\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 65\u00a0 bar rises 29.73\u00a0 2mph WSW dew-point 49\u00a0 Beltane, sunny<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Gibbous Flower Moon<\/p>\n
The places I have visited stay with me, sometimes like ghosts, haunting my dreams and intruding on waking life.\u00a0 Angkor.\u00a0\u00a0 Singapore.\u00a0 Bangkok.\u00a0 Ephesus.\u00a0 Delphi.\u00a0 Santorini.\u00a0 Rome.\u00a0 Pompeii.\u00a0 Venice.\u00a0 Florence.\u00a0 Crete.\u00a0 Delos.\u00a0 Istanbul.\u00a0 Bogota.\u00a0 Cartagena.\u00a0 Mexico City.\u00a0 Merida.\u00a0 Oaxaca. Vienna.\u00a0 Salzburg.\u00a0 Paris.\u00a0 London.\u00a0 Hawarden.\u00a0 Anglesey.\u00a0 Conwy.\u00a0 Edinburgh.\u00a0 Bath.\u00a0 Cities and towns, states and countrysides in the US and Canada too many to name.<\/p>\n
Angkor drapes vines over me, inserts vast tree roots into my memories while the howler monkeys and the cicada scream.\u00a0 It’s hot and it doesn’t let up, just gets hotter, too hot in the midday.\u00a0 The stone rises and rises, carved by artists capable of rendering the delicate and ephemeral in stone.\u00a0 The astronomical, astrological, theological pandemonium of it all causes reverberations deep in my soul, beyond my Self and down into my links with the collective unconscious.\u00a0 I was there when the stone masons cut the block, shaped Vishnu turning the great turtle in the sea of milk.\u00a0 My hand carved the apsara and fitted stones into the great western gate of Angkor Wat.<\/p>\n
Delphi sends music to me, pan-pipes and Apollo’s lute.\u00a0 The cedar scented sacred way winds it way up the side of Mt. Parnassus past the Athenian treasury, up to the Temple of Apollo where the Delphic Oracle met questioners and answered their questions with questions deep in its subterranean precincts.\u00a0 Here, too, is the omphalos stone, the center of the world.\u00a0 The Castalian spring.\u00a0 All round Mt. Parnassus are echoes of divinity, cries from the Pythian Games, honoring Apollo’s defeat of the cthonic serpent Python, still resound throughout the rocky hills.\u00a0 The Delphi Oracle still speaks today and she says, “Beware, Stranger, of forgetting\u00a0your past for in it lie secrets to your future.\u00a0 Without your past you will wander the earth always an infant in your understanding.”<\/p>\n
Merida and the Casa del Balam, house of the jaguar, bring heat, heat so intense that as the afternoon rains came there was no relief, only a suffocating rise in humidity.\u00a0 To escape the locals do much of their business in pre-dawn and dawn hours, sitting together in the main park around the confidenitales, small curved benches made so dating couples could sit beside each other, yet not touch.\u00a0 Here Mayan women sell blood oranges in front of the Cathedral, their roots at Chichen Itza and Tikal, not Jerusalem or Rome.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hawarden resonates with my genetic past.\u00a0 On the trains in North Wales most of the people looked like they could be my cousin short, thin, dark eyes and hair.\u00a0 The town with its residential library (where I stayed) and its brick and stone streets and buildings had Victorian written in its architecture, public and private.\u00a0 It also had a\u00a0bookish quality, an Oxford don would not have felt out of place.\u00a0 The church graveyard, just behind St. Deniol’s Library, had slate markers covered with moss and huge trees hanging heavy bows over the graves.\u00a0 Behind it the stone building of St. Deniol’s parish church sat calm and iconic.<\/p>\n
There are others, many others, but these places live within me, never absent.\u00a0 They are the great gift of travel and one I cherish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 65\u00a0 bar rises 29.73\u00a0 2mph WSW dew-point 49\u00a0 Beltane, sunny \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Gibbous Flower Moon The places I have visited stay with me, sometimes like ghosts, haunting my dreams and intruding on waking life.\u00a0 Angkor.\u00a0\u00a0 Singapore.\u00a0 Bangkok.\u00a0 Ephesus.\u00a0 Delphi.\u00a0 Santorini.\u00a0 Rome.\u00a0 Pompeii.\u00a0 Venice.\u00a0 Florence.\u00a0 Crete.\u00a0 Delos.\u00a0 Istanbul.\u00a0 Bogota.\u00a0 Cartagena.\u00a0 Mexico City.\u00a0 Merida.\u00a0 Oaxaca. Vienna.\u00a0 … Continue reading Visitations<\/span>