so much present inside my past

the summer after i graduated from high school, i took a trip with Sarah and Katie to the Newport Folk Festival—a real pilgrimage for anyone who grew up on good songwriting or kept collections of concert playlists and ticket stubs. in so many ways, it was the ultimate road trip, complete with mix-tapes, camping out, a million inside jokes and a map of every vegetarian restaurant between Nashville and New England. we packed so many miles onto the wheels of my little white Volvo and racked up an obscene amount of roaming charges on my mom’s car phone. but despite these things, it was an incredible trip together.

someone brought dozens of sheets of little ladybug stickers for the ride and before we’d left Tennessee, we’d started putting one on ordinary things we passed along the way that were made special for us by our encounter with them—public toilets, payphones, restaurant booths, road signs, gas pumps, license plates and sometimes people. the stickers were such a real part of that whole experience that it seems like we would have had some clearer understanding of what they symbolized, but i’m not sure we did. maybe we thought we would pass certain things again and each sticker would serve to help us recognize those things in a future time? or maybe we thought that we would never pass certain things again and we wanted to mark them in recognition of having lived them in our past?

regardless of our reasons or our reasonlessness, what i love about this story now is that we looked out the window for the ordinary things, that we slowed down for happiness, that we let the regular stuff matter and that we ritualized the present moment. i want to pull off the road tonight and stick a little ladybug on the occasion of that bright, young wisdom.

looking for the water from a deeper well

i arrived in Nicaragua in April, towards the end of the dry season. my first day on the job, I was invited to go into the campo to visit a community in San Ramon de Matagalpa with my colleagues. while they were speaking with some of the community’s leaders, i watched a young woman lower a plastic bucket down into an almost-empty well. she held one end of a battered rope in her hands and lowered the bucket down. i could hear it finding the bottom—one empty thing scraping against another—but i watched as she drew the filled-up bucket towards her body, with shaky, strong arms. she poured the water from the full bucket into an empty one beside her, and carried the water out to her garden, a project she has planted in an effort to ensure a secure source of food for herself and her family. driving home that evening i thought about how the fullness of their well affects the fullness of their garden which affects the fullness of their bodies, and i wondered what the community would do if the rains didn’t come in soon.

making a choice to move to Nicaragua was, in many ways, connected to my old boyfriend’s love for Latin America. his dream to someday return influenced my own dream of us someday coming together. some dreams don’t get lived into the way we expect they will, and i guess that’s the oldest story in the books that tell the stories about dreams. i arrived here soon after our break-up and when i touched down, the emotional landscape of reasons for being here seemed pretty dry. the dream that was supposed to be fat and wet and full felt more like a tipped-over bucket, with the dream spilled out everywhere in Spanish and other stuff i didn’t understand. in a million nameable ways, the bucket of being here has felt like that dream dried up.

many people in the world spend whole days in the work of moving water from full places to empty ones, using buckets and bowls and hands. this daily work is often ensures that there will be water for the next meal, the next day, the next need. i’ve been living in a house with a lot of water issues—the pipes are dry, the pipes are leaking, the faucet is broken or the water is not potable. when the water does run, the family i live with saves it for the next time there will be none. this usually involves moving around a dozen oddly-shaped plastic buckets with ill-fitting lids, and stacking them for various needs—washing, drinking, flushing, cooling down. a hundred times i’ve gone to the pipe for water and there is none, and i’m learning how to move the water from where it is to where it isn’t.

exactly what i expected would be so full is so empty: the dream’s down the drain, the faucet is dry and it hasn’t rained in so many days. but the rainy season has just started and the water is slowly coming in. i like to imagine the well in San Ramon getting fuller every day and their gardens growing fat and green. and as time passes, i have to believe my own water lines will rise too and that a new dream can grow inside this shell of an old one. while i’m waiting for the water to fill in, i’m trying to move the buckets around in a pattern all my own—lowering down into what feels empty and trying to love up what i can find there. and maybe one day, i will find myself fat and full from swallowing down this kind of empty.

and she’s lost to you, little green

i bought a thick copper sink at a tag sale maybe a decade ago or more. its base and basin are not connected, and its pieces can be moved separately, which is good since it weighs probably 90-plus pounds. time has turned the metal into a rusty, green patina, and the sink looks like it’s been soaking in the color of old age. it’s been in storage at my parents’ house for more than ten years and moved around at least that many times. my family hates the sink, especially my brothers, who are always the ones stuck with the job of moving it. next to it in the attic are stacks of old New Yorkers, boxes of rocks, art from college that ought to be wheeled to the curb and thousands and thousands of photographs. i can just hear my dad saying prayers of thanksgiving that we are in a digital age, because since being here, i’ve taken thousands more.

that same color of patina is everywhere in my eyes and everywhere in the photos. it’s the color of age, but against the one hundred shades of dirt and dry, the color is so fresh and everywhere, like a little spill of something cool to freshen what is always hot. it’s a pretty dusty landscape, and i feel like i have to find beauty in the same things over and over—perhaps a task we’re forever charged with, no matter where we live. so we take a new picture of the same wet mop, we see a new color in the ancient morning sun, we find a new way to use what we’ve already used, and we read over and over again that same verse about old things becoming new.

time, the revelator

in the nights, i spend so much time in my interior life—praying about my dreams for me, my dreams for the world. i scratch them out on scratch paper with words and bad drawings and tuck each one into a library card envelope Robert gave me for my trip. praying these dreams out loud like this makes life seem so short, like there could never be enough time for us to be and do all the things i want us to be and do.

but a day is also impossibly long, and a night, even longer. i am learning how fill myself with the empty time, how to live into every empty day, every empty envelope; i am learning how to make prayers. i don’t know if praying changes anything, but i do know praying changes me. and i don’t know if prayers are heard by another, but i do know my own prayers are heard by me.

well, life is short; but the days and nights are long.

these are days you’ll remember

a lot of us remember where we were for our twenty-first birthdays. or, a lot of us don’t remember, but we remember our hangovers enough to remember that they must have been memorable. my friend Juan Victor recently turned twenty-one, and i had the great privilege of being a guest at his birthday party—surely the most memorable celebration i’ve attended in my almost-thirty years.

he was waiting for me when i got home from work, dressed in a new (used) shirt tucked into his (brother’s) black pants held together with his (broken) belt. Juan’s younger cousin Ali put gel in his hair and another cousin Jorge sprayed him down with his bottle of cheap cologne. his aunt Martha bought a liter of Coke and our friend Jenni came over with a block of ice, which we knocked against the side of the house to break into smaller pieces for our cups. Juan’s cousin Wendi made beans and rice with pieces of hotdog cut up in it, and we made one cake with raisins. there were no invitations, no real presents to speak of. there was no icing on the cake, and there was no alcohol.

we hung out on the stoop, sat in the dusty street and bounced some marbles around on the cement patio. i wore my camping headlamp because the patio light was busted. we sang, laughed, and Juan Victor showed us some of his sick dance moves when we turned the music on. at the end of the night, Wendi told me that Juan had never celebrated his birthday before. she said this in front of him, in a way that was shocking, like it was almost too embarrassing to mention out loud, particularly in front of him. i looked over at his smile, which was bigger than his whole face, and his happiness appeared to be so wide with the present celebration that it seemed there could be no room for considering any past disappointments. and for the first time in my life i think, i felt a deep gratitude for what it really means to complete another year.

there may be no adequate way to celebrate that kind of gratitude. but we passed a really great night together, eating slices of dry cake with raisins off paper napkins, celebrating another year in the life of this man, who will forever be a boy.

diamonds on the inside

i am pretty certain i’ve been handed a diamond of an opportunity—to live in another country, to learn a new language, to work with an organization i believe does meaningful work, and perhaps most fundamentally, to have a job in a totally tanked economy. and yet i wake up so many mornings pissed off i’m here, and walk into my day lost, wondering how i landed in this dusty dirge of a city. i’m living here like there better be some big reward on the other side of all the being so far away from people i love, the constant diarrhea and the nasty words men smack out of their lips when i walk past. i cry to my mom on skype first thing in the mornings, after i close my office door. and then, while i click through pics of my friends and families having a big summertime blast in my absence, i remind myself that i made the choice to move my life here, at least for now.

and so many times everyday i have to make the choice all over again to believe there’s something to find here because my reassurances to myself don’t last too long. i think many of us make the choice to find some diamond in our struggles because we have to believe things will get better than they already are—in our own lives and in this world—and we just don’t know what the alternative would be. it makes so much sense that many of us find god in struggle; it’s easy to praise god on the good days, but essential to lean on god on the low ones.

several years ago, my friend Lauren’s mom lost the diamond to her engagement ring. she looked for it for many years, holding onto hope that she would find it. after a long time passed, she was doing dishes in their kitchen and saw something sparkle in a dust bunny, inside their kitchen cabinet. she reached her wet hand in, felt around and found her diamond; it had been so near to her the entire time.

i’m still looking for my diamond, which is just a refined way of saying, i don’t know why the hell i’m here. i do have the kind of eyes that can see diamonds as so many everyday things—shining out like chocolate on the chin of a boy who has never before tasted chocolate, sparkling through the mud when you reach your hand in to get his lost marble, flashing like soft raisins in the only birthday cake he ever had, or reflecting the light of a whole community’s satisfaction in having saved bean seeds from last year so they can plant more beans this one. surely these are diamonds, and when we find firsthand that diamonds don’t always look like diamonds, we learn a lesson we will not lose.

it’s an important lesson to learn, and i’m learning it. but i still want the big diamond, the one of promise, the one that says, oh baby this is hard, and i promise you get to keep me on the other side of this, and i promise you’ll know me as priceless. i believe other people holding this job—braver ones, more salt-of-the-earth-than-i’ll-ever-be ones—might say it’s enough for them to give themselves for the sacrifice, that giving is how they find their diamonds, that giving is the diamond. oh to be that kind of person! oh to be so selfless and so brave!

my church in Nashville sent me off with the sweetest, small cross to wear around my neck. it’s made of soft wood and was surely carved smooth by the dark hands of a woman who lives the kind of hard work i’ll never have to live. the cross has gotten dirty since i’ve been here, hanging around my sticky neck every day. this morning, i was sleepy, sensitive and waiting for my ride on the curb outside of our house. i was feeling sorry for myself because my driver was, as usual, late to pick me up. i had my head down, looking at a brigade of red ants who were plotting, with hot determination, how to delay my taxi driver long enough to help themselves to a hefty portion of my ankle, while Jeshua, the two year old boy i live with, played in a muddy puddle beside me. i wasn’t looking when he reached out and grabbed onto the small cross on my chest with his wet hand and pressed it into my chubby cheek. i laughed a sigh and wiped the dirty water off my face.

but thinking about it now, i think, of course this is my diamond, so close to me this entire time, never ever gone from me. this was my diamond when it was given so faithfully by the hundreds of hands in my congregation who reached out and laid it on me at Easter. this was my diamond in the Nashville airport, when i left the security of my gorgeous family to walk towards the TSA security line. this is the diamond that will be with me even after the necklace comes off. and this was my diamond before it was ever around my neck, that ancient symbol of struggle, of promise, of resurrection, of i will not forsake you. this is the diamond whose price and power are fixed inside the fact that it is and only ever was made of dirty wood—that humblest of materials.

every morning here still begs a decision to stay the course. being alone like this forces me to face sides of myself that are the most difficult to face—the ones that don’t get pasted onto the blog or recorded in the photographs. whether i live in Tennessee, New York or Nicaragua, the story about the diamond asks me to mine myself deeply, to hold onto some hope that my reasons for being where i am will shine themselves out of the common corners i reach into every day. and the story about the cross, well, it’s one i lose all the time, though it never loses me. i think that wooden diamond and i got engaged to each other a long time ago, and the promises we made to each other are always as close as me, with me already, just everywhere on the inside.

take my chances every chance i get

before i was old enough to drive, my grandmother Tallu and i were alone at Jekyll and needed to go off the island for something on the mainland, about a 20 minute drive into town. we climbed into the beach car—an old, standard Subaru and left. after we crossed the bridge and got on the causeway, i realized my grandmother didn’t really know how to drive stick. she fidgeted around with the gears and clutch and we made a jerking mess on the road. i asked her if she knew what she was doing, my eyes wide in disbelief, and she said more or less and so we made our choppy way into town, with starts, stops, tons of mistakes and lots of laughter. the whole trip was fueled by my grandmother’s huge appetite for life and her scrappy voracity for going for what she wants in a big way. i just held my breath and cheered her on.

my friend and colleague Jairo gives me dap every time i do good with my Spanish. he took me to visit his brother Gadiel a couple weeks ago, who is the Nicaraguan ambassador to Uruguay. we passed an afternoon together, playing songs on the guitar and drinking beers on his patio. it felt comfortable and i began asking them questions about their work, and about Nicaraguan politics—difficult to understand in any language. in turn, they asked me about why i moved to Nicaragua, my politics, my faith and what i believe in—difficult to explain in my own native language. i was scrappy with my Spanish and made a million mistakes the whole way through. they were both so patient, each of them celebrating my smallest improvements. at the end of the afternoon, Gadiel kissed me on the cheek and said to his brother over my shoulder, “Esa muchacha, ella es una luchadora.” Jairo and i climbed into his pickup to leave and before shifting gears, he gave me some major dap.

last week, my colleague Marcelino asked me to join him and eight other men we work with for a meeting to discuss how we might celebrate the fifteen mothers in our office for La Dia de las Madres, which was this past weekend. we gathered in Jairo’s office for the meeting, and Marcelino asked us for possible themes. everyone was quiet for a while, and finally i mentioned one possible theme, mostly to break the silence. i was going slow with my Spanish and Marcelino stood up in the middle of my idea and started talking to another colleague. i looked up at him and said no hombre, you asked us for ideas and this is my idea and i know my Spanish is not perfect, but please listen to me because this is important and i am trying so hard. all of the other men laughed and made noises and one of them leaned back and did that thing guys do with their fingers by waving their hands in the air and snapping their fingers when something good or funny happens. Jairo reached out across the gathered group to give me dap; Marcelino sat back down, humbled, smiling.

i love when that insatiable enthusiasm for getting where we want to go shows itself—loving, ready, wanting, expectant. we can rarely get there as gracefully as we wish to, but i like when we try anyway. we held the Mother’s Day service last Friday, which was, by the way, totally fueled by my idea for a theme. in the middle of it, i had the opportunity to mention my own strong mother and two grandmothers by name—all three of them luchadoras in tough and tender ways. my Spanish was slow, stubborn and full of errors, just like my grandmother driving that car she only almost knew how to drive. but i let my want for going out fuel my going out; i was so scrappy, i was so bad, and it was so, so good.

there are times that walk from you, like some passing afternoon

i spent a drawn-out eternity of a Sunday afternoon lying flat on the tile floor of our home because the heat was too great to be anywhere else with much comfort. five of us laid there, half naked in our skirts and shorts and bras, allowing as much of our skin to be in contact with the shiny, cool tile. and when the tile grew warm from our touch, we’d peel up and drag ourselves over twelve inches to get to another patch of cool.

the majority of the afternoon, the TV was tuned to a soap opera in Spanish that i hate. so i read my book and went in and out of sleep. Ali, the eight year old boy i live with, played with his marbles on the tile floor. every time he dropped one, it made a loud tap and i could feel its gentle shake reverberate across the hard floor. the sound woke me up several times, and when it did, i peeled myself up, inched over and fell into thin sleep again.

in a year or in five years or in twenty, i will lie down somewhere more comfortable—cushioned, cool, insulated from the noises of something this hard. but i hope that even then the small knocks of daily life here will still reverberate inside of me and keep me awake for a lifetime of being down where other people are.

free health care

last weekend, i banged up my foot pretty bad on a horseback ride from hell. all of our experiences mark us, especially the bad ones, and this one marked me up good. the next morning, i thought my foot needed some professional attention, just to make sure there were no breaks or fractures. so i spent $2.50 on a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the public hospital’s emergency room. after arriving, i sat on some repaired stadium seats outside, under mango trees, until i could check in and put my name on a sheet; there was no paperwork to fill out beyond that. inside smelled like our dog’s kennel, but the air-conditioning and its coolness blinded out the bad smells and felt like sweet cold jesus all over my sticky summertime body. i sat down again on some old bus seating that was being repurposed as waiting room chairs and looked around at all the other patients. we were a mixed group, icing appendages with wet bandanas and soggy washcloths. a young man with two gunshot wounds in his leg was hauled in on a stretcher made out of a hammock. an old woman with hairy legs limped in using a long umbrella for a cane. a nurse called my name (Tilly) and i hobbled through some swinging doors to sit down in triage. the doctors were awesome and cracked funny jokes with me about horses being asses. they took three x-rays on a jenky old x-ray machine and i waited for results. another nurse called my name (Tally) to tell me no broken bones, just a bad bang-up job. i left with a bandage and some more ice and limped out to catch a taxi home, which cost me $2.25.

flightless bird, american mouth

i’ve been seeing someone here in Nica named Ghasem. he’s Iranian and we met each other in our level one Spanish class at the Universidad Centroamericana. he speaks Farsi, a little Spanish, and not a word of English. talking with each other is exhausting because Spanish is so new for both of us, and we have to work so hard to communicate with words. we laugh all the time, make lots of mistakes, find ourselves in huge misunderstandings and an occasional outburst in our native languages. we spend forever on explaining one thing, and that we like each other continues to be a good incentive for us to practice more.

yesterday after class, we sat in a garden on campus and talked for about an hour. there was a huge flowering bush in front of us, and while we were talking, i watched a hummingbird hover over the same dark-colored flower for a long time—maybe four or five minutes. the bird was flapping its wings so fast, perched on nothing but air. it was breathless, but resting.

we held hands on the bench and talked. i teared up while i was talking, and he found enough Spanish words to say you have some crying in your eyes. i laughed and flapped around to try to respond. and then i saw some crying in his eyes too and realized i could stop working hard for more words. and so we sat quietly without words, and watched the hummingbird and the flower. and i thought, of course we are working so hard to be in the face of just a little beauty, of course we’re using these words like wings to hold us up, of course we can take all the time we want to hover here, to perch on almost nothing in common but some crying in our eyes.

it’s so sweet to go slow, to pick around at the same sweet flower, to look at every side of its beauty. i am so full of breath for that kind of flight; i am so breathless.