Dispatch 5 from Portugal
Hello Lovely Readers,
This is my fifth and final dispatch to you from my solo trip to Europe in November. Amazing and weird to think I’ve been home for a month! It feels like I just got home and that it happened years ago. Thank you for following along for this limited series in the newsletter; please write and let me know what you think! And if you’re inspired to take a trip yourself, tell me that too! I’d love to hear from you. The earlier dispatches are here, here, here and here.
We are heading straight into the Winter Solstice, a moment I love almost more than any other in the year. I used to mark it with a sunrise music listening moment and one year I gave a puppet show and hot cocoa at sunrise for the neighborhood children before they left for school. What do you do to mark the moment?
In Light Therapy Lamps and Candles,
Mariya
11/16/23
Today was my daylong trip to three small but important sites in the Portuguese countryside: Fatima shrine, Nazaré, where the biggest waves on earth hit, and Obidos, where there is a walled city from 1100CE built by the Moors.
I missed the 8:30am pick up spot on my GPS by about four blocks. The kind tour group representative answered the phone and told me to wait at Cartier jewellery boutique on the corner; I had raced out the door at 7am and neglected to eat, so I bought an almond croissant at one of Lisbon’s fantastic bakeries and took it to eat outside while I waited. My very own real-life Breakfast at Tiffany’s, er, Cartier’s. (They don’t display the diamonds in the windows before the shop opens, these days.) As I bit into my pastry, a tiny sprite of a woman appeared and asked if I was Mariya. This was Tania, our firecracker of a tour guide for the day. She walked me briskly down the four blocks to the van, where the rest of our group waited inside the vehicle and made room for me. I thanked them and we were on our way, Tania providing a steady patter the entire day.
The places were each spectacular in their own way — I definitely didn’t feel much connection with the Catholic shrine, but it was cool to see how built up it was and how many people come there. The plaza between the two churches at the shrine site has held 600,000 people when the pope visited! The booming church bell provided a delightful sound bath, and the olive grove of trees is beautiful.
The Fatima shrine itself is dedicated to three children who were canonized by the Church for having experienced a series of visions of the Virgin Mary in 1917. In the visions,
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