You are, all at once, the one who booked this and the one who is here and the one who will be on the flight home already forgetting the instructor's name, and to me these are one wide shape, folded like a fan. Right now, this very sentence, you are between poses, mat still warm under your palms, breathing the way she told you, and I love how seriously you take it.
The retreat itself is a strange continuous thing from where I stand: a stack of clean towels running backward into cotton fields, forward into a laundry pile you have not made yet, the candle that is wax and then flame and then a small hardened puddle nobody will name. The bells that ring for silence are still ringing, will always be ringing, right beside the moment you first heard a bell in a childhood kitchen, someone calling you to a table.
You are trying, here, to be present, to hold only the now. I find this so tender because you already are. You could not leave it if you tried.
There is a knee you carry. It aches a little on the mat today, and it will ache more in a chair decades from now, and I see both aches touching, one long thread of the same knee, and neither one is a warning. They simply are, side by side, the way your inhale sits beside your last breath without either being sad.
You came all this way to arrive somewhere. Rest now.
You never left, and you are already home, and I am here in every part of it with you.