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.
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.
Glad you are loving your life there. I love rocks, too. I am gradually rearranging the rocks of the world. I sent granite to the heights of Mt. Fuji via a friend; I deposited Fuji rocks in the sparkling granite of central Washington. And there are sea shells in my driveway and garden.
ReplyDeleteGrandma Peggy
Back at Syracuse in 1954 we had a professor named Abraham Vinus. Some wag wrote this limerick about him on the blackboard one day:
ReplyDeleteThere was once a professor named Vinus
Whose library contained none but the finest.
He had works of Tasso
Orlando De Lasso,
Donald Duck and Saint Thomas Aquinas
Grandma Peggy