¡Bienvenida!

Mi amigos y amigas, bienvendia. Welcome. This is my first blog. For years I have been told that my name alone warrants a readership. Well friends, here you are. And thus we go...

On Sunday, the g-force of a roller coaster called ¨Hercules¨ nearly blacked me out for the first time ever. I was being hurled through space at a Six Flags near Los Angeles, but still 12 hours from flight.

On Monday I soared fully conscious over the Equator for the second time, en route to walking on a fifth new continent. (Birth was the trip to my first.) I landed just before midnight in Lima, Peru.

This city expands to the edge of beach and bluffs, and the Pacific Ocean fills west past a hazy horizon. Although I have only just arrived, it´s as if I can sense the openness of sea just beyond me at any moment; as I bob down crowded sidewalks with the bubbling, preemptive beeps of a traffic flow just under control; as I wander along streets each defined by a particular goods or service, like aisles of a city-wide superstore; or as I pause to sit and sip coke and studiously rehearse my español. Even when out of sight I can feel its nearby might. I sense the tidal ebb and flow, and consider the coincidence of 8.2 million people settled at the edge of such an abrupt and untamed expanse. For I know that beneath the surface of each lies a depth and majesty of life so full that most stories go untold.

So it is that here, submerged, I will seek them out. I care to know not so much the topography of this town as the people who traverse it. I wish to glimpse the moments of their exchange, and to involve myself when life becomes plural. I want to stumble while speaking but then find the meaning; to smile and be let in. I want to bask in the smells of a market and pay my way without help; or catch a ride with locals and feel stiff by the end. I am awake to this constant communion. But there are quieter scenes of singularity I search for as well; to notice the sigh of an elder or the sweat of a worker or the creativity of a child at play. And as I marvel at an ingenuity that can make more out of less, as I quietly pray for a stray, I realize in the quality of man such a goodness and beauty that I am compelled to take note, and to share.

And maybe, in the end, a story of my own will form, and reach air.