Hot, Dry, Deep thoughts

It is a hot day today. I feel like I am being cooked for a lavish feast. Instead of spices, I am being cooked in dust. I had plans to visit the school today and also work on a world map painting project in the high school until I looked out my window this morning and saw kids still playing football and running by barefoot at nine o´clock. There is no school today. It turns out that the teachers are on a country wide strike because some have not been paid by the government. So for me that means an overly relaxing day. As most of you know I LOVE to be busy and RELAXING is something that I DO NOT enjoy… So I find myself finishing up my latest reading adventure—The Gringo Trail, by Mark Mann. The book focuses on the travels of three friends through South America (Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia). While at first, I didn’t like the novel because the travelers heavily used drugs and I found it to be a hippie tale, it ended up having a lot of perspectives on life that I appreciate and will share with you.

While hiking in the rainforest, the main character reveals his thoughts… “There could be a million different life-forms within a mile of us—all fighting, competing, living off each other, living in symbiosis with others. You name it, and it’s probably out there somewhere, close by. Every conceivable evolutionary strategy—there’s a plant or animal or insect doing it around us now.” Standing in the middle of the cloud forest over Easter weekend, I had the same feeling that everything around me was so full of conscience, consciously watching me.

Imagine the world mapped according to consciousness. Every life source registers a point brighter or weaker depending on how complex it is. People, animals, insects. Even a plant is conscious, in a sense. It reacts to its environment, and that’s all consciousness is, at a basic level. The capacity to absorb and respond to stimuli. All around us—millions of little points of consciousness. There can hardly be a single spot on the planet more conscious than here. (149)

…”But to my mind, what the animist world-view expresses—with its multitude of spirits and the magical parallel reality—is a sense of the sacredness of Nature itself. The crucial thing is that it’s not just humans who have souls, but everything. To animists, the whole natural world around us is charged with a magical, divine life-energy. The sacred is located within Nature, not somehow outside it, as with our own God. It’s a crucial difference. The Western conception of God reflects the Western belief that humans are intrinsically superior to the rest of Creation: that the natural world has been given to us by God purely for our benefit. If you ask me, it’s this belief that sowed the seeds of today’s environmental crisis.” (160) The Mormons feel that they have it all right, the only true way to God. The evangelic people feel that their faith is the only path to God. The Catholics feel that they are the only ones with the truth. The Muslims feel that Christianity is backwards and that their faith is the only one that leads forward to the realm of their God, Allah. Maybe everybody has a little part of it right. I feel that we are all droplets from a big pool. We leave that big pool when we are born and become vulnerable to sadness, loneliness, frustration, and anger because we are away from the whole. We spend our lives looking for connection, love, closeness to others. During our lives our meaning is to help the other soul pieces along their journey and finally in the end death breaks us away from our individuality and back to our whole spirit once again. I think we are all one, all in the same struggle of life battling the same negativity of feelings and that there is no reason for fighting within religions. The environment, animals, and plants are also part of the whole and a part of life that we need to respect and not waste out of carelessness.

Instead of a usual job path, I chose to escape. I chose peace corps. Many times I feel that our culture is overly centered on the success of a full time job, year round with only two weeks a year of vacation. What about family, love, children, experiences? The main character reflects on his friend who wasn’t the most responsible, nor productive in his life, but he had a few things figured out… “Mark and I hadn’t always seen eye to eye, especially on this trip. But he’d remained a special person for me. Perhaps it was because, almost alone among my friends, he’d rejected all that hypocritical, poisonous career shit. To most people, it looked like apathy and idleness, but I saw it differently. Mark had refused to sell his mind—his soul—to some bland, evil, world-fucking corporation just so he could swarm and backstab his way to self-important middle-management middle-age. I’d seen the vitality sucked out of too many other friends as they signed that Faustian pact. But Mark remained free. Alive. He’d refused to let a System’s projects and values become his projects and values. To Mark, music and drugs and having the time to think always came before money and respectability and a career. And he was right. They do. They should. I respected him for it. I respected him for not caring about things that were not worth caring about.” (283)

Sometimes there are events that you feel you knew were going to happen, somehow you felt them coming. Sometimes there are moments that you feel that you´ve done before. Is it all just coincidence or is there something to it? “Were these just coincidences, only invested with significance by a tragic accident? Probably. Or was there some strange magic here? Maybe all events have presentiments, like ripples in time stretching backwards as well as forwards, so faint that only a few tuned-in people can detect them. Maybe something as powerful as a death sent ripples big enough for even me to detect…” (284)


I am done with deep thinking for now. I am going to bake in the sun and cook in dust on my attempt to walk home and eat beans and tortillas for lunch. I hope you all find a piece of inner-happiness and feel that I am thinking about you today.

Coffee but not Cappuccino

I have a lot of thoughts and realizations that I want to pour out to you, but like pouring hot water too fast over too many coffee grounds, they overflow at the top of the filter, making a mess rather than a flowing liquid of richness. Riding on a bus in Tegucigalpa, passing the outer slums, a lady wearing a knee length green skirt and contrasting orange and yellow blouse balancing a large white sack on her head holds my eye. She climbs the dirt mound polk a dotted with wooden shacks. Most likely, her residence is one of those modest dwellings. I wonder how she feels looking out of her door each morning. Does she feel and live the beauty of the morning sun welcoming a new day?

I know some people that live in middle-upper class suburbs but they do not notice nor appreciate the morning sun. Sometimes despite its beauty and splendor, it becomes a part of a dull everyday routine. Rich people can live in poverty too. The real heartbreakers-- lonlieness, anger, guilt, and sadness can eat away anybody no matter what social class they belong to. The taxi driver that transfered me from the bus stops shared with me, "I am poor. I was not born with stars. I used to haul firewood from the forest." Note: nearly everybody has a wood burning stove which makes firewood necessary. He said that he had promised himself that he would not always have to haul firewood. He dropped out of school after sixth grade and then joined the military for awhile. Now he drives a taxi. Honestly, I would rather haul firewood and enjoy the nature of the countryside rather than drive a taxi in the slums of the polluted capital. Life is how one perceives it. I told him that I believe that everyone is born with stars and some type o destiny-meaning to help and integrate with others. I thanked him for the ride.

I think of my neighbor Doña Licha. Every morning, I walk out the back door to use the latrine, I ask her, "Como esta?"
"Alegre!" And she really is happy, as if it were a body trait like her skin color or hair color. She is happy and really enjoys the simplicity and beauty of life. She enjoys making tortillas and taking care of her children, grandchildren and daughter-in-law all under one roof.

More and more, I realize and believe that poverty is a concept of self-perception rather than an economic condition. What about me? How am I and who am I? I am happy for the love that I have, afraid of losing it, excited for all the good in the future and worried for all the bad because inevitably both good and bad travel together. I am everything all at once. I am becoming me-- not a North American anymore nor a Honduran, but rather a confusion between the two.

Easter is now another X marked off the calendar. I hope the big fat Easter bunny brought you lots of eggs, even though I do not understand this concept when bunnies do not even lay eggs. When I try to describe our traditions of the Easter bunny or Santa Clause to Hondurans, they wrinkle their eyebrows and stare back at me big eyed. Living in a diferent culture holds a mirror to my own culture, leading me to analyze it and see it from a different perspective. Here also, like in the States, Easter time is a holiday. The week is all vacation time for schools, factory workers and basically everybody. Men usually get drunk, drunk, and more drunk. They swerve back and forth on their horses and sleep in the street-- which is just as proposterous as the Easter bunny but certainly more dangerous. Families also swim in the river as a type of religious cleansing. We escaped both culture traditions and found peace and adventure hiking in the mountains with three other Peace Corps volunteers-- Tim, Xavier, and Karen. We stayed three nights in the cloud forest-jungle feeling the energy of nature and hiked 40 kilometers in total. Here are a few favorite moments from the trip to the Muralla cloud forest.

1. The public bus brought us to the closest town called La Union. From there we walked four hours to the reserve. We left the dry hot dusty town and it gradually changed to pine tree forest then coffee and banana plantations and finally to heavy lush green underbrush. The changes in climate, temperature, and environment is amazing. We left the dry town setting and arrived high in the cool mountain cloud forest setting within 14 kilometers of hiking up, up, up with heavy backpacks loaded with packaged beans, tortillas, oatmeal, water, tents, clothes, and sleeping bags to get us through the next three nights.

2. One morning, our fellow Peace Corps volunteer, Timothy woke up early to use the latrine. While hovering over the hole, he felt rising air beneath him. Before he had time to think, two bats flew in between his legs. Less than five minutes later, I also used the latrine. Luckily, Timothy didnt tell me until my business was done about his encounter with the bats.

3. Hiking through vibrant green bamboo, vines and towering trees and then seeing a flock of toucans fly above us!

4. Even though I loved our adventure hiking and sightseeing in the cloud forest, I admit that one of the best moments was arriving to our humble town once again and pouring the first bucket of cold water over myself washing off days of sweat.

While I love adventure, experiencing life and learning-- I think of you all often and miss you. There never is a place like, "real true blue home." While I have a home here in Moroceli, it is like (for you Judy) drinking coffee with sugar but not quite as good as with your hazelnut creamer. Or for you Dad-- While here in Honduras my home is like driving a motorcycle with the wind through my hair, but home in Kalamazoo with you is like riding a Harley. Or for you, Tammy, Moroceli is like off brand chocolate, but it doesn`t melt in your mouth like German chocolate that I know you love.

I will enjoy exploring the nooks and corners of Honduras but every inch of the way, I miss you all and love you all. The warmth of your love and support keeps me moving forward.