What did I think this blog was going to
be? What did you think you would find
here? An account of my day to day? I seem incapable of this. At least incapable of recounting the steps I
take and the hours I take them. My
imagination and emotions are what define me, and so under their direction my
words flow from my fingers. I hope that
is okay.
It is hard to be away. To try to understand and accept a life in a
different culture, to accept it…
that means letting go of your own for a little while, or at least loosening
your grip. This is hard to do. Sometime I have moments of utter misery born
from a longing for people, for places that I love, for things that I could do without
but don’t want to. These moments are too
frequent. When will the dreams I have at
night be of the world I am now in, not the one I have stepped out of for a
little while? When will crossing off a
day on my calendar be marked my sadness for another day in Ecuador gone instead
of the glorious morning ritual it is now?
This is hard. But, then I come
across moments that make me smile despite the stubbornness of my desire to
cuddle up on my pillow of sadness.
In Ecuador, in the United States, in any
place of the world, these are moments that are waiting to be found. My heart has been wracked with disgust and
misery learning about the lives that were lost in Newtown Connecticut. Glowing beams of potential, imagination, unguarded
love… faces torn from their host of light, buried in the ground. But while the faces are gone, the light is
surely still there; I know this to be the case.
To get through things like this that are
too hard to understand I look for moments that make it impossible to do
anything but smile. Sometime I stumble
across them and sometime I need to work for them to be found. This is important for me to remember;
sometime I need to make these moments for myself. That is ultimately why I am here, isn’t it?
Today I found such a moment when I found
myself surrounded by a group of little angels.
This is how I found them…
Standing at a distance, distance being a
comfortable home I often make for myself, I spotted the group of angels. They had wings that were as white as the snow
that will never fall here, and they had dresses that floated around them like little
puffs of clouds. Their little laughs and
smiles were enough to make me smile… and then they started to sway side to
side. Swaying turned to twirling at the
hip with their arms delicately slapping their fronts and their backs, and then
little feet picked up a rhythm and began to hop up and down. Soon hopping feet danced in circles, slow to
start but gradually gaining momentum spinning faster and faster. As tuning a guitar and baking a cake are
based off of unique ratios of sounds and ingredients, the spinning angels had
their own kind of ratio based in a majestic energy. As twirling increased in speed, laughter got
louder, smiles got bigger, flailing arms more difficult to control. The angels must of felt somehow that my heart
could not bear the overwhelming happiness of the moment much longer; for they
collapsed in the same moment I turned away overwhelmed by emotion. And I felt so lucky, because those same
little angels then got up giggling relentlessly, and took form in front of me
to share in the tune of my guitar and send their little voices of light and joy
out into the world. ‘Silent Night’ will
never feel the same again.
This is a moment that has been rooted to my
heart and my memory forever. It is a
moment like this that helps me appreciate why I am here. I am sure I have been present in similar
moments like this in my home in Connecticut or Maine, but did I ever appreciate
them before? Distance has cracked me
open to a well of emotions I didn’t know I could feel. Sometimes pain and longing for that ambiguous
word, “home,” but other times joys for the beauty of little moments my eyes
where never before trained to see.
And now I conclude with one more thought… in
the moment that I watched the little spinning angels, the joy I felt connected
me to a moment when I was one of those little angels, twirling wildly for no
other reason than the fact that it felt so wonderful and free; sisters,
friends, acquaintances, twirling and twirling with me. I am 25, still very young. How lucky I am to be reminded, now, that
there is still a little angel within me. I have so much of my life still before me. In
that time I can continue to discover the beautiful wisdom and freedom I
radiated as a little girl with big eyes, short hair and a poufy dress. In honor of the children who lost their lives
in Connecticut, and for the love and faith I have in my life; I am making it a
life resolution to never lose sight of the potential, imagination, and unguarded
love that I knew as a little girl. I
don´t feel it is my place to tell any of you to do the same, but maybe you
will; maybe you can find that child within yourself and see the world with
those fresh, eager eyes.
¡Feliz Navidad 2012!
