For a New Beginning

Today I remembered a line from a poem that one of my friends & fellow 'Companions of the Way' sent me from our intentional community in California with as a blessing. Today it came to mind as so many of you, dear ones (& myself) are in moments of transition:

                                        'For a New Beginning' | John O'Donohue

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Family

We pulled into the parking lot of a park in Ohio and got out nervously. I played with the hem of my dress, lingering so my mom would reach the hall and sign-in table before me. As she approached the table she realized who the middle aged twins were. "I played with you when we were young! You two are the only people I know here!" She exclaimed with relief as they recognized her as Charlie Papp's daughter and came to hug us. I know my grandfather through stories-- that they called him 'twinkle-toes', that he was the life of parties, that my mom and her sisters went to weddings when they were young where there were still Hungarian folk dances, that he was "from the wrong side of the tracks" literally, that he swore in Magyar, laughed easily, ran an radio shop where my mom worked for him for the summers.
       A dark-haired lady came out of the hall and embraced me, "You must be Meg! It is so good to finally meet you." We'd been exchanging photos and stories on the website since she located our family in her ancestor search-- she immigrated to the US as a child during the Hungarian revolution of the 50s. Suddenly I was pulled into a room of strangers-- relatives, family... kin-- pouring over old photos, connections being made for me, stories being told-- about Hungary, about my great-grandfather and grandfather, about the family's immigrations, Ohio, Portage Lake. I met 2nd cousins in their 80s who I've known of by childhood pictures. We ate sausage, pickled peppers, apple strudel. A relative living in Turkey invited me to come stay with her.  One older relative, Vaughn, couldn't speak but wrote out stories on a flip-pad of paper for my Mom and I. Earlier my mom and I visited my grandmother's oldest friend-- they had known each other since kindergarten. She pulled out her wedding album and my grandparents, in their 20s, smiled out at me.
     Belonging always overwhelms me-- like collapsing into a raft after having tread water for hours-- there is a sense of relief in coming to rest, of being part of something.  

     Home. I am never quite sure of what that word means, like love, it's used commonly and to express the deepest sense of intimacy and connection. My definition stretches from coast-to-coast, arcs off to foreign countries-- for the geography but more often for the people-- the connections by blood and the connections by experience. There are so many sources of family, of belonging-- some chosen, some inherited and I knit my sense of home around these hearts that move in and out of my life. I think of the tattoo of sketched roots around my arms-- remembering that these connections are wild, fleeting, grounded, dumb-blind luck, and the hardest, messiest sort of work... love. 

     

Home.

"And I am struck once again by the unutterable beauty, terror, and strangeness of everything we think we know."
-Edward Abbey

I walked across the backyard barefoot to sit under this bush that's grown into a tree. My grandma and mother used to sit here mornings and drink coffee together. This morning the wind rushes through the leaves of the tulip tree stirring a gathering hush, hush. On my way to the glider I peeked between the thick squash leaves and spotted survivors of my lazy gardening and felt proud (for the little help I offered the magic that seeds unfold and grow into food.) The summer has settled into itself-- rich, full, slow-- and lent me grace to wait for the slow lessons of ordinary life. I grasp the strands of my dreams as they slip out of memory and realize I am less anxious, less afraid of this year-- of remaining in one place, especially this hometown that has always felt more like a launch pad then a resting space. Does it matter? Does your birthplace have to become a home at some point? Probably not. But, there is a quiet sense of calm in me-- that this is right, that I have much to learn from this place, from my family, from the way the past is never quite finished with us.

Earlier today I read a piece from Vela about a year spent in Mongolia and wondered along with the author at these worlds I carry along inside me:

 Mongolia changed everything – how I live, how I see the world, how I see myself. When you travel, you tend to cultivate a persona different from that of your everyday life... I remember thinking: one, what if I lived with the same persona I traveled with, and two, if I could manage here by planning only one step ahead instead of ten, instead of trying to see the whole road – well, couldn’t I manage my life like that too?
...It makes me think that perhaps, my facility with the language had less to do with having a “good ear” and more to do with being so open: without buffers, so that everything around me in Mongolia came right on in. Did I go there without buffers or did the buffers disappear when I arrived? Is it the place that opens the traveler or the traveler who opens because she is traveling to that place?

This year I'll be working for Alternative Directions, helping run a mentorship program for children of incarcerated parents and facilitating re-entry workshops at the women's prison.  I am full of anticipation for this fall, for the newness and oldness of this place... (especially to move past being 17 years old when I am here.) I feel hopeful. I want to continue experiencing this place with the magic of a traveler, with buffers down, full of curiosity, risk, listening, and patience for myself and others.

Lari articulated wonderfully a tension I have been living this summer-- the struggle of feeling like an injustice-tour-guide, the way church has flooded me with positive and negative emotions, the constant awareness of white privilege, the wondering at when I can offer my voice-- "if we are too politically correct at the expense of our relationships, we will never do anything for fear of the bias we will bring up.  So I'm glad to be conscious, but am so glad that that is a result of living with people and reflecting on that, and want that to keep being the case- that my reflections come from real experience with real people, and that I can be in work, living, and social settings where I can ask my friends- what does this mean to you?  as opposed to making my own judgment."

My mind is on a handful of thoughts-- changing with people even when paths diverge, relationships, what it means to work in my context, new communities, what it means to make commitments to my friends/to place, navigating desire, navigating my hyphenated identity, prayer, ¿Quién es Diosito? I am thankful for the thoughtful questions my friends are always asking-- questions that help me understand myself and who they are in their own mapped territories, questions that narrow, widen, or focus our scope and questions that hack through brush to open up uncharted lands... so many questions to live into continually!

Who we are instead

My yoga routine this morning included a meditation on "if my heart were planted what would it grow?" I imagined sprouts of hot air balloons taking to the air like dandelion seeds.

The house is quiet, another afternoon spent alone at home and I fill my time with collages, letters, and books. Words and images. When my head grows tired I stalk around the block, a few streets that feel more like part of my own backyard then a neighborhood I live in. Streets that are worn over in my memory with layers of people and conversations held while feet pounded against this pavement, the playground court, the swingsets. Lately we've been venturing into the thin band of woods while we weave our lives back together over and over, from everyday experiences.

I feel joy.

reminders

I am going so stir-crazy and its horrible because the more time I am at home just reading articles & books & watching shows-- the less I feel able to socialize or the will to do anything. I find myself wishing to throw myself into drama just to have a mobilizing factor. Sometimes I think we fall in love to escape our own boredom, to invent a story line for ourselves-- not that that lessens love, if just seems like we spend so much time waiting for something in our lives to be consuming, to matter. Does that make sense? For some people its religion, or a lover, or a cause. I guess we all want meaning in our life and sometimes it falls back into a just sort of existing state. I am not sure what I need to create in Baltimore, it freaks me out that I committed to staying here till next August. 14 months. What gives my life meaning here-- eventually I'll be working and giving a lot of time and energy to that... but, I don't want what I am doing to be the only defining thing. Yesterday I was at the library and this lady started talking to me-- just the smallest conversation but I could tell she wanted to talk to someone and it made me feel more alive too, to have a genuine interaction even though it wasn't deep, it was just kindness, just noticing another human being's significance in front of me. Lately in this funk I've been irritable towards my family and feeling less and less like talking to anyone- it seems energy consuming to create friendships... yet, I know that what gives me meaning is connection to others. It is so hard to keep seeing something worth exploring in any human that crosses my path. It's so easy to reduce people to an idea and dismiss them thinking I don't like that idea or "they won't get me" ... I want to be a person who lives with wide open arms, that welcomes in the stranger & the person I assume I will not like or be known by and learn how to dismantle myself for them, to see them, ask them questions. I am so miserable at that so often. I think that is a reason I have been missing Dorothy's Place (the day shelter) so much lately... because I was forced to connect to people I would never have imagined a connection too- forced to connect not over my ideals, politics, or fatih-- but just over being there, being present in that small crowded room, together, and knowing I was meeting another human- "a self that touches all edges."

rant.

Today I was excited to go to my first meet-kindred-spirits in Baltimore activity... a feminist reading group. After taking the metro, I arrived worried that I was 10min late and for some reason it was canceled this week. So feeling disappointed, I tried to get directions to a support Bradley Manning event and failed. (I always feel that any attempt at bravery should be met by an equal force of the universe extending goodwill to you, really!) But instead, I got back on the subway, and met a young man who gave me a tract/witnessed to me, then told me about how he was thinking of leaving his church because they support women in leadership and he wants to follow the true gospel. I felt like screaming, ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? and ranting about patriarchy. It seems so typical, boring, and infuriating that I have to hear these perspectives & be told that God and Biblical authority support his view.

It upsets me that his sincerity, as a new and excited Christian, is warped by culture and main stream Christianity to support oppression and sexism. It was the type of interaction that represents why I feel uncomfortable in church, why two weeks ago I wanted to write a letter about inclusive language to my church pastors. Because too many people grow up with this idea that God is male and that God wants males to be overseeing women. The young man expressed genuine belief that women are equal but "different", that they might even have more wisdom, it's just not God's way for them to be in authority. (bah!)

We ended up riding the metro together while I tried to listen, encourage him to consider other perspectives and asked questions, and wondered how to be authentic in the interchange --and it was actually a good interaction.

I've been letting myself feel angry lately, sitting with it and I think this is a good place to be in and explore it.

Now I am going to watch something fierce and eat chocolate. 

as spring begins

This afternoon my parents and I planted our garden.

Yesterday I was searching for apartments in the city and trying to fend of a rising swell of panic at the expenses and fear of being trapped in the exburbs.

I've been feeling contrary. I wore my End the Occupation shirt to my parents church this morning -- not out of solidarity as much as a statement of my worldly, moral superiority. The sermon began with a long golf analogy/story and I was already feeling distant from the speaker, until we all had to stand and read from Ephesians together-- about how Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us, which is a passage connected to so many pieces of me. As the speaker unpacked his own prejudice & pride, I wrestled with mine. Church is difficult for me. I light my candles at night and whisper my thoughts- addressing them to various names of God, read poetry & prayers (this week Adrienne Rich and Thomas Merton) & passages from scripture (unconsciously Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, & Mark). I wish church felt more like those moments. I feel defensive at church, so aware of non-inclusive language, of a million Hes and Fathers batting at me, I feel defensive at the way my worship has been manipulated in the past, I feel angry at the politics and the lack of politics. I don't want to be there, and yet, there, I know it is a growing experience to try to listen, to try to be open to the sincere experience of others in worship and gathering, to be open to this tradition that is part of my story, to be open for the Spirit ("she is the spirit of wisdom & she is truth"- as Em wrote so beautifully.) Maybe that's the point-- if church is about worshiping, perhaps the truest thing I can do is go to church with my parents, wrestle and attempt to love my neighbor as myself in the midst of church. Love is worship. 

So, I put on my to-do list... write a letter to the pastors about inclusive language.

Speak. I tell myself this. I thought in church today, I need to speak to everyone like they are someone dear to me, that I can share my whole self with, not as much diplomatically as honestly.

There are so many things I need to give voice too & want to write about (especially instead of harboring these little seeds of resentment & pride- my own wall-mortar.) When I was in Harrisonburg I visited Shalom and teared-up with joy at the sense of belonging & struggle & beauty that gathering together can be. The message was also much needed and also about walls (maybe I don't like church because I'm always convicted? Which is probably why I should keep going.)

Being home is going to be a challenge. A dear friend and I have been talking about sunday-debriefing chats-- which might be much needed. Yes, I have been feeling a bit ornery and contrary lately, but maybe this is a good mood to sit with, to explore. I am happy and anxious and curious and many things about this stage.

Things I accomplished today:

Editing a few chapters of my mom's novel
Finally unpacking and setting up my altar
Building a raised bed for my garden (using a hand saw and power drill.- learning power tool skills from my dad.)
Cooking 'compost' stir-fry like Ellie
Reading 'History Will Absolve Me' and two of Fidel Castro's other speeches
Listening to lectures on postmoderism from coursera
Watching Game of Thrones & Downton Abbey 

color

Happy till it almost hurts.


&
it always begins a quiet day, the restlessness
then this:
(might as well do what I want while the summer's still mine.)
hair chalk: brilliant.

My body is not closed off:
so few my defenses
that the bare trees wound me
the sight of the pencil-thin wires
sketched in fast strokes over
the faster falling of light from
sky is its own type of pain:
                  the world is alive
                  all so raw
yet when I try to call you by name
all I can speak of is the shadow
under the brambles
a birds wing tracing its arc
along an invisible current
(I too feel the thing that
carries me, unseen)

These old brick homes cloth
themselves in ivy, white paint
another year fresh on the shutters
(I thought the word was shudders
for years, as a body should
learning to shut out a touch as
gentle as the afternoon light)
I can taste air pouring into my
body. She forgets each time how
naked skin can feel.
      
He never felt the Spirit move
as I did-- beneath a rain-full cloud
or in the handful of wind tossing
the lime buds of spring
                        and how could I
tell
him
why
       the crocus propping its stem
against the falling barn filled me
till the tears ran quietly over the
banks of my eyes, when he'd
forgotten that creeks, too, flood
in spring rains.
        

sprouts

I've returned to this house, this city, that I've never really possessed -- as a geography beyond the river & woods, the scattering of friends homes, and those old buildings I'd circled through that nothing leads me back to now.

It feel strange, to come to rest here without a plan to leave, to begin anew in a city that's familiar and still unknown. It's been seven years since I spent a spring here, walking in my neighborhood I'm amazed at the magnolia flowers dropping beneath the branches like pink snowfall, the bright lime buds, the perpetually cloudy grey skies.

I feel uncertain. Uncertain of my path here. Though I've lived almost four years with this idea: The untied knots can be redone... of 'a covenant with the land': eventually one must come home, one must come to rest and mix their blood and sweat with earth. I don't know how long this city will be home, but I am here.

I keep dreaming in a mixture of Spanish and English, missing my life in Guatemala. I wandered to the international food market, bought plantains and searched for masa. I'm not ready for the faces of my friends to retreat into memory, for their stories, our story, to settle. 

The floor of my bedroom is a half-finished unpacking I've abandoned momentarily for cooking, decorating cupcakes, making crafts, taking walks to pick spring bouquets, and reconnecting with the handful of dear friends I still know here.

I have so many questions of what "ordinary" life will be.

I've decided I don't want to leave

After 5-days of backpacking: La Torre: the highest non-volcanic point in Central America.

(and I convinced everyone to paint their faces.)

Quotes from Beyond Vietnam- Breaking the Silence by MLK... perhaps even more relevant now...

"And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

 ... " This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing -- embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate -- ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us."⁴ Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day."

... "  We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."

1.

Guatemala.

Good Friday.

It seems surreal that my time here is wrapping up. How do we ever encompass ourselves-- the people we have mirrored, smiles spreading over their faces at shared amusement? the stories we've been told in whispers, in raised voices, with eyes-tear-brimmed, downcast, starring into us? the stories we've used to articulate ourselves? talking ourselves and others in and out of euphoria and despair? the moments of exhaling between words, the moments of simply being present, of bearing witness to anothers existence? moments of delight, despair, hope, teasing, musing. I have been doing so much living and discovering here. There are so many snapshots playing in my head of the ordinary moments I have lived with friends here. Seven months is longer than some of my lifetimes.


I.
You talk of the systems you have lost faith in
your government and socialism, justice,
capitalism, and also the hippies,
the church was the first, the left the latest,
et cetera and et cetera,
you ask: what is left to believe in?
and I craddle my head in my arms
as if my body could shelter me from these realities
as if I could mother myself, then us, to wholeness

But: I protest: people live under these systems
and yet, we love this life
You look me in the eyes to remind me:
It is the poor who suffer; it is the poor who always pay.
I look you in the eyes because I can afford to
this is the truth: I say: perhaps to live is to suffer...

You protest: yet, still, we love this life.

We speak in your language,

an inheritance of colonization after
the history of tribes: everything with its sordid history
everything with its spectacular beauty

II.
The street breathes cold down my neck
and I smile at the sharp autumnal scent
of cigarette smoke, the end a ring 
the same neon hot as the clouds last memory of the
day's color-bleached heat. Jorge's hand
scatters ash as he laughs:
we can't quite learn to love ourselves,
I put tobacco on my fields as insecticide,
I put this in my body? Inhales, exhales,
and shakes his head still smiling.

I hug my body, though Jorge has
told me, I have at least five. This material one
is only the first level. I squeeze my arms
around my ribs to cup the body of energy,
though like water it pours out:
I can not look anyone in the eye

without being devoured.

III.
I dream of the bodies of trees.
Juan stopped the car in the moonlight after midnight
so we could embrace la Ceiba, the tree which
connects the underworld to the heavens
: solamente para este.We embraced the trunk, feet stepping on her roots-
we, dwellers of this middle ground.

Winter skies

Today is the first time I've been able to spend hours completely by myself in three months, it's the loveliest feeling, the decompression, as spacious as the undressed trees against the luminous winter skies.

There is so much I would like to write about-- hikes through the jungle, sleeping amongst the ruins, the generosity of strangers...  but today my mind is stuck on blindfolded bones, memories of the Sonoran Desert, drug war militarization, and how we circle our own stories, not knowing what they mean.

But I will leave you with my first poem in Spanish...

1.

Ella ha estado caminando

    a traves del desierto

con su soledad y sus sueños

     de la mejor vida

Ninguno le dijo a ella

sobre el sol que quema

ni el miedo que viene

    en la noche

ni todo el dolor de su cuerpo.

Ella no le dijo a ninguno

sobre el niño en su matriz

ni del hombre suyo

que escribió desde la carcel

de control:

-- no puedo regresar a ti,

ni a nuestro amor, espera

por mi, espera...

Ella estaba esperando

mientras una vida estaba

creciendo en ella.

-- No puedo esperar,

no mas, esta faltando la

mitad de mi corazon.

Estoy viniendo a ti.

Ninguno le dijo a ella

que el estará deportado

ni el hombre escéptico

ni  la frontera silencioso

ni su corazon sincero

el estaba tratando de regresar a ella

se perdía en un lugar sin nombre

Le dijo: Estoy yendo a ti.

2.

Ellos encontraron sus zapatos primero

y cuando encontaron

el cuerpo de ella,

se cayó no hacia el norte

se cayó hacia el sur

hacia él, hacia la tierra

ella huyó, se cayócon una mano

sobre su corazon.

Ellos nunca encontraron

su historia

ni sus sueños y esperanzas

ni su alma

pero el desierto nunca olvida

y cada dia mientras

la lluvia derrama lágrimas

y el viento esta soplando

con memorias en otras lugares

el desierto trata de abarcar

todo el sol, trata de tragar el

sol quemando y vivir en

nonches lúgubres, rehusando

el consuelo, pensando en las

penas ha visto dia a dia,

y no había podido cambiar

nada.

Tzununa

A month has passed. Blogging is not a discipline I’ve developed well. So many stories…

I spent a week in Chukmuk Dos, a community of families displaced by Hurricane Stan and spent afternoons dusty and sweaty from games of futbol, basketball, and chasing my host brothers and cousins around the yard.  In transition I spent a few days in Panajachel and danced with a drunken man in the deserted plaza while my trio of amigos/hostel-neighbors played Old Crow Medicine Show on the violin, harmonica, and guitar. Jim’s wisdom: “It’s a lot easier to distinguish where you’ve been then where you’re going. That’s for damn sure.”

The past few weeks, I’ve been WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in the tiny village of Tzununa. I am staying at a small hostel with the other woofers and we walk up the mountain to the farm each morning. The shower is buckets of cold water over a stone floor (and I always inhale sharply and involuntarily at the first splash.)

      “There’s not much there,” I said to a Guatemalan friend.
      “There’s nothing there,” he corrected.

There are churches.  At night, it sounds like the worship services are happening in my room. The nearest church is 100ft behind, but the speakers seem to project the vibrations of keyboard notes and prayers straight through the thin wood panels of my room. The prayers of the leader (and maybe tongues) are chanted in repetitions with an eerie yet alluring undertone of response or simultaneous prayer, “ayudame espirita sancta.” In YWAM we used to call this “Korean style” (everyone praying aloud at once.)  

       The farm consists of terraces of vegetables, a permaculture food forest, goats, chickens, straggly paths, and orchards… and occasionally scorpions. Nicholas found three in the rock pile we were moving and held the third out to me after cutting off the stinger.  (The knowledge of their presence has given me a not completely irrational fear of stepping anywhere in the dark.)  

 Shad, the farmer, is full of knowledge, passion, and humility. He often says, ‘I should have…” recounting the lessons of this land he’s gained through mistakes.  Explaining his permaculture system he talked of how what excite him are the unexpected things that happen in the in-between spaces, the borders—the things that grow in the space between the terraces and the future-pond space, between the goat house and the orchard. “You have to let the land unfold itself. It’s a patient process.”  It made me think of my own fascination with borderlands, on the crossings that create unexpected things in our selves. Bonhoffer wrote, “I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to live by faith.”  I’ve been milking goats, making cheese and yogurt, picking coffee, planting/transplanting, and weeding.  These tasks are like praying the rosary I think, quiet and repetitive, the mind growing quieter. It is the body’s way of listening for God.

        I walk thirty minutes into San Marcos most afternoons to buy vegetables or drink café. Kyle and Kayley, the two servers at Cafe Fe are like old friends. After it rains the air is pressed with the scent of herbs and flowers. Over the past month, I’ve made a group of Guatemalan friends in San Marcos and explored, gone to grand openings, celebrated Halloween, and crashed on the floor of stranger-friends. Yesterday, a group of teenage boys riding in the back of a truck shouted a comment about my tattoo, then their truck rattled to a stop and I followed their motioning to scurry over the tailgate for a ride home. Their Spanish is rapid and I listen first for the verbs, still piecing together my sentences but it is becoming easier. I am surprised how I find similar souls no matter where I go, find conversations flowing towards issues that lay on my heart. It's going to be strange to say goodbye to these pueblos that have grown so familiar over the past five weeks.

Solo

Descending the hair-pin turns entering Lago Atitlan, the rain was flowing in a steady muddied stream over the road and cascading down the hillside. Freddie, an older man from Vancouver who said, “we’re going to be family for the next few hours”  keeps up a lively banter with the driver while I sit up straighter and straighter to peer out the windshield (I am thinking of what I will cling to when we go careening off because there are no seat belts).  We have been sharing this bus with five other students headed to San Pedro -- everyone is growing tense as it grows darker and the rain grows heavier.  We worry about our deadlines (to catch other buses, boats, meet our host families, or find a place to stay). I arranged to be picked up at the airport but a miscommunication left me to the kindness of strangers who lent me a phone and communicated with the school to make an alternative plan. We arrive in the dark but everyone manages to get shuttled off in the right direction. The clerk at the tourism office calls my host family and I wait only a few minutes before Hector emerges with an umbrella and leads me on a one minute walk to my new home.  I sleep almost immediately feeling a slight panic of aloneness, newness, and stress.  

In the morning, I wake up to a soft light through the sheet-strung-curtains and open the window to the balcony.  Past the rooftops, the lake spreads out in a placid sheet of gun-metal gray beneath the lush vertical slopes of the volcanic range.  I feel a bit of relief, though I am still having a strange fear of this hillside town. Wide, flat spaces seem easier to comprehend.  There is no map. 

My host mom, Flores, walks me to the school’s office early in the morning—it is a path through cobblestone streets and narrow alleyways.  Before my first class, I explore a little, stopping in an Israeli owned hotel for a smoothie. There are a lot of Israeli’s in San Pedro—at the small juice stand near my house the menu is in Spanish and Hebrew.  I joke with my maestro, Clarita, that I may not remember my way home. Turns out it’s not a joke.  First I panic, then I just laugh. Another student walking home says, “It happens.” After turning around a few times I remember the sign for the “Burrito Factory” and find my way. 

Yesterday walking home at night after a conferencia, all the lights go out. This is a frequent occurrence during the rain and usually last only half a minute before they flicker back on.  I can’t see anything but the completeness of the darkness is somehow calming.  I continue walking.  

There is no map for my time here either and I remind myself to be gentle with myself, to get lost, to ask questions, to walk in the darkness.

Arrived.

The view from my window.

love of the temporary

Yesterday, I had to escape from procrastinating from packing by taking a walk. Home is always seductively comfortable (never mind that if I stay here a month without a plan I grow stagnate and restless, verging on insanity). On the corner of Green's Lane that stone house I always admire stuck out from the younger homes with ugly siding-- homes I secretly played in the foundations of during construction. Across the patio of the old house white nightgowns and garments were strung to dry, it looked so quintessential and out of place in Randallstown, it was only five but the house was dark and invented a lovely old lady already gone to sleep. 

I usually go to the elementary school playground at odd hours of the night and I was shocked to find it has a life of its own at dusk. Two teenaged guys rolled past me on their bikes showing off, a few kids were occupying the basketball courts for a wild game of soccer, and I actually had company on the swing set. Outside the air vents of the school, a cloud of bats was spiraling like the outline of a smoke curl. I kept watching the moon pass between layers of clouds and smiling at the people around me. My neighborhood always seems newer and more interesting when I am leaving it. I feel nostalgic about home and anxious about my upcoming travel. Lately I've been telling myself, I need to find a place to settle. ... and yet, here I am ready (well, I would be if I weren't writing to procrastinate actually packing) to leave again.

Is it only the quality of the temporal that makes a thing enticing? How do we remain in love with the familiar? David Foster Wallace wrote, "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day." I wonder if the same is true about place and what the equilibrium between exploration and home is, what the meeting ground of wandering and being located is.

Three years ago, trying to settle into Harrisonburg, I wrote: "The untied knots can be redone. He spoke with conviction of 'a covenant with the land: eventually one must come home, one must come to rest and mix their blood and sweat with earth.'" ... and a few weeks later, "I went up the hill till the cold reached through the ground into my bones. Always aching to be discovered, always hide away. I went to the hill to pray, city glittering beneath me, stars speeding away. The universe is growing too, so maybe it understands my little girl heart. I was born into longing, a heart of dreams. Tonight I was thinking of desire in the newborn quiet between those golden orbs, of the spaces immeasurable, vast empties, my heart craves for its own expanding- pressing outward since my birth..." The human being is made of some many contrary desires.

Bouldering

 

These photos made me think of albums I've seen of cool people I know actually climbing/ a Portlandia-esque montage of how I would pretend to know things about climbing...

Shot 1: Steep angle to establish the precariousness and incredible-ness of the climb.

Shot 2: Set the scale and undaunted/exhilarated stance of climbers.

 Shot 3: Wardrobe is really everything.

                                                    Shot 4/5:  Beginning Pitches (Notice our fabulous finger-holding technique and great use of legs.)

                                                           Shot 6: The Reach

                                                    Shot 7: Some rewarding teamwork.

                              Shot 8: Re-establish the extreme height and daring of our climb (and relative ease despite clinging to a cliff face = bonus cool points.)

                                  Shot 9:  Looking down after 'owning' our climb and jamming... and crimping... and uh... this reminds me of when I try to make fun of my genius brother and end up getting stumped by my lack of mathmatical engineering language.

Anyway. We're pretty cool. We can climb rocks in dresses.