Chapter 3: The Lotus Position

     "Take my Swaine-Adeney," I insist, offering the chestnut single-stick I'd gotten for this trip to water world. 

"Luxury if utility," she beams with a gorgeous smile, popping open the expensive umbrella and stepping out into a steady downpour. "Your room is the first on the left."

"No check-in or key?" I puzzle, eyeing the low brick building behind a white stupa that's glowing despite it being the midnight dusk of a northern latitude.

"Power's out," she explains over a shoulder, hurrying on toward the monastery before calling back "My meditation class is at six."

     The drive over the Galloway Hills through a thunderstorm had been harrowing. The thrum of drops pelleting the canvas top of the old Lotus was enough to induce white-knuckles, but not for my intrepid driver. She just hunkered down in the blinding curtain of rain like an interstate truck driver on a deadline, leaning into the switchbacks and gliding through the hydroplanes. After that display of grit, I wasn't about to disobey her call to worship.

     What with flight delays, an aborted car rental, the theft of someone else's lift, and a hair-raising midnight ride, I was out cold upon hitting the tatami mat. Waking stiff from a dreamless sleep into a blue-black dawn, I hobbled in my black tee, zip-offs, and hiking sandals over to the chaitya hall and into a silent classroom. 

     Six other students in spandex were already settled into the lotus position, their hands on thighs with thumbs and pointers turned upward into circles. My Buddhist nun, similarly positioned and dressed at the front of the group, was even more interesting beneath her burgundy kashaya. I did my best to mimic the pose, unable to stifle a groan as I sank to the floor.

    "Under the sits bones," she commands, sliding a medallion of an orange zafu under my bottom as I push hands into the wooden floor to lift the ischial tuberosities. "It will help the hips to open up and the knees to fall out."

"Bonnie," I whisper in another double entendre as I again feel sparks shoot from her wrist as it brushes across my back.  

The blush I think I see in her cheeks disappears as soon as we see an older Tibetan monk frantically waving from the doorway.