Free The Way of Wanderlust by Don George Page A

barriers beyond which visitors are not allowed to step, less than a kilometer from the rock, and you look. The rock is a smooth, sloping burnt-orange rise against a deep gray-blue sky. Before it are dark waves of vegetation, which surprise you; somehow you imagined the rock standing solitary in a vast flatland extending red and cracked-dry to the horizon.
    For the next half hour, as the Earth slowly tilts toward the sun at your back, you watch.
    The rock gradually grows more orange, more bright, and you begin to see the fissures and pocks in its side, shadowy sluices where rainfall must flow, deep gouges sculpted by wind and water and time.
    The sky lightens from dark blue to a pastel peach-pink, the bushes and trees in the foreground take a silver-green shape, the rock’s orange brightens, and pocks darken like caves in its side.
    The sky grows lighter and lighter, the rock face brighter and brighter; more veins and pits emerge in relief.
    And then, in what seems one miraculous moment, birdsong bursts from the bushes and trees and the sun fires up the face of Uluru and it is as if the rock is glowing from within, pulsing, breathing, one huge burning ember. And then it is like nothing you’ve seen before and you simply don’t have the words to describe it. It is alive with some kind of earth energy of its own. It pulses. It gathers everything into itself. It beats with a luminous orange energy that courses through the world around it. It is the heart of the soil and the rocks and the roots beneath the soil, coming to life.
    You think of the elaborate sun temples that ancient civilizations had constructed, of Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Sounion. And for a moment you think that this could be nature’s sun temple, a construct manifesting a connection so far beyond comprehension that the only possible response is awe.
    And then the moment ends. The people pack up their cameras and pile into their buses. Within minutes, they are gone.
    But you remain, listening to the birdsong, looking at the rock.
    You’ve had enough mysticism for one morning, so you drop to your knees and pick up a handful of soil. You want to ground yourself.
    But as you let the soil sift through your hands, slowly, softly, you feel it: some kind of electrical connection. The particles passing through your fingers are the same as the particles that molded to form the rock. And you consider: Are those particles really so different from the particles that molded into the big blue and green rock on which you now kneel?
    Sift, sift. The grains tilt through your dusty hands, bursting into sun-lit life.

Castaway in the Galapagos

    In 2002 I was exhilarated when the editor of Islands magazine asked me to take my family to the Galápagos and write a piece about our adventures on the islands. My two children were twelve and sixteen, perfect ages for the Galápagos, and for years I’d wanted to visit this seemingly enchanted and enchanting archipelago. Could it really be as magical as everyone said? Off we went. The ensuing journey was life-changing in ways we never could have imagined. And the writing journey was equally stretching and broadening. Over the years I’d become used to writing about my own journey, inward as well as outward, but in this case I had to re-create a family odyssey, apprehending and evoking the lessons we’d all learned, inner and outer, individually and together. The story forced me to experience, recall, and shape the trip in a new way, and this ended up adding one more layer to the islands’ imagination-stretching legacy.

    I WAS SITTING IN THE HOLLOW OF A ROCK carved over thousands of years by the incessant pulse of wind, rain, and wave. The sounds rushed in: Swissshhh-schwooosh. Tcha-tcha-tcha-tcah. Arerr, arerr, arrer. Chikoo-chikoo.   
    It was midmorning; a few hours before, my expedition group had ridden Zodiacs onto the beach at horseshoe-shaped Darwin Bay on Isla Genovesa, one of