Day 5: Córdoba

Flowers laugh, and your bracelets move beneath
the shelter of a courtyard shade.
Little birds offer us their most beautiful song.
Some pour forth their pain; others warble with joy.
Water flows freely between us.
Eyes and hands meet where they desire.
— Ibn Hazm (994-1064)
Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah

Córdoba.
Lejana y sola.
— Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
from “Canción de jinete”


Seville, May 24th 2025
Poolside, yet again, abba Sevilla Hotel
After a lovely night wandering Seville with Lindsey and her parents (getting very mildly drunk on orange wine, poking fun at Lindsey’s squid-ink risotto-stained face at dinner, more gelato before tucking in), we took a day-trip to Córdoba today, leaving mid-morning and returning in the early evening. I’m relaxing by the pool again, while Lindsey and mom are out for some last-minute shopping (tomorrow being our last day in Seville but a Sunday). Last night, Lindsey asked, “Is this too loud?” holding up a neon-pink top. Truth was, it was very loud, but I said I thought it would work, and I think it worked. Whether because it was the first day of Córdoba’s feria (annual spring festival), or because the city’s always so damn pretty, we blended right in with the Moorish architecture and the floral decor and the endless balconies and wall planters and hidden courtyards bursting with life and colour. One could argue we were the most subtly dressed two in town, so ubiquitous were the flamenco bailaora dresses, the bachelorette squads, the cross-dressing stag parties. It was an absolutely carnival atmosphere.

Out of all the places we’re visiting on our tour of Andalucía, Córdoba was tops on my to-see list. I came across Federico García Lorca’s poetry sometime in my teenage years, including his famous ode to the City of Courtyards in “Canción de jinete” (Horseman’s Song). I was that kind of teenager, for whom the deep passion of García Lorca, the clear love of place, the brooding desire, the fatalistic obsession with early death, had obvious thematic appeal, and many of those themes have made their way into my own creative life since. Not to mention, where else but the old caliphate capital of medieval Al-Andalus could you see one of world’s most beautiful cathedrals built into one of the world’s most striking and magnificent mosques? The city’s mosque-cathedral (La Mezquita-Catedral) was the focal point of our day’s exploration, offering a disarming meld of architectural styles and spiritual visions, and a profound reminder of the succession of human histories, cultural influences, conquests, and re-conquests that have shaped this region of the country.

On our morning walk from our hotel to Seville’s Estación Santa Justa, I tell Lindsey about how I found God (in a way) while stopping in random churches, basilicas, and cathedrals during my itinerant summer in Mexico. I didn’t convert to Catholicism, nor did I (or have I) ever seriously practiced prayer. But it was inside these hallowed spaces, seeking refuge from the sweltering sun, sitting in back-corner pews amongst tearful Jaliscans, listening to mass in a language I could only barely understand, that I first felt the big heart of the world, beating. It’s a feeling that’s informed my spirituality ever since, and I’ve felt it replicated in dozens of places: on clear cold mountaintops, before maritime vistas, above fish markets, on street corners, in deep forests. It was a similar feeling today in La Mezquita, although the festival atmosphere and the touristic experience (i.e. timed entry tickets) definitely overrode any spiritual stirrings I might have had. But still, you gaze up at the intricate carvings, the geometric shapes, the natural patterns, the elements of play between shadow and light, the dueling visions of heaven on earth, and you can’t help but feel a little pious. Or at least, you admire the piety in between photographs.

My favorite part of the day, actually, was watching Lindsey careen giddily around the ceramics shop just across the street from the entrance gate to La Mezquita, picking up everything on the shelves, carefully sorting and examining designs, gradually solving a complex multivariable calculus equation of interior design, gift-giving, and luggage capacity while the shopkeeper and I looked on with growing concern. “Listos ya?” The shopkeeper asks me quietly as the bowls and plates and decorative tiles continue to gather in neat little piles on the counter. “Todavía no,” I say, pretending to know what spirits are possessing Lindsey around the corner. Finally, we walk out with a big bag, plus several decorative vases carefully bundled inside my camera bag. I must say, it seemed like quite a bargain haul. I treat Lindsey to gelato afterward, mostly out of admiration. There’s a candid photo of her huge goofy smile inside the shop. I text it to Jane; she texts back, “Oh my god, Lindsey’s face!” Coming out of the mosque, we move our return train ticket a few hours earlier so that we can get back to Seville a little sooner - more relaxation, more shopping.

Novelty has become pattern and pattern has become ritual: Gym and pool. Shower and relax in bed. Then sundown, and a long walk, and what will surely be a nice meal. After next week, I will miss the institutionalized siesta. I suppose we can always be the change we want to see in the world.

Day 6: Seville, Pt 2

“O men and women of Al-Andalus, how happy you must be to have water, shadows, river, and tree!
The Garden of Eternal Felicity is not beyond your world, but is part of your earth…
Do not believe that you might enter into hell. No one enters into hell after being in the gardens of paradise.”
—Ibn Jafaya (1058-1138)


Seville, May 25th 2025
abba Sevilla Hotel
Our final night in Seville. Mostly packed except some swimwear and hand-washed clothes drying out on the hotel room patio, we flip through dubbed Spanish-language programming on TV. Sitting in bed next to me, Lindsey cries out, “I was watching Property Brothers, and now it's bombs!” Spanish narration over grainy World War II footage of aerial combat; not her cup of tea. A combo HGTV-History Channel situation; classic misdirection. We flip to something else. I’m watching halfheartedly, culling through photos from the day, as well as organizing work from the past month on my phone. A giant collection of landscapes from my productive week in the Outer Hebrides, developed at record pace. It occurs to me that time is slipping through my fingers in a strange way. I keep checking items off my extremely organized bucket list - big trips, new experiences, radical change - and yet everything somehow still feels the same. Age, and perspective, do that perhaps. I look at the bucket list. It is almost entirely comprised of travel, hobbies, and creative or expressive work. Outside the bucket list, though, is where I live the majority of my life. There, I am grounded by two incredible yet incredibly mundane patterns. One: wake up, go to work, and walk people through life-changing illness, serious grief, often death. Clock in, clock out, sometimes watch hearts shatter (or have my own shatter) in between. Two: get home and do roughly the same thing with Jordan every day (read, play, goof off, share a smoothie, clean up, laugh, go to bed). In many ways a boring home life, were it not for the human being growing and developing and acquiring his own feelings and loves and dreams beneath our roof and our watchful gaze. How to make sense of this? The passage of time, so ordinary as to be banal, depressive even. And yet, such a gift, so much beauty, on an average day. The bucket list - being on this trip, in Spain - helps me see it, gives me space to actually feel it. I’m trying to feel it, to not let it slip from my grasp. The sand keeps running through my fingers, to the other end of the hourglass.

In the late afternoon, after spending a few hours with Lindsey up at the pool (for the last time), I get dressed and wander off into the city alone before dinnertime. Moving quickly, I head west to the banks of the Guadalquivir, and then over the bridge to the neighborhood of Triana. Across the river, the cosmopolitan bustle of Seville gives way to quieter authenticity, to alleyways lined with streetlamps and colourful facades, to dogs barking and old men playing cards on a Sunday afternoon. On my own, I find myself immersed in the scene, shooting with the intention and clarity that I usually gain when approaching cherished landscapes. And I get very, very lost in my thoughts. Strolling back along the Muelle de la Sal, the riverfront walk on the east bank, I think back to other introspective, silent walks, and the people I have shared them with. For obvious reasons, my mind turns to Mexico and our Lady of Zapopan. The significance of some days, some journeys, some conversations, does not become clear until long after they have come and gone. How I wish I could do this in reverse. I will someday read this again, just as I have looked back on my old writings from those formative, halcyon days. But what if I could go back and show my younger self this journal, these thoughts and feelings? What would the former me say? Would that we could all crawl out of our graves, happily, our newborn eyes blinking away deep sleep, ready to experience the world all over again.

Earlier this morning, the four of us toured the Real Alcázar of Seville, an elaborate royal estate of interconnected gardens, courtyards, and palaces. I misread (or misremembered) our planned ticket time, nearly made us late for entry, but nothing that a slightly expedited morning routine and a brisk walk down to the cathedral district (the American in me showing) couldn’t rectify. Four days ago when we checked in, Lindsey and I marveled at our hotel’s liberal breakfast hours (until 11 AM); we’ve now come quite close to sleeping in so hard that we miss it. We have just about adopted la vida tapa, or perhaps it has adopted us. The palace itself - the photos will probably speak for themselves. I take a few portraits of Lindsey, and her family, with the surroundings. Moreso than the architecture (an eclectic blend of Islamic and Christian-European influences that seems to vary from building-to-building and room-to-room), or the flora (marvelously landscaped magnolias, yews, and plane-trees; colourful oranges, jacarandas, bougainvilleas, lantanas, and trumpet vines), what impresses me is the way that natural and designed elements flow into one another. It’s a marvelous place - the ostentatious wealth of the former Spanish Empire on full display, wealth which flowed from the subjugated New World all the way across the Atlantic, up the Guadalquivir from its marshy mouth, and to the river-port right here in Seville. Impressive as it is now, the Alcázar must have been quite the sight in its heyday.

Night brings a subdued, somber feeling, evocative of transitions and new directions. After returning from my walk alone, I meet Lindsey and parents on the hotel’s rooftop lounge to cash in our free drink vouchers (one per person), sipping on vino tinto as the sun sets upon the city skyline. Dinner in the restaurant just thirty feet from our hotel entrance downstairs - we’re too lazy to walk any farther. Lindsey’s mom tells me about what a good kid she was growing up; I share paella de mariscos with her dad. In the morning, it’s off to the train station and Granada. Goodnight.

Day 7: Granada

Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada.
// Give alms, woman, for there’s nothing in life like the punishment of being blind in Granada.
— Francisco de Icaza (1863-1925)

And the moon was cut like a D,
on a dark robe, written in gold.
— Shmu’el HaNagid (993-1056)
from “The Gazelle” (translation by Peter Cole)


Granada, May 26th 2025
The Albaicín
I’m ensconced in my new accommodations for the next two nights, a traditional carmen in the Albaicín neighborhood of Granada. The houses here are of Moorish design, and many of them date back several centuries: tall white-washed walls enclosing orchards, waterways, and gardens. Twisting alleyways leading to narrow stairs, vines of star jasmine creeping up and down the slope, the scent drifting across the terraces and courtyards, intoxicating in its sweetness. In the cool, shaded living room hangs an old black-and-white portrait, faded by time and sunlight. A beautiful raven-haired woman, a matrimonial outfit. No doubt somebody’s grandmother, great-grandmother, or never-forgotten love. From my patio, I look out and see a small square yard with blooming flowers, a burbling fountain. Down the slope of white awnings and rooftops, the Dauro River, and on the other side of the valley, the Alhambra, a complex of red-earthen palaces, ramparts, and fortresses rising up imperiously over the city. The lights are off and the air conditioning is non-functional; after a few minutes of fiddling I call my host, who tells me that the whole neighborhood is experiencing a blackout, and that power should be back on in a few hours. Oh well - all the more reason to nap and escape the mid-day heat. I try in vain to fire off a text to Lindsey (who is staying with her parents closer to the city center); for whatever reason, my cell service is spotty as well. I manage to call her and let her know I’ll be out of commission for a bit. Faced with a mandatory siesta, I’ve decided to sprawl out on the bed and write.

In my first semester of college, I took a seminar on Hebrew Poetry in Medieval Spain, taught by visiting professor Peter Cole, a poet and scholar from Princeton who quite literally wrote the book on the subject (and produced many of the definitive English translations). An eye-opener for a naive Chinese-American freshman from California, who had inklings of love for literature, but had never explored poetry, Jewish culture, or Spanish history in any detail whatsoever. The only two other students in the course (which shrank from a roomful during our first week ‘shopping period’ to a small, single round-table by the second time I walked into the room) were both senior literature or spiritual studies majors, Jewish, and deeply fluent in both Hebrew and Jewish cultural context. I remember feeling badly that I was slowing everyone down, limiting discussion to English, and so forth, but Professor Cole was incredibly gracious and patient, and I think recognized that I wanted to connect with the work, total novice though I was. It became a tremendous learning experience, and it exposed me to a place, a people, and a world of poetics that were entirely new to me. Through the profoundly beautiful, spiritual, romantic work of writers like Shmu’el HaNagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Yehuda Halevi, I learned about the golden age of Al-Andalus. Here was a Spain in which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers lived in close proximity, freely admixed styles and influences, and drew upon each other’s science, art, and literature. Where the great Jewish writers of the age were empowered by their milieu to express deep love and yearning - for family, community, place, home, God, fellow man - often through powerfully cross-cultural and erotic/homoerotic poetic conventions and forms. Although there was still plenty of religious segregation, discrimination, and violence to go around during the so-called Convivencia, I have often thought about what we current-day folk might learn from this period of time, situated as we are in our age of rapid globalization and modernization. As our geopolitical, interpersonal, and interior borders shift at growing speed, I wish more of us could practice freely giving and receiving from each other; welcoming each other’s gifts and flaws alike with gratitude; and creating more together, always with a view toward the beautiful and the eternal. Granada, alongside a few other cities in southern Spain, became an epicenter of this cultural moment. It was ultimately the final Muslim kingdom to fall to the Catholic monarchs’ reconquest in 1492. It is another place I have been looking forward to visiting for a very long time.

It was a roughly two-and-a-half hour ride from Seville to Granada this morning, passing through some familiar places such as Córdoba (from two days ago) and Antequerra (where Lindsey and I transferred on our way from Málaga to Ronda). As usual, after staring out of train windows for too long, wanderlust sets in. After we disembark the train and witness the snow-capped sierra rising above the city to the south, I part ways with Lindsey and family and set off on a stroll (the upside of backpacking as opposed to suitcasing) between the station and the Albaicín, the old Moorish quarter. Granada is more my vibe compared to the polished gleam of Seville’s city center: a touch grittier, more aware of itself, its history, its folklore. I pass barbers, fruit stands, traveling merchants selling religious trinkets. A plant shop named after the opening line from one of my favorite García Lorca poems. The city is suffused with his presence - there’s a certain duende in the air here, a certain “hopeless sensuality,” as he wrote about this neighborhood in his teenage years. This being, after all, his hometown, as well as his final resting place after a fascist squad unceremoniously murdered him and left him in an unmarked roadside grave somewhere nearby. I stop in a bookshop to browse and read. By the time I make the climb up the hillside of the Albaicín, following the terraces and staircases ever higher and higher, the sun is directly overhead, I’m covered in sweat, and glad to finally step into the cool comfort of my new home. My clothes (and I) are washed and drying on the patio now.

After attempting to locate Lindsey via extremely delayed echolocation (no luck; still struggling with phone and power issues, though I did have a nice wander down to the city center, passing by Calle de la Calderería and its North-African-feeling bazaar), I’ve returned to the house to rest and take the rest of the afternoon off. I’ve decided I will go sit in on an evening flamenco show in the caves of Sacromonte, the gitano quarter a short distance away from here. I have one fewer night in Granada than Lindsey and her folks (and will be back in Málaga by the time they take their night tour of the Alhambra on Wednesday), so I’d best make the most of my time. Then, it’ll be dinner with a view atop the Mirador San Nicolas, a prominent hill looking out onto the Alhambra from the upper reaches of the Albaicín. Lindsey may not know it yet, but her mom and I have been in cahoots for some time before this trip, and have essentially planned dueling birthday dinners for her here in Granada. Tonight on this side of town, tomorrow near the palace itself. In my typical fashion, I made a few different reservations months ago before settling on a restaurant at the last moment. Here’s hoping it’s anything to write home about.

Getting to dusk now. I’ll head out on foot to Sacromonte soon. As usual, with plenty time to spare, so that I can poke around with the camera and get a feel for where I’m going.