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.