VINTAGE TRAVEL

Berlin, circa Nov. 2016

The passage here was long planned— like a pact from two star-crossed lovers.  A week before in Hydra, Greece, writing/burning like a comet assuring-confident-with great expectations of their meeting. The avatar, "riding" it and bringing them together, was their favorite book: "The Universe is a Green Dragon." From Hamburg, finishing a PhD in Forestry, a train would taken to the meeting place at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof on the appointed date and hour. Flying from Athens to Berlin wasn't that arduous for the poet. They can't wait... 

Three years before, they were together in New York for the first time. A rendezvous on board the Staten Island Ferry was cinematic, wind-swept hairs on the side deck, against all obstacles, they made it. Sitting side-by-side on the ornate balustrade around the Jackie Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, gazing at the lone fountain, was eternal for them. Lunch of mustard apple salad and crisp wine at Café Sabarsky inside Neue Galerie (Gallery) was superfluous to the heart, their lives lit up. The impromptu, with dreadlocks, D.J. on the subway played what would be their "love song" in rap. They looked at each other shy, but happy, for the randomness of what was an unspoken truth promising the future it would bring. Poetry meant the world to them. In the shoebox studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the writer slept on the floor, and the forester was given the bed. At the departure's gate, inside a small gift was a novel by Brian Swimme. It was opened. And then tears...

Setting up nets and trap cages around the bog at dusk, they were research partners for an environmental impact assessment class (this was twelve years ago in the Laguna, Philippines), and according to the instructor what creatures would be caught that night determined the health or degradation of that ecosystem. The passion for biological nature had been planted as early as it could be remembered for the intrepid graduate student: The forest can communicate through its enduring presence.  And this was how it all started. A meeting of two minds, and of many great minds and faces along the way, and taking it as far as they could reach; to Berlin, to the universe. "She thinks with me, or rather, she thinks a whole world of which my thought is a mirror. And my feelings, too, my whole experience - consecrated in poetry..." (George Eliot, Middlemarch).