Torres del Paine was a life-changer. A game-changer. A soul-changer. The pictures by no means do it any justice because the feeling of the place was the most important. i want to try to capture it in verse, since nothing else seems sufficient.
Awakened by rain and wind
Lashing my window
Drawing stripes on the roof
Patagonia draws first blood
I am not afraid of wind nor rain
My boots are sturdy
My body, too
Gore-tex is my best friend
And long underwear?
The greatest invention known to humankind
Bring it, Patagonia
A natural cathedral
Gouged by melting glaciers
Ringed by twisted ancient trees
An aboreadom temple to perservence
And toughness
Even lichins display their ripe colors
Competing for dominance over the arching rainbow
Dancing in the clouds
A pilgrimage on bumpy roads
The nausea barely staved off
By crunchy donuts and nescafe
Each new microclimate
Microcosm
Brings a new variety of cold
Or wind
Or sun
Or rain
We change our clothes
We change our faces
The light begins to crystallize
In rainbows
Dancing in clouds around sharp points
Blue granite and blue ice
Sharper than immense knives
11:30 AM, 19 March 2011: I pass as Chilena for the first time.
A woolen cap pulled over my obviously not Chilean hair
The massif is hidden
Microcosms pass
Plains
Forest
Desert
A gray lake filled from Glacier Gray
The sediment of ten thousand years of grating on the mountain
Drifts
Reflecting the nublado sky
Our time is not here
Nor is our space
The mountains live in another
Geological and cosmic time are massive
Drawfing us puny
Brief
Humans
Humans are 50,000 years old
Maybe more
These mountains deal in eons, not in days
Winds race down the cliffs and glaciers
To try to knock us off our feet
Carrying spray
Green and heavy with it's ancient load
Into our eyes
Constant, instant change
The sun might flash
A momentary glare
The clouds might move
And obscure or reveal
Nothing is forever in Patagonia.
A lunch
Seems strange
I could live on the view
For at least a day
And never move from a single spot
Letting Torres del Paine change around me
Our puny stomachs filled, the pilgrimage continues.
Shangri-la
Not even hidden
Appears in the mist
Beckoning
To an impossible climb
Thousands of feet in the making
We could never make it
The wind would peel us off the face
And smash us against the jagged rocks
First one out
Last one back
Not enough time to spend here in the park
Visto? Visto?
No
I have seen nearly nothing
Of the magic of this place
And still rainbows follow us everywhere
Wide and wild
Life-changing
Windburned, hungry
Vacillating between too cold and too hot
We pass through more microcosms
And leave the landscape massif
To drift through plains and horses and forests
To a wild sunset over the blue/white mountains
As if heaven were only an arm's length away
But in my soul I feel the stillness of Paine
And to it I will always flee
A secret well of joy
And peace
And comfort in the unearthly beauty
Of that Tierra
breathtaking
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