Swimming with Sharks

It´s Sunday, so teaching isn´t until tomorrow. Spending all day on a dingy off the coast of St Cristobal is not a bad second choice. We sped 30-40 km around the west coast of the island and stopped to snorkel along the way.

We approached the rock called Sleeping Lion or the Kicker (depending on from where you view it), my heart racing because Jesse and Manolo say we have the option to swim with vegetarian sharks today.

I don´t know what didn´t stop me from jumping in the water to swim through the narrow crevice of the giant sea-stranded rocks, a craggy, sunny perch for Lobos (sea lions), Boobies, and iguanas. In the cold waters swishing through the tunnel we couldn´t see the sea floor. There was a metropolis below to which we did not belong only visible if we stopped to study the depths. From meters below our fins, the figure I knew well from aquariums and nature shows: the unmistakable confident and leathery sway of grey sharks. They were distinct only when still . . . and near.

They were not occupied by us. They were in fact, not vegetarian (as Wilson, our tour guide also insisted) but rather, pescatarians. I held Kathleen´s hand as promised to get through the crack to the promised land of the other side. That sunlight beyond the arch of the rocks was the closest imagining of heaven I have ever felt. Yet I was still and bewildered. We glided through the water sometimes hiding behind Wilson for ¨safety¨ whatever that means. But in the thick of the swim, on a higher echelon than the sharks floating in a threesome, were eagle rays, or what I prefer to call, ¨sea-moths¨. They stunned me without stinging. If only I could run. Even with fins, I must have moved like a sea lion on the sand...mobile but essentially helpless, awkward, and . . . cute as pie?

As we crossed through the oracle, I knew that from watching many a suspense thriller that any relief to have made it through, would only mean that I would suddenly feel the tearing of my leg from my hip by a baby shark and his ensuing family. I decided to remain agitated to preserve my safety as a terror film protagonist. But then again, this nervousness was also no good, I decided, despite my appearance of calm: to sharks, acting is probably as futile a mask as gum is to garlic. On the other side, the water was murky and full of tiny jellyfish. We were suddenly stung at random, the group of us singing like a chorus hit by tiny shafts of fire. We all climbed back aboard, never exhaling until we ourselves were each aboard (survival of the fittest; every woman for herself). The boat raced to our picnic spot as though it were as charged as we were by the creatures we dared to intrude upon.

But our last snorkel spot of all renewed our lightheartedness: in shallow shark-free waters we watched sea lions swim around us in spins and flips and stare with big puppy eyes. I thought I would explode. Galapagos turtles moved at their opposite speed under the surface while we voyeurs again looked on, uninvited but welcome.


Jan went home today.

Yesterday´s 5 hour rehearsal was so exciting. I can´t wait to create.

Tomorrow: in the school!

Wish you were here,

J.

Adapting to Galapagos

There is no way to catch it all except in fragments before I forget.
I am in the Galapagos now, and Quilotoa feels like a lifetime ago. I will still try to capture it before Galapagos takes it over and before Mindo takes over Galapagos.


Right now: Mockingbird Cafe in Galapagos, post breakfast, listening to Bryan Adams sing Ëverything I Do¨ in Spanish. This priceless CD is all 90´s covers in Spanish, including Glenn Medeiros´¨Never Gonna Change My Love for You¨.


Surprise of the Trip: Starbucks buys 85% of the Organic coffee grown in the Galapagos. This changes my snobbery of them entirely. Now if only the baristas had uniform training on how to make a cappucino.


Friday 5/29
Woke up sick as a gringo. Couldn´t keep anything in my body. Only fruit juice sufficed and had to go out to collect wood in a nature preserve in the highlands of the Galapagos. Sweat did me good. So did fresh squeezed ¨fruitas de la passion . . .¨ We met beautiful ladies from Finland, Scotland, and Connecticut who were spending months volunteering at Hacienda Tranquilitas. Then we rode horses up to a lookout where we saw the entire island. Endless blue. Cities took up so little of the landscape. Riding in the back of the truck taxi and drawing murals on buildings for children to paint.

We went to teach at the school, but they were off for children´s week! hahahahah love it. Then we hiked the crater that once was a volcano and watched giant frigets swoop and shake down into the lake. Then came the tortoise center and then the Porto Chino beach where we arrived at sunset and swam in the soft sand and waves until twilight was done while pelicans dive bombed the water around us. We picked up Jan, a traveler from Poland who is doing research on Ecuadorian politics and teaching children computer science. After my first nourishment since breakfast, we stopped by a political party which consisted of a basketball court and hibachi grills on the perimeter. That didn´t last long, I was so tired.

Today rehearsal and tomorrow we swim with sharks and sea lions.

More on Quilotoa later! Not enough time! My camera broke. Wish I could send pictures.

J.

Q & A

It's not home, but it will do . . .


. . . How or where do I begin?


Quito, Quilotoa, Quito--Ah! Altitude in the Andes . . .

Moving from Quito to Quilotoa and back to Quito again, the Altitude of the Andes has done more than Ahhh or Aggggh our bodies--it has shifted the earth within. If New York (elevation 33 ft.) felt distant upon my arrival in Quito (elevation 9,350 ft), it is even farther away from remembering now that I have lived a week in the remote village of Quilotoa (elevation 12,841 ft.). Climbing mountains has brought us health and sickness; it has answered many questions and has posed many new ones. The effects of traversing geological altitude is merely a symbol of the cordilleras and calderas in the mountain of my own affections and desires.

No one but I can explore the terrain within as intimately and deeply as I can and have. And for that, I am filled with gratitude and awe deeper than any ever before experienced. The gratefulness, respect, and wonder I have found for myself can be compared to that I have felt and feel now freshly remembering the awesome landscape and people of Quilotoa. The long 4 hour drive alone-- into folds of endless mountains, gorges, and hills-- is enough to generate spirituality within and without myself.

And then there was Domingo Cantinas --- an unpolished, cheeky, folky, self-depricating, witty songwriter who curses his lovers and his life in deadpan Spanish before crumpling his folder paper lyrics into a ball of trash and hurtling the coveted relics to his wild and cultish fans. I am now one of them. Woo me, sir on a Sunday in a bar: you have the elements of the wit that rips into my own spirit. Where to begin describing? I can´t. I will have to make another blog to put the phrases into the net of this blog, never wide enough to capture the panorama of my over-experienced week. Perhaps I have traveled into space and spent a lifetime in this week--aging only in my curiosity while all others have had nine lives since I left. Time is foreign here even though I own a watch for the first time in a decade...

I am so lucky to have this opportunity to SEEK (as one friend put it), and SOAK (as another put it) a fraction of the world´s diversity--nevermind Ecuador´s! This country, though small is so full of the range of resources and climates and experiences to follow in another blog. For now, I must soak and seek again.

Thanks for sipping. I´ll strive to put more flavor in the next blog.

Love and Openness and endless Questions,

Jennifer

Cordillera de Los Andes

QUITO

¨please wear these face masks as you disembark the plane¨

thick, scratchy, cringy, jungle heat

my nose in a coffin , an MRI for my lips without a panic button

weak orange streetlamps hush










hammocks and jam

a daylight brawl in pickpocket streets










lentils, rice, beans and plantains

splash from the sky

gringos wear keens and raincoats and funny hats










fedoras command the respect of a peacock

QUILOTOA

Andean peaks like steep and thick intestines lead to somewhere


a glass caldera of water, 800 years silent








dust, toothless smiles, blood-burnt cheeks and trash








words i don´t know and whispers











soup and potatoes and rice and soup. no exit. a pig screams at noon somewhere in the village. the house next to where I bought laurel leaves hangs a pink and red bone fan out to dry--four hooves swing quietly in the unrelenting breeze.










orange fire light in our mess hall, Jose´s den makes us forget to shiver.




Zumbuaha market sells sheep that come with free slaughtering. Though others watched to stretch their spirits, mine is just fine imagining the ritual. Cheese and honey, steaming pots and a carpet auction are oblivious to the green and endless slopes that nestle in this village.

Our work on the community center has only just begun. We gather the children off the volleyball court, which is a basketball court. We teach them English with name and number and animal games.

Jesse´s brother married an Ecuadorian woman, from Mindo last year. She makes all our delicious soups, including a green one you put popcorn in. They are lost in love. Santi and Sonya look at each other and make us forget where they are from.



Christen and I bunk up as the Blue cast is cast out of Princess a Toa. An orange kitten adopts us and convinces us to make a litter box out of gravel to keep under the stairs to the loft. We have hot water here, but it is so cold I only shower once.


In order to herd sheep you must first herd llamas.


Rainbows stretch here the size of Earth in a perfect half circle.







Sunsets are platinum and punctuated only with barking dogs, wind, and far off conversations in Quichua.

The president invites us to music at a house that would attract Grendel in the village now dark under the bright milky way. We dance and they sing and play objects and instruments. Each song is half an hour. We dance with the children who jump us up and down. We spin them. Girls wear white knee highs, black heels and shawls. Everyone wears a fedora. Jose slides his lips across the p¡pes with a pursed grin. ¨Hola Chica!¨ says his golden tooth. The president is in the circle, so are Blanca and Narcissa. I don´t want to go to dinner, which is getting cold.

One last bowl of starch before we leave.

Aloha New York

"Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you."
-Eckhart Tolle

IT HIT ME!!!!

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I just watched my netflix, Globe Trekker: Ecuador and the Galapagos, and I am so excited I can hardly contain myself! Justine you are my heroine, and I commend you for not eating the fried Hedgehog.

I apologize for the lackluster blogs!

Yahooooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I love you all. Time to sleep, something I have forgotten how to do lately . . .

Jennifer!!!!!!!!!! (and Monster)

Sense and Serendipity

The journey is contracting--when I open my eyes, I will be closing the door to my Astoria flat and entering a tunnel that will emerge in Ecuador.

We mark such chapters by significant changes, shifts in the techtonics of our physical and emotional lives. I know there is a continental shift in not only my soul but in the spirit of those around me both near and far. Friends are departing for summers away or abroad, casting themselves, as I am into the sea of the only life that we know.

Speaking of lives we know not of . . . today I faced the power of the sixth sense. I had brunch at my old apartment with Napa, and we listened to a tarot card reading we had done last year--it was recorded in May 2008.

Before Derek's reading, I had never indulged such curiosities (apart from Sister Reese whose way off visions did not convince me to unclog my chakrahs for an additional cost . . .Oh Sabrina, how could we?!) and since he is a friend of a friend from Hawai'i, we sought his sense about our immediate futures-- in work and in love. I shall focus on work here, though he was spot-on in both . . .

Derek not only is a direct contributor to the funding of this project, but he SAW it in the reading, though he didn't call it DAT at the time--he saw me traveling with a group of people to different places, (possibly Islands!) to work with education, children, and theatre. He said this will be the way I will work always, but this year is when it begins and I will tell the story of my travels ... the labor begins tomorrow, and the blog has already begun. "You'll be wearing glasses of some kind--I'm not quite sure if it's for a role or something else, but I see glasses . . . " Cousin Pat was with me when he approved my crazy frames last November. . . The year is over; a birthday is marked; a prophecy is fulfilled that will change my present life, that has been changing it and is.

It's funny what I imposed on such visions of the future at a time when I couldn't even fathom what the visions meant . . . I assumed they were related to my life as I knew it then --the people and places in it last May. Oh, how life has changed. He saw a ferris wheel . . . and this year has been that, certainly; my expectations-- however unexpecting-- and my experiences have been serendipitous and quite the Coney Island ride.

Christen, whom I met by watching a play that I almost never saw, introduced me to Seton Hall, and a year later, we both are going to Ecuador with DAT--without telling each other. We both thought we were underqualified, and now we will share our "undeserved" experience!

And so will Monster ...



Long story short: Monster hails from Boston, from the hands of Courtney and Tricia. And he shall continue to follow me through my travels. The day I released Monster to Sabrina, who is off to the West Coast, I received a package in the express mail from Tricia. In it: Monster. Serendipity strikes again.

Beginning with packing, I intend to be inspired by these "signs" and continue my course of ACTion (as DAT puts it) . . . This is only the beginning according to Derek and Cousin Pat, and Monster has a whole decade of traveling ahead of him!

Thank you for being part of this great story, all of you--for your emails and your action, which allows me to re-act and unfold the drama that is the ever-increasing "sum" our collective, intertwined lives.

This blog is inspired by Isabelle Allende, Derek Calibre, Napa Lum, Cousin Pat, Sabrina Cooke, Christen Madrazo, and Tricia Santomasso.

Bon Voyage to all!


Jennifer and Monster

A Great Summer Saunter

"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms."
-Thoreau, "Walking"

You all keep asking me if I am excited about my trip--I leave May 18th, by the way--but I find it hard to anticipate. I've got papers to grade, late taxes to sort, a room to organize, yoga to practice, dancing to do, saunters to take!

Alas, I didn't even have time to bake for Shakespeare's birthday this year. How far I've fallen from the mince pie days. . . . William, can you forgive me?

However, I will admit that during the DAT conference call on April 23rd, I finally felt it. I put the phone on mute, smacking the desktop and shouting AOOOOOOOO! about all the great things we'll be doing--for the community and as a byproduct, ourselves! Long bus rides, altitude changes, refurbishing the old building for the community center, learning Spanish, learning about the environment, teaching kids, hiking to summits far away from civilization, and writing about it all to create a piece of theatre, which we will share with you in New York in July. Stay tuned for that.

But before that, there's now.


In the space between the moment where you chuck a bottle out to sea and the moment it washes up on its next shore, there's a lot to learn and do while drifting. Actually, I've been surfing since Truth & Dare. After returning from a perfect, rainy, sublime Easter in Vancouver, where I spent every moment in the moment, I jumped right back into that New York state of anticipation, but last weekend I escaped again, joining a friend on The Great Saunter. The Saunter traces the perimeter of New York City--32 miles of it from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm.

So many discoveries lie quiet along "the long way." In New York, we rush from place to place, continually reverting inward to that robotic state we pride ourselves in, the state that enables us to 1. tune out crazy strangers and 2. figure out the fastest subway from Queens to Brooklyn-- without going through Manhattan (there is none). Once the novelty of this city-game wears off, the habit becomes exhausting, and it keeps us out of NOW; it wastes the moment by focusing on "where will I be?" It denies the people and places around us--even when we justify it as "for our own safety." We arrive at a destination on the opposite shore of this lonely island in record time and in one piece! --without a single memory of the path there. No adventure, no moment, no great saunter . . .

"What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?"

Last Saturday, we threw out the subway maps and time constraints; we let the shoreline lead us and show us the many quiet sculptures that watch the water day in and out--like St. Paul's Cathedral watches London while its movers move. When I stopped trying to lead, I was led by the movement of a simple intention to walk. I cast myself out of bed and onto the foggy water's edge. My friends and the early summer morning led the way.



And even though I did have to cut my saunter short by my own choice to respect the responsibility of "work"--I made time for both. Every moment I can remind myself of the moment, the more I can enjoy the drift or float or tempest that directs my journey. I don't know where I will wash up, but there are so many directions to go and only one bottle to ride. I have learned of late--for many things: the "long way" is better.

Hitchhike a while on mine if you like. I'll send you postcards.

xo J.

(photos 1, 3, 4 by Christina R.)