A Fateful Trip to Spain & Morocco
My first deeply synchronistic international journey to see my Love in 2001.
Exploding with twenty-one year old Spring Fever and in Love with a sweet-as-iced-tea redheaded Georgia Peach, my April 2001 journey to Spain and Morocco will always be one of the most life defining trips on this Earthly mission.
I was at the height of my Heidegger phase, from diving way too deeply into his cannon after studying Being and Time under mentor Kerry Dugan. To this day, no book has shattered me anywhere close to B&T. With Dugan’s Socratic mastery taken to its limit, I found me tip-toeing all the way to the brink of the Abyss of Nothingness. “I” was no longer thanks to Dugan’s “three levels of Nothing”, including the infamous “nothing with an X through it” — the ________ Beyond NOTHING.
One must wonder if this phase of the Journey isn’t absolutely essential for Love to come to Self? While maybe not “necessary”, I can say with certainty it was essential for this mission.
So there I was, on the plane to Spain for the first time to see this young lady who was studying abroad and had enchanted me with a visit to Sevilla to see her and smell the orange blossoms. Elizabeth would go on to be my wife some five years later, now some 22 years later.
The man to my right seat looked like a classy Hemingway character, with a tufted red neck scarf and hand-sewn pocket protector to store what could only have been fine Cubans. To my left was a nun, who spent literally the entire flight crouched over her rosary beads, praying and rocking back and forth for all six hours of in the air.
I’m in between these two reading Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, and I’m already trembling as the Abyss draws nearer with each page. The well-lived old man hands tapped the book and stuck up a friendly intellectual conversation. “Pretty heaving reading there kid”. “Yes sir I’ve sold my soul to existentialism and I am Nothingness, but not just capital N nothing, rather Nothingness with a X through it”… or the like.
He leans in closer and says, gently, “did you know the Nazi’s used Nietzsche and Heidegger to build their own strategies?” The trembling suddenly turned into nausea. The plan hit turbulence. The nun received the rosary louder and trashed up and down in terror. “It’s not that they condoned it, rather they misconstrued the works for their own power.” The surrounding dichotomy was overwhelming. I was sitting, literally, in between Good and Evil as I was reading it. Chills up the arm in writing this.
When I landed in Madrid where we were meeting, I went for a cab with of course no cash Pesetas, and had only an emergency credited card that was a “break glass” level use case. The driver locks my bags in the trunk, scoops me and whisks us away, and of course doesn’t speak a lick of English. I do my best to explain to him the very limited amount of information I have for him. We drive what seems like 45 minutes, when my lady had said it was 15–20 minutes from the airport to her house. He says we’re there and asks for cash, where I explain to him I have no Pesetas. Looking back, its hard to believe yet totally believable twenty-one year old me was so ill prepared.
So the cabby throws me back into the car, and takes me to the local mall, where he proceeds to spend another half hour shopping. I consider making a dash for it, only to realize my bags are still locked in the trunk. He finds a $100 step tracker device, makes me pay for it after breaking the ego glass it took to open my wallet, and run this credit card. He finally takes me back to the hotel, and I make my way to her room, completely defeated.
Elizabeth and I then proceed to have the most epic weeks journey imaginable. We drove to the Alhambra and snuck up to the roof where we made love, while falling in love with Arabic architecture and sacred geometry. We shared Manchego cheese and developed our love for Rioja wine over warm bread and old Spanish alleyways at dusk.
We drove south to the port of Algiers and sailed to Africa, where we took the Marrakech Express train sharing a tiny dilapidated car with what felt like 6 other people. As I read Richard Bach’s book “One”, deeply entrenched in his disassembly of the meaning and dimensions of time, or lack thereof, I looked down at my wrist. What had just been a perfectly fine watch was now literally dangling from my wrist, and had fallen into pieces beyond repair. Time was indeed full broken for me at this point, as somehow Elizabeth slept amidst the chaos of the train.
When we got to Marrakesh, we visited numerous little shops with countless beautiful hand built items, and for me, a mission to buy all my friends and myself drums. We rode camels deep into the Sarah desert, and roasted a whole lamb over open fire with Berber nomads. We played them LTJ Bukem on a CD walkman as they fed us roasted cus cus and lamb with their bare hands. We woke up in the desert and crawled past what seemed like a three foot long tarantula, gazing over sand formations as far as the eye could see. We rode the camels back to Marrakesh, and hit the Medina open marketplace to find more drums.
The Medina in Marrakesh is straight out of a movie, with snake charmers, dancers, food vendors, mountains of colorful spices and rices in a massive, intricate maze that went on forever. Asking around for drums, were were sent deeper into the Medina to the “drum factory”, which somehow we finally found. I loaded up on xylophones and drums and shakers and was happy as a clam, only to realize I only had that emergency credit card. The glass was already broken, I thought, why not just go ahead and use it.
The drum shop owner lays my card out on one of those swipe machines, with the lock CLICK-CLACK as you run the press over the blueprint paper. A fast-cut sequence played out in my mind of this guy having my emergency credit card at his disposal and I lost control. Just as he was about to swipe it, I dove over the counter and swiped the card away in a panic. I grabbed Lizzy’s hand, and pulled her from the store. We ran. And ran. And ran harder. Like something out of Indiana Jones, the shop owner screamed and ran after us. Surely, he knew these intricate market streets like the back of his hand, and we were running with not a clue in the world where we were going. To our knowledge, we couldn’t even figure out why he was chasing us. I’d just taken my card back and ran.
We finally found our way into the open market, and thought we’d lost him. Sure enough, he comes running and screaming out and grabs Elizabeth’s arm violently. There, hanging from her arm was a big bag full of drums. She’d been holding them, and when I panicked and ran out of the drum shop, she’d accidentally stolen them. So there we were, two American thieves, luckily in a pre-911 world. We expected him to have our hands chopped off, alas, he took the drums back in a huff, and that was that.
Once back in Spain, we drove around the incredibly beautiful southern shore, with a winding, jagged mountainous pass that like quite a bit like Highway 1 in California. As we took a turn around a bend, we had to abruptly stop due to a large herd of sheep and a shepherd standing in the street. There was no where to go, so we stopped the car and jumped out. We walked among the sheep and walked up to the shepherd. There was something truly magical about this man; rugged yet absolutely beautiful, and radiant. Piercing blue eyes, the perfect amount of stubble, the tattered hat someone in Tulum could only dream of. It was a surreal experience, for no significant reason other than the magic of this man. We chatted with him, rather Elizabeth chatted with him in Spanish, the sheep made their way off the road and we got in the car.
We drove maybe a hundred yards and looked back, and I swear on my children he and all the sheep were gone. We stopped the car. We looked harder. They were gone. Chills again.
I flew back to Boston on an overnight flight, heading back to attempt to make it to a new semester’s first class at 8am. I landed at 7:15. Got a cab. Bolted through campus with my bags in tow. Made it into the classroom and was the first there.
Sitting on every dest was a copy of the Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo. I tore through the book in one sitting, as it recounted experience after experience I had just had days prior. Reading the book was like re-living my journey again, recounting all the unthinkable synchronicities along the way, only to then experience a meta-synchronicity upon my return.
This Synchronicity was too profound, too layered, and too magical to simply let go of. It would define what would become one of my great life studies and applications, in ultimately taking the mantle of “Synchronicity Architect”, in the name of being able to design immersive experience that specifically generate synchronicity.
Can we design systems with the final output being synchronicity? I’ll be exploring this in posts to come.
Thanks for listening! If you dig this story or any of my other daily writings, please give a quick follow, clap and share if you feel so inclined.
Love,
jb
