This spring, I traveled to Morocco
along with my dear friend Julia.
It is a place I have dreamt of visiting for as long as I can recall. Around the age of seven or so, I became obsessed with the idea of moving there after watching Hideous Kinky. If you’re not familiar, it’s a vibrant and evocative film about a young mother who moves from England to Morocco with her two daughters in search of a better life.
While in retrospect, it is perhaps not a movie a seven-year-old should be watching, it awakened something intensely beautiful within me. I felt filled with an overwhelming sense of recognition as I watched the vast expanse desert flash on the screen before me and heard the ancient rhythm of Gnawa music for the first time.
I knew I had to go there one day.
During the trip, I posted very little on social media. It all felt too precious to share. I wanted to remain fully immersed in my own experience, and in the relationships I was forming. As I realized this lifelong dream, I wanted to be fully present and awake for every minute of it.
I wanted to savor the flavor of every meal and remember the precise scent of the almond blossoms which covered the verdant mountains. I tried to commit to memory the flowing contours of dolomite hills which shone jet black in the sun. I longed to remember the way the night air felt upon my cheeks as I drifted to sleep on the roof a five-hundred-year-old casbah and watched stars glimmering in the blackness above.
I’ve taken the last few months to integrate the experience and sift through the countless photos and handwritten notes I collected during my trip. I am delighted to have the opportunity to share a handful of these gems with you now. The medium of the Internet will never be sufficient to communicate the magic of an experience in its entirety. However, I hope that the glimpses which follow will touch something within you which knows intimately, the beauty to which they can only point.
