tristes tropiques

Claude Levi-Strauss was my intellectual hero when i was a young man. he wrote a travel biography entitled "sad tropics", which forms my initial association this month, and for no particularly rational reason...

i, myself, just spent some time in the "sad tropics"...

a challenging place to write up a training camp, but, with some imagination, and thanks to amazon, i got it done...

you got it... swim, bike, run. alot, in extreme heat, with lots of people looking at the strange white man running in the mid-day heat like he was mad...which maybe he is...

but the evenings were so much based on the pre-carnival atmosphere of fete, upon fete, all tributes to excess...

it makes we wonder, where did my one-time intellectual idol get his idea of a sad tropics?

surely there is poverty and corruption beyond compare, but, there is also, a simultaneous, almost unconscious celebration of existence itself. 

just some tropical images. 

i need to keep things flowing. 

i have learned that you can construct a great training camp just about anywhere, 

but the more liminal the space, the more in between, the more ritual, the better,

and extreme happy and extreme sad are a part of human life, 

no need to sugar coat reality. 

just live it. 

endure it. 

be it. 

moment by moment.....