By this time on Friday--assuming no flight cancellations and no sudden-onset covid--Wakanomori and I will be on a plane to Colombia. We'll spend a day in Bogotá, staying at the same place we stayed in 2018, and then we'll hop on a plane to Leticia.

I blocked off this week from work so that I could be free to prepare for the trip, and the result is that I think I'm well prepared (sovay--I have in fact purchased antiseptic ointment and band-aids, and I can feel the ~ scorn ~ of Markiyan Kamysh), but I have plenty of free time for my body to mount a huge pre-travel anxiety onslaught. It's beyond the ken of reason, just wave after wave of cortisol flooding my bloodstream, leaving me practically fainting. I've been through this before, so I know what to do, but even though I can defuse it or grapple it back into its box (choose your metaphor), it's always waiting to surge back.

Right now it's receded, so I can write this! Most recent thing I've done, taskwise, is load a couple of books onto my kindle for downtime when we're not watching macaws or river dolphins. Thanks to a recommendation from skygiants, I'm taking Julie Czerneda's Survival, and thanks to a recommendation from Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, I'm taking Gina Cole's Na Viro, a work of Pacifikafuturism.

Fun fact that Wakanomori just shared: Bogotá is 4 degrees north of the equator, and Leticia is 4 degrees south. So we'll cross the equator! We'll maybe see Southern Hemisphere stars! (... I should have looked for them when I was in Timor-Leste, which is 8 degrees south of the equator, but I didn't.)

... The forest presses in all around. There's roads and houses, and then forest, and forest, and forest, and forest, on and on. Here's a screen shot from Tabatinga, the part of Leticia that's in Brazil (or you could call Leticia the part of Tabatinga that's in Colombia--you cross the street and you're in another country).



Even now, with my brain in cortisol overproduction, when I think about being in this green embrace, held so tightly, I feel as if I'm about to sprout wings.