The Travelling Fairy DancerThe Eat Pray Love Avalanche
October 15th 2011 09:46
She lay dying on the street – hands curled around a baby too malnourished to cry, her feet clawed defiantly into cobblestones brimming with past atrocities. The slight lean of her head indicated her appeal for money, her deploring, foggy brown eyes were trained expertly on the wealthy - waiting, almost deliberately full of scorn, for a scrap of luck.
Luck? I recognized the need for it, as I strolled by this woman, perched at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome. My mind recalled warnings from well-meaning travelers, “Don’t give money to beggars, they’ll only follow you,” and, “If you give them anything, they’ll only do it more.” Do what more? Beg on the streets while tourists amble by with gelato and stomachs full of pasta? Is that something we’d all like to be doing with our time?
Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave her an apple regardless. The sodden eyes glittered with relief, the gnarled body moved with sudden energy to grasp the shiny red skin, the rotten teeth bit into the juicy fruit to tear its nutrition into pieces in order to feed her baby.
And the moment felt like spiritual enlightenment. I’m still not sure why or how, or what’s right or wrong in these situations whilst traveling, but I know my intuition chose for me.
Who wouldn’t want to traverse the world in search of individual enlightenment, aka, ‘Eat Pray Love’, by Elizabeth Gilbert, (a gorgeous read, by the way), but the experience is available to us all…if we open our eyes and allow ourselves to be guided by what we intrinsically know already…
Luck? I recognized the need for it, as I strolled by this woman, perched at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome. My mind recalled warnings from well-meaning travelers, “Don’t give money to beggars, they’ll only follow you,” and, “If you give them anything, they’ll only do it more.” Do what more? Beg on the streets while tourists amble by with gelato and stomachs full of pasta? Is that something we’d all like to be doing with our time?
Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave her an apple regardless. The sodden eyes glittered with relief, the gnarled body moved with sudden energy to grasp the shiny red skin, the rotten teeth bit into the juicy fruit to tear its nutrition into pieces in order to feed her baby.
And the moment felt like spiritual enlightenment. I’m still not sure why or how, or what’s right or wrong in these situations whilst traveling, but I know my intuition chose for me.
Who wouldn’t want to traverse the world in search of individual enlightenment, aka, ‘Eat Pray Love’, by Elizabeth Gilbert, (a gorgeous read, by the way), but the experience is available to us all…if we open our eyes and allow ourselves to be guided by what we intrinsically know already…
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