The Moment

Excerpt from my travel journal, September 4, 2006

Waking up at 5200 meters will inflict a range of maladies on an unacclimated individual. Headache, sore throat, runny nose, sore muscles, nausea, foggy head and overall grumpiness I found are common. I have faith in western medicine and am at least skeptical of most wholistic remedies. However I found relief not through pills- although Im sure they helped- but from a psychological and physiological response to a natural experience...

My least favorite part about camping in snow or in the winter is having to leave the comfortable confines of my tent and sleeping bag to relieve myself in the middle of the night. (That and Dad snores). And it was no better leaving my pile of blankets to brave the bone chilling wind to relieve the gallons of tea I drank the night before at EBC. (Staying hydrated is supposed to be a GOOD thing!) And so it was again when I awoke in the morning, pulled on my cold boots, layered on my jackets and excused myself to my groggily awakening tent mates in order to run around the back of the tent in an urgent response to nature's call.

I face south and get midstream before I look up with eyes half open in the ecstacy of release. But soon my eyes are opened wide as I continue to look upward, and up, and up. My eyes follow the ridge on the horizon and my own groggy brain takes half a second to compute what it is my eyes are already aware of. They Mother has overcome her modesty, shed her shroud of clouds, and is dancing gracefully in the midmorning sun.

My next instinct is that I must share this with my companions as I realize I am the only one outside with full view of the Goddess Mother's impressive physique. Zipping up quickly, I sprint to the door of our tent, poke my head inside long enough to violently slur some sort of announcement to the others, and keep running all the way to the top of the hill. At the top I keep over and suck a few huge breaths to stabilize myself before I can even get a picture off. And for less than a minute, I am getting a private showing of the Goddess's sensual skylit pose.

Not far behind me comes Trevor and soon we are surrounded by a hoard of visitors of different nationalities who- like us- made the long journey in hopes of setting their gaze on the tallest mountain that Mother Nature could create.

The show lasts a full thirty minutes during which time I took nearly a hundred pictures of different angles and zoom. But after I had saturated my eye with every framing imaginable, I put my camera away, and sat alone on the mountain side of the hill. I allowed my eyes to relax again, and my gaze to unfocus, and for a couple minutes I breathed deeply the air of the satisfaction only felt at the realization of a dream. It is a feeling of complete inner happiness that defines a life and I am very blessed because I had felt the same peace once before.



Writing this now it is very easy to draw parallels between reclining in the sun on that hill in Tibet, basking in the warmth of the Goddess Mother's image and reclining in a chair on the sun drenched balcony of my apartment in Siena, sipping an espresso and staring out over the beauty of the rolling Tuscan countryside only a year and a half prior. Both are unforgetable moments occupied by a self-reflection revealing utter contentment with the present and symbolize the successful completion of a life goal. More than never forgetting these moments, I commit the rest of my life, as should other's there's, to the pursuit and realization of these fleeting glimpses oif a perfect world, whatever they may be.