Sabbath

Sometimes 'weekends' need to be a long sabbath and that's it.

After an extremely long and surprisingly stressful week at work, my weekend (Tuesday and Wednesday) needed to be a time to decompress, sleep, get the kink out of my neck and stop my eye from twitching. I'd say that's pretty ambitious.

So I skipped Quizzo on Monday (I know, shock, I actually skip Quizzo. I love it dearly but I was exhausted and in pain and didn't want to use my brain) to go to bed early and get rather intimate with a tube of Ben-Gay. That may have sounded weirder than I meant but I'm leaving it in. My blog, dammit. Mine. I haven't been sleeping well, as when I go to bed my room is a sauna but around 2:30am it is more fridge-like so there is a lack of consistency that is necessary to get to that blissful REM state.

My friend Katherine and I decided to abandon downtown Asheville on Tuesday and high tail it to the hills; Hot Springs to be exact. We spent most of the day laying in the cooling waters of the French Broad; small rapids doubled as cooling jets on our skin and we considered it a success when we both got goosebumps in August. Awesome. Perfect amount of sun and wind and water for a day.

(Katherine and her 8-month pregnant belly and the pretty heat rock she found to give Andy, her husband. A "Hey I played in a river all day but I got you a pretty rock" sort of present.)

We got back into town around 4, enough time to take a quick nap and shower before I drove south to Brevard and the Cradle of Forestry in Pisgah National Forest. I met Jonathan at the Ranger Station and hopped in the infamous VW and we drove up to the parking lot for Mt. Pisgah where we made dinner, sipped wine and watched the sun set over the Smokies.

We had great plans to do a night hike up Pisgah but a big bowl of pasta and two glasses of merlot will do wonders to hiking ambition. Instead we talked til the moon was setting and pulled out the pop-top mattress and laid it on the ground to look at the stars, which took up every spot in the sky. Jonathan has a computer program that will show the exact night sky based on coordinates and so we were able to identify constellations I've never known. I fell in love with Vega last night. It was cool enough for a fleece and when we finally went to bed around 3 the sleeping bags were necessary warmth. Oh blissful altitude. Wednesday morning brought a brunch at the overlook for the Cradle of Forestry, a meal including coffee, pancakes and, of course, the Diane Rehm show. I'd say it was the best Sabbath I've had in recent memory. How I love my times to live in kairos.(the Cradle of Forestry made me think of ESF and want to shout out to the foresters I didn't know and the forestry classes I didn't take. But approximation is a powerful thing from 14 hours and five years away)
(There was a vernal pool full of bull frog tadpoles. I loved the self-importance of their world)