Isla del Alma

I feel endlessly grateful everyday for all the marvelous gifts Chile is giving me, for the people I am meeting and the people I continue to love, and the ever-present strength I find in myself. Last weekend, Elise, David, and I went to Chiloé, a cluster of islands in the Region de los Lagos in the south of Chile. Since reading a novel by Isabel Allende when I was 18 I have been fantasizing about going to this mystical, climatically intense, kind and mysterious island. Actually setting foot on the land of Chiloé was remarkable! It was a place of nostalgia and memory, although I have never been before, as every section flooded my mind with images and sensations of places I've been in my past; Vermont, Ocracoke, the cloud forest of Costa Rica, Cape Cod. We met the most lovely humans there, and I truly wanted to buy a little hut and stay there forever, with a garden and a cow and a little row boat. 

I love small communities! It was really lovely to get to experience this unique place and witness a tiny fragment of what island life is all year. Also the natural spaces are truly glorious. We went for one hike to the Muelle del Alma, which is a metaphorical bridge for deceased humans' souls to launch themselves into the next life, symbolized by a wooden structure rising into the air above a sea cliff. We were left speechless at the divine earth! We live on a remarkable planet, and in the words of one of my dearest humans, I love this place too much to lose it yet. The rest of my feelings come through in the dancing. 

begin freewrite. 

Have I ever heard the sound of the ocean running back and forth over 1 million grape-sized pebbles, like the most glorious rain stick nature herself created?

Full body peace. This island carries an energy that I've never felt before, its explosive and serene the way I imagine Athena or Mother Nature are. Something settles in my body and I no longer fully tell the difference between where I start and she ends, my flesh and blood and bones are a part of it, part of the whole. 

Dancing on the Muelle del Alma I felt the spiritual winds rushing through my hair and it became an honoring, my movement as an unspoken language attempting to thank the divine earth we live on. Heights and slick ancient wood make my stomach drop like an apple tossed off a cliff. The breath of this place is haunting. The nature and the people and the cows and the rain sun rhythm all pulse in and out in a massive symphony of waning and waxing, tides and moo's and run rays with rain drops and grass hovering in that subtle wind dance.

I always want to close my eyes and hum to the energy but without sight I inevitably fall.