My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit […]

I asked my man what images came to mind when he thought about Colombia. He said, “Marijuana, cocaine, drug lords, guerrilla warfare. Isn’t that what everyone thinks of?” He went on to say, “Unless you’re a real nerd. And then you might think about coffee.”
But I don’t like that image. It’s a stereotype in the […]

From Chile, we travel north along the Pacific coast of South America to Colombia with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. From the first line of the book, we know that this will be an incredible adventure. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that […]

Our journeys have led us from fantasy to spirituality, heading straight toward magic. Ever since I read The House of the Spirits in college, I’ve had a thing for magical realism. So a visit with Isabel Allende in Chile will be the first stop on our magical realism tour of the world.
Although she never mentions […]

Something of the divine has touched me this week. I started a new book, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. A dozen books were waiting on my shelves to be read, and none of them seemed right, until I spotted this one, a recent birthday gift from a dear friend. I felt something akin to […]

But I do own a conch shell. My parents brought one home from their Bermuda honeymoon, and it sat on a book shelf in our house my entire life. As kids, we would always put the shell up to our ears so we could hear the ocean.
When I graduated from college and moved to Dallas […]

My first introduction to Tom Robbins was through his book Skinny Legs and All, and it changed my life, taking me on a very unexpected journey and giving me a direction to follow for years to come.
Tom Robbins set me free. I figured, if he can give a bunch of inaminate objects personalities and purpose […]

Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, created new worlds and new languages, and popularized the fantasy genre of fiction, but he was also proud to call himself a Catholic.
And if J.R.R. was alive today, he would probably be among those enraged by the chocolate Jesus. I wonder which would be more offensive to […]

No, we’re not talking about the little people anymore. We’re talking about rock and roll.
Just as Tolkien has his caves, Alice in Chains has their hole. And this time the womanly metaphor is a little more obvious. In the song “Down in a Hole,” the hole is both a womb and a tomb. The man […]