A Drunken Rant

My trip to Spain has been interesting.   I made it to Barcelona after a long, long flight.  Richard and I walked around Las Ramblas and the city and it's quite an enchanting place, but I can't help but compare it to Southern Spain and Andalucia- where my heart is.  The landscape, food, people, and culture is much different here.  It's much more cosmopolitan and European than the low-key ambience of Granada.

I'm here in Cadaques- which is more reminiscent of Andalucia for me.  The cabos and coast is very similar.  The rugged rocks kissing the blue Mediterranean never fails to impress me and put me in place.  The lifestyle seems so simple and enjoyable.  It seems to fit my philosophy of working to live- and this is living.  The Mediterranean is so precious and to think of the history the waters have seen- the love and hate that has happened on its shores.  I see people in love and it's so romantic, but at the same time it's impossible to forget all the hate and war that has occurred here and the memories of this are evident in the scattered castles and ruins along both the Spanish and Italian countryside.  All the power-hungry people fighting for religious and political control over land that has no choice, bot to grow its life.  For sure you can cut flowers and cypresses, but spring will come again and these Napoleons will never realize that.  This belief carries over in so many ways.  Perhaps even with me being here with Richard.  I'm just fortunate to be able to experience this on an extremely conscious level.  Or not?

Memorial Day

No way better to spend Memorial day, but creating memories and capturing them.  It's especially fun with an italiano, an abs-a-doodle, and some red wine.

Sounds of Silence

What is most striking about the desert

Is the incomparable peace.

At first unsettling, it reveals just how many distractions

You allow yourself to entertain elsewhere.

Footsteps echo for incredible distance;

You can hear your camel's digestion outside your tent

Or the sand shifting from a light breeze over the dunes.

There you are, face to face with yourself,

And everyone else laid as equally bare before you-

And nobody cares.

The day we arrived to the end of the earth-

Sifting through sandcastle villages to our sandcastle palace-

We climbed to the top of a dune,

Took pictures of the nothingness.

And reconciled ourselves to the humming in our ears-

There lay the Sahara desert stretched out before us...

Everything about Morocco, from start to finish, was memorable.  Sometimes trying, sometimes frustrating, often funny, even more pleasant, and in the end worth every inconvenience (even a couple nights with a couple of hustlers).  It proved to be a trip full of good fortune and unforgettable landscapes.