Tikal National Park

Close your eyes after you read this and imagine it in your brain. You have just walked into a lush green jungle, surrounded by trees, wildlife, and ancient Mayan ruins around every corner.  You decide to climb a pyramid temple, putting one foot above another on the steep stones to the top. Alone at the top you peer over the jungle and witness Spider and Howler Monkeys leaping from one tree to the next.  Colorful Toucan birds chirp in delight in the joy of a new day. 

 
Welcome to Tikal National Park located in North Central Guatemala. I took a sunset tour and this was definitely one of the highlights of my trip.  The Mayan settled here around 700 BC - 900 AD. The site is vast and has hundreds of temples, pyramids and stelae (stone slabs erected as monuments).  

 

Pachamama

Pachamama 

Goddess of Mother Earth revered by the Indigenous of the Andes

The  following is written by Janne Robinson my favorite writer at the moment:

I wish the world to smell like cedar. For the only struggle to be with spider webs from paths untouched by human feet. To fall asleep by a fire that cackles, right there, on the floor, in the wood chips and the ash. I wish to wake up each morning and pee in the woods. 

my wake up office, another day of work - Canyonlands National Park, Utah 2015

 Brush my teeth looking out at a lake still sleeping. Spider webs glistening by a white bar of soap on the dock. I wish to make kicking horse coffee in a blue tin cup and read book after book laying in the bottom of the canoe as it is still tied up. 

Teton Crest Trail, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming 2015

I wish to wake up to the chill of the morning, not forced heat that makes me claustrophobic to breathe--crisp air, cleaned by the hemlocks and spruces outside my bedroom window.

Alaska !

 
 I wish to wake up and water the flowers, barefoot and bare bummed. Light the kettle on a blue oven and pull open a door that stinks of cedar and time.

one of my many offices at Glacier National Park Montana 2012

  I would like you to be here, but if you're not--I will marvel, rest and play with the woman of the hour I came to see--mamma earth. If you need me, this is where I'll be.

This is for the Wild Ones

Media is out of control. Daily we get bombarded by TV, newspapers, radio, magazines, social media like Facebook or the Internet, advertisements, billboards.  What you put into your mind, changes your mind, and the way you think and interact with the world. Just because it is print or text, does not make it authentic, accurate, or a good idea (especially all this political talk). Check the sources and actually talk to people involved in the story. Read beyond some glossy headline.

I was thinking of this when Facebook lit up with "International Woman's Day". What, one day dedicated to us? How about celebrating fierce, strong, brave, courageous women every day? To the single mothers, the woman who has to work two jobs to survive, to the woman with breast cancer, to the working pregnant woman, to the woman who lives a life that she wants, to the woman who have to live up to society's expectations of what it really means to be a woman?

So, I complied some of my favorite quotes and some of my photos from one of my inspirational woman writers Janne Robinson  post below.

 “Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Hiking in my Wonderland: San Juan Mountains, Colorado in July (Photo by Ben)

Silverton, Colorado (Photo by Ben)

“There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage.” ~ Barbara Lazear Ascher

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.” ~ Roman Payne

 

Canyoneering in Capitol Reef National Park, 2014 (Photo by Ben)

 

Back county Patrol in Glacier National Park, Montana 2012

 “And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

And to my wild woman inspiration, my mother, who has had a lifetime filled with wild stories of her own: 

mom hugging a redwood tree in Humboldt County, California, 2010

Semuc Champey

Semuc Champey

Not easy to get to, but was definitely worth it. 

I don't have much to say because I think the pictures justify the beauty !

I Will Never Be a Well Behaved Woman

 I Will Never Be a Well Behaved Woman by Janne Robinson

I would rather pass my days lying in the middle of dirt roads, staring at the full moon with a bottle of summer red in my palms.

I would rather have kids when it suits me, not when society expects or throws shoulds.

I would rather live in a hammock on a beach for six months, and write like my soul means it.

I would rather be horribly broke at times, than married to a job because a mortgage payment has my ass on a hook.

I would rather own moments, than investments.

I would rather eat alone, than sit with women who bore me at “Wives’ Night.”

I would rather swim naked with bioluminescence, have it fall like fireflies from my hair, my breasts, my back.

I would rather do handstands naked in the moonlight when no one’s watching than pick bridesmaid dresses.

I would rather drink seven year old rum from a sandy bottle, smell of smoke and ash than sit in church.

I would rather learn from life than rack up debt, in a desk.

I would rather drink the ocean, again and again—celebrate being madly alive.

I would rather my love be defined by love itself, and nothing more or less.

I don’t need a ring on my finger to prove that I am in love.

I would rather take the chicken bus, than spend useless money in safe gated communities. Sit beside a goat, listen to raggaeton and eat green mango with sugar in a plastic bag sold from the woman who harasses the bus each time it stops.

I do not need a degree to prove that I am intelligent.

I do not need to own a piece of earth with some wood on top of it—to feel successful. No one truly owns the land, anyway—we just think we do.

My savings account has diddly to do with my richness.

I would rather sprawl my single ass out like a lioness each morning and enjoy each corner of my empty bed.

I will take a job I love and freedom over a pension, any day.

I will not work and work and work to live when my body is old and I am tired.

Stocks are for people who get boners from money.

Not everyone should have kids, and my eggs aren’t expiring.

I will not drink the societal Kool-Aid on a bus, nor will I drink it on a train.

Not on a plane, with a goat, in the rain, in the dark, in a tree, with a fox, in a box!

I will not jump through societies’ hoops and red tape, the treasure hunt in the rat race we chase.

If we must have milestones—mine will be measured by how much joy I have collected at the end of each day and how often in this life I have truly, deeply, opened.

Seek, see, love, do.