Back from the ONSEN!! If you get it, you get it, if you don't --- go put your clothes back on & take a shower!!

The simplicity of the rituals of water......visibly drawing out the roughness from the edges of my taunt nerves & replacing it with a hidden smile just waiting to explode if given the slightest provocation.

Who would think loosing myself could be so hard. From the moment I came here my mind keeps dragging me back to thoughts, speculation, the steady plodding hammer of chiding necessities.

But it all seems inconsequential when I'm breathing in white cypress & submerging myself in a tinder-dry wave of heat. My body is a canvas of shining droplets, the intensity of the heat drives me into the floor -- for when you're lying flat you can't fall any further but sink into a world of dizzying pulses pushing you deeper & deeper into yourself.

And when your lungs are bursting with dry burning air and drops of sweat trace paths down your arms & legs creating pools and trickles, you stumble out & drop into water so cold your breath catches in a way that grabs you around the throat.

Breathing deeper & deeper till you think it's not possible for your lungs to expand any further -- but they do and do and do. Then it's there...the impossible instant where exhaling ends & the instinct of taking another breath escapes you altogether.

My only connection to reality is the beating of my heart that strangely I can only feel in the tips of my fingers & toes. And in that moment I can't help but be terribly impressed with my ability to have mentally flatlined 100%. There evolves nothing in the way of traceable thoughts and words but I am instead full of ridiculous notions and senses.

I desperately want to be a tiny bubble of air trapped along my submerged skin. Growing, expanding & waiting for inevitable journey from the cold surface & contact the blasting heat of the world. I'm overloaded with a deranged & overcoming sense of beauty that I can only imagine is infantile -- finding amusement & a curious acceptance of beauty in every sphere of movement, sound & color.

Outside naked people milling should, by all means, remain naked, calm & undisturbed by the heaviness that comes with an existance in eternal textile bondage. Gangly naked legs & plump jello hips all at peace, beautifully released for their daily constraints. Tiny toddlers grasping rocks & drunkenly smiling as their wobbly legs step into the, not too distant memory & familiarity of water. White haired matriarchs sighing, whispering & easing their burdens into an enveloping steamy weightlessness.

I'm suspecting I'm not the only one who feels like we have all just come home?

Out here I'm embarrassingly giddy with the simplicity & extent of my composure. No reason to move, no appointment or attendance. No beginning & no end. Past present & future just floated off in the section of sky allotted me right here. MY section of autumn sky.

But before I can abandon all inhibitions & float downstream thinking mermaid thoughts, composing my epitaph & vowing an aquatic existence, I drag myself out -- Back to time, space & matter.

......Until I'm at the onsen again