In collecting all my travel stories together, like gathering flying keys and putting them, clanking, into an old wooden box, I have realized that my response to losing my greatest loves: best friends, soul mates, parents, husbands; is always to travel. Jumping into the unknown, going to a place where I’ve never been and I don’t know the language, makes me feel lost, and somehow, helps me find myself again. Dancing on Mt. Kilimanjaro was one of those moments, where I felt lost and found at the same time. I went to the ancient mountain to dance back in 1999. That year was a year of transformation for me. I darkened my hair, went back to school, bought a reliable car for the first time, and took up the cello. It had been a difficult, heart-breaking summer, rescuing my best friend, Kim, from the grips of depression, and dropping out of school to care for her. Once she was stabilized, I went to Africa to heal my soul. My wise-woman belly dance teacher, Mesmera, had created a belly dance safari in Kenya. I decided to go two days before it started. Every day in Kenya was a mind-bending, soul-soaring adventure, from stopping our van for frolicking baboons in the dirt road to watching a tower of ethereal giraffes float across our path, the sun setting behind their elegant silhouettes. We watched lionesses licking their paws in grassy fields while cubs tumbled around them, and we gazed in silent wonder when we spotted a leopard sleeping high in a tree, it’s massive paws hanging off the branch like a teenager with one leg hanging off the bed.
One of my favorite moments in Kenya was a transcendent experience belly dancing with my silk rainbow veil on Mt. Kilimanjaro, while herds of elephants stampeded below us. Mesmera joined me on the cliff with her own veil, the warm wind whipping the fabric, and it felt like we were dancing in the sky. Back in LA, Kim and I had always called our home together the Royal Palace, because whenever we were together, it felt like we were in our own kingdom. As I moved my veil through the Mt. Kilimanjaro sky, I felt like I was wrapping Kim in soft silk from across the world, surrounded by a sky so vast it felt like time and space didn’t exist. Mesmera swirled her veil around next to me, and when I finally fell to my knees on the rocky outcropping, weeping, she let me cry in peace and kept dancing. After several hours on the mountain, we drove back to our hotel during magic hour, right after sunset. A confusion of wildebeest and a dazzle of zebras surrounded the car, galloping around us in a frenzy. It was terrifying, beautiful, and exhilarating. I stood up in the van with my head out the sunroof, and it felt like we were part of the stampede, the van moving at the same pace as the galloping animals. That night I wrote to Kim in my little journal. I wrote to her, that my love for her was boundless, timeless, eternal. This bone-deep understanding is the gift Africa gave me. And now, I have a marvelous treasure safely stored in a rainbow silk scarf, some fragile fragments of a certain palace, a palace so beautiful you can still see its reflections in the sky over Mt. Kilimanjaro when the light is just right.
