Reset

I've been reading lots of end of 2016 Facebook posts, most with the sentiment of a big fuck you to the year. The election debacle spiraled me, and many friends, into a permanent discoloring of life. Everything read in the lens of impending doom. Despair. Fear. These held me, unsteady, throughout the fall into the shortened days.

Music tinged with loss. Bowie. Prince. Keith Emerson. A list that kept growing. The familiar and unfamiliar soundtracks of my youth, reminders, marked memories.

I needed a break. Not because the year felt like some big dismal castaway. I can trace good. Reorient and be grateful. But that doesn't diminish the ease with which I fell into bleakness. Panic.

Travel cures all, at least for me, and Nan. When we planned our annual holiday escape in June, we must have known that by December 18th, we would need little distraction, a nothingness that stills and erases. Presence could be found in Mexico, in Valladolid, on Isla Holbox.

Time erased for hours and hours. Disconnected from steady emails, mindless scrolling, information overloads. We ambled to breakfast around 9am each day--fresh fruit juices, eggs, beans, sauces. Walked back along the beach to our cute tiny place off the main stretch, a hidden small oasis, our private retreat. Time to linger on the beach, wade into bathtub temperature water, smell the sky, lose thoughts, be there.

I read out of 2016 and into 2017 journeying with Patti Smith's M Train. Words carry me back, always, if I sit long enough, and linger.