List

Things That Rule in Ecuador
1) The value of the American dollar: I bought an unwrapped block of brown sugar and a little bottle of rum for 3.75, seven bananas for 35 cents total, from my friend Alonso, whose drunk friend asked me to marry him tonight and divorce him in the morning, and about a pound of butter, wrapped as a stick in a plastic bag, for 75 cents. I came home and made bananas foster for dinner.

2) Recogando las babosas: Collecting slugs. This is to be done in the morning by overturning wet planks among the beds in the garden and putting the slugs in a jar to feed to the chickens. There are these super awesome blck flat slugs that look like petroleum and move like it, too. I honestly don´t know why but it freaks m out when the slugs climb up and start coming out of the jar. Feels like an attack. Milagros helps me with slug duty.

3) Milagros: is 4. She yammers at me in completely incomprehensible 4-year-old Spanish. She also has the cutest damn outfits I´ve ever seen. And the cutest eyes. And the cutest smile. And the cutest hairdos. Today she told me she loved me and I almost cried I work with her mom in the garden.

4) All the fresh vegetables I can eat growing in my backyard: All the fresh vegetables I can eat growing in my backyard. Also fresh milk and eggs.

5) The climate: Dry, cool, cloudy.

6) The animals: There´s livestock everywhere just grazing. We have a burro who is white, takes dust baths in the road, and brays till he´s asthmatic. Also there are dogs everywhere. I mean, I went into a resteraunt and there was a dog lying under the table and no one cared.

7) Complete disregard for safety: The food vendors on the street. The people riding in the backs of pickup trucks barreling down the cliffside highway at 60mph. The dogs in resteraunts. The theifs who will rob you blind (I´ve been lucky knock wood). The five year olds walking around by themselves. Drinking on streetcorners. The men hanging out the doors of the buses yelling Quito or Otavalo to see if anyone wants to get on.

8) The buses: Super cheap, will pick you up at any point on the road, and drop you off anywhere. They also have ultra-violent movies in Spanish showing and they usually have little curtains on the windows and pictures of Che on the dash. Some play raggaeton instead of movies. At longer stops, venders get on to sell snacks and drinks.

9) The mountains: I cannot begin to say how breathtakingly unreal the Panamerican mountains are. I am in love.

10) No one is stressed: Ever.

11) Bromance: Really the only woman I have regular contact with is Gimena, whom I work with in the garden. She is the coolest ( her husband, Luis, who operates a bakery from the house, and her brothers, who come to stay with her in the weekends, are also unbelievably hospitable and kind and patient. We went to Otavalo yesterday, which has the biggest market of food, clothes, and jewelry in Ecuador. Amilca, this 21 year old guy, followed me around my shopping spree protecting the gringa so she didn´t get robbed blind). Other than Gimena and of course, Milagros, it´s me and the guys.

12) The fried chicken: rules.

13) Tabacundo: the local town, a 7-minute, 15 cent busride away, where I get internet, fruit, grains, beans, sugar, pan de coco (a doughnut sprinkled with coconut shavings. I buy it mainly for the gooey milk pudding in the center.) I am meeting shopkeepers and it is safe for me to walk around alone at night. Locals describe it as one big family (of 3,000).

Stay tuned for things that do not rule in Ecuador (preview: 1) the keyboards- my fingers are dying here!)

In Ecuador

There´s a lot to say but at the same time not much.
I took 4 hours of Spanish lessons today and got to this weird point where I had no word retrieval in English or in Spanish. Most of the volunteers only speak English but there are a lot of Ecuadorian families on the farm. And about a million kids who walk up to me and ask, Como te llamas, or que haces? What is your name or what are you doing. Little kid Spanish kills me every time.

The mountains are totally unreal, as are the sunsets.
I am in Tabacundo, the nearest city, right now, just had pan de piña as a pre-dinner snack. My little brother made me a tazer out of recycled materials for my birthday before I left- best present I have gotten in a long time- in case someone tries to rob me.
I am beginning to read Lolita. Damn good prose style, Nabokov.

Using up my internet cafe time minimum

For my 21st birthday, I bought myself a package of 15 chocolate liqueurs at the airport. Didn't even get carded.

My flight is delayed an hour, and I'm hedging my bets on emailing my airport pickup because it's 13 dollars to call Ecuador. For 13 dollars I think I'd rather walk to the hostel.

Don't worry mom, just kidding about walking.

So I'm stuck in Atlanta, and I've already smelled almost every perfume they have in the duty free shop.

I realized something I have never seen is birds flying out of an airplane window. Not at any height. Where are all the birds, I ask you? Are they as frightened of airplanes as I am? Impossible. So for my birthday, I have decided that is what I want: birds flying next to my window.

counting down the minutes to my birthday

Sometimes when I'm in a mood I can feel- for a split second- everyone I've ever loved move inside of me.

Maybe like grass sinking under a foot.

Or like a pile of worms.

Or like water that is getting bigger and bigger.

Once, at yoga school, we did an exercise in Phoenix Rising yoga therapy, where our partner held us, supine, in an intense hip opener.  At some point, I realized, maybe because of the overwhelming number of memories and emotions: my life has been infinite.

I am told most people never have that feeling, that it's usually the opposite.  I don't feel done, or fully expanded.  I have a lot of experiences on my list of things to do before I die that I've yet to check off.  

But for a short moment, I felt all the lifetimes worth of living I've already done.  It wasn't a connection with past lives or anything like that, either.  I just felt how far I have traveled, and it seemed endless.

Maybe take a moment to remember your endlessness.  There is someone you used to be.

It's a little funny writing this because Alex was telling me about the Buddhist concept of no self last night.  How there is no core, only fluctuation and accrued patterns.  But that's a copy of a copy of an explanation.

Armageddon

I just watched that movie again tonight.  A few thoughts:

1) Re the space ship taking off:  this is how I feel every time I get on a plane.  Like it's the bounciest, most frightening and bad-ass event of my lifetime. 

Since I have become a VBA (very brave adult), I no longer take Xanex for flights.  I do, however, have a bittersweet strategy.  I quickly befriend my single-serving seat-mate with inquiries of his/her corporate job and tales of my fecund, burgeoning young professional career to come.  That way, during takeoff, I can direct my "what's that sound?", "is that normal?", and "this is fine, right?" questions at my new sympathetic friend.  He or she, having flown a million times for business in the past, will assure me that everything is totally normal.  Some have even offered me in-depth knowledge about how planes work and use the anatomically correct names of plane parts to explain what's going on.  The problem with this strategy is that once we level off and I want to read or sleep, my new friend keeps on yammering, presumably because he or she is just so thrilled to be engaged in conversation at the intensity level of my life-fearing desperation.  I feel a little bad leading them on, treating them like the most interesting and important person I've ever met for the first fifteen minutes, but after all, I'm not that interesting to talk to myself, and they probably have a great book waiting in their briefcase.

2) I almost cried only once, during a scene of thousands of people praying in front of some sort of Oriental temple.  It was the most beautiful and poignant part of the movie.  I generally don't have many experiences of huge masses of people coming together to commune with the divine, but I imagine it is an experience worth having.

3) I don't want this to come off the wrong way, so I'll keep my environmental alarmism as low as possible.  We are not facing an enormous asteroid hurtling toward the earth that will, as Billy Bob assures us, destroy all life, even bacteria.  However, we are currently experiencing the highest extinction rate since the dinosaurs, or actually ever, I'm pretty sure ever.  We're definitely destroying the planet as it currently exists.  It will recover after us, but still, what I'm saying is that we don't see movies about huge numbers of people mobilizing and praying to fix it.  And if NASA spent billions of dollars, it would help, right?  Maybe.  The thing is, it's not a problem we can just blow up; the problem is an attitude that if we have enough machines and gas to power them, we're gonna pull through.  What scares me most about the problems of my generation is that:

a)all the geniuses working on it can't find an easy fix

b)the fixes that have been found are being thwarted by corporations

c)the problem is too slow and subtle for the world to treat it like the emergency it is

Ok, in retrospect, the environmental alarmism of this post is about an 8.5 out of 10.  Sorry.

4) Something that felt really nice about this movie was that it made me feel super proud to be an American, because in the movie we had all the best equipment and the best experts and we joined with other nations to cooperate and save the world.  And we were space cowboys and our go-for-the-gold-come-hell-or-high-water attitude was what saved it.  So for about 90 minutes, I could forget about imperialism and just feel really great about the US.  

This is the joy and the danger of the movies.

I don't know I can say all that much more about America tonight, except that each of us is part of it.  We each, by being a a citizen, are helping to define it.  So in some way, by each becoming the best person we can be, we're improving it a little, right?

Sometimes in a democracy, it can be hard not to feel really bossy, which, in my case, then leads to feeling really stupid and really powerless.  And like I don't know how to best effect the changes I think need to happen.  And like I don't even know what needs to happen.

I'm going to go drink a cup of tea and read a book.  After I put the uneaten cookie dough and jello jigglers in the fridge.  Strawberry, in case you're asking.  Duh.

colgado

is the spanish word for suspension.  so, I am colgado entre muchas vidas, hung between many lives.  

I am living in two parents' houses right now, my mother's new house and the one I grew up in, which my father is living in until it sells.  

I left school about two weeks ago, but it feels like forever already.  I moved out of the housing coop I've lived in for two years.  I will miss it very much (it's truly one of the best things that has ever happened to me), but next year I will be living with 3 magnificent friends, and will have many homes away from home on campus.

I recently returned from a week of living in a yurt with Alley at a spiritual spring gathering in the mountains.  We were blessed with a lot of sun.  I don't want to get very into it, but pretty much right from the start one thing bled into the next and steered me in some very good directions for my life.  I felt a lot of frustration, but it led me to be in the right place at the right time with the right people and making choices to move my life forward toward where I want it.

I leave for Ecuador on Monday.

Alley just pulled in from returning the yurt to its owners; we're going on errands.

More later.

Spring

The natural state of the heart is to be bursting with love.  

Paradoxically, all "negative" emotions are also our human responses to the world.

We are all trying to find more numerous and intrinsic ways of letting ourselves be who we are.