Un beso: chau chau, Uruguay.

“Less hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go.

We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way,

begin no day where we have ended another day;

and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us...”
-Gibran Khalil Gibran


I spent a good part of this year discovering that I am a wanderer and a seeker. At first, the thought of this terrified me. What if I never find a home?, I asked myself. What if I‘m destined to spend the rest of my days perpetually lost? But between Billy Joel, Mr. Jones, NTVG, Gibran Khalil Gibran and my crazy uruguaya gypsy friends, I may have learned a thing or two this year.

I think, for now, that if in this life, I am indeed meant to wander the earth in search of something, that would be ok. I still don’t know exactly what it is that I seek, and that may just be the point of it all. But among the endless number of things that I may be searching for, a home is not one of them, for I understand now that that is something I have never been without.

“Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Your house is your larger body.
It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? and dreaming, leave the city for the grove or hilltop?
Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would that the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through the vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.
But theses things are not yet to be.
In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together. And that fear shall endure a little longer. A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.
And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the night?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and them becomes a host, and then a master?...
…But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall not be an anchor but a mast.
It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they may strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest the walls should crack and fall down…
…And though of magnificence and splendor, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansions of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and silences of the night. “

- Gibran Khalil Gibran

Whitman

6 a.m.
i was fast asleep
when i heard my phone go off
there was a simple message from
a reader of walt whitman
and right there all alone in bed
as dawn broke outside my window
is when i just may have fallen in love
i'll think on it again in the morn'.

At the ends of the Earth.

It was barely 4 a.m. when we boarded the bus that reminded me a little of the Polar Express. The morning air was crisp and cold, so we shivered together in the back seat and watched our breath on the window turn to frost. Though sleepy eyes we saw the pearl moon cradled in the gentle oyster of the black night sky. They say that destiny is written in the stars, for they are but shards of the old gipsy's crystal ball that fell once on the black marble floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, never to be put back together again. Out here the hills are blacker than night and the air is colder than steel. As we drove on through winding valleys of sand, slowly the stars began to fade and the ebony sky melted to periwinkle, though the sun was nowhere to be seen among the brickred mountain peaks. Soon we arrived at a place where all that should have been real was magic, and all that should have been magic was real. Smoke and steam surged forth from the earth and, like a factory of clouds, painted mist in the silver sky. And as we wandered though the silent fog, we huggged each other and knew that we were lost together at the ends of the Earth.

The Atacama Desert.

Some say God has forsaken this land, but I don't think that's true. I think He has tucked it away in the corner of the Earth, saving it for Himself and for that handful of souls who know that it is precisely in places like this where God hides in all His glory among the foothills and the sand. And just who are these souls? you might ask. These are the souls who wander; these are the souls who who seek. They come here looking for something, and although many, like myself, may not have known what it was when we came, I do think that most of us find it. Now "it" is not necessarily anything in particular. In fact, if you were to ask the people here what it is that drew them here, or in some cases, what it is that keeps them here, they would probably all tell you something different. Some may tell you it's Beauty, others Freedom, others Solitude. Still, some may tell you it's Magic and others may even say it's God. Some may say it's all of these things and others may say it's none, that it's something more, something beyond everything we are capable of naming, but I don't think that is the important part.

Because regardless of the word (and of the language, for people here come from all over the planet), what matters is that we've all, in our very own way, found "it." "It" is something universal, if only by virtue of being simply undefineable. There are some things that you just can't define, and these are the things that are bigger than us. So no matter what we call it, no matter how we describe it, we are really all out here, just another grain of sand beneath the stars, contemplating the desert.