The old gypsies set out again this past weekend to explore the world.  Their souls yearned for the luxury of the mountains and the pleasantness of rivers, but there was no escape from the heat; no solace from the sun whatsoever…

Up, up into those glorious mountains they went; to that beautiful place, parapet by a placid lake… but when they got there, nothing felt right… the heat was unbearable and the lake seem made out of fire and glass.

The place was less crowded than usual, and there wasn’t a single soul around.  The rows of glorious lilac trees barricading the campsite were devoid of blooms this time and the shady places were scarce and unprotected from the intense glare.  The lake, too, was unusually quiet and undisturbed by boats or swimmers… 
  

The intense sun of summer had charred grasses and withered low bushes; birds were hardly seen either and all around you, you could feel the air, dried and unhappy, exhaling into your face...

The old gypsies ate their lunch in silence, feeling heavy and groggy. Not a single soul was seen anywhere, as if the place was devoid of people, and it felt deserted and like a place of the dead. They went to hide inside their gypsy trailer, thankful that they could count on electricity to turn on the air-conditioning and saved from dying of a heat stroke… 

Evening brought the magic back to the land and the last sun spread out a magical cloak upon the waters, filling it with diminutive sparkling stars that moved and shined and dance in sheer glee… the earth filled with a new freshness and mellower temperatures, breathed magic upon the land and upon the heart of the old gypsies. How beautiful, how very beautiful everything looked and felt then…

The doors of the gypsy trailer were flung open and the gypsy girl swept up the floors and cleaned up the place, while her Fisherman went down to the lake to talk to his fishes… 

  

This is why the camp, this is why they go out heat or cold… to find themselves in finding Nature, and to be one in soul, with this old world, and with each other…

Summer days

Oh, summer how I love thee!  

 

I’m living my days in the garden these days.  Hours and hours spent watching at how Nature master its own way on becoming prosper and a beautiful place for humans to live in.

And how the garden has fully-fledged and swollen itself in this deed green lushness and summer glories and squawks and croaks and bird-talk!

I grow roses for many reasons... to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them embellishing my world when I look out my window!     

  

Birds are everywhere, and the diminutive Hanna hummingbird have found the sugary water I make for them.  I love to watch them—two, three of them flying around my head without the slightest fear, as if I were yet another garden statue.  How lovely, how very lovely these tiny creatures are...

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.  

  

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. 

Just talking

I can hardly believe that an entire year had already passed by since our house in the roses got repainted, early last summer. 

 

Time is an amazing creature, isn’t it?   Nobody owns it, no body can hold time.  Time is a mystical wild horse… it passed by the pathways and trails of our lives in swiftly manners, and if we aren’t paying enough attention, it will go by and we’ll never see it again… we must retain it, we must pay attention to time and hold it very dearly and very tight onto our hearts, even if it is only for a moment…

Live, laugh and love with all your heart… do everything with gusto, because perhaps you won’t have another change… there’s not a day that passes that I won’t think of my dear mother… and how I wish I could go to that clock which is life and rewind it. Rewind it to those days when she used to laugh out loud and to those days when we would hold hands and walk to wherever we were going talking and laughing and owning our moments together…

 

Early at the beginning of this month, as I was going out for my daily morning walk throughout our neighborhood, I found a most disturbing thing in my garden… someone had pushed down the beautiful and dense Virginia creeper that for years and years had mantled our fence and beautified the path or corridor that serves as the garden entrance.  

Everything was on the floor, big beautiful branches laid broken and distorted on the floor, and leaves were scattered everywhere. Someone had taken the trouble to pushed the entire vine off the fence and had trashed it onto our side of the fence… I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and how sad!  I knew it had to be an unconsidered someone, but who? 

The previous night I had heard our neighbor shouting at someone as he was pulling in his trailer onto the narrow alley separated by our mutual fence.  Apparently, the vine must had bothered him in some unusual way, or maybe he was just drunk... and thus went on destroying it…

I felt very distressed about it, but decided to move on and continue with my daily routine.  I would worry about the vine when I came back.  To top it all off, I was feeling rotten that morning.  One of my legs and hip was causing me problems and I could hardly walked…  but I kept on walking or limping, immersed in my frustrations…

A woman was coming towards me from the other side of the road, I saw her looking straight at me from the distance, but I kept to myself, immersed as I was on my morning’s miseries.  Then, as she approached, I heard her offering a most questionable “good morning!”—you know the kind, like forcing you, like when somebody say “thank you” but they don’t really mean it and their only intention is to inflict the nasty disruptive feeling of “violation of personal integrity” on you.  No, it wasn’t a good morning.  It wasn’t a good time to smile or even to raise up my eyes from the road, and yet there she was forcing me; forcing me to smile and to have to say something I didn’t feel. 

The feeling was exactly the same in texture and flavor as the feeling that comes with having been raped, but is a lot less intense. I always greet people with whom I meet on my walks, or I would say something and smile, but if they don’t respond, or if I notice they are not willing to reciprocate, I won’t force.  It is wrong to force people, even wronger to force them into gratifying or pleasing you, and wronger still, to dictate exactly how you want them to gratify you.

 

Be happy, be kind. Don’t force people to please you by making them do what you consider is right, or it should be done… Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.  This is my motto, whenever I meet people… anyone… Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
 

The gypsies and their friends

Us, the gypsies, head out again—up up into the tallest mountains we went; to a place where eagles fly above rivers and hot springs run through the earth. 

When we got to our camp; however, we discovered that our campsite was already being occupied by some other gypsies… why, what was going on!  We had made our reservation long ago, but now we didn’t have a space to park our gypsy trailer…

It was the Fisherman’s fault… indeed, it was!  You see, somehow, he mixed up the days by a day and it happened that were supposed arrived not until the following day!  Which meant we needed to find another spot right away!

We were lucky to find an emptied space on the other side of the camp, for everything was taken!  And at the end everything worked for the best… the new site was much nicer; double the size in space and double the privacy; with the river running right in back of our gypsy trailer.

We were situated in a bend on the road with no one else in close proximity, which is one of my requirements for comfort… thanks goodness, sometimes mishaps can work in our favor after all…

It was too hot to go to the thermal hot springs at that time, so we made lunch and went to explore the camp.  The river was just a few feet down; clear cold water run freely to some unknown places and my heart pulsed wild and free… 

While the Fisherman fished, I played with the water and chased away my shadow, I sang and prayed and then collected rocks for my garden.  I collect rocks from all the places we visit and then take them to my garden—cobalt black rocks from the Oregon seashores, ashen rocks from Yellowstone and shinny black rocks from Craters of the Moon.... rivers and mountains and from everywhere!

Mermaid hair like seaweed!

Shinning rocks

...and rocks that look like cheeses!

The trails were brimming with wildflowers… how I love stealing out of Nature’s abundance, and then decorate our home with it…  I loved it… I loved how at our little white house I used to go to my backyard and always find some type of a wildflower blooming in the woods behind our home… I always had flowers embellishing our little white cottage, through every season.  And how do trails form?  And where do they go?

 

Later, when the sun lessened in its brightness and temperatures mellowed down just a bit, we went down to the natural pool…

It was almost 10 pm when we came back to our site.  A half moon shone opaque under a murky film and it was dark with only the very top of the mountains mysteriously illuminated by a puny light.  We sat outside and watched how the night deepened in its shadowy cloak, until suddenly a mysterious cloud appeared out of nowhere in the cloudless sky.  It drifted quickly across the firmament and it situated itself right in front of the already feeble moon, obscuring it in its entirety.  From where we stood it seemed grotesque and unusual and closer to earth than normal.

I watched in awe, unable to tell now if it was really a cloud, or if perhaps this thing was something else; something more cynical like the angel of destruction that passed over Egypt the night before the Israelite left to the Red sea, killing all the first born.  The more I watched, the more I understood it was that same angel—big and menacing; dark wings flattened on each side, while the well-formed head moved forward, leading its trek across the night sky.     

I am very good at spooking myself, so at this point there was nothing else to do now but to run back into the coziness and safety of our gypsy trailer and beg the Fisherman to come in… we locked all doors and turned off all the lights and went to sleep… or at least tried to sleep.

It was so hot… so very hot and the moon outside kept spooking me for a long long time.

------------------------------

Morning came with the new bright sun; we made breakfast and cleaned our gypsy house on wheels.

While the Fisherman prepared to go down to the river to do some fishing, I put on my makeup and savored each moment of beauty all around me… 

The river was packed full with fish... the Fisherman caught a big strong trout and I was so excited for him and so sad for the fish...

The Fisherman always makes sure to throw his fishes back in the water... and they always survive!  It is a happy thing seeing how fast they recover and go back on being their happy little self!

Splash!

We rode our bicycles and read our books... I always take with me all those books I'm reading and never get to finish... for those of you who asked what I'm reading:  V. Sackville-West's Garden Book, The Dovekeepers, The Sonship of Christ, The girl who drank the moon, The Ivy Tree, Just like Jesus and At Seventy, a Journal of May Sarton... Oh, my bicycle is also the place where I dry my undies! Gypsy at heart, wild at heart for sure! Lol

On Saturday afternoon, our friends Ricardo and Florencia droved almost three hours to meet us and spend the day with us… we made a fantastic lunch, drank kombucha and ate watermelon and cherries for dessert.  A deer came by our table to say hi when we were having lunch, she got so close to us I could almost hear the panting of her heart... For just a flash of a moment she stopped, looked me in the eyes and then was gone… strange, but I already knew she was coming. I had already seen her in my day dreams the day before, in that same spot.  It was just a matter of time!  How very special that was!

Then, we sat down in the shade and talked and talked and talked… we went to the hot springs later, eat ice-cream and started making dinner… they left right after dinner and we cleaned up everything and packed most everything.  Before we even noticed, another night had descended upon the mountains and upon our gypsy trailer and our little life story…  

I always feel this prang of pain and lost after my friends and dear ones depart from me… is a kind of loneliness hard to explain; like an emptiness in the heart that almost hurt.  But what a beautiful morning it was the following day... we went back to the river and the Fisherman did more fishing and caught more trout while I danced and sang and sat down to collect more moments...

 “She was born to be free, let her run wild in her own way and you will never lose her.”

“Wild woman are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves yet give a piece of who they are to everyone they meet.  If you have met one, hold on to her, she'll allow you into her chaos but she'll also show you her magic.”
― Nikki Rowe

“The only cure to all this madness; is too dream, far and wide, if possibility doesn't knock, create a damn door. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't make it. If the journey your travelling seems to far fetched and wild beyond your imagination; continue on it, great things come to the risk takers. And last but not least, live today; here, right now, you'll thank your future self for it later.”

― Nikki Rowe 

What a beautiful, beautiful trip this was!

To all of you peace and blessings without stopping!!