A soft damp wind rolls over the windowsill. Beyond, tips of oak and maple, laced with salty ocean, hide the Cape Cod beach from me. I sit on the floor and stretch my legs in front of me. Moving my torso forward my hamstrings become long bright wires as I graze my hands over outer calves, over ankles, then splay fingers across the delicate web of bones in the top of my feet. I inhale and gently recede. It is slow, tidal, like the waves creeping forth up the shore and sucking back into the belly of Buzzards Bay.

I repeat this movement several times. Soon, the protective tightness in my hip sockets relents, letting me lay my torso flat against my thighs. I rest here, stomach pushing against legs in a comforting pulse. My closed eyes look behind themselves. Like beams they pierce into black mist. I see outer edges of a vast, primordial reach where nocturnal cloud cover peels open, revealing stains of rosy black, blue black, jade black. Timid as a nest of fairies perceptible only at the edge of twilight, my body's inner recesses wake in this congenial dark. I slip through the chink between thought and oblivion.

As I sit up from the stretch, a muscle in my upper back slides over my shoulder blade, well-oiled, sensuous. Every day I feel this miracle of sensuality. Every day my body makes love to different parts of itself - muscle to bone, fascia to organ. They lean and whisper sonnets to one another, my breathing sough their music. When I lull my controlling mind to sleep with the rocking, torquing, kneading of my body, gentle whispery sensation has permission, to come out, sit down and play on the floor inside me.

Suddenly the blackness whips up like a window shade. I have been thinking. My inner life, a once populous ocean floor, runs back into hiding leaving a vacant patch of pale sand. I open my eyes and change position, stretching one leg behind me. The front of my thigh sings a wide, round note of delight. I roll the bundle of quadriceps fully onto the floor, lifting my pelvis up and away while extending front heel ten invisible miles forward from pubic bone to fulfill the complete range of the split. My tail bone spears its line of movement into the floor as navel draws into spine. I clasp my hands, reach them up and back into an arch, drawing myself to the edge of pain but not over it. My ribs work hard against taut, elongated abdominal muscles. The bones flare and release. My breath strives, energized by challenge.

When it is over, I unfurl onto my back. Every cell is pumping, alive. I rest and listen to the cacophony of rhythms - breath, blood and lymph - my energy swinging up and down and around inside my frame. My breathing hums an attenuated decrescendo, sinking down, down, down, and falls open like full-blown rose petals. I sigh deeply, my ribs free.

Beyond thought, I float in a flood of endorphin, all lingering anxiety washed away. The air settles around me. It enters through my nose, my skin, my hair. It creeps under my clothes, nestles against my belly. I feel how Earth is miles of lovely heavy air leaning on our bodies.