Adventures of a Sun Seeker: Guppies, bats, and my BMW: a "rest" day

Yesterday, in Tulum, we took a rest day. Although I didn't rest so much as move from beautiful place to beautiful place. The day started at the ruins of Tulum, this ancient Mayan fortress standing proud over the teal waters of the Caribbean Sea. Getting there right at the opening hour, before the smash of tourist groups, was the key to a surprisingly special experience. It was just us and the one group of organized Germans at that hour.

The limestone hunks, the looming walls, the palm trees, the ocean crashing, iguanas basking, birds singing exotic songs. It was magnificently peaceful. Both stunning and lulling. I don't come to ancient ruins to learn that they were built in 1345 or that the ball court is here next to the palace or that the Mayans traded with other Mayans in Campeche, but instead I just come to BE in them, to feel their presence and gaze and bask.

I wandered around these stone structures, 500+ years old, and interestingly, was thinking about pipe organ music. Of all things. Some pieces that I play that were written in 1564, 1614. How large this Earth is, imagining that stoic music in a frigid cathedral in Europe somewhere, a different way of life entirely than this crashing Caribbean surf. And how in playing that music, or sitting gazing at this stone pillar, I can touch into something much more timeless than myself.

And to be amongst the ruins, without other people, I can feel more the stone and the sea, more of my focus resting on those aspects, rather than the selfie sticks and the beautiful Latina women who smell like vanilla cake who came later with the tour buses.

In the afternoon, Buddy Jen and I joined forces with Architecture Annie for an adventure to a cenote (limestone cave swimming hole). Annie, like Lady Elise, is another of my passionate, perceptive, strong female friends, who I love dearly. And, completely separate from our trip, she JUST HAPPENS to be here herself. Which is just so much delicious serendipity. For all the conversing over cocktails in Ithaca or Buffalo that Annie and I have done about our travels, about our dreams, it was glorious to be Doing The Real Thing With Her. We made a line of three smiling sun women biking the road out of town to the Gran Cenote.

We climbed some stairs below ground level, to a platform over the pool in the cave. Stalactites and stalagmites, drooping ferns and vines, the water shimmering and reflecting onto the mottled ceiling of the cave. How can I even describe what it is like to swim in this beautifully clear water, taking in the inner topography of a cave? Coils and squeezes and elongated lumps and crags and corners and contours. And there are bats! And there are turtles!

We three swam out of the bright sunlight and under one of the long dim overpasses of the cave. We could touch and rest on this big underwater limestone lump. "We're standing on a dinosaur poop," Jen observed brightly, "it has the plops on top".

We shared a rented snorkel set amongst us, and when I put it on and peeked under I had to immediately shoot up again, "there is SO MUCH down there!" Annie said I was like a puppy seeing snow for the first time.

The guppies! I used to have guppies in my little (big? 30gal) homeschooler fish tank growing up. When you look down at them from above the cenote surface they are these little unremarkable fish, but then when you join them with your mask and snorkel, at eye level, these fish bodies are huge and suspended in front of your face. They care not that you are there, gaping at them.

A little turtle swims past with quick dismissive swipes of alternating flippers. You take a breath and go for a deep dive until your ears throb with pain. The world is suddenly deadened into silence under the water, there is an enormous world under there, almost freakishly intricate, all this is huge and real and not seen from the surface. Then you plunge upward out of it in a crash and a grateful breath.

That evening I rode the languid curvy paved bike path to the beach. Being in Tulum with all these other tourists and their rented clanking beach cruisers, I can't help but feel a little smug like That Guy who's driving a BMW around a bunch of Corollas. It's a lot of money and dismantling and re-mantling to haul this beloved machine of mine along with me, but boy do I love it. I cringe seeing the bright pink blooms of soft rectangle sunburn on a pudgy back, knees in armpits on a lugger bike.

We had ladies night that night, these three amazing disparate women from my different chapters all together. That magic is more than I can encapsulate.

I finished the night with Lady Elise, sharing a veritable dinner platter of ceviche between us at an off-the-beaten-path local spot, just us two, like old times. A little over-lit sidewalk plastic table, Miss Next Door Shop over me taking down her shoe display for the night, the full moon above us, the fish and shrimp soft and giving and flavorful.

I cannot believe how wonderful it is to get to BE here. Feeling very blessed and enchanted.