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Partly because I'm in a good place. Balanced in dynamic emotion. Eager for movement, content in my position. Full to the brim of new ideas, feelings, plans, wants. Looking forward to what will grab me, when I reach out my hands.

Partly because I don't really know what I look like these days. Content-driven, food-motivated, high-verbal, overactive imagination. Highly experienced, building new skills, stretching boundaries, embodying new comfort zones. Compassionate confrontation, emergence, sanctuary. And I'd like to see it all laid out, playing out, in front of me.

Mostly because I want to connect, and this is one way I know how to open.

The Berlin Wall Is An Almost Perfect Synaesthetic Experience

It stands in front of you. It's so tall. And so thin. Hesitantly thin, stage-prop thin. You think, I could be the one to push it over, I could take this wall down with one good shove. Heat blooms in your chest, your cheeks, smelling of raw carrot. But it looms over you -- The Wall -- stormclouds with silvery barbed-wire lining, and even though it is fragile and swaying, it's nailbed is under your feet. It pulls you into its shadow with a roar nearly subsonic and tangy with rust. You think about it holding in decades, holding back hope, holding down the city in the unstretching tug of a long scar down your back.

The Wall swells before you, absorbing light and doubt. The dignity of the Wall rears over you, equal parts stubborn pride and clear glaring humility, dense as wool felt and welcoming. The Wall says, You have pushed me over hundreds of times, and I hope you will destroy me hundreds more times, everywhere you want to grow. And then it shows you how. The Wall fluffs out its feathers, a million billowing layers of gilt and angst, the million prayers and curses rubbed onto its surface. The color rises, fills your vision as a holy mountain, coats your tongue with opals and justice. Nettle infusion and the heat off birthday candles. A winged kitten, all downy fur and needle claws and wide skylight eyes, begins raging and playing in your chest. You know you will say no untrue thing the rest of the day. You know you are in the right place.

A Prelude To All This Bathing

I love bathing. Soaking. Sweating. Steaming. I love bathing of all sorts. I love giant claw-foot cast iron tubs. I love dinner-plate cascade showerheads. I love wooden rooms with black stoves breathing the scalding perfume of forests. I love pale smooth tiled rooms veiled in curls of warm mist.

I love camping solar showers and watertank farm showers and jumping in rivers. I love exfoliating with beach sand and painting myself with mud. I love homemade salt scrubs and candlelit tubs and chromotherapy and fragrant, herb-infused water. And yes, if it's all I've got, I also love rickety prefab shower cabinets and thumpy fiberglass tubs.

And I love bathhouses. All-wood and tatami, onsen-inspired ones. Romanesque marble-and-echo ones. Mosaic bellystone ones. YMCA gymnasium ones. Hippies-on-the-beach ones. Forest retreat picture-window ones. Strip-mall imported-salt-chunk-and-plastic-seahorse ones. Sanitarium scrub-down ones. I am radically pro-bathhouse. I want more in the world.

I want you to know this, so you know where I'm coming from, when I talk about what I've been doing. I read through guidebooks and travel forums, and people are reviewing bathhouses like the opening of a new fast-food chain. I've been to bathhouses that weren't my style, and bathhouses that didn't function, but I don't believe in bad bathhouses. I'm not looking for perfect. I'm not looking for fancy. I'm not even looking for effortless. I don't mind a bathhouse that takes me an hour to find, that's older than I am, whose traditions I have to learn, whose cleaning crews aren't compulsive. I've got reams of theories about bathing and enjoying life, about health and happiness and the right to both. I want bathhouses that make people happy. I'm looking for living, vital bathhouses that are loved by their patrons, cared for by their owners, and are improving people's lives. I believe in bathhouses that work. I believe in lots and lots of bathing experiences.

And the bathing experience we're discussing right now is saunas. Because this is Scandinavia, full-on Finland, where they made up the word Sauna. So, our language is sweat and stove and stone and wood and fire and steam. For the rest of the chapter, we are all sizzle and bench and endorphin rushes and this beautiful idea of löyly (which is a word I can't pronounce, and neither can you, but I like to read it, and to hear Finnish people describe it as near-sentient steam, the soul of the sauna.)

Oh, and a word about temperature. I'm using Celsius as my sauna-heat measure, because it underscores for me the whole complete and unique tactile environment in the stove room. (I can't hear “110 degrees Fahrenheit” without thinking of that vacation in Texas, or my childhood summer egg-experiments. Too prone to hyperbole. Even (hitherto) imaginary temperatures like 180.) Celsius gives sauna heat it's own authority. So, let's just remember that 100 degrees boils water, yes? And 40 is a dangerously hot summer day.

All Kinds Of Ready!

I have a mission today! A bright, golden glowing mission that will, can only, result in lovely sighs and victory! I've got a fancy new wooly hat, and a scratchy new mitt, and you know what that means? Today I sauna!

Sauna Aitta -- Helsinki's only all-sauna, all-the-time accoutrement store!

Sky all the way to Road

As far as the horizon, and as wide as my heart, strong flowers...





































I started photographing roadkill as a kind of playful competition with this slice of awesome. Quickly though the conversation turned to speed, to distance, both physical and between species. That coyote we saw, perfect except for his raw jawbone (broken neck?) -- were we the only humans to see him? Ever? Probably the only ones to photograph him. That frog -- did the car that squished him even notice? When we move so fast, in cars, miles and air and neighbors speed past, and where are we? One biker I know says "Speed kills," and he means the Imagination, the Relation, the chance to greet a cousin before she is unrecognizable and flat.

Incubation complete!

Remember the first rechargable batteries? How the older they got, the longer you needed to recharge them? I think Compelling Inspiration is like that. The longer you live with it on the periphery, lovely to think about but not the driving core of your days, the harder it is to shine it up and warm it up til it's a perpetual energy engine. Stoke that fire or it will barely flicker forever, making no difference at all in your illumination!

No time like the present.

Sitting in simple presence with 95 others -- in the same pace of growing up, with the same concerns shaking off unhappy programming, the same undirected fervor that now is the time for something -- was a steady positioning of self-conscious sight in the lens of living today. Meeting in the woods with 560 others -- of four generations, with the same

Today I'm back from the women's herb conference, and I'm trying to polish this spark. This past month has been about settling and taking stock, a lot of internal work -- a lot of the time I doubt this "just thinking" (daydreaming, planning, remembering, hoping, fearing, wanting, avoiding, judging, justifying, narrating, actually seeing it all happen in my mind) and I have to call up patience to sit with it, still, and let this unravelling thing soften me up. Like a roast in Brother's crockpot. The meditation retreat was one thing, familiar, skill-building for its own sake. But a weekend with these women!, these herbs, this great yawning healing wellspring of magic; this is another continuum altogether. The weekend storming, in hurricane tail and drumming and honest voices, familiar in my marrow but like having my old face wiped away with snakeskin. A tipping point, I can feel something churning up in the silt of my soul, some molten thing sliding up behind me, some ladder urging me outward, upward, forward. And I'm ready to go.

No time like the present.

My dear, that thing you love, that you have always loved since you opened your eyes, that your body pulls to with the honest magnetics of trust; do that thing. Once. Today. Now.

Again.