I just came back from a trip to the mountains where I facilitated two week long intuitive painting retreats. Now, this in and of itself is not particularly newsworthy, since I facilitate intuitve painting retreats between 12 and 15 times in any given year. But this particular trip had a tinge of the miraculous to it because I was in the mountains at close to 7,000 feet in elevation and I felt remarkably good and healthy and happy for most of my trip. And this has not been the case for a very long time. I am at heart a mountain mama. I get my most inspirational creative juice from ANY kind of contact with the natural world, but the mountains are my spiritual home. They are the place where my soul feels the most vital and joyful and blissfully alive. But 10 years ago, when I was in the throes of menopausal craziness and my body was changing in all KINDS of weird and disturbing ways, I began experiencing altitude sickness. And for any of you that have never had a bout of this particular ailment it is SO not fun. […]