Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Rio Celeste and Volcan Tenorio


In Costa Rica, south of Lake Nicaragua, a series of volcanos dot the landscape from the northwest to the southeast. One of those is the triple-humped Volcan Tenorio, famous as the headwaters for the Rio Celeste.  A sulfurous vent and calcium carbonate cause the river to run an opalescent blue.  We hiked up into the cloud forest to the catarata, past blue lakes and bubbling hot springs.  To the strange place where a white vein of mineral slashes across the crystal clear river.  There the river is shocked immediately into its unlikely shade of blue.




click on any picture to enlarge

The Love Note to 2014: February 16 to March 10

February 16 to March 10:

I love words.

These baskets woven of sound - these containers for some nugget that we have cut from the stream of our thinking.  We click and hiss and hammer the air and another brain catches our thoughts.

I love the murmur of a place where people gather - air vibrating as these woven baskets and their cargoes of meanings move among minds.

I love that humans play with this elaborately crazy adaptation - we joke, we sing, we pun.

I love to travel to places visited long ago.  To see the peaks of Olympus rising above the Puget Sound and think, "Oh, I'd forgotten how they loom over the city in light like this."  To see old friends who are sudden years farther down their paths and have them see me.  To replace memories that are tattered, blurred and incomplete, with new ones.

I love when memories of place get crossed - the drizzle of Seattle so exactly like the soft rain of Cork.  

I love to travel to places new.  In Costa Rica, there is a place upon the skirt of a volcano where a little seam of white turns a river an opalescent blue.  And markets where the fruit is strange and the seller must explain what parts to eat - tomate de palo, cas, manzana de agua, rambutan . . .