What I hope:

I hope to feel the dew collect along my collarbones and arms in the rice paddy fields of Bali as the sun reaches up, evoking the promise of today.

I hope to ride my bike through streets laden with the stories of thousands embedded within them.

I hope to marvel at the work of our Earth; lush greenery polluted with the fragrance of rain and soil, land and forests littered with flora and fauna—the ultimate permeable magic, the holy footprint of our Mother.

I hope to sit atop a mountain, or cliff, or a grassy peak and let the landscape consume me—the microcosm into the macrocosm—letting the wide, expansive, abysmal horizon devour me.  

I hope to smell roses—native roses lunging toward the sky, wild and unruly, adorning themselves with painful thorns and irrevocable beauty in one fell swoop; a metaphor for the unwavering woman.

I hope to be surrounded by lavender; hundreds of foliage so potent and persuasive, a paradise so holy all you can do is fall to your knees in a prayer of quiet resolution.

I hope to be enclosed in a small sphere of sound—a theatre housing reverberations and intricacy of echo and air and movement, taking our heads, unraveling them, and lifting them to the ceiling. I hope the hairs stand tall on the back of my neck.

I hope to always know my home, and that, to come home, is to be still wherever I am in any frame of time; the pause, the exhale, the stillness—that is my meditation. No need to try or attempt at the favorite identity of the ego; the doer, the excel-ler, the spiritual one.

 No need for false refuges any longer. 

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