The Azure Window...
I am just back from a fabulous ten mile run...
I followed a new route today, because new possibilities were opened up for me yesterday by 'the 'hop on hop off' open top bus...
We have seen these vehicles traversing the island, and decided to go to the harbour yesterday morning at 10.30am... And hop on...!
The idea is to buy a ticket, then there are five buses that follow each other at forty five minute intervals throughout the day; this means that you can leap off, to look at a 'sight', and then leap back on after a quick spin around the said landmark....
Of course if you are a more serious sight seer than I have even been, you might be better to hire a car, or to do several days of hopping on and hopping off so that you could properly 'do' the whole island....
We were given headphones to listen to the history of the land as we journeyed... I was totally transfixed by the voice of the woman telling us the stories of Gozo, both historical, mythical and current...
I just loved listening to her; at the end of the tour, we discovered that Anadi and I had 'taken in' very different aspects of her history lesson...
For instance I was spellbound as we made our way to the Calypso caves, listening to the story of Calypso making Odysseus a prisoner of love, and giving him the gift of immortality; about him missing his faithful wife Penelope and after seven years Calypso letting him go, giving him some bread and wine and the necessary tools to make a raft...
Whereas Anadi was able to tell me that the original port had not been at Mgarr as it is now, but at Marsalforn...
This piece of information had completely passed me by...
Which again goes to demonstrate how much we take in information that is already to do with us, and keeps us in our own private world...
We are all individual universes experiencing this life in our own way...
It's all about us, our perception, our paradigm, and our projections...!
It takes 24/7 awareness of this to be present to the gaps between the thoughts. The gap is where stillness is; the more we can drop into the gap between the thoughts and stay in the place of stillness; nothingness; the more we can trust that what emerges from this place will be true, our unique contribution to the manifestation of life on this planet....
'I could listen to this woman's voice all day...' I said to Anadi, about the lady in my ear; she spoke English so beautifully and her words wove the tapestry of the pictures as we rumbled through the Gozo countryside... Some of the roads seeming far too small for a great big bus....
We hopped off to look at the Ggantija Megalithic Temples, which are apparently the oldest Meagaliths on the planet...
The energy was lovely there, very still and quiet, the stones are huge, and no one knows how they got there... Like Stone Henge it is a mad made structure; and the civilisation who put them there is also shrouded in mystery; no one knows how they came to their end; what happened to them....
We were happy to be in the energy of the stones; they felt peaceful and were very big... Big felt nice. Peaceful felt nice too...
We hopped back on our bus and stayed on it, until we reached the Azure Window, which is a Limestone natural arch. It is situated near Dwejra Bay, another of Anadi's special haunts with his family when he was little.
The Azure window - which was created after two limestone sea caves collapsed - is very beautiful indeed, and it was fun to go down to a stretch of the bay where Anadi used to swim though a cave, which took him right out into the open sea the other side of the huge, high rocks...
He stood looking at the entrance to the cave and Anadi said that in this place, he really did remember his time there as a child...
It was also a great place to stop for lunch!
That was enough hopping on and off for us...
I am not a great sight seer at the best of times, I far prefer to run everywhere and see the land this way...
Be the place, immerse myself in it....
But our hoppity bus ride was fun.... And it opened up new ideas for runs for me...
And this is how my ten mile run was carried out on a new loop today...