Poetry from Portugal: The Embark & The Goodbye by Luis de Camoes
from Ploughing the Sea: Poems from the Lusiadas
by Luis de Camoes
Canto IV: 86-93
Having done everything practical
To make ready for so long a voyage,
We prepared our souls to meet death
Which is always on a sailor’s horizon.
To God on high who alone sustains
The heavens with his beloved presence,
We asked His favour that He should endorse
Our every enterprise and steer our course.
The holy chapel from which we parted
Is built there on the very beach,
And takes its name, Belem, from the town
Where God was given to the world as flesh.
O King, I tell you, when I reflect
On how I parted from that shore,
Tormented by so many doubts and fears,
Even now it is hard to restrain my tears. Read more…
Poetry from the 3:15 Experiment: nothing to tag a poem on
August 13, 2009 3:15am
I am going to fall b
ack to sleep
before I choose to write anything
Bits & pieces of ideas float
but no words have form nor weight
There’s nothing to tag a poem on tonight
it’s all fog; not even the foghorn is solid
Only one eye will stay open at a time
The cowboy boots a cold pool of water
There will be another day
& the pen will come clip clopping
Insistent like a thunderstorm
Consistent as the summer fog
Above is a poem from the 2009 3:15 Experiment where poets from all over the world awake at 3:15am every night in August to write and then in the following month to post unedited their hypnopompic/hynogogic ramblings.
Although I had plenty of sleep last night and should be all caught up after my adventures in Portugal, I am feeling overwhelmed by it all just as during the 3:15am experiment I am at times overwhelmed by the desire to sleep. As much as I’d like to, I have “nothing to tag a poem on” when it comes to writing about my recent trip to Portugal.
And I admit I am feeling melancholic as well. I wish I was still there, breathing with the pace of the land and the people. They say that time is slow in the Alentejo, like what I call mountain time, when you slow down to the pace of the breath of the place.
I wish that I had taken the time last week to figure out the logistics so that I could have spent a few more days in Portugal, to let my experiences settle a bit, to write, to sit quietly in the countryside, or by the sea, or within a castle’s walls, before I had to go home. At the very least, I should have looked a little more deeper into the opportunity to attend the Wine Futures Conference in Rioja on Nov. 12 and 13, to have tried harder to stay for another week, to have trusted my family and my students would be taken care of.
I am used to traveling at a different pace–by foot or by VW van, used to camping at night and sleeping close to the land. I am used to navigating the town, the trails on my own. Don’t get me wrong–I loved the hotels we stayed in, especially in Evora at the M’Ar de Ar. What a pleasure.
But it is a different pace, a different experience when you spend most of your day outside in a place, smelling the air, crushing the herbs between your fingers. The moon was full while I was there in Portugal, shining its light upon the co
rk oaks, castles, and Roman monuments, but I never got a chance to gaze on the stars, my ancestors hanging out in the sky there, watching, protecting, the same but different than at home.
I wasn’t ready to leave. I feel like I was torn and part of me I left behind with my yoga pants and my cashmere sweater, some tears of laughter, my footprints on stone pavement, my fingerprints on castle walls. The soft “sh” sounds of the Portuguese language soothes, echoes in the memories of the wine caves at Carmim and Borba, soft like lapping water of the Tagus along the waterfront of Lisbon, the hush and crash of the waves on the westernmost point of Europe on the coast by Sintra pictured above.
Wish here, shush, shush, the voices whisper, wish here, shush shush.
The quiet shushing voices wash away the fears, wish for my return. I will be back, I tell them. And not just in my dreams.
For more poetry, catch a ride on the Monday Train.
Sleep, Sleep, Glorious Sleep!
I am starting to understand what people talk about when they talk about jet lag.
Last week, while I was in Portugal, I didn’t worry about it. When I’d been to Peru in 2001, I didn’t have any problems with jet lag going or coming and even slept on the plane going there curled up against the window (it’s only three hours difference but it is also a LONG flight: we went from LAX to Miami to Lima). In Lisbon, I stayed up late: two hour dinners starting at 8:30 or 9pm or later, followed by writing and keeping caught up on projects on the other side of the globe where it was mid-afternoon or evening. Most nights I slept 4-5 hours; one night I actually slept for 6. The days were so busy and exciting visiting wineries and castles and delicious lunches closed with an espresso that while at times I grew quiet, I never dozed off or wanted to. It didn’t really feel like jet lag was much of a problem.
Sleeping on a crowded plane is a joke. I didn’t sleep much going to Portugal or coming back home–except for the leg from Lisbon to Zurich when I had three seats to myself and could stretch out and sleep for two hours. (Next time, in addition to my silk wrap I used as an additional blanket and pillow, and plenty of warm clothes, I will have ear phones, one of those neck supports, and an eye covering beyond pulling my beret down over my eyes!)
So when I arrived in LA, I was a zombie Read more…
Now that I’m back home in Southern California, everyone’s asking me about Portugal. As soon as I start talking about one thing or another, people are so full of questions, I never seem to finish as story when I’m off on a tangent and another and another!
I am realizing just HOW MUCH I learned in one jam packed week. There is so much I want to say, so many stories I want to tell that I see I will need to spend some time just figuring out how to present it here in this medium.
I’m tempted to start off by writing a post about my last day in Lisbon when we visited the ancient city of Belem, the castle at Sintra (pictured), Read more…
Leaving On A Jet Plane…
My bags are packed
I’m ready to go
I’m really not ready to leave Lisbon Portugal, to end my trip sponsored by Enoforum Wines. But then, I love to travel, I love new roads. I love the castles, the countryside, the coast, the history, the rolling cork oak covered hillsides of the Alentejo, the historic buildings at Belem in Lisboa like this tower which was originally out in the water, protecting the people from invaders from the sea.
I love Portugal. These explorers are my people–they are the earliest Art Predators!
My trip here to Portugal has been an amazing experience. I had absolutely no idea what to expect last month when I wrote a 200 word essay about why I wanted to come here. I didn’t know the first thing about Portuguese wine and cuisine. I just knew it sounded like a great adventure and I wanted to go! Read more…
Yesterday, we didn’t go to any castles. Sorry to disappoint you.
It’s not like we ran out of castles or antiquities to visit. Portugal is so full of cool castles it seems to me I could fill a whole vacation just roaming around them, climbing stairs, exploring, marveling, and eating in quaint cafes, mingling elbow to elbow with the people who live in them.
Nope, no castles yesterday.
And no, we didn’t visit one of the many Stonehenge like ancient ruins. Did you know the landscape of Portugal is littered with these monolithic statues erected 6 or so thousand years ago? I didn’t; one is pictured on the bottle behind the glass.
This I found out while tasting some of the wines from Redondo, a huge cooperative which sells several of the most popular and most consumed wines in Portugal–for obvious reasons–they offer the Portuguese version of Two Buck Chuck–except their wines aren’t chemicalized (made drinkable through the use of chemical additions and manipulations) and Redondo’s wines have a wonderful flavor for about the same price which is typical of Portuguese wines in general.
Redondo’s labels celebrates their Portuguese heritage in such a way that our visit there allowed my hosts to share even more of Portugal’s rich heritage and history with me–and which I look forward to sharing with you at a later time.
So what did we do? Something equally amazing but different and completely unexpected to me. In the later afternoon, after our visit to Redondo and lunch along the road (even the Alejanto cuisine and espress offered there was excellent!), we checked into our Hotel Olissippo which is near the water in the Parque Nacional
The Parque Nacional was the home to the 1998 World Expo. Portugal took the opportunity of hosting the event to revitalize a contaminated dock area full of decrepit rundown warehouses and abandoned buildings. The area now is full of beautiful public art which celebrates Portugal’s traditions: tile, light, the sea, and exploration. It’s a pleasure and a joy to walk along the water’s edge, and many do: even on this cold fall night, people congregated on bikes and walking, and even a running club which acted like Hash House Harriers (I didn’t ask).
So while I can’t see the ocean from my room (sorry Ganesh!), we are so close that a pro baseball player could land a ball in it.
And, it turns out, an aquarium was constructed as part of the 1998 expo–the largest in the world at the time, although one in Japan is now larger.
Larger smarger–this aquarium, the second largest in the world, was certainly big enough for me and fabulous too. It’s not the size that really matters, but what you do with it you know.
The Oceanario de Lisboa has a HUGE central tank that you circle and then examples of four aquatic ecosystems: Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Antartic. Otters and then a few minutes later, penguins delighted us with their antics. Seabirds flew past our noses and then I walked a wooden boardwalk to find tropical birds hidden in the trees. In the middle, central tank, we were fascinated by a sunfish, at 2-3 tons as bigs as any fish I’d every seen, and fascinating to look at too. Bright tropical fish darted in other tanks. I tried out my new video camera (the results remain to be seen!) while Jo shot hundreds of images–turns out she loves fish and aquariums.
When the aquarium closed at 6pm, we strolled the boardwalk looking for someplace to eat. According to Delfim Costa, my host from Enoforum Wines, the best restaurants are downtown but traffic would be horrible for another 2-3 hours and we were all getting hungry. The area offers many international restaurants so we chose an Italian one for a change. I’ll just say that the highlight of the meal for me was the Portuguese olive oil and wine–and I desperately missed the Portuguese bread I’ve come to love!
For today, we intend to see several important cultural sights near Lisbon: Belem and Sintra for example. We leave so soon that I will 
miss out on the amazing spread they offer each morning at the hotels here in this country. Lunch and the dinner of Portuguese cuisine and I will be packing and leaving–I’m even buying a new suitcase to put some of the wines I’m bringing back!
But back I’ve got to get, no matter how tempting it is to stay and attend the Wine Futures conference next week in Rioja Spain with luminaries of the field like Jancis Robinson and Tom Parker. I have a First Friday ArtRide and Bikers Ball to lead tomorrow night Nov. 6 back in California! And a small boy has a birthday coming up too.
Miles from Now/here Today: Adventures in Evora, Redondo, Lisbon
I woke with this Cat Stevens song in my head as the rain gently falls on the Roman ruins outside my room, the wind howls, and the morning traffic honks. Voices murmur outside my room in Portuguese and English. I open the curtains and the sun flashes on the dark wet ruins and white plaster walls. As much as I try, my little camera can’t capture the intense contrasts of light and dark. These images of Evora are from yesterday morning and show how the people here have integrated the Roman aquaduct into their very houses. 
“Miles from Nowhere
guess I’ll take my time
oh yeah to reach thereLord my body
has been a good friend
oh yeah til we reach the endI love everything
it makes me feel glad
I love everything
my honey I sing to that
I sing to that”
Don’t quote me on those exact lyrics; they are easy enough to find on the internet. These are the lyrics I was hearing Cat Stevens sing this morning in my head–in more or less the way I remember him singing it recently on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic–sometimes with the variation “I’ll drink to that.” But I couldn’t find that version on the internet for you!
Don’t we all do that? Make the lyrics say what we want them to say anyway?
So what’s up for today? If it clears enough, I am going to put some coffee in my thermal cup I brought from the States for use on the plane (ever notice how much waste happens on planes? Just imagine how much less it would be if people just brought their own cups!!)
And downstairs at breakfast I will grab some flaky croissants, some beautiful fruit from the bowl (so beautiful that yesterday I had to double check to make sure it was real and not fake!), and borrow one of the hotel’s bikes to ride around on the narrow cobbled streets inside the walled city of Evora. Every hotel should offer up bikes free to its
I would love to spend more time here in Evora. It’s gorgeous, yes, but there’s an energy here that I am in love with. Yes the town has possibly the best restaurant Fialho in Portugal and certainly the best they say when it comes to Alentejo gastonomy (and where we ate last night! wow, the octopus was so tender! and the goat defies description!); the restaurant is so famous that today, a book is being launched featuring its recipes and story. I was presented with a copy last night and I look forward to experimenting with its recipes when I get back home.
There are many more wonderful restaurants featuring the delicious regional cuisine, but there is something else here, something to feel about the pace of the place, the genorousity of heart in the people. This older woman pictured and I waved and exchanged evening pleasantries. More investigation required!
I need to finish packing up this morning as we will drive today to our third and last winery, Redondo, in the town of Redondo. Redondo is another large cooperative of grape growers which Enoforum works with so we will once again taste the local winery’s offerings as well as Enoforum’s. Then we’ll drive back west toward Lisbon where we visit Belem which is the most well-known historic site in Portugal and offers a particular custard pastry which is shared elsewhere but this is where it is done best.
As Enoforum is sponsoring my trip, you’d expect me to tell you their wines are great. But let me say, that so far what I’m most impressed with is how much wine you get for the price. These Alentex wines will retail for under $10 a bottle. When these wines get into the market in the United States, like at Trader Joe’s, they are going to knock people’s socks off. They have so much flavor, character, and complexity for the money, and they go so well with a range of foods that they will fly off the shelves. It will be fun when people start telling ME about these wines!
You can learn more about Enoforum Wines, including the ones I mentioned, here.
Yep, it’s my blogoversary time once again. My blog is another year older today.
And what a way to celebrate! Because of this blog, and because of my rabid blogging in general about wine and adventures, I have not only made new friends around the world, but right now I am halfway around the world in Evora, Portugal, visiting castles and wineries by day and staying in a beautiful hotel M’Ar de Ar with views of an ancient Roman Aquaduct from my bed at night. I took that sillouette of myself yesterday at the castle at Monsarez so far east of Lisbon it is almost in Spain.
As I write this, I listen to fado singer Mariza, sip some intense Sandeman’s 2007 Porto which was given me at my third Wine Blogger’s Conference, and reflect on how I am on a tour of the Alentejo Wine region on a trip sponsored by Enoforum where I have been wined and dined to my heart’s content. (And I haven’t held back–letting myself be my wild Art Predator self. Can you hear me howl at the full moon?)
So how did I get here from where I was two years ago? How did I go from averaging 30 pages views a day to 6,000 in one week a few weeks later to settling into an average of 100 page views a day for my first year and 350 a day for my second year?
Thanks to you, dear reader! You are the answers to my prayers offering friendship, support and an audience! Thank you!
I really couldn’t do it alone–I am sure I would have been discouraged it I hadn’t found it gratifying to meet an unmet need, to discover and write about wines and food, adventures, music, and travels, ideas and poetry that YOU wanted to know and read about.
So it’s a partnership. I write about what interests me and I write about what I think interests you. I try to tell as many stories as possible because I know that it is through stories that we learn about others and ourselves, that we learn what it is to be human and to be part of humanity in all its glorious complexity.
Unless you’re writing about a topic that’s wildly popular–and you’re the first and possibly only one writing–it’s going to take time and commitment. It can also be a fluke: the week I had 6,000 page views in my fourth month of blogging I wrote about the lunar eclipse and people were interested in the breadth of what I wrote about–astronomy, astrology, and ritual.
My writing about the Burning Man Project has also been wildly popular over the years. This recent September, I averaged over 550 page views–mostly Burning Man related. When I saw some cool photos by my friend Alan Sailer, I wanted to post them because I liked them–not because I thought they’d draw so many page views to my blog.
Since I started this writing project, I have blogged on average well over a post a day. Most months for the past year I have posted around 40 times; this will be my 838 post in 730 days. That’s a lot of writing and a lot of page views. That’s translated to over 200 subscribers.
Not bad for an eclectic blog which follows a dictum of Coleridge’s: the aesthetic is that which engages the whole soul.
Below I have the most viewed posts. They’re not necessarily my favorite posts or the ones I think are the best, but the ones which have been viewed in the past two years over 1000 times.Which ones do I think are best or are my favorites? I think that should be answered another day but during my first year I did a page “Greatest Hits” which still represents some of my better work here. I also like the poetry I presented in a reading in September 2009 which featured poetry I first published here. Which ones are your favorites?
As if yesterday’s castle at Monsarez was not enough…
As if yesterday’s castle at Monsarez wasn’t a spectacular enough experience, today we are going to Borba and we will visit another castle for lunch.
Tromps in vineyards. Olive oil tastings. Castles for lunch. Dinners at the best restaurants in Portugal. Views of a Roman Aquaduct from my bathtub as I soak and dream and from my bed as I write for you…
I am definitely enjoying this. Each day is full of so many new experiences, new foods, wines to swirl and discover its nuances. The land here is so beautiful, so full of rich stories, full of personable people I am thrilled to know.
By now, halfway through my trip, I have hundreds of photos, all of which I want to share. Today, I am going to try to shoot some video. In time, I guess, in time, I trust, I will get some of them out from my imagination and out into cyberspace to share with you.
For example, this photo is of the bullfight ring at the castle at Monsarez. In the distance, you can see the church. In the middle distance sits Delfim Costa of Enoforum Wines which is hosting my trip. Delfim has been an exquisite and knowledgeable host, and no question goes unanswered and unappreciated. For anybody who knows me, that’s saying a lot!
Right now, it’s breakfast, a shower, and a new day of adventures. Each day has been so full of unexpected pleasures. I so look forward to sharing more of them with you soon.
Poetry: Lord Ganesh Wants to Travel
Lord Ganesh wanted to travel. You don’t
say no to Lord Ganesh. I said of course.
First he wanted to go to Burning Man. Read more…
art predator 