Detached
Medellín, Colombia
One of the biggest reasons I love traveling the world is because it gives me this feeling of belonging to it all and yet to nowhere in particular.
It’s a pretty expansive feeling
I peel back a layer that shows me a doorway into its deeper truth, taking the world from wide to deep
The truth that
All that I am, everything that has happened to me has been passed down for millennia after millennia.
All the wounds have already been cut. All the pain has already been felt. All the experiences have already been had. The weight I carry has been carried before. The same wars have been waged. The heartbreak of love lost or never found is an exact replica.
The paradoxical dichotomy of belonging to it all and yet nowhere in particular expands to a higher truth, one that touches so deep it passes beyond the breastbone of humanity. A truth few will be able to grasp firmly.
It brings a piercing clarity that everything belongs to us all and yet no One in particular.
It’s all a part of our interconnectedness, what makes us part of one, of a collective.
I, you, her, him, she, they….we are all but vessels to carry the ancestral loads until they become light or we realize we needn’t carry them at all. The script will be rewritten until we understand none of it is actually ours.
And that’s how we let it go, or maybe start to release our grip from it & its grip on us.
By knowing it is not ours to begin with lets us drop our hands to let it all fall away. Recognizing we have the choice for it to continue to be ours or to release it & release ourselves from it.
By understanding that it was never ours to begin with, we stop taking ownership of it. We allow it to fade into nothingness, unfed and starved by detachment.
This is how we release, how we transcend and expand, and how we elevate.
Indulgent Simplicity
Salamina, Caldas, Colombia
Life has a way of tearing me in two.
Between a simple life and the one I’ve been enticed to want.
Our greatest gift and greatest curse as humans is (arguably) our autonomy. The responsibility we have to decide swings on the pendulum. One side it sings songs of liberation & on the opposite side it spins in overwhelm. So many choices. All with their own flare & persuasion. All with their own risks. All almost perfect but…what if what if?
It’s how I feel about choosing a way in which to lead life.
Simplicity vs. indulgence
They both feel pretty damn good
Which makes it so hard to choose
Just before I leave on another trip abroad, I have the quintessential bougie Saturday. I brush the boughs of the upwardly mobile neighborhoods of Philadelphia, do the well-to-do things like an exclusive fitness class, sip champagne as my friend and I are attended to in a bridal boutique, ^ eat an excessive amount of overpriced food with drinks to euphorically lubricate the experience. It’s a great fkn day.
It’s a day that smugly says, “I made it”. These days are for living, but that doesn’t mask the effort it takes to get there. Not pictured: the stress and pressure to fashion myself a certain way, to make and spend money, and the “need” to enhance the experience with alcohol.
Fast-forward a week & I’m living in a rustic home in the rural Colombian countryside. It’s a 9-hour, full day's ride to Bogotá or Medellín. I’m 15 minutes away by car from the closest town.
The charm lies in the purity of life to be lived in such a manner.
I manually grind my coffee each morning, churning fresh beans & an even fresher energy into the start of a new day. I tilt the lighter on its side to get the flame going for the moka pot & then watch the shifting lights of dawn through the kitchen window as I wait for the coffee to percolate. We hand wash & prepare fresh, finca-to-table veggies & fruits when we break bread around noon. My host offers homemade workout equipment for weight training & has recently constructed a half-completed deck that I do yoga on. When we’re low on crema de leche we watch for the bus to crest the hill so we can run down to catch it into town. I ride backwards so that I can watch the green hills spilling out before the doors that are left wide open.
It’s the kind of natural beauty that knocks the breath out of me, but in a soft, endearing way…in a way that keeps me in an eternal state of awe, my most favorite state of being.
I double my sleep just by being in such proximity to serenity. The muscles in my face release, soften & relax as I seamlessly drift off to sleep for 9-10 hours. My body sheds the stress it’s been storing for whatever destructive reason it invented.
There is a stillness that holds a permanent residence here and, therefore, me. What I spend in two weeks is what I often spend in one day in the States. I’m greeted every morning by Carmen, one of the dogs, who charges toward me to jump up to give me a hug. The cat accompanies me in the bathroom as she waits for me to turn on the sink so she can drink from the tap. Then, she curls up on my lap as I precariously balance my laptop over her sleeping body so that I can work. I learn that chickens are even more curious than cats & get into way more trouble & messes than I could have imagined.
These days are filled with soft moments that tug at my heart. It’s a place where I see the foolishness of making life complicated, when it really can be simple.
To me, the ease is bliss. The slowness is paradise. It’s so simple it’s indulgent and rich.
There is a price to pay, of course, for such a life.
Not pictured: the discomforts of the uncivilized. I wait stark naked in 50-something degree temperatures for the shower to get warm. Most of the time it does. Some of the time, it doesn’t. I wrap afghans around me like a cape that drapes behind me as I walk. My clothes smell worse than before I washed them because they simply couldn’t dry, despite being hung on the clothesline for 4 days. The animals are as equally happy in their wild as they are in their filth. I grab their paws to keep them from ruining my clothes. I sadly forbid the cat from entering my room because she’s claw to elbow in dirt and mud. Roosters don’t crow at dawn as they’ve been rumored to. They do so at all hours of the night.
Both ways of living have their price & this only reinforces what we’ve known all along about the side of grass we choose not necessarily being greener, but it’s all about how we decide to lie in it. It matters less what it is than how it feels within us.
The comparison between my time here & in the states is vast. They are equally enjoyable and fulfilling. Each has one leg up over the other in some formation, but one is not better than the other. One can only be better than the other based on the viewpoint of the experiencer.
Each boasts a life that I want, that makes me feel good. Their allure moves me past choosing between the two and into the territory of
How do I have both?
How do I create a life that’s lived with indulgence and simplicity?
And when I look at the life I’m creating, I already know I’m well on my way.
Atrapasueños
Alto Bonito, Las Palmas, Caldas, Colombia
¿Cómo atrapas sueños
Para que puedas tocarlos
Y guardarlos?
Como si ellos estuvieran reales
Vivos
No es tan difícil
Solo hay que ser creadora
Y no perder la fe en ti mismo
Es más posible de lo que pensaba
Tocar los sueños
Me di cuenta
Que no hay tanto frío afuera
Por el ritmo de mi corazón
Por el fuego de mi espíritu
Solo hay fuerza
Y paz
En cada momento
Si los dejo
Estos son los momentos
Que esperaba tanto
Y si los dejo
Se me escapan
Solo soy mujer
Con alma que llora
Por ser salvaje
The only thing certain is
Esta vida se nos va
Entonces
A respirar
A vivir
A atrapar sueños entre sus propias manos sagradas
Y
A guardarlas para siempre
How do you catch dreams
So that you can touch them
And keep them?
As if they were real
Alive
It’s not so hard
All you have to do is be a creator
And not lose faith in yourself
It’s more possible than I thought
To touch your dreams
I realized
It’s not so cold outside
Because of the rhythm of my heart
And the fire of my spirit
There’s only strength
And peace
In each moment
If you let it
These are the moments
I waited for so long
And if I let them
They’ll escape me
I’m just a woman
Whose soul cries
To be wild
La única cosa segura es
This life will leave us
And so
We must breathe
And live
And catch our dreams between our own two hands
And
And hold onto them forever
Filtrado
Finca Elda, Caldas, Colombia
El único peligro es querer quedarse
The only danger is wanting to stay.
It’s a beautiful danger.
These words & this conversation were graciously shared with me by my host, a week into my stay outside of a lesser-known town in the Zona Cafetera of Colombia.
I find it interesting when Colombians thank me for visiting their country. I thought we had moved past its once tainted reputation, but apparently old beliefs linger on.
What we believe creates the lens in which we view the world and that filter shades and jades our experience with it.
I’ve always seen Colombia as a country rich in spirit; a place filled with color and life and warm people bounding with energy.
Which is exactly how I experienced her to be. 3 trips in the past 5 years has left me nothing but enamored with the country.
Long ago, I heard the rumors and felt some sort of obligation to believe them. After I considered them, I scraped them away with the grain of salt I took them with. You can never really know a place (or person) until you…know them.
So I’ve chosen to show up and let the places (and people) reveal themselves as they are, void of suspicions and expectations. Fresh eyes brimming with wonder and curiosity allows for its true essence to unravel, for its spirit to emit without confinement.
It’s a new region for me, but I recognize the rolling mountains right away. The way to the northern end of the Coffee zone is dramatically steep and emphatically bending, which only compounds its allure.
One particularly memorable day, I spend blissed out in the rural countryside. I meet the owner of a local coffee finca in the town center where he picks up his 7-year old daughter from school. I hop on the back of his bike and he sweeps us away to their home in the mountains, 20-something minutes away.
I’m welcomed into his home and into the daily workings of his life. His wife helps strap a bucked to my waist and they lead me up the steep hill to pick coffee. I suppose my Spanish has improved tenfold since my first coffee tour, but I was taught the entire coffee process - de semilla a taza - from seed to cup.
There is nothing but care and attention to detail and an earnest, raw, and pure intention to share their craft with me.
Truth be told….that’s been most of my experience abroad. Probably because that’s exactly how I view the world: one big loving place filled with people who just want to connect and share a piece of themselves.
There may be much “wrong” with the world, but there is even more that is good. What we focus on expands. How we perceive creates our reality and the little recognized truth is that we’re in control of our reality more than we give ourselves credit for.
While the “bad” must be spoken for, it is vain to do so without action toward a resolution. There is no fruit in bypassing that which needs to evolve, but there is no glory or value in staying in the troughs of despair. For that will be the foundation for how we interact with life itself.
Do we choose
Blissed out or beaten down?
Silver lining or doom & gloom?
How do we filter life? Through which lens?
It may just be an even more important concept to consider than how you filter your coffee.
Libre de Vicios
Salamina, Caldas, Colombia
It was a summer filled with old stress, new stress, & stress reinvented.
All self-imposed, even if I couldn’t see that until I was on the other side. I was swirling in a pack of racing thoughts, being jostled and elbowed and roughly pushed along the way as I tried to keep up with life.
I had fallen BACK into the trap of believing life was some type of punishment, turning a blind eye to my ability (& responsibility) to alter anything that was not adding value to my life.
As per usual, I took on more than I could handle mentally and, as such, I was fighting a losing battle of controlling my internal world.
There was my beloved cat to re-home. A storage unit to empty single-handedly. Deep wounds of a breakup resurfaced and surged with a force that left the entire cavity of my chest pained and constricted. All this was encompassed by my choice to overextend staying at my mother’s house. I was gracious of her hospitality, but once the nest is left, it can only be returned to to tend to an injury. It is not for the flier who wants to soar high. There’s an unconscious level of self-expression and peace of mind that is suffocated under such conditions.
From an aching heart to an inability to fully breathe, my chest became so tight I could inhale but a millimeter until I felt as if an iron wrought cage was confining it on all sides. It felt so restricted that I wished someone would give me chest compressions for any sense of relief.
Like a caged bird, the air was trapped by my ribs. I was unable to access full expansion of myself - body, mind, or spirit. By all outward appearances, I was doing fine (minus the all-too-predictable weight gain).
Yet much was not in alignment. There was a blockage of flow, a low current of energy.
Sleep dwindled, coping mechanisms returned, and I slipped into a mode of survival. One where creativity has no soil to attach its roots, much less grow, and even less bloom.
The only thing that provided me solace was my exercise routine. It was my only means for getting out of my mind and into my body.
My acupuncturist helped me further pinpoint the corporeal areas in distress and unblock them through his gifted and insightfully intuitive healing. But I knew that relief was temporary: he got the energy re-flowing but it was up to me to keep everything from getting blocked again.
Given my need for something physical, I knew I needed a change in environment. What’s more is that I needed a change in lifestyle.
I needed a dramatic time-out.
It’s funny we’re so loathe to go after what we really want & need. I wanted my own space in nature to drink coffee all day and write my heart out. Doesn’t sound too complicated, does it?
Enter Alto Bonito. It was one of the first places to pop-up when I did a preliminary search of AirBnBs in Medellin. Given its 7-hour driving distance from the city, I’d like to say it found me or my internal compass just lunged for it.
2 trains
1 international flight
1 domestic flight.
1 collectivo*
1 shared taxi ride &
1 private taxi
later I arrive in the middle of the Colombian Andes, a modest 2,000 meters closer to the sky.
My host reflects back to me that wholesome part within me — the one I have embodied and have also yet to embody.
It’s the push-rest balance. It’s going to bed with the moon and waking with the sun. It’s all fresh, unprocessed, whole foods. It’s supplementing that diet with sunbathing in those glorious sun- and heat-filled moments in the mountains. It’s a place full of nature and free of vices. It’s a place that halts the running of the thoughts, allowing me to double my sleep from 4.5 hours to 9 just by being in its presence.
It’s a place where you go from stressed-out to blissed-out upon entry.
It’s a place where I am void of distractions and have absolutely no choice, and no greater honor, than to focus inward.
*collectivo is a shared dozen-plus shared van which they also call a bus
Healing Through Travel
The road to healing begins by journeying within ourselves. The truth is, healing doesn’t have to take place in a holy land under the guidance of a shaman or Buddhist monk.
We are quite capable of getting uncomfortable in our homes. But for me, I couldn’t journey within until I ventured out into the world. I had to remove myself from the comforts of home because their temptations were too great. It was too easy for me to keep doing things I had always done them because their familiarity and predictable outcomes created a sense of safety, albeit a false one.
Minca, Colombia
So I decided to venture out into the world to spread my wings, to prove to myself that I could respond to its unpredictability.
Through traveling…
I learned self-reliance. I can navigate city streets, public transportation, rural roads, and endless trails that traverse the mountains to get to any destination I please. I can handle sicknesses, going to the ER, being stuck without water or electricity for days, among so many other happenstance things that seem to only happen when one travels.
I learned to receive. In a world that applauds martyrdom & hyper-independence, I now know that receiving from another person is, many times, a gift in itself.
I learned to be autonomous. In a foreign country, I am removed from my normal life, where I’m heavily influenced by what society/family/friends tell me I should be doing, feeling, or wanting. I discovered what I actually want to be doing, feeling, and wanting.
I learned the power of feelings & emotions. The unique experiences the great Universe has bestowed upon me has awakened me to passionate, intense feelings. This has ultimately led me to break open as a person, especially as a woman. Traveling carries with it a certain freedom that allows the self to open up & expand. As such, I’ve been able to release so much trauma & pain I’ve stored & hidden in my body. It has also guided me to actually feel & thus chase higher feelings like bliss, peace, & euphoria.
I reinstated a sense of self that I can be proud of. I consider my trips to be like my children, a grand creation I conjure from my resources. I have become a ”resourceress.”
I learned that I am human and that making mistakes is normal. I have given up my rules of perfection and now embrace my hiccups. Everything in life is a lesson.
I learned the first steps toward vulnerability. I now make deep connections with strangers that allow me to show raw aspects of myself that I typically wouldn't share.
I learned how to achieve communion with Source in the remoteness of nature.
I learned to care less about my body image. My energy is what values more than gold
I learned two core values:
Don’t let life get too safe.
Keep the world big.
The more I align with these values and apply these lessons to my life, the more I thrive and live a life that I love.
Que siga el viaje
May the journey continue.
Stepping Into One’s Power
It’s better to get up, stand up, no matter how homemade your platform, and live the most you can, the best you can, and forgo the sneaking of counterfeits. Sneaking a counterfeit soul-life never works.
From the pages of:
Women Who Run with the Wolves by
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes
The sneaking of a counterfeit life is the result of the age-old belief that we must live based on some prescribed, predetermined trajectory. We subconsciously {or not-so-subconsciously} feel shame when we yearn to be on another path, one that doesn’t come close to paralleling the one we think we should be on. More often than not, we hide our passionate longings in bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and steal nips when no one is looking or stuff them in a deep corner of a closet, abandoning them whilst never being able to forget them.
We frequently download messages that condition us to play small. Societal expectations want us to fit into a box, leading us to believe we need to be a certain size and shape in order to fit in. This expectancy penetrates to the inner workings of our mind, instilling an understanding for which ways of life are acceptable and which ways of life are not. If we want to be loved, accepted and feel connected, we learn to mindlessly conform to these beliefs, without listening to the voice that lies within; the voice that speaks on behalf of our spirit, mind, and soul.
Many of our mentors throughout life are, indeed, well-intentioned, which makes it hard for us to see any injustice they might have committed. An English teacher enforces strict guidelines on writing that shift the focus from creativity to arbitrary rules for spelling and grammar. A parent opposes the pursuit of a particular course of study for fear that it will not result in a lucrative career for the child. A coach denies the intuition of our bodies, persuading us to doubt its omniscient messages telling us how & when to rest, push, and heal.
We also absorb the subliminal (and explicit) messages embedded in our daily lives. When we predominantly see a certain type of person who is a specific ethnicity, has a particular body type, portrays flawless beauty, and lives a specific lifestyle, we learn to equate those external characteristics with success, happiness, and, in many cases, worthiness.
Our malleability in our early years teaches us to strive to meet such expectations. These beliefs often continue to plague us in our adulthood, lasting, ultimately, a lifetime.
If we choose to listen.
At any given time, we have the choice to tune in to the voice within and tune out the voices around us. We have the option to rid ourselves of the beliefs we inherited along the way and to adopt our own.
There is, undoubtedly, a tremendous life force within each and every one of us. It is not only our birthright to tap into & emanate that vital energy but also our responsibility. In order to fully step into our power, we must challenge our beliefs, especially the ones that have been holding us back. We must ask the inner workings of our being what it has to say.
Not only are the answers within us, but the power is, too. It lies betwixt our very hands, ready for action whenever we are. It is within this knowledge that we recognize that we are capable of extraordinary things, capable of attaining any goal we set our focus on.
After all, how did those footprints get on the moon in the first place?