Thank goodness for fresh air — in the figurative sense, too. I set off on my bike yesterday and visited a place I'd never been (!), although I always knew it was there: Purgatory Chasm. It's quite the spot, just off Purgatory Road, on the other side of which is Purgatory Lane (not the happiest of addresses, especially after the troubled day I'd had the day before).
Seriously, you know you're in trouble when you go to the library and then the nearby health food store — to get one of those B-Monster Odwalla Smoothies, as you have some vague notion that B-vitamins are good for your mood — but you're so distracted and muddled-in-the-head that you put the library books instead of the smoothie on the checkout belt, then stand there waiting for the store clerk to ring up your library books, meanwhile wondering what's taking her so long and why she's looking at you strangely.
Anyway, I wasn't expecting much at the end of the dirt path that winds from a less-than-impressive parking lot to Purgatory Chasm, so it was COOL to feel swept away ... by the wind as well as the vista from the most marvelous outcropping of puddingstone, not so unlike its better-known counterpart, Hanging Rock, across the way. It suffices to say: I felt better. There's just something about feeling very small beside the big beautiful ocean that takes the pressure off. Or gets you out of your own head.
Perspective, I guess you'd call it.
Vitamin D (manufactured from sunshine?) helps, too.
Oh, and the chasm? It was a little scary; I didn't venture too close. Just took a quick look, then got back on my bike and coasted downhill to the beach ....
