.  After putting Grace and Abby to sleep – to their overwhelming delight, together – Denise, Lisa and I sat around and talked.  Lisa is far more extraordinary than I’d even imagined, which is saying something, since I was deeply impressed already.  The three of us talked as though we’d known each other forever.  We covered writing, cancer, lecherous grade school principals, navigating pre-puberty with daughters, the joys and challenges of younger sons, twitter, and more writing, writing, writing.

Yesterday afternoon I went, unenthusiastically, for a long run.  I ran by the Charles River and one small part of my route winds through the woods.  I was alone in there today, running, feeling tired, achey, weak.  The wind came up then and suddenly I was surrounded by a cloud of dandelion fluff.