Beads of sweat that rise from inside me and start to trickle down my face and down my arms and down my chest. They come harder until they are coming from all over me and drip off to the ground. Until I am raining. The chanting goes on and on until I know it will not stop, and I rain or I flow and my toes settle into the damp earth. There are times in life when waking approximates sleep.
Some experiences are like bridges.
I pad up the stairs, almost evening now, the fever floating higher in my head, a mug of chocolate cupped in my hands. The safety of a heated house, billows of warm air coming up the stairwell from the radiators. I am thinking of that sweat lodge, the rainbows over Second Mesa. And of the feeling on airplanes that speaks of the vastest journeys, your body's clock not in time with the sun's, the dark out the window. And the gold and green and white points of light that are cities below you, their faint glow, their foreignness.