may the road rise to meet you

i have a friend here named Juan Victor. he is twenty years old and the grandson of Martha, the woman I live with. Juan’s father committed suicide eleven years ago and Juan’s mother does not provide basic things most parents provide for their children—clothes, food, nurturing. but he has a lot of cousins to pass his time with and in exchange for help around the house and with the baby, Martha feeds him every day. Juan has some form of developmental disability, though it’s not clear to me whether it’s ever been given a name. i do know there were never enough resources to keep him in school. he doesn’t speak in sentences, but uses only single words, and since i speak in single words too, we find ourselves together much of the time. and our sparse vocabulary is not all we have in common; like me, has a younger brother named Roy.

in Central America, the Spanish term for speed bump is policia acostado, which translates to a police officer laid down. it is one of those names for things that is so perfectly appropriate, and every time we drive over one i say policia acostado out loud and picture a big body thrown across the road to slow us down, like someone watching for us for when we’re not watching for ourselves.

the extended family i live with has turned the entire end of a dirt road into a compound of homes, in one of Managua’s poorest neighborhoods. they truly live in community—one long hose connecting all the water, one web of extension cords providing all the electric. a group of us meet outside in the early mornings for exercise in the form of a very slow walk. Juan usually comes along and likes to walk by my side, which i love because it excuses me from having to say too much so early and because he’s my favorite. he and i only use words occasionally and whenever it’s time to cross a street, he stops me on the sidewalk and steps out into the road to check for cars. when it’s safe, he gives a strong nod and grabs my hand. being with him is like being with my child and my parent at the same time—someone i am watching out for, someone watching out for me.

in the evenings, when i return home from my office, Juan is always sitting on our stoop watching, waiting. he’ll quickly say a few indecipherable words to me in English and then bury his head into the collar of his shirt with a smile, flushed with embarrassment. this is like the one thing i can count on in my daily life here: the water may or may not run, the electricity may or may not work, but when i reach home, Juan will be on the stoop, with his smile. 

Juan’s flip-flops got stolen last night—his only pair of shoes—and so he didn’t meet us for our walk this morning. i will buy him new ones, because he’s my friend and because i can. but what i wish i could do is throw my laid down body across the hard road he walks, a road built of poverty, suicide, disability. a road built of never enough and the kinds of hard bumps that don’t protect him, but keep him perpetually in danger.

but i can’t do that, because how do we do that? i’ll let the road rise to meet me in this sweetest boy sitting on the edge of our stoop each night and i’ll learn from him, because he’s slowing me and he’s showing me. i don’t know how he learned how to step out into the road like he does, but he does it like that’s just what we do for each other—just lay our bodies down.

a bird flies out

a few summers ago, i watched two birds build a nest off the porch of our cabin in western Pennsylvania. they chirped back and forth with each other as they built, and it sounded like the best hard work—satisfying, beautiful, with an occasional argument. i was breathlessly part of this building because i had the privilege of burning my gaze into their daily negotiation and teamwork.

after several mornings of this magic, i settled into my spot on the porch to check in, and the birds were gone and the nest was gone—only scattered pieces of it left on the ground behind them. maybe this is the ordinary way of living things; maybe this is the natural world.

i was working on something very fine in Boston—a beautiful relationship. i tried to give the best of myself to the building—singing the sacred songs, telling the whole truth and oh, the listening! i was not always good at it, but felt loved most in those times. god, this is a good nest, i thought. how i love this nest, i thought. in all the world, this nest is best! but it was not what i thought it was, or as strong as i was promised it was and i’m not singing the songs anymore and neither is he.

you tell me—oh babe, there will be a better bird, there will be better building, it will be better! and i want to believe it. i want to believe in a thing i can come back to. i want to believe the one i trust the most is the one i can always trust the most. i want to believe the most delicate thing can be strong. and i want to believe what we build well won’t fall prey to the hunger for some willing, wild thing.

but birds fly out, and scatter trails of broken nest behind them. and it’s so hard to believe. 

oh swallow, what did you swallow?

i went to a day camp one summer when i was small and made a friend there who lived on a farm. she was a country girl, with lots of brothers and sisters and always brought what i believed were unusual foods for lunchtime. one day, she brought a whole tomato in her lunch sack and held it up to her lips. i asked her if she was planning to eat the tomato like an apple and she said yes and i said i don’t believe you and she placed a ten-cent bet with me that she would do it. i watched her swallow the whole thing down, and the next day, i brought her a dime.

last night for supper i was served a plate of boiled chicken throats over rice. i wanted to cry when i translated the Spanish words and closed my dictionary. give me all the dimes in your pockets and jelly jars because instead of crying, i sat down at our modest table, cut each piece in half with a spoon and swallowed them down whole. 

there will be, there will be, there will be a light

i woke up in the middle of the night last night, and started thinking the kinds of thoughts that would prevent anyone from falling back to sleep. it was a hard night.

at my home in Boston, i painted some words above my bed on the ceiling—a kind of prayer about patience and trusting the slow work of god. so many nights and mornings i read the prayer, and they offered a significant amount of comfort for me. but challenge too, because i am so impatient! i am not good at slow!

in the middle of one sleepless night this winter, i took a small flashlight from my bedside table and shined its pale light up towards the ceiling. i read the words out loud. the little light beaming from my hand helped me get to the words, and was the same thing as the words.

above all, trust in the slow work of god.we are quite naturally impatient in everything, to reach the end without delay. we should like to skip the intermediate stages; we are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability, and that may take a very long time. only god could say what this new spirit, gradually forming within you will be. give god the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. 

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

i’m leaning on these words like a flashlight. the night around me is deep. 

 

achtung baby!

a friend of mine is about to have a baby, her first one. after recently receiving news from her midwife that the baby was breached, and that if its position didn’t change she may have to deliver by C-section, she began swimming and doing exercises to encourage her baby to move.

she and i talked about this over the phone. she told me how she’d been wanting, needing and expecting that labor would provide some transition between being pregnant and having the baby in her arms. when C-section was introduced into the conversation, she feared she would not get that time to transition.

i just love this and understand this and keep thinking about her wisdom. i’m in another culture, learning another language and all i want to do is tell old stories i’ve been meaning to tell instead of writing about all the obvious eccentricities of my new life in Nicaragua. i’ll get there. but first, some exercises and then some labor—some pushing out the life that’s been growing in me a while. 

a pearl of great price

diamond or a stone? is what our mom asked us every afternoon when she picked us up from school. as a child i thought it was just a question all moms asked their kids—a common metaphor most people understood. a diamond was a good day, and a stone was a bad day, and our world was pretty black or white like that.

i went to Portland last summer with Aaron on a hot whim. we ate wild Maine mussels at a restaurant called Local 188 that a friend suggested. they were served to us in a buttery broth, with onion, tomato and garlic. as i was eating, i felt something small and round in my mouth—a little, purple pearl. we saved it in my camera’s lens cap for the rest of our evening out. after dinner, we drank beers and told stories and dreamt out loud about art we want to make and businesses we want to start. it was the first time in a couple months i’d felt like my best me, and i am grateful for how our closest friends remind us we are special and precious.

both Aaron and i had our hefty share of stones last summer; each of us trying to swallow tough goodbyes, death, breakups, moving and starting new. and in that night together we were reminded that bad things always come with some glimmer of good, that no always comes with yes, and that the world is not so black and white. it’s growing up and it’s not always easy to chew or swallow.

just thinking back on it now, i remember our trip to Portland like a pearl in my mouth—a little bit diamond in a summer of stones—so small, so precious, so wild and unpolished.

i’ve got a bumper sticker on my chest that says no regrets, no regrets

one late October when i was in college, i was desperate for a last minute costume to wear to a raucous Halloween party. my roommate Lauren helped me fashion a strapless dress out of a roll of saran wrap. we added pearls and high heels, and it looked amazing. working with the same genius stroke of creativity, we made a strapless dress for Lauren out of aluminum foil. when we arrived at the party together—a shiny duo—everyone doted on us and greeted us with compliments, and we patted ourselves on the back for being the artsy-est among our art school friends.

but unfortunately, aluminum foil doesn’t have the same elasticity and give that plastic has, and Lauren looked uncomfortable all night long, especially when pieces of her dress started falling off. i laugh so hard when Lauren recounts how Mama Lea, the host of the party, offered her clothes the whole night, insinuating that she both looked, and looked like she felt, ridiculous. while Lauren spent much of the night on one corner of the couch, i worked the party with confidence, taking dozens of pictures with dozens of different people on a dozen different cameras. a few weeks later, i received a stack of photos in the mail from a friend and every single one of them revealed my body beneath the saran wrap—skin, hair, bulges—all of it.

everyone does stupid stuff in college, and i am no exception. if only this had been the stupidest! the light shines on all the stupid stuff sometimes, and i know my mom would say i’d have been better off on the couch right beside my best friend. but i love when Lauren and i tell this story together now and the way my face looks so alive in those pictures. so no regrets, no regrets.