Month: July 2019

            Since my last post, I spent the majority of June back in the States to visit with family and friends. It was pretty weird.

            Essentially what happened was that over the course of the last ten months I forgot a lot of my old American life rules (Oh right, we hate carbs. Oh right, we don’t just sing and dance whenever and wherever we darn well please. Oh right, we don’t just talk to strangers. Oh right, we should always be efficient and busy. Oh right, we don’t actually talk about God. Oh right, we are supposed to know the next 10-year span of our lives, which definitely should include very predictable, serious things (i.e. please please anything but creative writing)) as well as missed ten months worth of stuff that I needed to care about (Orange cream Twizzlers, Old Town Road, and JoBros 2.0 are all great advancements, by the way. Dad shoes as high fashion may take some more warming up to.)

            Had I become somewhat of an un-conditioned wildwoman?

            In a way, I suppose. In a way, I wish moreso that I had. Because in some moments back on Planet America, I caught things feeling a bit scattered, a bit hollow. Meaning I accidentally slipped back to buying the pretty rules, the hologram concept of who I “ought” to be once more, to be good, to be happy, to have succeeded today. As if the Finca had taught me nothing. Ha! As if.

           Now, I’m back on the wild Caribbean sands once again, and the truth stands like the red sun. No, really, there’s a time when it’s pure red. It never actually sets or goes anywhere but right now I can’t get around looking at it.

            Recently I was sitting with a fellow volunteer at our massive dinner table —we both just simultaneously busted one another for opting out of the same mandatory event in favor of staying in the house to breathe.

            “Hey, you know what I realized?” I say after a while.

            “What’s that?”

            “I realized, actually just now when I was laying on my bed, quite physically unable to change into a skirt and go to Holy Hour…that… the Finca has been the most humiliating experience of my life.”

            My friend doesn’t know what to say to that, so I continue, “and like, that’s been the best part about it.” Then follows a shared laughter that sounds like freedom.

             See, despite the fact that I’ve seen this episode before, part of me still showed up to this place last October ready to be a really “good” person here. All I had to do, my subconscious decided, was constantly be available and extroverted, disappoint no one with an unlimited “sí” generosity, always knock out pristine lesson plans for the schoolchildren in the morning and have the energy to play soccer with the resident children in the afternoon, ultimately warp “service” into some kind of Self-neglecting, self-glorifying effort to do it all as I’d gotten the sense I ought to. Step-by-step, by the rulebook. One day I’ll arrive. *Wistful look into the future* One day I’ll be…”good.” (Yes, friends, I beg you, please laugh with me about this.)

            So I tried it out, for a little, as my stubborn arse tends to do. And then I was bed-ridden for nearly a week. That process happened about six times (Currently in the sixth, actually. Greetings from bed) before it more tangibly sunk in that either I will never actually be a good person ever at all or that everyone, including me, always has been, no matter what we have done or haven’t done. Something about the heat, the HD-clear dominion of nature, the close-quarters living with a lot of people, the general material and technological lessness, and the whole being an apparently rather sickly foreigner makes it delightfully harder to pretend here. For that reason I’ll be grateful to this place until the day I die.

            No matter how high I crank up the try-hard dial, I will never fit the “ought” here. Were I to anonymously conduct a survey, I run the risk of plenty of people in my Honduran life reporting that I am, at best, a strange sort of happy idiot, and at worst, a selfish, lazy Gringa (a truly welcome contrast to the idealizations that can get flung on me in America).

            How very okay that is after all. How fun to allow none of it to stick, to feel no urge to correct it, to smile, to know we can always be Jim from The Office and break the fourth wall to look at God like, “Well at least you get me, Mate” and hope one day all the bros and sis’s will remember their invitation to the Party too. That’s the day I dream of.  And there are always those who accept me unconditionally, the ones with whom I’ve been able to form those rascally, liberating bonds that have a lot to do with not taking things so seriously, and a little to do with that thing called Love.

            In the same way, when I dug my heels in so as to not get swept away by the current of the “ought” during my Stateside time, when I looked not to the mirage of judgment–tempting as it was–but to the people, the Goodness, my own happy (though maybe culturally divergent) truths right in front of me, things deepened. Real recognizes Real. And oh, it’s a wonderful today we have here, guys.

            There’s a stubborn choice we must make in every moment that knocks our “ought” images down— in my case, moments of being a disappointing “no” sayer, a frequently immobile ill person, a grammatically inelegant Spanish speaker, a teacher who’s a little too forgiving for the local discipline norms, a girl whose hair, skin, and stomach haven’t matched a beauty standard in months, a community member who cannot hide the fact that she cannot in fact do it all—to not despair that we don’t fit the “good person, good life” template, but rather to laugh with God, shouting joyously from the rooftops: “WOOHOO YES, I AM ODD AND UNIMPRESSIVE!!!” What sweet relief to get that one off our chests.

            A secret: I think that’s where real life begins.

            I think on the other end of embracing “I’m odd and unimpressive” is the genesis of any truly alive human being. Because you can only really be free when you aren’t afraid to let go of your shiny, transient “ought.”

          This is what purifies the tiresome gunk away. From here we no longer act in accordance to a prototype we’ve seen before, but rather in accordance with Creation itself. God Himself now moves us in the new and natural flight we were created for, and we don’t get to be the ones who judge it “good” or “bad” this time. We act not to prove ourselves to the world, but to love it. And sometimes we realize the world doesn’t need us to act at all, but rest in the knowledge that there’s a good Higher Power that’s got this.

            I feel the freedom of Marvin, the fisherman who introduces himself as his crew spreads their net out in the sea before us. “Girls, this is how we Garifuna people been living for hundreds of years! We are a people who live close to the land, day by day. And it’s a good life.” This strikes some ancient chord in me. A life off the land. Working just to live, not striving, just enjoying. Odd and unimpressive. Happy, human, and good.

            I join Grandma Bartoszewicz at the family barbecue, perched in her patio chair, with nothing to prove through debate or cornhole competition. She simply smiles and says, “Oh, I just love you all so much.” I realize that’s our natural state.

            I listen to Grandma Steiner as she tells me she’ll gladly pass a day with her hands in the dirt of her garden or in the piecrust dough of her kitchen. After ordering biscuits and gravy at the healthy millennial breakfast joint we’re dining in, she tells me of the poker nights she hosts and says that the best part of being 84 is “84 years of just a good life, Ally.”

            I laugh with my band of tiny five year-olds. Tiny five year-olds are almost entirely lacking of useful skills, yet are prodigies of, as Merton says, “cast[ing] awful solemnity to the winds, and join[ing] in the general dance.” That, I realize, is an eternal kind of skillset.

            I’m sitting in the story that Ruthie serves us at the dinner table. Her late youth minister stands before a congregation that has been charismatically praying for the healing of his cancer. He is hairless bones with a protruding plastic tube, and he tells them with undeniable peace, “Thank you, guys, but you know… I am perfectly alright, whether I am miraculously cured or not.” Also an eternal skillset.

            I’m a stream from this living water: Could Jesus have been ultimate witness to the fact that Love will always have the last word around here, if he had gotten all caught up in “Oh, but I ought not disappoint everyone’s expectations of the buff, kingly, gold-plated expectations of a Messiah!”?

            Of course not.

            And so I too observe myself, as I slowly give her permission to like carbs, to sing as she pleases, to talk to “strangers” on the bus, to name the the taboos we all want to talk about anyways. To say “no” sometimes, and happily, guiltlessly sit among trees, or sleep. To do yoga in a Catholic compound and know it’s the same God. To be the eccentric teacher who declares every Wednesday a holiday so that Kínder can spend a chunk of the day surprising another class with a massive scribbly card, off-key song, and clumsy dance because she thinks that matters too. To unabashedly say, “God’s running this one, not me,” to the relatives who ask about long-term plans—because let’s face it, He’s really the only one who knows what “good” looks like anyways. To indulge in that silly “writing” thing she seems to just keep doing anyways…

            To let people see something other than a hologram. To give them that chance to remember for themselves.

            To love all as is.

            Come this December, I will be on American turf once more, indefinitely, and I really want to hold myself accountable this time around, guys. So I think I’m going to get some “I am odd and unimpressive” bumper stickers printed, and then put one on whatever car I’m driving, as well as on my water bottle, travel mug, bathroom mirror, laptop, phone, keys, sunglasses, toothbrush, pen, fork, forehead, etc. so that neither you nor I is ever fooled again.