Two Things

#1 Nilambe Meditation Center

I spend a lot of unmediated time with my consciousness up in this misty jungle retreat. Meditation comes surpisingly easily despite my two-week break from the practice, except for when the meditation teacher tells me to unfold my heart like a towel at 5:30 in the morning (still sleepy and grumpy, I turn my heart into a venus fly trap instead). There is no electricity at Nilambe. At nighttime a crazy German lights his path with a single candle in a house of mirrors, and the fireflies are vivid as they tote around stolen bits of moon.

#2 A Close Encounter with The End of the World

Up in the hill country there is a national park called Horton Plains, where one can visit a spectacular geological formation known as "The End of the Word." Intrigued, Gabe and I make our long-winding way up into the clouded heights of the tea hills to see this place... does the land just turn into empty space? Are there sea dragons of the sort that would have consumed Columbus and their crew if they had taken a wrong turn? These questions churn in our minds as we walk through a jungle that is oddly like northern California with a dash of African savannah. Our adventurous aspirations are thwarted, however, by a 15 dollar permit fee. Who knew you have to bring that much money to the end of the world? We try to sweet-talk the gatekeeper, but he will have none of it, so we semi-bitterly eat a bunch of banannas at the entrance and then walk back down the road to the train station.

In retrospect, it is apparent to me that it would have been foolish to actually go to the end of the world. It was so foggy that no mysteries would have been demystified, and we almost certainly would have been eaten by dragons.