This is my fifth trip to the Azores, and still I cannot quite prepare myself for it. I can’t even find the words. There are feelings of ancientness, lushness, and ruggedness, and there is also dabblings of wild manicured landscapes everywhere.
The flight is overnight. Four hours from the East Coast sounds civilized enough until you realize what it means to arrive bleary-eyed and slightly unmoored, having slept only in fragments. I woke as we descended through the clouds and recognized the little islands below: all greenness and rough edges of the ocean. I was off the plane, the airport coffee woke me up… nothing like a little demi of espresso for .90 EU. Delicious!
The Azores defies easy description. It’s almost comic, but also ancient. It is neither wholly wild nor wholly tamed, and yet it is something stranger and more interesting than either. Hydrangeas line every road in abundance, planted once as boundary markers, now gone feral. Calla lilies spill into drainage ditches like discarded luxury. And the Kahili ginger is invasive, unstoppable, and intoxicatingly fragrant while it torches the roadsides in yellow and red. Cryptomeria tower overhead. This Japanese cedar brought by Portuguese hands to make the lightweight boxes that carried Azorean citrus to the world. This is old enough now to feel primordial. On the terraced hillsides, Camellia sinensis is the plant behind every cup of green, black, and white tea ever poured. It unfurls its leaves in careful rows above the Atlantic. It turns out that volcanic soil, persistent mist, and mild ocean air make for extraordinary tea. The only tea grown in Europe grows here, and it has for nearly two hundred years.
Driving along the wide open highways with little traffic but plenty to pay attention to is a truck grinding along, impossibly overloaded, creeping on the inside lane of a coastal highway while cows graze along the lime green hills against the ocean, raw and insistent. This green is different, not lime and not the polite green of a New England May. Something older. More saturated. A green that feels as though it has been here since before anyone was keeping track…
See, I have no words…
And then somewhere around the next bend there is a donkey, entirely unbothered, pulling a cart and man with piles of that invasive ginger that is most likely going to a market to be sold for arrangement in the luxury hotels and spas.
This is a place where the manicured and the untamed, the magical and the whimsical, have been living together so long they’ve forgotten which is which.
The ferns alone tell their own story.
There are nearly forty native species on these islands, some of them relics from the Tertiary period, so rare on the European continent that you have to come here to see them. On an earlier trip I took, I left thinking I would learn all the different species, but I never did.
This morning I did a hike through a soggy rainforest interior on a trail where the path moves from dark volcanic beach to sea cliff to dripping forest all within three and a half miles; you feel it in your body. AND then one comes across a perfectly built walled pond with no explanation.
.
I have a few days to myself before the group arrives, and it is a world of discovery, both outward and inward. It is a tapping of something I hadn’t realized was waiting. There is so much to feel and see after a short flight and an early morning. I feel as though I packed a month’s worth of experiences into just a few hours.
By one o’clock I was ravenous. I drove into a small coastal village along the north shore and found a little restaurant and ordered a bowl of tomato and pepper soup and a plate of barracuda caught a few miles offshore. The freedom of having nowhere to be, no one to attend to … just the island, and whatever it wanted to show me.
And then there are the cows.
You cannot talk about the Azores without talking about the cows. But that is a longer story, and it will have to wait
.
But before I run off to find Hugo, I will share a recipe of Hugo’s - its good! (and read about Hugo in the recipe)
..and John Bagnulo and I sat down to begin mapping out our upcoming retreats and classes, both in person and online.
If you missed his post today on type three diabetes and brain health, READ IT !
The calendar is set. Go take a look and mark the dates.
We would love to see you in one of them. Next February in Florida is on heart health!
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.