Delays, delays...

You can learn a lot about the human condition when your flight boards, and then, and hour and a half later, is cancelled. Things become fierce as you form an infinite cue with your co-travelers for flight re-scheduling. You realize how hollow and tenuous optimism can be; you tread the far-reaching borderlands of compassion.

I stood obsequiously aside as a first-class passenger harassed a bedraggled Delta agent. "I paid a thousand dollars for this ticket!" he shouted, "Serve me first! I must get to Minneapolis." Later he trolled the Line of Eternity asking everyone to confirm that the agent had been unacceptably rude. I wanted to look at him and say, "I'm sorry, Sir -- despite the fact that we live in an unfortunately capitalistic hegemony, it makes sense that the employees of the airline do not stratify our humanness in terms of our income and our willingness to spend. Your tie is overly pressed and not flattering."

I did not say this. Instead I took a sip of my coffee and tried to feel serene and glad that I wore my festive holiday sweater. Now I get to hang out in the airport for nine hours. If anyone ever wants a detailed description of the A Terminal of Boston Logan, I will gladly draw you an interpretive, artful sketch from memory. 

East

I am in New York City, sipping a latte in a hip coffee shop with a preponderance of mirrors and shafts of light shining artfully through bottles of vintage wine. I just submitted my first graduate school application.

I flew to Boston on Sunday to visit Harvard's Divinity School, and now I'm in New York to eat some bagels and realize my dream of ice-skating in Central Park whilst wearing a billowing scarf. So far I've spent a lot of time taking trains in the wrong direction on the underground. Also, my dear friend Kai and I split a pitcher of sangria last night and wandered the parks and streets of this place, pondering how the myth of a city can affect our experience of a particular tree.

It was fascinating to visit Harvard -- it feels absurd and audacious that I would consider that institution (speaking of myth), but their Religious Studies program is full of inspiring people that I would love to work with, so I really can't resist. That does not mean, however, that I was not thoroughly intimidated by the vast numbers of chandeliers and shiny shoes that I found on campus. It scared me somewhat, all of the history and the opulence and the ego. I walked through the historical architecture of Harvard Yard, dwarfed by monumental panes of stained glass and old stones engraved with Latin phrases that struck me as foreign incantations. I felt a deep pain in my chest when I compared the steeples and the slate-gray sky to my home in Oregon. If I were to study on the East Coast, I would be so far away from the forest and the mountains and Eugene.

But then it was three o'clock, and the bells tolled the hour, beautifully. There's a circular labyrinth outside of the Divinity School that's shaped exactly like the one that I know on Orcas Island at Indralaya -- I stood at the heart of the winding paths and used every fiber of my being to bind New England and the Ivy League to the salt-smell of the Pacific.

I met with a professor that teaches an entire class on eye-contact. She works with prison inmates, studying the way that Buddhism and Neuroscience can be integrated and then taught to prisoners in such a way that they can live free, meaningful lives behind bars. I remembered that I read a book by Thich Nhat Han when I was an exchange student in Chile. The monk is writing for prisoners of all sorts, from the literally incarcerated to those ensnared in the inevitable constraints of civilized culture. He says that, if you feel trapped, you should listen for bells, because every bell means that you're free, no matter where you are. Since then I've always been listening.

I'll be back home on Monday, to feel festive and celebrate my 24th birthday on the 24th of December. I will no longer be prime, but rather very highly divisible. I'm kind of excited to find out what that means.

A different perspective:

...TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK...

That constant heartbeat of a noise, like an unending polka danced by an obese woman in stilettos, had been pounding rhythmically ever since anyone could remember. Even though each beat created a minor aftershock in the clan's wall space, it faded into the background, an unquestionable element of life. Like ear mites.

Unquestionable, that is, until Simon stuck his whiskers where no mouse should tread. 

"Dad," he squeaked on an otherwise routine Tuesday, "what is that sound? Do our walls breathe?"

Monohan Mouse, Simon's distinguished father, regarded his son condescendingly. "Don't be silly," he said with a nervous twitch of his tail, "our walls are inert, nothing more than a delineation of our world. You mustn't think of such things."

Had Simon possessed any sort of sense, he would have left the matter at that and continued along the well-oiled family tradition of caution and prodigious replication. He had always displayed a perilous propensity for pondering, however, and we all know that young mice lack sense.

As a result, that previously inoffensive Tuesday raised it's fists for combat and prepared to go down in history. Simon (that little rascal) disregarded his father's sage advice and got ready to Leave. 

Vamoose. 

Pry at the Gaps. 

Escape.

...TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK...

Simon's ears quivered as they searched for the source of the cadence that had heretofore defined his existence. It somehow seemed to come from all directions at once. Well, he told himself, I have no choice--he would have to violate every moray of mouse-hood. With that thought, the errant son attacked the wall tooth and nail. His fellow rodents barely had time to gape in horror before the tip of his tail slithered through a gnawed perforation in the the wall. 

"He's a goner," rasped cousin Edna. 

Simon was a world away from his petrified family, however. He emerged into glaring light that poured down from an impossible height. The light glinted off of an equally expansive floor. Simon would have been faced with an uncontrollable urge to zoom a zamboni across that gleaming surface, had he known what a zamboni was. Instead, his heart caught wordlessly in his throat. What was this blinding place of forever dimensions? For the second time in a single Tuesday, Simon confronted just one option. The little mouse made his reluctant way across the foreign ground, the click of his nails producing an dissonant echo.

...TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK...

It was getting louder. Simon's exhilaration blended with the sobering realization that, for the first time in his life, he was alone. Just as his doubts were beginning to put a stutter in his gait, he saw It:

It was like nothing he had ever seen before. It towered almost to the limits of his vision. Its wooden sides reflected the glimmering mist of the forest from whence the cleft wood came. Simon did not know what a forest was. Its glass doors contained an entity that seemed to dance with Its rhythm. Simon could not discern its true shape. Its face... Simon couldn't see its face.

...TICKTOCK...

The mouse ran up the clock.

La La Land

So I made an interesting discovery about two days ago: one of my graduate school applications is due in just four weeks--an entire month earlier than I had planned. Eeep. I needed to rapidly come to terms with several highly stressful states of affairs, given that I really want to enroll in a master's degree program starting next fall. Unquestionably, the largest source of my newfound stress was the GRE (the "Graduate Record Examination" is pretty much the grad school equivalent of the SAT). After a frantic and barely-intelligible conversation with an outsourced exam scheduler in India, I discerned that the only way for me to take this exam in time for my deadline was to have it proctored to me in Portland, today. So I forked over the $160 registration fee, and came to Portland.

Let me just say now that I think the GRE is a manifestation of everything that is wrong with the educational system. In fact, I will claim that the GRE is evil. I hate that I have to take this test; I hate that the schools I am interested in require me to take it. But. My conviction that I can carve a path for myself studying The Questions That Matter made me swallow my pride and submit myself to the exam. I entered a room full of computers and artificial light, donned the yellow noise-canceling headphones, and clicked and typed my way through four hours of bullshit.

I bought The Princeton Review's Cracking the GRE to help me study for this test. The authors have a hilarious, sardonic take on standardized testing: "If you find yourself in the math section with a half a page full of calculations and no answer, you are in La La Land," the Princeton Review told me. It then gave me a neatly bullet-pointed list of tips on how to escape from La La Land. And, indeed, there was a moment today today when I was wandering a quagmire of calculations, and I was like, "Oh no! Caitlin! You are in La La Land!" I forgot the bullet-pointed list, and laughed out loud at the hilarity and hopelessness of La La Land. Then the test proctor came in and told me not to disrupt the testing studio. It was great.

But really, I survived. I actually finished the exam 45 minutes early, walked out of the Computer Lab of Exam Doom into an invigorating autumn downpour, and heaved a sigh of relief. Now I'm rocking gently on the train back to Eugene... Take that, Mr. Man--I can take your tests, and they do not daunt me. I may not get the best score in the world, and I may spend a portion of my life floating in different dimensions of La La Land, but I'm going to try with everything I've got to figure out this "Grad School" thing.

Employment

Since I've been back in Eugene, I've have to confront the inevitable fact that I need to find a job. It's really been fascinating a experience, given that I've spent the past five years of my life using every single resource I possess to evade the so-called real world. And by "fascinating," of course, I mean "ego-shattering." Getting a job necessarily means that I will be rejected again and again--probably upwards of millions of times in this economy--before I succeed. And I have not yet succeeded. I sent an e-mail to eight professors at the university asking if they needed research assistance, and six of them politely rejected me in just one hour. Two responses to my inquiries have been scams, and I will never forget how blatantly dismissive a manager of a café became when I told her that I didn't have any experience as a barista. Even worse, perhaps, is the silence. I've spent a fair amount of time in the past couple of weeks wondering what will become of the resumés that I have dropped off at local businesses. Will they slowly rot in forgotten drawers alongside the resumés of a thousand other job hopefuls? Do managers and business owners crumple their innumerable useless resumés with a wry chuckle? Maybe their laughter is maniacal. Maybe they actually eat the resumés.

There was a low point today, after I picked up a job application at community credit union. Everything felt bleak--not only was I considering working directly for the Man who fabricates the illusion we call "money," but I also needed to buy a watch. (My watch broke a few weeks ago, and I had taken it as a sign that I was free of linear time... but now it's become apparent that I actually need one to keep appointments and such things.) So I was marketing myself to a bank, I was shackling myself into time, and it was also starting to pour so that the ink ran on my warped resumé. Bleak indeed.

But then, when I started the engine of my car, this is what was coming out of the radio:

"Music is on the radio – I notice that as I listen, I think of my mistakes, ill words, wasted time, and the next note I think of who I love and who I hate and the success I've had at both and of my tomorrow's chances. And I feel like a singing god riding on a cloud snapping my fingers and ruling a universe."

Pete Seeger spoke with deep reassurance as he strummed his banjo, and I remembered that I love the rain. I remembered that I chose to come back to Eugene because this place is my home. I am not trapped--even in this conventional urban 'wasteland' there is music; an intensity of the human spirit that makes my skin crawl. Here there a long conversations over coffee, mountains, community, and my family. I am always free, wherever I am. 

Maybe I can face the job market tomorrow. Reject me, I dare you.

Danyo's Bowls

There was a silent meditation retreat during my last days at Indralaya. About 15 people partook, and it was perfect to end my time on the island in an atmosphere of deliberate silence. 

The meditator who I will remember most from the retreat was a Somalian man named Danyo. His complexion was so dark that it was almost purple, and he wore loose white robes. He walked slowly, with a sort of hulking grace. Before the vow of silence was taken, Danyo told a story about how he sustained a compound fracture in his upper arm running from a hippopotamus in the swamps of Somalia. 

The first evening of the retreat we all gathered in the library to enter into silence together, and Danyo unveiled his bowls. He had seven bronze bowls of various shapes and sizes. Wrapped lovingly in burlap, they were nested inside of one another like Russian dolls. He took them out one by one with an astonishing gentleness, and arranged them around his folded knees. And then he told us the story of his bowls.

Danyo told us how he moved from Somalia to Manhattan, and then got a job as a taxi driver. One day, when he was driving around the city, he passed a shop that was owned by a Tibetan couple--it sold traditional Tibetan items like thangka paintings and incense, and Danyo was immediately attracted to the place. That very day he parked his cab and walked inside. "It was like I was going home. I loved the bowls as soon as I saw them," he told us. His accented voice was rich and sweet like honey. 

Over time Danyo saved enough money to buy his bowls. Now he knows each of their voices like they are his brothers. He calls himself the steward of the bowls, and he lives only to let their singing lead people toward truth. To begin our silence, he rang the largest of the bowls. He struck the thick brass with a wooden mallet again and again, and I could feel the deep ringing in my chest. This was a sound that a whale would understand; a sound that a mountain might utter over the course of eons. And then everything was quiet. 

Now I'm not exactly sure about my status on reincarnation... I tend to believe very little, but lately I've been trying to remind myself that believing nothing gives me the space to accept everything. Why shouldn't Danyo be a reincarnation of a Tibetan lama? It really would make perfect sense. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a Romanian Religious Studies professor that I met on the train in Tibet, when I was leaving Lhasa. After briefly discussing the clouds and their meaning, this middle-aged Romanian woman relayed to me her experience in a Tibetan monastery. She told me how, upon entering the walls of the monastery, she immediately fell to her knees and dissolved into tears of joy. She told me that, before that moment, she had never felt like she belonged anywhere.

Why not?

I left Indralaya at dawn, before the silence was broken. The sun rose as the ferry bore me across the sea to the mainland. It's sort of a scary thing, "the mainland." It's a land of job markets and graduate school applications; a land where I could see the Bellingham oil refinery belching out plumes of dirty smoke over the Pacific. But we all have to return to the mainland, I guess. We have to take the peace and light that we gather on our respective islands and bring it home with us, bottled up somewhere inside of us. We have to share it to the best of our ability, cuz it's far too easy to get lost in the fog. At least that's what I'm trying to do. 

When I focus I can still let myself hear Danyo's largest bowl resonate. Or at least I can still imagine the vibration, somewhere near the pit of my stomach.

 

Written for an Indralaya Publication:

I grew up coming to family camp at Indralaya with my mother and brother. I vividly remember the sense of magic that permeated my experience of this place: we would always stay in Apple Cabin, and the carpets of my secret workshop that I built during guided meditations were deep purple. All year long I would look forward to painting my nails for the Sock Hop, or watching my intricate beach mandala vanish in the tide. That was back when I thought that “ferry” and “fairy” were the same word. It was easy for me to see the halos around trees.

A decade has intervened since my last visit to Indralaya. I started High School and then I graduated; I enrolled in college and emerged with a degree in Religious Studies and Neuroscience. I’ve studied in Egypt and Turkey, taught English in Tibet, practiced Buddhist meditation in India, and hitchhiked across South America. I’ve engaged critically with the questions that I find beautiful, been lost and confused, and grappled with the implications of my own freedom. I don’t know about “growing up” but I’m twenty-three now. I’m striving to carve out a place for myself in a chaotic world.

And now, ten years later, I have returned to Orcas Island to spend six weeks at Indralaya as an intern. And it’s beautiful. Again. I meditate in the morning, comparing bells with gulls and remembering the limitations of my analytical mind. I’ve laughed in the basil patch, made gallons of pesto, and stuck my face into plum trees in search of their perfect purple fruits. There have been moments where time collapses, and where I sense the presence my childhood self—the girl who believed that anything is possible. After being swept away in a whirlwind of continents, résumés, and unanswerable questions, it is so relieving to plunge my hands into freshly turned earth and breathe.

Of course my path is still loosely defined, and my thoughts still get the better of me. But my hands are stained with beet juice, and the other day I watched bioluminescent lights kiss and spin in the nighttime ocean. I’m remembering exactly how deep a moment goes. Although many years separate me from wide-eyed childhood wonder, Indralaya continues to be a beautiful place for me to plant my feet and remember my spirit.

What now, T.S. Eliot?

Do I dare 

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

...so asks T.S. Eliot, in his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." And I, in turn, ask myself, "Do I dare?" This question can mean so many things. When is a risk beautiful? What is freedom? On how many levels can one rattle the foundations of this universe and perceive new inklings of beauty?

I'm musing about Mr. Eliot because of Major Life Decisions, unsurprisingly. I'm musing because I just decided not to go to Alaska. I decided instead to move home to Eugene, Oregon and overwinter conceivably close to my family, listening to the sound of rain. "WHAT?!?" you ask, "Is this the Caitlin I know, the Caitlin who climbed an Egyptian pyramid in secret and stalked alpaca in the high Andes?" I dunno... the Buddha said that the self is an illusion. I just know that I'm not quite sure what "home" means anymore, and that I've been running for a long time. I know that after I bought my plane ticket to Alaska, things just didn't feel right. I've been to the plateau of Tibet and, spurred by some intangible itch of the soul, sprinted down the Friendship Highway through a nighttime thunderstorm. Everything has been preposterously beautiful, but I feel a bit lost and I can't pinpoint what I'm looking for. Yesterday when I was breaking up clods of earth in the garden beds it occurred to me that I need to be grounded for a while; to get in touch with my roots. 

So I'm going home. 

"Home."

Home?

...to the rain. The Northern Lights will wait.

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Geography and Other Frontiers

There is something inevitably metaphorical about islands. I mean, to get to the island where I'm currently living, I have to board a ferry and motor across buoyant sea-scapes and gleaming clouds. Then, when I disembark, my feet encounter something new. The secret coves with their purple and orange starfish, the fragrant forests, the gnarled orchards drooping with fruit: they are beautiful in their own right, but, beyond that, they're gleaming with luminous ideas. There's more space here for people to bring their far-flung notions and bring them to life (or cast them out to sea). There's a fierce independence to islands, like their making some sort of noble last stand against the corruption of civilization. I feel like I'm living on a real frontier. And the stark geography can push me to the boundaries of my mind.

Today I walked with some friends down the beach through a fierce gale. I wore rubber boots and tromped through the seaweed while the wind ran like vast invisible herds of horses over the surface of the Pacific. It's fall here now, suddenly--the blustering wind felled pine needles and apples by the dozen. This morning I made the sad discovery that most poems about autumn are terribly preoccupied with mortality. Poets love to muse about fleeting moments and impending frost in the fall. They talk a lot about final flairs and shadows. But I dunno, even in the rain storm I felt a beautiful golden texture to the turning of the seasons. Yesterday I plucked a ripe fig from the orchard, and today I pulled perfect smooth clay from the seaside. Both were malleable and fleshy, earthbound, beautiful. I'm not quite sure what I'm saying. There is still clay under my fingernails, and the fruit is ripe. I feel optimistic about autumn.

Pesto and Walruses

So I made 68 cups of pesto. If you are curious, 68 cups is equal to 4.25 gallons. I realize that this is a great feat, and I am proud. In Wisteria, the cabin where my friend Kendra and I reside, you can still catch the occasional fragrant whiff of basil.

It is worth mentioning that I met Kendra at a national park in Patagonia (for a reflection on that experience, you can glance at this post from the archives). We last parted ways in Bolivia, and then I sent her this e-mail saying, "So I'm going to this island in the fall... wanna come?" And, miraculously, it worked out. I picked her up in Seattle and now we're here, unfathomable latitudes from our meeting-place, laughing in the basil-patch. And we also happened to meet a bunch of Chileans on the ferry and practiced our Spanish in the open water at ridiculous odds.

Being back at camp Indralaya is beautiful. It's been exactly a decade since I was last here, and I can feel the presence of the past selves of my childhood here--the Caitlins that believed in magic. I've been meditating every morning with the resident managers and my co-volunteers, listening to vast silence punctuated by the occasional airplane or soulful loon. I've been thinking a lot lately about the crazy mental barriers we so often insist on building... you know, barriers against freedom, or magic, or love. I've been thinking about breaking them down.

Oh and NEWS FLASH: I've been informed of an unfathomably exciting volunteer opportunity. Apparently a marine wildlife rescue center outside of Anchorage, AK is currently seeking volunteers to spoon with baby walruses. I am not kidding. There are baby orphan walruses that need humans in walrus suits to cuddle with them. I'm currently scheming ways to incorporate walrus-cuddling into my Alaska winter. It just makes sense.

Forward ho!

So after a bit of a hiatus, I've decided to resuscitate this narrative. Because I'm a million percent convinced that I can find something beautiful in every moment that's worth writing about and reflecting on. And, of course, my life continues to be ridiculous. I'm trying on questions and lifestyles like so many hats; traveling still; trying at once to figure out my future and rejoice in the present moment. Reminding myself that bewilderment is sacred.

So here's the lowdown of what has happened in the four month gap since I last wrote: I flew from Peru to Minnesota, where I visited Carleton for about a week, and then I flew to Seattle and took the train down the Pacific coast to my hometown of Eugene, Oregon. There I used my dwindling funds to purchase a car (a 1995 Subaru, Delilah), and proceeded to drive down the interstate to my summer job in the mountains of Southern California. After spending 11 crazy/wonderful weeks working with kids and reveling in starlight, I drove back up to Eugene by way of San Francisco, said "Hey," and then promptly filled Delilah's trunk to the brim with anything I could possibly ever want and drove up to the San Juan Islands in Northern Washington. I'm currently living on Orcas Island, working at a beautiful camp where I used to come when I was young. I'm making pesto, drying plums, eating ripe figs off the tree... and in my spare time applying to graduate school. Days ago I accepted a job working with sled dogs in Alaska for the winter, and that's another adventure looming on the horizon. The Northern Lights.

The other night I was sitting at the beach at Indralaya, the camp where I'm working, with my co-interns. We watched the sun sink and the almost-full moon rise, marveling at the way celestial reflections slither on the ocean without ever moving. Then, one by one, bioluminescent particles came to life in the tides. The little lights were a violent shade of aqua, and they darted about almost playfully -- they kissed and swirled, and then, without warning, extinguished. I've had Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game" stuck in my head incessantly since my arrival on the island, and I can't get over the smell of things. I'm excited about everything unfolding (with a healthy amount of fear and confusion for spice).

So that's that. It's all boundless, and I'm writing again. Stay tuned for stories.

...and then we flew.

Cuzco and Maccu Picchu were a story of impossible, ancient mortar. That is to say, the Incas did not use mortar. They used magic. After a 12 hour bus ride (in which more than one pickle per hour was consumed) Nathaniel and I excited Bolivia for good (only one day over the visa limit!) and arrived in the ancient capital of the Incan empire. There was a peculiar misty light in Cuzco, which strangely seemed to sharpen the edges of things... and many stairs. Many, many stairs. 123 stairs to get to our hostel, in fact. Magic mortar mingled with modernity on the city streets, and we enjoyed museums and wandering and markets.

And then we journeyed to the iconic ruins of Maccu Picchu. We did the Extreme Budget Version (total cost: $100). This is what the Extreme Budget Version of Maccu Picchu entails: On the first day we awoke at 3:42 a.m. to take a series of harrowing taxi rides to a hydroelectric plant in the middle of the jungle where we had to walk on some railroad tracks for three hours to get to the town at the base of the iconic ruins. Exhausted, we fell asleep at 7:00 p.m., only to get up the next day at 3:42 a.m. to sprint up 600 vertical meters of stairs to be the first people in line at Maccu Picchu so we can climb another mountain (i.e. more stairs).  It was crazy, but it was beautiful. We communed with llamas. Nathaniel juggled. I really have no idea what the Incas were thinking building a city up there with the clouds and lots of vertical cliffs, but wowzers. Even after so much travel I am still overwhelmed by these "postcard moments."

We splurged on train tickets to return to Cuzco, where we proceeded to treat ourselves to full body massages with hot rocks and pedicures for $15. That's right, my toenails are now something verging on hot pink. We finished Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy on a park bench in the pigeon-filled Cuzco plaza, I baked banana bread, and then we took an absolutely mind-numbing 22 hour bus ride to Lima. (I actually wanted to strangle myself with the complimentary blanket after we had to watch the ad about the award-winning prescription lens company for the 27th time... but we made it). 

And now we're in Lima, in a hostel overrun with delightful hippies that get by selling hand-made crafts. It smells unmistakably like the ocean here, and it's cuz the Pacific's only a few blocks away. We've run along the seafront in the mornings (so much oxygen!), seen an extremely excellent ancient library that monks used to use, and failed at visiting two museums (par for the course). And today is our last day in South America. Tomorrow we fly to Chicago... what? I really can't believe it. But rituals help. You know, Meaningful Things like blowing out candles or wearing robes. So, after some consideration, we decided to commemorate the past seven and a half months with flight.

...and then we flew. Or more technically, paraglided (paraglid?). I believe that my experience of those 12 minutes--those moments spent hanging silently over the Lima coastline with my trusty parachute pilot Marcelo--is the closest I will ever come to understanding what it is like to be a bird. Every flying dream I've ever had merged with reality as I watched my feet soar over city streets and regarded premium Lima pent-house apartments up close. Walking is so bumbling and lame in comparison.

And tomorrow I get to fly in a roaring mechanical behemoth; a machine that will bear me back to my mother country. It really is strange. I find myself wishing  for something concrete to lend it all meaning... When Nathaniel and I finished reading The Amber Spyglass out loud, there was a whole page imprinted simply with two words: "The End." There were ornate designs squiggling above and below those words. It was almost monumental. How can you find that in life? I sure don't know. Instead of two clear words with text ornaments, I know that life will give me an overwhelming whirlwind of airports and friends and family and places, and that I will be left grasping for threads to orient me in the flood. I'll unpack my backpack, start thinking about my summer job, say goodbye to Nathaniel. Be confused for a while. But it has been beautiful. I don't know if I'll ever make sense of it, but I have flown. And I will fly. Tomorrow, and again and again.

Coffee and Ancient Stones

So the coffee man never showed up to take us to the coffee farm. A harrowing taxi ride took us to the sultry jungle-town of Caranavi, but the second leg of the trip never quite connected... This is actually pretty par for the course for Bolivian logistics--with more time, of course, we could have figured out how to get there eventually, but with only eleven days until The Return to "Reality" (AH) we just didn´t have time. We did, however, get to spend an interesting 24 hours in the metropolis of Caranavi, which was nothing like any Bolivian city I have encountered. There were no gringos whatsoever in this green, hot, sporadically rainy crossroads, but there was infinite fried chicken. Like, really. Nathaniel and I were astounded. Next to the fried chicken, there were also ladies selling pure un-sugared hunks of home-processed chocolate on the street. I crumbled this delicious jungle-fruit into my espresso while Nathaniel and I read aloud from Philip Pulman´s His Dark Materials series. (A note: I think that the quality that makes both coffee and chocolate delicious is exactly that which tastes like dirt. Coffee and chocolate are delicious dirt.)

After Caranavi another harrowing taxi ride brought us to Coroico, another jungle town (during this particular harrowing taxi ride, Nathaniel and I shared the back seat with an entire family of four). Coroico is mind-bogglingly positioned on top of a sheer jungle cliff, and it was inside of a cloud for most of our time there. Occasionally, though, I glimpsed the world and realized that I have a deep, semi-rational desire to learn to hang-glide. Nathaniel and I had one of the best fondue experiences of our lives at a little German-run fondue restaurant, I glimpsed a firefly, and I picked a coffee berry and observed with wonder and it changed from deep scarlet to brown over the course of a day.

One (final?) harrowing taxi ride later, we are back in La Paz. Today we saw some spectacular pre-Incan ruins with an amateaur archeology enthusiast, and I was reminded how much ancient civilizations baffle me. The ruins were up on the plateau (at about 4000 meters). One of the men with whom I was exploring the ancient rocks, a British-turned-Bolivian writer, was convinced that you could see stars at mid-day at that altitude... I couldn´t see any stars, so I ran my hands over the impossibly smooth masonry and thought about the scope of time. Fifteen hundred years? That´s how old these stone blocks are? What about three months? That´s how long I´ve been in Bolivia. And I´m leaving tomorrow for Peru...

La Paz

So I have left the Sucre universe behind in exchange for the for the airy mountain city of La Paz. "The Peace." The city has been somewhat quiet due to the resurrection of Jesus, but I ate a chocolate bunny and got ridiculously lost while jogging uphill with limited oxygen. I have enjoyed good food,  helped Nathaniel pick out an increasingly large stash of fine knitted alpaca "gear" for re-sale in the States, and planned out the few remaining days of "This Trip." (You know, this absurd-kaleidescope journey that's gonna be reduced to a label just like that in 16 days.) I've also purchased a strange array of cheap earrings, some of which involve colored feathers... and discovered that I have a weakness for knit leg-warmers.

Before leaving Sucre I had the immense pleasure of hiking through the mountains (my mountains?) one last time. The moon was full and deep yellow--Henrry, a guide for Condortrekkers who has come to be a dear friend, told me that the moon flickers golden like that when it's sad. I dunno... The stars were out of control before they were eclipsed by the melancholy moon, I saw silly rainbow caterpillars, I bathed in a waterfall, and I talked with Henrry about the way in which people re-interpret and express the intangible beauty of the universe. The mountains simply Were, still secretive, monolithic, just out of reach, almost breathing. And I said goodbye.

On the way back from the hike we rode in the over-packed camión. I had space for one foot on the floor of the truck, the wind whipped my hair, and a lady made my Australian friend hold a box that turned out to contain a live chicken. Then I got back to my home in Sucre, where I've lived for almost three months. I bid farewell to a beautiful community in that white-washed city and packed my life into a bag again. Movement: a beautiful, exhilarating exercise in serial heartbreak. I am addicted.

Next Nathaniel and I are planning on visiting a small organic coffee farm in the Yungas, the high altitude jungles a few hours outside of La Paz. We met the owner of the farm today--he served me a steaming delectably foamy delicious cappuccino and talked rapid-fire about his passion for coffee. His eyes were exactly the color of coffee. As a coffee aficionado, I am brimming with anticipation

Freedom=Licking Flamingoes

So I´ve left Sucre behind to be a tourist for a little bit. In particular,  I am going to roam over great expanses of salt in central Bolivia. I´m currently in the bleak, flat, high altitude town of Uyuni--we got here last night at 2 a.m. and had to wander the frigid streets with prowling dogs to find a hostel. We found one eventually, and today I enlisted, along with Nathaniel and our Swedish friend Sara, to spend the next three days voyaging across alien, salty, geyser-filled landscapes in a Jeep. Ostensibly there are flamingoes, and a glaring question has arisen in my mind: are the flamingoes salty? Clearly I am going to need to lick the flamingoes. Also, I am looking forward to learning all of the lyirics to Aladdin´s "A Whole New World" in Swedish and taking cheesy pictures of undescribable geology.

Leaving Sucre was weird. I mean I have to go back there to get my computer and my passport if nothing else, but it hurts to gradually dislodge myself from a place that has an unquestionable flavor of "home." I´ve learned to play Settlers of Catan. I´ve decorated my room, I´ve given my soul to the mountains, and all of the ladies in the market recognize me and call me mamita linda or querida caserita. The fruit lady even gives me bites of crazy exotic fruit for free every time I buy from her. And the other night we cooked a fabulous three course meal for Lidia, the secretary for Condortrekkers. It felt so much like family that it was almost uncanny. So it´s weird not to be there, but that´s how it goes, I guess: things arise and things pass away, like the ocean lapping the shore, or like huge salt lakes that evaporate over millenia and turn into enormous piles of table-salt. I will console myself by chasing incongruous pink birds through the desert in an effort to determine their flavor.

Back in Sucre

Life in Sucre continues. I recently got back from a trek with 10 French clients... One of them had a birthday during the trek, and I managed to break one of the two celebratory bottles of wine all over my sleeping bag. Henrry (the Bolivian guide) and I had to consume countless gourd-fulls of chicha (fermented corn beverage) that were given to us by a subsistence farmer because the clients didn't like it and we didn't want to offend anyone. I marveled and this one particular rock that crumbles like snow, and I think I began to better understand donkeys. I got up before five every day to prepare breakfast. I noticed the moon.

There has always been a fascinating parade of characters in the apartment where I´ve been living, but now, for various reasons, everyone has dissappeared. This means that I have been prancing about the large empty space listening to loud music and lighting candles at random. Yesterday I washed trekking dishes for hours straight--I think I may have been enlightened there for a second when I was scrubbing the stove with hot sudsy water.

I have also been reading a ridiculous amount of poetry, and thinking with some apprehension about the... (gah) future. I even got so far as filling out most of a fellowship application, but then I accidentally deleted it. Today I made a rough list of experiences that might comprise a resumé of mine and I laughed at myself a bit. The sunlight is reflecting of the white-washed walls of Sucre, and my solitude is poignant and optimistic. All is well.

Starting a New Journal

As I have written, my three-year old journal was stolen back in December. Mild tragedy. I bought a new one in a librería in Punta Arenas, on the Straight of Magellan, and have been filling it with new words for the last four months. A couple of weeks I thought I had lost it (AH) but it actually turned out to be in my brain (my backpack one) next to some dead batteries. These events have made me think a lot about what journaling means to me. I was reminded of this today when I was writing in my journal and, on a whim, I read the first entry I ever wrote in it. I remember writing it: I was on the top bunk of a sketch hostel in Puerto Natales, Chile. Everyone in the dorm was asleep, and I was writing with my headlamp...

So how do you start a new journal? By ruminating on the old one that was neatly and horribly stolen from me in the Puerto Montt bus terminal? By wondering how the hell it can be worth it to pour my soul and my secrets into something so impermanent?


Oh I don't know of course. There was so much beauty in that journal but there was intense suffering too--maybe it's better in the end to let it all go; to be baptized by the frigid winds that blow here at the end of the world. Goodbye heartwrenched pages of first-kisses and Tibet exploration and musing at Carleton and on dark Kansas highways. Goodbye to resolutions about family and enlightenment written on the roof of my beloved Bodh Gaya Vihar, and goodbye to my goodbye to my Sangha. Goodbye to that place where tears splashed on the page from raw loneliness. Goodbye words; you are made of air and mean nothing, just like this cloak of a "self" I wear skating through life. 


But of course I have to build it up again. I am not enlightened so I bought a new journal to replace the old one, and goddamn you impermanence I'm going to fill up these pages with the contents of my soul. Again. It's like finding the strength to love someone again; to climb up the mountain after you have fallen, again . This process may be truth but it stings like hell when your mirror is shattered and you have to start all over again with a newborn shaft of light or whatever stuff it is that makes words and dreams. But it's noble I guess. Or hope.


Beginnings are freedom.

Timeline

So the Andes were large and spectacular and there wasn`t enough air. I hiked with Nathaniel and his mother and brother, and our guide brought us up a "little hill" that was actually a 17,000 ft. mountain (we then skied down the snowy face without skies). I began to empathize with the cult obession that surrounds summits. We also walked on soft nobules of spongy creek moss through landscapes of snowy spires, and I experienced simultaneous hail and sunlight. Goofy parades of awkwardly shorn alpacas made me giggle. The snow-mountains produced their own light when the stars came out. I was gasping; it was alien and beautiful and very very cold.

Then we went to the sacred Lake Titicaca where the Incan universe began. It all came from a very unremarkable rock, apparently, a rock on an island in the lake called "Isla del Sol." It was sunny there, but it also rained. I spent a lot of time frenetically reading random books and looking out over the waters that the guidebook called "limpid" eventhough "limpid" seems like a word that is way too flabby and lame to describe the iridescent womb of the Incan universe.

And then Nathaniel´s family left, all too quickly. They were great--Nathaniel and his brother argued in lawerly detail about everything. Once when they were arguing particularly hilariously their mom stepped in between them and started singing this song that goes "I am a pizza! With pepperoni!" I miss them a lot like they were my family or something because of all that mild dysfunction and love and three part harmony.

Now Nathaniel and I are in the city of  Cochabamba, looking up a fellow Carleton alum that runs a chain of bookstores called the Spitting Llama and is writing a book about the history of coffee. We might get into early-morning Tai Chi; I don´t know. Mostly we´ve obssesively been reading Michael Chrichton´s Timeline which we found in the La Paz branch of the Spitting Llama. We read almost 300 pages aloud in just two days. Yesterday we read aloud in a restaurant owned by a crazy Frenchman--we met a drug-lord with reflective aviators who told us about his friend who was a concentration camp survivor, and then we ordered a bottle of wine before noon and kept reading about quantum foam and time-travel. Later a lady with an impractically small chair on her head walked by. I don´t know.

And I have purchased an alpaca sweater which I believe to be authentic. It is frumpy and long and is spattered with irregular green and red geometry. I love it a lot, especially when I wear it, am warm, and think about how alpacas look like ewoks.

So that´s the timeline of my life, in a nutshell. As soon as Nathaniel and I finish Chrichton´s Timeline I´m probably going to head back to Sucre and continue trekking through my beloved Frailes mountains with interesting people. I just found out that I can fly from Cochabamba to Sucre with the Bolivian air force for $30, and it revolutionized my world. (On the bus to La Paz I awoke at 2 a.m. to the driver telling all of the men on the bus to get out and push and then we ran out of gas and had to wait for another bus to deliver diesel in 5 gallon buckets). Yeah, so I´ll buy that ticket soon. And did I mention that I´ve purchased my ticket back to the States? It´s for May 11th, from Lima, Peru to Chicago. AHHHH.

Words, Rocks, and Beads

 OK, ok, ok...  After having spent the last month volunteering in Sucre for Condortrekkers, a non-profit trekking company, I am FULL--full of airy poems unwritten, full of rocks and their impossible timeless feats, full of questions and love for the colorful landscape of Bolivia.

I´ve filled my days in Sucre reading in cafès with serial cups of coffee (current selection: The Passion of the Western Mind, a 500 page interview of Western intellectual history... learned that Socrates and Plato were absolute ballers; been a bit bogged down in the Middle Ages lately), wandering around the white-washed streets of Sucre eating humitas and being lost, leading 1-3 day treks through the Andes, cooking, taking Spanish lessons, washing dishes, and staying up late into the night discussing Things That Matter over glasses of delicious affordable vino tinto. A couple of weeks ago I realized with some surprise that I´ve walked into a world that I love. That realization is at once fabulous and heart-wrenching, especially given that the end of this year of wandering has become concrete, what with the flight I just booked from Lima to Chicago in mid-May (eep).

In order to encapsulate some of my life in blog form I want to briefly address three points: (1) Carnival, (2) the mountains, and (3) beads. Ahem...

(1) Carnival may sound fun to many people, and in many places it may a wonderful inverted party, but I did not find carnival to be fun. For weeks surrounding carnival young people paraded through the streets of Sucre with water balloons and large brass instruments, assaulting passers-by with liquid explosions and deafening renditions of La Macarena. It usually takes a lot to make me angry, but by the time Carnival was in full swing I was dangerous. I may or may not have wrested a water pistol from the hands of a seven year old boy and used his own weapon to squirt him in the face. I also may or may not have ripped off a conniving teenager`s hat, thrown it on the ground, and stomped on it in sheer rage.

(2) There is a passage from East of Eden in which Steinbeck describes moments of glory: "You can feel them growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite... Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes..." The mountains where I´ve been trekking have (re)taught me exactly what this glory means. The cliffs are bent and colored in impossible illegible patterns, the sky yawns like a perfect question, and occasional thunderstorms batter me into something real. I happily scatter pieces of myself over the Andes as I walk the ancient Incan trails, even though I know I´ll never get the pieces back.

(3) A few days ago I made a waist-bracelet with my friend Kendra, who is from Ohio. We bought beads from the bead-man in the Mercado Central (a character who is brilliant when juxtaposed against the potato-ladies). As we were beading all of those golden and blue and sometimes bright-white beads we bought from the bead man, I couldn´t help but recall those rainbow rocks that litter the mountains I´ve been walking... in one of my favorite poems Gary Snyder writes, "Lay down these words like rocks." Words and rocks and beads--how do you string them together? I found a sacred agency in beading. Something about freedom.

Yeah, so that´s life, imperfectly rendered in bullet-points. Right now I´m in the beautiful rust-red city of La Paz, eating falafel and preparing to rendezvouz with Nathaniel´s mother and brother for a week and a half of adventuring accross Bolivia (yes, Nathaniel and I have been reuinited and it´s wonderful to be experiencing again with my Partner in Travel and Confusion).

And thus it all unfolds in some sort of inside-out oragami that I could never hope to understand. I ponder Thomos Aquinas. Nathaniel and I wonder if God doodles in different dimensions. The mountains keep their secrets. Tomorrow? Nos veremos.

More media?

Dear Readership,

I have a confession: I've created another blog. This blog, however, is entirely different in nature. I've been reading so much lately, and I've found myself copying poems and quotes incessantly... so it occurred to me that it might be cool to have an online place where I can copy poems, quotes, and images that are pleasing to me. Here is the URL of my newly founded collection:

riprapping.tumblr.com

Fear not, however. This blog will continue to exist (and hopefully thrive) as a place for my writing on thoughts and travels and the silliness of life. Happy reading!

Sincerely,
Caitlin

The Camión

Often at the end of a trek we take public Bolivian transport from our rural terminus back to Sucre. This mode of transport is known simply as "el camiòn" (literally, "the truck"). And that´s what it is. A truck. A high-sided flatbed truck that is filled to the brim with Bolivian villagers and their market-wares and tired hikers, standing room only. It grumbles bumbily over terrifying mountain roads, and when the rains come town the driver covers its occupents with a tarp. To call the camión uncomforable would be a gross understatement. The last time I rode it there was a poor little girl jammed into my smelly hiking armpit, a boy vomiting into his hat at my feet, and old lady pinching the back of my leg because I was squashing her bag of wheat. Note how I smile forcibly as the truck fills up (photo credit to Lim, a delightful French tourist with whom I hiked):

Strangely enough, however, I find something about the camión thrilling, maybe even endearing... Perhaps I haven´t ridden it enough, but I find it amusing to watch young campesinos exchange flirtatious looks and cell-phone numbers, and I marvel at the way the Bolivian mothers juggle numerous children and blankets full of peaches. And, with the right mental fortitude, I can find true contentment as I roll through jaw-dropping mountainscapes with the sun on my back (again, thanks Lim).

Parallels

Sorry Blog! I´ve been living in Sucre for over two weeks now, leading treks for a non-profit organization and pasting poems to the expansive blank walls of the room I´m renting. How do I fit it all into a post? How the labyrinth of whitewashed city streets blurrs with the labyrinth of my mind? How I´ve fallen in love with ancient Greek philosophy, and learned that cows with red tassel earrings are protected by the devil? For some reason I´m at more of a loss than usual, so I think I´ll copy down an entry from my journal. I tried to express two sets of parallel experiences... I don´t know if it makes sense or exactly how it matters, but I felt a weird resonance in these moments, like they were charged with meaning.

12.14.11
Happy Valentine's Day, self. I was thinking while I was hiking today, and, for some reason I started grouping imagines, like I could categorize this strange montage I call "my life." Below I will record some results of this thought experiment:


#1
(a) I´m listening to the only three songs on Master-G, my MP3 player, again and again on a bus ride in Northern Argentina. For some reason, the swirls of the bus driver´s smoke seem more beautiful than most things, like they are spelling out secrets in a language I can't understand.
(b) I´m experiencing wind and vertigo at the top of a wrinkled Andean cliff. I feel like the rushing brown river has turned to green falling numbers like in the Matrix. Like the number/water whispers Truth.

#2
(a) I´m laying alone in the shady grass after lunch during one of the treks. My body feels like part of the earth as I waft in and out of dreams... "This is what contentment tastes like," I think.
(b) I'm painting my toenails a perposterous shade of day-glo orange in my freshly-decorated room. It´s Valentine´s day, and I´m listening to Bob Dylan and thinking about love.

I don´t know... All these moments happen and you have to order them, draw analogies, build your narrative. But sometimes it´s so overwhelming. What do I do when an old woman in the Bolivian foothills holds my white hand and looks up at me in wonder through a face that mirrors mountains? When I climb out of a crater at sunrise at place my palm in the fossilized footprint of a Tyrranosaurus Rex? I make strange parallels, I guess, and grasp at poems.

Unexpected Bagpipes

So I just hitchhiked from northeastern Argentina to northwestern Argentina, and I'm bound for Bolivia in just two days. However, for this post to make sense, I must briefly revisit my Junior year of college in Minnesota and recount a brief story:

I had stayed up until the nether-hours of the night writing a paper for my existentialism class. It was about Nietzsche and the death of God... how can we create a framework of morals in a word devoid of transcendent truth? I sure as hell didn't know, but I typed something thesis-driven and exited Carleton's computing center to the sleepy cheeping of birds and pre-dawn darkness. I wasn't only tired--I was beaten. Those unsettling unanswerable questions (you know, the ones that are so mighty at night when everyone else is sleeping?), they had stomped down on my sleep-deprived soul and ground in their heals. I walked slowly across the quad through solitude and confusion... And then it happened, The Miracle: A barely-visible figure in the middle of the grassy quad began to play the bagpipes. Passionately. The notes of the bagpipes rose bravely through the night. Lofty. Absurd. Almost-clashing. Epic. It was a little bit otherworldly, but it was human in a way that puts a pang in your chest. I forgot my deep fatigue and was moved. In that moment, I loved the anonymous player of pipes.

OK, fast-forward one and a half years to today, the 30th of January, 2011. Nathaniel and I have been on the move through Argentina since January 8th, and we're getting pretty tired of being tourists. I mean, we've seen some spectacular things, but a couple of weeks of spectacular-thing-guzzling can bring you down... you start to miss the trappings of community and get the urge to dig your feet into a place and get beyond the superficial "spectacular things." Last time we were weary like this we were at the southern tip of this continent, and we scrambled cookie dough on a stove top to console ourselves. Today, however, we decided to visit some painted hills. And they were, well... spectacular. It's like, God accidentally spilled all these oceanic turquoises and fiery reds and yellows on some random cliffs in the Argentine desert and forgot to clean up after himself. Giant cacti stood like sentinels as Nathaniel and I relished the quiet of the high desert. And then, out of nowhere, a man started playing the bagpipes. He walked slowly, belting out beautiful alien bagpipe twangs that were absolutely out of place in the Andean highlands. The painted cliffs were his intended audience, and I loved him. After a performance that was both heart-wrenching and silly, he packed his pipes back into his sports car (they wheezed as they deflated into the back seat) and explained that he was from Buenos Aires and yes, he did often travel with his bagpipes. Then he drove away.

Iguazú.

I would like to take a moment for us to consider the word cataract. As far as we know it started off in Greece. Katarhaktes means "broken, falling water;" "swooping, rushing, striking down;" and even "portcullis." "Portcullis," probably, because of the way that castle gates come slamming down. In Latin the word cataractus simply came to mean "waterfall." The French, however, looked at the Greeks, thought of castle doors in terms of "obstruction," and passed their interpretation to English. Then we labeled an eye-disease.

Cataract can also meas waterfall in English, and it strikes me as silly that such a beautiful word connotes blindness. Countless gallons of rushing water subjected to gravity and empty space... to me, that deserves strong syllables; hard sounds that ring while they flow. Cataract.

Forgive my etymological gushing (katarhaktes?). It's just that today I went to Iguazu falls in Northeastern Argentina, and I couldn't help but think of the brave letters that strive to depict beauty like that. In Spanish it's catarata. I mean, it was really just a wide lazy river that ran out of ground, but holy shit! rainbows and fireworks. You get dizzy, and the improbability of the mist and the roar, it eats you. Cataract. My eyes were so wide open.

Unfortunately my experience of Iguazu was tempered by fast-food courts, long lines, a cheesy train that played music, motorized rafts full of screaming sight-seers, and hoards upon hoards of co-revelers. I mean, I don't mind sharing nature with people, but there must be a way to make an awesome waterfall seem less like Disneyland? Maybe? I asked myself this as I watched a giant jungle-ant struggle to move a Pringle.

But whatever. I saw wordless falling water and weird racoonish-beings with long snouts and some of the most out of control spider web fortresses ever. Mist fogged my sun-glasses and I thought I could fly. I will try to forget to bandaids on the concrete path.

Tomorrow Nathaniel and I are planning to leave Puerto Iguazu and hitchhike our way westward across northern Argentina toward Salta, Jujuy, and Bolivia. The first large intermediate city we want to reach is called "Corrientes," and I am very excited to find myself a piece of cardboard, write that (very wonderful) word on it with my green Sharpie, and then stick out my thumb. I realize that I haven't written much about our experience hitching ~2800 kilometers to Buenos Aires (I'm planning on dedicating a whole post to our crazy road life soon--until then look at Nathaniel's blog), but it was awesome and I'm excited to do it again. So here's to the vagrant life, and cups of mate served steaming on the highway...

On an Uruguayan street after espresso:

Nathaniel: "You know, I think fiction might be a better way of expressing truth because you aren´t confined to reality."

Caitlin: (repeats Nathaniel´s statement exactly)

Nathaniel: "I hate you. You make me say things like that."

La Poesía

I write from Buenos Aires, from a cafe/bar called La Poesia. I chose beer over coffee, and have proceeded to watch a fleeting rain storm drench the parched streets of this teeming city. The bottom floor of the cafe has flooded--I watch with some amusement from the loft as waiters tiptoe over tiles. Thunder booms; there's a pictures of Jorge Luis Borges sipping coffee just downstairs. Yes, there is poetry here.

There's too much to write. Of course. Since my last post Nathaniel and I have
--said goodbye to an unbelievable universe of clouds and rocks and people
--hitchhiked over 1700 miles from Southern Patagonia to Buenos Aires, Argentina
--eaten Thai curry on a friend's rooftop terrace in BA while discussing Nietzsche

Sometimes insufficient lists make me want to run down a busy city street in the rain and bang my head on a bell. I don't think I'll do it, but I'm tempted. I think, my dear readership, that the times call for a promise (what with an imminent trip to Urugray with which to contend): I will write more. Soon.

It's time to ring, 2011.

Torres del Paine National Park awoke splendidly to the new year. Fairytale cloud castles, and lo! the towers. It's been such an honor to live in the shadow of these iconic granite spires... Today they appeared to me as the sweet craggy cores of carrots, but then they morphed into opaque amber, then pencil lead. There are a shit ton of poems in those hunks of rock, and you can't help but be a little reverent.

Christmas has passed here in the park, and now the new year too. On the night of Christmas Eve a crew of Chilean search and rescue workers yelled, "Gringos! Vecinos!", invited us to partake of their wine, and smashed a birthday cake (which they just happened to have with them) into my face. It was beautiful. The sun beat down on my tent on Christmas morning, we played cards in the grass, and since then the universe has given me many presents.

My last week of work in the park has included a disproportionate amount of time wearing a jumpsuit and a Santa hat. We've sung carols about the principles of Leave no Trace to passing hikers, decorated a Christmas tree, made wooden signs that tell people not to feed the marauding foxes, dug trenches, and moved boulders. For the new year we painted silly masks orange and told one another beautiful stories of 2010 (popcorn style). A small herd of sheep was crucified for the consumption of the hotel staff, I laughed so hard I cried as I helped wash dishes in the kitchen, and I proposed to a cloud.

We the volunteers decided that our motto for 2011 is "It's gonna be fine." Because it will be. The unknown course of my life can be terrifying, but there are moments when I love the panoply of possible futures that I might one day call mine. So ring, 2011! Ring! There's a whole year to live before the apocalypse, and it's gonna be fine.