Laughing Matters

Along this path there have been moments that evoked chuckles, guffaws, chortles, belly laughs and even giggles.
Driving cross country I would periodically go into the 'getting holy" phase. And end up laughing at myself.
Like the time I stripped naked and walked into the desert to sit and meditate. It took only minutes before the ants, whose house I had destroyed with my thoughtlessness, urgently bit my ass. My naked ass.
There was the time when I sat on the edge of a canyon. My legs painfully twisted into the appropriate form for meditation, and my mind kept wandering. I kept trying to write postcards home to friends, tried to describe seeing an eagle below me, trying to describe the powerful sound of the Colorado and the Red River meeting a thousand of feet below me. It sounded like ... like... (I was reaching for the perfect description) ... Highway 26. I laughed out loud at the attachment we have to "good sounds" (like the rushing rivers) versus the "bad sounds" of a busy interstate highway ... even though they sounded the same.

Then there were the nights in India when I lay out next to the Ganges, in Rishikesh, giving my body to the mosquitoes. It took me a year later before I laughed.
The laughter continues.