An adventure in reconnection, renewal, & the Unknown.
I. We find our steps, again, in a lacunae ten thousand miles deep by seven years wide, but the same portal sun beckons there to the children of wolves. In the stillness now is not heaviness but a coarse patoi of courage, stumbling on tongue tips of burnt honey. Not an aimless idle, but an inner knowing that an invisible River never ceases, even in yearning, in restless drought, even where a sandbar erased the map.
Listen: Danza del Agua – Miki Gonzalez
Tayrona National Park, Magdalena // Caribbean coast
II. We have learned how to look inside the hollow, rather than without, to find that it is not hollow at all but a prism bending this way and that, waiting to refract shivers of cerulean lemondrop dusk in late August if only these tendrils would shake the dirt and reach, just further. We fear the mirrorage and the apostrophe but we are learning to trust the rain.
Listen: Antenna – Bonobo
Minca, Magdalena // Sierra Nevadas
III. Behind traded verse, Quetzalcoatl drums a memory of the future into resounding silence–that voice-echoing-open-armed emptiness waiting to be found and filled with breath amidst a fray of nation-sized wounds, festering traumas, the perfume of homeless sorrows mingling with diesel exhaust, swollen bellies, transcontinental bloodlines seeking a womb, self-sabotage, exile.
Listen: Montañita – Lulacruza
IV. Hip to hip through jungles of monkey vine and slave-shaped stone, sabanna brush and virgen blessings, we walk and I burn blood from my cheeks. I see, now. My ghosts are not gone; they are dancing in the palm fronds but oh how I sway with them now, twirl my fingers through their hair, build miniature altars to honor the softened skin I wear from their bright bones.
Listen: Pools – Glass Animals
Suesca, Cundinamarca // Sábana de Bogotá
V. Underground, underwater, under canopy, under flame four feet crisscross fallow fields with the mother tongue of coded dreams. Whether the planting is of peonies or cloud forest is not written; for now, the task is to lick salt from old wounds and trace their patterns with a firm hand. But in the scratch of bare shoulders to a thatched floor, in the red embers drawn to the breath of ocean in coastal darkness, there is a planet reflecting back the sunlight.
Listen: Burning Stars – Mimicking Birds