Just Enjoy Your Life

I've been taking a writing class this summer with Harry Thurston, a well known Canadian author and a neighbor and friend.

One of our assignments was to write about something magical that happened in your life.  I narrowed it down to three incidents. One, involving a monk in an elevator in Albuquerque just seemed to beg to be enhanced and so I turned it into a short story.

The actual incident was real.  About 8 years ago, I checked in to the Albuquerque Hilton a day before my friends Kathy and Carol were arriving there from Pennsylvania.  I was coming from Colorado, and I can't remember why I arrived early. Our plan was to go to Santa Fe and furnish Kathy's newly purchased condo.  When I checked in to the Hilton, there was a large spirituality conference going on, and after wandering around among the booths and book stalls, I got on the elevator to go up to my room.  The elevator was filled with people from the conference, talking enthusiastically about the sessions they had attended.

The last person to get on was a tall, broad monk in a long orange robe.  As the elevator whined its way up to our floors, only the monk and I were quiet.  When it got to the fifth floor, the door opened, the monk stepped out, turned and lifted his arm to hold the elevator door open.  He looked at each one of us, waited till everyone stopped talking, got eye contact with each one of us and said,

" Just enjoy your life, that's all there is."

 Then he let the door close,  turned, and walked away.

Just enjoy your life, that's all there is!

My story goes from there, and stays in the magical vein that I felt on that elevator on that day.

In the  writing class with Harry, he gave some great comments, but asked, " Does the monk have to keep coming back?" ( In my short story, the monk keeps coming back, mostly through messages.)
I said yes, the monk had to keep coming back or there was no story.

Since the class, in my real life, the monk and his message keeps coming back in all sorts of mysterious  ways, and I'm choosing to keep living in the magic of "Just enjoying my life."

 I did this  illustration on my ipad - drawing it with my finger and printing it to give away. My latest "monkish" adventure was to make it into a wine label for our newest batch of wine.