Un beso: chau chau, Uruguay.

“Less hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go.

We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way,

begin no day where we have ended another day;

and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us...”
-Gibran Khalil Gibran


I spent a good part of this year discovering that I am a wanderer and a seeker. At first, the thought of this terrified me. What if I never find a home?, I asked myself. What if I‘m destined to spend the rest of my days perpetually lost? But between Billy Joel, Mr. Jones, NTVG, Gibran Khalil Gibran and my crazy uruguaya gypsy friends, I may have learned a thing or two this year.

I think, for now, that if in this life, I am indeed meant to wander the earth in search of something, that would be ok. I still don’t know exactly what it is that I seek, and that may just be the point of it all. But among the endless number of things that I may be searching for, a home is not one of them, for I understand now that that is something I have never been without.

“Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Your house is your larger body.
It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? and dreaming, leave the city for the grove or hilltop?
Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would that the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through the vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.
But theses things are not yet to be.
In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together. And that fear shall endure a little longer. A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.
And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the night?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and them becomes a host, and then a master?...
…But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall not be an anchor but a mast.
It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they may strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest the walls should crack and fall down…
…And though of magnificence and splendor, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansions of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and silences of the night. “

- Gibran Khalil Gibran

Whitman

6 a.m.
i was fast asleep
when i heard my phone go off
there was a simple message from
a reader of walt whitman
and right there all alone in bed
as dawn broke outside my window
is when i just may have fallen in love
i'll think on it again in the morn'.

At the ends of the Earth.

It was barely 4 a.m. when we boarded the bus that reminded me a little of the Polar Express. The morning air was crisp and cold, so we shivered together in the back seat and watched our breath on the window turn to frost. Though sleepy eyes we saw the pearl moon cradled in the gentle oyster of the black night sky. They say that destiny is written in the stars, for they are but shards of the old gipsy's crystal ball that fell once on the black marble floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, never to be put back together again. Out here the hills are blacker than night and the air is colder than steel. As we drove on through winding valleys of sand, slowly the stars began to fade and the ebony sky melted to periwinkle, though the sun was nowhere to be seen among the brickred mountain peaks. Soon we arrived at a place where all that should have been real was magic, and all that should have been magic was real. Smoke and steam surged forth from the earth and, like a factory of clouds, painted mist in the silver sky. And as we wandered though the silent fog, we huggged each other and knew that we were lost together at the ends of the Earth.

The Atacama Desert.

Some say God has forsaken this land, but I don't think that's true. I think He has tucked it away in the corner of the Earth, saving it for Himself and for that handful of souls who know that it is precisely in places like this where God hides in all His glory among the foothills and the sand. And just who are these souls? you might ask. These are the souls who wander; these are the souls who who seek. They come here looking for something, and although many, like myself, may not have known what it was when we came, I do think that most of us find it. Now "it" is not necessarily anything in particular. In fact, if you were to ask the people here what it is that drew them here, or in some cases, what it is that keeps them here, they would probably all tell you something different. Some may tell you it's Beauty, others Freedom, others Solitude. Still, some may tell you it's Magic and others may even say it's God. Some may say it's all of these things and others may say it's none, that it's something more, something beyond everything we are capable of naming, but I don't think that is the important part.

Because regardless of the word (and of the language, for people here come from all over the planet), what matters is that we've all, in our very own way, found "it." "It" is something universal, if only by virtue of being simply undefineable. There are some things that you just can't define, and these are the things that are bigger than us. So no matter what we call it, no matter how we describe it, we are really all out here, just another grain of sand beneath the stars, contemplating the desert.

I think the laundromat may have made off with my clothes and fled to Mexico...

It's been too cold and damp here to wash my clothes myself and hang them out on the line because they might not dry until next summer. So on Monday I dropped off my laundry at the laundromat. Since I was going to be paying to get my clothes washed, and since I hadn't done laundry in a while, and since I didn't really have a good idea of what was clean and what wasn't, and since I don't have a very large supply of winter clothes here, I figured I might as well get all of my clothes washed. So I packed up everything but the clothes on my back and headed over to the laundromat. He told me everything would be clean and smelling lovely by Tuesday. So I went back on Tuesday and he was closed. So I went back on Wednesday and he was closed. So I went back today and he's closed. So I'm going to have to borrow clothes from Jimena and pray that one day the mysterious laundromat will once again open its doors so that I won't have to fly home um...you know, "en bolas" (that is, not clothed).

Simple lessons

It was cold and damp in Punto del Diablo and Dad and I decided to build a fire. Dad slaved away for about an hour, stripping wood, rolling up newspapers, lighting matches and blowing on the hearth in hopes that the sparks would catch and the logs would keep a flame. Alas, the fire would not burn. Frustrated, Dad gave up and sat back against the wall. It was only as he was rolling up his sleeves that he realized he was no longer cold. And so we are reminded once again that it is not about the destination, but rather the journey.

Or maybe Dad didn't even realize that he had rolled up his sleeves or maybe he wasn't cold to begin with, and maybe it was just me. Either way, all that really matters is the simple lesson that comes out of this. And even more important than the lesson is the way in which the lesson was taught.

Every day, in the simplest of ways, the world offers us lessons like this one. Most of the time, we are blind or deaf or asleep and we let them pass us by. If we would only pay closer attention, we might just learn to read; and once we learn to read, the world will open up to us like a book.

Sometimes I pay attention in class, really I do...

Said the pyschologist,
who was a determinist
(and a fan of Nietzche)
I'm sorry, but I can't help you
Basically, we're all just trapped
In this prison we call "language"

Said the patient,
who was an optimist
(and a fan of Quixote)
And so it may be that all we've got
Is the power to create

Your cell is only as wretched
As you, yourself make it out to be
Why not find a paintbrush
And cover the walls with flowers?


According to psychoanalytic theory, a person who is psychotic is outside of the realm of language. One moment, I was taking notes; the next, I was writing a poem. And translating it.

4 Things I like about Today

1) I like that instead of studying for my exam, I may or may not have put a Sufi trance song on repeat, tried to write a poem, failed at writing a poem and experienced the good fortune of my computer freezing and the music shutting off in time for me to remember that I had to actually go to my exam.

2) I like that when I arrived at my exam, it consisted of three hours, four sheets of blank, legal-sized paper and the following intruction: discuss a theory of language acquisition.

3) I like that I can't feel my right wrist, because, despite the Sufi trance, I somehow managed to write an awful lot about the behaviorist theory of language development.

4) Most of all, I like that on my way home from the exam, I walked by a store window where they were having a sliverware sale, and there was a sign that said "Ross bizarre." (For those of you not of the Middlebury persuasion, Ross is a dining hall; have no fear: he is not a boy.)