A Single Shaft of Light

I considered a grand apology for all the half-thoughts, mental vomit and intellectual garbage that has cascaded from my mind onto this webpage. I suppose I could make it. But part of me wants to stand by what I've written, confused and angry and contradictory as it is, as hypocritical and pretentious as it may be.

The correct word at this point would be a good Greek one, metanoia, the word for “turning around,” literally (often translated as “repentance”). It wasn't that the Prodigal Son repented his poor behavior but that he turned around. And walked home. Back to the start.

Yesterday I sat in Santo Domingo cathedral here in Oaxaca, Mexico, and after a long and torturous session of self-examination and confusion, I walked out. And looked around. What, who did I find? An open plaza, with people mingled around its edges. Vendors and old Mexican women chatting on benches, tourists taking photos, young Latino lovers tangled up in each other, children toddling to an open-armed mother, friends laughing with each other about some shared joke. People. Just people. Doing what people do: be people. Silly, sad, serious, angry, joyous people. And I saw myself among them. I stood still and watched them move around me. The afternoon clouds shifted and a single shaft of light lanced across the sky. Hope. Peace. Reconciliation.

The turning will take time. I have moved too quickly, assumed to much and judged too harshly. We are all people, with our problems, hopes and joys. All sorts of things are mixed up in me and I haven't settled them out yet. Again, it will take time. I'd not like to go into all the details of what things I've discovered in my life that are not healthy and need to be surgically removed through some intense concentration and letting go.

I saw myself, briefly, clearly, in that moment in Santo Domingo. It was not pretty. You spoiled brat. I have put the world at your feet and given you everything and more and your heart is still hard, your eyes still cold and dead, your mind weakened by trivialities. The mystery and wonder of your daily life has been ignored, taken for granted and skimmed over. I felt all that lays behind me, all that lays still ahead of me, and a great sense of thankfulness arose in me. The weapons of the self I use to defend the narrow, fragile defenses and boundaries and frontiers of “my” space in the world crashed to the ground and shattered. And my heart, eyes, mind lept up at the reality of my existence, the wonder and miracle of being alive.

I almost pulled the plug on this whole blog. Because I saw in it perhaps a true image of a part of me: and it disgusted me. Ugly, twisted meanness, selfish defensiveness, the contorted scars of anger and fear, the old blemishes of doubt and judgment. Ancient, primordial roots of what is the mixed bag of my human-ness. The immaturity and hypocrisy rushed to the fore with blinding clarity. And I had to say, Yes, this is part of me. The blog, if anything, has done this and it is a service. Probably not all our thoughts should be made public to all people anywhere at any time. But it forces self-examination, I suppose.

Americans are wonderful people. American culture is wonderful. It is a land truly blessed by God. I want to make that absolutely clear. Panamanians are wonderful people. Panamanian culture is wonderful. Never will I be able to retract any of these statements. But we must be realistic as well. Americans have their problems. And so does American culture and society. It's not all sunshine and gumdrops. But the same goes for Panama. It has its separate problems and faults. On both sides are mounted great advantages and great disadvantages. Unfortunately, both sides may fail to appreciate this. For most people (American and Panamanian), the formula is simple: USA=good, developed, rich, easy; Panama=bad, underdeveloped, poor, difficult. Explaining this to Americans is easy. And Panamanians would jump to agree to these simplistic statements. What is the unexpected truth is the wealth of advantages Panamanian culture has and the weaknesses in the American culture which has, by some standards, sold its soul to gain the whole world. And in that light, Panama may still have its soul, its fire and dance and love and family that is sometimes harder to find in America, or weakened.

I've seen both sides pretty well, American and Panamanian. And I bet explaining the disadvantages of America and the benefits of Panama to either side is an uphill battle. It may be impossible. I don't blame people for not being able to make the jump. Two and a half years ago I never could have made that jump. It's really incomprehensible, without living in rural Panama for two years like I have, a commitment few would be able to make.

I may have rushed too far to correct this imbalance or misunderstanding in some of my writing. I may have been intensely critical and harsh toward Americans, Western culture and the scorecard of “developed/developing states.” For that I apologize. I am very proud of Panama and very honored and grateful for my experience there. But I don't want that returning-to-America pro-Panama pride to rub the wrong way and be interpreted as a slight, insult, or venomous barb against the culture that raised me, formed me, challenged me and provided me the vast opportunity to jump out of it for a while and see it from the outside.

Well, there I did it and apologized.

It feels better.

I want to find Latinos in America and speak Spanish and get them to teach me how to salsa well. I want to listen to Panamanian radio via the internet and read Panamanian newspapers on the web. I want to call my community and not lose touch. I want to enjoy time with my family and move through my American Life slower, more appreciatively, and more engaged with other people. I want to carry the best of Panama, its generosity, openness, hospitality, sense of time and relationships, to the people I love in America. I want to find the correct balance of both cultures that is realistic and healthy. I want the best of both worlds to inform my life as I move forward.

It will be a challenge. But what isn't?

I have three more days in Mexico. Then I fly to America, to Charleston, to my home and my family, to a new dawning horizon in my life.

Existential Crisis Of A Tourist

So this is Mexico.

What changed? Most obviously, the vegetation. Crossing the river between Guatemala and Mexico that was the first thing that struck me, the change in plant life. I felt like we were in East Texas or Louisiana. All the palm fronds and big banana leaves that make up the landscape between Darién and the Petén suddenly disappeared. Trees like the ones we'd find in the southern U.S. And the food, to a smaller degree. Lots of salsas, picantes (spicy salsas), condiments. We have ecstatically discovered that literally all food is made better with lime. Mexico has given me at least this.

Mexicans are very proud people. They know their history and culture and language much better than I know mine. A sweaty, bespectacled Mexican squabbles with a seated, overweight Mexican in a stretched shirt about the minutia of dates during the Mexican Revolution. And my ponderous ignorance on American history, the forgotten and dusty pages from AP American History in high school.

I hate to say it, and I hate how these entries turn out so negative or critical, but the nature of the beast is that it's all starting to run together, all these towns and plazas and squares and fountains and churches and ruins and indigenous clothing and foods. From the highlands of Peru, to the jungles of Guatemala, from the historic quarters of Panama: most obviously the vast “conquered” swath of territory from Chile to the Rio Grande we call “Latin America”, the rice-and-beans, Catholic, Spanish-indigenous culture that millions call home. It is all starting to blur together. I am in the midst of a small existential crisis with my identity as a tourist.

I wanted for so long to be a “traveler,” separate from those “tourists” who jump on their chartered buses to run out to ruins and churches for their tours in English. But I'm among them. And I suppose accepting that title is a step towards honest self-examination. Stepping off my grand (did you notice?) soap-box about Peace Corps about how I'm now somehow “different” (I've noticed my difference but don't know the details of this difference yet). We fall into the same tourist-traps, the Lonely-Planet-guided path to all the “cool places” discovered as “cool” and then condemned with the golden touch of death, the thumbs up from the guidebooks which simultaneously rockets a town into the tourism industry, while also constraining it with all the problems inherent in such an industry. The loss of authenticity and culture, the sort of sad and sometimes sick parading of culture, the pedaling of history as a trinket made (sometimes in China) for you to take home to prove somehow “I was there.”

Pride. Maybe that's all it comes down to? My vast, idiotic scorecard of “where I've been”: my nausea at adding five to six new countries of places I now “know” (horrifically superficially). To compare with others, to their scorecards, to see who “wins” in this insane race to “see the world.” Why? Why this desire to “know” a place? I ran into an old Australian couple who (deliberately or not) dropped names of all the countries in Asian and Latin America they've been to, and they mentioned that they visited China twice, in the 1970's and a few years ago, and how completely different it was. So even the places we've tagged as “known”, “seen”, “checked off” change more rapidly than we can visit and revisit them. So what the hell are we doing?

Ideas from the smart guys I'm traveling with: Education, Entertainment. A kind of relaxation (I don't always see running around frantically to “see the sights” as relaxing), a different experience from the work-a-day life we are used to. And to get interested in some topic you never considered (the history of Mexico's revolution, Mayan astrological-architectural correlations, the demographic of illegal immigrants to the US, South Carolina history, the comparative strength of the Mexican economy in Central America and its relation to NAFTA, etc). And that curiosity inspiring you to look up/research the facts for yourself. Or, reversed, to see the places you've already read about, to see first hand the ruins you've read a book or two on. If only I could do this research ahead of time.

We saw Monte Alban yesterday. So what? Why, after that two hour tour in Spanish, am I better off? What did I learn or how was I challenged or changed? Did I do that just to add another ruin to the list of ruins I've seen? We took photos and turned down tourist trinkets, we paid our entrance fee and walked around. Cool.

The fact of the matter may be that my appreciation has plummeted since joining this wild adventure in a culture I now feel so at home with, post-Panama. That it's all “ho-hum” now what in two to five years will be “wow!”. I've exhausted my travel-endurance, perhaps in these crazy two years, visiting in two years more countries than I'd visited in my life prior (almost: five/six to five/six, depending if you count Kenya or Costa Rica). But doubling in two years my perspectival horizon may have stretched me too far. And this is the “what are we really doing here?” whiplash.

I'm open to your comments and help to free me from this entangled mess I've inadvertently snagged myself in (acknowledging my hopeless tendency to over-complicate things normally accepted casually by Most Anybody).

Turkey sounds nice. Charleston sounds nice. Family sounds nice. Christmas lights. Sunrises over the marsh. Long visits with family. After almost two and a half years, I'm on my way home. Home.

Show me the way to your Sanitary/Bath/Service!

The word for bathroom in Spanish varies from “baño” to “servicio” (Panamanian) to (as I now learned in Guatemala) “sanitario.” A question for the “servicio” always ends with, you mean “sanitario”? Like we actually speak this language. We, as always, learn to roll with the linguistic punches. At dinner we sat around with a Guatemalan in a 3 tacos-for-$1.30-place and discussed things said/done (phrases, gestures, vocab used) in Panama but completely useless here. He was amused by Panamanian antics. So am I. Ahh, the Mother Land.

So, to update you in my typically obtuse style … after volcanos and lava and such (see below) we decided walking over lava was JUST SILLY and decided to take three days to see the bien famoso Lago Atitlán. Another interesting and much less dangerous experience.

With a bus from Antigua, we arrived in Panajachel, the gringo-town famous for making Peace Corps volunteers nauseous with too-many-Americans. We promptly left (having sampled the only good thing in the town, a delicious piece of fried chicken unrivaled on this continent) and crossed the sparkling water to the town of Santiago de Atitlán, a cool very not-touristy place where we spent several hours walking around the same block looking for our hotel (which we literally collapsed in front of, not realizing it was our hotel … the name had been changed since the publication of our absurd guidebook). The day was low-key. We enjoyed views from the hotel roof of the beautiful parorama that is the lake. Later we enjoyed views from the bed as we soaked in a little cable T.V. The height of the achievement of the day was by far the find of 10 Quetzal ($1.30) street-meat dinner which was the most flavorable piece of beef I’ve encountered in this continent. Avacado, beans, tortillas, rice, beef, sour cream. Heaven, in a word, on a Styrofoam plate. I gloated in our great victory a bit and the other guys (their names are Alan and Josh) rolled their eyes in collective disgust. I will without a doubt miss the super-fast, super-cheap, full home-cooked meals in often-outdoor eateries that are so characteristic of this culture. America is a corporate demon from which I must find a means of escape!

The next day we high-tailed it out of there and went to a bizarre location, across the lake, the little town of San Marcos La Laguna, a strange haunt of gringo-hippies and poor Guatemalans. The town was ghettoized into the ritzy/trendy massage parlors (seriously), sauna baths, meditation centers, yoga clubs, etc. by the water and the poor, much more interesting Guatemalan side of town with the typical basketball court, small comedors (eateries), dirt streets, young Guatemalan children standing in doorways barefoot and bashful, etc. Much less pretty and much more real. I enjoyed the Guatemalan side. The trim and neat, an-effort-made-to-be-natural-yet-distinctly-fake gringo playland, the artificial world of plant-life and chic little cafés populated by dredlocked, glazed-eyed hippies, wearing lots of hemp and prayer beads, distinctly turned me off. They have made spirituality into a commercial phenomenon. A pay-for-yoga-classes-and-attain-enlightenment kind of “soft soap” (CS Lewis) way of thinking that I feel cannot work. I want to fly-in an Aghori tantric yogi and show them this guy and tell them THAT is yoga, a man sitting in a graveyard at midnight, covering himself in human ashes and eating burnt human flesh (DO YOUR RESEARCH if you want to do this I’m-going-all-eastern-because-the-West/Christian-culture-fails-to-speak-to-me stuff).

But it got me thinking a lot about identity and authenticity, two important words to think about. How one defines one’s identity and how one remains authentic, always being who one is (identity). It also started a lot of good thoughts on the nature of spirituality and how it can be authentic or commercial. How visiting a monastery has a much more genuine, authentic aspect whereas paying for trendy classes and yoga-equipment has the hint of wanting to be accepted through a certain identity, a group of friends and associates that forms one’s identity as a calling-card for what one is. This stuff worries me. I also thought about the nature of space in spirituality: how one should not need a special/beautiful place to “do” spiritual things/live spiritually. How ideally spiritual living saturates daily life and can be done anywhere at any time. Why must I meditate on the most beautiful lake in the world and then go to a steam bath and relax and do yoga to find peace? Perhaps these “retreat” type situations are important breaks in the spiritual journey, refuges of rest, but they cannot be made into a real lifestyle, can they? Is that what monasticism is, a kind of escape from certain pressures (daily, worldly) to other pressures (spiritual, emotional)? I feel it’s something much more than that. Any monk would argue you flee the world to find the world (paradoxically). That to enter the monastic lifestyle turns one from a kind of reality so that one can see that reality most clearly and plunge into all its consequences.

Why do these entries come out so judgmental and harsh? I feel peace corps has taught me to start to view the world from others’ eyes and judge them less for what I perceive as their faults. Yet I find a disturbing intolerance continually creeping in: for trendy, wealthy Americans flopping around this continent or world in search of meaning/truth/reality by paying lots of money, or trying to learn Spanish to appear cultured or worldly, or pushing their agenda on others. We were in a little bus today going to a famous kite festival today in Santiago de Antigua and the high-tension, high-stress Americans grated on my nerves to an unexpected degree. They were freaking out that we were leaving 30 minutes late (it didn’t matter, we got there and the activities still had not started). A hyperactive Spaniard chewed out the bus driver and I almost said something to him. The motor wouldn’t start, so we had to hop out and bus the bus til the engine fired. They were flabbergasted. I thought, Welcome to the Developing World, Welcome to Reality. This is how things are for a lot of people on this planet. Deal.

Peace Corps has given me a phenomenal gift: a two year life lived in rural, trying conditions in the developing world, and I am immensely grateful. It has opened my eyes and shown me how things really are. This amazing, life-changing gift comes with a great burden, the burden of knowledge: of having scales of ignorance drop from the eyes and the painful truth rush in and blind. I have seen the world as very, very few people on this planet have (at least the people from the so-called “Developed World” (a term full of problems)). All of us, every Peace Corps volunteer, has had this experience and now we are asked, demanded, to live in a culture, a country, a civilization which has none of the experiences we have. I see us as a kind of lonely elite, a great but sad minority of Americans which has seen the real world, the Other Side, and now must return to live in the dismal grandeur, the great vomiting insanity of capitalism and consumerism that is the “Developed World.”

More fun thoughts coming soon!