The mountain or the beach? The mountain, of course!

I was born in Bogota Colombia, a city nestled right in the middle of the Andes, located 2,600 mts above sea level. I am a mountain person of course! The mountain runs in my veins. This was encouraged by the fascination I had with the story Heidi by Johanna Spyri. I loved the book and the Japanese TV series. I wanted to be Heidi, I was Heidi. I wanted to live a simple life connected with the mountain and the woods where appearances, status, or prejudice didn’t exist. We lived in a house in a rural area, and going to the mountains wasn’t difficult. I loved going to lakes and exploring woods. I also loved reading about foreign mountains and animals…

This is perhaps why I was drawn to Henry David Thoreau (1817-18d2), an American essayist, philosopher and poet from Concord, Massachusetts. I first stumbled onto his famous book Walden or Life in the Woods, precisely because he talked about woods. He said: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I fell in love with this… This is Heidi amplified, lived as an adult: an appreciation of life within the woods… I treasure this book. I went to Concord on a pilgrimage to see where this great man had lived and to see the woods he had cherished and which had inspired his individualist philosophy of the appreciation of life.

Is not that I don’t like going to the beach; I like going to the beach from time to time, but the mountains and the woods will always be where I long to be…