buffalo-yogi

Four days in bed with the flu, enough. I dressed myself in every layer of clothing I could find and headed outside where the sun was. It was cold in that invigorating, glad to be alive kind of way and the sound of snow crunching under my feet, well, there's nothing like it. I went to the park to say hello to the trees and see how the animals were doing.

The llamas were still there, fit to spit and probably thinking that the signage assuring me they were used to cold weather was total crap - they might be accustomed to cold weather and high altitudes but our winters are no Peruvian mountaintop. The peacocks and wallabies were long gone for warmer climates but my favourites, the buffalo, had held their ground.

As a kid I would fixate on a topic and read everything I could find on it until I'd exhausted the library and was forced to move on: vampires, the lost city of atlantis, redwinged blackbirds, bigfoot, buffalos. There was something about the sheer size of them, that they were friendly giants, that they roamed the entire length of Canada (wanderlust even then), that they survived the ice age, that they were social and friendly - they fascinated me.

I stood and communed with the big daddy buffalo for a while, enjoying the calmness around him, before realizing that that noise I heard was his breathing. Dude was ujayii breathing. Total yogi for sure...