Maybe I am a bit loony, but here I am in Winthrop, Washington at Sun Mountain Lodge where I am attending a weekend ski/yoga retreat.  Attending for a change!  The focus is cross country skiing (I will be having daily ski lessons so that I can improve on my overall speed and various x-country skiing techniques) and YOGA!  I just went from 70 degrees in India to 12 degrees in Winthrop, Washington!   Though I just got back from India on Tuesday and taught my full schedule of yoga classes on Wednesday and Thursday this week, I am ready to go.  I need to be here! For some reason, I haven’t suffered from jet lag.  Maybe because when I got home on Tuesday, I was so dead tired from the 19 hour flight and 6 hours of layover time in the Amsterdam airport, that I slept for about 12 hours.  That 12 hours of sleep was the most delicious sleep I have ever had!  Just to give you an idea of how dog-tired I was, get this: I laid down on the Delhi Airport floor and slept for about an hour, using my bag as a pillow.  Trust me, you have to be pretty tired to do that!

I am thinking about Professor Rana Singh.  He came to give us a lecture on Sacred Geography  in Varanasi on my last day in India.  He is a very articulate, charismatic man.  He asked,  “Ah, Varanasi!  When you see my city, what do you see?”  No one answered.  No one would dare say what they saw.  So he answered for us, “Yes, Yes…You see filth, poverty, beggars!  Disgusting!…if you only look with these eyes! Yes, if you see Varanasi and India with this vision, you will never want to come back…BUT if you look with this other set of eyes (he taps his forehead!) you will see pure hearts, spiritual wealth, the happiest people on earth!  Beauty everywhere! The most fascinating place on earth!”  How wise of Professor Rana Singh!  Yes, I was able to use my second set of eyes and capture the beauty of India.  You can see it in the photos. Now, I want to bring this vision more and more into my everyday life.

Back to Winthrop.  I am blogging at Sun Mountain Lodge.  My roommate Bev is asleep and tossing and turning in her bed. I am sure I am annoying her.  I word process super fast BUT I learned to keyboard on an old fashioned manual typewriter many many years ago, so my fingers hit the keys HARD.  My fingers make a racket.  Most of the letters on my keyboard are smoothly eroded plain white chips.  Letters have dissolved to nothing.

We had a vigorous yoga session this evening, followed by two hours of relaxation, followed by appetizers and drinks (and a silly game where we had to find out “who knows the first two lines of Moby Dick” and “Who has two tattoos” and “Who has more than two piercings”..please don’t play this game at my 30th high school reunion!).  I did my duty and schmoozed and met the other women!  Great group of women gathered here! A large group of 55 women! I met an oncology nurse  and a woman with new cochlear implants in both ears.  The implants don’t work very well so she was reading my lips.  I noticed her earlier in my yoga class.  She didn’t hear the cue to get out of shavasana and stayed on her back while the rest of us chanted OM. I was amazed she didn’t hear the OM as it was quite loud.  I wondered why the teacher didn’t try to let her know it was time to get up. Finally, after everyone was getting up, I gave her a nudge and she got up, blushing, clearly embarrassed.  Well, during schmooze-hour, we reconnected and I found out she is a pediatric neurologist.  Wendy.  I introduced her to the oncological nurse and slipped away to my room.  Great people on this retreat, but I am feeling tired and so off to be on my own.

Ok, I will leave  you with some photos from the drive here. Beautiful Washington State!! Fresh snowfall yesterday! We left at 7 pm and got here around noon!  Steven’s Pass was already full of skiers and snow boarders.  It was 0 degrees at the pass (altitude 4056 feet).  These are all taken from the road.  Fresh snowfall!

My  prize photo: note the wisp of cirrus cloud!