An idea can take you far. I thought this gawking out the oversized window of our bus as we drove through Peru 2 years ago this month. We had trudged through mud in the Amazon, hiked through the ruins of Machu Picchu and now we were on a 10 hour bus ride to get ready for the last adventure of our trip: Uros Island.

I had been fascinated by visiting this monoculture since I read about it a few years before. There wasn’t much to be read about it, the Wikipedia entries were short and there were few accessible books. And my interest was more spiritual. What would it be like to visit a world where everything was crafted from one material?

Written while listening to: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/68w1gmwaCZu3SZ1IlwjKej?si=tuA7g1BwTEyOXTUzKkTHOw – 10 years later and I still can’t embed! (TechnologY!)

Almost 10 years later, a few days after Christmas, watching one chubby squirrel bound through the backyard from the neighbor's hedge to the bare persimmon tree and then up and down the stairs in an afternoon adventure after many days of rain, I listen to the same playlist, an artifact from another time. The strange thing about time is that so much and so little has changed from the time I wrote this post and now. I am living in the same house; I worked for one company for most of this time; this was written before I started working there, this is now rewritten now some time after I stopped working there. I am listening to the same playlist and I doubt I've listened to it much since I began writing about Uros. I still think about returning to this place, where their hut of planned obsolescence pops up in thought every once in a while when I think about if the world really needs certain technological ideas. In between this time, there has been a lot of travel and paintings and laughter and pain.  And now closure.

I really like that photograph in this post; I don’t know exactly where I was when I took it; perhaps on the totora reed boat that transported us between islands on that April day, or perhaps it was the other way around. Her yellow shirt appears different than I remember, slightly faded, but the fluorescent pink of her skirt, has stayed vibrant and I think the purpose of finishing this post so much time later it is a reminder to go downstairs and try to finally paint this memory.