Big Sur or bust

Some encounters at (and near) Esalen during last week's yoga retreat:

1) The fasting quasi-resident German who, while he was still wasting away, joined the workshop for a few days, just in time to protest both the use of yoga mats (“I don’t like plastic”), and the much needed fly strips, an attempt to thin the steadily rising swarm inside our yoga practice room (“I simply cannot abide by that. What did those flies ever do to you?” Aside from landing on me in the most annoying places during all the difficult poses, not really all that much... )

2) The elephant seals whose barks echoed along the beach and up the cliffs as the males slammed their thousands of pounds of blubber into each other in their annual mating ritual.

3) The all-women’s erotic dance yoga class where we learned to “shake your tailbone up and down and feel more like a girl.”

4) The cliffs basking in morning light. Every day was simply stunning.

5) My friend, “call me JC. Those really are my initials, you know." A burly guy with tattoos and tales of hard living and massively dysfunctional families (“Addictoholics” he said, “all of us. Addicted to anything and everything."). This wasn't his virign yoga voyage. In fact he had met his girlfriend at a prior Esalen yoga retreat (although when he retold the circumstances of their cute meet in front of her at dinner he managed to throw every single detail of the story into dispute). This JC didn’t take anyone or anything too seriously, including himself (or anyone else). I tried to position my mat near his, this “token Australian” who once was an actual American cowboy, to ensure, if nothing else, that I got a good laugh during class. And as a bonus, he paid enough attention to manage partner work (unlike the fasting German who on the first day of the retreat tried to argue with me about where the top of my hip bones actually were; he, having never studied anatomy and having ignored that morning's lecture on anatomy, was convinced that they were somewhere near the bottom of my ribcage).

6) An observer as I sat down to write in the cafeteria one afternoon.

7) The yogic instructions: “Squeeze the block between your legs, hard,” the teacher yelled at us one afternoon. “Squeeze harder. Imagine it is President Bush’s head.”

8) A glimpse at some migrating monarchs.

9) The naked guy who lay on a massage table as he played his didgeridoo into an empty bathtub for all the spectators to hear and then contemplate, meditate, or simply fall asleep. The concert lasted for over an hour. Hrmmrmmmrmmmrmmm...

10) The windy day that Rummy resigned when I tried to go to the beach with my Esalen roommate. A cold front skipping along the coast blasted us with waves and sand.