A Changing Stream of Moments

“What is that bright light?”

I asked in a low but tilted voice, the kind that reveals a spark of resistance to change. I was sitting on a natural hot spring nestled by towering pine trees in the Sierra Mountains. I had my head leaned back on the rocks that shaped the pool, looking up at the dark sky and bright stars, reveling in the gentle rustling of the dark trees in the invisible wind. I had been enjoying the steam rising from the water to meet my face in the darkness, the sulfuric smell that allowed us to find the pool just off a trail by a gazebo. This was perfection, or so I thought.

From the back, the bright light felt like an unwanted spotlight, until my partner said:

“Turn around.”

I gasped. The moon was rising and peeking between the pine trees, sending its rays straight into the water. I became aware of the size of the pool, and the appearance of a few other couples whose faces were turned towards the moon. Everything was still. Everyone was silent. I dunked the side of my head under the water so one ear was in the air and another in the water. With the ear to the water, I heard my heart beat.   With the ear in the air, I took in the stillness. I felt my breath enlarge and contract my ribcage, and I imagined that the whole pool was expanding and contracting with my breath. This feeling then extended to the trees around me and sky above me, all breathing together like family.

This is one of those moments you live for, I thought. Part of me wished it to last forever.

Then I got the urge to get out of the water. I lifted my body and propped it by the edge of the pool, letting the moonlight add glitter to my wet body, as my lungs took in fully the scent of pine. Rather than an interruption of my earlier reverie, it felt like the response to an inner prompting, nudging me to change positions in the larger configuration of “us” to enter the next moment.

I returned to this pool in the daytime, leaning my head back again in the rocks to gaze at the changing sky.

The sky is alive, I thought. The apparent novelty of the thought struck me. My eyes attempted to capture the figures made by the clouds—the smiling faces, the bicycles, the elephants—as well as the spaces in between, the lines of deep gray between the white, the patches of blue. Then my eyes drifted shut, for just a few seconds it seemed, only to find the whole aerial scene reconfigured. Blue swatches of sky seemed now to dominate the canvas, with the white clouds moving sideways to the left all hunched together, and the gray lines all but gone.

When it was time to leave the Sierras, I felt satisfied and rested from the endless stream of worries that tend to crowd my head. Yet, walking down Broadway in Oakland just a few hours after my last soak in the natural springs, skin still soft and sulfuric smelling, I felt like covering myself up. I was still wearing a sundress and I felt naked. I took in the scent of the gas fumes and felt my throat begin to scratch. I went back home to Berkeley and dove under my bed covers, wondering how I could bring the flow of my attunement to the Sierras, which felt like an attunement to a larger self, into my bustling city life.

I woke to an overcast sky and the sound of dogs running. I grabbed my flute and walked towards Aquatic Park. I sat on a dark red picnic bench and looked across the water to the cars and trucks speeding past on Route 80 before lifting the flute to play. When I put it down, I hard the urge to turn around. A Berkeley police officer approach me. He said:

“Life is a changing stream of moments. Listening to you play the flute, with the traffic right across from the water, I realized this was one of those moments. You can wait five months breathlessly for your next vacation, or you can walk to your vacation one moment at a time. You can be happy in this moment.”

Just like that that, he was gone, and on the way home, I got to take in the joy of having been part of someone’s moment, just by following my own.