it's all right now

Quito from the bus window

About three weeks ago I sat on a bench in the Miami International Airport Hotel lobby waiting for 23 students. Destination: Ecuador. Yesterday I stared at that same bench, where my journey began, from a chair a few meters away.

Memories fly through my mind, like the landscape out the window of a moving bus. Flying from MIA to STL our cruising altitude was a little more than twice that of Refugio José F. Ribas, a point we climbed to on the slopes of Cotopaxi. The flight time was equivalent to the time it takes to travel from Puerto Ayora to Puerto Villamil via speed boat in the Galápagos. My life has new standards of comparisons, new metaphors.

Traveling encourages personal growth, but on that bench in Miami I wasn't certain that traveling with 23 students and two other leaders would permit such growth. It did. In many ways, it was an experience multiplied by 25.

I want to speak better Spanish. I'm signing up for a class in the fall. I want to do more things I fear. Often when I do simple things in life that I fear, I gain the most enjoyment. I want to conserve more. (What's up with this new trend to wrap your luggage in tons of saran wrap? Does a pristine bag function any better than the one with a scuff?) I want to live abroad, algún día, for sure.

Disconnected from their social circles and daily life routines, our kids were forced to live in the moment. I learned to do the same. A quote in a book I read while traveling (Savages by Joe Kane - read it!) resonates:

No day and night here, mate. No asleep, no awake. No dreams, no reality. No past, no future. It's a continuum: Huaorani time. It's all right now.

As a journalist, I'm a post processor. I don't cry while I photograph funerals. I don't clap when I hear a message I like. I react days, weeks later. It's a professional necessity that has become a personal defense mechanism. Ecuador broke it down. The páramo's spirit caught me off guard. On horseback, I closed my eyes only when the wind blew up the dust so bad it hurt my eyes. With my eyes closed, the sound of the horses' hooves and the whipping of the wind kept the scenery alive in my mind. In Galápagos I jumped into the Pacific and within minutes a sea turtle swam to my left, a sea lion to my right. I could be no where but that moment. It's all right now.

As the plane broke through the clouds over Miami, I saw a speck of glowing orange. It looked more like the sun than the moon, but it was rising in the east at night. Moonrise. A stared at it for quite a while, until I was convinced that, yes, this was the moon. Then I sat back and sang along with the song coming through my earphones, "We live in a beautiful world..."