Those magical summers long ago...

It’s Sunday. Does it matter?

The young girl swings gently on the hammock suspended between two poles. As she hears the music the wind makes entangled in the leaves overhead, she glances to the north. The soft dune grass sways and twirls, framing the perfect billowing sails that float across the water.

It’s not Sunday. In this perfect moment and place, time has ceased to exist.

She has been here, in this perfect hammock, her hair pulled up in a scarf out of the teasing fingers of the wind, since the beginning of time. Yet she has remembrances. Of what? Dreams? Past lives? Where do these hauntingly beautiful memories come from and why have they chosen this moment to rise, like a phoenix, from the ashes of her soul?

She remembers love. An overlying love of life and bonds as strong as steel shared with so many people. She remembers paddling down a river somewhere. All about her the water was churning and bubbling. She was with friends. They had been canoeing all day. They had to stop. It was cold and the rain beat down so they bivouaced on the side of a wet grassy hill. They had portaged for miles through winding deer trails and tight trees. She remembers pain from having a canoe on her shoulders for over and hour, stepping over logs, through what seemed like fields of thorns and stinging nettles, and sinking knee deep in mud. Oh, it felt liberating to be suffering the rawness of nature. So pure. She remembers other times of liberation.

There were times when she had run freely, naked, enveloped in air, mist, or moonlight. She had danced down beaches, through orchards and basked in secret fields of swaying grasses and bright flowers, revealed to the sun. There were other times in which she was naked in water. Some during calm, still nights, others while it rained and stormed in the distance. In a few others still, and more precious yet she had floated in the darkness, enveloped in a glistening road to the moon, with her eyes closed and moonlight on her face, being rocked with the push and pull of fluid motion. Life shot out from her like sparks from a sparkler.

She remembers other things too. Beautiful moments from what must have been her childhood. Times when she would swing so high she thought she might touch heaven and she would laugh so hard that tears would flow from her shining eyes, so full of life. Sometimes she felt she could capture the clouds, or at least twirl them in her toes at that second’s pause, suspended in mid-air, or that she could fly like superman.
She had climbed so many trees then. Climbed and pushed her way to the top so she could close her eyes and sway with the wind.

Then there were times when she would sing, fluidly or silly, and there was so much ice cream. A million years worth of it, at least, and carnival rides!

And still more memories pour into the young woman’s head. Memories of biking hundreds of miles and eating sandwiches every day. And every sandwich was peanut butter, honey, ham, turkey, jelly, and mustard…all in one. And then there are memories of kayaking and surfing on big waves and riding all the way into the beautiful sandy beaches on one wave.

There are other things she remembers too. More fairy tale moments. Hers or someone else’s? There were special places; a llama farm, nights sleeping on the highest point around, porches and gazebos that witnessed many a sleepover, hours of conversation, consumption of the most mouth tingling cherries in the world, baths of morning sunlight, and the soft strumming of a guitar. Then there was a time when she had danced on a midnight street to Frank Sinatra, illuminated by the headlights of a car.

And the memories cease to stop now. Suddenly she remembers hundreds of weather fabulosities and so much life. There was a tornado at some point. Raw power so large harnessed in such a small space. Creeping up and bursting through clouds. Swirling around her loved ones as they tried to escape the water, nearly kissing them with death.. There was meteor showers. Lazy bursts of green and orange rocketing through the skies with a brilliance indescribable. She remembers hundreds of them. She can see vividly in her mind the wind and the rain. Running, dancing, singing, and getting soaked. She had once longed for passion and had found it in the caress of the wind and in the thunder that shook her as it swept towards her from over the waters complimenting brilliant streaks of lightning. She had taken night trips. Gliding through the water in a kayak under a twinkling blanket of midnight stars and slept on deserted beaches.

The memories are beginning to slow, but before stopping a few more dance through her head. Sweltering heat and hot pavement, the promise of rain, the determination of young people, a perfect kiss framed by starry skies, a lone spotlight illuminating a piano, a seranade in a lightning storm, the warm glow of a fire, lapping waves, a gentle breeze and the journey of graceful deer along the shoreline.

All of this, a million painted sunsets, and a few precious sunrises.

All she can utter to herself after this flood of memories is disbelief at the beauty that she has somehow experienced. That it must have taken hundreds of thousands of lifetimes for these memories to accumulate, like grains of sand, to form this mystical land that dwells in her soul. Billions of years. If time did exist, that’s how long it would take. So why does it feel like only yesterday? What’s more she remembers no pain, or rather, much pain turned into beautiful sorrow and liberating life lessons. What was it that transformed her pain? She knows it was the people. Oh the people! She remembers so many free spirits touching her and tugging at the ends of her soul to stretch it wide like the sky. She remembers those beautiful people and as she does, she longs to thank them all. But it seems like there were just so many! She hopes that they knew that she loved them. She remembers reading a quote somewhere,
“The world is all that is encased here: life, death, people and everything else that surrounds us.
The world is in comprehensible. We won’t ever understand it: we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: A sheer mystery.”

The young girl raises her eyes from her trance of memory rises from the hammock and gazes out over the deep mystery of the lake before her. Tears of joy gather in her eyes and she whispers a silent thank you into the wind. She hopes that it is carried to all those souls who have touched her life and that they all remember to sing loudly, dance happily and smile in wonder.

She slowly gathers all the breath that was just taken from her as the memories flooded in. Energy flows from the ground into her bare feet and she stands rooted like a tree to the earth. It grows stronger and stronger in her body until she can barely stand it. At the last moment, when she thinks she may burst and the beauty of all that surrounds her, she throws her head back into the wind, opens her mouth and screams into the blue sky, “HOOOOOO AHHHHHH!” She has kept the fire burning within her.

Adeus Iberia...

"The principal ingredient is love" said the man in the kelly green shirt with the mohawk mullet cascading gracefully down the back of his head as he served up a second helping of cornbread crusted cod fish (bacalhau) to another happy, wine flushed guest at the Lisbon Lounge Hostel. That was the beginning of our time here. Now, six weeks later we are preparing to leave Portugal... with a little bit less money in our pockets, heads full of amazing stories, hearts full of love for this country, its language and its culture, and certainly a lot more meat on our bones. As usual, it is so hard to sum up the experiences we have had here so for now, until I can compile my thoughts into some readable format, I will leave you with some pictures of our time here. Right now I think this collage of experiences will say more than I can until I get my act and my thoughts together...enjoy!

Em Lisboa (In Lisbon)

Eu adoro (e-oo a-do-roo). I love it here. It´s beautiful. And not like beautiful we have back home. Perhaps we do to some degree in older cities on the East coast. No...Lisbon is beautiful because it bleeds history from every avenue, from every building, from every tile and brick. It seems to ooze out of the old churches, monasteries, blue and white azulejos that paint the sides of the buildings. Since our arrival, we have wandered wide-eyed, twisting up and down narrow cobblestone sidewalks - assaulted at every step by this magnificent history and architecture. There is so much to explore, so much to enjoy in this city, and I suspect there will be much to tell as we do :)

Holi Wah!

Strangely, stepping off the plane into the warm, pollution laden air of Kathmandu, weaving through traffic, using all lanes of the road, being bombarded by the honking of horns...it felt a little bit like home. Things were feeling good. Familiar. Until I felt the first explosion against my back and turned around wide eyed and dripping wet, to search out the seemingly invisible perpetrator who dared to hit me with a loaded water balloon. Alas, he just disappeared. I had become a victim of Holi. Holi, a religious festival turned chaos, falls on the first full moon in the month of Falgun. It's a festival of friendship, a reminder of the coming monsoon, a quest to keep germs at bay (which, the local newspaper points out can be achieved by playing with colored water in the sunshine). Through the eyes of an observer though, Holi is a city-wide, gender vs gender (or more accurately men targeting women) colored water fight. In the week leading up to Holi, all the roadside stands sell packets of colored powder and there are significantly fewer women on the streets as local boys warm up for full assault. Bags of water and water balloons fly unannounced from rooftops and through open windows to splatter on unsuspecting women walking on the streets below. I took 4 pre-holi hits total. All little buggers who smiled sweetly (devilishly?) as I walked by and then blasted me in the back before running off. Brian, his masculinity a saving grace, got away unscathed.

On the actually day of Holi, however, it was no holds barred. Men vs men, men vs women. At our guest house in Paknajol, old and young, men and women, all joined in a full on, 3 hour rooftop combat, hurling red dye-filled water balloons, throwing buckets of water on one another, breaching security territory to smear red paste all over the faces/hair/clothing of anyone lucky enough to be nearby. Later in the evening, when we actually ventured out of our hotel (wearing garbage bags) the streets looked like a war zone and the people we passed were soaking wet and often covered head to toe in rainbows of colors. There was no water for hours after the heavy combat. It had all been used up and now we have the wonderful privilege to walk down the plastic bag and balloon lined streets of Nepal in relative safety, although I admit I am still quite paranoid and glance up at the rooftops much more than I did before. Welcome back to Kathmandu, the land of obscure, but aggressively exuberant holidays!

Hiking up the trail to Gokyo Valley. Brian and an icy waterfall between Phorste Tenga and Dole.

More to come...