Lisa's Journeys of Love & Peace Around the World

METAMORPHOSIS (How I Became The Butterfly...)

2010-09-21T10:37:00.001-07:00

If we had not been in silence, the afternoons long and full and wordless, senses of sight and touch and smell heightened without the web of words weaving through the air to connect us, I might never have noticed the butterflies, wings fluttering ever so slightly on the surface of the water, these butterflies trapped by the weight of their own dampened wings, unable to fly.

They were so elegant, delicate, helpless.

One by one, I plucked them out of the pool, gently holding each one on my fingertips, up to the sun so the wings could dry. One by one, I sat with them for minutes that stretched on like quiet hours, the second hand on the clock above the pool slowly circling around, seconds ticking away while their delicate orange and black wings dried.

I watched them gently moving in my hand, the hind and fore wings stirring, the thorax and proboscis used to sip flower nectar bending with the wind of my hot breath. These creatures were small, complex, miraculous.

After about 10 minutes when the wings were dry and flapping open, I would shake each butterfly off my hand, and scoop another one out of the pool.

They were my personal symbol, a metaphor for my own transformation. The massage therapist who had kneaded my shoulders and back earlier in the silent retreat, trying to free me of my anxiety, told me as she rubbed my shoulder-blades, “I feel four sets of wings growing in.”

Four sets of wings. Which angels were these sprouting wings out of my back, I wondered?

Surely Eric was one, my guardian angel, the man I loved who had died when I was 22. Surely my grandfather, my mother's father whose sky blue eyes and thousand-watt smile I had inherited.

I didn’t know who was responsible for these other sets of wings. Maybe I was turning into an angel myself over time, after all I had suffered and learned.

Going on silent retreat was new to me. Here I was, camped out on the cliffs above Santa Barbara, on a ranch once owned by Jane Fonda and where Michael Jackson had donated the money to build a theater.

I was there with 25 other students, devotees of my yoga and meditation instructor Dina, who was teaching me how to love myself again, how to open my heart and soften so that I wouldn’t talk to myself in such mean ways. For such a kind woman, I could be ruthless with myself.

I couldn’t remember ever not being that way, ever since I was a child prodigy and adults fussed over me and told me I would be great at everything. I appreciated the attention, and was terrified by the pressure. How would I save this planet of ours, and keep it spinning on its axis, when wars and poverty threatened to make it implode, our beautiful blue and green sphere crushed by the weight of all the hate in the world?

Fixing the world felt like my job. Well into my 30s, I had never gotten over that, even after earning degrees from Princeton and Harvard, organizing events for Hillary Clinton, working for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and being asked to run for mayor of the small city where I’d lived before moving to SF – Troy, New York.

That is why being on retreat for a week in total silence, rising each day at 7 a.m. to meditate, doing yoga for four hours a day, phone turned off, computer at home, nobody calling me or emailing me or counting on me for anything, felt like such a relief.

Here I could just be, simply enjoy the luscious sweetness of every bite of ripe papaya, raspberries, peaches, pineapple, apple, drizzled with yogurt and sweet coconut and raisins, as I spooned it into my mouth in the morning. Here I could just lie in the grass for hours, lazing in the sun like a cat, stretching out to catch the rays, sliding across the grass to a new golden patch of light when I fell into shadow as the sun dipped west.

Sunsets over the cliffs were dazzling, skies striped in pink and purple, the sky dropping away, earth falling straight down in a sheer wall that bottomed out at houses, one mile down, with the city of Santa Barbara in a lit-up grid beneath us, and the ocean beyond that.

The next year when I returned for the same retreat, the scene would be different, the skies filling with smoke and the trees in the distance leaping with orange flames. The wildfires were creeping closer and closer, and we eventually had to be evacuated.

The helicopters swooped in overhead, diving down to scoop up baskets full of water and rushing back to pour it over the flames, creating a hissing cloud of steam over the forest, again and again. I felt like I was in an action adventure movie.

And my life certainly didn’t need any more drama. Nor did I want any more fires.

Before I chose the butterfly as my metaphor, I thought of myself as the phoenix rising from Greek mythology. These birds were identified with the sun and said to have a life span of 500 to 1,000 years. As the end of its life approached, the phoenix would build a nest of myrrh, set it aflame, burn down and in three days rise again.

That had been me. My story was one of renewal and rebirth.

The worst of it happened between ages 20 and 22, while I was in college. Young, naïve, Princeton undergrad, an accidental overachiever who aced every class in high school without trying and now had to put some effort in, I was fumbling my way through college, as any mildly depressed, overweight co-ed feeling out of place at a school full of rich and pretty people might do.

During Christmas break sophomore year, I drove south from my parents’ house in Massachusetts to a friend’s party in Rhode Island. I didn’t want to get drunk, knowing how awful it felt – vertigo, throwing up, passing out. Been there, done that.

I decided to only have two drinks that night. I just wanted to hang out with my friends and relax.

At some point during the night, someone slipped something into my drink, and the rest of the night was erased, except for one slice of memory in which I was lying on my back in the backseat of a car with a man pounding into me and dark glass behind that. The man who raped me left me passed out half-naked in the back of his car.

It was my guardian angel Eric, who I was sure was responsible for at least one of the sprouting sets of wings the massage therapist talked about, who found me in the car, carried me inside, cleaned me up, and put me to bed.

I remember none of this, only that when I woke up in the morning and saw the face of my rapist in the kitchen, bright white countertops glaring in the sun, glasses of orange juice on the counter, and his countenance – I wanted to kill him.

I never filed charges because I thought I would be the one put on trial. I moved on with my life.

I took a year off from Princeton to figure out what to major in, since I’d drifted during my first two years. When I returned to school, I was a jubilant English major, writing poems and reading 19th century Victorian novels, ridiculously happy to bury myself in books again, which had soothed and comforted me as an overly smart, shy child.

During the winter of my senior year, I started dating a local starving artist, a “townie” who lived in Princeton but did not attend the university. Alan was six feet tall with sculpted muscles, a toned and hairless chest as I would soon find out, almond eyes, café au lait skin, a chiseled jaw. He was half-Black and half-White but looked Latino. He was impossibly handsome.

He had been courting me for nearly a year, chatting me up in the student center rotunda café. I had steadfastly ignored him but eventually he roped me in by offering to do a pen-and-ink portrait of my family, modeled after a photograph. I was so touched that he created this piece of art for me that I agreed to go on a date with him.

The first week was okay, consisting of dates at Burger King which he could manage on his budget, a bottle or two of cheap champagne that we drank before stumbling back to my dorm room, and smoking cloves in the student café. By week two, my intuition was flashing red neon signs saying “Run fast!” and I was just as steadfastly ignoring them.

Alan had started to display another side of his personality, which included telling me “jokes” about how he was going to kill me. “That’s not funny, Alan,” I’d say, and he’d always just laugh and shake his head and say, “I’m just kidding baby, take it easy.”

One day in the basement of the dorms while folding his laundry, I discovered a pair of orange pajama bottoms with the word Trenton Psychiatric Hospital printed on them, and Alan’s last name stamped on the waistband. I froze, terrified, told Alan that I needed to get more coins for the dryer, ran back to my dorm room, and locked myself in, heart pounding.

Who was this man? What was his history? What should I do?

Mouth dry, palms wet, I finally talked myself into confronting him. He’d been strumming songs on his guitar while I did his laundry, and he set the instrument down and began to unravel the crazy story. He’d apparently already been arrested for stalking a woman who “couldn’t take a joke” when he’d threatened to kill her, he said. He had kicked out the back window of the police car when they arrested him. He had impersonated a crazy person, he said, going ballistic, so they would put him in the psychiatric ward instead of in the jail overnight. Apparently, it worked.

God only knows why I did not break up with him on the spot, but I didn’t know how to, and felt that maybe this was my fate. I’d been reading tragedies for my English class – Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde. Perhaps I would die young at the hands of my lover. Perhaps that was my path.

That March, as I was struggling to figure out how to leave Alan, who was getting more crazy by the day, I got the phone call that my beloved angel Eric, who I’d known and loved for nine years and who I felt sure I would marry one day long off in the future once I got all my silliness and insecurity out of my system, was back in the hospital for surgery again.

Eric had a condition called Marfan’s Syndrome, a congenital disorder of the connective tissues that had weakened his aorta. He had survived open heart surgery at 19 and took impeccable care of his health, walking every day, taking all the required pills, altering his diet, and even giving up basketball, the sport he most loved.

He was training in college to be a sports photojournalist, so he could document the sport he loved, since he could no longer play.

I could see Eric and myself years into the future, as his family’s lakehouse in Maine, a rolling tumble of children – our children – falling off the couches, laughing, as we loved and laughed and lived, a happy family together. I felt sure that would happen – someday – although in the interim I dodged his attempted kisses, too frightened by the tenderness I felt for him, and too sure that I would hurt him if I did not get my own wildness and confusion out of my system first.

Obviously, he would live a long life, and obviously we would be together someday, if I could only survive Alan’s craziness.

Instead, one Friday in March, while I was up late trying to write another essay about a tragic love story murder-suicide, I found myself playing sad love songs, Mozart’s Requiem and U2’s With or Without You, Eric’s and my favorites, staying up all night. I thought I was going to die that night. I thought Alan would finally break in and snap my neck and it would just be over.

At 7 a.m. I finally collapsed, sleep drugging me and knocking me into bed. Two hours later the phone started ringing, and ringing. I refused to answer it.

Somehow I knew. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want the truth.

I was alive, and Eric was gone. He’d gone into the hospital for surgery number two, and survived the night at St. Luke’s Hospital in Texas. In the morning at 7 a.m. his heart exploded.

I was inconsolable. This was not supposed to happen. This man was my future, once I got my own life straightened out.

Suddenly my life split in half, into my life with Eric and my life after. He was gone. I was suddenly shocked awake into my own life, fed up with Alan’s craziness, since he had kept stalking me after I finally broke down and had him arrested, and it took five men to pin him down to drag him flailing and shouting out of my dorm room.

I was no longer willing to leave my future to fate. I moved out of state, back into my parents’ house, and spent the first three months back there planning a memorial event for Eric. I withdrew from school for the semester. I couldn’t stand it that he was gone, and that I’d never had the chance to tell him how much I loved him.

Tall, lanky, gangly Eric, the gentle giant, the captain of our high school basketball team when I was a cheerleader, with front teeth crooked from a childhood sledding accident, and the big span of his hands that liked to pat me on the head, Eric with his caramel brown eyes, knowing looks, the way he’d look at me sideways, shaking his head, Eric with his winning smile, was gone.

That summer was a blur. I spent it mostly smoking pot with Eric’s sister Niki in the basement of their mom’s home. I couldn’t deal with life for a few months, but by the fall was ready to go back to school. This time I moved to Boston to live with a junior high friend, taking classes at Harvard and UMass Boston and transferring the credits back to Princeton so I could finish my degree.

I felt him around me all the time. I convinced myself I would be fine. I went to see a therapist now and then, telling her about the rape, that it wasn’t a big deal to me, telling her about Alan, saying I was over it. We talked about Eric and she tried to assuage my guilt that I had never told him how I felt.

Somehow I knew that he knew that I loved him.

One year and three months after Eric died, I graduated from Princeton. It was 1995 and I was 24. I was ready to take the world by storm, get a job at a fancy publishing house in NYC doing editing, and to write my own books.

Until my world started to collapse, the ground crumbling beneath my feet, feeling as if I was sliding off a cliff with no roots or trees or rocks to grab onto. Suddenly I felt into a state of paralysis, unable to perform simple actions in order to move my new career forward. Suddenly, I felt as though I’d screwed everything up and my life was over.

Suddenly, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown that no one had anticipated, plotting my own death. Would it be by knife, gun, noose, an overdose?

While my family frantically tried to keep me alive, I focused only on my suicide, knowing I had to end it. I snapped. Years later, I read and learned about post-traumatic stress disorder, and with all my poor young body had been through in two years – the rape, the stalking, Eric’s death – then trying to pretend everything was “fine,” it was no wonder that I lost my mind for a while.

At the time, all I knew was that I felt sure I had ruined everything, that my life was over, that I needed to die.

So I took every pill I could find from all the prescriptions the doctors had me on to keep me tethered to reality, and mixed it with anything else I could find – Tylenol, drugs in my mom’s medicine cabinet – swallowing dozens of little white pills in one fell swoop.

When I woke up in a stupor, limbs limp like noodles and so waterlogged that I couldn’t move, trapped in my own body, I knew I was still alive. “Okay, God,” I said, “I guess you still want me alive. If there is a purpose for my life, I really wish you’d show me what it is!”

The next fifteen years of my life would become a frantic search for just that. Why was I here? What was I supposed to do with this life of mine?

Obviously I was still alive, and obviously the world still needed saving.

I tried on so many hats – should I go to divinity school to pay homage to the God who had saved me from myself? Should I be a “real” writer, which was what my heart longed to do? Should I work in marketing, which is what seemed more practical? Should I run for office, which is what people in my town started recruiting me to do after I morphed into a neighborhood leader somehow…. What exactly was I supposed to do with this one life?

The years flew by in a flurry of activity and an outward display of happiness, despite the fact that I would spend nights in a panic, locked in my bathroom, a cell phone in one hand and a knife in the other, still convinced that someone was going to break in and kill me. I got really good at hiding my terror and anxiety. It was my little secret.

Somewhere along the way, I got married, became a dance instructor, metamorphasized into an accidental community leader, traveled across several continents. I kept achieving, accumulating possessions, striving to be the good wife, citizen, daughter.

I pretended that I had no dark past, only happiness.

And yet the soul is wiser than that, and if it needs healing, sometimes the surface will start to crack. Things fell apart. My marriage ended. My job with the mayor of San Francisco ended. My sublet at my apartment was up. I was living in San Francisco with no income and no job.

Miraculously, things re-aligned for me quickly. A graduate school friend of mine asked me to move into her palatial Pacific Heights home, for free, until I could get back on my feet. I bumped into two Harvard-educated landscape architects while sipping tea at a picnic table by Crissy Fields. They spotted my Harvard baseball cap, found out I was trained in strategic planning, and promptly hired me.

My teachers started finding me – yoga instructors, meditation teachers, wisdom teachers. I was too stubborn to seek treatment for PTSD, and so the universe kept throwing healers at me. One by one they introduced me to new techniques to help me calm my nerves and feel more at peace.

Suddenly this formerly overly agitated and restless overachiever was sitting still for minutes at a time, meditating. Suddenly I was upside down in downward facing dog, practicing in a lineage that spanned thousands of years.

Suddenly I was finding some semblance of peace.

Fast forward five years. It was 2010 and I was living in upstate New York, where I had moved to put my house back together. My ex-husband and I were about to sell our house as the final piece of our divorce settlement when our tenants accidentally set it on fire.

It was around this time that I decided that my symbol should not be the phoenix rising anymore, that the universe was obviously taking my metaphors way too seriously, and that I would become the butterfly instead, emerging from the chrysalis to become a creature of flight and exquisite beauty.

After spending a year rebuilding my house, I started focusing again on building out my career. I really wanted to write books, although I was terrified of tackling this lifelong dream of mine. I also wanted to find someone to love.

I was more peaceful than I had been years earlier, having cultivated a daily meditation practice, with fewer sleepness nights due to the panic attacks, less consistently agitated. My stomach did not churn all the time with worry – just occasionally.

I had steady consulting work and even took the brave step, for me, of telling my story for the first time. I was the keynote speaker at the Take Back the Night rally for victims of sexual trauma. It was utterly terrifying and also liberating. I had spoken the truth out loud, and nothing happened. My friends were still my friends. My career did not fall apart. No one ran away screaming accusing me of mental illness, the prospect of which had terrified me since my breakdown years ago.

I was still just me, living my life, and I finally decided that it was time to write my story as well, to show others that they could recover from something so painful and build a happy life.

Life in general was good from the outside. Yet I still often felt like the chrysalis, wrapped in my cocoon, still hibernating with episodes of mild depression sometimes, still wondering why things wouldn’t align in my love life.

One day, I decided that I’d had enough of my own suffering and drama. I really wanted just to live my happy live, make my dreams come true, and not to stew in the memories of what had happened to me, or what could have been. Something broke inside me again. I just wanted to live.

I sat down and wrote a pledge to myself that I would absolutely live all of my dreams. I wouldn’t let fear stop me. I wouldn’t let my past or my stories about any limitations I imagined I had stop me. I would write my book. I would meet my soul mate. I would raise a family. I would be peaceful and happy.

I signed it, tucked it into a drawer in my desk, and forgot about it.

Suddenly those four sets of wings sprouted. Suddenly I was taking off and not even knowing how. Everything in my life turned around. I found a spiritual teacher who embodied all that I had ever wanted to learn, fervently made a wish to meet him, and much to my shock and surprise found myself spending most of the month of August with him. He was teaching his first workshops in the US, although his home base was India, and I organized them for him. He taught in my town, and stayed in my house.

Suddenly my career dreams started to click into place and take shape. I was nearly 300 pages into my book, which told my redemption story. People who read my weekly blog, which talks about living my dreams, asked to hire me as their life coach.

Suddenly I met the first man I have really liked in a very long time, and thought to myself, I think I just met my husband.

Suddenly everything I’d ever dreamed of seemed to be coming true. And suddenly, it didn’t even matter whether it all materialized or not, because I was profoundly and deeply aware in every cell of my body, suddenly, that every day I have on this planet is a gift.

I tried to end my life all those years ago. Alan wanted to kill me. I was given another chance.

Feeling like a miracle, I have been walking through the days of my life glowing, shining with happiness, so that the people around me want me to drink it in, want me to be the genie in their lamp, want some of my illumination to rub off on them. Suddenly I am so peaceful that I have forgotten how to worry.

Suddenly I realize that I am the butterfly, that my wings are dry, that I can fly into the sunshine over the cliffs, be who I want to be, and that my past is now over.

Suddenly I am simply, beautifully me.

© Lisa Powell, September 2010

The Year of Fire & Ice

2009-02-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

An act of kindness can melt even the coldest heart…

Driving into Troy that day, the trees were glittering, branches coated in ice as if they’d been dipped in glass. The sun was out and water dripped down like crystals falling. The world was sparkling, magical from my perspective, warm in the car, bundled up, untouched by the cold.

Yet the effects of the storm had been devastating. The region was blanketed in ice, trees bowing under the weight of it. Many were down, and with them, power lines, and for several days much of the region went without power – no electricity and in some cases, no water or heat. How could it be so beautiful – the trees were jewels – and yet so merciless in taking out the current that brings people light and heat.

My sweet housemate invited friends to stay with us so they wouldn’t have to pay for hotels or suffer in the dark and cold. December in Troy is chilly, and the temperatures were still hovering around freezing, although the sun made it feel warmer.

Back in Troy, NY, back in a small-town community of 49,000 with neighborhoods where the neighbors actually know and watch out for each other, it was comforting somehow to see people reaching out to give their neighbors a hand when the lines came crashing down. It was a microcosm, a view onto the world and how intrinsic kindness comes out, people reach beyond their own selfish impulses, when others truly need help.

The city is truly a place where neighbors find connection and comfort in each other, and where how interconnected we all are becomes obvious. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. You bump into 12 people you know when you shop at the Farmers’ Market, or walk to the post office downtown. The news of a separation or dating relationship, of a house sale or a job lost or a promotion or a baby, often hits the streets quickly and it’s generally a mystery how it got disseminated. Who was the source? Through what pipeline does the news flow? Mouth to mouth to mouth, flowing like water or electricity, the news travels, so it’s impossible to keep your anonymity here. Yet when the power’s out, your friends take you in.

Troy is a little bitty city. You could fit it in the palm of your hand, compared to NY or San Francisco. The streets are in miniature, like something from a movie set of historic Victorian Brooklyn – and in fact, movies about Victorian Brooklyn are sometimes set here. As you approach the historic downtown from Second Street, where I live, the buildings are no taller than four stories and the trees arc over the street and at the end of it there is a monument, a statue of a woman with a trumpet on a pillar overlooking Monument Square at the heart of the city. It’s only two blocks to get from my house to the entrance to the downtown, and two more to get to Monument Square.

Everything is little bitty. You could walk the whole downtown easily in 20 minutes, and that is if you cross-cross back and forth to hit every street. The grid that comprises the central part of downtown is essentially four streets deep by six streets across (from the river to the foot of the hill that climbs up to the RPI campus). Twenty-four small city blocks, with the usual array: some cafes, some restaurants, some galleries, some antique shops, a bookstore, some banks, a post office. And the not-so-usual: a world-class Music Hall where Yo Yo Ma records his music, the historic Proctor’s Theater, not currently in use but still intact, houses from 1825 and a historic plaque dedicated to a famous Harriet Tubman visit to Troy.

Troy is beautiful, and working class, and creative, and hi-tech, and backwards in terms of its politics, and rough-around-the-edges. It is poorer than most cities of its size, with a lower than average per capita income, yet was once the fourth wealthiest city in the nation. It boasts one of the world’s great technological institutions, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and yet City Hall is still low-tech and “best practices” is a foreign concept in city governance in Troy. Troy is a city of contradictions, and that perhaps is part of why I like it. Like the rest of us, it’s a work in progress, beautiful and flawed, organically evolving and waiting to see where its future leads us…
I didn’t mean to land back here so soon, despite my love for this little community. I had been having a perfectly good time camping out in beautiful San Francisco, the Paris of the West Coast, “Baghdad by the Bay,” the American city with the Mediterranean feel. I fell in love when I first moved there, staggered by the beauty of the city by the bay – the forty-two hills, the vertical descents that could give a person vertigo, those steep thrilling dips as you drive over the edge of a street, like a roller coaster, the Victorian houses climbing the hills, painted like wedding cakes, elegant and frosted.

San Francisco took my breath away, and not just from climbing those steep hills – from the way you could glimpse the ocean or the bay from just about any high vantage point, how the city is surrounded on three sides by water and overgrown with wild flora – beautiful princess flowers dropping their purple petals on the sidewalks, roses blooming in January, overgrown lollipop bushes like something out of Dr. Seuss. Dazzling.

And the people – so eclectic, so embodied, there is a sense that you can BE who you are in San Francisco, and celebrate that, and it’s okay to be whoever you are, dress however you like. No one will blink. Walk around in platform heels and a silver gown, in torn jeans with tattoos all over your face, in a dog collar, in a mink coat, naked and no one cares (okay, perhaps those from PETA would protest the mink coat). It is true that it is something of a free-for-all there, very easy to be and celebrate being a free spirit.

I thrived in that environment, blossomed all over again, started dressing in more fun and provocative clothing again (because I can!), learned to strut, learned to sing in a gospel choir, took belly dancing. This city just makes my soul expand. It is too beautiful for words and it amazed me that people could walk the streets every day and take that for granted.

And yet, and yet, in some people’s worlds there things are so dark, they are so broken, they live so low to the ground – literally - sleeping on cardboard boxes and grungy blankets, in doorways and on stoops. Their world is dank and it often reeks of urine and I just could feel the despair weighing heavy in the air when walking through these neighborhoods, like the Tenderloin. When you personally are broken, when your home is the outdoors and a cold sidewalk, when you have to wait hours in line every day for a meal, and beg for a quarter, I don’t think you necessarily see it – the beauty of the city by the bay, the beauty of its buildings, art, flowers, people. You are just struggling to survive.

Humanity is amazing – the capacity for survival and what can be endured, and the capacity for change. I have been tested this year too and it was not only the year of the ice storms, when ice like glass coated the trees, but the year of fire for me. I am glad that year is over, and have switched my personal totem/symbol from the phoenix rising to a sunflower – rooted, grounded and yet growing toward the sun, blooming where she is planted, opening her face and petals to shine her beauty on everyone, planting seeds of love everywhere she goes. That is what I see as my symbol of the moment - and I am looking for one of a bird too, the one in me who flies, the free spirit, soaring, and I don’t know yet what kind of wings, if I’m a hummingbird, which I may well be, a bright little jewel moving so rapidly the wings are blinking, or a chickadee, or a soaring eagle (perhaps too masculine for me?). I’ll find her, my new bird…

The old one, the phoenix rising, is extinguished as a symbol for me because there were so many fires in my life this year, and I want to move on from that energy – the energy that says you have to burn things down or destroy in order to create. I don’t believe that, I believe it’s possible to plant seeds in healthy soil and start WHERE I AM and create beauty and grow and spread my joy from there… not necessary to tear down and rebuild. I want to grow from where I am, and be happy. This is what I choose for my life.

The fires – there were three – like anything major in our lives, changed me. The first was the fire in my own house when my tenants accidently started a grease fire. Nine months later, I see the blessing in it – my house has undergone $60,000 worth of renovations and has a new kitchen, new dining room, new bathroom, new master bedroom, newly repainted façade, and it’s gorgeous, and it suits my temperament, and I love it.

The second was a fire in Santa Barbara where I was away on yoga retreat in July. After watching the flames climb along the hillside 1,000 feet from us for three days, with the smoke billowing and growing into larger clouds, and the orange flames licking the air, leaping 30 feet high, we were asked to evacuate. Wild times, helicopters swooping overhead, my car-mate and I quickly exiting the building after taking a few last fire pictures to get back safely to SF.

The third was a fire in a church the night of the presidential election. I was in Boston watching President-elect Obama’s victory, in tears of joy, up til 3 a.m. texting friends in California to celebrate. At 3 a.m. in Springfield, MA where I grew up, someone was lighting a new church on fire, burning down a $2.5 million new church under construction. The congregation was predominantly African-American and it smelled immediately of a hate crime on the eve of this new era in American history. It too brought tears to my eyes, of disbelief and shared suffering and sadness that someone could DO that.

It brought me back together with my first-grade principal, Bryant Robinson, who is now the bishop of that church. I went to a multi-faith service put on in downtown Springfield where Bishop Robinson spoke. Before the service started, I approached him to introduce myself. He was moved that I was there, and in fact introduced me to the whole congregation from the pulpit when starting his remarks. He said he knew that God was up to good, even in this fire, because he had met a student of his again and saw what a beautiful young woman she had turned out to be (referring to me!). It was a blessing.

I went up to thank him after the service and told him about my fire, how we had rebuilt my house, how although it would take time and prayer and effort and hard work, I knew they would rebuild theirs. How wild that it took two fires to bring us back together. I am forwarding word of the fire to those at Glide, my magnificent church in San Francisco, to ask for their resources, prayers and support.

This is part of my Buddhist practice now (fledgling Bodhisattva that I am!) – do good where you can, and do no harm. I am looking to grow in my practice, and we do that by walking the steps and living it. There is so much each of us can do, so many small steps to take and ways to love, ways to reach out to our neighbors. After an icestorm. After a fire.

Our world wouldn’t be what it is without these primal elements – fire to cook and generate heat, to create chemical and manufacturing processes, to help nature recreate and generate itself, as is the case with the fires in the redwoods in California. And ice which allows us to keep foods preserved, sled, skate, cool our drinks, kick off chemical processes as well. Can’t imagine a world without them – fire to heat, ice to cool, one to melt the other.

And yet what gives life can take it, what feeds us can destroy us. We are strong yet fragile creatures, all of us, in this interconnected web of life, and we are interdependent. We need each other for a shelter from the storm sometimes. We need those prayers and funds and helping hands to rebuild what has burnt down to the ground. We could not do it without each other. Every kind or charitable act or word matters.

In this holiday season, I hope that you too will remember, as I’ve been reminded this year so viscerally in my own life experiences, how very connected we are, how very dependent we are upon one another (in the best way!) for our happiness and warmth. Without our neighbors, friends, family, community, without the kindness of strangers, most of us – all of us –would not be where we are today. Every act of kindness in the web, any act, may be the one that helps us find a home, a job, a mate, a shelter from the storm, that makes us laugh or keeps us warm. We are for each other what makes life truly worth living.

So I hope you will find ways to remember to be kind and to practice it and give back and offer a helping hand or a shelter or a kind word or a shoulder to cry on for a friend or neighbor who needs it. When we do this we are also an inspiration and a light for others, a reminder that there is more to life than our own selfish needs, wants and desires. It feels good to give back anyways and studies have shown that charitable actions bring much more lasting pleasure than simple sensual pleasures themselves (of food or sex or other experiences of the body). We are carnal beings, animals, but more than that we have these beautiful souls, and they are fed and pleasured by being loving to one another and giving back. Science has shown it. In our own lives, we can feel it, the joy of it when our boundaries are stretched and we grow by giving, how by shining your own light for others, you glow.

I am grateful to all of those who have helped make my life more warm and wonderful this year. May I always be able to give more than I take and help light up the lives of others. You are lights in my sky and my life. Blessings to you and all of your loved ones during this holiday season, in the New Year, and always.

From the darkness into the light

2008-11-14T14:37:00.000-08:00

When I heard the news that Barack Hussein Obama had just been declared President-Elect of the United States of America, I was sitting on a bar stool at Uno's Grille in Swampscott, MA, next to a handsome brown-eyed stranger. I'd driven to Boston that night after arriving in the Hartford, CT airport after four days of volunteering for Obama in Virginia. A friend of mine from grad school had just been re-elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and she was throwing a re-election party at Uno's. I drove the two hours to toast her and to watch the election news in friendly company.

Lori had since taken off to go home and be with her husband and kids as the election results rolled in, and I was swilling beers with the friendly Democrats at the bar. Kevin, the stranger beside me, was a cartographer, I'd learned. Making maps of the world seemed like an appropriate profession right now as it seemed like the whole world was shifting before our eyes. Everything was changing.

Like the rest of the country, and much of the world, I was overcome with emotion at the news. Forty-five years ago Martin Luther King had delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, and here, now, all these years later, a man of mixed Caucasian and African descent stood before us, judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character as he was decisively elected the leader of the free world.

As the news rolled on, and as he delivered his speech, I couldn't stop crying. Kevin, my friendly neighboring cartographer, rubbed my back and told me how sweet it was that I was crying. It wasn't intentional, it wasn't planned, I just felt the waves of change coming, the magnitude of this historic moment, and what it could mean for the world. As a grad school friend of mine from Germany later expressed it, "The U.S. is moving from the darkness into the light."

From the darkness into the light. Is that what the world felt and responded to? The news showed crowds cheering in Africa, in Kenya where Obama's father was from, in Europe and South America and Central America and Asia. Everyone seemed to recognize that something amazing was happening.

The defeated candidate was gracious. The current sitting president was gracious. Everyone seemed to rise to the occasion in deference to this leader who clearly had inspired the people of the U.S. - enough to get out and vote in record numbers, enough to motivate thousands to register to vote for the first time.

Out of the darkness into the light. What is it about this man? It's more than the color of his skin or the fact that electing an African American man to this post is so historic. It's more about the light that shines from within him, his willingness to stand up and lead in tough times, and his ability to inspire others, to empower the people around him so that they feel they have a voice again.

The exultation in the room and around the world was palpable. For me it symbolized something more too, how we all seek in our lives to move from the darkness into the light, how we all want to stand for what we believe, believe that change is possible, and move in that direction. Too often in our own lives it can be easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day minutiae of life, and to feel as though in the broader strokes of our lives, the change and dreams we hope for may not all be realized in this lifetime. And yet we wake up each day to keep trying, to find out what is possible by being in action on our dreams.

When the nation collectively unites to stand for change, and to stand for what is possible, how amazing is that? How can we individually get discouraged when we are standing for all people, when love is what we are standing for?

I remain amazed and grateful to be alive during these historic times, and excited to see what changes are coming.

The world is on fire

2008-07-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

"Fire is important to this community because the tiny seeds of the giant sequoia must fall on partially burned or bare mineral soil to germinate successfully."
~ http://www.fire.ca.gov

The scene was surreal, like something out of an action adventure movie. Standing on the cliffs above Santa Barbara, 1,000 feet up, we watched the flames shooting up into the air on a ridge just a few miles away. Bright orange, they licked at the smoke-filled sky, rising well above the tree-line.

The flames must’ve been 20 to 30 feet high. Smoke billowed to the left, following the direction of the wind, yellow smoke closest to the fire, gray and brown as it spread out, white like cumulus clouds as the edges as it dispersed.

We watched the helicopter swoop overhead, flying back and forth from the pond at the ranch where we were staying to refill a giant hanging basket with water, which turned to instant steam when it was dumped over the flames.

We were being evacuated from the ranch right in the middle of a six-day long silent meditation and yoga retreat. “Include this, too, in your practice,” my teacher, a long-time Buddhist practitioner, instructed us as we posed in lotus or yoga asanas on our mats, while the smoke filled the air just miles from where our studio sat, perched above the city.

This was not the first time I’d had to include fire in my practice of growing and evolving and walking through this life. Just three months beforehand, I’d gotten a phone call from my former next-door neighbors while enjoying a Mediterranean meal of lentils and veggies in a restaurant in San Francisco, where I lived at the time.

“Have you heard the news?” my neighbor John asked. John and his wife Joyce used to live next door to me in Troy, New York, and I still owned the home adjacent to theirs.

“No,” I said.

“Your house is on fire,” he said.

Three thousand miles away, I felt powerless to do much of anything, and so had to trust that everyone back in that community would handle it, that the capable fire fighters would put the fire out in time to save our house, that everyone would be okay.

Luckily, the fire crew did get there in time to save the first floor of our house, although the second floor kitchen was gutted and the walls throughout the second floor were streaked gray with smoke. Our tenants, a young couple with a baby, had put cooking oil on the stove, and then fallen asleep, accidentally starting a grease fire. Fortunately they were fine, if shaken up by the experience.

They set our house on fire literally two days after my ex-husband and I had completed our divorce proceedings, with the sale of the house as the last item on the checklist to dissolve our former financial partnership. I was, needless to say, somewhat shell-shocked, and could only shake my head and wonder at whatever greater powers are guiding the course of events.

God must have some kind of sense of humor, I thought, considering that this divorce had dragged on for three years, and that once it was complete, the fire happened 48 hours later. What’s the message here? I thought. What is the universe calling on me to learn? I’m a good person - Where the hell am I going wrong? Of course, rationally I knew that I wasn’t being singled out for punishment, that this wasn’t about anything being “wrong.” Everything happens for a reason, I believe this, and I trusted that the reason for this would become clear with time. Yet it seemed just absurd for this to happen now – of all things, a fire!

Interestingly, fire for me has always been a compelling metaphor and I’d even chosen, years before, the phoenix rising as my own personal mythological symbol. The phoenix is a symbol of resurrection, the bird of legend that would arise from the ashes after incinerating – and this metaphor had served me at an earlier time in my life when my world had collapsed, and I felt as though I was starting from scratch.

I’d also chosen to live in cities that had burned to the ground and been resurrected – Troy, New York which suffered through the great fire of 1862, when more than 500 buildings were destroyed, and San Francisco, which had been savaged by the earthquake and fire of 1906. Both cities had been rebuilt, with even more grandeur than before. I had rebuilt my life and was thriving. Yet now I was starting to question the wisdom of aligning myself with the metaphor of the phoenix, since I seemed to be manifesting fires all around me! What did I need to burn away? What, I wondered, needs to be recreated in my life?

Who really knows the “why” of why anything happens in our lives, yet I felt there was some symbolism here around me burning away old, restricting beliefs in my life, and recreating myself again, without limits. I’m someone who despite my worldly successes and achievements over the years − as a Harvard and Princeton educated strategic planning and governmental consultant, a writer, a community leader who had worked on countless urban revitalization projects in Troy, as a dancer, a loving wife to my ex-husband, a good friend, a devoted daughter − despite all of this I’d often questioned my own worth and sabotaged myself sometimes, in work, life, relationships. Something in my mind, some old pattern of thinking, wasn’t allowing me to fully live all of my life and be all the beauty, love and joy I know I am inside.

The fires seemed as good a time as any to take stock of what had held me back in life previously, and to generate a new life and vision for myself. I decided that it is time for me to believe fully in all the possibilities for my life, in love, work and general adventures. And to know that no fire, no loss of material possessions or even love lost, could take away from who I am inside, the burning passion for life at the core of me, or who I am in this world, which is a bright light.

Now, about the only fire I want to deal with is that of the fire in my belly when I’m taking on a project that excites me, and the fire I feel when I’m wild for a man who tantalizes me. There was a man once in my life whose presence was like a five-alarm fire from the day I met him, just constant heat and light and burning excitement. I like that kind of heat, would happily pour gasoline on the flames to fan the fire. The rest I feel ready to leave behind.

I think I’ll choose a new metaphor, then – the hummingbird perhaps which symbolizes resurrection, optimism, sweetness, a messenger and “stopper of time.” Or the deer, which can symbolize “love, gentleness, kindness, gracefulness, sensitivity, purity of purpose, walking in the light, meditation, longevity, wealth” – all lovely qualities to have in my life!

That said, I have to be grateful for the lessons of the fires. The Santa Barbara fire provided me with the gift of knowing that I could remain peaceful and grounded despite the challenging conditions that were arising. The house fire brought me back to New York to work on renovations, bringing me closer again to family and old friends in a tight-knit community that I lived in and loved for seven years of my life.

In times like this, I also remind myself that the California wildfires are actually a necessary part of the natural process, that the giant sequoia trees need the fire and ash for their seeds to germinate in the soil. I’m curious to see what will grow up next in my life, from the ashes of the fires.

© Lisa Powell Graham, July 2008

The monk, the caterpillar, and me...

2008-04-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

"There is only one question: how to love this world."
~ Mary Oliver, from her poem "Spring"

The sun shone through the 300-foot tall trees of the Enchanted Forest, bright like a North Star above me, shining on me like a benediction through the giant redwood trees. I was curled up in a hammock strung between two redwoods, napping between yoga sessions at the Land of the Medicine Buddha in Santa Cruz, CA where I'd headed for a four day yoga and meditation retreat.

Two of those four days were spent in silence. This was my fourth silent yoga and meditation retreat with my teacher, Dina Amsterdam, who is like a forest sprite herself, lanky and long-limbed, slim and dark and beautiful in an exotic Buddhist-Jewish way.

The retreats follow a certain pattern: arrive in the evening, join the group for dinner followed by an opening circle and an evening meditation, and awake the next day into silence. The practice for the subsequent two days is yoga, meditation and our own time to do as we wish, all of it in silence.

The idea is to help us move into present moment awareness and peace, which can be easier said than done in our rush-rush-rush, blackberry-bluetooth-Ipod-TVO, sensory-overload kind of world. Yet I believe most of us are stumbling and falling our way toward enlightenment in this lifetime, sloooowly evolving (at least I know my own path has not been smooth, linear, or fast!).

Talking about the path toward enlightenment, Dina gave the analogy of moving one grain of sand at a time from a pile which represents the "unconscious," unawakened part of ourselves, into another pile that represents the enlightened being in us. She said that in our regular lives we generally move one grain of sand at a time from one pile to another, in a painstakingly slow progression, grain of sand by grain of sand, as we gradually awaken in this lifetime to our own divine nature.

Dina said her teacher says that a retreat is like a chance to take a whole scoop of sand and pour it into the "enlightened" pile! We are learning tools to help us stay "awake," to live our purpose in this world.

Time away from the chaos of the world to work on our "awakening" is such a gift. A true blessing. The blessings were manifold this time at the Land of the Medicine Buddha. The grounds were filled with monks in their saffron and mustard robes, and I'd often cross paths with a shaven head or two as I walked in the woods, or walked to the dining hall. To respect my vow of silence, I'd simply bow with hands in prayer position - Namaste. I honor the divine in you.

The monks were not in silence this time, but there to receive a Highest Yogic Tantra initiation from the Venerable Choden Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama born in 1933 who was one of the teachers/guides of the Dalai Lama. Needless to say, a great man and spirit...

As ordinary yogis who had not received the Highest Yogic Tantra yet, we were not allowed to sit in on the ceremony, but I got to bow down to him, touch his vehicle (I know, that sounds almost kinky, but I mean it quite literally - I touched his car, which bore the message: "May anyone who sees, touches, remembers, talks or dreams about this car achieve everlasting happiness and have compassion for all living beings"), and do a sitting meditation/prayer in the hall where he was teaching, thus taking the energy into me... All of it, a blessing.

The days were filled with yoga, meditation, prayer, journaling, walking the forest paths, praying in the temples, observing with awe and delight the simple wonders of spring... Lupines and lobelia with their blue and purple splendor, bluejays, butterflies fluttering around blossoms, even the bright banana slugs in the forest, which look like slices of mango underfoot, only they are moving, shining, glistening, with two slimy antenna reaching out to the world... All of it, beautiful, fascinating.

I've been on some silent retreats in the past where the lessons and epiphanies seemed big and dramatic. This retreat was peaceful, restful, lovely, and more simple. No giant lessons descending from the heavens, no opening in the clouds, no deep pain or out-of-body bliss experiences. Simply this message, over and over, which was inscribed on a bench in the forest: "The path is under your feet."

I'd come into the retreat with some questions in mind about love, work, home... I am going through some transitions in my life, all positive, and looking for "divine guidance" to lead me... The message this time was simple. Keep walking. Trust your heart. One step at a time. The path is under your feet...

Walking the forest path on the last day, I was stopped by a monk who asked me "Do you know what time it is?" I had to keep my vow of silence so shook my head no, but then remembered my cell phone was in my pocket (I was using it as a watch!). I took it out and showed him the time and we bowed to one another.

We passed each other again on my way out of the forest, and bowed in silence and respect. This, too, felt like a blessing. I'd been watching my steps, careful of where my foot falls, because I'd noticed the black, white and gold caterpillars that were on the path, inching along, dozens of them, scattered across the earth, one every few feet. Some had been squished already by another hiker, and in my "retreat state" I was feeling an extra high level of compassion for these creatures, wanting to be careful of them, and also to just walk lightly on the earth in general.

Reverence for all beings, for all life, seemed to be another message on this retreat, or rather a reminder. The monk and the caterpillar, equally important, one bowing to me, one below me, one a spiritual guide, one a lesson - to walk lightly on the earth. What is more important? Who can say?

To all creatures of the earth, I say, Namaste, and give thanks for the blessing of a time away like this! I will end with a poem by Hafiz... My wonderful teacher, Dina, conducted a "poetry hour" Saturday night when we came out of the silence, reading poems by Hafiz, Rumi, Mary Oliver. If you have not spent time in the company of Hafiz, 14th century Sufi master poet, I suggest you do sometime! He is funny, wise and wonderful... His poems make me laugh and touch my heart.

May this poem help you to feel deep compassion for all beings - which is what it does for me.

Blessings, peace, love, light!

Lisa

It Felt Love

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart

And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain

Too

Frightened.

by Hafiz

Water into wine, Argentina-style...

2008-01-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

After three weeks in Argentina, my veins are flowing with red wine. Vino tinto. Vino tinto. Y mas vino tinto.

With bottles of fine wine starting at 20 pesos (approximately $6 US) or less, a father with a sommelier's instincts for the best in wine, and a visit to Argentina's wine country, the sweet nectar of crushed grapes and tannins has replaced my red blood cells. I am a walking glass of Malbec.

I am filled with sweetness too because everything here is topped or filled with dulce de leche. Alfajores cookies, smothered in chocolate, ice cream, medialuna breakfast croissants. Everything goes better with dulce de leche, the thick caramel that I eat by the spoonful sometimes (only in Argentina!). My normally healthy diet of veggies, grains, fish and beans has gone to hell here, temporarily.

I - the ovalactopescatarian - even eat a bite of filet mignon one night after my sister raved in ecstasy about her meat. Argentina is famous for its steak, a beef-eater's paradise. This isn't one of the highlights of the country for a veggie like me, but it makes my father, sister and mom happy as they dine on barbecued pig, ribs and goat. The flesh is succulent, they tell me. Tasty. Delicious. I trust them, skip it, and happily eat more roasted vegetables, pasta, empanadas.

Of course, there is more to Argentina than the food and wine. Mountains. Rivers. Hot-blooded Latin men. Tango. Charming art deco neighborhoods in famous Buenos Aires. Friendly people everywhere who kiss you on both cheeks in greeting, even when you first meet them. Argentina is literally and figuratively warm. We roast in the 95 degree heat, and warm to the gestures and love of friends.

And we bask in the pleasures of a trip like this... We started the week in Rosario, where my sister Carrie and her husband Pablo live about three to six months out of the year. Rosario is the third largest city in Argentina, and is rapidly gaining a reputation as being one of the most enchanting cities to visit in South America.

Famous for its river, historic denizens (Che Guavara is originally from Rosario), and the beauty of its women, Rosarinos also claim that their ice cream is superior to that of Buenos Aires. We do an informal taste test in both cities, and I have to say that my family agrees with this assessment.

The first few days were a whirlwind of family, dining, shopping and holiday celebrations. We arrived the day after Christmas and met up with Pablo's family to toast the holiday season. This mean lots of dinners at Pablo's father's restaurant, where a plate of meat as big as my torso was served. Literally these ribs had to be 2 feet long and 1 across. We cooked asado (Argentinian barbecue) often in Pablo's backyard, and cooled off from the high temperatures by the pool.

New Year's Eve was another good excuse to throw a barbecue. Carrie, Pablo, my parents, my sister Margaret and I gathered with Pablo's brother Mariano, his beautiful Portuguese girlfriend Bea, and Pablo's mom, Cristina.

My mom and Margaret had prepared two big pots full of vegetables roasted with garlic and herbs, a swiss chard and swiss cheese quiche. Bea made a carrot and squash puree. Mariano tended to the meat on the grill for hours, salting it to keep it juicy and then slowly roasting it over the coals. We cracked open multiple bottles of red and white wine. At midnight everyone toasted and kissed.

Then the fireworks started overhead - red and green and white, bursting open in the sky above. We watched and drank and toasted and marveled at all being here together in the Argentina summertime in January. At 3 a.m. it was time to head out to the New Year's parties that last all night long.

This year I skipped the festivities, staying in the yard to hang with Carrie and Pablo, while Mariano, Bea and my sister Margaret headed out. Margaret partied until 10 a.m. and despite being covered with mosquito bites from the outdoor party at a country club was thrilled with the attention from all the Argentinian men. It's good to be a single American woman in Argentina!

We moved on next to Buenos Aires, city of tango and Art Deco buildings and wrought iron balconies and European flair. I would only have one day there because my next stop was Rio Ceballos, a small mountainous town in the Cordoba region.

I was fortunate enough to land an interview with a Zen Buddhist master, Dr. Augusto Alcalde, who also practices Chinese medicine, indigenous herb healing, tai chi and qigong. An unusual Roshi, he also rides a motor bike, smokes a pipe and drinks gin. He invited me to spend a few days at his home dojo, the Rincon Cultural Center.

For two peaceful days, we talked about Buddhism, life, flow, breath, meditation. We ate pizza with olives on top and sipped mate. I meditated in his home dojo, and felt this boundless sense of connection to all beings, a boundless sense of gratitude for every moment in my life that had brought me to that exact moment. I felt lightness, happiness, peace.

From Cordoba, replenished and rejuvenated, I flew to our next stop - Mendoza, in the wine region. Thereupon commenced three days of feasting - including one of the best meals I'd ever had at a restaurant called A Zafran, which came highly recommended by a few guests from the Bay Area who were staying at our hotel.

Wine, wine, and more wine - fine red wines flowing - beet and goat cheese salad, the best gnocchi I've ever had with carmelized onions and veggies, sweet and tender and melting on the tongue delicious, a dulce de leche and coconut torta for dessert. Every bite was exquisite.

Luckily to offset all the eating we had some outdoor adventures as well. I went white water rafting for the first time with Carrie, Pablo and Margaret. We suited up on shore in banana yellow waterproof poofy pants and tops and helmets clicked in place under our chins. We looked ridiculous, like the astronauts who dropped out of NASA class or a yellow version of the Michelin Man.

Luckily those crazy outfits do actually keep you (somewhat!) dry and warm when the icy water splashes over you. And kept my pale skin from frying. We tackled Class 4 rapids on my first time out, which to me at least felt brave!

To stave off any anxiety about being swept into a hole in the water, I treated the whole experience as a meditation, reminding myself to surrender to the power of the river. The water was awesome, swirling and raging, and sometimes we'd ride wild waves of it. The view was spectacular - mountains and pure blue skies as far as the eye can see. I came off the boat feeling exhilarated, happy and slightly relieved to have not gone overboard.

Wine, water, and Buddhist wisdom... It was a magical three weeks. The water in my veins turned into wine. The wisdom of a Zen Buddhist master helped me to feel more grounded, and alive. The time with family was a gift and blessing.

Life, let's face it, is divine...

Giving thanks for this life

2007-11-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
- Henry David Thoreau

To your tired eyes I bring a vision
Of a different world,
So new and clean and fresh
You will forget the pain and sorrow
that you saw before.
Yet this a vision is
Which you must share
With everyone you see,
For otherwise you will behold it not.
To give this gift is how you make it yours.
- A Course in Miracles

I don't know about you, but some days the world can just break my heart.

Yesterday was one of those days when I was reminded of how ridiculously blessed I am, and stunned again by what people endure, how much suffering there is in this world. Where do you find meaning, where do you find love, when life feels bleak, when you are on the streets, when nothing in life has mapped out as you planned? How do you keep going? How do you find grace?

Yesterday I met Joseph, in his 80s, white beard, red face, a jack-o-lantern smile with a handful of crooked teeth and open spaces in-between. Fashionably dressed in a white plastic apron, white paper hat, and clear plastic gloves, I poured red Kool-Aid into Joseph's paper cup at Glide (www.glide.org), where my friend Reema and her mom Nora and I were serving meals Thanksgiving day. Joseph was cheerful and a flirt and promised me that if I liked older men, he'd take good care of me.

As the crowd filed in and filled the long tables, Reema, Nora and I poured Kool-Aid and cleared away empty trays with the remnants of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, ice cream. We shared Thanksgiving greetings and flirted with the cute kitchen volunteers who were scraping the trays. And we flirted with the men and women at the tables, because who doesn't want to be noticed, appreciated?

Young and old, black, white, Latino, Asian, they poured in, an endless stream of men and women, some weathered and beaten by the street life, some dressed like any professional you might walk by on a busy city street. I am often surprised by just how many look like you and me, or our friends, or our parents. A man in a San Francisco Giants hat and black sweatshirt, salt and pepper hair and mustache, a broad smile, could have been my dad.

Why I am the one privileged to serve, rather than wait in line to eat, why I get to put on a name-tag and a paper hat and plastic gloves and hand out meals, why I am blessed to live in a spacious apartment with hillside views in San Francisco, enjoy a full day of meals and good times with friends versus lining up outside Glide, is a question for which there is no simple answer. Life is a complex equation.

I come from a loving middle class family, have been blessed with an outstanding education and have so many resources and friends - I am SO blessed! - that this need never be a reality for me. I have never truly known need, hunger, desperation. I have cried of course, had my heart broken, had my own moments of darkness when I didn't know what to do or where to turn next. But they always pass.

My refrigerator is full, my apartment is warm, my Blackberry is programmed with names of friends and family who love me. I know I am not alone in the world. Glide provides that sense of family, shelter, community for those who have none, and it is for this reason that I keep returning. Glide brings joy and hope into the lives of those who have lost hope, helps them hold on, rebuild their lives, start again.

Yesterday I met Donnie at the church service at Glide. Tall, handsome despite missing some teeth, wearing his bluetooth headset, and just about bursting with energy, Donnie whispered Glide gossip to me in between dancing to the rousing numbers of the gospel choir and jazz band.

An ex-convict who'd turned his life around, he'd worked at Glide for seven years, rescued from the streets by Reverend Cecil Williams and the Glide family. He knew the inside scoop on everyone and was happy to share the stories with me. Donnie called out to the speakers and the singers on stage: "Preach it! Sing it! Amen!" We got up and danced together, held hands during the prayers. "I was saved by grace," he told me. "I was saved by grace."

Later that day, I handed out meals with my friend Andoni as part of "Operation Turkey Day," organized by a caterer in Marin who prepares 500 turkey meals in biodegradable paper boxes with the help of 40 or so friends, and passes them out on the streets of downtown SF. Every box was hand-decorated in colorful marker with a Thanksgiving message, holiday greeting or positive words: Joy. Yes. A simple red heart. We passed out boxed lunches, juice boxes and clean white socks. In less than 20 minutes, 500 meals had been distributed. So many hungry people.

As an experiment yesterday, I skipped breakfast and lunch just to see what it felt like to be hungry. My stomach churned and I felt a little nauseous, but I knew I had Thanksgiving dinner coming up with friends at 4:30. No real hardship here.

At 2:30 I broke down and ducked into Sears Restaurant on Powell Street to order up a steaming plate of fish and chips, just because I could. I was craving fish, and had my wallet in my pocket, and there was nothing stopping me from ordering a big plate, pouring vinegar on my fried cod, dipping french fries into tartar sauce or ketchup.

The restaurant was about half-full on Thanksgiving day, with couples scattered around eating plates of turkey and all the fixings, most of them in silence. Companionable silence? or lonely silence? I find it striking sometimes how many of us seem alone or lonely even in a room full of people. At most of the tables, with a few happy exceptions, there seemed to be an absence of laughter, of joy. Even with so much, people are lonely.

And here I sat alone dipping my french fries in ketchup and taking in the scene. Perhaps to stave off my own loneliness, I called my family who were gathered for a meal in New Jersey, across the country. I talked to those I love who are far away, as the phone got passed from my mom and dad to brother and sister, Grandmom, aunts and uncles, cousins. They missed me. They love me. They can't wait to see me at Christmastime.

I ate half my meal, boxed the rest, and offered it to the first man I saw sitting on the street. His face and hands were raw from the sun and street living. He was probably younger than me, but missing most of his teeth, ragged, looking bereft. He nearly broke down when I offered him the meal, red eyes shining. "But I'm not allowed to ask women for nothing!" he protested.

I felt the heartache of a man holding onto a promise he had made to someone, words that still held meaning for him, even when he had nothing else left. "But I gave it you," I said. "You didn't ask."

"Thank you ma'am, thank you ma'am, thank you ma'am!" he shouted.

Two hours later I headed to the home of Betty and Ernie, friends of mine in their 80s who are my "adopted grandparents" in SF. I wrote an article about Ernie, a retired sign-maker who hand-crafts carnival games, for a local paper and we became fast friends. They told me to consider them "like family." When I decided to stay in SF for Thanksgiving this year, versus flying home to be with family as I usually do, they invited me to their home to share the holiday meal.

I poured miniature marshmallows on top of the bubbling sweet potatoes for Betty before she popped them and the wheat rolls in the oven. I whisked instant mashed potato mix into a boiling pot of water, milk and butter until it was thick and creamy. Ernie set the table and poured us glasses of white wine.

Four of us ate dinner together - Ernie, Betty, me and their son Bob, who is an alcoholic in his 40s who still lives at home. "I'm an isolationist," he told me. He holes up in a little cluttered room in the back of the house. During dinner, he got up often to refill his beer glass.

"This is the first time I've had dinner with my parents in about two years," he told me, when Ernie and Betty got up to get the pie and clear the plates. "I have nothing to say."

Yet he kept up a steady stream of conversation, as we sat and talked for four and half hours, the whole family, about politics and spiritual practice and the general state of the world. Bob is widely read, but lives in his own world. His body has been ravaged by the alcohol abuse, nose red and pocked, teeth brown, legs skinny in ragged jeans.

He still has dreams. Don't we all have dreams? After dinner, he offered me a shot of tequila from a bottle that he said he'd found on the streets of Mexico years ago. He told me about his dream - to be a war correspondent in Iraq. He'd served in the army years ago and traveled, and felt he'd have a unique perspective to offer. "How do you think I could get there?" he asked.

I told him my journalistic work was much more local, stateside, and that I didn't know the path to get there. What can you say? He drank himself silly, taking a slug directly from the bottle. "I shouldn't be drinking this," he said.

"I guess you don't know much about my profession now," he said. "I work in commodities." He recycles bottles, scavenges on the streets, picks up an occasional odd job - gardening or painting - to buy his bottles of beer. This is his "career."

We all have dreams. We all have stories about ourselves and our lives and how we've ended up where we are, and when it's too hard to face the reality, some turn to booze, or sex, or money, or food, to try to fill the hole inside. We all feel lost sometimes and we all have our own ways of coping.

Some of us are blessed with better coping mechanisms, intact family structures, good work that pays the bills and then some. We have so much, some of us, that we can afford to take fancy vacations to far-off places, buy gifts for our friends and family, take a day at the spa, sit at home and make art.

I am one of these. I go away on yoga retreats. I’m going to Argentina to visit my sister for Christmas. I am privileged beyond belief to be able to sit here in a warm home, keys clicking as I type this, hot cup of tea beside me, a closet full of clothes, shelves full of books, walls hung with art collected from my travels around the world. I do not take any of this for granted.

I have been blessed with joy and abundance in my life, with peace of mind, and I do my best to give that back. Some days I feel like there is so little I can do to make an impact, with so much suffering in the world.

But I do what I can, where I am, with what I have. I shine my light because I feel that it is my duty and responsibility in this world to give back, and it is my joy. I give because it replenishes me. I shine, because I can.

And I choose to focus in my own life on all the JOY - my family, my friends, my writing, my dancing, the beautiful city where I live, all the blessings of every day. What we focus on increases. The Buddha teaches that in this life there will be pain - sickness, old age (if we are lucky enough to live a long life!), death. We can't escape from the reality of life in this body.

And yet, he also teaches that suffering is optional. It is possible to find freedom in our own lives from the suffering created by our own thoughts, and to share that sense of freedom with others. That is my practice and my path, and I do my best to walk it every day.

I send my love to all of you today, who are the true blessings in my life, and ask that we all just remember on this holiday how very blessed we are, and that we reach out with compassion to others in the world who are suffering and broken, when we can. That we shine our light and share our joy, those of us who have so much.

That we do what we can to make others feel less alone in this world.

May you have a blessed holiday season, and always know that you are loved.

Lisa Powell Graham, November 2007

Journey inward: six days of silence in the Santa Barbara mountains!

2007-07-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

"Life unfolds chaotically and magically."
~ Dina Amsterdam, yogini and spiritual teacher

"All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt."
~ Charles M. Schulz

I spear a piece of fruit, and lift it to my mouth. Papaya. Another bite. I name it: Blackberry. Slowly I chew and swallow. The California sunshine warms the air and my bare skin. I am up above the cloudline, and I gaze out over the Pacific Ocean at the foot of the cliffs below me. More slow, delicious bites.

I name them: Pineapple. Nectarine. Green apple. Raspberry. I have drizzled whole milk yogurt and coconut on top of the fruit. I have sprinkled California raisins on top. How can there be so much sweetness and flavor in one bowl? Each bite is a small burst of pure pleasure in my mouth.
What could be more sensuous ~ and sensual ~ than a silent yoga and meditation retreat?

Six days of silence, yoga and meditation has a way of awakening the senses that have been dulled by busy-ness, the buzz of too much thinking, too much living in the mind. Re-immersion, my friend Will called it. Re-immersing yourself in the true life, the world beyond the confines of our thinking mind.

There is something about practicing zazen (sitting meditation) and yoga for six hours a day that shakes you out of your thinking mind so that you re-arrive, expectant and overly sensitized, in your physical body. Everything tastes better. Your nerve endings come alive. Frankly, being on retreat is sexy. At least, this is how it works for me.

It seems paradoxical because the Buddhist path also teaches that overindulging in sensory pleasures is one of the ways we can distract ourselves from our true purpose, one of the ways we bury our feelings and "escape."

Yet feeling truly present in the body and the moment makes every moment beautiful, the pleasures of simply being alive intensified. I truly feel and experience the world around me. I am not anasthetized to its pleasures. Hallelujah, Amen!

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the grounds where we are practicing on this retreat are rolling, green, flourishing. We are perched on the cliffs above Santa Barbara, California, with panoramic views over the city and the Pacific Ocean.

Jane Fonda once owned this land, years ago, and the current owner graciously makes the land available for retreats like this one, providing the opportunity for people to reconnect with silence, peace, themselves - their own sense of inner stillness and expansiveness.

We are practicing on sprawling acres of green land, laced with flowers, trees, breathtaking cliffside sunset views. There is a pool near the edge of the cliffs, and a hot tub perched right on the edge where you can contemplate the cosmos at night while soaking in bubbles, muscles massaged by firm hot jets of water.

There is a pond on the edge of the grounds where you can lie on a raft (clothing optional!), letting the sun warm and dry your bare skin, and where you can swim right up to a patch of lotus flowers and drink in their sweet fragrance. I plucked one to decorate the altar in the meditation room, adding my own perfumed offering symbolizing the Buddha, to the collection of flowers, rocks, and scraps of papers scrawled with handwritten notes that were already there.

Here on this lush land, 30 of us circle each other in silence every day, on the same grounds, sharing the same yoga practice room and teacher, but each locked in our own inner world. Some happily, some not so much so! We all ride waves of bliss and a spectrum of other emotions here, from sadness to numbness to anxiety to fear. Our teacher, Dina, talks us through the periods of daily yoga and meditation to guide us, but we remain in silence for a full four of the six days we are here, dipping into it again briefly on the last day.

Incidentally, many, many people who have known me over the years, who know that I am a Myers-Briggs ENFP (a big extrovert!) might wonder, and justly so, how I could possibly remain totally silent for four full days. Amazingly, to me as well, it is much simpler than I ever imagined, and more replenishing. It is peaceful and calming to be in such a quiet space, and to work on continually quieting the mind. It is wonderful to see what arises in such a space.

Sometimes I step outside myself briefly to watch all of us here, and imagine how odd we would look to someone just visiting - we walk around in silence, eat meals at round tables without making eye contact, circle around each other as we make our way to hike the trails or lie in the hammock, never greeting one another. No waves, no hellos, barely even the faintest of smiles dancing on someone's lips. We exchange no signals to indicate that we are in communication with one another.

Because we're not - for these six days, our job is not to relate to the world, as we incessantly do on the outside, but to relate to ourselves. To journey inward. I wish everyone could have the chance to experience this at least once in a lifetime.

It is not all fun and games here. When entering deeply into silence, we are often forced to force whatever unwelcome companions we've been locking away inside. What fear don't you want to face? What part of you feels most unloved? Chances are, it'll float right to the surface while you're sitting cross-legged on your meditation cushion, or upside-down in Downward Dog.

On this retreat, for me, that meant facing the fact that I tend to avoid emotional confrontations. Perhaps from some deep-seated desire to make everyone happy around me, to be liked, to have everything be "okay" all the time, I have had a tendency to procrastinate sometimes on dealing with issues that instead percolate underneath the surface, until they reach their eventual boiling point and spill out into the world.

Of course, when I avoid dealing with troublesome situations or emotions, I instead have to live with fear and anxiety in the interim of how things *could* turn out. Often, these "meantime emotions" are much worse than whatever happens once I actually face my fears, as I have seen borne out time and time again, when I confront things and what was a source of anxiety resolves itself, melts away.

Suddenly, facing myself in silence here at the retreat, avoidance just doesn't feel like any kind of solution anymore.

I also face the fact that I have not always been great at loving myself no matter what. I profess to want to practice unconditional love in this world, and the truth is that if I am to do that - it has to start with me. I have to love myself even when I'm tired, down, sad, angry, blue, worn out. I have to love myself when I'm performing at the top of my game, when everything is going my way, AND when it's not.

This means changing patterns of aspiring toward impossible standards of perfection, and then beating myself up when I (of course!) can't reach them, which has been a long-standing pattern of mine. Retreat brings me face-to-face with myself again and I see what I need to do. Love myself first. Love myself completely, no matter what.

It is clear that this is what I am to learn right now, what life needs me to learn in order to take the next steps in my life, and be transformed... Who knew it could be so hard to be truly tender and kind to yourself, when it comes so easily for many of us to love others?

It is like I am developing real intimacy with myself for perhaps the first time ever by being brutally honest with myself, but at the same time doing so with gentleness and kindness. I am looking at myself in the mirror with love, but am also able to say - this is how it is, this is who you are, accept yourself, love yourself!

I find myself wondering why it can be such a challenge for women in particular to love ourselves completely. Of course, we are bombarded with voices in society that would have us believe that we are not enough, we need to be skinnier, prettier, we don't look like this or that model or have the thighs of a sixteen year old anymore, and therefore are not truly beautiful, not enough.

The truth is the opposite -it is our unique qualities that truly make each of us beautiful. Why can't we all learn that sooner? Why so many years of suffering?

Retreat becomes a place where we are tested, where we learn to sit with our own uncomfortable edges, face our own fears. It can be difficult to sit with unpleasant emotions.

We are so accustomed, as a society, to fleeing from them by turning to television, alcohol, food, sex, or anything else that will numb us from truly feeling deeply whatever most hurts, whatever feels shameful. There is a sudden liberation in learning to accept the wide range of human emotions we all experience, and not only to accept, but to embrace this range.

First, we have to learn to sit still. "No fidgeting," says Dina, her voice floating disembodied from somewhere in the front of the room. "I am the fidgeting police."

I am still. My eyes are closed. My hands are resting gently, palms face down, one on each knee. I am sitting cross-legged on the edge of zafu, or meditation cushion, my coccyx bone raised about three inches off the ground to give my spine more length and elegance. My left ankle is positioned snugly in front of my right ankle, knees wide, in a sort of modified lotus position.

There is a small gnat buzzing around my head and I resist the urge to swat at it. This time is all about stillness. Turning inward. Not giving in to the sometimes intense desire to move, shift position, itch. The body sometimes sends out tiny red flags of urgency. Move now! Scratch me now! Here, our job is to not move. Not to fidget.

Of all the perils of meditation, perhaps the most treacherous is the foot-falling-asleep. When you sit for 45 minutes in cross-legged position, the foot can become a numb lump, something that feels heavily attached to the body, but not of the body. Pins and needles. A dull sort of tingling. It can overtake you so that you feel that you will not survive your foot falling asleep.

This is where you learn to conquer your mind, where you learn that sitting with discomfort actually will not kill you. We can endure discomfort. We can endure unpleasant emotions. We can face all of this with equanimity. (Who knew?) After all, it's temporary.

And we are not the emotions that surge and swell through our body, but something deeper, the container that holds them, the peace at the core. We are not even this body! It too is a vessel for the spirit that we are. That is what the great sages tell us, and it is what I believe, and it is what this practice ultimately teaches us.

Soon enough, Dina rings the bell to end the meditation session. The foot, with some shaking to restore blood flow, slowly wakes up again. And the rewards of sitting still and training the "monkey mind" to be still are so great.

For me, it is the way I return again and again to the center of peace inside me (we all have it!). It is how I train and remind myself to listen to my intuition, to feel what my body is telling me to do when making key decisions in my life, vs. just analyzing everything, turning possible solutions over and over anxiously, with my overworking, thinking mind.

In this place of spaciousness, in stillness, real love and beauty can arise. On this retreat, during our last meditation sit, just before Dina rings the bell to end our second of two 15-minute sits, this vow rises up inside me: "LIVE WITH MY HEART WIDE OPEN." It is what I take as my instructions from myself to live out in the world once I leave Laurel Springs Ranch and return to everyday life.

At the end of the meditation, I also visualize flowers blooming inside of me. It brings to mind the beautiful poem by Galway Kinnell that Dina often reads on her retreats which features the line: "Everything flowers from within of self-blessing."

I flower from within of self-blessing. I bow to honor the divine in me, and in all of us. Namaste. Shalom. Peace.

Pura Vida - back to the simple life in Costa Rica...

2007-06-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

"Should we pick the bananas on the way home?" I ask. It is dark. We are walking the trails to the right of the catarata (waterfall) in the middle of the Monteverde Cloud Preserve in Costa Rica. We walk single file, my sister Carrie in front, her husband Pablo behind me.

Carrie and I wear the kind of headlamps that miners wear, illuminating 15 feet ahead of us on our path. We navigate carefully, slipping sometimes on large tropical leaves or patches of mud, picking our way over stone paths, holding on trees and sometimes each other.

All around us, night sounds: birds, crickets chirping, the sound of rushing water. Occasionally Pablo howls or whistles behind me in response to an animal call. "A little further to go," says Carrie, as we walk up and down muddy steps, across rocks, over more slippery yellow leaves. The canopy of trees overhead obscures the moon.

When darnkness fell, we had been sitting at the mouth of the waterfall, by the pool at the foot of a 100 foot cascade, but when the packs of bats came swooping down overhead, we scrambled back to the path and headed home.

We feel our way, the light spilling ahead of us on our path, up and down and around, across log bridges, rocky stairways and paths, forks in the road. I couldn't figure out how Carrie and Pablo knew the way home so well, but it is a path they had walked many times before. To me, it stretched on and on in the dark... until we finally reach a meadow that looks familiar to me.

We walk through it and then through the banana trees. At the end of the corridor of banana trees, Carrie picks six green bananas to fry for our dinner, passing up the plantains this time. Overhead the clouds slide across the star-pricked sky to reveal the moon.

Bananas in hand, we walk back toward the cabin, ducking underneath the barbed wire fence. "Home sweet home," Carrie says as we approach the small wooden cabin, painted aquamarine on the outside, with two travel hammocks swinging on the porch overlooking the mountain and valley views beyond.

In the mornings here, there are hummingbirds, butterflies, sometimes even a pack of white-faced monkeys flying through the trees next to the cabin. Sometimes they hang around outside long enough for us to catch a quick out-of-focus picture, but if you get too close, they vanish into the treetops. You hear the wish-wish-wish sound of leaves rustling at the tops of the trees, and suddenly the fast moving climbers are out of sight, gone.

The variety of the animal species residing here is amazing - from the resplendent quetzal to the basilisk or "Jesus lizard" that walks on water to the shimny honeycreeper (blue bird) to the famous large blue morpho butterflies, an otherworldly royal blue on one side and camouflage brown with a big fake eye on the underside (they are my favorites).

Inside the cabin there are hundreds of varieties of bugs it seems, crawling and flying around - the cabin is charming, rustic, but not airtight or bugproof. When I first arrive, my sister warns me about the scorpions. "Don't worry," she says. "They're not the lethal kind."

Once or twice a day, she takes a bucket and a kitchen spoon and scoops a scorpion off the wall or floor and carries the bucket outside to deposit it on the grass or near the compost heap.

I never thought I'd be so casual about scorpions, but somehow I don't give the bugs here a second thought, content to settle into a simplified life for a while. We spend a week together in this cabin, where there is no hot running water, and no refrigerator.

Preparing meals takes a while, and it's something Carrie and I do together to pass the time while we visit. Carrie and Pablo have greens and veggies delivered to the house twice a week, and we cook up root vegetables and rice, or curried lentils, or black beans with onion and hot sauce. The cooking supplies are limited of course since we can't have perishable items - dairy or meats - only veggies, beans, grains, dry goods.

Somehow this environment brings out the creative cook in me and I find myself making extravagantly delicious dishes with simple ingredients: spicy curried lentils with lemon rice and fried candied sweet potato slices. Pasta with fresh basil and tomatoes and garlic, salted just enough.

Somehow when we cook in the rainforest with simple ingredients on a two burner stove, and you're very hungry, the food is twice is delicious. Simple. Good. Pura vida.

This is the slogan for Costa Rica, the tourist-friendly motto - Pura vida - and it fits here. We wake up when we wake up, cook breakfast (oatmeal, or granola with powdered soy milk, or fresh fruit) then walk to the river to swim, bathe, lie on the rocks basking in the sunshine like the lizards that slither by.

We take longer walks sometimes to the EcoLodge in the center of San Luis, where we can check the Internet, interact with other visitors and the naturalists who travel here from around the world to work at the lodge, giving tours of the wildlife.

We walk up to the waterfall. We visit and talk for hours, and nap when we feel like it, and take sponge baths with hot water heated on the stove in the middle of the day sometimes. We read in the hammock. It's a leisurely, beautiful, simple life.

After a week in the cabin, we head to town to try out some of the organized rainforest activities: flying along the zipline 400+ feet up in the air, walking on suspension bridges over the canopy. I take a ride on 11 ziplines, including one on which you are zipping along at up to 40 miles per hour over the trees. It's exhilirating and not the least bit scary, as long as you don't let yourself think about the risk factor. (As with flying, which I do often, I choose to embrace as a miracle the fact that I'm shooting through the air at 600+ miles per hour in a metal tube, and landing safely, versus thinking about what could go wrong). I don't think about the risk involved, and therefore I have a blast.

By the end, Pablo and I are muddy and happy, splashed with mud and water from the trees when the rain kicked in after the first two ziplines. I recommend that everyone try flying over the rainforest, hooked into a harness, in the sun and rain.... Nothing quite like that sensation.

We then headed to Rincon de la Vieja, one of the volcanoes on the mainland, where we stayed in a picturesque cabin, surrounded by colorful gardens, the cabin walls spilling over with a luscious fuschia tumble of bougainvillea. We swam in the waterfall and soaked in hot sulfur springs.

I nearly passed out when we soaked and sniffed too close to the source of the sulfur fumes, hallucinating for a minute - strange people were talking to me in my head until I snapped out of it and entered the real world again after about 30 lost seconds. Be quite sure you're not allergic to sulfur (apparently, I am!) before trying this trick at home.

Then, we were off to spend the remainder of the last week in the cozy little Pacific beach town of Playa Samara. We stayed in a cabin right along the beach, right next door to the surfer school where cute young Tico (short for "Costa Rican") Rasta-styled, dreadlocked, surfer boys lounged and chatted all day long, occasionally interrupting their endless conversations to teach a lesson.

We drank strawberry margharitas at bars along the beach, including my favorite place, Shake Joe's, which featured comfy bed-style couches and hammocks to lounge in with friends while eyeing the other customers in the hazy evening light and sipping drinks with tropical fruit and little paper umbrellas.

I soaked in the sun, slathered head to toe in SPF 30 or higher of course, and swam in the warm Pacific aqua blue and clear Pacific waters. I got blonder by the day, my red hair picking up golden highlights in the sunshine.

We woke up when the sun or breeze or our internal clock woke us, fell asleep to the sound of the surf crashing at night, lounged about on the beach or in the hammock during the day, ate sumpuously full plates of tropical fruits every morning, and sometimes sipped fresh coconut milk. If this is not relaxing - what is???

When caught in the whirlwind of our normal busy, buzzing lives, few things are healthier I think than slowing down, taking a break, getting back to basics. The simple and pure life in Costa Rica was the perfect way to recharge my batteries.

Perhaps you are not as fortunate as I am to have a sister living in Costa Rica, as Carrie was for a while, and granted, that helped make this a possibility for me. But if not in Costa Rica, build some pura vida into your own life wherever you are, by taking some time just to slow down, relax, unplug the computer, turn off the Treo, to just enjoy some peace and quiet, to just enjoy the company of the people around you.

Luckily, as I have learned again and again, the world keeps spinning if I step out of my work routine for a while. My work is still waiting for me when I return home. But I am calmer, happier, more peaceful, more sane.

And that is a blessing, for me and everyone around me. So, with apologies to Paris and Nicole, whose show I will never watch, here's to living the simple life...

One love

2007-02-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It's Valentine's Day, and I'm single, and I'm a veteran of one marriage that, like most marriages, had some good in it, some sweetness and some happiness. Yet it didn't work, it fell apart, it ended. Ah, love...

The past year, when my ex- and I filed for divorce, was filled with a lot of grief and guilt, and a lot of blessings too, like my travels, the sale of my house, my friends around the world, my work. I have spent a lot of time exploring what went wrong in my marriage, and exploring concepts of love. What does it mean to me? What do I want from love? Or, the flip-side - how much love do I have to give?

A lot, a lot. Love, in its deepest form, is boundless. There is room enough in my heart for all six billion people on earth - although, of course, I can't marry all six billion, or even speed-date all six billion (or even the three billion with the y-chromosome). Now, putting this capacity for boundless love into practice is another question.

I do believe we all have an endless and divine capacity to love yet it's generally easier, and very normal and human, to constrict ourselves, to withhold the love we give, as if there wasn't enough to go around, as if we'd run out. When by giving it, it only grows...

This is hardly an original thought of course; ask the Dalai Lama, Buddha, Jesus, any old guru or prophet you meet on the street, and they will agree. It's just that this is the time in my life when I am more ready to finally live it, to at least try to put this into practice in my life...

For me, love has expanded this year well beyond the concept of romance, where it was stuck on pause and rewind for a while. Don't get me wrong: I, like most of us, still want the soul-mate, passionate lover, best friend, all rolled into one.

I want a partner on the spiritual path with whom to share the joys and lessons, with whom I can contribute to the world, make a difference and give back, and also (ahem) with whom I can enjoy a good roll in the sack. Maybe some of you have that today already and if you do, God bless! Celebrate it!

I'm still searching, but I live a life filled with love in so many ways. I'm reminded every Sunday of what it means to really put unconditional love into action when I walk into Glide Memorial Methodist Church, where the sign above the door as you enter from the meal hall reads, "To be spiritual is to love everybody."

Glide puts that into action... Everyone is welcomed at Glide, no matter your ethnicity, religion, sexual preference. As they say, transgendered, transexual, even trans-bay are all welcome (okay, non-Bay Area residents, this last one is an SF insiders' joke!).

At Glide, they serve more than one million meals a year to those in need, run recovery programs, clinics and shelters. You may have seen the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" featuring Will Smith that tells the true story of Chris Gardner, who went from being a homeless single father on the streets of SF to a millionaire Wall Street broker. He credits Glide for getting him back on his feet again.

Glide has a million more stories of redemption and grace, and I show up every Sunday to hear the stories, to be blessed by the spirit of joy in the church, to learn again and feel in my bones how very blessed I am to be healthy, alive, happy, to have a home and good food to eat and so many friends. I have so much more than so many on this planet... We are all so abundantly blessed, and it's easy to forget that sometimes.

Yet having a home and food and money and other external blessings don't guarantee a happy heart. "Loneliness and the experience of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty," said Mother Teresa, who knew something about poverty. Rev. Fitch shared this quote with us, and I watched one member of the choir weep, her eyes rimmed red, as the woman next to her wrapped her in her arms.

He challenged us all to reach out to someone who was lonely, someone who was hurting, to stop judging, to stop thinking only of ourselves, to help someone heal. There is no greater gift than unconditional love. As Reverend Fitch said, "When we judge people, we have no time to love them."

I do an exercise sometimes, inspired by a book by Wayne Dyer, while walking down the street. I try to simply send unconditional love to everyone who passes me. I was honestly surprised to find, when I focused my attention on it, that I pass so many quick judgments about people, that I can within seconds see someone and size them up, pass a judgment about whether or not this is someone I would want to talk to...

Judging by appearances is so easy to do, and we're so trained to do it by society, marketing campaigns, flashy billboards and glitzy advertisements. I think a lot of us at one point or another have had an idea in our head of what our mate is supposed to look like, or maybe we've fallen into step with certain friends because they look or dress like us (what teenager hasn't done that at some point, wanting to belong?) but it's so often a false construct. People so often surprise us.

Yet it's still a challenge, I find, to send love to everyone I see - but it's a challenge I want to continue to take on. Who doesn't benefit from some simple kindness, loving thoughts, a little attention? We all want to be noticed, appreciated.

That is not to say that we have to like everyone, or should even try - we all have different sensibilities, we all have different tastes. And there just isn't enough time to be friends with the whole planet, or to have all the inhabitants of your continent over for dinner. But to love everyone? In spirit, and in practice, when you are face to face with a stranger? In my mind at least that's a noble goal.

Luckily, I do like all of you who are reading this - my friends. Blessings to you. I honestly don't know what I'd do without having so many incredible friends around the world, who inspire me, make me laugh, boost me up when I'm feeling down and help me to know that I'm not crazy for feeling whatever I'm feeling, whatever wave I'm riding at the moment... Who are there to make my life really worth living.

My daily meditation practice also helps me to love myself and my life more deeply by reconnecting me with my breath, my body, and by helping me to clear some of the cobwebs out of my mind. I find myself a little bit less caught in stories and drama, every day, a little more able to live in the present moment fully, and to choose my response to the moment...

Which helps of course when it comes to men. As for the other part of the love relationship equation, what all my other relationships in my life can't give me, i.e. sex, physical love, well, this is a PG-13 blog read by many of my family members so we won't delve into that too deeply.

I'll let the funny, wonderful and wise author Elizabeth Gilbert speak for me on this one - I, too, want to devote myself to God, but also want worldly pleasures... Here is what she has to say on that topic, as she discusses it with the medicine man Ketut in Indonesia:

"I want to have a lasting experience of God," I told him. "Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God."

Ketut said he could answer my question with a picture. He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart.

"To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God."

"You must stop looking at the world through your head." Ah, yes. Easily said, not always so easily done - but that is what my journey is now, to follow a path with heart. When I'm living in the present moment, not obsessing about my past or fantasizing about the future, when I'm being led by love in my life, when I'm following my intuition and heart (and showing up, and doing the work this life calls for too) there is no "wrong" or "right," or rather, I'm always in the right place. The challenges and what seem to be failures in any given moment become lessons.

When I look at love and dating that way, I'm more willing to take risks, put myself out there, knowing that all experiences of human connection are worthwhile, and that if I am true to myself, my path will lead me where I need to go.

I'll end with this beautiful quote from Pujya Swamiji: "Love has no conditions. When we put conditions, when we put barriers and boundaries, then we lose love. Love is condition-less. Love is barrier-less. Look at the moon, sun, stars, trees... they are just on for everyone. When our love also flows for everyone, you become very natural."

Here's to being like the sun, moon, stars, which are "on for everyone." May I be a light in this world, as the Buddha urged his followers on his deathbed. May I not be afraid to shine. Because you never know when your light will illuminate the path for someone else, as so many other shining lights have illuminated mine.

Blessings to you all, to my friends around the world, for being lights in my life.

Now, go give someone a big smooch or hug. Go spread some love! Happy Valentine's Day.

"Ever since Love heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you...."
- Hafiz

Lisa Powell Graham © 2007

The best year of my life...

2006-12-29T20:41:00.000-08:00

....was, without a doubt, 2006 (although rumor has it 2007 will be even better...).

On the face of it, this might seem like a stretch. Certainly, 2006 was not without change, upheaval, even turmoil in my life. After all, my ex- and I initiated divorce proceedings in 2006, and this was (and is) unquestionably hard. I moved half a dozen times, stayed in three times that many homes, and have basically not stopped living out of a suitcase for the past four months.

But what a ride it's been. I've been to 20+ cities and traveled tens of thousands of miles on a few dozen airplane rides, to the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe and back and forth between the East and West Coast of the United States. I've visited with, and made, dozens of friends in countries around the globe.

I've studied five languages (Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Spanish), learned three tongue twisters in Italian, a handful of bar pick-up lines in Turkish (hey, you never know...), and got a free cab ride from a driver in Amman, Jordan after chatting with him about his family in Arabic. I've tried exotic dishes, from escargot in brown sauce at 7 a.m. at La Boqueria in Barcelona, to barbecue cooked under rocks in the sand by Bedouins in the middle of the desert in Jordan.

I've smoked hookah pipes and sipped arak, raki and campari. I've belly-danced, Greek-danced, lindy-hopped and attended a "no talent talent show" featuring smokin' hot burlesque dancing. I've ridden on the back of motorcycles and scooters up the cliffs of Greek islands, along the seacoast of Napoli, past the Colosseum in Roma.

I've been skiing in Tahoe, been on a silent yoga/meditation retreat in the Santa Barbara Mountains, and soaked in hot tubs in at least four states on both coasts. I've sipped champagne on a hillside overlooking Rome, and on a terrace overlooking Napa Valley Wine Country.

What I can I say, life is sweet...

I became the consummate California girl in many ways, shocking for a born-and-bred East Coaster. I took up yoga, meditation, became a vegetarian (in fall 2005), got a life coach and a spiritual advisor, dressed up for Halloween in the Castro, swam in my bikini in the Bay with the president of the Board of Supervisors from SF (also fall 2005, but who's counting??).

I shopped at the Ferry Building Farmers' Market, Trader Joe's and Chinatown and tried smoked tofu, tofu chocolate mousse, tofu scramble. I also incidentally became a temporary carnivore again overseas so I could try delicacies like moussaka, schwarma, and pasta carbonara at the source. (Life's too short to be too rigid and to make too many rules, either, IMHO...)

It has not been a dull year, not for one second...

The greatest part of the journey has been what I've learned about myself. I am one fun, adventurous chick, and to my own apparent surprise, pretty fearless. Or okay, let's be real, I still feel some fear sometimes ~ it's hard to cure a lifetime of neurosis overnight ~ but it doesn't stop me from doing what I want to do.

In the words of the guru of one of my favorite writers/spiritual seekers, Elizabeth Gilbert: "Fear, who cares?"

I am getting more Zen as I age, even as I get more adventurous, and I love that. You might as well remain calm while you're flying down a mountain, navigating your way around a foreign city, or landing a new contract with a government somewhere around the world.

This is not to say that I don't have my occasional petulant "moments" when the ski boots don't fit right or the backpack feels cumbersome after hopping on the second train of the day. But then I never said I was the Dalai Lama, just a more Zen me, that's all.

If you know me well enough to know my past, you know that I have always been an overachiever, and generally pretty tough on myself. This year I learned to let go of my need to be "perfect," whatever that means, and to be willing to live a little more, risk a little more, just have a helluva time in the grand adventure of life.

I've learned that there isn't one "right" way to do things, and that making mistakes is what we're here for anyway - to learn, to grow. To have some fun, for chrissakes! It has been a fun ride. It is a fun ride.

This past year, I also stripped away all the labels that I thought defined me. Adrian's wife. Troy community leader. Lindy-hop instructor. A+ perfectionist. Harvard and Princeton graduate. Try this as an exercise sometime. Who are you if you are not your job, your relationship, your pedigree/degree(s), your contributions to the community?

Maybe you're crystal-clear on who you are already without these markers - and if you are - God bless! I wasn't. I'd never stepped away from them for long enough to ask who was I underneath it all - I was always too busy frenetically doing, so rarely stopping to take a breath, so rarely just being me.

What would it mean to just travel and just be me? Who is Lisa underneath all the labels? That was my journey this year, really - figuring out who I am when I'm not defining myself by all the external factors in my life. Luckily, I really liked what I found!

I have found in myself what I thought I was looking for in someone else: Courage. A sense of adventure. Passion. A wicked sense of humor, and a real appetite for joy and fun. Abundance, in the universe, and therefore in me. Inner peace and calm - Lord knows I used to look for even that externally and have finally figured out that that, too, comes from inside me. All this, in one cute-little-redheaded package that looks good in a bikini.

Hell, I'd date me. (All this, and humility too!)

Ha! In all seriousness, though...

The good news is that my life is full and fun and exciting and abundant, full of wonderful friends around the world in amazing countries, and adventures and joy and love and peace, as it is now. I pretty much have a rockin' life. I'm one lucky woman. I am honored to know so many beautiful people!! I am beyond incredibly blessed to have all of you in my life.

Everyone should have it this good.

Next year, mind you, will be even better... In'sha Allah. I do believe there is a greater force that guides us (call it God, call it love, call it Allah, I think God responds to prayers under any name as long as they are from the heart), and that we also have the power to influence how our lives go, to create what we wish for in the world, and at the very least to always choose our attitudes about what happens in our lives.

I have a lot of work projects that I'm exploring right now that I'm excited about, homes on both coasts of the U.S. (Troy and San Francisco are both home for me, still, in various ways), a zillion friends.

I have my health, my happiness, my ability to dance. I am blessed with an amazing family - I wouldn't be half of what I am without them. I have the world's greatest life coach. I have passions and interests and skills and degrees and financial means, and the ability to give back in the world.

What more could I ask for???

I'll think of more to ask for, I'm sure, by following my heart this year where it leads me, by doing work in the world that I'm passionate about, by exploring and continuing the grand adventure.

Hope my path leads me to you this year. Be in touch. Send stories. Send love. Be happy.

Life is too short to not love and value every day. May you be blessed with joy every day of your life.

I'll close with some wise words from Gail Blanke, personal and executive coach and author ~ These words helped launch me on my journey this year. "Stop measuring yourself based on how much you get done in any given day, and start celebrating yourself based on how much you discover. Let go of being the world's greatest efficiency expert and embrace the role of lover and adventurer."

Amen!

Peace and love,
Lisa

p.s. One of my favorite songs from my childhood, "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles is playing right now on the stereo (my mom used to play it for me when I was a little girl):

"Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter,
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been clear...."

May you have sunshine this winter, and may light shine in all the darkest seasons of your life. I've had some dark days this year too, but I find that the sun always shines again.

If things aren't as bright in your life as you wish they were right now, I hope you'll remember the change of seasons, and reach out to me and other friends and let us buoy you up - as so many of you have done for me, too, this past year. Bless you for it!

To everyone who has sent love, given love, shared kind words, shared hugs, and boosted my spirits on the tough days, helped me remember pleasure, danced with me, showed me your city, celebrated with me, or just listened when I needed to talk, for all who hosted me and made your home mine for a few days - love you right back!

You are all welcome in my home(s), welcome in my life and in my heart, always.

"Little darling, I felt that ice is slowly melting..."

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

Tutto il mundo e un paese...

2006-11-10T11:50:00.000-08:00

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
~"Seasons of Love" from the musical Rent

I know the moments I will never forget from this year ~ bellydancing to Arabic pop while glamorous women in hijab cheer me on, saying, "Hot, hot!" ~ having my Bedouin guide Mahmoud place prayer beads in my hands as I meditate in the Bedouin museum and tell me "I feel something very strong about you" ~ climbing the cliffs to survey the royal tombs carved into the red rock in the lost city of Petra ~ lounging on cushions, smoking a hookah pipe and drinking apple tea as I watch the sun turn the water golden and silhouette the minarets at the Golden Horn in Istanbul ~ watching the Martha Graham Dance Company perform their interpretation of Greek myths in an ancient ampitheatre at the Acropolis in Athens ~ zipping past the Colosseum, illuminated at night, on the back of Antonio's scooter my first night in Roma ~ eating a whole pizza, the best of my life, from Pizza Man with Giamba in Firenze ~ gazing over Mt. Vesuvius and the hillside homes of Napoli with il mio amico Mario ~ drinking Campari in Barceloneta by the sea and telling jokes with Matteo in six languages ~ Life feels dreamlike and magical when I think about all I've experienced, lived, felt, tasted, seen in the past few months of my travels ~ unforgettable.

And then there is today. The sun is streaming through the window; outside is the whir of a leaf-blower as the neighbor rounds up the fallen leaves. It is November in New England and I am home. Whatever home means... I'm back from my travels overseas, staying at my parents' house in Western Massachusetts for a few days before heading to my beloved Troy, New York, then back to my other favorite U.S. city, San Francisco, for a while. I've just returned from a few beautiful days in mile-high Denver, Colorado, and before that, Boston. And of course, before that, Barcelona...

It is a bit of a shock to the system to be stateside again. My days are no longer filled with wide-eyed wanderings through cobbled streets and side-alleys, soaking up sunlight and the spectacle of street performers and the pulsing beats of music in other languages, drinking wine and campari and tasting sweets and seafood in tasty Catalan preparations, letting it all fill me...

My days here are filled with friends and family, another kind of beauty. The days are still slow and relaxed although I'm starting to feel the impetus to be on the go again. It's pretty unavoidable here in our work-work-work-driven society, where I need my daily meditation practice to keep my sense of calm and peace.

I came home early to celebrate the life of someone I love who has passed on (Sue Williamson, the director of my graduate program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government), to see my dear sister Carrie off before she flew to Mexico for a few months, to visit with some old family friends, and to wrap up some important business in my own life before resuming my normal work-a-day life. This means of course that my immersion program in Spanish was delayed, to be pursued instead most likely in 2007.

Sometimes it's just more important to be with the people we love than to pursue our adventure plans - and there is a lifetime yet to fulfill those anyhow. I have many to fit in - how and when, we shall see - Que sera, sera.... Venga lo que venga!

It seems fitting that my return home for Sue's memorial service at the Kennedy School brought me back to the space, place and people who inspired my travels in the first place. It is the Kennedy School that brought me 216 friends from around the world in my amazing MPA class. I am still knocked out daily by who these people are and how they give back to the world; I have never known a more inspiring, giving group of people.

It was my beloved friend and classmate Salma's wedding in Jordan that gave me the inspiration to head overseas this fall, and the friends who live along the Mediterranean corridor who gave me the further inspiration to follow the map through five more countries, following my heart on a journey that ultimately inspired me, changed me, made me more completely me.... A journey that reconnected me to my passion for languages, learning, people from around the planet, that reawakened my desire to truly be a global citizen and to give back perhaps in a larger sense than I had envisioned before.

I traveled to learn about the world and ultimately learned about myself; isn't that how it always goes?

All around me at Sue's memorial, my classmates, including public servants, heads of NGOs, military leaders, of all ages, colors, persuasions, pulled out kleenex to dry their eyes; no one was left unmoved. A group of a dozen of us got up to sing a song for Sue, which was a request she made before she died. We led the packed auditorium in singing "Seasons of Love" from Rent. Sue called the song, "How Do You Measure A Year."

This song asks us all that question, gives some possible answers ("in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee, in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife") and ultimately answers that you measure it in love.

I'd agree with that ~ The moments I will remember on my travels were connections with other people, forming bonds of love and understanding across cultures. The moments I will remember back here at home are moments with friends as we mourn Sue's loss and celebrate her life; time with family back in Massachusetts; time with beloved friends in Colorado; visiting with the community I love in Troy and my posse in San Francisco, which I look forward to doing soon...

My travels changed me and raised new questions for me about my work and larger purpose in the world. I am thinking seriously about ways to translate the work I have done and my studies in public policy and urban affairs into the global environment. Could there be a way for me to do work with other cities internationally, and also use my language skills and learn about other cultures in the process? Absolutely, there could, it's just a matter of when and how I would like to create this ~ Many questions to answer here stateside first, too....

Our lives are what we make them, how we choose to create them, and how full they are, how technicolor, how full of love and adventure, laughter and magic, is entirely up to us. I'm so filled with energy and inspiration again, that kind of happy energy that makes you want to do cartwheels around the room, after my travels and feel ready to channel it with force into the world again.

The questions of how, where and when exactly everything will work for me are yet to be answered, but I'm not worried. If travel has taught me anything, it's that we need so little to get by (a little food, a little clothing, some sunshine, love and friendship will do!).

Charting your own path is never easy, but always worth it - Follow your heart and your path will be the right one for you. I truly believe that, and want to continue to live that in the world.

I feel brimming with the spirit of adventure that defined this particular journey through six countries for me - I know there are many other adventures ahead, and I can't wait to embark on the next leg of the journey.

Lots of love to all who made it possible for me along the way.... And to those who are reading my stories, thanks for sharing the journey with me.

p.s. Tutto il mundo e un paese! All the world is one country. I think that is my favorite expression from along my travels - The further I go, the more I learn how much we are all alike, and how the future of this world depends on us all. I am lucky to be able to just play my part and I look forward to all the coming adventures....

To be continued.....

Barcelona - un gusto de Gaudi, un sabor de Miro...

2006-10-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

"This tree next to my workshop, this is my master." So said master architect and artist Antoni Gaudi, whose Sagrada Familia has a cathedral interior based on the vaulted canopies of the forest.

Here in Barcelona, I am living only two blocks from La Sagrada Familia, that beautiful monstrosity, the most audicious and outrageous work of public art and expression of religious faith that I have ever seen...

Gaudi just makes me laugh out loud with joy and wonder at his sense of humor, deep faith, homage to nature, his sheer bravado. The top of the cathedral features stalks of corn and grapes and peaches and the word, repeated over and over, "Sanctus."

He drew inspiration from trees, leaves, honeycombs, birds, flowers, fruits, vegetables. And from light - I am amazed at the way his buildings are illuminated, the grace with which he harnesses the natural light.

He said about La Sagrada Familia, an ongoing masterwork of art and architecture started over 100 years ago and scheduled for completion in another 20 years or so, "Look at the top! Doesn't it just look as though the earth joins with the heavens? This burst of mosaics is the first thing sailors arriving in Barcelona will see. It will be a sparkling welcome!"

There is not a single straight line in La Pedrera, one of Gaudi's other masterpieces on Passeig de Gracia, which I also tour. The roof is simply splendid, mushrooming with towers and faces and spires and spirals, and who ever thought of making a roofline wavy anyway? Who ever thought to make a roof ornamental, indeed, vs. just somewhere that pigeons land or somewhere to hang the laundry?

Gaudi, that's who, his roof is necessary, not pedestrian as roofs usually are, just a building top, but instead pure art and lush design, and where else could you so admire the Barcelona skyline but from between his undulating rooflines... I'm in love with this roof... And we have not even talked about his Casa Battlo, Dio mio...

Here in Barcelona, these Catalan streets are still haunted by the spirits of Gaudi, Miro, Picasso...In a few short days, colorful, off-beat Barcelona has turned me upside down and inside out and made me laugh out loud and stand stock still in awe....

Pablo Picasso, what can I say? Who could be more playful and prolific? As his museum would testify... You can see here in this 15th century castle comme museo the evolution of the man who would later create Guernica - You can see it in his black and white study of "Las Meninas," one of 58 exhaustive studies of "La Familia de Felipe IV" executed by Picasso from December to August 1957.

You can see it in "La Joie de Vivre" also known as "La Alegria de Vivir," although the subject matter is different, the happy little goats, the pan flute, the voluptuous nymph. You can see how alive he is through his art and how the world lives here through his canvases - You can see what is to come...

I walk out of the Picasso Museum and the whole world is brighter and I see it in new frames, with new eyes - I take pictures at odd angles just for fun and am captivated by small details, a plastic flower on a balcony, trays of chocolates garnished with candied fruit in a shop window, laundry hanging on a pink pastel wall.

I feel a little crazier here, more inclined to take risks, knowing these artists did this and see what happened to the world?

I even dress myself like a work of art in Barcelona. This morning, I put on a simple black outfit with a low-cut black top, down to there, because these are the ultimate melons in nature anyway, this part of the woman - beautiful, no? Why not let the world admire sometimes... I wrap my hair in a bright red scarf and put on red lipstick and black eyeliner.

I am in the city of Miro. I am in the city of Picasso. How could I not treat my body as a work of art too, here where the figure of the woman was also admired and loved in art... I think of the joyous high round breasts of the nymph in Picasso's La Alegria de Vivir and figure I am dancing the streets in this spirit...

It's fun to do this and fun to walk around as if I am a roving piece of art. Everyone on the Ramblas does and is this anyhow... And it's comforting to be comfortable enough in my own skin now that I understand that some will love my display and exclaim, "Mama mia!" as some men do along the way, and some will ignore me because perhaps they prefer Cezanne to Miro, brunettes to strawberry blondes, whatever. I don't take it personally.

Some people love plums and some bananas and I am a pomegranate (bright and colorful, full of surprises, planting seeds of joy, better once you unwrap me!). Anyway, I revel in the beauty that God gave me as just, well, ME, pure Lisa, and have fun showcasing that here in this colorful city...

Here in Barcelona, I practice my Spanish but also check out the menus in Catalan. This is a place where your "X" Scrabble tile could actually win you big points, as this seems to be the middle letter of every word in Catalan. I don't pretend to have a handle on this language yet at all but it is seemingly a mix of Spanish and French and something more medeival.

For lunch I try "txapela" and "bikini txapela" at a Catalan tapas place; yesterday had "El Menu del Dia" at La Llesca, a mom-and-pop operation run by a family in Paseo Gaudi, which featured two plates - tostaditos con chorizo y tomate and albondigas con salsa, champinones y patatas, along with vino tinto, pan and flan - one of my alltime favorite desserts! - all for 10 Euros. Wow...
I am haunted by the city and still have not even lived it yet, i.e. haven't yet experienced "Barcelona by night" - although tonight I will treat myself to un paseo along Las Ramblas, and tomorrow to the Boqueria market I go! I will also visit Gaudi's house in Parque Guell tomorrow - have already been to several of his other houses and of course his masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia.

I can't seem to get enough of Gaudi... I just want to be consumed by his eclectic humorous sacred gorgeousness, to live in the organic-ness of his art....

Here the city really is a work of art, Modernisme, Catalan style art nouveau, and I am so grateful for it... I am reminded again how much the city is a passion of mine, the city as organism and eco-system, and I wonder as I walk how the city has evolved and is evolving now, what is its soul and nature? who are the spirits living and dead who roam the streets now? how do the people live and worship, what are the colors of the city by day and night, how does the afternoon light fall by the sea... Another city to fall in love with...

So you see, I am fickle, so quickly enamored of a city in Spain. However. You must understand though that my love for Italy is boundless and inexplicable, and I barely even saw the country - yet I felt it and tasted it and drank it in in a way that changed me in a few short weeks. What country could possibly be more sexy than Italy?

I don't think there is another place on earth sexier than this - the country is shaped like a woman's high-heeled, thigh-high boot for God's sake, kicking the island of Sicilia as if she has nothing better to do. I want to just kick some islands in my thigh-highed, high-heeled boots too when I am in Italy...

The day I leave Firenze, I am so sad to go. But all of my last moments there feel perfect, as they should be - I admire the graffiti of Jesu, spray painted in gold with "L'Uomo" on a stucco wall. I have a foccaccia dell'ouvo and a tortina della nonna, my last sweet in Italy for now.

It is the perfect sweet to end my two weeks there, symbolic for me somehow since I hope to be a nonna (Grandma!) someday and because it has a creamy sweet ricotta filling - My weakness here is for the milky, creamy sweets. The country of gelato. Heavenly. Also, in the U.S. we would not call this "the little cake of the Grandmother" - even the name of the dessert is sweet for Chrissakes!

Oh! And bow-tie pasta - here it is called farfallino which means "little butterfly." Little butterfly! Poetry in my mouth! My favorite gelato flavor is of course Bacio, which means kiss, and which is creamy chocolate with hazelnut. (Now, if you want to win my heart, sweet slow romance, perhaps a nice red wine, and anything with chocolate and hazelnut will do it....)

Italy is pure romance, where they name my favorite gelato flavor after a kiss - And with apologies to Spanish where we say "todo bien" nothing makes me happier than to hear the voices singing, "Tutto bene! Tutto bene!"

All is well - Of course it is - How could I possibly ever leave this country...

Vedi Napoli e Poi Muori - "Visit Napoli and you can die," so goes the Italian expression. I heard this from multiple Italian friends and it seems that I can't miss this place on this trip. So. I go. I see. I sigh... I meet Mario.

I don't really know what to say about Napoli, except, GO, and what to say about Mario except that I am happy to know he is alive. It was one of those days and one of those times when you just feel so grateful to be here, now, in the perfect moment.

Mario and I rode his Harley Davidson all over Napoli and watched the sunset from Parco Virgiliano and then checked out other stunning vistas of this historic and beautiful city on the sea. Napoli is perhaps better known to American tourists for its long history of organized crime or for not being the safest tourist destination in Italy today.

I can't speak for others but for me it was a friendly and beautiful place. I got to experience it through the eyes of someone who loves the city, which was such a blessing, and I understood why the Italians love this city so much.

We met at Castel Dell'Uovo as a simple stroke of fate; I had headed to a restaurant to grab some pizza and they were closing. Mario was leaving with members of his brother's wedding party (his brother was married the night before - Mario had been up all night and then spent the next day showing his brothers' friends from Milan the city - and then showed Napoli to me!).

We met, and he offered help me find another place to try Neopolitan pizza, and to show me his city. Mario's pride in his home and birthplace was obvious; he told me this was the best city in the world and he would take me to the best place in the best city in the world, that it was so beautiful that I would not be able to breathe...

It was, indeed, breathtaking. We watched the sunset from the west of the city, where the coastline curves around the Mediterranean creating a harbor and bay where the historic center of city is nestled. We are on the outer Western curve, by the industrial part of the city. Mario shares his vision for this part of Napoli, to transform the old factory buildings into art museums, build restaurants and shops by the sea. I can see it, perfectly...

Mario also is just a good soul, the youngest of eight children in a big Italian family that spans 28 years, known by the family as "the sweetest" of all the brothers. This was clear from his conversations with me. He is a spiritual and kind person who is dedicated to making a difference in the world and does everyday through his kindnesses and hard work and the sunshine he brings into others' lives, as he did into mine that day. I feel like I have more faith in the future and salvation of the world just knowing he exists!

Am grateful for experiencing his goodness... So many good people in the world and how lucky I am to meet some along the way... If you are familiar with tikkun olam, the concept from Jewish mysticism about reconnecting all the fractured bits of light scattered around the world to heal the earth - Meeting someone like Mario for me is like connecting again with one of these points of light.

If enough of us focus on healing the world together, it is possible... Anything is possible.

Other Italy stops included Pompei, Siena, Cinque Terre... I cannot extoll the virtues of Italy enough. I breathe more deeply and walk more slowly and feel more like a goddess here than anywhere on earth, apparently - I plan to trasplant this feeling, this way of being, back to the U.S...

Pompei was a marvel because here in a place of real art and culture and beauty a city was frozen in time. It is chilling and beautiful to see it, to see the plaster casts of people who were captured frozen in a moment in their everyday lives, surprised by the sudden volcanic eruption and shower of volcanic ash.

Siena is a medieval city, still intact today, and I climb the towers there for an overview of the red roofs, Tuscan hillsides, city walls. The Duomo in Siena knocks me out.

Just when you think you cannot breathe in any more beauty, there is more - the vaulted ceilings, the blue and white striped marble columns, the busts of Popes and noble figures along the ceiling vault, the frescos, the mosaic tile floors with stories of creation and resurrection - it is too much, really, it is about as much beauty as I can take in one day... I breathe it in...

And Cinque Terre - here I walk the Via Dell'Amore (Lover's Lane or the Road of Love) and marvel at the cliffside villages with the picturesque pastel houses of melon, peach, pink - I have a picnic lunch of formaggio and foccacia in a hidden cemetery which is a beautiful and quiet place with cliffside views. I hike for hours and watch the sunset over the cliffs and dine in a little place in Monterosso... I meditate on the rocks by the Mediterranean Sea. It is a quiet, lovely, replenishing time.

My last week has been so replenishing and I am grateful for this. Sometimes travel can be tiring and our bodies and souls just need to recharge, and the last few quiet, lovely days in Italy and my first few days in wondrous and wonderful Barcelona have provided just this for me. It is time to reflect on lessons of travel too, and to offer gratitude for the gifts.

I am so grateful for the kindness of strangers - it is this really that has made the world so welcoming, such a wonderland for me. Mario was a stranger who made Napoli friendly for me, and who is now a friend. By the Town Hall in Siena, a nice couple from Illinois shared their picnic lunch with me. They insisted on feeding me crackers, goat cheese, part of a pear, orange, grapes and cookies.

In Pompei Gianni befriended me and helped me to find my way to Napoli, bought me coffee and pizza and just kept me company, walking me through the square at night and showing me an archaelogical dig site off the beaten path, near where he grew up, that he insists I was the first tourist ever to see! This is probably true. I will remember this always.

It is little kindnesses like this that you remember, and hopefully pass on, in the world...

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

Roma: non basta una vita...

2006-10-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

"It is a night with a lovely girl and 100 flowers," Antonio says....

We are on a night tour of the city on his scooter, my arms wrapped around his waist and his lap filled with two dozen roses that I bought for my friend Francesca, who is hosting me here in the city... It is my first night in Roma. He takes me to Trevi Fountain, breathtaking by night, where I toss a coin over my shoulder and make a wish to return to Roma...

We zip by the Colloseum, Piazza Venezia, Piazza di Spagna with the famous Spanish steps where beautiful people historically gathered hoping to be spotted for work as models... onto the Piazza del Popolo with dual churches at the foot of Pincio Hill. The city is marvelous by moonlight.

Antonio wants to kiss me and I refuse; I learn "abbracciare," the Italian word for hug. He is a friend but also a hot-blooded Italian man so I have to set the boundaries. Sometimes I feel like I should hang one of the museum-style "non toccare" signs around my neck - look, don't touch.

The attention is still lovely however and it is a gift to have friends in the city as I do, mostly people I have connected with through other friends in the States. Roma is like a dream to me and the magic of these moments makes it so.

There are many more: dinner at Fortunato near the Pantheon where Bill Clinton and Prince Charles dine when they are in town, a treat from Claudio who works in PR for the Minister of Justice; we have spaghetti with frutti di mare (seafood) and it is exquisite in a red sauce with just the right touch of red pepper, then white fish in a light buttery sauce with patatas. Mmmm...

There is champagne with Gianfranco, who deals in Napa Valley wines, at the Pergola on the top floor of the Hilton with stunning views of Roma. Flavio, another friend, takes me out in Trastevere and we have liqueur shots out of dark chocolate cups in an out-of-the-way bookstore cafe that specializes in exotic drinks, like Absinthe, which they actually serve! And Alessandro and I drink amaretto and chocolate liqueur and eat fine chocolates from Brazil while discussing Buddhism, politics and friendships around the world.

Life, what can I say, is good... It is la dolce vita, indeed... I've never been wined and dined so much in my life. The men have all been gentlemen and good company; some have become good friends already and will remain so after this trip. I could get used to this...

And life is sacred here, eternal... I awake to the sound of church bells my first morning in Roma, here in the home of the Pope, the eternal city that is a living museum, streets full of monuments, sculptures, fountains, piazzas by some of history's great artists, the grandeur of the days of the Empire still present in every walk I take...

Rome is monumental. Besides being home to master works by Michaelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Caravaggio, the city itself is a work of art. The buildings are grand, there are metro stations with marble angels perching on ledges above the curving facades, there are mythological figures spouting water in the endless fountains...

For me the feeling of the eternal city is expressed in the water fountains along the street that run eternally, water pouring from a tap into the street, where fashionably dressed cat-eyed Italian women stop for a drink, pulling back their long dark hair to drink from the flowing water, before rushing to their next destination in this buzzing modern and historic city...

Although the pace here is of a big modern city, Roma slows me down. I walk more slowly to admire everything, feeling like I have all the time in the world.

I sashay, walking like a runway model, swishing my hips, wearing heels on cobblestone streets and fitted skirts and dresses, only because this is Roma and it feels right to do this here. La moda matters here.

And I feel sexier in Roma...

If you are a 35 year old woman getting a divorce, as I am, and want to feel feminine and beautiful, even adored, again, I suggest spending some time in Roma where you feel like a W-O-M-A-N... There is something in the air here.

It doesn't hurt here that the men who sell you coffee or bus tickets often look like Calvin Klein underwear models. And you don't buy shampoo at CVS, you buy it at a profumeria. How much more sexy is that?

Even the names of my friends here all have three or four syllables, are more melodic: Giambattista, Alessandro, Gianfranco, Francesca, Claudio, Flavio... They roll off the tongue.

La lingua italiana is poetry to my ears; the national language was shaped by La Divina Commedia by Dante after all and all the words ending in "o" and "gia" make basic conversation, even swear words, which I am learning, perche non (why not?), sound like music....

I feel like I traveled 9,000 years to get here as well, having traveled back to the Paleothic and Neolithic Ages in Greece...

At the Benaki Museum in Athens, I marveled at small red clay female figurines, with full breasts and swollen bellies likely symbolizing fertility, that could fit in the palm of my hand and that date back to 6500 BC.

I experienced the Early Bronze Age, the Cypriots, the Archaic Period, the Mycenaens, through art, history coming alive for me in a way that it cannot through only reading it in books. I feel the energy of the creative spirit that has documented history and stories through art for thousands and thousands of years, predating language.

I marvel at the time and precision needed to create a Byzantine mosaic, a gold-leafed icon, a richly embroidered traditional costume... The care, the love, the artistry that went into all of these is breathtaking and such a reminder of the power of the human spirit to create things of great beauty.

You feel so much through this art, it raises so many questions and tells so many stories, about how people worshipped and lived, how they ate and worked, what their lives were like. It's awe-inspiring to absorb this much history in a few short days...

I learn too more about the Byzantine era which spanned from approximately the 4th to 15th century AD, the Greek-speaking Roman empire centered in Constantinople, i.e. my beloved Istanbul. It is one of my favorite periods in art.

I learn how priests and laypeople both fought for the right to create and display iconography, that this art was nearly lost when all religious imagery was banned from Byzantine art for over a century starting in 726, and the efforts of a dedicated few saved it. Icons were the common people's bible, the way to share the stories of Christianity with the illiterate versus reserving the religion for only the learned.

This art had a real impact in that time and I marvel now at its beauty; I love the icons with gold-leaf and rich reds, the endless depictions of Madonna and child and Christ and his apostles.

It's easy to forget in an Internet age and coming from a country where it is common to earn advanced degrees that even today an estimated 870 million adults are illiterate; art has always been a vehicle to share stories and emotions with all.

I feel the sense of great civilizations rising and falling when Xenia tours me through the Acropolis in Athens, the Parthenon which I learn means "Temple of the Virgin Athena," the Acropolis Museum, the porch of Caryatides, the Propylaea, or grand entrance leading into the sacred temple area...

I learn the Greek legend about how Athena and Poseidon battled it out for the city; she planted an olive tree as her offering and Poseidon struck a rock and water came out. The people of the city valued olive oil more and voila, the city was named for this goddess...

I learn that the owl is the national bird of Greece, symbolizing wisdom, and that the pomegranates featured in the ancient statues symbolize fertility. In small traditional villages for a housewarming guests would throw a pomegranate on the steps; it would burst open and the red seeds were supposed to bring good luck and fertility.

I was blessed to get to see a live performance that same night in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus - the Martha Graham Dance Company bringing Greek myths to life through dance. I got chills thinking about the great performances and culture that had cycled through this land centuries before, when Aeschylus and Euripides would perform comedies and tragedies in theater competitions in the nearby Theater of Dionysus, that accommodated 17,000 spectators...

Xenia encouraged me to visualize, and I did, the great minds that helped launch Western civilization walking on these grounds, talking about philosphy... It's so much more palpable when you've been in the space, seen a performance in the theater, walked the sacred grounds.

I learn, and I learn, and I learn... After a few days in sexy Roma (which, my friend Gianfranco points out, is "Amor" spelled backwards!!) I make a detour to Firenze, i.e. Florence. The city is quiet and small in comparison to Rome, magnificently beautiful, with endless cobbled alleys, green shuttered buildings, red tile roofs....

Dante lived here and Michaelangelo, and endless artists including the incomparable Caravaggio flourished under the patronage of the Medicis. The vibe here is so different from Roma, much more mellow, more art students sitting in Piazzas endlessly sketching fountains and facades, less rushing and more women in sensible shoes versus the high stilettos on the cobblestones streets of sexy Roma.

This is interesting to me, since besides gelaterias, lingerie stores are the most frequent type of shop I see in Firenze. Sneakers and lingerie, art and history, Ponte Vecchio which survived the Nazy occupation and is a timeless symbol of the city... Firenze is complex...

My first night here my friend Giambattista tours me around on his scooter by night - how did I get so lucky to experience all of Italy this way?? We go to Piazza Michaelangelo for an overview of the city and Giamba, who is a professional photographer, teaches me how to take a night-time picture of the city skyline using an open aperture and lengthy exposure. I capture the Duomo and Santa Croce by night - wow...

Then he takes me to Pizza Man in Firenze where I have, I kid you not, THE BEST PIZZA OF MY LIFE (with apologies to DeFazio's in Troy, NY, where I regularly indulge in the best pizza I've ever eaten elsewhere in the world).

I eat a whole pizza. A whole pizza! This, for me, is a record, but every bite is mouthwateringly perfect and the next bite just as good...

The pizzas are simple. I have half a pizza margharita and half of one with fresh cherry tomatoes and basil. The crust is light and thin and you fold it in half. The tomatoes are so fresh. The cheese is exquisite, sliding off the sauce, yet sparingly applied vs. the greasy mozzarella that often gets glopped onto slices in the States. Everything applied judiciously- and so fresh!

The pizza is lighter with pure ingredients that all taste farm fresh and you taste every ingredient in every bite. That said there is really no way to describe properly in words why and how this is so much better than the pizzas in the U.S. (you must go to Pizza Man and experience it for yourself!) but one pizza and a few glasses of plum grappa later, I am a very happy, satiated woman.

Luckily I walk 1,000 steps the next day to burn off that pizza. I climb to the top of the Duomo and a few hours later climb the Campanile by sunset, for both daytime and evening views over the red roofs of Florence and surrounding Tuscan hillsides.

I catch a mass at the Duomo, just to experience that in Italian, and try ribollita, the filling and tasty Florence soup with vegetables and pieces of crusty bread soaked in the soup broth. It is delicious. I finally try panna cotta, one of my favorite desserts in the U.S., here in Italy and it is creamy, smooth, so creamy, delicious, and smothered in hot chocolate sauce flavored with liqueur.

The tiramisu is divine, and I've tried at least seven flavors of gelato by now, including the famous varieties at San Crispino near Trevi Fountain, which specializes in honey flavored gelato.

What can I say? I walk the streets of Italy all day and feast at night - My body is no worse for the wear, maybe slightly curvier, who can say, but I'm still in good shape and having nice curves never hurt a woman, especially here in Italy.... The men are not complaining.

I still have many sights to see in the week I have left in this beautiful country: Cinque Terre, Pompeii, Siena, Venezia. Today I toured the Vatican Museums, and there is too much to say here about that now (more soon) but suffice it to say I cried in the Sistine Chapel and could have spent a week there. Next week I will tour the famed Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

How did I get so lucky??? Sono felice, sono contenta.

That is not to say that every moment of my travels has been perfect and glamorous, of course... I've stayed in not-so-fancy but very friendly youth hostels and crashed on the couches of some gracious friends, been ripped off by an illegitimate taxi driver when caught during an Italian local transportation strike today, had some nights of less than optimal sleep.

But I'm happy, and I've learned that I can live with less, live more simply, than I once thought... We need so little, really, to be happy. Food, a safe place to sleep, some good company, and beauty.... I am an aesthete, seeking beauty everywhere, and I find it.

Seek and ye shall find...

Beauty will save the world... At least, I am counting on this. It is everywhere, and perhaps there is a higher concentration in Italy, but that is all a matter of perspective.

I breathe in beauty and it feeds me... It is replenishing. It calms my soul.

No matter the hardships or inconveniences of travel, which are always part of the deal, the moments of beauty define my travels for me.

These are the moments I will remember, always....

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

Endless sunshine of the spotless mind

2006-09-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

"It is so simple, the life," Lucky said to me this morning in his famous Santorini falafel and souvlaki stand where I bought my breakfast falafel for 2.5 Euros. "You are happy, you bring many happies."

We are all called to be happy, he said, and to respect and revere a power greater than us, and to love one another, starting with our family and friends but radiating that light out even to those who we may want to distrust, the way the Greeks, Lucky said, sometimes view the Turks or the Arab world may view the U.S. The Turk, he has feelings, a heart, is respectful too, says Lucky.

Fifteen minutes with Lucky while my falafel balls fried, and I got his philosophy on life, 9/11, and why he is lucky to be famous and own this souvlaki stand in Santorini. God called him to make good souvlaki and falafel, he says, and he teaches others how to make it and shares with Greek youngsters his thoughts on how to talk to the people of the world.

One nation united under falafel, here on this island of staggering beauty, one of the top destination spots on earth...

Luckily, and Lucky would be proud, I am happy. My blue eyes bring good luck to others as well, he says, and that's fine with me - I'm happy to share my happiness, the bounty of it all.

The beauty on my travels feeds me and the light on the island feeds my soul. The light and colors, the hot clear sun of day and fiery panoramic sunsets, the light dancing on the water, this is Greece to me - sunset, sunshine, sunrise, white light and gold light, blue and red skies...

The colors of the sky at sunset are red, gold, white, the sun a ball of fire or light pouring through clouds in rays that fan out toward the water, light pouring down and signifying to me a power so much greater than us that lights up the world every day, and the surface of the sea shimmers and dances with light.

This despite the fact that it has been a rainy week! In the interlude between showers it is nothing but dazzling sunshine and endless blue skies until the highlight of every night - sunset over mountains, cliffsides, cities, seas. The best so far that I have seen were in Oia on the island of Santorini, and, unbelievably, from the terrace of Xenia's house in the Athens suburb of Papagos.

I spent the weekend on Santorini and learned more of the history of this place of myth and magic and gasp-inducing views. Along with the island of Crete, Santorini is supposed to be the location of the lost city of Atlantis, the advanced civilization that disappeared into the sea. When the volcano in the center of the once-round island erupted in ~1630 BC, the eruption was so violent that it caused a tsunami in its wake, that destroyed the island of Crete. 2/3 of the center of the island disappeared beneath the sea, leaving the crescent shape that is now Santorini, the caldera of cliffs that now draws visitors from around the world. It is thought to be one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in history.

The volcanic eruptions in Santorini had biblical implications as well, according to Xenia, who as a student of archaeology years ago excavated the lost city in Santorini. The ash blew south and covered the sun in Egypt for six months, thus leading to the seven plagues, and the force before the tsunami drew the Red Sea back, "parting the sea" and leaving a clearing for Moses to lead his people to the promised land.

There was a logical geological explanation for these Biblical miracles, Xenia says, if you piece together this time in history. I get the chills when she describes it. It is awesome, truly, to be in places that have such rich history, places that helped shape Western civilization as we know it.

As a Christian, which I consider myself to be albeit one that practices Buddhism as well and embraces all religions, I am awestruck by the power of holy lands and places, to be where the stories of the Bible originated, not to mention the epic stories of literature - the Iliad, the Odyssey.

Knowing about Santorini's history helps to elevate it as well to more than just another beautiful tourist destination, which the island also is. It is utterly packed with tourists so the island is not about the charm of the locals (although there is Lucky!) but you can't really blame us all for gathering from around the world to appreciate the beauty of this unique destination.

I loved Oia best, the tip of the island famous for its sunset views where I watched the sunset both nights. The cliffs of Oia are lined with charming white, yellow and pink houses and the famous blue-domed churches of Santorini. Here, I dined on souvlaki for 2 Euros - an island bargain! - bought two watercolor paintings of the city for only 28 Euros, and indulged in dessert decadence.

Night one, Saturday, I dined at Lotza's Terrace overlooking the cliffside homes, vegetable stew with retsina wine, then I treated myself to ekmek, which seems to be too sinful to exist. It is sheer sweet lunacy, bread and shredded wheat soaked in syrup with custard on top and whipped cream flavored with cardamom and sprinkled with chopped pistachios on top of that.

Night two I had a crepe filled with nutella and bananas and drizzled with chocolate sauce and a glass of local Santorini white wine from the barrel in what must be the most beautiful jazz bar in the world - I sat on the open air terrace surrounded by white and fuschia bougainvillea, overhead and along the terracotta walls, and took in the color of the post-sunset Oia sky while sipping wine and savoring chocolate.

If you are currently celibate, I recommend nutella loaded on anything to make you swoon. We find ecstasy where we can, no?

Oddly, perhaps from all the sweetness, perhaps from the dazzling views or couples silhouetted at every vista point, cuddling and kissing and swooning from the heights and over-the-top picture-postcard romanticism of it all, Santorini was about the only place on my travels so far where I felt alone sometimes as if only "one half" without being part of a complete couple. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to be struck by such a feeling on what is known to be one of the most romantic sites on the planet.

Hey. Whatever. I can always go back to Santorini someday if I choose with my "other half," wherever/whoever he might be, and cruise around on our scooter on the snaking mountain roads with the rush of open air and exhiliration of sheer cliff dropoffs alongside, sip coffee or wine along the cliffs, dance together to thumping beats in Fira's downtown district, etc. For now I am still happy to be alone navigating my way through the world as I wish - it's a privilege and blessing to be traveling this way, too.

Other Santorini highlights included my scooter ride to Fira along winding cliff roads, hanging on to the greasy Greek mechanic Niko whose long curly hair whipped into my face as we rode (he'd offered me a ride to Fira for free rather than letting me rent a scooter, for safety's sake, since I'm an inexperienced motorized-two-wheeler-driver and he said there are many accidents here); sunbathing and swimming topless in the Aegean at the black sand beach of Perissa, where you walk on volcanic rock underneath the surface of the water; eating my falafel this a.m., after my talk with Lucky, at a cliffside cafe with a gentle breeze and breathtaking views of Fira spread out beneath me.

Last night I danced 'til three at Fira clubs. At Murphy's, the crowd pulsed to Vanilla Ice and Sublime. At bar two, I got treated to free shots when I belly-danced to Turkish music with a Greek woman. I will freely admit that I am an exhibitionist when it comes to performing, especially belly-dancing. I do not mind at all when the crowds clap for me!

Thus I was happy when I got cheers of "Bravo!" and "Oh-pah!" when I did my first Greek dancing solo in a traditional taverna where I'd dined with my friend Iaonnis from the Kennedy School a few nights ago, before leaving for the Santorini trip. We were in Psiri where crowds of attractive Greeks throng the streets until sunrise - women in leggings and short skirts and low-slung belts, olive-complected handsome men with five o'clock shadow everywhere.

We quit at 1:30 a.m., which was early, since I had to catch the ferry to Santorini at 7:30 the next morning, which meant leaving the house at 6 a.m. I s'pose when you are traveling sleep is so overrated - but I do need some to keep my stamina up for another two months of travel.

During my night out with Iaonni I also got to try some classic Greek dishes, including dakos from Crete, which is a hard brown bread with thick layers of tomato and feta on top - Greek bruschetta essentially! The bread, which tastes of molasses, crumbles and melts in your mouth.

We had touszakakia, meatballs with red cumin sauce, which were delicious (and yes my vegetarian diet has gone to hell again in Greece - but while in Greece, one must try the delicacies, right?). I danced multiple Greek dances, coaxed and coached by the Greek women dancing to the live musicians in the back of the taverna, culminating in my solo when they beckoned me onto the dance floor late that night.

Iaonni said that night, when speaking of the relations between the Turks and the Greeks, that "the next war will be over baklava." The Turks claim it and so do the Greeks. Of course the troubles between the nations run deeper than this - they still fight today over Cyprus, where a fence divides the Turkish from the Greek side, and there has been a lot of bloodshed and bitterness between the two nations.

"When a Greek talks about Istanbul, their heart bleeds," Xenia has told me.

In Istanbul, Aya Sofia, or Hagia Sofia in Greek, which means "divine wisdom," is something of a pilgrimage site for Greeks, symbolizing the greatness of the Byzantine empire which has Hellenic roots. Aya Sofia was originally a Greek Orthodox church, Xenia said, years before it was a Muslim mosque.

Food unites, food divides, and one could say it ultimately has more power than religion because we need it to survive. As fuel, food keeps us alive, but of course is also a great source of pleasure in life, and I am happy to be eating this way during my stay but also happy to have lots of Greek ruins and cliffs to climb so I can stay in bikini shape for the beaches of Italy - coming next!

First, another few days in Athens... So far here I have toured the neighborhoods around the Acropolis by night, enjoyed a delicious mezza meal of cold salads - caviar, eggplant, tzatsiki - retsina wine and spiced cream cheese, when Xenia and Kostas kindly treated me to a meal at the traditional Plaka restaurant, Stamatopoulos Tavern, where three musicians played traditional Greek folk songs on the open air terrace, that was located right at the foot of the Acropolis which is illuminated by night....

Xenia and her husband are the perfect hosts. I have tried an Athens brew pub with my friend Konstantinos as well, where over red ale and sweet lager we discussed life, work, spirituality and camping out in medieval castles, which he has done here in Greece. Perhaps next time I can add this to my list of adventures as well.

More to report on this historic city and country soon... Oh-pah!

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

Hayye ales Salah - Let's go to the mosque....

2006-09-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

One cup of coffee and you remember it for 40 years - That is a Turkish proverb to live by, shared by my friend Moses over apple tea outside his carpet shop. As Moses said, "Familyship, relationship, friendship, these are all most important to us in Turkey..."

In the end it is these moments that last and it is perhaps the greatest gift of travel, moments shared with others that stay with us, like hearing a new friend, Ali, a reciter of the Koran, speak passages aloud to me like poetry and translate the haunting sounds of the call to prayer that I hear in the streets of Istanbul every day...

As Professor H. A.R. Gibb has said about Muhammad and how the reading of the Koran affects the human heart, "No man in fifteen hundred years has ever played on that deep toned instrument with such power, such boldness, and such range of emotional effect."

Here is Ali's transliteration for me and his literal translation of the call to prayer that comes five times a day:

Allah Ekber - God is great ~
Eshedu en lalilahe illallah - There is no one like God ~
Eshedu eme Muhammad un Rusulluldai - Muhammad is the person like the men God wants from us ~
Hayye ales Salah - Let's go to the Mosque ~

I met Ali near the Grand Bazaar when I asked for directions to the whirling dervish show; he walked me there, then spent an hour and a half telling me stories of the miracles of the world from the Koran.

Though only 22, Ali was full of knowledge and stories. He said according to the Koran if we could hear the sound of the world turning we would explode.

He talked about the two moons that are part of Islam, although we can only see one here on earth, and that the second moon is also a miracle - the crescent moon of course is featured on the flag of Turkey as a symbol of Islam.

He said that God knows how many breaths you will take in your life - it is predetermined - and for that reason he said I might notice that the Turks breathe deeply and slowly! Make your breaths last and extend your life... This is one of the best reasons I've heard so far to breathe deeply!

My friend Ismail asked me what Turkey is famous for and when I said, "Turkish delight? bellydancing?" he answered, "Turkish hospitality." Ismail spent an afternoon showing me the Süleymaniye Camii or Suleymaniye mosque, which was built in seven years, from 1550 to 1557, by the great architect Sinan for Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent.

The night before, we smoked a nargileh and drank raki at his friend's courtyard bar in Sultanahmet - before that I'd been out dancing at a local bellydancing show by a fiendishly beautiful blond dancer who rippled her sinewy body in surprising and sensual S-shapes - I want to dance like that I thought! I'll keep practicing my bellydancing so inshallah someday I can... She did pull me up to dance with her which was fun...

Another favorite moment with Ismail, who works in hospitality managing a restaurant in Sultanahmet, was when he told me, "I can say I love you in ten languages," and then proceeded to share each one with me. He spends so much time with tourists that he's learned key phrases - such as that one! "I love you" in Turkish is "seni seviyorum."

I packed a lot into my eight days in Istanbul, with the help of my friends. The hammam (Turkish baths and massage where they scrub, soap down and rub you!), multiple mosques, a boat cruise down the Bosphorus, dancing in nightclubs in trendy Taksim night after night, climbing the winding cobblestone hills to take in the panoramic views from Galleta Tower, even dinner in some charming historic neighborhoods frequented by the locals, so off the beaten path...

My dear friend Seref from the Kennedy School showed me around town and also loaned me his friends as guides. His friend Mehmet and Mehmet's son Birkan took me to dinner at Ulus, perched high on a hill above the Bosphorus with spectacular views - We then went for Turkish coffee in Bebek, a charming Istanbul neighborhood frequented by locals, and drove along the length of the Bosphorus.

The Bosphorus itself is fascinating, a narrow strait that links the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea and that separates the European from the Asian side in Istanbul, the only city in the world that spans two continents.

Drinking our Turkish coffee overlooking the Bosphorus, Birkan taught me more Turkish slang, including "Wassup?" (Nasil gidiyor?) and "Take care of yourself" (Kendine iyi bak). My Turkish friends loved it when I pulled those out in conversation!

I love the convergence of worlds that travel brings, like hearing legends about the famous castle that is a historic landmark in green Slovenia from my new Slovenian friend Bruno, who was also staying at my hostel, as we ate kebab (loaded with sauce, for 1 lira only! or about 60 cents...) in Taksim at 4 a.m. with a hazel-eyed Brazilian engineer, Cassiano, a British rugby player named Will, a posse of Aussie friends all from the hostel, and local Turkish friends... The world comes together around kebab.

I think my favorite night of the trip was when I walked from Ortakoy, a charming districts of cafes, restaurants and shops along the Bosphorus that the locals frequent, to Arnavutkoy, which is one of the most beautiful little places I've ever been on earth! The coastline curves along the Bosphorus and along the sea curve where the fishing boats dock is a row of four and five story gingerbread Victorian homes, like something you'd see in old New England or San Francisco...

There is a canal in this section of town abutted by restaurants full of cafe tables with red and white umbrellas and full of families and couples enjoying the evening along the Bosphorus... I dined on the outdoor rooftop terrace at Garga, a famous restaurant with pictures of its visitors - Brigitte Bardot, Alfred Hitchcock - lining the walls.

My spinach salad with orange slices and walnuts and a glass of house wine only cost 15.50 lira (about $10 USD) and the sunset view was free... It was one of those moments of feeling like I am in paradise when I travel, since after all paradise can be something we create on earth, I believe...

It is such a gift to have these moments, small miracles, when the rest of life can feel hellish on hustling, bustling, busy, cranky days... We all have some of those as well. It's a gift to simply enjoy beauty and be in the flow of life, to take it slowly and enjoy the simple pleasures. This has been one of the great gifts of my travels so far...

I was sad to leave Istanbul although I'm happy to now be in Athens, staying at the home of my dear friend Xenia who lives in Papagoy, a suburb of the city. From her rooftop terrace you can see the sunset - I watched it tonight and understand what she meant when she talked about the Golden Age here.

Xenia is a career diplomat, currently posted in San Francisco as Consul General for nine western US states, and she is trained in history and archaeology - a beloved friend of mine and the perfect Athens guide! She pointed out the mountains that you can see from her terrace, next to the Acropolis - beyond that, the sea.

Here in 480 BC the Greeks defeated the Persians to start the golden age of civilization. How fitting I thought as I watched the sky of gold tonight - I do think the highlights of Greece will include learning more about its incredible history, which shaped Western civilization and culture in so many ways, and the quality of the light.

I think Greece for me will be about the way sunlight shines on the white buildings and blue sea, the luminous and bright quality of the white and golden light. Xenia said this tonight as well, that the quality of the light here literally helped shape civilization because when the quality of the light is clear, the quality of the thought is clear.

She said that here, "the Gods are brilliant and sparkling, everything is sparkling," and this creates clear and brilliant thought. It is easy to see already how one could be inspired by the light of Greece...

I look forward to seeing more sunsets and sunrises here and to learning more about Greek history and civilization. It felt fitting that I left Istanbul at sunset - I had arrived there the first day at sunrise - to complete the circle.

Istanbul is still haunting to me and I know I'll return. I learned a lot there as well, including fun Turkish phrases, and how to navigate when the Turkish hospitality becomes overly friendly, as it can, especially for a Western woman traveling alone. It can wear you down if you allow it to - the attention is non-stop and not always wanted.

Honestly I was feeling a bit jaded by the end by it all, despite being enamored when I first arrived, perhaps like a lover whose infatuation has burned itself out after nonstop passionate days and nights - Istanbul was like that for me.

By my last days there however I decided to take it for what it is worth and deal with it when needed just by ignoring unwanted attention and saying no - simple, right? There is so much that is good in the warmth and kindness of the Turkish people, their willingness to drop everything to show you their beautiful city and to make you feel welcome, that I didn't want to focus on the negative.

My advice for traveling in Istanbul would be - ignore the men on the street when you need to because they will pay you too much attention - which always starts with, "Can I ask you just one question?" - but also be open to some new friendships and to what you will learn from the people there.

My trip would not have been half of what it was without my new Turkish friends who taught me language, culture, history and took me to the out of the way places that aren't highlighted in the guidebooks.

I left exhausted but exhilirated after days of being barraged with attention on the streets, days of drinking in incredible and seemingly inexhaustible beauty, days of practicing my Turkish and dancing 'til 4 in the nightclubs of Taksim... What a trip!

Greece for me has been replenishing so far - A thunderstorm this afternoon meant it was not the perfect day for touring the Acropolis, so I rested, caught up on email and organized myself for the coming days. Tonight- dinner in the Old City at the foot of the Acropolis with Xenia and her husband Kostas and perhaps meeting up with my friend Konstantinos afterwards... More on Greece soon!

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

Bu iyi, bu guzel - In Istanbul, it is good, it is beautiful...

2006-09-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

God is smiling upon me in Istanbul, the Paris of the Middle East, the capital city of the world under numerous empires - Byzantine, Roman, Ottoman - A city with a Christian and Muslim history - a city that spans two continents - Today I was in Europe and also in Asia, and all in Istanbul!

It is an endless romance for me here, seduced by the city, called to its streets and waterways as millions are called to prayer by the haunting voices that echo from the mosques five times a day... Istanbul is intoxicating.

This makes sense to me - after all, it is a city of belly-dancing, whirling dervishes, dark and handsome men with bewitching eyes, splashes of color in the coral, blue and yellow of the buildings, light, water, sunsets over the Golden Horn and Bosphorus where the sky and water turn aquamarine, the minarets illuminated along the skyline...

Last night, it was so beautiful at sunset under the Galleta Bridge where I drank tea and smoked a shishi pipe, reclining on a soft cushion, that I could have cried...

Earlier that morning as I meditated on a cushion on the rooftop terrace of my hotel in the sunshine, with the sun glittering on the Bosphorus and the silhouettes of ships gliding silently across the Marmara Sea, my breath was deep and steady and easy. Simply being here is a form of meditation, a form of prayer.

Even the seagulls fly differently here, gracefully swooping in arcs like Arabic script, carving a slow dance like an exhalation in the air - They seem to know they are flying over centuries of history and beauty, soaring over this city is more beautiful than most places on earth, I am convinced of it....

I have made a million friends already, one on every corner - Everyone wants to serve me apple tea, sit with me, stare into my blue eyes (they are something of a novelty here...). The Turkish hospitality is beyond belief to the point of being exhausting at times because how many invitations can you accept, and how many can you turn down, again and again, but kindly?

I have been guided and cared for and received so many gifts, tea on rooftops, wine and chocolates, roses in the street - It feels like a constant romance and seduction by a whole city, 12 million people at once! (not that I am complaining....)

The sights that I have seen so far include Aya Sofia, a fıfteen-hundred year old mosque built by Emperor Justinian as the finest church of its time (it was a Christian church before the Muslim conquest); the Blue Mosque where I wrapped my bare arms and red hair with an aqua scarf to enter; the Grand Bazaar which is the biggest and most beautiful ancient indoor mall ever, 600 years of peddling wares and still in operation, featuring 4,000+ shops; the Spice Market where I sampled more than a dozen varieties of Turkish delight and marveled at the small mountains of rich red saffron, yellow curries, endless piles of figs, dates and jellied candies....

I have toured the European side of Istanbul and the Asian side both by car and on foot and taken the ferry from one continent to another in the cool night air and in the morning sunshine... Yet to do - Topkapi Palace, Bosphorus boat tour, and maybe Capadoccia this weekend (a marvel of an ancient city in central Turkey...). And, just more exploring of these winding cobblestone streets where there is a fortress wall, palace or mosque every time you turn the corner...

Last night I hung out with my friend Hakan in popular Taksim in Beyolu, full of restaurants, cafes, bars and shops and throngs of people... There was a festival going on featuring traditional Turkish music - The streets and balconies were lit up and there were balloons everywhere - We had dinner at a rooftop terrace restaurant, shrimp casserole and fried aubergines, so delicious! Then raki, the Turkish national drink that is like Greek oozu or Arabian arak - anisette flavored, milky in color when water is added, so good and so strong!

We listened to traditional Turkish folk songs, Hakan translated for me the fairy tales being celebrated in song, and I practiced some belly-dancing moves to the catchy Turkish songs - It was an evening of great friendship which reminded me once again how you can be kindred spirits and so enjoy someone's company who comes from such a different place and culture - Hakan is kind and funny and clever and taught me lots of new Turkish words, while we traded opinions on everything from politics to religion, work life and social life, our own and our nation's histories, travel and dancing - Such fun.

Tonight I will go see the whirling dervishes and have drinks at the Seven Hills Restaurant rooftop terrace which overlooks Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, enjoy the cool evening Istanbul air and more great company... I am staying at the BauHaus Hostel in Sultanahmet, which is ranked by the Washington Post as one of the world's top dozen hostels, run by the incomparable Neco who is up until sunrise every morning orchestrating and enjoying special events with his guests... Neco is also a champion Tavla player, a Turkish game of strategy which I have yet to learn (give me a few days!). Tonight there will be a fire party on the roof and drinking and talking 'til dawn...

In'shala - they have this expression in Turkish too - I will bring the spirit of this city home with me and savor every moment here, now and when I return again and again in the future... I do truly love it here. Yet despite my waxing poetic I also know and understand that the history of the city and country is complicated too, and bloody - the Turks conquered and were conquered many times over before national hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk made this a secular and free democracy with his vision and spirit, when Turkey became a republic in 1923... the Turkish flag is red for blood spilled, after all, so the legend goes - and I know that this city like all others has its dark side and problems.

But ma'shallah, it will remain magical too always, as it is to me now, and peaceful, as it also is - Truly here in Istanbul the problems of the PKK and terrorist bombings in the southeast corner of the country near Iraq feel a million miles away - In'sha Allah the people of the city will remain safe and able to enjoy their lives peacefully... I will wish for this always!

Bu iyi, bu guzel. It is good here, it is beautiful, in Istanbul.

On to more adventures - pictures coming soon!

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

A weekend in Dubai, shining city of gold...

2006-09-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

It was a culture shock coming to modern, glitzy, fast-growing Dubai in the United Arab Emirates after two weeks in historic Amman. Historically, Dubai was a small port city, surrounded by desert, in an area primarily inhabited by nomadic Bedouin tribes. Not so long ago, the city was little more than flat desert land and many of the locals were camel-herders.

Today it is the Middle East's answer to both fast-growing Las Vegas and New York, known for its skyscrapers of iridescent glass. The city has boomed in the past 20 years and is still growing at an exponential rate. 20 percent of the cranes in the world are in Dubai, according to one local (another claimed it is 80% of the world's cranes!) and buildings are going up everywhere you look.

Some of the new plans for Dubai include the Dubai Waterfront, a business, residential and entertainment mini-city, planned to be 2.5 times the size of Washington, DC and 7 times the size of the island of Manhattan. The world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, is currently under construction here, scheduled for completion in 2008, although the final height remains a closely guarded secret.

Life is tax-free in Dubai, and the free zones mean that industry is flocking here, but the cost of living here is high. Some locals I met who live in the Dubai Marina told me they pay 130,000 durhams per year (that's about 35,000 US dollars) for their two-bedroom apartment in a building that is only three months old...

It is not a pedestrian city. You take taxis everywhere. This is in part due to the way the city has been built, around highways, and in part due to the fact that the weather here is sweltering, and everyone lives inside in the AC.

The temperature this evening, for example, is a cool 91 degrees, Fahrenheit (33 Celsius) with 69% humidity and haze. Mind you, it's 7 p.m. and the sun has already set... Temperatures this week are expected to be in the 102 to 104 degree range (39 to 40 degrees Celsius) and we're in September already... Whew!

What this means is that you break into a sweat the minute you walk outside and your glasses or camera lens fogs up right away - it's that humid.

More on Dubai tomorrow, including stories of my desert safari adventures tonight - I am right now at the Dubai airport, getting ready to board a flight to Istanbul - I could not resist the call of this magical city after all... I am off for a week in Turkey, then another week in Greece! Wheee!

For more on Dubai, check here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

The holy land called ~and I stayed ~

2006-09-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Well I wished for more time in Amman and I got it! After hearing news of a fresh wave of bombings in Turkey last weekend, I decided to delay my trip to Istanbul to spend more time with friends here.

This decision made me sad because I don't want to live a life that is restricted by my fears, and because I am in love with Istanbul already even though I haven't been there (yet!) ~ the minarets, the architecture, the belly-dancing and music, the history and culture, the Bosphorus, the Blue Mosque, the spice market, the Grand Bazaar, Aiya Sofia, Turkish piping hot coffee and warm hospitality - I have a feeling I will be enchanted with the vibrant colors, fragrances, sounds, tastes, and the feelings and spirit when I go - I can feel the energy of the city swirling around me already, even from here.... And what place could be more romantic and more melancholy in the summer, as a Turkish friend once told me?

But as an American woman traveling alone, with friends here who I had yet to spend time with and with Amman still tugging at my heart, it felt better to stay for now. Ironically, the day I stayed was the same day that a crazy man shot at a group of tourists here in the Roman ampitheatre in downtown Amman, a site I'd visited just a few days before. I guess it goes to show you that there is some madness everywhere - here, the US, around the world - and sadly there is no avoiding that. Despite all of the love and good people here and everywhere there is still random violence in the world.

Yet in'sha Allah my travels will continue to be blessed and safe... Every friend we make across international and cultural lines is another victory for peace, and I was happy to stay here longer for this reason... Also, staying in Amman made for a relaxing and replenishing week...

Time dissolves here like sugar stirred into into hot tea... The days are a blur of happy meetings with friends at cafes, restaurants, bars and inside people's homes. Time slows down, and is about enjoying meals and conversation... This is how I spend my days, with friends... I have been to a high-end rooftop sushi and salad restaurant called Vinagrette with views of Amman, the famous international Blue Fig Cafe, Tche Tche Cafe known for its argileh ("hubbly-bubbly" as they call it here, or hookah pipes!), trendy Books@Cafe and Le Calle Italian bar, even Salt & Pepper, a new Arabic fast food joint where I ate delicious spiced rice and okra, frekka soup and a taste of mansouf - rich goat's milk yogurt with butter that is poured over rice. Yum.

Today I enjoyed a feast of a lunch at the groom's family's house in Shmeisani neighborhood - homemade lasagna Arabic style with white sauce and lots of cheese, salad, fried meat dumplings, Turkish coffee, green tea with honey, wine from Mt. Nebo and of course Arabic sweets for dessert. Ana nabateeya is how you say "I am a vegetarian" but here I've ventured outside my usual culinary restrictions a bit, as I thought I might - How can you avoid eating meat entirely when the best schwarma stand in Amman is across the street from my hotel, for example, and when one schwarma sandwich costs 1/2 dinar? (About 75 cents!).

Today I visited with Lama and Renna, Basel's sisters, his brother Akhmad and Lama's American husband, Patrick. As we wrapped up a lazy afternoon of eating sumptuous food and talking politics, music wafted into the room - a wedding outside, an Egyptian one, Lama said, from the sound of the singing and the band.

The weddings here are lavish, traditional, magical, as Salma's was - with a traditional Jordanian band to announce the arrival of the groom at the bride's house, then a procession to the hotel with cars honking horns - More singing and dancing at the hotel when the bride and groom descended from the staircase toward the ballroom! And of course, at the wedding, and the parties all week long beforehand, we danced, and danced, and danced....

I say, God gave me hips for a reason. My given nickname here was that of the best belly dancer in Jordan ~ An exaggeration of course but for an American girl I can shake it with the best of them! It was a revelation how the women cheered me on and danced with me, many of them veiled.

I didn't know culturally how it would go over to have a redheaded blue eyed Westerner baring my arms and body-rolling, but apparently, I was a hit... I learned new moves from the dancers here as well.

And the music moves me in a way I can't explain ~ I feel it inside me and it moves through me. I even love the Arabic pop especially the catchy rump-shaking songs by Nancy Ajarim. In'sha Allah, more belly-dancing lessons when I return to the US!

The rest of last week was filled with parties, meeting the bride and groom's friends - more and more and more of the warm Arabic hospitality. The parties were numerous and over the top ~ dancing in the open air at Action Target outside Amman to Arabic pop, where Basel's sister Lama tied a scarf around my hips and taught me belly-dancing moves - go slow and sexy she coaxed, and I did...

The party at Lana's parents' home, where we danced on top of the pool, a glowing surface covered by sheer plexiglass panels and lit from underneath - The atmosphere was absolutely magical...

The wedding itself of course, which took up the whole day, since we spent time in the salon getting our hair and nails done, putting on shimmery eyeshadow, being sure we were sufficiently glamourous to blend with this elegant crowd!

The other highlights of last week included the rose-red city of Petra, which leaves me nearly at a loss for words... It is so spectacular, you must go there yourself, in'sha Allah - It is a spot in the world not to be missed. Add it to your list of things to do before you die.

For 700 years Petra was a "lost city," like Atlantis, known only to local Bedouins until it was rediscovered by Swiss explorer JL Burckhardt in 1812 when he disguised himself as a Muslim holy man to gain access to the mysterious site he had heard rumors of... There is archeological evidence on the site of a village dating back to 7000 BC, but the heyday was from around the 6th century BC to about 70 AD.

The Nabataeans, master engineers and artists, carved royal tombs and treasuries and theatres and places of worship into the soft red desert rock with spectacular results. The entrace into Petra is the 1.2 km Siq, a gorge formed by tectonic movement that is only a few kilometers across in some spots.

Our guide Ali who was a very spiritual man told us that walking in the Siq "strengthens your soul" and that Petra is a holy place. Interestingly, most of the city was built in homage to the dead, with marvelous tombs - The living Nabataeans were nomads who lived in tents, like some modern Bedouins still do.

Thornton Wilder once said, "There is a land of the living and the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." This philosophy to me was at the heart of what made Petra beautiful ~ The views and vistas in Petra are beyond belief, especially when you get the first glimpse of the Treasury from the Siq, and when you climb the rock paths...

We hiked where the signs said "Do Not Climb" to get close up views of the Royal Tombs, and to stand and look down over the Roman theatre. Hundreds of feet below us, a line of Japanese tourists with umbrellas open to shade them from the sun wandered by in a parade of pastel color, and camels sauntered loaded with packs and people in the blazing sun, their long legs like matchsticks viewed from so high above. Petra is simply awesome.

The Roman ruins at Jerash, where we spent the day on Monday, where marvelous as well, especially with the backdrop of a small modern day city which surrounds the ancient site.

And floating in the Dead Sea is all it's cracked up to be - Your limbs pop to the surface as you float like a bobbing cork in all the salty water with it's slick, oily feel - It is warm as bath water and you can lie on your back, belly, or even your side in fetal position and stay on top of the water.

It's the lowest point on earth at more than 415 meters below sea level. Before heading into the water, you coat your whole body in mud and let it dry for 15 minutes - good for the skin! It itches a bit but feels so soft afterwards - Just don't go into the Dead Sea with any open wounds unless you are ready to feel a real sting!

The Marriott Resort where we hung out at the Dead Sea was posh, too - Three levels of pools with man-made waterfalls and even a waterslide, with the last pool overlooking the Dead Sea ~ The edge of the pool visually blurred with the edge of the sea. Restful, peaceful, beautiful. We lounged in our bikinis and had drinks poolside for hours, soaking in the hot sun...

All in all, an incredible week ~ And this week was the time to be with friends, rest-up and recover - Tonight I head out to a reggae dance party with my new friend KK, who is a bartender, Arabic tutor, English teacher and all-around cool guy - He is also strikingly handsome and doesn't look like he is "from here," since he dresses Western style and is tall with dreadlocks. He's a walking example of a person whose style transcends a certain time and place and he's a world traveller, too. So many fascinating people here.....

Must go dance! Tomorrow, the Turkish baths here (hammam) and hopefully an art gallery at lunchtime before flying to Dubai tomorrow evening for a weekend with Masuda- then to Athens and Mykonos next week with Xenia...

What a blessing it is to be here. Il-Hamdu lillah - Thanks be to God! As one would say here... in an expression of love that I also love... I have felt like family here, treated with kindness and embraced as a sister or a cousin, with love ~ and will return again someday for sure. In'sha Allah.

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

In'sha Allah, I will return to Jordan again someday soon....

2006-09-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

Today is my 10th and last day in Jordan ~ so many stories to tell! The people here are sweeter than keenafa, which is a favorite local dessert made of white cheese with dough on top and lots of honey...

I have been treated with so much respect and love and kindness, truly like a queen. Just call me Malekah Lisa. I leave here with a deep respect for the people, gratitude for all the gifts I have been given, and many new and dear friends. Also, ana bakhi arabi schway - I speak a little Arabic now!

It is a wonderful language, full of expressions that reveal the importance of religion, faith and human kindness in a country that is 95% Muslim. We great each other by saying "Salaam alaykoom" - May peace be upon you. Many sentences are followed by "In'sha Allah," God-willing.

Five times a day we hear the calls to prayer sounding in the streets, beautiful and eerie, ringing through the loudspeakers. On the ceiling of the hotel rooms at the Belle Vue where I am staying, on the second traffic circle in Amman, there is an arrow pointing to Mecca.

Despite all of the obvious cultural differences, Amman to me is the Middle East's answer to San Francisco. It was built on seven hills originally and there are now 22 hills (jebel) in the city. The city is also constructed around circles (duar) with directions given according to the traffic circle closest to the address you are seeking and with landmarks, vs. with street addresses, which generally are not recognized by the taxi drivers.

It is a modern city, but in the center of the downtown is an ancient Roman theatre and Citadel, still preserved today. So much history, so many civilizations, that have passed through this holy land...

My travels in Jordan have included Mt. Nebo where Moses saw the Promised Land before he died and Jesus' baptism site, and there are many biblical sites here ~ yet the spirit of the holy land is felt day-to-day here in the way people live their lives. There is deep faith in this country in something greater than all of us, and I have felt and heard and seen that in my daily interactions with the people here.

The buildings in the city are all made with facades of white stone, by law, so the streetscapes feature views of white buildings on the hillsides, with colorful shop signs in Arabic script in the shopping districts. It's a dusty city in this arid landscape ~ Amman is essentially surrounded by dessert, and much of Jordan is a dry and dusty country, with the occasional oases in the resort town of Aqaba, the Dead Sea, Petra, Jerash, Amman.

Amman is a city of contrasts. Many of the women are hijab - veiled - some in full burka, with only the eyes showing, but others wear modern Western clothing. The Jordanian and Lebanese women in the middle and upper classes, our friends here, are elegant and glamorous creatures. They are always impeccably dressed often in sexy outfits, with make-up and hair done. Being at the wedding was like being on the red carpet Oscars night! The ballroom was full of beautiful dark eyed women in sparkling floor-length beaded and sequined gowns, like so many Arabic movie stars...

Amman is growing rapidly. There has been a recent influx of Iraqis, many of whom are businesspeople who fled the country during the war and have invested in real estate and business development here.

There are new malls, including the glitzy Mecca Mall which spans four floors, already features a new extension and a food court to rival any mall in the US (although fortunately you can get delicious Arabic fast food at the mall here).

Many locals here, from cab drivers to friends of Salma's, have told us that the growth in the city has driven up prices, with the price to buy an apartment having tripled in the past few years, from about 40,000 dinars (approximately 56,000 dollars) to close to 150,000 JD (Jordanian dinars).

The governmental structure in Jordan is fascinating, with both a prime minister and King Abdullah, son of the popular late King Hussein, whose fourth wife happened to be an (Arab) American woman named Lisa Halaby who also attended Princeton University. I wonder if there is a chance for me to also join the royal family? ;-)

Portraits of the kings are featured everywhere - in rest stops along the highway, in libraries, behind the desk in the front lobby at the Belle Vue hotel. There is deep respect, a reverence, for King Abdullah here and for his father.

I have heard many stories of the late King Hussein's kindness, such as the time he stopped to greet my Saudi friend Majid on the streets of Amman when Majid was a child. The king visited with Majid who was 10 or so at the time and with his six year old sister. His Royal Highness noticed that Majid's sister's shoe was untied, and he knelt down to tie her shoe himself. So many people have personal stories that show the King in this light, as a great, humble and kind man.

That's all for the moment because I have a flight to catch to Istanbul in four hours ~ but I promise more stories soon about my travels in the ancient city of Petra, the Dead Sea, the Roman ruins of Jerash, the hot springs at Ma'In, and of course the extravaganza that was Salma and Basel's magical and amazing wedding! Pictures coming soon too.

Salaam alaykoom (may peace be upon you). Sending love from the Middle East to all of you....

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006

The journey starts NOW....

2006-08-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

My flight for Amman, Jordan leaves at 4:53 p.m. tomorrow Eastern time. By Friday night I will be at the Queen Alia Airport in Amman, trading in my cash for Jordanian dinars, buying a temporary visa, catching a taxi ride with classmate Jo Addy to the Four Seasons hotel in Amman, where I will crash with Jo for two nights before moving to the more affordable Belle Vue (a 3-star hotel, $30 US dollars to share a double room per night) ...

It is a region of the world I have never experienced before, a region rich in history, culture, and conflict, a region where stories in the Bible were lived out years ago. I will see the 3,000 year old rose city of Petra, the ruins of Jeresh, and float in the Dead Sea.

I will dance at a Muslim wedding of my dearest grad school friend, beloved Salma, and her fiance Basel. I will taste Arabic sweets, drink Arabic coffee, hear the melodies of the Arabic language in the streets, perhaps have my coffee grounds read to predict my future.

If I had to predict it now, I'd predict a happy future, full of love, peace, pleasure, magic but also service and gratitude. Mostly gratitude. Lots of gratitude.

I am a pilgrim of peace headed overseas to dance my way across Europe and the Middle East! Blessed be.

© Lisa Powell Graham 2006