Girona_11.2025
Girona, Catalonia, Espana; November 2025
My best childhood friend, Madison, lives in Girona, Spain. In November of 2025, Eli & I were able to take a trip out to visit her and celebrate mine and Eli's engagement, and mine and Madison's 20-year friendship anniversary. It was a kickoff to a holiday season in the United States that celebrates and centers family, gathering, and memory; it was the end of fall and the beginning of winter with a physical re-enforcement from a uncharacteristically cold-snap in the Mediterranean; and it was the transition from a life before and a life after.
We returned from this trip changed; expanded, yes, but also different.
When we left our daily living we found ourselves in a different context-- an obvious truth-- but one that goes untapped in the daily living. We found ourselves in different company, with different foods, different rhythms, and ways of moving through a space and a day. And it made us different.
It made me different.
For the most tangible, I drank coffee for the first time and feel like a youth with marijuana all over again; my brain is elated! Wow is coffee a drug and a sweet one at that!? It's been a delightfully caffinated rush incorporating coffee into my daily and community life here in Asheville and that is inseperable from my openness to expansion while in Catalonia.
And in other, less tangible ways, there is a different posture I am holding myself too; a type of awareness in which I am grateful for the gift I have to move through this world bearing witness to it all. To experience what is outside of myself within myself. Weltinnenraum as Rilke calls it.
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