The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea. ~ Karen Blixen

Three Questions, February 11, 2025

You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!

What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?

The post sunset over the Indio Valley. Something I learned a long time ago and then saw in print in the Bridges of Madison County of all places, is the how to shoot sunsets. People give up too early, the sun breaks the horizon and they go inside. Some of the best sunset photos I’ve ever shot were taken after the sun was gone and you get the long blue light screaming over the horizon fighting the darkness and dancing with the last bits of red and pink in the sky. Tonight over the mountains that frame the Indio Valley that’s exactly the sky I got to see.

What did I learn today?

Today I learned that some Polish salt miners had better lungs than other miners. So a doctor believed it was the healing power of the tiny salt crystals in the air. This has led to spas and hippies everywhere creating and extolling the virtues of salt rooms, and especially Himalayan Salt rooms. Well, I’ve been struggling, I’ve runaway, I’m at a spa so right after this post I’m going to go sit in the Himalayan Salt Room and breath deep the flecks of airborne sodium-choloride crystals. Yes friends, I’m pulling out all of the hippy cards in the deck!

What made me happy today?

I had a plan, come to this spa, watch the Tennessee/Kentucky basketball game after check-in, get a massage and soak in a hot spring tub. It all initially went to hell, I checked March not February apparently so my reservation was for a month from now, I’d made the massage appointment appropriately but then they connected it to the reservation and moved it. I got the room worked out, but have lost a day, got the massage re-booked and finally got to the room, no TV, game isn’t on my app. Honestly, I almost broke into tears from the shear consistent volume of losing I’ve been experiencing over the last month. But I dug in and found a way to get the game on my laptop using a free trial on a sports app.

So what made me happy today was a mix of things all wrapped up in a lovely package. Watching the game (my team lost, nothing’s perfect I guess), getting the best massage I’ve had in 10 years (Sarah at the Azure Palms Spa in Desert Hot Springs is amazing!), soaking for thirty minutes in my private hot springs tub and eating a lovely, snacky dinner of a salad and vegetables. And the slightest hope that maybe this voodoo curse of a life I’ve been leading lately might just start turning around.

Off to the Himalayan Salt Room!