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🎨 Artwork Journey
Artwork Journey is a section of the Emily Lupita ❤️🔥 Creativity Series featuring new Lupita paintings I made while reflecting on my world journey - with accompanying short travel essays.
Lupita Flies Through The Air, The Cloud Forest
By Emily Lupita
The Cloud Forest, Mindo, Ecuador, 2008
About the Painting:
I was a translator & cultural consultant on a study abroad program to Ecuador in 2008. The Spanish language program was based in the capital of Quito, but we often traveled on the weekends. One weekend we took the students up to the Mindo Cloud Forest. It’s a high altitude, lush tropical forest located on the North-Western slopes of the Andean mountain range. During our time there, we went on a walk to see a waterfall, woke up at sunrise to call toucans, and went on a mountain hike. The thing about the mountain hike was that the way down was by a series of several zip lines.
The first time - I screamed all the way across the mountain. It was exhilarating and liberating and frightening. The second time - I started to look around me at the incredible natural sight on all sides. The next several times - I was quiet and thoughtful, zipping through the air at an outrageous speed, trying to absorb those unique moments of feeling like a bird in flight.
On my final time across, I prayed. I prayed to God and Our Lady of Guadalupe. I felt close to them, closer than I’d ever felt on the ground. And I realized in that brief time up among the clouds why pyramids and temples of all kinds are built up so high, pointing upward. I realized why mountain climbers make the hazardous journey to the peak. Why people parachute out of airplanes and go up in hot hair balloons. There’s something distinctly divine about being in the sky with the birds, the wind on your face, full of joy and fear as you feel your fragile humanity way down deep in your bones and look up, ask God to help you in all things.
Good journey,
❤️🔥Emily Lupita
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me too. I wish I could've been there with you!! I was going to take my niece zip lining in the Gatineau Hills this fall but she was too short and even if she wasn't, I might have chickened out. It looks so scary and the older I get the more scared I get with those things it seems. Knowing you did it and how amazing it felt, I will try next year.
Wish I could’ve been there with you!!!