Happy birthday Ginny!

Dearest Dancing Queen,

Well I just finished seeing all the photos you posted on Facebook today, of the birthday you spent at your beautiful chacra at El Hueco. It looks like it was a lovely day, full of sunshine and friends. Sky trelissing beans from the garden, you on the porch with your easle and paints. You were surrounded with laughter and your horses, just like you like it.

I have such memories of our time in El Huecu with its one gas station, clinic and small grocery shop - where you sent me to pick up some FiberOne and yogurt one morning when we were out. I remember walking the dirt road as frequented by horses as cars and seeing the expansive views of the Patagonian mountains all around. For a good long while it was just me and those mountains and nothing else. I remember breathing deeply to internalize the feeling and remember it forever.

What age might you be celebrating now, is it 63 or 64? In the photos you posted you look radiant and ageless. I love the one of you and Sky smiling each other, your faces equally beautiful and full of love. So cool she made you a cake. She can do everything. Your daughter is amazing.

I see you said your birthday prayers too, complete with sage and condor feather in hand. I remember when we did that together, gave our thanks to Mother Earth and the sky and everything else. You taught me how to feel truly grateful, to live every moment full of conscious gratitude. I was drawn to yoga because of it when I returned to New York, and when I meditate I still sometimes think of Volcan Copahue outside our window in Caviahue. Often throughout my day I still think of you.

How you liked to turn up the music real loud and dance, even though sometimes you hardly could.

My life right now is very different from the quiet, nurturing, nature-filled days I spent in your presence full of reading, writing, hiking, laughing, drinking mate - and the great big Patagonian sky. Now I am a social media queen, helping startups do marketing in sunny Middle Eastern Tel Aviv - a place so opposite from where you are in every possible way you can imagine. I still wonder sometimes what my life would look like or who I would be if I had stayed. It was something I definitely considered. For one thing, I bet by now I would know how to ride a horse!

But at least I got to take a part of you with me. I learned how to be more fearless, to laugh more, to try to take it easy even when things aren't. Or to at least take things in stride. I learned how important it is to have as many adventures as possible because that's the only way to discover new places and people that will touch and amaze you and quite possibly change you forever. This has happened to me a few times now since leaving New York to travel or for good. These are lessons I try to live by.

For everything you taught me - and remind me when I see the updates and photos you post every once in a while on Facebook - I am grateful (like you) that you are alive.  Happy birthday dear Ginny and so many more.

Love always,
Karen

I don't want another story.

tzury asked me to marry him last night. he asked me just like that and i said yes. it was not a grandiose pre-meditated moment, far from anything i had ever imagined. there was not even a ring. 

i said yes then grew quiet, probably from the shock of how far the reality of the moment was from my imagining of it. i considered whether years of American culture and reality TV had effectively taken their toll: was i so deeply brainwashed by the tales of elaborate proposals and glamorous rings that i could not just revel in the beauty of this quite different approach by someone i simply wanted to spend the rest of my life with?

i hated to think that was so. i imagined the question that would invariably follow the news of my engagement to the man i loved - "how did he do it?" - and wondered what i would say. 

"um we were laughing about something in bed. and um chatting. and then he asked me." 

a few things came before. a wedding and a funeral, to be precise (no joke). two consecutive days of emotional intensity set the stage for the proposal that followed one late Wednesday night, as anti-climactic as it was. 

although the truth of the matter is that maybe anti-climatic is fitting for us. having met barely 2 months ago, then moving in together barely 1 month after that, people thought we were crazy to be going so fast. how could we be so sure, especially as set as we were in our independent ways at our age? did we even really know each other yet? 

but those 2 months were full of solid moments of positive reinforcement. we cooked and cleared closet space. met each others' friends and family (including over Skype). we visited Ikea and spent 4 days in Rome. and of course attended that wedding and that funeral. we discovered we had stores of patience for each other that never seemed to wane, and that being together was never dull even if were just watching bad TV.

as accelerated as things might have seemed from the outside, for us things were just moving forward as they should. every once in a while we would stop to marvel at our strange reality and laugh at the giddy conviction we thought only teenagers could feel when they were dating someone new. 

but in general we agreed, if something feels this natural and obvious why would we possibly waste time and energy fighting it?

so maybe tzury’s whispered proposal under the covers in the dark makes perfect sense. and the way his question came rolling out followed by my answer (i made him ask me again just to be sure). another story involving helicopters and hot air balloons might be more fun to tell. but this one is mine.