Stress

I feel like I’ve lost myself a little these days.  My knuckles crack loudly when I pop them, but the tension doesn’t go away. I find myself repetitiously cleaning the dirt under my fingernails, as if they might crumble by sitting dormant for even two seconds. I feel something in my heart, my chest, my throat, what it is I can’t quite pin down.  Its something heavy, something hard, something stuck.  And the real problem is that I haven’t thrown up that something onto these pages in a too long of a while.

What is stress, really? Being stretched to thin, being pulled in opposite directions, a something trying to figure out how it can do thrice the amount of its intended use.  Welcome, Kristin, to adulthood. You better bite it in the ass while you still can.

Mostly, it goes away in the mornings.  When the doors of my eyelids naturally creep their way open, sleepy dust and all, to a misty, smokey 6 o’clock sunshine sneaking through the opaque curtains of my little cuartito.

These are the things that defeat my stress.  The absolutely, boringly, simple miracles of reality.  They have no budget, no deadline, no grant networking, no operations manual, no broken down car in the campo.  They are a reality that has existed for thousands of years.  Thinking of these realities, these commonplace, quotidian simplicities leads me… boringly.. into a realization that I am a small speck of a being in a much bigger carbon cycle of miracles. I look up at the sky, remember how much I don’t matter, and breath easier. 

I want to do this more, I want to revel in these boring simplicities of my life, and savor every last delicious bite of their pedestrian nature.  I want to walk – but really waaaaalk.  I want to become entrenched and betrothed by the steps I take, the miracle of my body taking them. I want to smell the tortillas toasting, hear the teenage girls gossiping, feel the innumberable cracks of these shitty Guatemalan sidewalks.  I want to cook, without hurry, without schedule, without worry to conserve or to waste, to achieve or disappoint, to nourish or to not.  I just want to fall in love with that moment where the only cracked wooden spoon I have swirls its way around a tiny pan of colorful vegetables. 

In my garden, my therapy, my refuge. Even there I find myself making plans, having anxiety – will the seedlings make it through the rain? I should have intercropped the carrots! Why isn’t my kale growing as big as Juan Pablo’s?  I want to dig my fingers into heaps of dirt and sleep there.  I want to dream myself a worm and wake up in the dizzy daydreaming inside a pot of compost.

In those sweet mornings when I take that first breath, I want it to be my saving grace. I want to smile at its ability and its freshness, and the way the chill of Xela mornings tickles my nose. I want to fold over, touch my toes, and pine for the way my body aches in its creaking and cracking, opening its doors and creating new spaces.  I want to hang there, dangled over, my head below my heart inverting my bloodflow and thinking shit, this just feels good.  No explanation.

Miracles. Dirt, sleepy dust, pot bellies, smiles, compost, bouganvilla, the smell of coffee, an creamy giant coastal Guatemalan avocado, a nap in a hammock under the tree, bug bites, scars from bug bites, cold bucket showers after a long day in the sun, a seed, more seeds, the mist lifting over Santa Maria volcano at sunset, getting out of breath walking up the hill to the market at 7,000 feet, rain, floods, rain that makes you feel like your in that romantic movie at the end when just when you think he has left your prince charming comes running back and kisses you soaking wet, wet muddy shoes, a frustrating day at the office, a magical day at the office, that 10 minute window where you can sneak out of the concrete slab of the house sit by the compost pile and feel the 2 o clock sun stream across your face, the cemetery, enchiladas from Doña Clemencia, the way the señoras tell me Buenos dias on the street in the morning, the way the Mayan girls giggle when they see me on the bus, the way my plants dangle over my bookshelf, wool socks on cold Xela nights, the smell of fresh rosemary, stretching my hips, dancing salsa, singing silly songs in Spanish, and once in a while, a good cigarette.

A thousand tiny hands

Driving through those mountainous hillsides, clouds covering up the pueblos like the country’s best kept and most shameful secret.  All the overpopulation, the poverty, the indigenous, the brisk, red, wind-burnt cheeks carrying firewood down the mountain.  The clouds are shading them, hiding them from the rich elite that might be passersby on the carreterra.  Yet like development and aid projects abounding, these clouds come and go and they can’t hide these secrets forever.  Out from the clouds emerges those rebels, those little hoodlums, those curious little niños who without even knowing it have ventured from the pueblo to the highway to reveal this best kept secret.  So many tiny hands waved at me on my drive back from Lake Atitlan on Sunday.  I gazed out the window thinking about all the stories hidden from my eyes by those clouds.  It was the best moment of their day.  It was their adventure.  It was their trip to the airport to watch the planes fly overhead.  It was their forbidden peaking through the cracks to observe the rich next door neighbors. I’m not sure if they had to sneak out to do it.  They just sat there, in groups of four of five, holdig each other with the most innocent intimacy, and the most apparent excitement and curiosity.  Gigantic smiles draped from ear to ear, eyebrows raised in the hopes of a wave back.  Every car, and I mean every car was honored with a wave from these kiddos, like beauty pageant stars that are never ingenuine and never get tired of waving. 

I was distracted long enough from my novel long enough to ponder all these tiny, scarred, Moreno hands waving at me all afternoon.  What is it they were hoping for?  What is the feeling they got when I waved back at them.  Do they dream sometimes, at night in those clouded, shaded, cold hillsides, that someday they could drive in the car on that highway.  If they did, would they wave back?

That could be me.

I live in one of the most unequal countries in the world.  Of all the seemingly useless information I learned studying International Development, the Gini coefficient is unfortunately seared in my brain – one of the endless nifty ways nerdy statisticians have created to measure a country’s worth.  For what its worth, on a scale of 0-100 (0 being perfectly equal, 100 being perfectly unequal), Guatemala comes in at a shocking 61 - the highest in Latin America and topped only by Namibia and Botswana in the world.  While numbers are interesting and incredibly useful for research papers in grad school, now I live in this number. So where exactly do I lay and how do my ideals line up with my (temporary?) home on the spectrum?

I am privileged. Period.  Born somewhere in the middle class range, I take residence with the majority of my fellow Americans who own cars, eat out when they want, take an occasional roadtrip down to camp in the great outdoors, and generally have some (if even minimal) amount of dispensable income.  Guatemala on the other hand, struggles to define a middle class, mostly because there is none. Money is not the problem, Guatemala holds the highest GDP in Central America believe it or not (another one of those silly statistician marvels of simplifying an overly complex idea) Yet even so, nearly 70% of the population lives below the poverty line.   Another 10% own over half of the entire wealth of Guatemala, either relaxing in their mega coffee farm haciendas or crusing through town in their pimped out hummers payed for by the drug trade. I guess this is where that mysterious and undefinable middle class is, somewhere in that remaining 20% of the population.  And I guess I am somewhere in there as well. 

I have an exceptional portrait of this question of class, living in diversified and progressive Xela. Recycled US school busses tote Mayan women in every morning from the highlands to sell produce, shoeless and shirtless children shine boots in the park for 20 cents, twenty-something hipsters walk from university to organic coffee shop to dance club, a healthy population of expats take a break from first-class stature back home to ride in coach for a while, and wealthy lawyers send their kids to private grade schools more expensive than my university – talk about a spectrum.  I don’t have a closet, a dresser or an oven, but I have a warm comforter for cold nights in the mountains.  My bedroom walls are made of plywood, but I can splurge on a $3 box of wine for nights out with the girls.  My office is an old concrete house with one desk for the entire operation, but I am paid 10 times more than the tortilla vender the next door over. 

 “Here are people of all classes and stages of rank. From all countries of the globe. Every hue of ignorance and learning, morality and vice, wealth and want, fashion and coarseness, breeding and brutality, elevation and degradation, impudence and modesty.” I keep looking out thinking, That could be me.  And that could be me. Why am I not indigenously dawned in bright colors with produce overflowing a thatch basket?  Why wasn't I born as a shoeshiner?  What is it that separates any of us?

About the leaning and loafing...

Walt Whitman started what would become one of the most loved and hated collections of poetry in American history with the words, “I loafe and invite my soul.”  Right now, I am leaning and loafing.... at my ease observing a green-covered hillside backlit by one of the bluest skies I have ever seen.  What is in front of me is not necessarily beauty.  These rusted tin roofs, broken electrical lines and the colorful array of ragged clothes hanging on a clothesline would never make the cover of National Geographic.  But something about the smoke from the tortillerias, the ominous clouds carrying earth’s most precious assets, and the unfinished buildings of shotty concrete construction across from me… something about these things makes me feel alive.  I invited my soul – or maybe my soul invited me – into this world, and now that I’m here I just feel so alive. Maybe that’s what true living is, checking the RSVP box on your soul’s invitation to life, saying yes to sinking, drowning in a world of your soul and your self.  Leaning and loafing in there, that’s what I’m living. 

When the art is not lost

I want to see things more.  I want to see more things.  In places where there is not enough municipal clout to incessantly paint over graffiti, its easy to notice art that has not been lost in the mix.  In the age of facebook, tumblr and a million options for wigging out on some narcissistic advertisement of your art, its refreshing to absorb someone's work of which I will never know the artist's name.  They do this without recognition or respect, and their art is not lost.   

About leaning and loafing

Walt Whitman started what would become one of the most loved and hated collections of poetry in American history with the words, “I loafe and invite my soul.”  Right now, I am leaning and loafing.... at my ease observing a green-covered hillside backlit by one of the bluest skies I have ever seen.  What is in front of me is not necessarily beauty.  These rusted tin roofs, broken electrical lines and the colorful array of ragged clothes hanging on a clothesline would never make the cover of National Geographic.  But something about the smoke from the tortillerias, the ominous clouds carrying earth’s most precious assets, and the unfinished buildings of shotty concrete construction across from me… something about these things makes me feel alive.  I invited my soul – or maybe my soul invited me – into this world, and now that I’m here I just feel so alive. Maybe that’s what true living is, checking the RSVP box on your soul’s invitation to life, saying yes to sinking, drowning in a world of your soul and your self.  Leaning and loafing in there, that’s what I’m living.