On a sunny morning. She’s sitting on the bench on her partially shaded balcony, in Padmasana. The sun is still too low to toast her skin, but a soft fragrant breeze of late spring flicks through the fine hair on her forearms, and the sweet riffling of the warm air on her cheeks stirs old memories of home. Back when the inevitable rap of adulthood and the dullness of routine, obligations and compromises didn’t weigh her down; a time and place where the unforgiving fist of life spared her from the constant kneading, pulling and stretching her thin. A middle-aged woman now, her imagination brought up vivid visualizations of herself as an elderly woman, and she couldn’t help wondering what was simmering for her down the road; what if life was reserving for her hardship and suffering, beyond what she had already gone through. Nothing chilled her deeper than the thought of becoming physically or mentally disabled by disease, becoming dependent on other people in her waning years, loosing her freedom. Her biggest pride and joy lay in her self-reliance, and how she had been able to cope and thrive, -well into her forties- struggling with ADHD and clinical anxiety, coming to terms with a life of relative simplicity and content. She’d left the family nest to experience the world in her early twenties and she was more than confident she could trust her self-sufficiency and hard work on any day. She had a deep sense of her own humanity, her limitations and potentials; her strength of will, her stubbornness were remarkable.

She stood up and walked into the kitchen through the sliding door, leaving momentarily the peace and quiet of her morning sanctuary amid a well of surrounding windows, like the gazes of dozens of Peeping Toms; steel and glass eyes. The cat was comfortably sitting on the windowsill – her favourite spot- looking out, welcoming the warm sunlight sifted by the tall buildings in the horizon. She put the kettle on and waited for the water to boil, feeling a bit lightheaded, eager, anticipating her first cup of tea of the day, before becoming dunked in meetings and work calls scheduled days prior. She prepared it the way she always did. Steeping the teabag for a bit too long until the degree of bitterness she loved, never extracting the small mesh sack from the cup, then added two shy teaspoonfuls of chamomile and fireweed honey, no milk, but she tossed in a pinch of ginger chips she herself sliced and roasted the night before. On her way back outside, her lips touched the rim of the cup, barely getting wet with the infusion, which was enough to send a thrust of dopamine straight from her upstairs, trickling down to her sweet, slim and delicate figure, flooding her with all of those tenderizing, warm sensations. She felt full of life, then drew two small sips before she made it back to the balcony. She sat the cup and saucer on the low coffee table to the side of her couch where she repositioned herself, cross-legged. Her eyes closed. A stream of memories ran awash in her head as she was trying to silence the voices that would never otherwise shut up. She had trained herself to coexist with them, let them be, welcome them like a distant relative who’s come to town from abroad; only too often. She’d tend to them as if they were the only ones paying attention to her, listening to her in her solitary life, although she knew far too well it was the other way around. 

* * *

“How many times have you tried to shift that idea in your head, make it vanish, only to see it come back as a boomerang time and time again; ever stronger?”. When she was a child, she relished laying down on her sister’s bed at the end of the day; alone, the radio on, lights out. She’d close the door so nobody would pop her bubble. She’d tune in to the waves of the local government sponsored radio station. Jazz and Gospels, world music, Bossa Nova, Cuban boleros, European electronic music, Flamenco and Latin American folklore would play with almost no publicity in between songs. With her eyes closed, she used to quench her thirst for peace and quiet in the middle of queasy episodes of anxiety. The solitude and the darkness, her two sobering best friends. The music was soothing, like a fluffy cushion for her soul to lay back on, as she witnessed her wounds being licked and tended to by invisible hands; gashes she never had the conscience or the bandwidth to understand their why, their where or their when; their perpetrator or their originator never coming out into the light. They haunted her like a faceless specter in her wildest nightmares. She learned to silence them; mostly masking them them up under a veneer of normalcy and dissimulation: nervous smiles and gestures, overthinking, talking too much, and giving off a false impression of being sociable, when in reality she considered herself an introvert. But the soulful respite these intimate, short-lived, self-inflicted seclusions from the outside world procured her, was priceless, like gold dust for her soul. It dissipated all darkness ever so effectively.

Lying down on her sister’s bed, the music would play for what felt like hours, until her name was articulated by a maternal timbre travelling through the hallway of the house, reaching her sister’s bedroom. When she began to make out her name being pronounced somewhere else in the house, on top of the music, she knew somebody needed her to go run an errand. The spell was broken. As an adult, she still longs for a present-day version of her sister’s bedside radio in her dreaded anxiety-filled episodes. 

* * *

The balcony is flooding with sunlight, it faces a busy street, but from its vantage point one can see through the rows of turn-of-the-century two-story houses, their backyards erupting in shades of purple and violet, pink and mauve-white in heavy contrast against the red brick houses and the lush foliage of the silver maples, the oaks, the Norway maples, the red ashes, the honey-locusts and the European lindens, making it look like a gouache colour study. Spring lilacs, magnolias, crabapples and cherry blossoms yielding their scents. Their essence saturating the atmosphere with sweet, inebriating fragrances. In the meantime, a motorbike chokes up passing by the street lined with cars parked on both sides. Eric Lapointe’s raspy voice is blasting from the outboard speakers, bouncing off the walls of the surrounding houses. A neighbour is walking her Great Dane on one side of the street and another one is coming the opposite direction with a French bulldog on a leash. The neighbourhood stray cat crosses the street behind the motorcycle and rushes to avoid the coming bulldog.

Her mind is a still river, delving in a contemplative state behind closed eyes; a serene embrace of inner calm and still thoughts. She can’t care less about the street noise. She is in a deep focused state, scanning her entire body from top to bottom. Fully aware of her limbs and her butt touching the cushioning underneath; her straightened lower back, and her shoulders, chest and neck holding up the weight of her head. Alert but relaxed. “This all shall pass”, appears in the centre of her mind’s eye, like a miniature billboard moving across the pinkish-beige canvas of her closed eyelids. “I am…, pure consciousness” goes off in her mind, and this thought makes her twitch and stretch higher on top of the last vertebrae at the base of her skull, elongating her spine. The feeling is akin to a subtle jolt of energy running across her column; an electrical rush that spreads down to her legs and arms. The tips of her toes and fingers wiggling and throbbing.

She doesn’t do this daily routine to find peace, but rather to come meet herself in the real world; to show up for herself and attune to the messy world around her: the noises, the wind, the temperature, the sensations on her body, her pain, her struggles, the unknown. She’s come to believe that the more she practices, the better tooled up she will be to handle her finicky nervous system, in turn gauging better, more balanced responses to life’s curveballs, which this time around, seem to be coming about way too often. She just wants to be better prepared. All she wants is peace, no further pretense beyond that. 

“How many times have you tried to shift that idea in your head, make it vanish, only to see it come back as a boomerang time and time again; ever stronger?” She wonders.

* * *

Mother would be cooking in the kitchen. You’d find her father just finishing the Saturday house clean up. Still with one damp rag in one hand and a glass of beer in the other. Barry White, Laura Branigan or George Benson supplying the soundtrack to this weekly ritual. She remembers so vividly the lustful feast for the senses it was to sniff the strange blend of pine-scented household chemicals, the charred beef fat roasting on the stove top, -mother’s preferred cooking surface- and the tantalizing savory ingredients swirling up in the air and twirling up her nostrils to end up hard-stamped on her brain, where she would store them, not knowing that later –decades after – she’d be digging them up: eager, desperate, melancholic, hopeful.  

An assortment of toothpick snacks adorned the dining table as if laid down as appetizers for a special occasion. Both the front and back doors were wide open, letting a warm breeze run like a runaway horse through the house. She’d make sporadic excursions to the oval dining table in the centre of the living room,  and fish an olive swimming in brine, or snatch a marinated mushroom from a bowl, then sink her upper incisors on a piece of cheese or nibble on some chewy ham cubes, to finally recede back to her bedroom, where a carnival of felt pens, chalk pastels and wax crayons were spread on the cement floor. She’d be lying flat in an army crawl position like a soldier ready to shoot, armed with colour pencils between her fingers mounting guard on top of her sketches, taking advantage of the hard floor still cooled from the overnight air conditioning. The chilling effect made her body flicker; the temperature outside a scorching 36°C in the shade.  

* * * 

The sun continues its journey through the sky like a caravan of camels along the silk road in the desert. Now her bare thighs are being kissed. The stretched, shiny skin on her knees is going from pale pink to light brown, but before it reaches a point of no return and a regrettable outcome, she silently recites a Metta prayer inside of her head: 

“May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, may I be peaceful, may I be strong and confident…, and may my practice benefit all living creatures on this wonderful place, my home, this planet… Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu Namaste.” 

She then opens her eyes, unfolds her legs, and readjusts to the ambient luminosity. Her teacup almost untouched, resting on top of the side table. She picks it up, holding the edge of the saucer, slides the screen door open and sneaks into her apartment like a burglar in the middle of the night, ready to kick off her professional schedule. 

* * *

It is now José José, “The Prince of Song” and his mix of melodramatic ballads bursting up in the living room of her childhood. Dad is on his first drink after his lunch, but it’s his third drink in total; he’s upped his game from beer to harder stuff: rum or scotch, and this will most likely stop after two more drinks, when his wife blares at him the killer look he knows all too well, and she starts her passive aggressive remarks, but by then the kids will be gone for a couple of hours, and he will probably fall asleep on the couch.

Mother is doing the dishes, there’s no dishwasher, so she washes by hand; the eldest sister is providing kitchen towel support. Everybody ate well, but likely feeling a bit bloated and sluggish after a copious meal of beef roast, glazed veggies and salad, and before that, all the toothpick snacks consumed as appetizers. She scarfed her plate so she could run to watch her afternoon TV show before her grandma called mother to remind her not to let the kids miss Catechism class. She knows the drill by heart. 

It feels funny in the pit of her stomach when mother asks her to turn off the TV and go in the shower: wash thoroughly under her arms, scrub the soles of her feet, and not to waste water. Fifteen minutes later, she is fragrant like an elderly woman looking more white than a Geisha with talcum powder under her arms. She’s walking with her sister to the Cathedral. Several cousins and other neighbourhood kids join them as they pass in front of their houses. She giggles and cracks jokes at her cousins on their way to church. Saturday afternoon catechism classes start at 4 o’clock. They take place in the courtyard of the new Cathedral still in construction. A church with imposing 80-metre-tall baroque towers which first started construction in the late 18^th century, and went through several iterations, including the whole project going on hiatus for more than a decade during the Garrido administration – a governor with socialist authoritarian inclinations that made public burnings of religious effigies, and persecution of religious people during the “Christeros war”, the trademark of his campaign to eradicate fanaticism, and instill progress based upon reason, logic and objective values.

When they arrive in the vast area under the shade of mango, tamarind tress, and gigantic rain trees, the magnificent rosy trumpets, and guayacans – the signature trees of her hometown- are blooming. Their fallen flowers adorn the floor like a thick carpet of pink and yellow. Her friends are expecting her behind the church’s main nave, a monumental building that’s open at its back, granting the children access to a blown-up, ample chamber with a majestic, vaulted ceiling. Outside, stacks of building blocks and mounds of sand and construction materials scatter the yard, in a vast area that she and her friends use as their playgrounds. They run and they hide. Meanwhile, under the trees, the chairs are arranged in circles and the teachers are struggling to gather dozens of kids around and quiet them down, so the opening prayer can be said, and the class can start. She is exalted and her heart is racing, while the catechism teachers are trying to force everybody into a meditative state. They ask the pupils to close their eyes and take three deep breaths, “in by the nose, out by the mouth” they instruct. The praying begins. 

After a few seconds resisting relaxation, the rhythmic regularity of the teacher’s whispery voice in prayer, the enticing fragrance of the trees, and the soft breeze fluttering on her cheeks makes her plunge into a kind of drunken stupor. It is 4 o’clock and, although in the shade of the magnificent trees, the ambient heat is only barely mitigated. There’s calm in the entire premises. All the teachers have managed to quiet their groups, and all the children are in an eerie stillness. Her eldest sister kicks the heel of her foot to prevent her from dozing off on her chair. 

But she is fully awake. 

Fully aware, her mind as still as a Nordic pond by a winter night.

She is drowning in gratitude. 

Back to reality.