In writing an essay such as this, with the directions only of "exploring various issues of justice, God, and El Salvador, it helps to have a thesis. And forming a "thesis," a hammered framework through which to filter the torrents of information rusing through, in over our 20 American bodies, means believing in something (or at least 5-7 pages worth of believing); in choosing a point on the axis of hope and fear to pencil in. And standing solidly almost smack dab in the middle of our four month trip, what we choose, even just for the purpose of a measly little essay, has the real danger of actually meaning something. A bit terrifying, in the sense graduating from high school or travelling abroad for the first time is terrifying--in what lies on the other side of our doorstep now, in wondering who or what could possibly be standing at the peephole next. Injustice buzzing around your ears is one thing, but picking off the wings and lefs is almost a whole different animal, and rarely altogether too "pleasant" in the gory understanding it brings. More than listening to or reading others, it gets your hands bloody. Perhaps this is why so many seem to avoid the matter at all; it is an understandable paradigm that a lack of curiosity keeps you from smelling the blood of your hands. If some reason, any reason, can be devised to explain "why" without the risk of actually referring to the bodies involved historically it has been so graciously billed as "fact."
This is the purpose of Liberation Theology, to act as a lens through which to more intimately know death and, hence, poverty, and hence, of course, life. It is designed to make the reader question the risks he or she is taking on behald of life, and what kind of a life that is. Most importantly, it asks what it means to be "poor." As Gustavo Gutierrez, forefather of the practice says,
"...it is important to remember this--to be poor is a way of life. It is a way of thinking, of loving, of praying, of believing, of hoping, of spending free time, of struggling for a livelihood...Poor also means being involved in the battle for justice and peace, defending one's life and liberty, seeking a greater democratic participation in the decisions of society, organizing to live one's faith in an intergral way, and committing oneself to the liberation of every human person" (Option for the Poor, 23).
This past weekend I explored the on the ground reality of this theology of liberation along with 3 other students in the community of Tierra Blanca. Our guides, if you will, were Sister Helena, an Oregonian nun who has lived in El Salvador for 23 years, and Padre Pedro, a Spainard who has lived in El Salvador for the past 24 years. Here is a translation of some of the ground that we covered, how this particular animal looked under the lens.
--
The four of us lay sprawled out in the bed of Roberto Hernandez's white Toyota pick-up on the dusty, sticky late September day.
Four and forty-two minutes before, we had been driving down the honking, chipped bright paint and smog of the central calle in San Salvador, past the Metrocentro mall on our left, the ___ mall on our right, the
until we jagged a quick left into a pale-dust filled parking lot
We stone-eyed and elbowed our way through the fast talking crossfire of taxi drivers
We had just an hour or so before stepped off the 3 hour bus ride from our program base in San Salvador, thrown our bags on the floor of the room in the community center we would be sleeping in , and ate a quick lunch when we were whisked off for our first venture into the greater Tierra Blanca community. Roberto was driving us to speak with the members of one of the areas most successful agricultural cooperatives. From that first step off the bus it was clear that we were far from the boxy, corporate big city of El Salvador, but the feeling of being "away" grew more real in the back of the pick up. We bumped and swerved along the rutted, packed dirt road for 20 minutes or so until we hit a lick of smooth black pavement. Twice we came to a complete halt to of droopy-eyed cattle
Pairs of children were dotted periodically along the side of the road, spreading corn kernels in a thin layer to dry in the blazing Salvadorean sun. Sister Helena told us later this was to ensure they didn't rot while waiting to fulfill their desinty of being boiled, pounded, rolled and slapped into the tortilla. Tall green trees seemed to surround us in a bustle wherever we went, lending a sweet, fresh air surely missed during our weekdays in the city. We pulled a right onto a dusty road, then another, and saw inching over the windshield the group of them we were coming to meet. Under the forgiving shade of a windingrow of trees they sat in a large circle of plastic chairs, hands folded quietly in their laps or knuckles grazing the grass behind them, sprawled out with their work shirts scrunched up to air their firm, just slightly rounded bellies in the occassional breeze. Their wore white woven "cowboy" type hats loafed on their heads toward the back or the front, either avoiding the sun or catching the breeze. The men were between their late 30s and perhaps early 60s, though age was difficult to estimate with their worn confidence and labor intimate bodies. The men across from me had the elasticity of skin of a 60, even 70, year old, but the slim, carved firmness of a man of 25. Most had their machetes tucked safely between the plastic legs of their chair, and most of them wore blue jeans. Somehow I was distinctly impressed with the image of them sitting there before we even started talking. Physically, in theory, they could be a group of manual laborers anywhere, organized in whatever manner, with their bodies and attires. But you could see how well they knew each other's laughter. You could see that they had held each other up in ways that perhaps there is not even a metaphor for. They looked like a cooperative.
Though this was a long way from our first conference with a cooperative on this trip, it was our first stilted on our own Spanish abilities, and it was our first real dialogue. We discussed the cooperative itself, neoliberalism, ARENA (the conservative political party currently in power in El Salvador), Bush, loans and education in the States, healthcare. Much of our discussion seemed to revolve around the spindle of privatization and the eternally shocking acts of "development" made everyday in its name.
Some numbers that seemed to leap out of their mouths and down my throat:
23%- Interest rate Citibank charges the coop for their land.
700- Amount of El Salvadoreans attempting to migrate every day (out of the country's 5.7 million).
$7,000- Price to pay cojote to cross the border into the US, which 15 in their community had done (out of 30 families)
$200- The price of a medication prescribed to a woman in the community. "For $200," a man in the group repeated two, three, four times, "for $200, it is easier to kill yourself. For $200 it is easier to kill yourself." The other men followed the speaker's arc of emotion in unison, from a self-contained, shoulder-shaking chuckles to a wrinkled, solemn silence, stares at sun-baked stalks of grass.
While these men were obviously kepy busy working long days at the coop, many of them found time to periodically lend their hands to a small papayeria don the road. We went to visit the next day, and though the visit to the simple, tiny papaya farm was brief, the impression made was in brave disproportion to its size. When we first arrived in Tierra Blanca and sat down at the picnic table for lunch with Sister Helena, one of the first things she told us about was the return of two members of the community who had been sent away. I had forgotten about this when I hopped out of the back of the pick-up truck and walked up to the farm. Sitting in front of the home by a few wheelbarrows of papaya was a young (18? 20? 25? I have trouble telling here) mother holding her beautiful round-faced baby, staring up at me with those wide eyes like pools of chocolate syrup. I walked my pale, long body over to the pair, smiling at the mother and wiggling my fingers at the little girl. Nearby her sister stood watching us, wearing a rather fancy looking red velvet dress, worn nubby and thin in patches from use. Kneeling by the little baby, she stared blankly back at me with those wide chocolate eyes, mouth agape in a perfect pink little O. I grabbed her little hand, the same whitewashed stare echoed in her eyes, seeming to lie somewhere between unaware by my presence and stunned into dazed stillness by it. My own stare was starting to echo hers in confusion when my gaze wandered over her little teacup face. Here, as per usual, the beginnings of the bold black Salvadorean mane were starting to sprout in dark tufts, except for one heart-dropping tist--thick clumps of hair interspersed with strips of almost bare scalp. I looked over at her older sister, fingers shyly in her mouth, and she, too, had her anemic braids crowned by pale glimpses of scalp. Brain churning, I realized that these were the two members of the community that had been sent away--the two little girls that the church had paid for to be sent to a renutrition camp, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save them from the acute starvation that gripped their family at home. The fact that home was a papaya farm is punch in the guts ironic, if literary devices apply to starvation. The church paid for the girls to go, they also were supporting their stay at the papaya farm, allowing them to live in the house in exchange for ork, and even giving a $4/day stipend.
(INCLUDE MORE ABOUT NO OPTIONS)
They had absolutely no other options. No other options. This is not a restraint Americans grasp easily. The ramifications of the church's presence in the community here was concrete and indismissable. In the face of odds insurmountable along, the church here, representative of hosts of other examples I saw in the community, buoyed the community so they could remain afloat in a rocky sea of bone-soaking, lung-filling injustice. It was this that touched me so about my time in the community--the role of praxis in liberation theology, in its by-definition inability to keep resigned to dusty, far away offices and textbooks, big words and still starving children.
Padre Pedro offered us an important insight into the role of Liberation Theology church in an increasingly globalized world in his statement "When privitization begins to occur, the first thing to be auctioned off is the mass." In his words and, far more importantly, in his work, he illuminates what I saw in Tierra Blanca that is so lasting a feeling--the stance of his church on the dirt floors, in the muddy fields, in the bellies of hungry children and in the hardened bodies of exploited workers, where "God" or "faith" or whatever word you choose to use for humanity for humanity is, and where religion belongs.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
El Salvador & faith
In El Salvador, we each had to do a final project after our Liberation Theology class. El Salvador was perhaps the most intense experience I had in any of the countries I've spent time in these past months. I decided to write a poem about it.
Here's where the poem stands now in the revisionary process--
Faith
Like some humans and chickens,
some stories are ground-dwellers,
peck peck pecking at tossed handfuls
of dried words, resigning faith
to the pale hand dipping in
the frame, the sky a blue door
locked. Down-eyed with craned necks,
they are not life stories, with steady gaze
up, out, to the sky our window,
with yawning senses steeping in
the hot snap of winged metaphor,
with face to the sun and the moon man,
coaxing us into the front yard
of the universe; a life story is
a view. Like sky birds, these histories
glide and jag and twist all of it
together, we watch them rewrite
the air and rename gravity,
flying through altitudes for death
and the hatch, clouds and mountains,
and not for timeliness, or efficiency.
II.
Why else but for a new life
story do we hike thick brush and thin
oxygen to capped peaks of countries,
decades, but for hope to fix
saucer eyes to the heavy flap
of screech and song circling overhead?
Why else but to lose our breath and be held
in the grip of plated talons, of wings
muscled like highways, for hope to fly
over crashing crests of royal blues,
to scope the little pixels of the heads
moving over the sand, to feel
the beat of the breeze through an open door;
A life story has no conclusion
but action. There is no freedom
but to open your bones to the flocks,
letting their glide pick up your elbows
like a marionette, plunk you
in oceans, shoving the wet round world
to fill your lungs of salt and faith.
Costa Rica and "travel education"
This is the reflection essay I wrote in correspondence with the grant I received to teach English and work on an organic farm in Costa Rica from June until early August. I taught English at a language school where I also took Spanish classes, CPI (Centro por Idiomas PanAmericano), in Monteverde. The Spanish classes were pretty good, but the English department was pretty much in disarray when I was working there. The farm I worked on was on the Caribbean coast, just south of Puerto Viejo, called Punta Mona. It's a little cheesy, but, hey, I wrote it for people who gave me money.
October 27, 2007
¨The only way to learn is to go into the framework of freedom.¨-- Michael Pollan
Cloud forests and Caribbean jungle farms. English and Spanish and dirt in my fingernails. Discussion groups and compost toilets. Poetry and plants. Rain and bugs. One of the insights on the English language that was illuminated this past summer teaching English and farming in Costa Rica is the often needless separation between travel, ¨to move or go from one place or point to another,¨ and education, ¨the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.¨ If we are not moving or going towards the act or process of imparting or acquirig general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life, in one place or point or another, then what are we doing?
In Monteverde, I aided the director of the English language program, Royner, at the CPI, Centro Panamericano de Idiomas, school. We would look through stacks of English planning books and find fun activities for English teaching, and create workbook pages. Examining the processes of teaching English was illuminating, or embarassing, when the one of the students in my discussion group asks how many tenses there are in English and when my face is as blank as my idea of the answer, another responds ¨Trece.¨ But certainly the most influential experience I had was the discussion group I led with three Costa Rican youths in the evening, after they had finished their school and work and made the 30-60 minute walk to the language school at the top of the hill. When Royner first shuffled them into the room to meet me, they sat down awkwardly at the table, flitting their eyes amongst one another, responding to any of my attempts at English conversation with a muffled silence and, if I was lucky enough to get a whisper of an attempt at an English response from one of them, gales of giggles quickly drowning the attempt. Royner had told me that they had had classes for a few years, and this may have been true. Though they certainly were just beginning learners, eventually through some warm humor and some shameless incorporations of Spanish into the ¨intensive English¨ class, we found our own language by the end of our time together. Hugging them goodbye after hearing bits about their ¨bruthers and seesters,¨ football, their pets, and their mamas and papas was a kind of connection I have rarely felt, full of a real, deep pride and a tenderness inordinate to the hours we had spent together. It was a bit of a shock to walk them safely to the door, wave goodbye and realize, ¨Huh. I guess that´s what teaching feels like.¨
When one declares one´s English major to a querying individual, the expected response (beyond the always shockingly difficult question of ¨So what´s your favorite book?¨) is ¨So you wanna be a teacher?¨ I think for this reason I had always sort of ruled out teaching as a possibility in my life. I didn´t want to be that cliche--I can come up with a more creative answer. Not that I haven´t always respected the business of teaching, and felt moved and sparked by a variety of truly great teachers throughout my lifetime; I had much respect, but I still felt, not for me.
Unfortunately, this experience brought yet another possible career path back onto the plate that I´m supposed to be narrowing down at this point. My silly little discussion group made me feel infested with the power of a great teacher student relationship. While I was familiar with the feelings of a student having a great teacher, I had never felt in that way the feelings of a teacher having a great student. Considering that as of yet my life has been pretty much straightforward that of a full-time student, this perspective taught me volumes.
And then, at the tail end of my Costa Rican adventure, my Gilbert award brought me to a ¨center for sustainable living and education,¨ a permaculture subsistence farm on the Caribbean coast by the name of Punta Mona. I had long felt it one of my most acute gaps in education that I had very little grasp of plant life, food, farming, gardening, the growing process. If it´s true that ¨You are what you eat,¨ I did not know who I was, and that is what travel education is for. While I was there, I woke up early to go for a morning swim in the Caribbean before breakfast made entirely from produce growing on the farm (subsizidized with the occasional ingredient traded at the farmer´s market), backstroking by the tropical flowers and palm trees. On my first day I arrived after the work day ended and sea kayaked out to a little palm tree island with my fellow volunteers. As we paddled out, a family of dolphins splashing through the salty water warm as the sunshine with me. We had handpicked, hand roasted local coffee and fresh cracked coconut milk on tap all day. I never tan. But, somehow, during my time there, I tanned. And there happened to be an ex-professional chef there at the time who loved making brownies with cocoa beans picked from the farm.
But of course, the gods of the farm have a sense of humor--just as I was growing dizzy with the fact that I had, in fact, discovered Eden so marvelously tucked away in a little corner of Costa Rica, hidden to all but us brilliant 13 volunteers, the moon came out. And all the electricity poofed out, run only on solar power (there was a generator, but, of course, we tried to save its expensive juice for necessary occassions). And the water for showering and flushing and hand washing ran out for a week, because we only used that collected from the rainwater catchment system, and it hadn´t rained, and we´d been doing manual labor in the dirt and 100 degree weather all day. (Not that, ironically, the knee-high mud that so cleverly collected in pockets on the trail to the bathroom, was affected by this dry spell.) And the bugs came out. ¨Buggy¨is such a relative term. I have never, ever in my life known the feel of a cloud of mosquitos and their delightful relative the ¨zancudo,¨ small as a gnat with a more long-lasting sting, buzzing from ears to ankles. One particularly trying day, I was attempting to help salvage the rainwater collection system on a day where it hit 110 and got literally 80 bug bites. It felt like the marrow of my bones were swollen with mosquite venom. And towards the end of my trip there, a huge bout of Dengue fever came out amongst almost all the volunteers (luckily, I escaped this fate, but still, one of the only healthies in a sea of pale, fevery, diarrhea-filled unwell is another level of Dante altogether).
But, still, I survived! And beyond survival, I had an education. And I even had fun. During the work day, whether that was putting on knee high boots and a shower of insect repellent and sloshing out to carry bamboo to build a new fence, or pushing wheelbarrows of wet leaves to mulch the new squash garden I planted, or the ever glamorous reality of bathroom duty (made all the more noble by the numerous composting toilets), I stretched muscles I was shocked to learn that I had, I was bit places I never knew I could be bit. I had never smelled so bad, or lived so fully. Smelling yourself awake in the morning is, certainly, a ¨travel education.¨
I chose the English major to be able to read and write about life. I chose the Peace & Conflict Studies major to learn about the systems of human life. If there could be a Venn diagram of the worlds of these two interests, I lived in the center this past summer. On it´s face, it could be argued that manual labor in a Spanish speaking country has nothing to do with an English major. I believe this is entirely missing the point. Although I´m well aware that this is not the case for everyone, for me, ¨English¨ is rather an arbitrary title for my major-- what I wanted is to be able to use language to create. The essence of the English major for me is getting trained in all the urgent needs we have in this world for appropriate applications of communication--learning to be able to carefully treate the world with word salves and word balms, to be able to mix up a vial of word solution and inject it into the vein. This past summer, I received some invaluable training. There is no way that I could have done this without the Gilbert Award. I had a baby-sitting job lined up. From both the specifics of a now active interest in becoming a teacher to a the broader education from entering the frameworks of my own freedom, because of the Gilbert Award I have been able to continue my love affair with words and be safe in saying I am truly more educated.
October 27, 2007
¨The only way to learn is to go into the framework of freedom.¨-- Michael Pollan
Cloud forests and Caribbean jungle farms. English and Spanish and dirt in my fingernails. Discussion groups and compost toilets. Poetry and plants. Rain and bugs. One of the insights on the English language that was illuminated this past summer teaching English and farming in Costa Rica is the often needless separation between travel, ¨to move or go from one place or point to another,¨ and education, ¨the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.¨ If we are not moving or going towards the act or process of imparting or acquirig general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life, in one place or point or another, then what are we doing?
In Monteverde, I aided the director of the English language program, Royner, at the CPI, Centro Panamericano de Idiomas, school. We would look through stacks of English planning books and find fun activities for English teaching, and create workbook pages. Examining the processes of teaching English was illuminating, or embarassing, when the one of the students in my discussion group asks how many tenses there are in English and when my face is as blank as my idea of the answer, another responds ¨Trece.¨ But certainly the most influential experience I had was the discussion group I led with three Costa Rican youths in the evening, after they had finished their school and work and made the 30-60 minute walk to the language school at the top of the hill. When Royner first shuffled them into the room to meet me, they sat down awkwardly at the table, flitting their eyes amongst one another, responding to any of my attempts at English conversation with a muffled silence and, if I was lucky enough to get a whisper of an attempt at an English response from one of them, gales of giggles quickly drowning the attempt. Royner had told me that they had had classes for a few years, and this may have been true. Though they certainly were just beginning learners, eventually through some warm humor and some shameless incorporations of Spanish into the ¨intensive English¨ class, we found our own language by the end of our time together. Hugging them goodbye after hearing bits about their ¨bruthers and seesters,¨ football, their pets, and their mamas and papas was a kind of connection I have rarely felt, full of a real, deep pride and a tenderness inordinate to the hours we had spent together. It was a bit of a shock to walk them safely to the door, wave goodbye and realize, ¨Huh. I guess that´s what teaching feels like.¨
When one declares one´s English major to a querying individual, the expected response (beyond the always shockingly difficult question of ¨So what´s your favorite book?¨) is ¨So you wanna be a teacher?¨ I think for this reason I had always sort of ruled out teaching as a possibility in my life. I didn´t want to be that cliche--I can come up with a more creative answer. Not that I haven´t always respected the business of teaching, and felt moved and sparked by a variety of truly great teachers throughout my lifetime; I had much respect, but I still felt, not for me.
Unfortunately, this experience brought yet another possible career path back onto the plate that I´m supposed to be narrowing down at this point. My silly little discussion group made me feel infested with the power of a great teacher student relationship. While I was familiar with the feelings of a student having a great teacher, I had never felt in that way the feelings of a teacher having a great student. Considering that as of yet my life has been pretty much straightforward that of a full-time student, this perspective taught me volumes.
And then, at the tail end of my Costa Rican adventure, my Gilbert award brought me to a ¨center for sustainable living and education,¨ a permaculture subsistence farm on the Caribbean coast by the name of Punta Mona. I had long felt it one of my most acute gaps in education that I had very little grasp of plant life, food, farming, gardening, the growing process. If it´s true that ¨You are what you eat,¨ I did not know who I was, and that is what travel education is for. While I was there, I woke up early to go for a morning swim in the Caribbean before breakfast made entirely from produce growing on the farm (subsizidized with the occasional ingredient traded at the farmer´s market), backstroking by the tropical flowers and palm trees. On my first day I arrived after the work day ended and sea kayaked out to a little palm tree island with my fellow volunteers. As we paddled out, a family of dolphins splashing through the salty water warm as the sunshine with me. We had handpicked, hand roasted local coffee and fresh cracked coconut milk on tap all day. I never tan. But, somehow, during my time there, I tanned. And there happened to be an ex-professional chef there at the time who loved making brownies with cocoa beans picked from the farm.
But of course, the gods of the farm have a sense of humor--just as I was growing dizzy with the fact that I had, in fact, discovered Eden so marvelously tucked away in a little corner of Costa Rica, hidden to all but us brilliant 13 volunteers, the moon came out. And all the electricity poofed out, run only on solar power (there was a generator, but, of course, we tried to save its expensive juice for necessary occassions). And the water for showering and flushing and hand washing ran out for a week, because we only used that collected from the rainwater catchment system, and it hadn´t rained, and we´d been doing manual labor in the dirt and 100 degree weather all day. (Not that, ironically, the knee-high mud that so cleverly collected in pockets on the trail to the bathroom, was affected by this dry spell.) And the bugs came out. ¨Buggy¨is such a relative term. I have never, ever in my life known the feel of a cloud of mosquitos and their delightful relative the ¨zancudo,¨ small as a gnat with a more long-lasting sting, buzzing from ears to ankles. One particularly trying day, I was attempting to help salvage the rainwater collection system on a day where it hit 110 and got literally 80 bug bites. It felt like the marrow of my bones were swollen with mosquite venom. And towards the end of my trip there, a huge bout of Dengue fever came out amongst almost all the volunteers (luckily, I escaped this fate, but still, one of the only healthies in a sea of pale, fevery, diarrhea-filled unwell is another level of Dante altogether).
But, still, I survived! And beyond survival, I had an education. And I even had fun. During the work day, whether that was putting on knee high boots and a shower of insect repellent and sloshing out to carry bamboo to build a new fence, or pushing wheelbarrows of wet leaves to mulch the new squash garden I planted, or the ever glamorous reality of bathroom duty (made all the more noble by the numerous composting toilets), I stretched muscles I was shocked to learn that I had, I was bit places I never knew I could be bit. I had never smelled so bad, or lived so fully. Smelling yourself awake in the morning is, certainly, a ¨travel education.¨
I chose the English major to be able to read and write about life. I chose the Peace & Conflict Studies major to learn about the systems of human life. If there could be a Venn diagram of the worlds of these two interests, I lived in the center this past summer. On it´s face, it could be argued that manual labor in a Spanish speaking country has nothing to do with an English major. I believe this is entirely missing the point. Although I´m well aware that this is not the case for everyone, for me, ¨English¨ is rather an arbitrary title for my major-- what I wanted is to be able to use language to create. The essence of the English major for me is getting trained in all the urgent needs we have in this world for appropriate applications of communication--learning to be able to carefully treate the world with word salves and word balms, to be able to mix up a vial of word solution and inject it into the vein. This past summer, I received some invaluable training. There is no way that I could have done this without the Gilbert Award. I had a baby-sitting job lined up. From both the specifics of a now active interest in becoming a teacher to a the broader education from entering the frameworks of my own freedom, because of the Gilbert Award I have been able to continue my love affair with words and be safe in saying I am truly more educated.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
i believe in living
Hi friendses,
this is a lil' blog guy I compiled after returning from a 6 month stint in Latin America, from June through December 2007.
I was in Oaxaca, Mexico, on a delegation I organized with Witness for Peace for 3 weeks in June, from which I went to Costa Rica--specifically Monteverde and a "sustainable education center" on the Caribbean Coast, just south of Manzanillo.
I then had me a semester abroad in Guatemala (5 weeks), El Salvador (4 weeks), and Nicaragua (7 weeks).
All in all, quite an education.
I thought I'd put some of these things up for the general viewing public to share un pocito of what I learned and just let y'all see what I've been up to all this time.
I thought I'd start it out with a few poems by some of my favorites that have become standards of sorts for me during this spicy, smoggy, seed-sprouting, sun beating, earth-shaking time--
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all teh bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps teh purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkenss?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each like as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a confortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
this is a lil' blog guy I compiled after returning from a 6 month stint in Latin America, from June through December 2007.
I was in Oaxaca, Mexico, on a delegation I organized with Witness for Peace for 3 weeks in June, from which I went to Costa Rica--specifically Monteverde and a "sustainable education center" on the Caribbean Coast, just south of Manzanillo.
I then had me a semester abroad in Guatemala (5 weeks), El Salvador (4 weeks), and Nicaragua (7 weeks).
All in all, quite an education.
I thought I'd put some of these things up for the general viewing public to share un pocito of what I learned and just let y'all see what I've been up to all this time.
I thought I'd start it out with a few poems by some of my favorites that have become standards of sorts for me during this spicy, smoggy, seed-sprouting, sun beating, earth-shaking time--
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all teh bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps teh purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkenss?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each like as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a confortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
i believe in living.
i believe in living.
i believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
i believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs;
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
i believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
i believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
i believe in life.
And i have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path
i have seen the destruction of the daylight
and seen bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted
i have seen the kind become the blind
and the blind become the bind
in one easy lesson.
i have walked on cut grass.
i have eaten crow and blunder bread
and breathed the stench of indifference
i have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know anything at all,
it's that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.
i believe in living
i believe in birth.
i believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.
And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home to port.
-Assata Shakur
Ode to the Book
When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.
The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine" Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.
No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.
- Pablo Neruda
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