Passage to More than Guatemala

"je suis si touchee"

2009-08-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

". . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded."
~Bessie Anderson Stanley

I had planned on today being my first day back to work after a whole summer away, but my car wouldn't start. I fiddled with a few things I thought might have been the problem but to no avail. Finally I decided to come back upstairs and call my boss to tell her I wouldn't be able to make it today. I gathered the wrenches and the red mug that had held the water and baking soda mixture to clean off the battery terminals, and headed back to the entry way to our apartment. I entered the security code for the building, stepped through the doors and began taking the few paces necessary to arrive at the elevator, when a book (the only book) sitting on one of the tables in the lobby caught my eye. It was a biography on Audry Hepburn written by her son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer. I thought, "that's interesting," went upstairs, put everything away and started to wonder what I was going to do about my car. Finally I decided there wasn't too much I could do until one of my brothers got home with a car, which was a relaxing thought. So I got up and went back downstairs to get a better look at that book. I sat down in one of the lobby chairs and started to read from the first page. I quickly realized that this was a book I was going to be very interested in. But, I think I'm getting a cold, my nose was starting to run like crazy. I knew I would have to go upstairs and get some tissue but I didn't want to leave the book. So I "stole" it for an afternoon. I still have it up here in the living room with me. I brought it up and got lost reading it for at least three hours. It was so beautiful I cried. She was an amazing woman that gave her all; an example to us all. I never knew she had been so involved with humanitarian work. She is proof that someone can be incredibly beautiful and talented without compromising principles or becoming prideful. And a reminder that what is truly important, what can heal and save us, is love. I've always felt that inner character shines through both physically and in personality. The book mentions a few times that her features were not what you would consider the ideal of beauty. That there was something else, some brilliant personal quality that won people over. I am convinced it was her inner beauty shining through. I am so grateful for people like her that are willing to truly shine, to dedicate themselves to being good and doing good even in the face of seemingly impossible odds. It has been an invaluable lesson for me at a crucial time. Thank you, whoever you are that happened to place Audry Hepburn, an Elegant Spirit in my condo lobby. And though I was initially frustrated with my car, I'm very glad now it wouldn't turn over. As if it knew better.

"Whether it be famine in Ethiopia, excruciating poverty in Guatemala and Honduras, civil strife in El Salvador, or ethnic massacre in the Sudan, I saw but one glaring truth. These are not natural disasters, but man-made tragedies, for which there is only one man-made solution--peace."
~Audry Hepburn

P.S.
One story I found particularly interesting was told by Henri Mancini, the composer of many of the soundtracks for the movies Audry Hepburn starred in. He said that she inspired him musically in a way no one else ever did, and that writing "Moon River" for her, which won song of the year, was so easy. He said no one else ever understood it like she did, and no one ever sang it like she did. When they went to preview the movie it was written for, Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of the head guys from Paramount was there. After it was over he said very straightforwardly, and vulgarly, that they were going to have to cut the song. Mancini said she flew out of her chair and a friend had to take her by the arm to restrain her. He says that was the only time he ever saw her come close to losing control. Her singing "Moon River" on the fire escape is probably one of the most memorable moments in cinema history, and the most powerful in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Once, while getting ready to attend a banquet she'd been invited to, she looked at her son and said, "If only I could stay home and eat with you in the kitchen."

Audry Hepburn's last words were a confession of her only regret in life: "I do regret something. I regret not meeting the Dalai Lama. He is probably the closest thing to God we have on this earth. So much humor . . . so much compassion . . . humanity."

At the end of the book I found the most beautiful poem. It was originally something written by Sam Levenson for his grandaughter that Audrey edited into a poem she called "Time-Tested Beauty Tips."

Time Tested Beauty Tips

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you'll never walk alone.
We leave you a tradition with a future.
The tender loving care of human beings will never become obsolete.
People even more than things have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and
redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.
Never throw out anybody.
Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself,
the other for helping others.
Your "good old days" are still ahead of you, may you have many of them.

When the Words Fall in Love

2009-08-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/search?type=words&last=the+knowlege+that+is+hid+up+because+of+unbelief&help=&wo=checked&search=the+Knowledge+that+is+Hid+Up+Because+of+Unbelief&iw=scriptures&tx=checked&af=checked&hw=checked&sw=checked

(Read while listening to “Re:Stacks,” by Bon Iver.)

The shadows behind people walking

in the bright piazza are not merely

gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness

is not the absence of badness.

Goodness is a triumph. And so it is

with love . . . We cobble love together

from this and those of our machinery

until there is suddenly an apparition

that never existed before. There it is,

unaccountable.

~Jack Gilbert

There is a man that walks through the market selling Jello, “gelatina” in Spanish. He goes up and down shouting “Gelatinas, gelatinas, gelatinas,” and the pronunciation in Spanish makes it sound like he's going around shouting, “Hey latinas! Hey latinas! Hey latinas!”

I've had a couple of mothscotas in my room (pet moths). They buzz around exploring where the light begins and ends. Their light touch is lightning. Yesterday one settled down enough for me to cradle it between two cupped hands and set it free.

My stomach had some serious issues for about a week. I woke up one morning, about two days ago I think, and felt ready to try a little eating. So I sat down to breakfast at the girls' tiny table because Abraham was at the big table designing a copy of the Guatemalan national anthem, which was written by a Cuban poet while he was in exile in Guatemala during the revolution. I ate slowly, watched Abraham work and swatted flies. One of the flies went crazy and did some senile swoop moves in an attempt to get past my hands and reached the promised land—boiled eggs and a saucy tamale. I thought, “Desperate House Flies,” and started chuckling. Abraham gave me a you-doing-alright look. I tried to explain.

They gave me the feisty cheese last night. Tat Lu came in while I was eating and asked in Quiche if I had eaten enough. I couldn't remember how to respond. The mind started flipping through foreign languages and landed randomly on “Oui,” which I almost said.

Woke up too early. Trying to go back to sleep. I can hear the faint sound of dishes clanging, the women preparing breakfast. I am thinking waffles with fruit and orange julius. Keep dreaming. “And that's just what I'm gonna do. Wohohohohooooh.”

I met a man selling clothes in the market yesterday. He started speaking to me in English, trying to help me find a cloth I was looking to buy. I asked him where he learned English and he told me that he just got back a month ago from living and working in North Carolina, and that he likes talking to gringos because he can practice his English. Then, out of nowhere, he got distant and sad, and started telling me a story about his friend James Max from North Carolina. "He was an old black man in a wheel chair, and for some reason we got along really well." They became best friends. But the doctors found out he had bone cancer and wasn't going to live much longer. "One day he was crying, so I talked to my boss." He got a week off and they traveled to Houston, Texas (his face lit up when he said that), and New Orleans. They had a great time. He told me there was a restaurant in North Carolina they would go to all the time because James loved their fried okra. His friend passed away a week before he came back to Guatemala. Now he's living with his family (siblings and parents) and helping them sell clothes in the markets.

I can't believe it has been three months. I can't believe I've been in Guatemala for the past three months. It has been an amazing experience I will remember forever. I am so full of love and joy and appreciation (which seem to me inseparable feelings) to the Lord for all He does for us. Amazing things have happened here. Things I will write about forever. Being here has been a major breakthrough for me. I have progressed a ton and feel established in my goals. The road to further progress is clear and open. I know the Lord is mindful of His children and has been mindful of us wanderers in a strange land. I've seen birds flying in the rain. A little girl greeting the wind with her wide kite smile. Stars and lightning in the same sky. The avocado's white blossom, one seamless bell-shaped petal. And know how much one falling petal sends up in us. I've had more success and grown more personally and spiritually than I'd imagined. All thanks to Him. I know He has all power in heaven and earth, and his hands are stretched forth to exert the powers of heaven on behalf of His children. If we trust in Him, we need never fear ( http://scriptures.lds.org/en/search?search=isaiah+51%3A+12-13&do=Search ). Our steps through this life will become so sure we could walk on water. Our weaknesses and shortcomings are not what matter. What matters is the beauty, the goodness in us. The stars between the blinds. That the good seed goes undisturbed. I see how much seems to lie latent in us, but is soon on its way. More patience, more mercy, more trying to see. More treasuring the beauty, 'cause man is it worth it.

I'm ready to go home, but will miss so much about life here, and my host family. What wonderful people. I learn so much from them about love and abnegation. Jacky's laughter has done things to my heart that will never be undone. And I've loved having all the time in the world to just be alive and experience and enjoy so many new and old things, and put all my effort into writing. A small taste of a fine future. “Fate never ends,” or so says one of the screen savers in the Internet tienda Andy and I frequent.

Like I tell my family here when they ask me how I feel about leaving, here I miss all of you back home, but back home I will miss all of them. And the way the sky looks early morning. And the abandoned adobe home on the way to the market, overrun by corn, and its pale green door. The hopeful look on the faces of tired street dogs. The way the canes shake and the avocado leaves bristle. A full moon in a star-littered sky with wild lightning on the horizon.

What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?

2009-07-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

Read Matthew 13:46 first: http://scriptures.lds.org/en/search?search=pearl+of+great+price

I talked with my dad the other day. He is excited about me writing, and told me to keep it up and not let anyone bring me down. "There is something special about doing what you´re passionate about." What amazing parents I have. It´s surprising to me, how I realized I always loved poetry. And the perfect timing. The same "spirit" that fills me with poetry, and that poetry fills me with, makes me a better person, my best person actually; it edifies me. I´m so grateful for it. I think we can all find things like this in our lives, like the stones the brother of Jared chose for the Lord to touch to give him light in his vessel. I feel, for me, many important things will come from my pursuit of poetry. I feel an obligation to it as well as a supreme joy in it now. I feel a need to write almost as a calling now (not that I´m anywhere near where I need or want to be yet, but I´m converted to it now), one I´m very grateful for. I know it can be a hobby for some, but I feel/know it needs to be more than that for me. A way of life. I´m gonna be a poet for better or worse forever! Hope it´s not too disappointing to anyone. Haha. But if it is, too bad. I think it is very possible for all of us to lead our lives all the very different ways we want and be happy. And find other people who enjoy it. But I think it of utmost importance to be true to ourselves. If we are, the rest will follow. And it´s just as important to not only let others follow their dreams, but to rejoice in it with them and encourage them. Thanks to all the great friends and family who support and believe in me. Neruda wrote poems since he was like six years old. His dad was a construction worker and hated the idea of his son being a poet; he couldn´t understand it and thought that meant it was worthless. Pablo Neruda is a pen name Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto chose so he could start publishing without his father realizing it. Little did his dad know that he would become the most widely translated poet ever, and one of the most accomplished and famous. So, when your dream hits you like a seed sewn on the wind, be the good ground it takes root in and brings forth much fruit from, and don´t let persecution or the cares of the world choke it or carry it away. Let it live, help it blossom and with time it will be so established and such a part of who you are, that it will speak for itself, and birds will come to sing in its branches.

The Name Game

2009-07-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna throw this out here to see if I can get a satisfactory answer, if there is one. A very serious question that has vexed me for about two years now, I think, or whenever that summer was I worked at Zinch.com and became randomly obsessed with Pacman (I found one of those little game boxes with a joystick and a couple of buttons that plugs into the TV while cleaning up to move out of Jamestown. Video games usually don't interest me very much, but for some reason Pacman had just what it took.). That summer I had a friend, Tanisha, who challenged me to a Pacman tournament. So here's the question. How do you play the name game with "Tanisha"?

Did you know . . .

A meteor can be any phenomenon in the sky (lightning, rainbow, snowfall, etc.).

And a meteor shower is a phenomenon observed when members of a group of meteors encounter the earth's atmosphere (knew that, but not the next part) and the luminous paths appear to diverge from a single point.

Sing

2009-07-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

I came out this morning and Dona Ramona was doing laundry at the pila singing loudly and happily. I´ve never heard her sing before. I love it when people can´t keep from singing or dancing to the song inside them.

“Without giving anything away, I can say it's by the sea.”

2009-07-14T17:40:00.000-07:00

The night before our trip to el Salvador, something happened to all the doors. I came back from watching some kids play basketball in the centro and went to use the bathroom but the door was warped and wouldn't close. The door to my room, which had always been warped and hard to open or close, swung easy, opening and closing without any problem. And the slide lock on the front door to the casita my room is in was kind of bent and hard to slide. I showed Suzana the bathroom door and she was just as baffled.

El Salvador was true to its name. We stayed in a surf resort right on the beach complete with a pool and really good restaurant . The first night I ate fresh mahi mahi caught that morning by the hotel owner. In a mushroom sauce. Soooo good. The restaurant is on a raised concrete platform right on the beach, and the waves wash up against it at high tide. Out in the surf a ways is a big lava rock formation. I'm guessing that the breakdown of lava rock is what has makes the sand black. However it happened, it's beautiful. When the water washes back down the beach it leaves sparkling trails of an almost purple or blue.

You could get lost in so much foam and never go home. I can hear it whispering on my shoulders like a sleepy lover. I wanted to slide out over its brilliance on a yellow surfboard at sunset and ride waves colored like flowers. Supposedly it's one of the best spots for learning to surf, but the waves were so rough while we were there that they weren't even offering lessons. Our second day we hit the beach to do some swimming and found out just how rough it was. I love playing rough with the waves though. I like diving right at the base of big ones and feeling all that energy bless my whole body and then stand me back upright. Or letting it slowly suck me towards it, and then, right before it crushes me, “sliding home.” Or jumping over top and crowd surfing. Sometimes I just take 'em straight in the chest and try to keep my balance. I had a flashback to when Aaron and Nate and I used to sit on the beach right where the waves would break, whenever there was bearable shorepound, and play chicken with the waves.

The rhythm of the waves gets down inside you. I let it move me for hours, singing, “Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I'm feelin'.”

We met a couple of fellow travelers on the beach that had come to try and surf but weren't confident enough to go out under the current conditions. One guy (Bryce) was traveling with his girlfriend, and the other (Gabriel) was traveling around with his son (maybe 12 years old). We ended up meeting up with them on the beach almost everyday to hack the waves together. That first day Andy and I decided to leave and get lunch around one (it was like a two minute walk down the beach to our hotel) and they decided to stay a little longer. Leaving an angry sea can be harder than leaving a love-sick lady. Just ask Ruben Dario (I guess she was after his money though). You're not getting out until she lets you go. I think it took me half an hour to work my way back up to the black sand. We got our stuff and then realized we hadn't said goodbye to Gabriel and Bryce, who were now standing and talking in ankle-deep water. We were in middle of saying our goodbyes when a big surge of water rushed up the beach. I had my shirt in my hand and lifted it over my head to keep it out of the suddenly-waist-high water. “Keep that shirt hight and dry,” Gabriel said. But then I saw their faces and turned around to look. The backlash came fast and was even worse. I was the only one left standing. Andy got dropped hard and he had his moral (side bag) on with his camera and some of my books in it. Luckily he didn't get hurt too bad, and he has a really good moral so nothing got wet. I know it shouldn't have been funny, but I couldn't keep from laughing.

The next day we rented boogie boards. Gabriel said his place wouldn't even rent them with the waves like they were. But we gave it a go. Didn't work out so well though. I was trying to coach Andy a little on how to catch a wave, it was his first time to the beach, but I was barely keeping my own neck above water. The one good wave I caught left me naked on the rocks. No joke. But my strange ability to never bruise endures. We ended up leaving the boards behind because, oddly enough, it was easier to work the waves without them.

The beach was so beautiful at night. I got so caught up considering the great lily of the sky, I had a hard time going in before midnight. More like one thirty. I met all kinds of interesting people that way, including the security guards who I'm sure usually got tired and lonely on those late shifts. At least they seemed grateful for a new face and good old conversation. But I figure they too might often prefer solitary stretches alone with a world of beauty. So I never kept them long.

One night I was looking out over the beach from the edge of our hotel property. There was a crowd of people playing soccer a little ways up. Just past them the town's little stream ran down the beach and emptied into the waves. Just beyond that a senorita came walking down the beach in a white dress. There were two flood lights further down that cast solid parallel beams of light across the water all the way up to where she stood, staring out at the sea. The moon left a lazy trail of light in the sand around her. It all made for a spectacular, surreal scene. She just stood there in her white dress looking out at the sea. Every now and then she bent over and fiddled with something at her feet, and then stood back up and kept staring. I couldn't help it. I hopped down and started walking towards her. But when I got to the bank of the stream crossing the beach I got swarmed by the soccer players, many of which were drunk, but still friendly. I never made it to where she was. I noticed there were a couple of men and kids waiting behind her just out of the water's reach. Once the drunk soccer players left me, I stood on the edge of the stream for a few seconds watching in confused awe, and then walked back over by our hotel and searched for colored sea stones and got my feet wet. The wet sand feels so good on bare feet. Why don't we fill our houses with some kind of non-stick wet sand instead of carpet? And walls with lightning horizons.

One night I sat on the edge of the hotel's concrete barrier, dangling my feet and writing a little in my notebook. I sat there for awhile. Then another resident of our hotel came back from a walk and stopped next to me. “You alright man?” “Yeah, just enjoying the night and writing a little.” He told me that earlier a surfer got washed up on the lava rock and almost killed, but Jesus, one of the waiters, went out and saved him. He asked me about what I was writing, and what I was up to in Central America. Then we got into a long conversation about poetry. Turns out he's a high school English teacher and teaches a poetry class. And he's studied Spanish literature. He said he wanted to do comparative literature but he would have had to pick up a third language and he wasn't up for that. So he did English. We talked a little about the future of poetry, and how I wish there were more people that enjoyed long poems like Larry Levis and Octavio Paz used to write. About the lost art of attention. I gave him a few recommendations of people to read. A few quotes he really liked. He showed me the only tattoo that's ever made any sense to me. It was a line from one of Neruda's veinte poemas arranged in a ring on the inside of his left arm: Juegas cada dia con la luz del universo.

One night I was up wandering around the beach under the moon. The security guards kept telling me to stay close, so I kind of did. Eventually this Salvadorian man wandered over holding a wooden paddle wrapped in fishing line, his index finger tugging on a strand trailing way out into the surf. He was fishing for some fish whose name I don't know in English. We talked for awhile and then he asked if I wanted to try. So he got me all rigged up and let me loose. I tried casting as far as I could but it was hard to tell where it ended up. When he finally dragged his line in it had an eel tangled in it. He started talking about how someone had told him that kind was poisonous. I think it was just a normal eel, but it was completely tangled in the line, and he didn't want to take any chances, so he just cut the line and let it die on the beach. It was really sad. I pulled mine in hoping there would be nothing on it, and then cast it back out one more time. Andy came around about then to see where I'd been. And there I was fishing with a couple of natives. He laughed and said, “Your life is so random.” I fished a little longer. My fellow fisherman asked me if I had any pretty American girls I could lend him. I said, “I thought you were married.” “Yeah, but I love to fish and often hop from beach to beach.” I looked at him and said, “That's a metaphor, isn't it.” He just laughed and we kept fishing.

I ate mahi mahi three times, lobster once, and these really good kebabs with beef, chicken and the biggest shrimp I've ever eaten. Fresh squeezed orange juice everyday. And fantastic banana splits.

I stayed out in the water so long one day, my eyelids start to chafe from the salt.

El Salvador is overrun by butterflies. There were these solid-colored ones that would dance around the restaurant tables. All yellow, all wing on the wind. Deborah, one of the students living in another town, said that she read in the Lonely Planet that there are such-and-such thousands of species in el Salvador, and half of them are butterflies.

One night I left our hotel and walked down the dirt road to the restaurant next door to sit and watch the water. There were a couple of tourists sitting off to my right. To my left, the joint's owners and family and friends playing cards under a single dim light bulb. I sat on the low wall that met the beach and dangled my legs. Soon I was getting swarmed by little hermit crabs. I picked one up and let it crawl all over my hands and arms. Amazing and frightening all at once.

A couple of evenings I stayed in the water long enough to see the sunset. It was always worth it. The last time was unreal though. I stood and faced the ocean. To my right a soft, lovely sunset painted the horizon and spilled into the water and over the sand. To my left a huge storm cloud was rolling in with thunder and lightning. It was the craziest cloud I've ever seen. I stood there and marveled at the divided sky, soaking my feet in the warm ocean water, when cold rain began to fall on my shoulders. People started running past me to find shelter, and I just stood there and let it soak me. After awhile I walked back to our place and used the beach shower in the rain in the weather's contagious spirit of excess and extravagance. Then I jumped back onto the beach with a shirt and my camera (shirt to cover the camera) and took some pictures. That was a good night.

The bus ride to and from el Salvador was beautiful. I love long bus rides. Lately I've been thinking a lot about “coincidence.” I've been thinking that maybe the “uncanniness” in movies isn't so overdone after all. Sometimes you take a corner and cross a bridge and the muddy river comes into view just long enough to see a dark-skinned kid wearing bright red briefs jump from the banks and enter with a splash. Sometimes there are miraculous rescues. Sometimes your sister's car tips and rolls and she comes out untouched. Sometimes birds fly overhead at just the right moment. Sometimes a girl walks beneath your bus window wearing a shirt that says, in English, “Love Exists,” when you most need it.

Breathcatching Moment

In Santa Clara there are a number of homeless people that wander around drunk asking for money. Some of them are old couples. It makes me wonder what happened. Did they lose everything to debt and modernization? Were they abandoned by their own children? Yesterday I passed one of them on the way home from church. This time it was the old lady. She was sitting on the steps of a shop, gathering herself like she'd just woken up. When I walked by she looked up—her face was covered in scabs and crusted blood, her nose obviously broken—and smiled the most sincere good-morning smile. There was a distant, hazy look in her sunlit eyes, like she was just coming to from a good dream or a deep memory of happiness, which overflowed with her into the present and ended up pointed in my direction. For a moment she looked as tender and blessed as a loved mother. I felt weak in the knees, wanted to fall down and honor her “muchness”, to praise and thank her for what she'd unwittingly done for my own hopes. I know God lives.

Today Ramonita came up to me and grabbed my hands so I would lift her. So I tossed her up a few times and put her down, and she started to tickle me. We often play a game of who can keep from laughing the longest, or rather, who will laugh first. “Cosquillas,” she said, drawing the word out as she tickled me. “No tengo,” I said through clenched teeth. “Las vendi en el mercado.” “Por cuanto?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Cien quetzales cada una. Son buenas cosquillas.” I heard Suzana laugh out in the hallway.

I think I felt a small earthquake at like three in the morning.

What is up with the doors?

A Calcined Yellow Ocher

2009-07-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning and stepped outside. The wind was going crazy, it was great. I spent a little time reading and looking through the old dictionary I bought in Antigua. I found a some phrases that I really like taken out of context, one of which is the title for this post.

lightsome
a continuous or intermittent signal for guiding navigators
a calcined yellow ocher
a sudden stroke of fortune
the existence of an ion or subatomic particle
the quality of being like

I went to breakfast and talked with Ramonita and Tat Lu for a bit, and then, because breakfast wasn't quite ready, took a shower (what else is there to do when breakfast isn't ready?). About halfway through, I realized that the songs I was singing kept morphing from one to the next all on their own. I started with Amos Lee "Keep it Loose, Keep it Tight," (actually woke up with that one in my head) and moved to Bob Marley. These two Bob Marley songs kept getting mixed together:

Rise up this mornin'; smiled with the risin' sun.
Three little birds perched by my doorstep
Singin' One Love! One Heart!
Let's get together and feel all right.

Then I caught myself singing "You're all I ever needed, oooo baby you're the one!"
And then, "That's why I'm eeeaaaaaeeeeaaaasyyyyyyyy. I'm easy like Sunday morning."

Singing Kalai in the shower is usually inevitable, but people are likely to think you a lunatic.

I had breakfast then, which was good and they gave me bread! I felt so good the whole morning. I actually had the feeling of being on the Oregon coast just beaming in me. Who knows why, but it felt great. I washed my hands at the pila and watched the light come through the peach tree leaves, noticing how light green they were, and thought (stating the obvious as usual), life is worth joy.

It was pretty cold this morning, and there was lots of wind. When I first put my hands in the water from the pila I was shocked by its iciness. It reminded me of wading Diamond Fork in Utah and dipping my hands in to gather pastel river stones. I remember once when we were hanging out on in the river at Zion Canyon, I reached down to lift a bigger stone while asking Andrea (her dad is an entomologist so I guess she's got bugs in the blood)if she thought there would be any nymphs in the river. Just as the last word was out of my mouth, I turned the stone over and heard Andrea shout, "wait!" There was a huge nymph on it called a helgamite, something like that, which is supposedly fairly rare, especially for that river. I love that river. Nice cool water running right through white desert sand, and sweet gnarled trees along the bank.

I also randomly remembered watching thunderstorms from our screen porch with a bowl of red grapes.

Snippets of ridiculous conversation
So I bought a thing of chocolate milk but the refrigerator it was in didn't seem to be on, and you can't ever trust the expiration date. But I gave it a go. I started opening it(it was a carton like the kind from the school cafteria):

Me: "I hope it's not warm and gross."
Andy: "Probably not warm, just gross."
(...)
Andy: "Bird crap!"
Me: "On your foot?"
Andy: "No my pants." Searches for the bird with his mouth slightly open.
Me: "Don't look up."

Then he starts throwing rocks straight up in the air to try and spook it off the pine branch but misses of course, and I end up getting showered with pebbles.

Later (Sometimes I mishear people. Or, often my brain will provide a quick list of all the words that are close to the sounds that were said, and I'll pick the most random one.):

Me: "Is there a water fountain in the Muni (equivalent of city hall)?"
Andy: "No."
Me: "There's a bathroom sink though, right(just joking of course)?"
Andy: "I actually did that in the ocean (mission) once."
Me: "You drank from a bathroom sink in the ocean once?"

Later:

Me: "I love the sky."
Andy: "You love this guy?"

I really do love the sky though. It was very impressive last night. The moon was almost full and the clouds made a meandering river of the sky. I want to write the sky. I like how Levis writes about the sky.

"I can understand Borges´s love for Buenose Aires, how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hands."

2009-07-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

"muttering a language whose sound had winged lions in it, and birds cut into a wall."

-Walcott

Try to teach a Spanish speaker the difference between snickers and sneakers.

I heard Ramonita´s mom trying to teach her the difference between sheep and bee (oveja, abeja).

We went to a fiesta in Santa Maria to watch the crowning of the town´s beauty queen. They invited queens from the surrounding towns and cities too. Their traditional clothing was amazing, and lots of them wore wooden crowns carved into birds and lions and flowers. Too bad neither of us had our cameras. We also went the next night to watch a band and fireworks. On the way home the first night Andy started ranting about how the chicken here is always bony, that it can´t be that hard to take the bones out. “In the States we grow boneless chickens like seedless watermelon.” I laughed all the way home. I kept imagining live boneless chickens. I think I was delirious with seuño and hunger.

“They” say the most important part of a sentence, or a poetic line, is the end. Read just the last words of each line from “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” by Derek Walcott. They alone convey completely the soul\voice of his poetry, and are interesting enough on their own to hold my attention:

Together

Earth

Tongues

Slopes

Streets

Sill

Until

Weather

Light

Sever

Drew

Ropes

Hear

Cries

World

Drawing

Eyes

Sleep

Light

Hill

Knew

Cawing

Chough

Concern

Belong

Love

Birth

Ones

Houses

Voices

Suns

Pause

Peace

Long

Or another poem:

Appease

Peers

Sphinx

Dream

Peace

Droop

Place

Stiffen

Drop

Drinks

Race

Pen

Begin

Rut

Leaves

Lives

Better

Academe

Just

Oeuvres Complѐtes

Or another if you´re still interested:

Canvas

Dissolves

Leaf

Wall

Settles eyes

Tongue

Further

Landscape

Rigour

Wall

Immortelle

Annunciation

Orange

Lantern

Frame

Green

Ache

Gnaw

Canvas

Smoke

Cloud

Pierce

Canvas

Commas

Rise

Feet

Dragon

(etc.)

“and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?”

2009-07-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

I find it very interesting that these two poems are placed right next to each other in Mary Oliver's selected poems:

Magellan

Like Magellan, let us find our islands

To die in, far from home, from anywhere

Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For years we have labored over common roads,

Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.

Let us be heroes, or, if that's not in us,

Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.

For what is life but reaching for an answer?

And what is death but a refusal to grow?

Magellan had a dream he had to follow.

The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.

And when the fever would not set him free,

To his thin crew, “Sail on, sail on!” he cried.

And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.

And thus Magellan lives, although he died.

Going to Walden

It isn't very far as highways lie.

I might be back by nightfall, having seen

The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.

Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.

They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:

How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool

To miss a day away in the cool country.

Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a Green visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

Ni tan tan, ni muy muy

2009-06-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

It was Tat Lu's birthday on Saturday, but we celebrated on Friday with a small lunch because Saturday afternoon his sons had to present their work for the year to see if they were going to graduate. Andy and I brought cake to the party. It was a small but fun celebration. He's such a good guy. Tat Lu was born the same year as my dad.

Each saint has it's own day, and the towns named for that saint throw a series of week-long celebrations to honor him/her. Santa Clara's is in August, right on our last week here. On Monday I went with my host brothers, Miguel and Abraham, to San Pedro for the ferria de San Pedro. Their main reason for going was to see a soccer match the town had arranged as part of their celebrations. They got members from national league soccer teams to come and play against a local team they put together. The national team slaughtered them, but it was a really fun game to watch because they got to show off a lot. It was like an NBA team visiting a small town to play against a pickup team of locals. I got a few good action shots. I really wanted to get a shot of two players crashing in mid air fighting for a header, but the timing was always bad and then my batteries started to die. After the games we went and ate lunch down by the lake and walked around the ferria for a bit. Abraham and I took a ride on the Ferris wheel. The rides there are powered by de-wheeled tractors. We also saw part of a parade in honor of San Pedro. And, next to a catholic church, there is a statue of him with the keys in hand standing next to the cock that crowed. An interesting juxtaposition.

We're going to el Salvador in a week for our mid-project trip. We've got a little over a month left. I haven't felt like my days revolved around/were mostly made up of meals since the MTC. We need to be up to eat breakfast, be back at around one to eat lunch and then back at about seven for dinner (Although I'm not used to having this kind of a schedule, so I'm often late for meals and such, which I think kind of frustrates Dona Ramona sometimes). And after dinner it gets dark so families just hang out a bit and then go to bed. Needless to say, the weeks sneak by like mice after the corn sack.

Name that Movie

2009-06-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

1. “Suresuresuresuresuresuresure.”

2. “'Just wait. I don't know, I want you to wait for me, just . . . awhile.”

3. “But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”

4. “There's nothing bigger than us”

5. “Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you.”

6. "They're smoking more than tomato! They have crazy narcotics in that!"

7. "Blockbuster Video, Des Moines Iowa."

Livin' the Dream

2009-06-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried writing a word in italics?

Sounds that are impossible to mimic with the human mouth:
1.Ducks drinking.
2.The noise a Mac makes when you hit the volume button.

A quick look at a typical morning/afternoon

Maybe take a morning dip in the lake.

Play games with the nenas and hang with the family.

(It rains a lot in the afternoon)

Practice guitar. Practice some more.

Read Larry Levis because I can't not.

Translate some Carlos Sabat Ercasty from his out-of-print book Sonetos de las Agonias y los Extasis.

Play a little guitar.

Translate more Ercasty.

Read Hamlet to take a break from translating.

A little writing of my own.

Listen to the rain . . . remember random things . . .

A little more writing.

Listen to music, watch a clip of a movie.

More reading/writing.

Later on, a good dinner with the fam.

One thing I love is stepping out around midnight to feel the moving stillness and silence of night, and to watch the moon and stars for a bit. I want to learn some of their local astronomy related beliefs.

Memories:

I woke up this morning to the sound of wind outside my window; a wind that also awakened a familiar feeling: the feeling of fall as a kid in Florida. It was always my favorite. I think there was only one tree on the block that ever changed colors, but the season always had a different, exciting feel to it. The house smelled differently, a natural different smell. I remember coming home after school with cold cheeks and hands and detecting it in the air for the first time each year. The temperature was perfect; just cool enough to excuse wearing "winter" clothing for a few weeks (I have a strange obsession with cool-weather clothing). And there was always a wild, gusting wind. Of course there is Halloween, my birthday, a Thanksgiving, and Christmas to all look forward to as well. I remember "studying" then on the trampoline in the backyard so that I could enjoy the weather and the wind. I really loved (still do) a good strong wind, loved to feel it quickening the senses, rushing and lifting. I could sit and watch it vivifying the trees for hours. I also remember liking it when we'd watch seasonal episodes of Charlie Brown in school. Fall and winter are still my favorite seasons.

Teaching English

I help out with an English class at the local middle school from time to time, and some of the kids came to my house to get help with their homework. Two kids came by yesterday while I was playing "Campanito" with Ramonita and Jackie. They wanted to know how to say food and drinks, as well as animals in English. When I asked them what animals they wanted to know, the first one they threw out was elephant. Next was tiger. The girls were playing around me and trying to tickle me. I looked at them and said, "monos," and they laughed, and I wrote monkey in their notebook. This morning I was writing a little when Juana came and told me that there were two muchachas looking for me. "Muchachas?" I asked. I went out to the street baffled as to why two girls would be looking for the wild-haired, bearded gringo. Turns out they were looking for English help too. They had been given to short passages they are supposed to translate into Spanish, but they don't know much English at all. I quickly scanned one of the passages, and it was about a kid witnessing a UFO and having an encounter with an alien(?). The Built to Spill song came to my head, "I thought it was an alien, turned out to be just God." I asked them to use their dictionaries, they said they have one, and do their best to try and understand it and then write in their journals what they think it is saying and then bring it to me, so that I don't end up doing all their homework for them. But they really don't know any English at all, so I'll probably end up having to help with a good portion of it when they come back. Their "teachers" don't really know English either, and the books they use have all kinds of mistakes in them. But they're trying. Teaching is lots of fun. When I showed up the first day, their real teacher just stopped teaching and dropped the class in my hands. MTC skills started coming back fast, at least the little I ever had. That's pretty much how it's been every time. He just hands me the class and watches me teach. The kids are great, and lots of fun, though sometimes a little rowdy. One of the students is actually a middle-aged pastor who just wants to learn English. I think it's pretty amazing that he would be willing to attend a class with a bunch of 12 yr old kids and struggle to learn English. He's a really nice, really cool guy. I heard Some kids call me by my first name in the park the other day, which totally caught me off guard, but turns out they are in the English class and remembered it from the one time I mentioned it the very first day I taught. No excuses about bad memories. haha.

Goodly Parents

2009-06-22T18:50:00.001-07:00

“ . . . and he did walk after the ways of his father, insomuch that he did prosper in the land.”
~Helaman 3: 20

I talked to my family yesterday, for Father's Day. It was really good to hear from them. I couldn't have asked for better parents, and that's no exaggeration. The other day I was reading in the Book of Mormon and the ultimate importance of keeping the commandments settled deep in my soul all over again. Not that I ever had big problems with this, but the importance of it was again carried to my heart, and deeply impressed upon me. More than a reminder, an old lesson taken to the next level. Staying close to the Lord by keeping his commandments is THE important thing in life. And then I realized again that my greatest examples of this have always been my parents. They are beautiful people whose strength lies in the Lord. And they are strong. And I have been blessed because of it.

Mirrorcles

2009-06-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

Read while listening to Keith Jarret's “Someone To Watch Over Me.”

Take the bus, but let Derek Walcott move you.

Brain massage: If you've got an annoying song stuck in your mind, fall asleep with your head against the bus window.

I really like long bus rides. I told Aaron that after so many long and sweaty bus rides, road trips back home will be a cheese of cake. I have always loved car trips, but I think these bus trips have improved my car-tripping stamina. Then he told me we might take one to Yellowstone to do some fishing when I get back. And I guess my parents are coming out to visit in September. Andale pues.

We went to the capital this past weekend to visit the temple and so Andy could visit a ward he served in. It was a good trip. We stayed in a big Holiday Inn so we would have nice beds and a good shower, etc., for a change. We sat down for a bit in the room to take a break before heading out and Andy turned on the TV and started flipping through channels. I asked him to stop for a minute on one called “The Concert Channel,” because there was a band playing some good jazz. I think it said it was Charles Mingus. We watched a few minutes of the band members taking turns rocking impromptu solos. Very impressive. I remembered a comment Julie had made on my wall about jazz being like poetry, and I thought, if we're going to compare it to poetry, it would have to be a renga.

We visited the temple, which is very beautiful. After dinner we wandered down to this mall close to our hotel, “Oakland Mall,” because we heard it had a movie theater. It's a gigantic mall with seven floors, a huge theater, a really big merry-go-round (It hit me how strange a name that is when I said it out loud in the mall, and got me wondering who comes up with names for things like that; “Someone's got that job.”), and tons of very nice stores. We randomly strolled into a couple of stores to look around. One of them was called Saul y Mendez. The name stood out to me for some reason so we walked in. As part of the decoration for the store, they had old books arranged on a glass shelf, so of course I started looking at the books instead of the clothes. I wasn't sure if I could pick them up, but I did anyway. I leafed through a few on one side of the shelf, and then moved over to the other side, and the first book I picked up was an ancient copy, in English, of The Grapes of Wrath. It was in great condition but still worn enough to look beautifully old, and the pages smelled great as well. There was a note on one of the first pages written in pencil signed “Hector y Margot, 1944.” I asked the manager if there was anyway they would sell the book and she assured me very firmly that there was no way she could sell any of the books. So I left disappointed, but still thinking, I need that book. We went up and got our tickets at the theater (we found out after we got our tickets that we could have bought VIP tickets, which puts you in a theater with big leather lazy boy chairs, a waiter, etc. for about $8 US), and the whole time I was thinking, man I want that book. So we decided to go back. I walked in and found her and asked if she was sure she couldn't sell it. She said they were the owner's and just there for decoration so she couldn't sell them. Then she asked me which one. So we walked over and I showed her. I explained that I study literature and was really interested in the book. We talked a bit about who we were and what we were doing in Guatemala. She looked at the date the message was signed and said, “Wow, look at the date.” I said, “Si, es viejo.” She paused, looked at it for a long minute, and then said, “Bueno . . .” like she was ready to make some kind of deal, but then she said, “Te lo regalo,” which means I'll gift it to you. It was one of those Amelie moments when something strikes the “inner resonant frequency” of one of the characters, like when Nino finds himself face to face with the mystery man in the photo booth and starts to glow while background music hums/reverberates, like he's going to explode. I couldn't believe it. I'm sure she could see how I felt on my face. She smiled. I asked if she was sure and she was. She told me, “So that when you come back to visit Gautemala you'll come see us again.” I glided out of the store, back up to the movie theater on cloud nine, and in complete shock. The only movie showing that wasn't dubbed and seemed somewhat interesting was “Angels and Demons.” (Their theaters only show American films. I would have loved to see an original Guatemalan movie.)Funny enough, in the movie there's a running theme of him wanting a certain ancient book by Galileo that the church won't let him see, but then, in the end, “gifts” to him. Haha.

It also reminds me of a story I read in Pablo Neruda's memoirs. One time he was visiting another town to do a reading and went out for a walk with his wife Matilde Urrutia. In the window of a shoe shop he spotted this really big, old shoe that for whatever reason caught his eye. I think it was carved out of wood or something like that. It wasn't a normal shoe. He was an eclectic collector and knew he wanted the shoe even after just one distant look through a window. He asked the owner if he could buy it and the man refused to sell it. Neruda gave the man a ticket to his reading that night and walked away thinking that he needed that shoe, and was going to have to find someway to convince the guy. But the guy ended up coming to the reading and was so moved by it he gifted Neruda the shoe.

Sometimes Andy and I get confused about what the other means when we say, “home,” or, “family,” not sure if I/he mean/means home and real family, or here and host family. Like when we're in the capital and he says, “I have that back home.” The other day he shot me this really confused look when I told him “my family” is starting to understand when I'm making a joke and now they think I'm pretty funny.

Read while listening to Keren Ann's “les rivieres de janvier,” and if you're taking your time, “Ailleurs,” too, and if you're really taking it slow, the whole album, Nolita.

So Andy and I went with Tat Lu after lunch up to the mirador (lookout) so he could check on his horse he had left grazing up there. It has been raining for the past two days but let up for a few hours today in the afternoon. So we went out to enjoy it. Andy says there is a tropical storm over by Mexico that is causing all the rain. It just happens to be called tropical storm Andy. It was a good trip to the lookout with all kinds of stories told by the master, Tat Lu. I love the corn fields. So green and amazing. And their stalks are a deep, almost purple, red. I could only compare Guatemala's breathtaking green to Tennessee green. On the way home from the lookout I started realizing how often the girls around here wear bandannas on their heads. I don't know why I just realized that after almost two months. We passed a bunch of girls walking home in the light rain, some balancing baskets and buckets on their heads, others just helping their younger sisters down the road. There were also lots of men walking their big black bulls up the road. But when I had this realization about the bandannas, I had a flashback to a couple of semesters ago, when a girl in my ward asked me to go with her to see one of the movies at the Sundance Film Festival. We saw Smart People. She was a very nice girl, with long red hair. Now that I think about it, she let me borrow some of her cowboy “equipment” to dress up for the cowboys-and-Indians murder mystery dinner we had that year for Halloween. And she was really good at basketball. After the movie we went to a restaurant whose name I can't remember now, but it had some seriously tasty mole (a kind of Mexican salsa, not the animalito) enchiladas. And up on the wall by our table was a painting with people wearing bandannas. We were trying to figure out the setting of the painting, which country exactly, and the bandannas kept us very confused, because they didn't quite go with the rest of the setting or the look of the people. I think last I heard she was engaged, so she's probably married by now. I don't know where I heard that though.

I was walking up the road one morning and met up with an elderly lady who was headed in the same direction. We tried talking to each other, but she didn't speak much Spanish. We did our best though. At one point another old lady came walking by headed the other way, and this is how they greeted each other:

Other lady: “eeeyyyyy.”

My lady: “aaahhhhh.”

"Ah, a man after my own heart."

2009-06-22T18:36:00.000-07:00

I was feeling pretty ill Sunday morning. Must have been something I ate. Andy went to visit his old ward and I stayed and tried to sleep off some stomach pain. At one point I picked up a Liahona Andy had bought at the store next to the temple. I found this article I thought was really interesting, so I looked it up in English so I could post it here. It's called, "Our Refined Heavenly Home," by Elder Douglass L. Callister. He talks a lot about the importance of literature and music in becoming “celestial” and developing a celestial home. He says that McKay once called the grand masters of literature "the minor prophets." He even mentions having met Audry Hepburn:

http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=0&sourceId=906f9ffc50481210VgnVCM100000176f620a____&vgnextoid=f318118dd536c010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD

Volcano

2009-06-19T18:07:00.000-07:00

DEREK WALCOTT

Joyce was afraid of thunder,
but lions roared at his funeral
from the Zurich zoo.
Was it Zurich or Trieste?
No matter. These are legends, as much
as the death of Joyce is a legend,
or the strong rumour that Conrad
is dead, and that Victory is ironic.
On the edge of the night-horizon
from this beach house on the cliffs
there are now, till dawn,
two glares from the miles-out-
at-sea derricks; they are like
the glow of the cigar
and the glow of the volcano
at Victory´s end.
One could abandon writing
for the slow-burning signals
of the great, to be, instead
their ideal reader, ruminative,
voracious, making the love of masterpieces
superior to attempting
to repeat or outdo them,
and be the greatest reader in the world.
At least it requires awe,
which has been lost to our time;
so many people have seen everything,
so many people can predict,
so many refuse to enter the silence
of victory, the indolence
that burns at the core,
so many are no more than
erect ash, like the cigar,
so many take thunder for granted.
How common is the lightning,
how lost the leviathans
we no longer look for!
There were giants in those days.
In those days they made good cigars.
I must read more carefully.

Some Pics

2009-06-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

What Happens When I Sleep

2009-06-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

“Last night I had the strangest dream.” Aaron and Nathan and I went to the Asian Emmies(?), and somehow it turned into an open singing competition. At one point Aaron went up and sang, I can't remember what, and ended up winning, so they awarded him an Emmy and then the whole place magically converted into a bookstore and they let him choose any book he wanted. Afterwards he showed us the book. The cover design was surprisingly impressive, which makes me wonder how much the mind is capable of on its own, and how much it holds out on us, because I couldn't consciously design a book like that to save my life. Then I read the title: “Marx on this Guy.” And one of the reviews read, “A surrogate title, but an amazing experience.” . . . ??? . . .

Random Memories:

Eating Ding Dongs on the porch when I was like 3.

Watching The Princess Bride in Spanish with Shiree while babysitting for some relatives of hers because the dad was playing the didgeridu at a concert.

Small Pleasures of Santa Clara:

Eating beside the fire every night.
Jackie's laughter.
Reading late into the night to the sound of rain on my tin roof.

As long as it's talking with you, talk of the weather will do.

2009-06-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

We went to Quetzaltenango(Xela ) over the weekend with the five BYU students who are in Santa Caterina: Dane, Ben Jonathan, Deborah and Thuy. It's a very nice, very big city. Andy and I got into town first and went to the parque central, a huge, beautiful central park with big statues and fountains and these really cool looking trees. We looked around a bit at the central park, and then we saw in the Lonely Planet that there are a number of bookstores in the area. So we headed for them. The first one we found was a small used bookstore run by a gringo with long hair and a beard. I bought five books there, one of which was a big, old English dictionary. Then we looked around for a second store but couldn't find it.

Our friends got in by then and called to see where we were, so we went and met them in the park and then went to another bookstore where I bought two more books: Neruda's Veinte Poemas and a nice collection of Ruben Dario's poems. Then we went to Wendy's and had lunch. I got a triple cheeseburger and fries and a frosty. I've taken up drinking Pepsi lately. Tat Lu and I finished off a bottle of Pepsi one afternoon while he told stories and, I don't know why, but it tasted so good that day. Ever since I've ordered it at restaurants when there aren't any good non-soda options.

Oh, Andy and I hadn't planned on staying over night, but once I got there I decided I wanted to, and then Andy decided he would too, so we went back to The Black Cat Hostel where the others were staying and got beds in one of the dorms. It was a great hostel, and the lady working it was awesome. She was lots of fun to talk to, loves Mormons apparently and was playing Radiohead in the lobby when we walked in. She had all kinds of great music like The Whitest Boy Alive, Arcade Fire, Beruit, etc. And the girl from the cafe in San Marcos that tried to hike up the price on the De Beauvoir book was there at the same hostel. She recognized me and came over to say hey, and there I was with a sack of old books in my hand. She was like, what's the deal, are you like a collector or something? We had a good talk. She was really nice and ended up telling me that Victor, the guy who sold me the books, didn't own them. He was just working there for the day and pocketed the money. We had a good laugh. I think she said she was slowly working her way to Mexico. I can't remember why though.

After that we went to the HiperPaiz, which is basically Guatemalan Super Walmart. And then looked around the mall that it's connected to. We did bumper cars in the mall, which was lots of fun even though it was really small, and then saw a movie, for the sake of seeing a movie in a theater.

Then we tried hunting down the art exhibit of an artist who had won a national competition this year, but we ended up going to the wrong place. Everyone really wanted to eat at Pizza Hut, but we weren't sure if we'd still have time to make it to both. I really wanted to do both, but especially the art show. So I said, let's call each place and find out when they close. I called both places and found out that we would have just enough time to do both if we hurried. So we hopped on Microbuses and headed out. I' m so glad we made it to the art show. It was a really good exhibit.

We spent awhile there, took some pictures with the artist, Josue Hernandez, and then went to Pizza Hut, which was great. We also stopped into a restaurant and listened to a pretty good band before heading back to the hostel. Back at the hostel, we hung out for a bit and I perused the old dictionary I bought (I think the most interesting word I found was “probabalism;" I´m still trying to figure out exactly what it is.), and then went to bed in my clothes in a room with a bunch of strangers.

In the morning we went to church there in Quetzaltenango. The building was huge. It was a really nice ward. There was an American traveling through Guatemala with his daughter as a gift for her recent graduation from her masters program in Rochester. She's going for her PhD in 19th century British literature. So we talked a little literature and then we had to go. We got some ice cream and got on the buses to come home. The bus we took had a very aggressive attendant that crammed it way beyond capacity. I was sitting on the edge of a seat that already had two people on it and then this very large lady somehow sat down on the edge of my seat and the other seat across the aisle, completely blocking the aisle. Any time we took a corner I got leaned on BIG time, and ended up leaning on the poor lady next to me with a sleeping daughter in her arms. At one point Andy and I gave up our “seats” so these two girls that had nowhere to sit could take a rest. It was actually kind of fun to stand and fight the swing and sway of the switchbacks around the mountain. It almost felt like old times in the keys when we had to lean off the side of McDougal's catamaran to stabilize it.

Today I've tried trimming my beard, and the trimmer won't hold a charge for long, so I'm doing it in pieces: Trim a little, write a little while it charges again, trim a little more, write/charge, trim . . .

I want to see if I can get Minus the Bear big here. I think it could work. I'd like to see their faces when/if they come on a random vacation to Atitlan and overhear some kids listening to their music. I think I'll start with the guys at the Internet place and let it spread from there. They're pretty cool and listen to some good music, including a lot of American stuff.

And I bought a guitar in Solola.

More Trips and Old Books

2009-06-12T17:12:00.000-07:00

So I've started collecting some of the local superstitions from Tat Lu and the crew. They're pretty serious about them. I find them fascinating and sometimes very funny (no disrespect). Here are a few:

If you step over a broom that's been knocked on the floor, you will have all daughters.

If you walk behind a dog (there are so many dogs here I don't know how this is avoidable), or, like kids here often do, ride on a dog's back, you will also have all daughters.

If you find a hole in the ground, don´t stick your hand in it because your luck might get left behind when you pull your hand out.

If you're baby is born while the moon is full and high, your child will be smart and a hard worker.

If the moon comes out and catches you walking with a candle or torch in hand, you'll go gray.

If you sit where an elderly person just sat, while the seat is still warm, you'll start growing old.

If you joke with or bother an old man in the street, his “oldness” will pass to you.

If you point at the sun while it has a rainbow ring, your finger will become crooked (arthritis). If you point at it with your lips, your mouth will go crooked (la boca chueca).

If a pregnant lady walks under the sun while it has a rainbow ring, her child will have “deficiencies.”

If a pregnant lady disrespects the water jug—sits on it, or blows into it—she'll get a fat neck after the baby is born (sounds like goiters maybe).

We went to the lake yesterday, Wednesday. It was perfect weather. I listened to April by Sun Kil Moon while we rode down the mountain standing in the back of a pickup. What a ride. Mark Kozelek is a freaking musical genius. The views on that ride are unbelievable. It's impossible not to smile when you whip around the first bend, and all that brilliant blue suddenly appears cupped in volcanic fingers. So much beauty concentrated in a single moment, a wink before the road veers away, is like a secret reassurance of something long hoped for.

The pickup takes you to San Juan where you get a tuc-tuc, a very small three-wheeled covered scooter-like thing, to San Marcos. They're actually pretty fun to ride in. I think it would be a great job for a teenage kid, just riding around all day up and down the mountain in such a beautiful area. We stopped for a minute during that ride so that the driver could talk to this guy who looked like he'd just come back from working some fields or orchards somewhere. He had on a cowboy hat and was holding this crazing c-shaped blade. They talked for a bit in some dialect we didn't recognize. The guy on the street chewed on a lemon while he talked, occasionally spitting green bursts of peel into the air. I sat and watched him chew and spit, thinking—all that zing in his mouth; each bite must've been like a tiny celebration, a way to briefly cheat the workday's monotony.

Once we got down to San Marcos Andy stopped at a street-front shop to get some chips and I got distracted looking around, as per usual. There were some kids playing soccer across the street and the ball got away from them and rolled over to us. A Guatemalan about our age intercepted it and kicked it back, but it wasn't the best kick, and the ball swerved and almost went right into the window of a little shop on the other side of the street where a little kid was waiting to attend customers. Little kids are always running shops and errands for their parents here. The ball came flying fast and landed just under the window, and the kid didn't even flinch. The other kids laughed, got their ball and ran off. We headed down the sidewalk towards the lake.

On the way there I noticed that this little cafe place had a bookshelf in the lounge area. There was a guy playing guitar out front, and another one singing. They weren't bad. We were trying to make good time so we could get back for lunch, so I figured I'd stop in and investigate on the way out if we had time. I did stop and get some tacos at the restaurant next door though. Swimming requires lots of fuel.

We found a great spot on the lake where we could get right into deep water off of the rocks. I brought my snorkeling gear this time, which worked out great. I think one of my favorite things is just floating on my back and looking up at the sky and the trees. And the rocks get so warm in the sun. Great for laying on to dry off and warm up. There are always all kinds of crazy lizards running around on them too.

On the way back I stopped in at that cafe to see what they had. I asked if the books were for sale, and the guy was like, well they're usually just for guests to read while they hangout, but if you find one you like we could settle on a price (all this in Spanish of course). I think it was one of those places where travelers just leave/exchange their old books. The selection in places like that is usually like what you would find on the bookshelves at Andrea's Grandma's cabin. This one was actually pretty good though. It had books in all kinds of languages. Among them I found an old copy of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins in Italian. I was a little disappointed that it wasn't in French, but then again, the fact that it was translated into Italian made it feel even more exotic for some reason. Plus it was a beautiful book. A light-blue cover with off-white wear-and-tear around the edges and what looks like a child's shoe print on the upper left corner. And the pages smell wonderfully aged. So I decided I needed it. I asked him how much. He didn't know so he did the old, how much do you want to pay for it? I laughed and said, how much do I want to pay? He kind of laughed, and we looked at the book and each other for a minute, neither wanting to make the first offer. So I asked him where he was from. He looked African, and sang in a way that reminded me of a certain Brazilian style of music, so I thought maybe he was from Brazil. Turns out he's from Honduras, and his name is Victor. So we talked a bit. He's was a real cool guy. I'm pretty sure it's his cafe. Then he looked at this British gypsy girl that I guess is friends with them and hangs out there all the time, and asked her what she thought. She comes over and looks at it. I don't think she had ever heard of the book or knows how to read Italian. She looks at it and says, how much would you pay? So I give in and make the first offer: like 35 quetzales. She pretty much says that's crazy talk and that something more like 150 would be a good price. I give a whistle and then take a pensive stance and say, that's a lot. Then she says that for less than 100 it wouldn't be worth taking it out of the library, but I can tell the guy really wants to make a little money today. So I say that I don't even have a hundred, which was the truth. I explain that I just came from the lake and that I don't have much on me. Then I add the old, but we live in Santa Clara and come down here often, so maybe another time. By then the girl has walked away, and the guy is like, how much do you have? Fifty? Now we're talkin. I pull out my notebook, where I sometimes keep money when I don't have pockets, and finger forty, thinking I might try and get him down to forty, but then decide that fifty is probably about right, and say, fifty then? He kind of looks over his shoulder to see if the girl is looking, and then nods. So we make the deal. I don't know Italian yet, but I figure it's a good way to start. Plus the novelty of it was too much to pass up. An old, worn copy of Les Mandarins in Italian from a small cafe in Guatemala? Come on.

In hindsight, maybe that guy was just working there as one of the musicians that day and decided to sell me a book from the hotel/cafe library and pocket the money. Haha.

“Our shoes on the stairs awakened other ancient footsteps.”

2009-06-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

*In the spirit of this post, listen to Jorge Drexler's “Mi Guitarra Y Vos”*

“When you reach the heart of life you shall find beauty in all things, even in the eyes that are blind to beauty.”~Kahlil Gibran

“A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.”~William Sansom

“Oh, I do believe in all the things you see.”

This post is meant to round out a little a previous post about listening called “Be Still and Know.” It ended with a poem by Mary Oliver whose last few lines asked “have you too gone crazy for power, for things?” I share Mary Oliver's appreciation for nature and the ability of nature's beauty to speak to the beauty within us. But I don't feel, nor do I think Oliver does, that the poet's source of awe and inspiration begins and ends with nature. Of course, we can find it in each other, and something of that same awe nurtured by nature can be stirred by the genius of man's industry (I think poetry, or art at all, is a case in point.). Oliver's poem seems, at least to me, a “crying from the wilderness,” calling us back to taking the time to enjoy life and the beauty around us, to not get so caught up in doing that we forget “the better part.” But this joy can also be derived from “listening” to man-made objects, from listening for man's echo in those objects like the ocean's in a seashell. I think that objects become deeply important to us when they become metaphors for what we love and suffer. Here are some quotes from/about one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda, whose poetry is equally as rife with nature themes as man-made objects:

“Anyone who hasn't been in the Chilean forest doesn't know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world.”
~Neruda

“It is useful at certain hours of the day and night to look closely at the world of objects at rest: wheels that have crossed long, dusty spaces with their huge vegetal and mineral burdens, bags of coal from the coal bins, barrels, baskets, handles, and hafts in a carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with earth, like an object lesson for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that hands have given to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to reality that we should not underestimate.”
~Neruda

“As for his passion for unusual objects, old things . . . he believed that things were charged with the presence of others—that is, an object had been lived with by other people, and something of the life of the other person remained in it, tangibly. Even broken things expressed something we should be in touch with.
Pablo saw these things in a perpetual motion and felt himself to be kind of resting place for them, while they in turn would be changed by his presence.”
~Jose Venturelli

“All his life he collected a great variety of things: ships-in-bottles, shells, French postcards, ship's figureheads, sextants, astrolabes, clocks, stones, books, hats bottles. He was a passionate acquirer. But he was also a great traveler, who always returned to Chile, his roots.”
~Alastair Reid

“I think of him as a creator of ambiances, environments, as much as of words, environments made out of objects. His is a world of materials, materialist, if you like, quite closely connected to his poems. His fantasies are also material. The things that crowd his poems are things you can touch, almost see, almost smell. I think of him as a great creator of of physical surroundings.”
~Jose Donoso

“V, I'm leaving.”

“There are 872 songs on here. I've listened to them all, but I've never danced to any of them.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Breathe my love, wake my love, hold me my love"

2009-06-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

When you can hear the rain but can't see it

2009-06-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

My tendency to sing full volume in the shower has started cropping up during bucket baths. My family probably gets a good laugh.

My memory has a special place for colors.

I need to go swimming at the lake again, and this time take my snorkeling gear.

Sometimes I get a sensation in my nose when I look at people. It's not what they actually smell like. More the memory, or maybe a “prediction” or guesstimate, of a smell conjured up by/about their appearance. It doesn't happen all the time, and it's not always a bad smell or anything like that. It's just that for one reason or another my mind connects the idea of them up with a certain smell. Maybe I'll give some examples sometime.

Traveling from place to place like this feels like waking from one dream into another.

I remember one night, back at the Manor (Jamestown), I had a dream that it was morning and my mom came into our (Aaron and I) apartment room at school, which was strange but didn't seem out of place during the dream, to tell us that breakfast was ready. I could smell the glory of cinnamon rolls wafting in with her, and thought: yum, cinnamon roles! Then I actually woke up. I lie in bed for a moment relishing the rich sunlight of Saturday morning pouring through the window, thinking about how nice yet random a dream that was, when Aaron rolled over in his bed and said: mmmmm, cinnamon roles. Apparently he had bought some Pillsbury ones earlier that week, which aren't as good as Mom's but miraculous enough, and happened to wake up in the mood. So we had cinnamon roles for breakfast.

I smelled deep, rich dirt this week for the first time in . . . well, awhile. There are times when I really miss working in the yard, or on the ranch or even construction. It feels good to work the land. I went up with Tat Lu to his terreno (land) Tuesday morning. I actually woke up at five to watch the sunrise behind the mountains visible from the backyard. It's nice to watch the world awaken and open like an eye, the shadows slowly “stand up” until they vanish. The ducks and chickens and the chucho (dog) all gradually stirred and wandered, chattered up water from puddles and pestered the pretty, yellow millipedes, while I sat under the peach tree and did some reading/writing. I found some poems in the Best American 2008 that blew my mind. Then I went up with Tat Lu to see his corn. It's beautiful up there. There's a terrific view of the lake, tons of wild flowers and towering, elegant Cyprus trees. The corn is coming along great. Sometimes animals try to dig up the infant plants and eat them, so whenever he finds one that he can tell has been dug around he constructs a little shelter for it. Tat Lu love's his land. Ramona, his wife, bought it for them. He and one other guy work the corn together. I guess he has some beans too, and an avacado tree. According to Mayan tradition, people were made from corn. Well, first the gods tried a couple of other things like mud and wood, but none of them worked out. Corn is a big deal for them. He kept calling it the santa milpa, and he brings up candles to burn under a tree in his fields for protection. He showed me around and then went to work. I hung out for awhile down by where he leaves his horse, Canela, to feed and just enjoyed the view and watched her graze. Supposedly she's pregnant. Horses are such impressive/beautiful animals. I thought of “All the Pretty Horses.” All that was missing was Penelope Cruise. Haha. But it's strange to me that horses lend themselves to man's uses with a little “encouragement.” I guess maybe they were made for us, but I'd like to meet a horse that never breaks, or doesn't have to be “broken.” Eventually Tat Lu came down and sat with me for a bit. Then a couple of guys came up and started arguing with him. Apparently the land where the horse was grazing is under dispute. Tat Lu says the real owner of the land lives in Santa Clara. They've been good friends for years, and he doesn't have a problem with Tat Lu grazing his horse on the land while he works. But some guy came up from San Pablo, maybe San Juan, and pretended like he owned the land and sold it to these two guys. It's being disputed in court right now, but the two guys don't want Tat Lu's horse grazing on “their” land, or at least not grazing on it until they figure things out. At least that's what I gathered. Most of it was in Quiche. They got pretty upset, but Tat Lu stayed impressively calm; “Only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.” One of them had his zipper down the whole time, and I almost interrupted to point it out, to throw a small wrench in the conversation and see what would happen. But I didn't. My sense of humor isn't exactly Guatemalan. I just smiled and took some pictures of dew on grass blades, occasionally straightening my straw hat whenever the view from the hill felt crooked. It's also kind of interesting that people own bits of land all in the same area and everyone ends up traipsing through everyone else's land to get to theirs. While I was looking out at the lake from the disputed lands, this whole family came cruising up the mountainside, each person with a big load of firewood tied to their backs. There's also a strap that comes around the forehead and they walk leaning forward. Even the youngest kid had his little load. So they all come up the mountain and walk right through a bunch of land owned by various people. And people use that area as a mirador (lookout) all the time, as if it were public. A very popular spot for guys to bring their girlfriends to after school. Nothing like a breathtaking view to induce the vertigo of love, to make you feel like the whole world lies ahead of you and nothing and no one behind you . . . Except for the gringo poet on his burgundy tarp reading Mary Oliver and watching the fog roll in overhead.

I started reading Hamlet that night, and, strangely enough, it kind of starts out with a land dispute. Then later that night, at the Internet place, I went to pay the guy up at the counter and right in front of me in a glass case was a candy bar called “Hamlet.” Haha. I took it to Andy's where we did a little picture-exchange + hangout night, and split it with him. It wasn't the tastiest. I think it was a little old.

On the way back from working with Tat Lu I played some soccer with Juan Antonio, a lone kid just kicking a ball in the street. I think I'm getting better? And I guess some guys entered us in a basketball tournament that starts this weekend. Oh boy.

“I faded away along with my thoughts, and like a train in the night trailed off mystically.” ~Sun Kil Moon, Like the River

Read Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

2009-06-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

After reading this passage by Mary Oliver I saw this poem in a whole new light. A quick lesson in sound (poem included):

"Read the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost, keeping in mind exactly what is going on—the pause within a journey, the quiet, introspective voice of the speaker, the dark and solitary woods, the falling snow.
The initial four lines are rife with w's and th'; f is there, and v. Three sets of double ll's. The heaviness of the vowels is increased by the use of diphthongs. The two words that end with a mute (think and up) are set within the lines and thus are softened. All other mutes are softened within the words themselves. One could scarcely read these lines in any other than a quiet, musing, almost whispered way.
One can say any number of things about the little horse of the second stanza. It is the only object in the poem on which the speaker focuses. It is the only other living thing in the poem, and it is as willing as the speaker for the moment is hesitant to continue the journey. In any case, we are drawn by the speaker to look at the little horse too, and as we do so the sounds of the whispery introduction, the interior monologue, no louder than the snow falling, are interrupted with little raps of sharper sound—not mallets, not that heavy, but different. “My little horse must think it queer” is not a very rattling line, but the sound of “think,” with its lightly snapping k this time followed not by a softer sound but by the snippet “it,” and “queer,” an echo of the k, makes it altogether livelier than the first stanza. “Stop” is a rap of a sound, then it is quieted by the rest of the line. After “lake” there is a momentary chasm, a fracture of silence out of which a different kind of electricity flows before the line swings and the adjective “darkest” repeats the k once more, two taps of disquietude.
In stanza 3 the reversal has taken place. Instead of the guttural mutes being quieted—swallowed up in a plash of softer sounds—they rise up among and after the soft sounds, insisting they be heard.
The first hard g in the poem occurs on the first line of this third stanza: “he gives his harness bells a shake . . .” Though the g is instantly quieted by the two h's, the moment of introspection is almost over, and the ear anticipates this with “bells” and with the word “shake”--louder than “lake,” more forceful. In the following line the k repeats in the very meaningful word “ask” (the traveler is not the only “asking” creature in the poem); and this line as well as the following lines of the third stanza end with mutes. Altogether, in this stanza, we have “shake,” “mistake,” “sweep,” and “flake,” while, in the two stanzas preceding, there has been only one such moment (the end word “lake” in line 7).
Something is stirring in the very sound; it leads us to ready ourselves for the resolution in 4. There, “the woods are lovely” takes us exactly back to the mood of the first stanza, but the second half of that line thumps out “dark and deep,” both words beginning with a mute and ending with a mute. They represent, in the sound, themselves, and more than themselves. They say not only that the woods are dark and deep, but that the speaker has come to another place in his mind and can speak in this different way, designating with voice, as with the gesture of an arm, a new sense of decision and resolution.
Line 2 of the last stanza both begins and ends with a mute, and there is the heavy p in “promises” in the center of the line. Lines 3 and 4, the same line repeated, are intricate indeed. “Miles,” that soft sound, representative of all one's difficult mortal years, floats above the heavy mutes pacing to the end of the lines—“go,” “before,” “sleep.” The unmistakable, definite weights that are the mutes help to make the final line more than an echo of the third line. Everything transcends from the confines of its initial meaning; it is no only the transcendence in meaning but the sound of the transcendence that enables it to work. With the wrong sounds, it could not have happened."

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds' the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

A Poem I Understand a Little Better Now

2009-06-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

The Troubadours etc.

Just for this evening, let's not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
Or ever recurring pepper trees in their gardens
Promising, promising.

At least they had ideas about love.

All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
Through metal contraptions to eat.
We've followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
Yellowing flowering shrubs.

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
The violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
There is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—
Darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound with the thunder of
their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
Not instinct or pattern but only
One another.

When they stopped, Audubon observed,
They broke the limbs of stout trees by the sheer weight of their numbers.

And when we stop we'll follow—what?
Our hearts?

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
Only through miracle,
But the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
How to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.

Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
Quietly to myself in my blue dress,
A blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
Though cloudless.

At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
Eve as it swells and waves.

Just for this evening, won't you put me before you
Until I'm far enough away you can
Believe me?

Then try, try to come closer—
My wonderful and less than.

More, More Everything

2009-06-02T11:20:00.001-07:00

Tat Lu is a Dragon Slayer (Sounds like a Minus the Bear song title.)

2009-06-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

So, things are going really well. I love it here. Here are some stories from the past couple of weeks:

I sat on my glasses. They were bent pretty badly. The screws ripped out and I think they had stripped their holes. I was able to reshape the frames back to normal . . . almost normal. Supposedly there's an eye doctor who comes to town now and then and who was supposed to be in town the next day for market day, but didn't show. So I was visually impaired for a little while until I finally I bought some super glue and glued them back together. (Not the prettiest solution, but it works fine.) Suzana asked me if I have trouble seeing things from far away without my glasses, so I put my hands up like three feet in front of me and said that I can see well without my glasses up to about here. She laughed and said oh, so all you can see well is your metz (girlfriend in Quiche), and we both laughed, and I said that it's better to have them off in that case anyway. They keep asking me if I have a girlfriend and never believe me when I tell them no. They say that all the students start out saying they don't have girlfriends back home and then it comes up at some point or another that they actually do. Supposedly one student went home early because of an “earache.” Maybe I do have someone out there whose name I can't remember, or I haven't met yet; an anonymous emotional “penpal” I've shared a connection with that defies space and time; some soul on my same frequency I've been sharing transmissions with my whole life without ever knowing what it was I was feeling. Maybe that is why I never feel totally lonely, and might explain this strange connection to some near yet distant beauty that burns for me across the sky. Or maybe my true love has simply always been beauty; in that case I've never been alone. But of course they don't have any of that in mind when they're asking me if I have a metz. Oh, and there also seems to be some controversy about that being the right word for girlfriend in Quiche. My host family says it is. Everyone else says it's not but can't offer any alternative.

Ramona beat me 140 to 0 at soccer. I was a little confused by the score myself, but then again I don't know much about soccer. After the game we went into what I guess you could call the living room and I sat in a chair as the patient while the girls played doctors. Then they bought these fruit drink things that come in bags, almost like otterpops but a lot bigger and melted. They gave me one and I looked at it for a minute trying to figure out how to open it. It's completely full to the point of bulging. Supposedly you just snag it with your teeth and rip. But to do that you have to be holding it in your hand. So I'm squeezing this bulging bag in my hand and then give it a rip with my teeth and juice squirts all the way across the room and all over me. Of course that got Jackie laughing her adorable laughter.

Dinner turns into story time for Tat Lu almost every night. I love it. One night last week we started talking about snakes somehow. I think I told him about finding some big bugs in my room and so he started telling me that the real danger around here is snakes. Black ones will hurt and make you swell up, but the green ones will kill you in half an hour. Supposedly they're only up in the mountains though (?). So then he launched into story after story of how he'd killed poisonous snakes when he was young. Once when he was a teenager he was up in the mountains working and decided to take a rest. He ducked under a tree to lie down and as soon as he was on his back he looked up into the tree and saw a two-headed snake—two of the green snakes with their tails tangled together. So he prayed a lot and then took a big stick and knocked one out of the tree and then the other with another stick, and finished them off with his machete (something like that). Then later that day he needed to take care of some “personal business,” and just as he was undoing his belt a rattle snake came cruising up through the brush. Suddenly he no longer needed to use the bathroom. He stood there wondering how he was going to kill it while it moved closer and started rattling, etc. He ended up killing that one too, I can't remember how though. Maybe another stick machete combo. That was just the first of many dragon slaying stories.

Andy came over Thursday night to plan our trip to Antigua the next day. We ended up listening to stories from Tat Lu for about an hour and a half—I like seeing how long he can go, it's really impressive—and then we planned. Then Tat Lu and I walked Andy home because it was late. It was a beautiful night, great for a walk. I love nighttime. On the way back I asked Tat Lu how he and his wife met. He said that when he was seventeen his grandma came to him and told him that she could feel that she was going to die soon. She told him how she loved him and wanted him to be happy and taken care of, and then she told him he needed to marry Ramona (who is his wife now). Ramona spent everyday up in the mountains herding sheep and cattle and such, which is rare/odd for a girl here. His grandma said that he needed to find her and marry her. Her dad had lots of land and Tat Lu would always be taken care of. As a seventeen year old kid he just laughed. I think he said that she came to him one more time and told him that he needed to go find her, that he would date other girls, but none of them would end up liking him and he would eventually marry Ramona anyway. He shrugged it off again. Time went by. He started working for the post office and dating girls from different areas. Nothing seemed to work out though. At twenty seven he started to worry about how old he was getting when he suddenly remembered the words of his grandma and decided to go look for Ramona. He found her up in the mountains with her animals and struck up a conversation. They spent TWO YEARS like that, hanging out and getting to know each other. After two years of talking he finally was like, so if you want to and don't have another man, if you do that's totally fine, but if not and you want to, let's get married. And so they did. Writing this I just remembered a moment I had on a street corner here, watching all the people walking up and down going about their business. Suddenly I wondered, does the Lord take care of all of us, direct and guide us in life, even if we don't know Him or recognize His hand in all things? And then my mind opened a little and my understanding of the Lord's title of Shepherd expanded and it all made complete sense for moment. And while the logistics seemed impossible, the reality of it overwhelmed me.

Antigua was tons of fun. The first day we strolled around to get the lay of the land, got Andy a new camera because his had broken, and checked out a really cool Cathedral that has been converted into a five star hotel and has a bunch of museums. We ate at some great places like Cafe Sky, La Escudilla and La Pena del Sol Latino. Cafe Sky is a a restaurant that has places to eat on the roof where you have a great view of the city and surrounding volcanoes. We had dinner there the first night. I had some excellent battered mushrooms. It's also where I started a small experiment with music. When I'm somewhere I know is going to be very memorable, I pull out my music player and listen to a song or two. I want to see if that song will become a memory trigger. Will Mark Kozelek's “Bad Boy Boogie” always remind me of looking out over Antigua from Cafe Sky, or Minus the Bear's “Guns and Ammo” of eating lunch with my hiking group and a stray dog on the side of a volcano after stabbing lava with a stick I bought from some kids for 5 quetzales, or Sun Kil Moon's “Lost Verses” of riding up the canyon to Santa Clara in the back of a pickup with three kids (brothers) huddled in blankets and pillows? We stayed at La Casa Rustica. It was a pretty nice place. The lonely planet says that, like the Texan owner, everything about this place is big. I guess that includes the dogs in the entry way and the slowness of the computer I used to transfer my pictures from my camera to a jump drive so I could take pictures on Pacaya the next day. I did meet a very nice lady from Ireland while transferring the pictures. It actually was a really nice place. One thing to remember to do on your trip to Antigua is to forget to bring socks for your volcano hike at six in the morning. Bring the shoes, you have to wear shoes on the hike, but forget the socks (I wore my chacos down there and had my shoes in my bag.). This will get you up at five thirty, the sun already up, hurrying past the big Texan dogs out into the street. Once you are outside you can ask the nearest Guatemalan, who will speak to you in English even though you're speaking Spanish, if there is a place you can get socks this early. He'll tell you to try the market a ways down the road. Then start power walking like Mom Dukes down to the market. As you do take a moment to realize how beautiful Antigua is in the morning when the streets are empty and the lighting is photographic (this would be the best time to take pictures because there's no one around to get in the way of a great shot of the arch or an old cathedral). Hurry past the pink and blue and yellow and green and ayayay buildings toward the market. If you're lucky, like I was, there will be one lady at the front of the market (the only one around) getting a head start on her market set up for the day, and the only thing she'll have set up so far will just happen to be a sock stand. By three pairs for ten quetz and run home because it's five to six (but if you know better, don't run, because the driver of your tour van is going to have a cold and wake up late). Also, be careful when you ring the very annoying doorbell to get back in, because it will break and stick and scream forever, at six in the morning. Pacaya was awesome. There were four others in our group: a couple from Australia, and a guy from America who was with a girl from Spain. We were the “Pumas.” Before you go up, there are a bunch of kids that want to sell you walking sticks for the hike. “Stick is good.” The hike was beautiful. Lava is amazing. I poked my stick in it. It was very hot though. Soles of shoes melted, and there was this crazy sulfuric gas that burned the nose, throat and lungs. On the way back we saw a bunch of people running down this really sandy side of the mountain. I wanted to do it so I left the group and hiked up there. When I looked down it was so foggy I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me. I did the run, which was fun, and then caught up to the group. That night we ate at La Pena del Sol Latino. It had some very tasty food, sinfully delicious brownies, and a band that played some excellent Incan music. It was a good trip. Oh, I also found some pretty good book stores. One of them had a whole section of Neruda. I already own a number of the ones up there, but I was surprised at how many good books they had. Most bookstores around here are actually paper stores. I found a book at another store by Humberto Ak'abal that I need for my work here. I also bought a couple of used classics, including Hamlet, at another store. My embarrassing confession is that I've never read an entire Shakespeare play but have recently become very interested in reading some. Actually, watching V for Vendetta again one night here—I actually watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, V for Vendetta, and half of The Thin Red line that night—really got me hungry for some Shakespeare. I also noticed something interesting while watching V this time. There's a scene when the detective is explaining his predictions on what is going to happen, and it shows a quick scene of EV in a green dress and in the mirror on the wall you can see a reflection of a man at the kitchen table. Can you tell who it is? I've been wanting to read more classics in general, plus I'd just visited a volcano, so I picked up Dante's Inferno as well. The trip back wasn't bad. The last leg we took in the back of a pickup. There were three brothers in the back huddling in blankets. It was a breathtaking drive through the mountains at sunset. We got dropped off a little ways from home and walked the rest of the way. A great way to end an excellent trip.

Most ridiculous question asked in Antigua: “Did you take one of me in baby mode?”

Today is the first day it's rained in like five days. It's miraculous, but I missed the rain. “God is in the rain.”

Every time I tie up the curtain on my window these birds come and hop around on the sill and peck at their reflections.

Random Memories:

Heather, riding home from school on her bike, looks back to talk to me and ends up hugging a mailbox.

The night Heather came to tell me she had decided to go on a mission.

The time I was driving out of the neighborhood, fiddling with the CD player, and looked up to realize that I was flying through someone's yard, up and over the driveway. I still don't know how, but I made it back to the road safe and sound.

Julie telling me that once, when her and Aaron were both at BYU in their first few semesters, she ran into Aaron in the grocery store and asked him if he wanted to come over to her place for dinner. He said he wasn't sure because it was chicken-cat week and anything could happen.

Julie's laughter and music on Sunday afternoons.

My mom doing her drill team routines in the kitchen while cooking.

My mom, the time I took a u-turn without looking and got in an accident. I walked home slowly, my friend Rusty trying to console me. When I got home my mom seemed excited about something and started to tell me about it, but I interrupted her to confess that I'd wrecked the car. She stopped for a minute and asked if everyone was OK. I said yes, and then she said, “Listen to this missionary experience I had today.”

Watching a movie with Tami for the first time on the mood-lit steps because there were no more seats in the theater, and the time we watched Signs in that same theater and she asked me to cover her eyes at one point but ended up peaking anyway, and the time she came down to the house and watched IQ with me and my mom.

Also the time she kidnapped me after “curfew,” and we played basketball in her driveway at night, and then danced to the radio in her dad's truck, unconcerned with how sweaty we were.

Mowing fields in tractors with Bryce on the ranch. Once I was driving right behind him, staggered a little to cut a double row. While we were taking a corner I started looking around daydreaming. When I turned around I realize he had come to a complete stop in front of me and quickly slammed on the brakes and started flipping gears. I ended up giving his tractor just a little nudge. Apparently he'd decided to take a nap. I also remember trying to memorize the old discussions together during lunch breaks.

Tami, wearing a pink shirt the night we first held hands while walking on the beach, and how we were late home because a sea turtle was laying eggs in the sand in front of the boardwalk stairs, and because of a very long train at the crossing in downtown Melbourne. Also that her favorite color was yellow.

Sharing a mango Italian ice with her at Busch Gardens when she fist realized my eyes are different colors.

Katie laughing harder than I ever heard her laugh when I joked with Bryce about spraying cologne on my belly everyday after getting out of the shower.

And how she wanted me to come see her at three in the morning when I got back from a week long trip with my brothers to see my sister and her family in Oregon.

Also that she fixed my watch as a surprise birthday present before we were “together,” and I wiggled my way out of work to spend time with her.

Finding a great Mexican restaurant that had wifi and the funniest painting of all time on that trip to Oregon. And how we slept in the car and fished for a few days on the way up.

When my dad took off work and let me skip school in sixth grade and took me and my best friend, who was moving away the next day, fishing at Sebastian Inlet.

Nate taking me to the water park, Wet N' Wild, with his friends the summer before his mission.

Our babysitter, Jodi, teaching us how to do a crazy frog sound with our throats. I think I was the only one that actually learned how to do it.

Neighbors coming to tell Nathan and I to turn down our amps.

When I came out to Provo a week early before entering the MTC and went fishing with my Dad, brothers and uncle, and forgot one of Aaron's rods down by the river. He ran back with me to try and find it. The sun went down on us while we were coming back. We followed the train tracks too far and almost got lost.

Aaron slipping out of work to see me off at the MTC.

Kyle, when he was like three, dancing and singing, “Don't throw turkeys at my jamis (pajamas) Batman.”

Catching dog fish with shrimp between the rocks at Sebastian.

Jumping off the bridge at Sebastian.

Being too afraid to step in and help a kid who was getting bullied in elementary school.

Kyle sharing his testimony after going to the temple.

Finding Ralph Waldo Emerson's poems and essays for the first time.

When we went to the keys and I made friends with the crazy midget key deer and then they swarmed our camp and started dipping their heads into our coolers and biting our melons and we had to chase them out with squirt guns.

Riding back on John Huberty's boat from the coral reef at John Penny Camp, singing out loud, because no one could hear me over the motor and rush of water, “It Was Just My Imagination . ..”

Dunking off Paul Pahulu's back during a Stake basketball game.

Doing a Jackson five song in a ward talent show, with afros and full choreography, with Paul, David, Shiblon and Tony. How Paul fell down in the hallway laughing before we stumbled back on stage for an encore.

Eating cow tongue.

Eating an entire Little Cesars pizza before anyone else got their food from the FAST food joint in the same parking lot (I swore those pizzas off a long time ago).

Be Still and Know

2009-06-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

“ 'You still believing in the beautiful light are you? How do you do that? You're a magician to me.'

'I still see a spark in you.' ”

“One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there's nothing but unanswered pain, that death's got the final word; it's laughing at 'em. Another man sees that same bird—feels the glory, feels something smilin' through it.”

“ 'In this world, a man himself is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.'

'You're wrong there Top. I've seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.' ”

~ The Thin Red Line

"No time for infinity? Gotta piece together a theory?"
-Huckabees

Lately I've been thinking about the importance of listening. It's a fairly poetic practice, I suppose. I guess I've always been more of a listener/observer, and good listening is one of the most important things poetry has helped me develop (or at least inspires me to want to develop). Poetry leaves me in awe at the power of the human heart to redeem. And when I read the descriptions of a “seer” in the scriptures, I think: That's a poet! (at least when loosely interpreted). Not that we all should be poet's by trade, but perhaps poets at heart: awake and aware, “plugged in,” redeeming even the infinitesimal. When I take the time to relax, ponder and listen (often in nature)—including all the senses—I'm always filled with more than enough to love and treasure. Those who are open to life and beauty seem to live in a world of heightened peace and enjoyment. I think it is a godly trait to delight in life, to be full of love for all, to perceive beauty in everything. I feel deeply that it is important for us to keep tender, full of awe and wonder, sifting the richness; we must nurture our delicate and fine sensitivities, give way to them, and never become “past feeling.” Here's a poem by Mary Oliver I found while thinking about this:

THE SUN

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

*Stay tender with awe and wonder*

Some Thoughts I Had While Reading/Praying

2009-06-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Love the Lord. Trust in His love. Never despair:
- “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; (2 Cor 4:8,9)”
Have faith that you can accomplish the goals of your heart.
Care more about love and happiness, about pursuing your dreams than wealth or acceptance. The Lord will provide. You will be rich in soul and the rest shall be added unto you, and will then actually mean more to you.
See the beauty in others, and in all. Take the time to pay attention to the little things, and share them with others. Share in the little things that are important to others. The little things, the simple things, are the secrets to understanding the heart.
“. . . and thus be lead by the Holy Spirit, becoming humble, meek, submissive, patient, full of love and all long-suffering; having faith on the Lord; having a hope that ye shall receive eternal life; having the love of God always in your hearts, that ye may be lifted up at the last day and enter his rest (Alma 13:28-29).”

Lately I was thinking about the story of the prodigal son. How patient and hopeful the Lord is, and, when we finally come around, how merciful and forgiving. I can still see the face of the girl who was baptized yesterday in Antigua: so bright, so happy. “Come, let us reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow,” as it says, more or less, in the first chapter of Isaiah. I know that He lives and loves us. I have felt His love and mercy in my life. When we come to him in faith, He will never forsake us. He answers us when we plead in faith for healing, for renewal, for forgiveness or direction. It seems one could almost spend an entire lifetime giving thanks.

Creature Fears: Bed Buddies

2009-05-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

So I thought I had my own room . . . I was up late last night writing and listening to music--I started writing some found poems using only song titles for fun--when I started finding my little roommates. Here are some pics. I couldn't bring myself to kill any of them. So I just let some of them be and took the others outside. And I also threw in a crazy turkey that looks like something off The Dark Crystal for kicks. No insects or animals were harmed in the making of this post.

Come Away with Me

2009-05-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

Here are some more pics. I have a few videos as well that have trouble loading. I´ll see if I can get them up. We went to the lake, lake Atitlan, on Tuesday. It´s amazing, and pretty close so I´ll definitely be going back often. You get there by riding down the mountain in the back of a pickup. The other pics with the ninos are from a couple of days ago. Ramonita had a thing of bubbles and wanted to play with them. So one of us would make the bubbles and the other would try to pop them, or we´d try to keep blowing one back and forth and see how long we could keep it up in the air. Then she decided she wanted to play in the street, and every nino on the block came out to play. So we played bubbles and then someone pulled out a ball and we played keep away and then started using two light poles as baskets to play basketball. It was a lot of fun. The kids want me to come out and play everyday now.

More Pics

2009-05-14T14:58:00.001-07:00

And I Said Hoo oo hoo oo to You (to be read while listening to “Last Tide” by Sun Kil Moon)

2009-05-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love most is sleeping under a tin roof. The rain at night turns the roof into a veritable marimba. It gets foggy here most evenings too. Andy and I took a stroll down to the neighboring town and got lost coming back in the fog, but ended up taking a much more scenic route than we would have otherwise. Another favorite thing is having a simple dinner made with fresh ingredients and corn tortillas, and letting Tat Lu (Don Pedro, my host dad, he's more like a grandpa actually) talk and talk and tell all kinds of stories. Sometimes it's hard to understand everything because Spanish is his second language, but I can get the gist. Such an honest, good-hearted man. Last night we sat by the fire stove in their dirt-floor kitchen and he told me all kinds of stories. This one came out of nowhere, the poet in him standing up for minute. He said he felt very sad one morning. He got his horse ready and headed up to clean the milpa (corn) feeling heavy and worried. So he went up to the mirador (“the lookout,” this place has some awesome views of the lake below, Andy and I went yesterday to the mirador and it is breathtaking) where his land is and sat down to think things through, to let the hurricane of sorrow work its wonder and teach its lessons. He said while he was sitting there thinking, two rabbits, a male chasing a female through the corn, ran straight into his legs (one into each leg) and then scampered off. And that was all it took to cure his mood. He decided to go after them because supposedly they're very rico. Two of his sons and his daughter live with him and his wife, as well as their daughter-in-law and her two daughters. Her husband, their oldest son, lives in Houston right now. Tat Lu and his wife, Ramona, are both up there in years, and when she told me her dad was still alive and lived up the road, I almost fell out of my chair. The too granddaughters are so adorable. Ramona is like seven or eight I think, and Yakelin is like three. Ramonita danced and danced last night, showing me all the dances she'd made up. Yakelin was a little timid at first but yesterday she started talking up a storm and narrating everything everyone else said or did. And her laugh kills me! It jumps from her so suddenly and honestly. I played a game with them that Ramona made up as we went that involved a piece of paper she had torn up into smaller pieces and distributed to me and Yakelin. We entertained ourselves for a good while with a couple of torn pieces of paper, Ramona's endless imagination and Yakelin's infectious alegria. They're a great family, always worried about me being comfortable, and wondering if I'm homesick, etc. We had these really good mashed potatoes for dinner and I told them they reminded me of potatoes my mom makes. They asked about my parents, their names and if they missed me. I told them their names and explained that I have the best parents en el mundo. Which is the complete truth. And I always miss my family and friends, though I'm not necessarily homesick. I took my first bucket bath today. They knocked on my door and said, “David, David. Are you busy?” Nope, just sleeping. “Mom has already prepared your bath, do you want your bath first or breakfast?” I didn't know I was taking a bath today. Maybe they were tired of smelling me. I went and had my very first, very warm bucket bath. It worked much better than I had imagined. Then I had a really good fried egg with some salsa and torillas (I had mentioned for some reason at one point that I liked fried eggs as well as scrambled, but that I liked el centro duro and she remembered perfectly). I got a cheap cell phone down here because it's important to be able to keep in touch with my family and Andy, especially when we travel to other parts. I pay by the minute to make calls, but I don't have to pay a cent to receive calls, even if they're from the states. So feel free to give me a call (45488948, I think the country code is 502).

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention about the plane ride: At one point we skirted around a thunderstorm. I watched it out the window. I can sing with Nora Jones that one of the prettiest things I ever did see was lightning from the top of the clouds.

I need to go work on some poems because I have to turn in three this week. Hope everyone is happy and well. Love y'all pues. Chao for now.

2009-05-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

Every Path Has Lead Me Back

2009-05-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Now that we're in Santa Clara I have more time to do some recapping of the last week. I was going to add a bunch of pictures but the internet here has to be carried back and forth on a guys back. It's kind of slow. Guess it will have to wait.

For starters, the plane trip was very interesting. I sat next to a lady who said she does neuro-linguistics. Yeah, neuro-linguistics. She's kind of a therapist. She helps rehabilitate addicts or people with behavioral issues. But she also helps people work on building what she called body language rapport with others so that you can communicate quickly via body language and more subliminal messages. A very interesting lady. She talked about making your request of the universe every morning, for her that meant God, and setting up some way of knowing that the universe was working with you. She said that while she was on vacation one time she wanted to find a sand dollar, but she was conflicted because she wasn't sure if she wanted to have to store it and get it home. She ended up finding lots of sand dollars but not taking any home. She said we need to not be conflicted about what we want. We must solidly want it and ask for it, and then it will happen. Then I asked, according to her studies, what she thought about telepathy and telekineses (Nate and I have kind of been experimenting with telepathy a little to see if we can pass each other images or numbers if we concentrate, it's kinda fun). She says she thinks it's real. She also said she knows a guy that took spoon bending classes in Salt Lake and can bend spoons. She also knows a lady who told her son that he needed to behave because she had eyes on the back of her head and always knew what he was up to. He didn't believe her, so to convince him she took out a spoon and told him she would bend it to prove her “supernatural” mother powers. She prayed like crazy it would happen, and it did, and her kid freaked out and believed her. Good trick to remember when I'm a parent: Do what I say, I can bend spoons with my mind. It was a lot of fun talking with her. Some of it was a little hard to swallow, but hey, who knows. I think any of it could be possible. It would be very interesting to hunt down that spoon bending class. Would make a great first date, haha. Andrea, Spencer, Nate, Amy, Catie, Bucketry—you guys should look into that, and then, once you've got it down, go back to scones and drones and really freak them out.

We got into Guatemala City on Friday afternoon and met up with the family of Alonzo, a Guatemalan that lives in Utah and has connections with BYU. They let us leave our bigger bags and my giant sack of books with them while we traveled around and helped us get to the Metro Norte mall where we ate and waited for the bus to Rio Dulce. While waiting at the bus stop I met a Jewish Guatemalan that actually worked for the Jewish embassy here. His great grandfather was a Jew that somehow ended up in Guatemala and married a Guatemalan. Apparently there is a big Jewish community here. He was really nice and helpful. We had a great talk about all kinds of random things, including My Name is Asher Lev, of course. It's interesting how quickly strong bonds of friendship can be formed down here. After just half an hour of chatting he gave me his phone number and told me he wanted me to come down so he could sneak me into Synagogue sometime. He told me to call if we ever needed anything—money or food or if we ever ran into problems with thieves or people trying to hassle us—to call and he would help us with mucho gusto. I really liked him a lot. He was currently in town investigating the murder of a Jewish Guatemalan that was supposedly carried out by Arabs in the area. I never knew the Jewish-Arab conflict extended all the way to Guatemala City. He helped us find the right bus and off we went.

By the time we got on the bus it was already early evening. The nicer buses didn't seem to be coming by so we grabbed whatever we could headed to Rio Dulce. The first while it was pretty empty and we got a nice breeze with the windows open. A Senorita with two ninas was sitting next to us and she struck up a friendly conversation, basically the history of her life and how her and her husband now owned some land out in the campo they were working. The daughters were adorable and lots of fun. They would act like they wanted us to take a picture of them and then would hide their faces just before we'd take one. So any of the pictures I got were pretty blurry. It was a really long bus ride that gradually got more and more uncomfortable as more people crowded on and the roads got bumpier, but it was a great experience and a chance to see the Guatemalan countryside for the first time. We stopped everywhere along the way, in little pueblos or even just the side of the road for whoever was sitting there waiting. A crazy, possibly inappropriate experience to share (too funny to pass up though): Later in the night I really had to use the bathroom. I'd been holding it forever, and this bus had no bathroom and wasn't making any pit stops. I've never been in so much bathroom-related pain in my life. Finally I asked the driver if I could use a bathroom at the next bus stop. We stopped in front of this little restaurant with a couple of ladies sitting on the porch looking our way. I got down and the guy told me to just go. “Aqui no le dan multas como en los estados.” Basically there weren't any bathrooms around and they weren't going to make the whole bus wait long. So I went right there next to the bus in front of some old ladies. It was a moment of extreme desperation in the backwoods of Guatemala. Por favor, no vayan a pensar mal de mi. We laughed about it for awhile. We didn't get into Rio Dulce until nine or so. We hopped off the bus and a guy came up to us and offered a place to stay that we took because it seemed pretty cool and we were tired and didn't want to hunt around (which is probably what he banks on). It was a hostel called Casa Perico that we had to take a lancha (a small motor boat) to get to. It is owned and run by a guy that I think is from Sweden but has lived in Guate for a long time and speaks good Spanish. We stayed the night there and met another friend we spent the night chatting with. Her mom lives in Antigua, which is a really nice/safe area, and had come down to visit her and travel Guatemala a bit. Turns out she found a group of people sailing from Rio Dulce to Miami and stopping in Cuba and a few other places along the way, so she decided to cut her trip a little short and do that. Can't blame her. Sailing to Cuba had me pretty jealous. We talked and shared a bag of pretzels(the place had a restaurant but we showed up too late to catch dinner and just bought a bunch of snacks to hold us over) until around eleven at night. I hadn't slept since Wednesday night and got real drowsy real quick. Sleeping that night was a little crazy. The place sat right on the river and the rooms had roofs but were otherwise completely open. There was crusty mosquito netting for the beds we were reluctant to use because they already had some bugs tangled in them. Pero ni modo. We used them. At one point, before we went to bed, I was reading some Pablo Neruda—I've been working on memorizing “Significa Sombras” at the end of the first book of Residencia en la Tierra—and I looked down and saw the hugest black ant of all time. It was seriously as long as the first half of my index finger and kept stopping, raising its rear and stabbing my bed with its crazy stinger. I swept it off with the spine of Residencia en la Tierra and watched it disappear between a couple boards. Once we turned out the lights it was easier to fall asleep. We woke in the morning (for some reason I naturally wake up really early here, like six in the morning or earlier) without any problems. It was actually a really cool looking place that was a lot of fun to stay at. We took the safest boat we could find from their rickety selection and paddled out to a piece of dock anchored out in Lago Izabal where we did some swimming/bathing before check out. I got my first sunburn from the Guatemalan sun on that dock. Man I'm so white. Oh, funny side note: everyone here thinks I'm a total Spaniard. When we first showed up to the dock to take the lancha to Casa Perico there was a guy just sitting there leaning against a column like he owned the place, or like no one owned the place. When we came up he nodded at me and said, “Puro Barcelona, no?” He thought my hair and beard were straight out of Barcelona. Because people have a hard time pronouncing me name—Talor, Taylor, Toyler?—I thought about just taking on the nickname Barcelona. I've actually started telling people to call me David, my middle name, because that's a name that exists in Spanish. I think Amy Maxwell went by her middle name down here too.

Then we went to take a microbus to El Estor, a little town further inland on the same lake. Andy served in that area on his mission, so we went to visit. It is a beautiful little town right on the lake with lots of friendly people and some good places to stay. Andy knew one of the drivers of the microbuses (basically vans that they cram with way too many people to go fairly short distances) from the ward in El Estor, so we rode with him from Rio Dulce to El Estor. I jokingly told him I would ride on the top with the luggage because it was so crowded and he said that once we got out of town that would be cool, but in town la policia molesta. We rode up front with him, and it wasn't too uncomfortable. I just had to move my leg now and then so he could shift. Sure enough, once we got out into the country, he let me get out and climb up onto the top and ride the rest of the way. In the words of Grandma Evans: Oh my guy! It was too good to describe, but if I could wish one beautiful thing on someone that might be it. We passed through cattle fields and endless fields of banana trees. And me just relaxin on the top, taking in the wind and the sun and the country.

El Estor was lots of fun. We went to church on Sunday and met the ward. The meeting felt amazing. I've always felt the Spirit surprisingly strongly in Spanish wards, but this one was really good. There were to sister missionaries in the ward that we met as well. They seemed to be doing a good job strengthening the ward there. The town was great, but it was baking hot. We made friends with the store owner where the ATM was. He suggested a couple of places with great views of the city and lake where I could sit and write, but we didn't have time to get to them. But the town had such a great vibe, we plan on going back some weekend to spend a little time there. After church we gathered our stuff and started hiking down the dirt road that leads out of town back to Rio Dulce. About fifteen minutes down the road this guy came running down to the road asking if I was a Spanish gypsy. He invited us to come down and talk for awhile. So we did and had a great time. Turns out they've talked to a lot of missionaries and even remember Andy. One of their daughters has actually been accepted to a program where she lives with a family in North Carolina for eight years to go to school and comes back to her home every summer. Then we headed out, hunted down some water at the small shops that line the road, and then waited at a bus stop for a bus or possibly a jalon (a free ride, hitchhiking basically). A couple of taxis came by, but we didn't take them because they were all really expensive. We were headed for the coastal town of Puerto Barrio that you can only get to through Rio Dulce, so we were telling everyone that we were headed for Rio Dulce. Every time a truck passed Andy would head up to the road and put out his thumb. Finally a really nice truck stopped and offered to take us to Rio Dulce, and off we went. That was a really beautiful drive, and really fast too. He took us to a junction where we got a bus for ten quetzales to Puerto Barrios. We made it from El Estor to Puerto Barrios for ten quetz and in really good time. We were proud of ourselves.

The countryside gets more lush and stunning as you approach the coast, or so Lonely Planet accurately describes it. In Puerto Barrios we stumbled across a really nice hotel (well, nice compared to where we'd typically been staying), that had air conditioning (hallelujah) and a nice clean bathroom with a shower and hot water. It also had a huge dining area and a pool where we did some swimming. In the morning they offer a free breakfast buffet which was really good (eggs, black beans, fried plantains, sausage, strawberry licuados). Plus I was able to get some laundry done, and thank goodness because I was in dire need. That night I really wanted to get some sea food, so we hunted around town and actually came across an LDS church with some members hanging out out front. They pointed us to a place right around the corner from where we were staying. We went there and I ordered a chowder-like marisco soup that was much more adventurous than I'd expected (whole clams, shell and all, an entire fish, etc.). They had great licuados and arctic AC. And giant flat screen TV that we watched Man vs Wild on in Spanish. Later that night I read up on Puerto Barrios and saw that there wasn't too much to do in the town and it is usually a little sketchy, so the next morning we headed out to the docks to catch the 10:00 AM boat to Livingston.

Livingston is a crazy town you can only get to by boat. The Garifuna people of Guatemala live there, an African people whose history in Guatemala I'm still not completely clear on. It's a very popular tourist area, kind of a party town. The boat ride over was excellent. It had been way too long since I'd been reunited with the ocean. When we got there, this Garifuna guy, Pedro, took us to a good place to stay (the African Place) and gave us a good rundown of the area. We tried looking for clean water but all of the stores were out, so we just started the long walk up the coast to Siete Alteres, a place with a series of waterfalls and pools to swim in. It was a fabulous hike. We past a number of shops along the way, none of which had water. Finally we found a really nice hotel/restaurant where we got some water and met a couple that was being shown around by a Garifuna guide. The guy gave me this crazy yellow fruit that tasted kind of like a bell pepper and a hundred other things but that totally dried out your mouth. Their guide told us Siete Altares didn't have any waterfalls because it hadn't rained for awhile so we started to head back, but then we decided we'd come so far we might as well go anyway. So we marched on. At the entrance of Siete Altares there was this dude at a little table making this crazy liquor out of roots that smelled up the whole place. He was a Mayan Garifuna mix. We gave him ten quetz and he let us go up. There weren't any waterfalls but there were still a couple of deep pools to swim in and it was a beautiful area. There we first met Anthony the Vietnamese French Canadian. Well, his parents had moved to France from Vietnam and he was born in France shortly after. At some point they moved to Montreal. Anyway, he was there with two friends from Montreal, who were both actually from France and were just studying in Montreal. There were three girls from Denmark there as well that we didn't get to talk to at the time, but ran into later on. Those six were all staying at the same hostel, Hotel Rio Dulce. So we made it a point to stop at the restaurant next to their hostel for dinner that night, and sure enough the three Danish girls were already there eating. We took a table close to them and exchanged glances for awhile before I finally got up and went over to there table to talk (something fairly out of character for me, but which felt fairly natural at the time). They had all recently graduated and, like most Danes, were taking time to travel before doing more school. They were a lot of fun to talk to. They were at a school “studying Spanish” in Mexico for a few months and had a week or so to travel so they had come down to Guatemala to visit a few places. They all spoke pretty good English and were really patient with my questions about how to say things in Danish. Apparently I somehow picked all of the hardest words to pronounce in Danish. Every time I asked a word they would say, oh, that's the hardest word to say in Dannish, oh, that's the second hardest. I guess they have a few letters that don't exist in any other language that are really hard to say. Apparently red is the hardest Danish word to pronounce. Moon is also hard to say. One of them was really into music so we talked about all kinds of bands and foreign films, etc. This didn't all come up at that one dinner meeting, but throughout the next couple of days as we traveled together. My food came eventually and started to get cold so I excused myself after inviting them to come with us to see some traditional Garifuna music. We didn't see them again until we ended up on the same boat out of Livingston the next morning. Anthony and his two lady friends showed up at the restaurant too and we talked with them. There was a short power outage we weathered on their balcony and then went down to a street cafe and had some cokes. He tried a shot of this crazy Garifuna drink. We were all planning on taking a boat out at 9:30 AM the next morning back to Rio Dulce to go to Tikal, so we decided to go together. Oh, earlier that night they had left their laundry with the hostel and they told them to come back for it at nine that night. But because the power went out the lady went home without doing it. This wild Garifuna guy came by and started asking everyone for help to open the laundry or when the laundry would be done. The restaurant next door seemed to be in charge but wouldn't do anything about it until morning. The guy tried to get us to pay him for helping. There are a lot of people there that try to beg money off the tourists or sell them random things or services they might or might not actually end up providing. But most were buena gente. There laundry wasn't done before they had to leave in the morning so they through it wet into some bags and took it with them like that. We did end up going to the bar where they supposedly play Garifuna music that night (lots of percussion on drums and even turtle shells, and blowing through conk shells, etc.). These two girls from England gave us a flier for it. Apparently they'd been living and working there for awhile. We went, probably later than we should have, and there wasn't much going on because of the power outage, but they did end up playing some Garifuna beats and I got some mango juice. The two girls from England had been traveling all over together for years. They'd been to Nepal and all kinds of other places and ended up in Livingston for awhile. There was a guy there from New Mexico also just traveling around the world hippie-style. There was a Guatemalan guy there who could play guitar and sing real well, even drunk. We left there after a short while and went to bed for the night. In the morning we got our boat tickets, bought some pan dulce to tie us over, and went to pay homage to the sad crocodiles they have in these tiny holding areas in the park before taking our boat up the river and into lake Izabal to Rio Dulce. It was a very scenic trip through canyons and jungle. A lot of it reminded me of air boat rides in Florida. Finally we made it to Rio Dulce and decided to all ride together on the same bus, the Danes and Canadians and us. We got tickets for a nice air conditioned bus from Rio Dulce to Flores for 3:00 PM and then went to eat at a dock on the lake. That's where I did a lot of getting to know the Danish girls. They were too much fun. We were told that our bus was having problems and would be late. It didn't end up coming until after five. The Canadians got separated from us looking for an ATM. Us and the Danes went down to a park under the bridge to be in the shade. We all met up back at the bus station after awhile. The attendant said it should be there soon, but then jumped on a bus and left us sitting there alone. But it turns out that he went to help the other bus and bring it to us. Finally it arrived and we got on but it continued to break down periodically throughout the trip. We didn't get to the island of Flores until late. We all got separated at the bus station by a swarm of taxi drivers. We met up with the Danes again after getting hostels and had dinner with them. We all ordered spaghetti and spent our last hour or so enjoying each others company. They had already been to Tikal and were taking a bus from Flores to Mexico the next morning at five. We said our goodbyes, but not before writing down some music suggestions and emails to find each other on Facebook. Our Canadian friends had completely vanished. We had planned on going to Tikal with them, but now we had no way of finding them before morning. We took a stroll around town up to the top of the hill where there was a big catholic church and some kids playing basketball. Then we went down to some docks on the lake and hung out for a bit before going to sleep in this prison-like hostel owned by a man older than most trees. But we slept like nenes and woke early in the morning and headed to Tikal. Tikal was amazing. I thought my vertigo would get the best of me, but it didn't cause me too many problems, nothing like Angel's Landing and its three foot wide razor backs where I had to hold up in the roots of a tree at the top and keep thinking about all the poetry there was left to read and write in the world to muster up enough guts to get down. I'm not as sissy as that makes me sound; heights just make me wobbly and weak in the knees. I think I understand why the concept of vertigo shows up in Octavio Paz's love poems so frequently, and understand a little better the line “the momentary vertigo of disbelief” in Nicole Krauss's “Valparaiso.” Anyhow, Tikal was superb. We did the whole hike on empty stomachs because we didn't have time to eat. Eventually we found our French friends and rode back with them on the bus to Flores. I had a lot of time to talk to Anthony then. He was very interesting, an incredibly sincere, honest and nice person. He has his masters in Aeronautic engineering (or something like that), speaks English, French, and Vietnamese fluently. He told me that he also writes music, but the hardest part for him is writing lyrics. He knew I was in Guatemala to write poetry so we talked a little about poetry and how he could work on writing lyrics. I gave him some good poets to study and some bands with lyrics I really like. Then he took out his ipod touch and let me listen to a song he had written. It blew me away. Seriously, the kids got skills. He plays piano, guitar, and works some sweet techno. The song had a very Muse feel to it so I asked him if he liked Muse and he said Muse was one of his biggest influences. He currently plays in a band for fun, but wants to do his own thing eventually. He is also working on his drawing/painting skills and learning how to use photoshop for the heck of it and all kinds of other things. He said he doesn't think he'll get his PhD because he has too many “projects” he's working on. A real nice, well-rounded and well-grounded kid. He wants me to come up to Montreal and visit him there. He says its great during certain summer months because there are music festivals and lots of people play free shows. He said he saw Bireli Lagrene live for free in France and it blew his mind. Real cool kid. We talked a little about Pho too. Gotta talk about Pho, so delicious. We also exchanged info to keep in touch. The girls he was with were really cool too, but didn't speak as much English, and my one semester of French was worse then their English. Their English wasn't terrible, but still enough to be somewhat of an obstacle. We all had a good time together though. We hopped off the bus at our stop, and that was the last we saw of them. They are still in Guate for a little while. They were going to fly from Flores to Guatemala City and visit Antigua and Quetzaltenango before heading back to Canada. (Antigua is a great place for travels, really clean and safe and also very historic. We haven't been quite yet, but everything we read and everyone we talk to says the same. There are also volcanoes close by you can visit. We are excited to take a weekend trip there sometime. I hear they have a number of good used bookstores I definitely want to check out.) I really think I might take him up on his invite to Montreal. It's weird yet amazing how firm these fast relationships on the road have been. I wonder about the impact we had on one another and how long it will last before becoming a weak inkling, a feeling so thoroughly assimilated it is no longer a specific memory but a means of interpreting new experiences, perhaps like most of the earliest years of childhood. I remember reading part of an interview of Roberto Bolano where he talked about meeting someone briefly. I'd have to read it again to quote it justly. He did some great interviews before passing away. I still can't believe he's gone. And Lorca and Neruda. I remember when I first heard that Lorca had been assassinated. It hurt for weeks as though he were family, or though his passing were something recent. Somehow it was something close to me, something that still hurts when I think about it. It's still strange why it feels so personal to me. We've met so many interesting people but had so little time with them. I think some how the scarcity of time makes our experiences together more valuable and potent. Somehow there are certain people, certain writers, musicians, coworkers, classmates, fellow travels I seem to get along with instantly, as though in finding them I'm remembering them, recalling something precious and lost, something that works so well it seems it must have always been part of me.

We were able to make it from Flores to Dangriga, Belize that same day. We had to rent a microbus just for us, kind of pricey, and then the driver tried to back out on us when we were almost there because he didn't want to have to wait on the road construction going on. We talked him into taking us the rest of the way and we crossed the border around fiveish. All that was running at that time from the border to other cities were taxis. So we took a taxi to Belmopan where we hopped a bus to Dangriga. We got to Dangriga pretty late, like nineish, and the bus driver helped us find someone who took us to a local hostel. I took a picture of the name of it because I figured Aaron, Nate, Spencer, etc. might appreciate it. The hotel “Double H.” Anyway, the room wasn't too nice, but we had a nice balcony we could see the beach from and catch a good sea breeze. Man, the sky in Belize looks just like the sky in Florida. It felt a lot like being in the keys. The sky especially felt like home. We went down to this restaurant close to the bus stop to have dinner. Houston and the Lakers was on TV. I got some really tasty fried chicken. Belize has a good amount of Mayan people, but lots of Africans as well, and the national language is English. And strangely, most of the shops are run by Asians. We walked back and sat on our balcony for awhile and I did some writing. People kept mentioning this place called Placencia. So the next day we took a long walk on the beach and got some breakfast and then used a special shaped stick to find where the internet was buried and looked up Placencia. It looked pretty awesome so we took a bus to Independence and hopped a lancha from there to Placencia. In the bus station at Dangriga we met Dustin, a guy from the states who was taking a year or so to backpack around Central America. He reminded me so much of Dad's brother John, in appearance and especially his mannerisms. He was probably early forties, late thirties. Real nice guy. He was also headed to Placencia, so we went together. He'd been to a lot of places, including Cuba, which really interested me. He said if I could get to Mexico, it would only cost about $500 to spend four or five days in Cuba. He also told me there's a guide for hitchhiking on sailboats around the world. He really shouldn't have told me that. Haha. He was really nice and talkative. All three of us stayed at Lydia's Guest House in Placencia. Beautiful Placencia de mis suenos. That was an awesome spot. It's a really thin peninsula with a main road and then a famous sidewalk that runs right along the beach and most hotels, restaurants and shops. There are lots of hotels and restaurants right on the beach with chairs and tables, but the whole beach is public. We spent the first evening just hanging out on some chairs under some coconut trees right on the beach. I took a quick dip to get salty and say hello to the ocean. Dustin had come to do some diving with whale sharks. I guess during the spring and summer whenever there's a full moon there are whale sharks that show up off the coast there. I just wanted to go snorkeling on the reef. I was really tempted to go do the whale shark thing with Dustin, but didn't have the time or money. So we walked around trying to get that set up. We also ate at this outdoor place that served breakfast all day. I got a sweet French toast meal that came with four mighty slices of brilliantly seasoned French toast, eggs, and bacon. The temperature there in the evening is perfect. The next day I went snorkeling, Andy felt it was too expensive and Dustin was going to do the whale shark thing, so I went alone. We took a long boat trip out to a small island called Ranagua, I think. It's a privately owned island that they let people use for a fee. It was an awesome little island and the reef goes right around it. There are a couple of bungalows out there and I found out that they rent one of them out, so people could actually stay on the island. Snorkeling was awesome, as always, but my facial hair kept the mask from sealing well, so I had to deal with salt water up the nose. Dustin let me borrow this bag you could put a normal camera in that sealed up tight. So I used his bag and an old camera of his to take pictures, but it didn't work too well, so I only have a few good pics. We had a guide that took us around the reef. We did one trip on one side of the island, came in and had lunch, and then did the other side of the island. On the second trip I got lost from the group falling this school of dark fish with neon stripes on the edge of their fins. After awhile I swam back to the island. I ended up getting back a little early but had some time to talk to another French Canadian who was there snorkeling because of his wife. They took turns choosing an activity each day, and today was her turn. He was a hockey coach and said water wasn't his thing. Being the smart Alec that I am, I added, unless it's frozen. He laughed and agreed. He said something about how the guy that used to own his team bought the Jazz, or vice versa, or something like that. Anyway, I got the impression he was doing some big-time coaching, but didn't think to ask him which team. The boat ride out and back were so good. I love the ocean. The guide wanted to know where he could get a bag like I had for the camera. He said that the guides drop their phones in the water all the time. He'd lost three in as many weeks. Probably more expensive than getting a bag. That night we spent some more time hanging out on the beach and in the hammocks in front of our hotel. Dustin showed me his pictures from Cuba. We talked some about the probability of finding a wife that would be cool with raising a family abroad. I guess if bending spoons is possible, that might be possible. The next morning Dustin took off early to go hunt whale sharks, and we started heading toward Punta Gorda. Bus rides through Belize are beautiful. We rode out listening to some American tunes on the radio like Chicago, Usher and that “I don't want to fall in love” song. I also heard “Lady in Red” in Spanish in a little tienda earlier that day. It got me wondering how much culture effects are concept of love, romantic love that is. I think the root of it, the heart of it, is basically the same, with some cultural differences in manifestation. I started thinking about how many people there are in the world and that really, once you've honestly found one out of all of them that truly rocks your world, you had better doing something about it (I know, not very profound, but a self-lecture that might do me some good). I thought of Beck's song about finding “true love” which Sun Kil Moon sums up pretty well in a line in one of their songs on April, “Our true love finds us when it is time.” Beck says true love will find you in the end, but that you have to put yourself out their because true love is looking too, and how can it find you if you're not around to be found. For some reason I firmly believe what Beck and Sun Kil Moon say, that our true love finds us when it is time. Even if we are buried somewhere in Belize or Guate, or Provo. I know it sounds really sappy and idealistic, but for some reason it rings true for me. All this push to get out all the time and date and go crazy trying to find someone and smooth them into wanting you doesn't jive. Not that it's bad to be really social, it can be great, but I don't think it guarantees success. There's too much involved. Too many variables for you to get it all figured out in a few weeks of dating a small population of people. Not putting yourself out there at all however, can might keep you from finding or being found when it is time. I love long bus rides through the countryside of Guate and Belize. In Belize there are lots of orange groves and these really cool trees with red or orange flowers. I asked Anela, whom I'll introduce shortly, what the flowery trees were called, but she said she didn't know. So I figured I'd just call them Anela trees.

In Punta Gorda we arrived at the dock where we would take a boat back to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala. They showed us where we could buy tickets for the boat and where we would pay our exit fee and get our passports stamped. I really had to go to the bathroom and they pointed me to a place that didn't actually have one. So I went to the police station and they let me go up these windy stairs into a big sala with a bed in the middle of the floor. I found the bathroom, used it, and split quick. Back at the dock we met Anela, a very nice, very beautiful Belizena who sold the boat tickets and manned a little snack shop. We had a good talk with her while we waited for the boat and the very polychronic immigration office workers. She was so sweet and sincerely interested/interesting. I told her her name was almost cinnamon in Spanish (of course I thought of Buck and his “Cinnamon Girl”). She said my name was easy to remember because she has a friend named Tyler. Michael Jackson was playing on the radio, so I asked her if she liked Michael Jackson, and she kind of looked at me strangely, and then laughed and said that her last name is Jackson and kids used to tease her calling her Michael Jackson. There have been very few anomalous people who have had the force to disrupt the strange pleasure of passing through; she was definitely one of them. I crossed the sea on a small lancha, madly in love with the waves and the sky, soaking my arm in the spray from the boat, composing lines in my mind for sweet Anela in Punta Gorda, Belize. That boat ride has been one of my most favorite moments so far. Man I love the ocean. We got to Puerto Barrios, and ate at a small out-door cafe where I got some tacos and a really good strawberry licuado. The waitress seemed a little distracted, and later confessed that she was. She would occasionally start dancing or singing to the love songs on the radio. I think she was a little tipsy on strong dose of infatuation. We couldn't tell if it was with her boss or someone else .But she was able to serve us and dance and daydream all at the same time just fine. We waited at the bus station until 1:00 AM and caught a bus to Guatemala City. In the station we saw most of Gladiator and Troy in Spanish on TNT. Kind of funny to see that down here. We got to the city at like six in the morning, waited for Burger King to open (it was right at the stop), ate and hung out until eight when we met up with our friends from the capital, picked up our stuff, took a cab ride to the bust station, and started our way up to Santa Clara. The bus ride up in the mountains was a little hairy, but beautiful. Anywhere up here by Atitlan is great. Panajachel is a bigger city, fairly touristy. There are lots of good places around the lake. Santiago Atitlan is also cool, they have a really cool traditional dress there. All of it is very native Guatemalan with beautiful countryside.

Here in Santa Clara we found a hostel, and then the wrong Don Pedro. But today we found the right Don Pedro and should have everything set up to move in with families tomorrow. Don Pedro, or Tat Lu, works in some fields he gets to on horseback (I think), and supposedly I will be able to go to work with him whenever I want. I'm excited to see how things go. I think it was good to be in the town on our own for a couple of days and get to know it well. Now we can move in with families and get used to that. We ran into another gringa here from Virginia working with the Peace Corps. She's been here for a year, and has a year left. She's teaching English in the school. Supposedly there are others around this area too. We ate dinner at this little place that served pizza and hamburgers and shakes. It was up on the second floor balcony area of a big building right in the centro overlooking the main court area. I think I'd heard about it from Andrea so we gave a try and had some pizza and shakes. It was definitely the joven hangout spot. There were teenage kids all over the balcony with their girlfriends. They got a kick out of us being there. The place blasted American music like Knocking on Heaven's Door (a couple versions of that actually), Coldplay, Cranberries, and more. Well, we are here and pretty much set to go. Hope things go really well. I'll try to keep everyone informed. I'm currently trying to find this really cool style of hat they have down here, and some good shoes to work in. It rains pretty often here. A nice rain but with some good thunder and occasional lightning. I've missed real thunderstorms. Right now, at night, I can here all kinds of dogs barking in the streets and confused roosters going off at midnight. Its a really safe tranquilo place. A good place for us to hold up for awhile. We're also excited to take a few trips to the surrounding areas and to places like Antigua or Quetzaltenango. This is a lot to read. Good job if you made it this far. Sorry if it's a little rambley and incoherent. I wrote it in one night and tried to get in as much as I could. Miss you all and hope you're doing well. Keep praying for us and keep in touch too.

We just woke up and there's something making the craziest noise. Like someone sawing a chainsaw in half with a pig. We both agree that nothing posthistoric can make that sound. Maybe it's a chicken and a pig and horse all dying tortuously at once. Anyhow, there's a lot of crazy livestock here. Oh, and Andy loves playing solitaire. Haha. We're off to start our first day with our host families.

Placencia, Belize

2009-05-08T17:14:00.001-07:00

Now we are in Placencia, town at the end of a long, skinny peninsula on the coast of Belize. It's a beautiful and really chill spot. I did some snorkeling today out at a reef that surrounds a little island. This has been a great place to spend a couple of days. We'll start making our way towrds Atitlan tomorrow, hopefully get their by Monday. Once I'm there I'll be able to write some real posts and put up pics.

Belize

2009-05-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

Well, we are in Belize now in a town called Dangriga. Tikal was amazing. I'll put up pictures of it as soon as I can. We were able to make it from Flores to Dangriga the same day. The sky and weather here are just like Florida. It feels like being in the keys. It feels so good. I love the salty air. Our place has a little balcony we sat out on last night and watched the ocean and let the air salt our souls. We'll probably leave town today and head further south. Sorry these posts have been so quick and random.

2009-05-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

El Estor was a beautiful little town on lake Izabal. The ride out was amazing. Andy knew the guy that drove the microbus from his mission and once we were far enough out of the city he let me climb up and ride on the luggage rack. How I wish I´d had my camera then. We caught a ride in the back of a nice pick up that took us halfway to Puerto barrios and then took a bus the rest of the way. The countryside gets really lush as you get closer to the coast. We stayed one night in a really nice place in Puerto Barrios and then took a boat to Livingston where the Garifuna people live. We had some fun there and met up with a seven other young tourists from Canada, France, and Denmark that we a traveling with to Flores today to see Tikal. The bus we will be takng had troubles with two tires so it will be arriving a little late, so we are waiting for it to get here and using internet. Andy and I are the only ones that speak spanish in our little party so we´ve kind of become the offical translators/guides. It is hot and sweaty all the time. You pretty much get used to it and it feels normal. The bus we´re taking now will be airconditioned and first class so that will be nice. Oh, we took a boat from livingston up to rio dulce and that was great trip. Guatemala reminds me a lot of Florida. We´ve had a great time, been a lot of places and met a lot of really cool people. I know these posts are short and shallow, but I will write better ones when i´m in santa clara and have time. Some more pics--

2009-05-02T12:53:00.001-07:00

Well we are in Guaemala. We got into the city and met up with a really great family of members that is related to someone we know at BYU. They helped us get started. We rode a long bus to rio dulce and stayed in a hostile on the river. It was pretty sweet. I have a lot to report about this part of the trip. We met some really cool people and had some crazy experiences. Here are some pictures. I´ll write more later, I promise. We´re off to eat and head to El Estor. Chao.

Beginnings

2009-04-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d

wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce

merely,

Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-

lifters of the departing,

Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops

selling goods from the rest of the earth,

Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place

where money is plentiest,

Nor the place of the most numerous population [. . .]

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole

world.

~Song of the Broad Axe, Walt Whitman

Welcome to Tyler Singleton's Guatemala travel blog. I'll be living in Guatemala this summer writing and translating poetry. You can use this blog to keep up to speed on my adventures.

The title for this blog was taken from a Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India.” It's a poem written while traveling about traveling, giving Whitman an opportunity to expound on his reasons for traveling so frequently, some of the same reasons for which I'll be traveling to Guatemala. Here are a few excerpts from the poem:

Passage to more than India!

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights? [. . .]

Passage to you, your shores, ye aged enigmas!

Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems! [. . .]

Passage indeed O soul to primal thought,

Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness,

The young maturity of brood and bloom,

To realms of budding bibles.

To soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,

Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,

Of man, the voyage of his mind's return,

To reason's early paradise,

Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions,

Again with fair creation. [. . .]

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? [. . .]

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

My adventure to Guatemala is, like Whitman's travels, a passage to poetry; passage to new sights, peoples and experiences that will hopefully sow “exotic” seeds in the mind and heart, some of which will ripen into poetry. I guess in a sense poetry has always been a means of charting the soul and life's mysteries, setting forth into the unknown and coming away astonished and enlightened. In this way traveling also becomes a way of harmonizing my life with the act of creating poetry. In the words of Unamuno, “mi religión es luchar incesante e incansablemente con el misterio.”

Side note on Whitman: Walt Whitman's revolutionary poetry had a far-flung impact. Many 20^th century poets from around the world have claimed him as one of their biggest influence. Pablo Neruda, who as many of you know is my favorite and greatest influence, was one of them. Once, when Neruda was moving into a new house, a man helping with the move saw him hanging up a large portrait of Whitman. The man asked if it was his father in the painting. Neruda smiled and said it was. Seeing as how Neruda claimed Whitman as his “poetic father,” and I would claim Neruda as my “poetic father,” I guess that would make Whitman my grandaddy. If I had to choose a mother, I would have to say Nicole Krauss, but since she sort of abandoned me by giving up poetry, I think I have been adopted by Mary Oliver.