The Great Joy of Aimless Meandering (Antigua: Holy Week + Photos)

By on April 7, 2012 in Photos, The Journey

Antigua, Guatemala– Good Friday Semana Santa (Holy Week). The Semana Santa religious festival is the biggest event of the year in Antigua, and people come from all over Guatemala and the world filling the city up to the rafters.*

It was a gorgeous afternoon and my all-night dance party hangover was just wearing off. I ran into some travel friends from San Pedro La Laguna in the central park just as the sky was starting to turn and sprinkle a light rain. We decided to go walking, and soon enough a sprinkle turned into a drizzle and then a torrential downpour. We ducked into this cafe — Jose Calaveras — just in time to beat the sheets of rain pouring down.

The majority of the pics here cover that period of about 2 hours in the cafe, and just out front, from about 4:30-6:30pm Friday. You can see a rare site of the procession altars on wheels as the rain first starts to let up. Later, the official procession starts, carrying the main altar that weighs in at about 7,000 pounds. 

It was the perfect afternoon.  Continue Reading →

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When Your Whole Life Boils Down to A Single Moment of Reckoning: (What do you make of it?)

By on March 19, 2012 in The Journey
Lago Atitlan Boatman

The Boatman - Lago Atitlan, Guatemala

 

It’s now just over two weeks since I landed at the tiny lakeshore town of San Pedro La Laguna in Guatemala. There are so many experiences I’d love to share with you from these past couple weeks…it’s been a blur of intensity as I’ve sought to immerse myself fully into a new way of life. But there’s one event in particular from the last week that I cannot overlook — one of the most harrowing and life-changing experiences of my 35 years on this earth.  

At the core of the experience is a single moment — a quiet roar of reckoning in which an entire lifetime of meaning is effortlessly distilled. And since then there’s been a struggle to find the meaning — to determine for myself the lesson of the experience. But let me tell you the story and maybe then you can decide for yourself….

Here, then, is the story of an encounter with the lake — Lago Atitlán — that almost took my life.
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Seven Principles of the Warrior of Light: (First Dispatch from Guatemala)

By on March 1, 2012 in Spiritual Practice, The Journey

Flying Into Guatemala City

Flying into Guatemala City


 
It’s my first dispatch from overseas. I’ve landed safely in Guatemala at a little haven called San Pedro La Laguna at the beautiful Lago Atitlán. The hotel wi-fi is unreliable as expected, but here at the gorgeous little cafe across the way the connection is fast as I could hope for and the coffee isn’t half bad too..

I can’t say I’ve arrived 100% yet — I’ve only just started really dropping into this journey. In the middle of the night somewhere above the midwest on my flight over it finally hit me, and I started laughing outloud at the delightful absurdity of it all. But here I am, my fingers tapping and my heart opening…and, well, racing from two Americanos.

Here then is my first “serious” piece of writing from the journey overseas. I’m finding a wonderful sense of clarity here, and a certain directionality in my thinking that’s actually unusual and a bit unexpected. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all unfolds…

Prologue

I hit on the archetype of the Warrior of Light in preparing for this journey and my first live workshop and breathwork healing group the last weekend before taking off. A couple days before the workshop I’d hit a wall and the pressure was unbearable so I took a grand pause and dived back into the truth of my mission, and the moment.

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