¿Qué es este lugar?

There is a point with travel when you cross over. I suppose it’s different for different people. For me, it’s happened twice. When I hitchhiked after college and again, five years later, when I spent six months in Central America. And now a third time. It’s that point when you cease to be a tourist and traveling becomes what you do.

In the past, one may have been a pilgrim. Less the pilgrim intent on a particular destination, and more the one with no destination at all.

The poet David Whyte knew of it:

Once you’ve got up

from your chair and opened the door,

once you’ve walked out into the clean air

toward that edge,

and taken the path up high beyond the ordinary,

you have become the privileged and the pilgrim,

the one who will tell the story . . .

Today is the twenty-first day. Perhaps I’m somewhere in between but, nevertheless, on the cusp of it.

It’s a fascinating place. A different reality. One in which the unexpected is to be expected.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.

Yesterday we visited the Mezquita de Cordoba - the Mosque of Cordoba. And if you’re Christian, the Mezquita-Catedral de Cordoba, perhaps more suggestive of its history.

I knew little of it, and Pa nothing at all.

At night, and from a distance, it’s a heavenly site on a hill above the city.

During the day, and up close, you can barely grasp its immensity.

But at some point you must enter,

and be confronted with the unexpected.

And the utterly unexpected is what you find.

There are few words in our language to express it, to describe its other reality.

At first, and for quite sometime, one can only wander, and ask the question: “what is this place?”

Is it a maze?

A puzzle?

Is it a dream?

Time does not exist within the walls of the Mezquita. And so it’s impossible to say when the shift occurs - when the eyes begin to focus, and a second question arises: “but on what?”

The columns?

The arches?

The paintings?

The statuary?

The light, and from where it enters?

We stayed until hunger demanded attention, walking into the courtyard, into the clean air.

Finding a resting place in the orange grove,

there were more questions.

Who were those people, those architects of the sublime? Were they aliens? Residents of an advanced civilization?

We tried to place ourselves in their company,

and felt very small.