10K Waves

Ending our summers in Santa Fe with a trip to 10,000 Waves is something of a ritual.   It says something about the onrushing semester - the mound of chair-related administration, the fact that it's mid-August and our courses haven't exactly been is a state of refined readiness for weeks, etc - that we have already vowed that next summer, we are going to book up well, well in advance for a day of private hot tub, massages, wraps, you name it ... the day after we roll into town.   This evening we contented ourselves with soaking in the Waterfall Tub.

Ten Thousand Waves is in part so wonderful because it's both completely non-south-western, and quintissentially Santa Fe - meditative - that is, meditation-inspiring - and alternative/wacky (in the sense of finding a Japanese spa in the middle of the high desert, complete with hot stone massages, salt wraps, and yes, I did once have a nightingale-droppings facial ...) and yet surrounded with pine trees and aspens and humming birds.   I wish I'd taken a tripod up with me - I'm sure its three-pointedness could have been made to serve some meditational or sacred function - because the Japanese lights and banners and silhouetted plants merited it.   As it is, this just gives a sense of the path down through the pines to the carpark - Alice standing somewhere in the gloom - with the steps, if not the lights, looking as though they've escaped from a Greek island.