Boulder Interlude

I wrote this while visiting Boulder, Colorado. A friend lined up two days of clients for me to see. It’s fun to be a traveling expert! Spending time in a totally different setting is utterly refreshing, and having hours to myself is soooo relaxing. I’d really love to write stories about my adventures with the clients, but that just isn’t cool. Confidentiality, you know. Suffice it to say that each of us is a universe unto ourselves, with a history and habit and interpretation of events unique to us. I am in awe of the wisdom and the pain hidden within every person. We are an awe-inspiring species.

June 29, 2005

For 12 hours, my home is an old schoolbus named Quicksilver. A more apt name might be “Parked Silver”. Quicksilver waits patiently in the side yard, offering refuge for guests and kids on college breaks. I see my clients in the treatment room in the house, then retire to the bus for sleep.

I’m delighted with my quaint, quiet lodgings. The bed is cozy. The table is adorned with a vase of glistening red roses for my benefit. To my surprise, the bookshelf holds the same anatomy book I’m studying at home! Tonight I studied the many layers of skin. The little illustrations of layered skin cross-sections look like drawings of layer cakes. Weird.

Next I dove into a book that set off a chain reaction of explosions in my psyche. It’s called “Maps to Ecstasy” by Gabrielle Roth. Wow. In a nutshell - a paltry, deficient nutshell – she describes archetypal movement and dance as one way to leave behind all hurts, habits, patterns and concepts, and find freedom in the stillpoint within the center of the soul. Her stories of discovering Life in the pure moment, primarily through dance, are enrapturing. The exercises she suggests are intriguing, and FUN!

How can I lie in a schoolbus and read about dancing?!? I just wanna get up and dance til I lose my poise, dance til I forget who I am, dance til I remember who I am, and then dance as an expression of my soul! Quicksilver the bus would probably tumble over, though, if I started that kind of action. It’ll have to wait.

Sleep eludes me so far. In this metal shelter, even the rustle of windfallen leaves on the roof is audible. Every so often “thud-scamper-scamper” a squirrel leaps from a tree to the bus roof. Then “scurry-scurry-scamper” it does whatever squirrels do on top of buses in the night, and leaps back to the tree.

Endless muted traffic flow on the nearby freeway reminds me of the ocean, minus the rhythmic organization. I close my eyes, relax, and breathe audibly in the back of my throat, breathing like the ocean waves. I’m dancing inwardly, slowly, like an ocean wave. Dancing to sleep in a schoolbus.
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