Tag Archives: slow travel

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I’ve been lucky to have stayed with great people during my journey. I suppose to say “I’ve been lucky” is false, for most everyone who belongs to the WarmShowers network is an understanding, sympathetic, and generous host, often going beyond what any rational person’s expectations of kindness and hospitality might be. One might think that after experiencing such fantastic hospitality at host’s place after host’s place that I would have adjusted my expectations accordingly, but I never do; it always yields such sweet surprises to expect so little and receive so much. I would imagine too it would be more difficult to play the gracious, thankful guest if I just assumed so much to be normal behavior.

I’m currently writing this at Ten Thousand Waves, and I am sitting here outside, in a lounge chair by the communal bath: a hot water pool with a cold one next to it separated by a low wall which one might hop or slide over from one to the other. After sitting in the hot water bath for ten minutes, maybe longer, getting nice and cooked (and very relaxed), taking a dip in the cold water bath is marvelously refreshing. It’s a frightful shock as well, and wonderfully stimulating, especially if one sits for about an equal amount of time as one had sat in the hot water pool. Most people don’t do this however, and spend little more than fifteen or twenty seconds partly submerged in the chill of the cold water. These persons’ experience of the baths is resultantly hollow and lacking by comparison. Unfortunate for them, I guess. But this strikes me as so typical of the 20th/21st century (and other centuries too, but I wasn’t quite alive then so can’t comment, or I could, but then this would turn into some sort of long essay about the aristocracy of centuries past, and how as we’ve moved into the twentieth that aristocracy developed into the rich, upper class which the ever growing middle class wished (and wishes still!) to emulate, and then there’s the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” thing, and yadda yadda yadda), developed nation attitude. So many of these people want all the comfort, warmth, and luxury available to them, but don’t want the slightest bit of discomfort to get in the way of that. They want to be coddled, and wrapped in silk undies and lingerie, and sleep on their thousand thread-count sheets with their 900-fill down duvet. Life to them, I should think, is accordingly felt less acutely. It is a thin attenuation, and no matter the width of their televisions, the suppleness of their automobile’s suspension, or the loft of their pillows they lie their heads on, nothing can broaden that stripe. The easier one’s life becomes the more one expects it to be so, and the harder it is to willingly insert hardship or difficulty into it.

Anyway, the spa is located up in the mountains, a few hundred feet higher in elevation than Santa Fe proper. Lounging in the pool one’s view is an assemblage of Piñon Pines, Cottonwoods, Maples and Oaks which grow just beyond the boundaries of the property. Up above, nothing but a big, mottled, blue and white sky, the white bits mutating, always in flux, changing shape, drifting by lazily like manta rays in the sea, or aspen pollen in the mountains. The experience is one of complete luxury. I’ve never experienced it before and I suspect it will be some time before I do so again.

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05/20

Tomorrow will be two months on the road. That’s something.

No, it isn’t anything.

It’s something.
But it’s not everything.
Glory, glory, glory! Fucking New Mexico! Glory, glory, glory!

The light. The clarity. Brilliant. Unimaginable. Unfathomable, until one arrives. The whole world in crystalline sharpness. Like being dropped into a single pearl of dew that may or may not be clinging to a blade of grass or a spider’s web—it could be freely drifting through the air for all I can imagine—and peering out through your suddenly liquid, spherical window-wall and everything exterior of it glimmering and percolating brilliantly, like all the constituent parts of the world have been stored inside a champagne bottle and then shaken up, and the cork popped and existence exploded everywhere eventually forming the state of New Mexico, or at least this particular part of it. Spaces long and wide and vast, undulating, slanting. Low-growing sagey plants, prickly, and loofah-like; pine trees stuck in the ground like toothpicks. Dandelions are so much smaller than these, like me, but tower over the ants that crawl among their green stems and fronds and yellow caps, like I crawl across this landscape, over these mountains and plateaus, through the forests of tall trees, and down through valleys narrow and wide, alone.

What is it like to be an ant, I wonder. To be nothing on its own, but only defined by the colony which it is a part. I wonder what it is like to be a colony of ants, defined by its individual members all together, working harmoniously as one single organism in the same way as a human body is a single organism made of its individual blood cells, bone cells, muscle cells, nerves, hormones, gut bacteria and on and on….
Sometimes one stumbles across the right person at the right time.
But back to New Mexico whose mountains run along in unbroken chains like clasped hands. And there are creeks and rivers too, that race towards whatever it is they race towards, the sound of their waters splashing among the rocks like laughter, like the arc of a cliff swallow, like kids playing marbles on a city sidewalk in front of some row homes in, say, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. They wind down slope and across field, a ribbon of shimmering sunlight wrapped around a gift that one can not seem to break into, whose wrapping paper can not be torn, nor seams untaped. The signs, as invisible as they may be, read plainly, “LOOK BUT DO NOT TOUCH.”