LimeBoard

Coming to Nashville with big dreams that seem much too large to fit in a pocket, but they do, and they make sense in my pocket. It’s not hard to see how this could become a pattern, because I’ve already fallen into it so easily. Enjoying the few first moments here at a Nashville luxury hotels for the beginning, a treat for before the move into living here. It sounds so much harder than it actually is. There’s plenty of moments in front of me, and on nights like this, they seem so much greater than the moments behind me, and there’s time to breathe several sighs of relief, every one delicious.

The city opens up like a wall of mirrors, not like the ones in the funhouses where I grew up daydreaming about myself staring at myself in rivers. These mirrors are all true, and in the daytime they are only shadows, but at night they glow. This is the first place I’ve been where the song about Echo first starts to make sense, and this tells me I might have been onto something, and for a long time, too. This is enough to keep going for another week, and then after that there’s a strange faith that new inspirations are around the corner.

My favorite song, and the one no one will ever hear, is the one about Orpheus and Eurydice . That’s the one that brought me here, and it seems fitting now that there would have to be some loss before all of this that lies before me. Nashville is more of a mystery than I could have imagined, and my imagination is larger than the dreams in my pocket. The first part of any story is getting to know the main characters, so I am keeping my eyes open for who I might meet. But I understand from the myth that I won’t recognize the key players at first, they will only reveal themselves when time starts to unfold, beyond my control, and far beyond my dreams.

There is a profound sense of joy that comes from having a spa in your own backyard.  The home becomes a refuge again, and is a place where you are sure to be able to relax at the end of a long day.  When the tired muscles hit the hot water, and when the jets start to do their work, there is really nothing like it on earth.  And it has fantastic therapeutic value, too.  There are new discoveries every day that suggest that portable spas are great for the heart and for circulation.  Then take into account the soothing effects of water, and the refreshing outside air, and these would add up to a lovely experience.

Interestingly, human beings have had a relationship with bathing that goes back a long time.  In Iceland, a sauna had to be built before the settlers would even move in back in the Middle Ages, which points toward a history of spas that goes back for centuries.  In the Middle Ages particularly is where many origins of our contemporary ideas of the hot tub originate.  This may seem to defy logic, or some basic preconceptions about the Middle Ages that might need some reconsideration.  Our perception of the Medieval times is not generally associated with acute personal hygiene, but rather the opposite.  Perhaps the idea of Courtly Love and public baths have not always gone together, and perhaps they should.

Recently, there has been a rather hefty amount of translations completed that are all suggesting that the people of the Middle Ages practiced bathing in a way that rivals the Romans with their baths.  It was a common part of public life in most areas of Europe, and the descriptions sound very much like our experiences with our hot tubs.  The great writer on courtly love, who has been a guide for cavalier lovers, Andreas Capellanus, always stressed the importance of the bath and its role in higher love.  A simple dip, then, into your portable spa might be a dip into a fascinating history.