Remembering with Shakti: Lotus Feet and Vancouver’s Sea Wall

It was a couple years ago that this piece of music resoundingly re-entered my life. The spring in Vancouver seemed to be a never-ending stream of sunny, tranquil days, riding my bicycle along the miles and miles of sea wall ringing the city. This is a spectacularly beautiful city once it wakens from its winter greys. I’d spent the winter in Whistler, one of the world’s great ski resorts, and had reconnected to the bliss of skiing, of living in a true winter with new snow daily for weeks on end. Whistler is even more spectacular, blanketed with snow, than Vancouver blanketed in cherry blossoms and blue skies.

It was a spring of immense upheaval in my life, welcome upheaval, as I finally broke through a darkness that had clouded my life for decades and found in it the light of insight, forgiveness and a reacquantance with beauty and love. This song found its way to my iPod shuffle, accompanying me on daily rides out to Spanish Banks or around Stanley Park. The world was in flow again, and I in it. Nothing seems to epitomize the sense of beautiful wonder that came into me that spring better than those days with Lotus Feet in my ears, the roll of the bicycle beneath me, the ocean to one side and the verdant green and glistening glass of the city I love on the other.