Blessed

If you had asked me last week, I would have said, Yes, as in marked with blood. On Tuesday I woke up at 3:34 am to discover that the prior day’s salmon was not merely disagreeing with my stomach, but instead engaged in a desperate, all-out brawl to swim upstream. The salmon was victorious, and I was left wondering if my Scandinavian ancestry had suddenly expired. Indeed, prior weeks had confirmed my unsuitability for any sort of Viking pursuit: I had squealed in fright at (a) the vibrating notification unit at a restaurant (where, I would very much like to point out, I ate bison meat); and (b) the feathers of a pillow that had burst in the dryer.

It makes sense, then, that my early-morning Battle Over the Sink was a summons by no less a power than Odin himself, that I might provide a worthy sacrifice for the vernal equinox. He got five pounds.

I spent the rest of the week on the sofa, which allowed me to catch up on some reading as well as question the rhetorical exigence of “Oprah and Gayle’s Big Adventure.” One of the books I read was Deepak Chopra’s excellent The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire. The book’s subtitle is “Harnessing the Power of Coincidence,” and my reading of it (a gift from a friend) was itself a coincidence. Exactly one year had passed since my first trip to Los Angeles.

The real benefit of being laid low, however, was getting to spend a bunch of time with Jenifer before her Big Trip. As I write this, she is in San Francisco awaiting her next flight, to New Zealand. For the next six weeks she’ll be teaching at Hot Yoga of New Zealand, a new studio in Nelson (an artistic community home to the One Ring). This is a key turning point in her career, a blessing just beginning to unfold. I'll be joining her for awhile after her stint is finished. In the meantime, I have a script to write.