Countdown
We’re ready for Christmas.
The only thing that remains is to order the shrimp for Christmas Eve, select the cheese, prepare the feast. My mother’s old bundt pan arrived yesterday, and I’ll use it to make pineapple upside down cake. It was my father’s favorite–a nice remembrance for Christmas dinner.
Our Christmas present won’t be under the tree-it will be boarding a jetBlue flight to Phoenix two weeks from today. We’re heading off Arizona for a much-needed and deserved vacation. We’ll plan each day when we roll out of bed. Some days we won’t roll much past the patio-just lounge, read, and breathe in deep the desert air.
Arizona is a favorite spot – if I hadn’t ended up with Lyme disease we probably would have retired there. But the intense sunlight and heat would be too much for me, now.
We have a few places lined up for a visit – Kartchner cave, some favorite places to eat, and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. On the way from Tucson I’ll stop and hike out to the petroglyphs I used to visit on retreat. The ancient figures of bighorn sheep running towards distant peaks was a reminder of my spiritual journey-running hard towards something, faraway, unseen, but sensed.
I could also relate to the spirals scratched into the boulders-the endless circling back to relearn and revisit and encounter over and over again.
The retreats never settled the issue of the stronger call–yearning for stillness and yearning for distant peaks.
