on retreating

and not eating (and loving and hating and living)

I am on a retreat in the Portugese mountains outside Faros, a heavenly place called Moinhos Velos. I have not eaten food in three days. I have practiced hours of yoga and meditation. I have swum many cool, slow lengths of a blue-tiled pool and sweated in a wood-fired sauna and walked for miles through a red dirt valley under whispering conifer pines. Ye…