Some time has passed since I last posted, and I’m still wrapping my mind around what’s transpired in the meantime. The events aren’t necessarily intended for reasoning or standard expectations. Instead, I’m seeing just how random everything can be (or at least feel) and that so much depends on how we react and the lessons we learn.

The Pacific Ocean… seen now in California, Hawaii, Australia, Chile, and Perú

As I mentioned we would, Ryan and I traveled to Perú to honor Lorenzo’s due date, September 20. We chose Máncora, a coastal town in the north that sits on the Pan-American Highway and has warmer Pacific waters than we’re familiar with in either California or Chile. We wanted to be by the healing ocean in order to mark this solemn day—that was our first and really only priority. We did not want to be home in Santiago, amid the festivals and flags and general fan fair of another dieciocho. All the better that Ryan could get in some much-needed surfing and I could walk the beach and center with some yoga. We could get back to just be-ing.

My husband, the insta-celeb.

I’m not going to name the hotel. It’s not important at this point and I don’t want the culminating event there to overshadow the trip. I want to remember the four days where Ryan and I got to be together uninterrupted and undistracted, the daily yoga sessions that asked me to open my heart, the incredible food, the sunsets practically within reach of our patio, the way the wind picked up in the afternoon and sent ripples across the surface of the pool, and the simple, private ceremony we had to honor Lorenzo on the morning of the 20th on the beach, a few hours before those winds picked up. I remember that ceremony, especially, and the peace we felt and my legs submerged in the waves soon thereafter.

No caption needed.

I almost don’t want to tell you what happened because it might spoil an image you have in your mind now, just as it threatened to spoil so many of ours. But I tell you so we might walk along together in this confusing universe.

Colors. The first solo pic I’ve allowed to be taken in four months.

On the night of the due date, after we’d met the day with such anticipation and managed to find a real sense of peace, our locked hotel room was robbed. We didn’t notice at first; nothing was in disarray. We came back from an early dinner in town, I took off the heart-necklace Ryan gave me for my birthday two years ago and which I’ve been wearing with new meaning the past few months, and went to check the bedside table for the time. Only, my watch was gone. “So are our backpacks,” Ryan said, and sure enough they were no longer propped up on the couch. If our backpacks were gone, that meant our laptops, ipods, cell phones, Kindle, and two sets of house keys were also gone. In addition to the watch, they also rooted around for my camera, Ryan’s sunglasses, and even his SF Giants baseball cap. My gut finished its twist when I realized my hand-written notes about Lorenzo and this trip were also gone, as I’d put them in the front pocket of the backpack earlier that day so they wouldn’t be at risk in my beach bag, as we were warned theft was most likely to occur down on the beach.

Peruvian ceviche. It doesn’t get better than this.

Thankfully, we were safe, our passports were well hidden, and our wallets were on us. But there it was—we’d been robbed—as we told the front desk, as we told the other guests who stood outside their beachfront cabañas gawking at the scene and surely grateful it hadn’t happened to them, as we told the Peruvian police in the final hour of the due date. Whoever it was had the key and took the time to lock back up—an inside job—which adds a certain rancidness to the violation. “Trust no one,” as my husband sometimes says, both in and not in jest, though we both do trust others. I know there is much unspoken here about our privilege, the poverty in Máncora, and that whoever did have the key is likely far worse off than Ryan and I are in many ways. For those reasons, I don’t feel like a victim; I just see clearly how barbed wire, 24-hour security guards on patrol, and lock and key don’t actually protect you.

Mototaxis like this one are the main method of transportation.

The hotel did what they could, but needless to say, our things were not recovered. Thanks to my friend Amanda, who jumped through hoops, we had house keys waiting for us when we got back at midnight two days later. We’ve started to replace these things that we lost, which are thankfully mostly all replaceable. The headache of protecting all the information on my laptop has been the main frustration and a hard lesson learned. I will never again travel with such a valuable workstation, though nearly every other guest at the hotel had one of their own with them at breakfast or by the pool. We seem so used to this technology being with us at all times, even when we’re far away from home.

Of course, the street art caught my eye.

Many of you dear friends are so wise and have offered truly helpful insights. Those insights have helped me arrive at the over-arching lesson: I may not understand how the universe works—taking things away from us on a day that reminds us all too vividly of the depth of our real loss—but I have to let go… of these material possessions as well as the heavy guilt I’ve been carrying. I don’t know if I’ll succeed every day at this, as the past four months have continued to be that wavy, circular line my friend Suzy talked about. But I have to try to carry less of all of it.

It was right there at our fingertips.

Which brings me back here, to where I am right now, with Ruby asleep near my feet and my and my husband’s personhood safe—all that really matters. I can’t explain it; I do feel lighter. Not better, but lighter. Whether it’s because I physically have less to carry or because we’ve honored a due date that has now passed, I can’t quite say. It just seems no matter how we are forced to part with the material, our liberation from it can feel as freeing as it can disheartening sometimes. Although, any good Buddhist will tell you (as my friend Elsa did), “all that is material is immaterial.” So, what do you do when it’s the immaterial that has it’s hold on you? In my case, you travel to Perú, set it all down in order to find peace by the ocean, leave it there, and come back home again.