Day 3: April 14

Thursday. I forgot to mention yesterday that one of my favorite blokes, Yoga Mark Jones, picked me up at the airport. Unfortunately, he informed me that the dates for the trek were off by one day, so I would not have a day of rest in between the trek and my Consciousness Retreat, which means I can’t use that day to plan, so I’d better do it now. I’m the kind of person who might freak out initially when I hear bad news like this but then, because of my understanding of the Three Principles, I fairly quickly seem to go into resignation, then into acceptance, and then it’s just a question of getting down to business and taking care of it. So I ended up spending most of the day planning for my “A Deeper Exploration into Consciousness” retreat. Because I never have conducted a retreat like this before, I figured I needed to do some pretty stringent planning. I had done a bunch of work on it before, but it all got lost along with my notebook. So I began again. Unfortunately, too, I had tried to go to bed fairly late on purpose, but I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning, unable to get back to sleep. I finally fell back to sleep around 5 A.M. and slept until 6:30. But I did not feel in good shape after sleeping only a few hours. It’s difficult to concentrate on something like planning when I feel like I’m operating our of a fog and can barely keep my eyes open. By the middle of the day I had no choice but to take a 20 minute nap, which helped some.

The other interesting thing is I started my day off with the beautiful walk up to the lighthouse, and by the time I got down I could already feel my legs start to hurt. This walk is usually a piece of cake, but it is mostly uphill for about 40 minutes, and since I moved from Vermont to Florida where everything is so flat I discovered I have lost most of my walking up and down leg muscles, and my three-day trek in the mountains begins in a couple of days! I’m trying not to think future, here, but uh oh, I may be hurtin’.

A few people attending the various events have started to trickle in, and it is really wonderful to see them again.