The bright yellow leaves of fall fell from the trees, and the weather turned from warm to crisp chilling out the evening air so much that one was inclined to shiver. We decided to follow suit. We left our home in Aspen, and the namesake, nearly naked, Aspen trees, for places that promised heat and humidity and languages created from symbols we could not even recognize.
Thailand is a place that is beyond anything I have known. There are parts of a known universe – the climate feels like Hawaii, I have eaten their food and even practiced the ancient style of bodywork that bears the country’s name, but beyond that, the curly style of the Thai alphabet and the sounds that come from the curious and courteous populous are completely foreign.
There is complete chaos outside on the streets and such a relative calm within the confines of the Amanpuri Resort where we relax on the beach, searching out a cloud in the blue sky and digging our feet in the sand.
We are attended to by throngs of eager staff who greet us with a cheerful “Swadee Ka” everywhere we go bringing their hands together into a prayer position in front of their chest, bowing and lowering their eyes. I find myself doing the same; the custom comes easily to me from the “Namaste” spoken and hands together in prayer at the end of each yoga class I teach or take.
My husband and I awoke here in Thailand on Monday with our heads still full of the clouds we were flying over since Friday night.
Sunday, it seems, never happened.
We slept through it hovering over the earth at 35,000 feet and lost it completely due to the 13-hour time difference between Colorado and Thailand.
Sunday in the Sky: it was full of dreams and disasters (I always dream of dying while flying strangely), turbulence and transfers.
What would have happened on that fateful lost Sunday? Is that the day I might have stopped thinking and talking about all my big ideas and I would have started doing something about them? Was it on that lost Sunday that I was going to make the connections I have been wanting to make? Is that the day my forlorn friends would decide to let go of that imaginary space that has been keeping us apart, would the resentment and judgment that we have held for each other have disappeared on the one day that didn’t actually exist in my lifetime?
The day that was lost in the clouds?
Is it possible my family would have figured out a way to find financial security on Sunday?
Is that the day the Japanese agreed to stop slaughtering dolphins or the day that little girls in Thailand, Cambodia and India were freed from the horrors of sex slavery?
Maybe I missed the binding agreement where all the nations of the world readily agreed that climate change was real and that we would all take drastic steps to reduce this evitable warming…
Were zoo animals, journalists and other innocent creatures in captivity freed?
Or, maybe I just slept through another day when I would have been dreaming - whether I was high in the sky or sitting on the earth, awake or asleep - surrounded by my ideas and hopes and my desire to change the world for good, but with the same foggy jet-lagged feeling keeping it from happening.
Maybe.
