After almost two years...

I know, I know, it's hard to imagine that angelic little ol' me is related to these wild animal hat wearing beasties! But yes, after lugging my over sized red suitcase onto three different buses (getting the evil eye from three different Korean drivers), jumping onto two planes, surviving the Beijing water Nazis and the 24hr flight (gasp)....and after almost two years MIA, I flew into the LAX airport to be greeted by....(duh duh dum) two glove/mask wearing siblings happily waiting with their hazmat body bag ready to secure the Korean diseased sister. Love I tell ya, truly loved.
We spent a glorious xmas with our aunties riding ponies, eating green chili stew, and hiking one of them until she hurled chunks (yep, grandma Jeanne will never talk smack again!;). We took off to explore more of the Cali coast, stumbling upon blubber bellied sea lions in Morro Bay where we decided to camp the night. We braved the monsoon weather and the plopping vultures who sat in the tree above our tent having a plop-on-the-camper-contest. As we headed inland the rain turned to snow that stalked us all the way to my parent's house in New Mexico where we got snowed in blizzard style. I travel half way around the world to get stuck in the worst snow storm NM has seen in years, go figure! ;) Now the car is packed, the coffee pot set to brew at 5am and the butterflies are spinning expectantly for the next leg of my east-erly trip. If you see two crazy, animal hat wearing people driving like mad in their pimped out ol' Camry cutting a wide swath across Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Illinois on a few hours of sleep and a couple gallons of coffee don't be worried...it's just me bringing the party to IN+KY! :) Happy New Years you all! Let's live it up 2011 style!

My last travel adventure in Nepal and trekking the EBC was an incredible experience and one I found profoundly spiritual. These are some orphan images that never found a home in past blog posts, but that I wanted to share.

"May your paths be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds." -Edward Abbey

Dear Friends

Tonight I was going through some old photos of my dear friends, Cora and Susie, a pair of sisters I met one Spring day in 2007 trawling the back roads of Appalachia Kentucky looking for an ACP workshop story. I saw these two beautiful wrinkled old women working their garden and stopped to sit and shoot the breeze and that day marked the beginning of our beautiful friendship and my two year documentary of their extraordinary lives. As I looked through the photos I felt a profound sense of loss as if their beautiful faces were no longer around to shine kindness in my direction and would never have another photographed taken of them. They were inching closer to 90 years old when I left and a part of me knew I would never see them again, but I never wanted to think it. I wonder if I remembered to tell them how special they were to me and how much taking me in like an odd stray bird and treating me like a daughter meant to me. I am so honored that our lives touched for such a brief moment and so happy that I could share their world for such a short time. But I will miss these two incredible women. Women whose hand's felt like the work roughened ones that took mine in Indonesia and whose rusty voice that told me stories sounded like that of my Korean grandmother. Whose wrinkles creased with tears and sun were just the story lines of a life well lived like those I saw on the faces of the Nepali Sherpas. Feeling their loss made me think about death and how it's something that we never seem comfortable with as humans. I know it's because it's so final, it's The End, but you would think that like a good ending to a great book it would leave us with a feeling of peace and acceptance of this cycle that is life. But it never feels like peace does it? A part of me recognizes that it is the impermanence of life that makes it so special, that reminds us to revel in every moment and yet I fight against the very thing that makes this world so painfully beautiful. A good friend of mine said something that I thought was profound,
"If everything lasted forever, experiencing it would be meaningless."-AH
I hope to someday be comfortable enough with death and my own decay to cheer a beautiful well lived life and to accept death as a natural process, as natural as being born...

Dear Friends

Tonight I was going through some old photos of my dear friends, Cora and Susie, a pair of sisters I met one fall day in 2007 trawling the back roads of Appalachia Kentucky looking for an ACP workshop story. I saw these two beautiful wrinkled old women working their garden and stopped to sit and shoot the breeze and that day marked the beginning of our beautiful friendship and my two year documentary of their extraordinary lives. As I looked through the photos I felt a profound sense of loss as if their beautiful faces were no longer around to shine kindness in my direction and would never have another photographed taken of them. They were inching closer to 90 years old when I left and a part of me knew I would never see them again, but I never wanted to think it. I wonder if I remembered to tell them how special they were to me and how much taking me in like an odd stray bird and treating me like a daughter meant to me. I am so honored that our lives touched for such a brief moment and so happy that I could share their world for such a short time. But I will miss these two incredible angels. Angel's whose hands feel like the work roughened ones that took mine in Indonesia and the rusty voice that told me stories like that of my Korean grandmother, whose wrinkles creased with tears and sun are just the story lines of a life well lived, like those of the Nepali Sherpa. Feeling their loss made me think about death and how it's something that we never seem comfortable with as humans. I know it's because it's so final, it's The End, but you would think that like a good ending to a great book it would leave us with a feeling of peace and acceptance of the inevitable cycle of life. But it never feels like peace does it? A part of me recognized that it is the impermanence of life that makes it so special, that reminds us to revel in every moment and yet I fight against the very thing that makes this world so painfully beautiful. A good friend of mine said something that I thought was profound,
"If everything lasted forever, experiencing it would be meaningless."-AH
I hope to someday be comfortable enough with death and my own decay to cheer a beautiful, well lived life and to accept death as a natural process, as natural as being born...