COVID
/In late December 2019 we were in northern Thailand and were well aware, with tension building daily, of a public health crisis beginning to grip mainland China. We were nearing the last months of our long-planned Heart-to-Heart tour and our second time visits to India, Myanmar and Japan, in addition to our third visit to Thailand. As had been planned we were holding mid-March 2020 return airline tickets to our home in Portland, Oregon. Little did we know our timing would be impeccable as our scheduled flight would end up being the very last direct flight from Tokyo to Portland — ever. Delta Airlines still has not resurrected that convenient leg from Portland to east Asia.
Paul was using every bit of healing energy he could find while in Thailand to recover from a nasty bout of dengue fever he contracted in northern India. We took our own health emergency and the unfolding global health emergency in stride and held fast to our original plan to return home deflecting suggestions from both friends and family to seriously consider coming home earlier in light of the deteriorating situation.
Little did we know we were barreling into our next journey — spending two years at home deeply immersed in a sometimes disintegrative but an ultimate reemergence to a new world. Like everyone else we were forever changed by what each of us went through during the worldwide shutdown during COVID-19.
Only later did we realize it was like another Hotel Guys tour — a tour we now retrospectively see as our “Mind” tour and a time of deep introspection and a worldly re-orientation about what our aspirations are for the next, golden age in our lives and to what good things we could contribute for a better world! For everyone. Pure and simple.
It was a difficult time for many people. We were well aware of this with sometimes a loss of life and often significant disruption of people’s livelihoods. This affected people we knew all over the world. Like everyone else, we supported others.
But for us, it was a grounding time of doing significant inner work and cultivating a new direction in our lives. Rich spent a lot of time with his hands in the soil creating another extraordinary garden that wow’d our friends and neighbors. And when the weather permitted he could be found on the shores of the Colombia river with his bare feet and butt in the sand and mud. Paul took the bounty of the land and prepared really good food and celebration, when possible, to feed everyone who was around. And everyday he spent time with stacks (and stacks) of books reading history, archeology, anthropology, the new science, consciousness studies and more.
When we reemerged on the other side of the Covid wormhole we were ready to travel again, signed paperwork to take a tour of Egypt and Turkey and set-off on the Discover Tour.
