Kundalini and the Art of Being ... 1After another hour or so, I started to get tired from erratic sleep, mes-
merizing traffic, and the warm summer sun shining down on me
at a pull-off on the side of the road. I sat down on my pack with
my hitching arm resting on one knee. Feeling pleasantly sleepy, I sat
down on the ground and leaned against my pack with one arm cov-
ering my eyes, the other behind my head, and thumb extended, in
case any of the cars whizzing by happened to notice me.
I was just beginning to drift off into an amusing daydream, when a
car pulled over and narrowly missed me. It was three teenagers from
Florida on a summer road trip. I quickly came to from my contem-
plative daze and climbed into the back of their shiny sedan, pulling
my dirty backpack onto my lap. They were headed for the Grand
Canyon, before making their way back east.
After hanging out for a while on the south rim of the canyon, do-
ing the usual tourist thing, the teenagers invited me to join them for
the night. The four of us camped together that night at a campground
inside the park and cooked up a big pot of macaroni and cheese for
dinner. We roasted marshmallows around the fire and talked triviali-
ties into the late hours. They were a fun group of kids and helped
give me a little momentum to get out of the funk I’d bogged down in
while caught in the Sedona vortex.
The next day—again standing on the rim peering into the depths
of the canyon—I decided to venture on with them. This time, it was
way too hot to hike 10,000 feet down and back up. Maybe next time
the temperature would be just right for my grand trek, but not this
time. The teenagers invited me to join them to Telluride, Colorado,
which they had heard was a nice town to visit. I assured them that
it was, since I had skied there with my family as a kid. I thought it
might be a nice place to revisit a bit of my childhood, as well as camp
in the woods nearby for a few days, before heading to the Mayan
ceremony at the Four Corners to meet up with Natty and Apollo.
We arrived in Telluride at about midnight after twelve hours of driv-
ing—to find total madness. It turned out that the next day, unbeknownst