Dear Judith,

When I got to visit you over the Christmas holiday you said that spring green was the color, so I tied a length of green yarn to my camera case and carried it all over Patagonia and the central Andes during my January trip. The two pictures I'm sending are taken from the top of Cerro Bonete, a 16,400' mountain adjacent to Aconcagua (22,800-ish); the first looks out over the endless-seeming Andes, and the second is the view of Aconcagua. It was probably the most challenging hike I've ever done in terms of sheer physical effort spread over a number of days, but every step was worth it, and every step was taken thinking about you.

I'm always ambivalent about taking the big trips that I've been priviledged to, worrying over whether I can justify spending that much money on myself, put off by all the excesses and falsities of tourism, but there are moments when the reason I do comes to me in stunning clarity: when all of the effort, the patience, the ragged breathing is swept away by coming over the top of a ridge and a new, un-looked for landscape is spread seemingly to eternity. The raw, scale-less, intense beauty of the Andes, the bright topaz of the glacial lakes, the effort it took me to get there-- it all combines to produce a moment of grace, a moment of humility and awe for the wonders of the world, an acute awareness of my simultaneous insignificance and grandeur as my lungs complain and the blood pounds in my head. It's a spiritual enough experience to hush my science-bound brain and just feel for a moment.

I hope that somehow that energy was sent to you, my dear. You are my constant inspiration toward grace.

All my love,

Laurel