Defining moments
Moments in time occasionally arrive with a profoundness that changes something fundamental within you, pushing you over a threshold and into the rest of your life. These moments can be big, culturally understood significant events - the birth of a child, graduating from university, retirement. Or they can be cloaked in insignificance for the bystander, their meaning wholly derived from the journey upon which you are travelling.
In our mid 20s, after getting married and falling into somewhat stable careers, my husband and I had a choice to make. To continue on the expected path, save our pennies, buy a house and start a family... or to spend those pennies on an adventure... so it was that in mid 2012 we found ourselves in Bolivia, a country so distant in every way from our comfort zone, filled so deeply with a life force we had not before experienced in our sanitised worlds. Vast and varied landscapes inspiring a rich and colourful culture that rushed towards us each time we stepped onto the street.
From the edge of the Amazon rainforest, to the peaks of the Andes mountains, bedraggled after days of long haul busses on winding mountain roads, a single moment in time embraced me in deep connection with mother earth. To an onlooker, even my husband sitting beside me, nothing about this moment looked different to any other that came before or after.
Speeding along a road carving a meandering path through the majestic Andes, winding down between two gigantic, rock encrusted cliff faces sprinkled with snow, mountains towering above us, beside us, behind us and in front of us, seemingly endless in their enormity. The sky between the snow capped peeks a cloaked in a blanket of grey.
A little glimpse of the Andes
My whole being was suddenly overpowered by the place in which I found myself.
A sense of awe and wonder, an overwhelm of my own significance and parallel insignificance. My breath was taken from me and while I felt the power of this moment, I did not know it’s meaning. Nearly ten years have passed and I often return there, each time with a deeper understanding of the power of mother earth holding me, nourishing me, showing me in each moment her power and force that fill this planet with life itself.
Take some time to reflect upon a moment that you regularly return to. What is the power that draws you there? What connects you to that place? Has that meaning, that connection, changed over the course of time?
