Disappearing with Warning

Tomorrow I exit the Iberian Peninsula, finally. Catalyunia is here, holding me for the last few days. A good friend and his family who treated me like family and not just because they have a son my age who is also traveling, a renewed farmhouse with a little sheep locked up in it, green slopes and tractor trails to walk on, homemade queso fresco, a baby goose hatched in an incubator in the bathroom. The Pyrenees have snow on them, in the distance, I woke up more than three months ago on a train from Paris with the sun coming over their white sides and the air very frosty. I go to Italy tomorrow.

I thought I would have been in France or Italy ages ago. Tomorrow the names Bologna, Faenza. Ten days of silence at the Dhamma Atala Vipassana centre, spelled that way. I don´t know why I feel the need this time to signal a mere ten days of disappearing. I have vanished from this page for much longer before. But oh well. I am tired of constant disappearing! Missing the people who know me best does this. I want you to know where I am. Or in case I don´t survive the silence. In case they find a wild woman screaming in the woods on Sunday, unable to take it anymore. But actually....I am sure I will do just fine there. It isn´t the silence that scares me, but...the painful learning of patience....something like that.

Well anyway. See you in Firenze at the end of the month. Ciao a tutti

ghosts of the posts that weren't made, part one

I bought a ghost-white camera in Gibraltar, where Aaron and I went for a few days back in mid-January. Gibraltar is a cross between a slightly backwoods small British town and the duty free section of the airport, the main street lined with shops selling huge cartons of cigarettes, discounted liquor, perfumes, and electronics. It belongs to Britain but lives at the tip of Spain, with a big ugly jutting-up rock from the top of which you can see the mountains of Morocco, and also monkeys. We stayed in a hotel in La Linea, Spain, and walked across the border to England and back each day. La Linea had much better nightlife, one elephant, no monkeys.