Writers' Retreat Day 7 - Full Circle

In Taos, it is impossible to decide which time of day is most beautiful.

The sun kisses me softly awake as it has every morning in this precious enclave, caressing me and then nudging me gently from slumber. I rise to feel the warmth of the hundred year wood floor on my bare feet, timbers that seem to radiate heat even through the cool of the night.

In the stillness of dawn, the butterflies and grasshoppers rest motionless on the sagebrush, drying the dew on their wings in the sun’s first gentle rays.

Then the hummingbirds flit from their nests, seeking the sweet nectar they must sip to float, buzz and flutter from yellow to purple bloom.

Soon the striking black-and-white magpies call out to one another and dive from tree to tree in their mystical mating dance.

Later the clouds make shadow patterns over the mesas, chasing one another across the surface of the high desert. They might thicken and team over the mountains, crowding into gray clusters and thundering a warning as they approach to deliver a brief afternoon rain shower followed by an impossibly vibrant rainbow.

In epilogue, the sun commences its daily descent, splaying orange then red, pink and finally lavender beams of light across the landscape; across my eager face.

On a cloudless night, the stars twinkle on their black velvet backing like diamonds and the Milky Way arcs across the sky in a spray of thick diamond dust.

In Taos, it is impossible to determine where you end and the world begins.

We have basked in the light of this place and let it seep through our cracks until we were ready to throw open ourselves to it.

We have bathed in the waters and springs of this earth and had its dust caked upon our soles.

We have heard the whisper of the wind, beckoning us to listen to its songs and carry forth its wisdom.

We have lost ourselves, but found something truer than who we thought we were when we arrived.

And like links in a chain, we have joined one to another to the next and strengthened the bonds that unite these seemingly separate parts into a circular whole.

In Taos one is completed, as we have been, forged whole by sunshine and shadow, water and dust, solitude and sisterhood, laughter and tears, silence and sound.

We who have come to Taos lost, asleep, broken or afraid find we have made – together and alone – a most sacred journey.

Like this reverent place in its perfect cycle, we have come full circle.

Indelibly linked, yet now physically separate, we walk out from our circle’s edge, expanding it from every point in every direction. Healed where we did not realize we were broken, we emerge into the world.

Now, our connections hold fast, sealed by the whispered wisdom of one another and a force greater than ourselves. Now, at long last, we return to live in the once abandoned sanctuaries of our newly opened hearts.