Food Poisoning and Paradise

Home. As a creepy crawly creature of habit, I love me some home-style predictability and routine.

Since the trip summary in paragraph style would end up a thousand scrolls long, I’ll make a list:

1. Disconnecting was good. We did some Group Therapy, since apparently I’m not the only one with tech-addictions. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought, maybe because I knew everything was in great hands.

3. This was the Most Beautiful and Romantic place I could have imagined.

4. I missed my hubby terribly. Especially since I couldn’t talk to him and especially since it was painfully romantic and especially because it was my birthday.

2. There’s a whole scorpion story from the Costa Rica retreat that I won’t go into right now, but let’s just say that I met my demon last year. And apparently he has cousins in Mexico.

5. Food poisoning. Didn’t I just throw up my own leg last month? Here we go again… and the eve of my birthday. At first I was feeling rather philosophical about it… like, “Wow, there must be something I really need to leave in my 37th year. I’m ‘purging’ so that I can meet this new year empty and clean.” But no, it was just some bad cheese.

6. Along with the food poisoning, Thursday night was hurricane-like windy. My Most Beautiful and Romantic room was transformed into a whirlwind of flying dirt, leaves, gauzy curtains (which were actually the walls), and whatever loose papers and clothes I hadn’t pinned down in the room. The mosquito netting around the bed was alternately blowing around, knocking over the kerosene lanterns, and engulfing me like a giant spider web (think delusional mummy in a bad 1940s horror film after a couple of cocktails in a wind storm. That was me, minus the cocktails.) This was all in the middle of the night, darker than my deepest secrets, in between what we affectionately now call Toilet Chatturungas (I don’t think that needs any more explanation).

So happy to get home, swearing I’ll never go anywhere again (after NYC and then this – it’s a lot for a delicate flower like me… we don’t take to travel easily).

And yet… now I have an opportunity to go to Asilomar for a week with Havi Brooks. Last minute, totally spontaneous, personal invitation…. what to do? Stay tuned…

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