NOW is the last owl call in the grey dawn light. The morning bird song. The rooster. NOW is the dusty rutted dirt road below my rubber sandals. The chickens pecking amongst the garbage. The guard dog straining against his rope, teeth barred and snarling. NOW is the tide. Low. High. Waves breaking. Pelicans diving. Magnificent Frigatebirds soaring above us all. NOW is walking in town, eyes cast down. Looking for potholes. Looking for dog poop. Weaving out to the road, around the parked cars, back to the sidewalk, around the vendors, past the drivers yelling Taxi! Taxi! NOW is …

I have been practicing yoga for 25 years and have taken classes in carpeted gyms, in converted classrooms with hard concrete floors and in a lovely log building above a high-mountain Colorado river. But my most favorite place is where I take my yoga classes now, at Zen Yoga in the heart of San Juan del Sur. It’s open-air. So you feel the breezes. And the heat when there is no breeze. You hear the birds. The rooster. The children at recess in the school next door. The school bell calling them back to class. The motorcycles. The door-to-door vendor …

Last year at the start of the pandemic John and I decided we would walk everywhere we needed to go. We don’t own a car here and mostly walk everywhere anyway, but as a way to keep ourselves safe from Covid-19 we decided to decline the occasional rides in vehicles with other people, including taxis. Weeks of solely walking everywhere turned into months of our doing so, and then it became a personal challenge…could we possibly go a year? We went a year and a week to be exact. Then it became time to go to the States to get …