Practice Thursday--The Yoga of Hot Tubs

Oh lord, I'm buying a hot tub.

I finally knew I would get myself a hot tub after my trip to Palm Springs in December. As many of you know, I used to live at a hot springs resort in Northern California, and ever since I've been a hot springs hound. I never feel more relaxed, more healed, more at peace, more myself than when I'm outside, neck deep in hot water.

So I came home and I said to myself: "Self, why have you denied yourself a hot tub all these years?" and Self replied: "Because you haven't let me."

So I'm gonna let me. I'm gonna let me have the one large, expensive item that I think will change my life. Even while I know it really won't.

The above picture is NOT my hot tub, though I dearly would love it to be. No, my hot tub will be much more pedestrian—a good ol' Sundance Burlington 680. It has a lot of bells and whistles. It has many, many adjustable jets. It has lounge seating, and Clear Ray filtering, and LED lights, and all kinds of other specifications that had me dazed minutes after I entered the showroom.

The salesman jabbered on while I got the glazed look that appears whenever someone's trying to sell me something that costs a LOT of money. I started daydreaming about a wooden tub heated by fire, surrounded by a Japanese Bamboo fence, night-flowering jasmine in a glazed pot. I imagined walking barefoot on a stone path at nightfall in only my robe, stepping into the tub and sinking, feeling that elusive ahhhhhh take over my body and mind.

I imagined the night expanding around me, the silence revealing a rustle of wind, a gull still still circling, the trot of my dog coming out to find me. She'd stand guard, sniffing the wind for coyote, deer, and wild rabbits, barking at the errant plastic bags blowing in the wind. The tub would smell of old cedar; the water would trickle in by gravity; it would remain a perfect, quiet 104 degrees. I'd steep in that tub, and feel all my stumbling blocks dissolve....

That's what I imagined anyway, while the salesman kept talking, and I kept nodding, and then found myself writing a check for a LOT of money for a hot tub that in no way resembles my fantasy. And then I had to call the electrician to find out it would cost a LOT of money to even get electricity out to the hot tub site, and that doesn't include trenching, so I have to call another guy, and then there's the matter of fencing for privacy, and so on and so on.

But I know at this point it's all inevitable, and it won't be worth it to fret (my dining room remodel taught me something about the nature of fantasy vs. reality, after all....) It should all happen in a few weeks time, and while my bank account will be bruised, I'll be giggling with anticipation, planning the hot tub's christening. Self will be very happy, I hope, with this gift she so rightly deserves.