Travel has taken me again and I’ve moved from my Antigua, Guatemala, my home for the past 6 months, to a small town on the coast. I’m here now, melting as my body adjusts from mountain temperatures to the 38 degree, 100% humidity of the tropical coast. Horizontal in a hammock is about all I can manage for now, using a toe to swing myself in this hammock, laptop balanced on my stomach and arduously, slowly, typing this out.
By the end of the week I’ll be able to bear clothes and normal human activity, but for now I’m in the shade of this house cold water-bottle dripping condensation beside me, freshly-showered wet hair dripping down my back. I hope so at least – I have 7 weeks here while I finish up my commitment as an English teacher. When I stumbled into the job I knew it was just a matter of time before the gravity of this place sucked me in. Now, two months later, I’ve made the move.
It’s a good fit for my lifestyle here. I teach lessons to the volunteers and employees of the local NGO and the staff of one of the hostels here, two days a week. The other days – all the days, actually – I work online teaching English to Chinese kids with VIPkid. I dabble in some work online, volunteering for two other NGOs but the work is sporadic, slow enough that I have most days free. All the online word seems counter-intuitive to rural living but there is a little shop that sells phone-data and I can buy it 2G at a time and use hot-spot to power the way I make my living.
More importantly, the focus for now is on Spanish and how much I want to learn it (although I tend to spend more time talking about studying than actually studying). This town, El Paredon, is the perfect place to practice as Anglos are limited and Spanish is a daily necessity. For now I have just enough words to crassly get my message across and stumbling to find the right verb, butchering the conjugations when I find it.
(Opposing this is a desire to write more, which drowns my brain in English and shoves all of the Spanish out. Sigh. Maybe I’ll do alternating days.)
So, my workload is light. There are many, many hours in a day. More hours here than anywhere else, I think. The afternoons in Paredon are long, they pass like molasses, everyone moving slowly in the heat. By the time 8 pm finally rolls around and night has officially set in, the only lights in the darkness are those shining from the tiendas. People lounge around the doors of the shops or sitting around by the fried-chicken stand, shit-talking the evening away. At most there will be a little cookout for a church event, a local woman and her daughters tending coals blazing in a wheelbarrow and flipping tortillas or roasting chicken on the metal grill balanced atop it.
There might be a game at the cancha that draws a crowd but more often there is a handful of teenagers and kids wheeling around on skateboards or battling a ball back and forth across the pavement. The animals that wander during the day -cthe cats prancing delicately along the top of fences, the 3 fat pigs that snuffle around in their grassy patches, the chickens that abruptly dash headlong across the road at the slightest noise that startles them – have hidden away for the night. By dusk Paredon is canine territory. Dogs patrol the sand streets, giving sharp yips to each other to mark out their territory and escorting humans, tails wagging, to the edge of their land before retreating to guard their stoop.
There’s not much to do and all the time in the world to do it.
With the luxury of time and the (luxury? challenge?) of limited internet, I’m taking these 7 weeks as a self-made personal retreat. A yoga retreat, a silent retreat, a creative retreat, a reading retreat… all of those combined. I have a mat with me and a cool, flat cement floor to practice on. I have a massive book downloaded on my kindle account, my favourite playlists on Spotify, two Spanish movies and a local library chock-full of espanol translations of popular YA books. (Give me 45 days and I’ll know vampire, werewolf, broomstick, wand, mockingjay and district in Spanish like the back of my hand). The only food to eat is the truck-loads of vegetables and the tiendas with dry goods like rice, spaghetti, beans, oats, cereal. There is one bar and a few hostels, and my friends/co-workers houses to drink at.
In short, Paredon is the perfect place to get away and focus on myself. The goal is to come out of here at the end of the summer more settled so that I can start to dash around the world and fracture my focus and become all unwound again.
The inspiration for this self-made “retreat” is my new place. I’m renting out a gorgeous ex-pat house here, complete with indoor plumbing (the toilet only works when you pour water in the top, but hey, this is luxury, not paradise). I’ve never lived alone before and this house is private as possible in a little town like this. The owners of the house are recluses, I think, and have grown a green paradise of a garden and camouflaged the perimeter of the yard with thick greenery. There are just enough gaps to make me apprehensions about totally letting loose and dancing around in my underwear, but comfortable enough to sit out here and write, half-way in my underwear.
But, this is a small town in a community where privacy is nothing but a myth. My neighbours are crammed in tightly, their sprawling houses a collection of wood slat walls, cement floors and tin/palm frond roofs haphazardly arranged, additions stacking up like lean-tos. Noises carry here, and there is no such thing as a silent moment, save for the hours before dawn when everyone else is asleep. With the sun, there are roosters cawing, dogs barking, dishes clattering, music playing and the conversations of families on all sides.
These 45 days will be a challenge and a pleasure all in one; a chance to dive into the non-existent peaceful side of my nature. I’m so used to being on the go, always stacking up things to do – even when I’m travelling and you’d think there’d be nothing. I like to feel busy. I like feeling busy so much that even in my “retreat” I can’t help but write myself a list of goals and tasks.
I know that “Be” and “Live in the moment” should NOT be on a to-do list, but humour me. This is day one.
- Yoga. Practicing yoga. The goal is 45 straight days of yoga: some of it hardcore exercise-yoga, some of it sleepy stretching yoga, maybe even some breathing yoga. Maybe 30 minutes, maybe 90, anything as long as its stepping into my body and moving and flowing intentionally. Out of head, into limbs.
- Write. Write what I see, think, feel, have learned. There’s been so much moving and shifting and learning this past year and it’s a good time to sit down and spill it all out onto the page until it makes a little more sense.
- Learn. I love to learn, I really do. Spanish learning and English learning. Spanish will be reading, talking, studying Spanish. The English will be reading, and reading things that make me think. Reading articles, reading books, reading about politics and spirituality, current events and ways of being.
- Exercise. Run, move, surf. Sports were a huge part of my life for so long and I miss the drive and the drama and the bone-aching fatigue of pushing your body. I miss the sense of satisfaction of a day well spend and the wincing soreness of muscles getting stronger. My sports injuries are as healed as they ever will be, and I’m ready to train again and make my body a place I’m proud to live in.
- Settle into single-objective focus. So often my brain works doing a hundred things at once and not living in any of them. I want to work on being, living more closely and delibrately. Moving with my mind and stepping with sureness. I want to be able to absorb the beautiful things in the present rather than being half-there, everywhere.
Fully embracing my nerdy nature, I’m planning on writing a little each and every day to check in with myself. How is it going? I’m sure some days I’ll hate it and other days I’ll give up and other times I’ll be on top of the damn world.
Even if I am not flawless in execution, I hope to leave here more settled in my body and more at peace in my mind. A little wiser, a little more informed and ready to charge back out into the world to make shit happen.
Vagabond and Beyond 