a proliferation of words

I’m getting to the point where getting on the internet and writing an email requires an awesome act of will. Actually, starting out is not so bad, but to carry it through to completion takes a lot of gnashing of teeth. No offense, but writing for this website also tends to jerk some tears.

Writing is a strenuous discipline even in ideal conditions, and looking at a computer screen is most decidedly not ideal. Disregarding for a moment the difficulty of writing with the cold that has kept my nose a wide-open faucet all day, I have never learned to enjoy the probably-carcinogenic humming bluish glow of the screen and the way it makes my eyes burn redder the longer I sit staring.

Nevertheless, I am a man with a mission. I have decided that this time in Peru is too full of rich experience and that if I don’t unpack it, I might just explode. Or implode. Or laugh or cry or just plain sweat a lot. So here I go again.

Today I rode in a moto-taxi to town to get medicine and felt really vulnerable and unsafe. I don’t know if I’m getting old and therefore more pansie-ish or if my years in the safety-obsessed industry of tree planting have tainted my thinking, but I kept coming back to the thought that if anything happened, I was toast. A moto-taxi, for the uninitiated, is a taxi made of the front three-quarters of a motorcycle welded onto a padded bench seat with a canvas roof and some sort of floorboards, the whole thing being perched on an axle connecting two tires. It is open to the air on all sides. Moto-taxis are pretty standard transportation in third-world countries and in this town there are about two gagillion of them out there on barely regulated roads, weaving at hair-splitting speeds between pedestrians, animals, dump trucks, taxis (which run a route like a bus) and the odd shiny car owned by the infrequent rich person or missionary. Rich, here, would probably be defined as middle to lower-middle class in North America – so basically just about the same category as most people who might potentially be reading this. The contrast here is much more stark.

Which brings me to the two seemingly contrapposed lessons that being here seems to have been teaching me. First, it has fortified my distaste for consumer/conformist North American culture. A. by placing me once again face-to-face with the harsh and difficult struggle in which most of the world’s population (through no choice or fault of its own) is forced to live – and B. by constantly slapping me with little reminders that globalfreakinization has sneaked its dirty little fingers into everyone’s drawers – even here on the fringes of the wild and savage Amazon. It’s a cold reminder that the natives who snapped my photograph from a dugout canoe as I kayaked the Urubamba through what could almost be described as the heart of darkness back in 1997 were only a taste of the hyper-linked world tomorrow’s children will face. That is, of course, if the floods or earthquakes or famines or diseases don’t get them first.

This, for some antithetical reason, brings me to the second lesson – to stop worrying about it. For some reason, I find myself being more hopeful about the whole thing. Perhaps it is living in North American opulence and apathetic nonchalance that has had me wound up in knots. Maybe coming to a place where the problems are so blatant has freed me up. It could be that I’ve just been getting all hot and bothered living with the daily contradictions of a country where pain and suffering are only to be experienced in a sterilized fashion, with a soundtrack, on the evening news. Maybe I’ve felt myself being sucked into complacency and it’s been ripping me apart.

Here, though, I am shocked again by the daily reminders of my wealth and of the wealth of the country whose passport I carry. Reminders like the little boy, half of his face burned off, his clothes in tatters, who tries to sell me some cookies on the street. Or like Jesus - the blind, deaf and autistic boy at the orphanage who rejoices when touched, who takes my hands and jumps up and down laughing with glee. When he is eighteen, the rules of the orphanage dictate that he must leave. It is beyond the ability of most in this hot, harsh world to care for one such as him. It is here in my face though, and I find myself loving the reality of it. I love it the way I love planting trees, the way the physicality and intensity of that work forces me to set aside the existential angst borne of luxury and ease.

So here I am, being. I am in Peru in the midst of pain I cannot assuage, comfortable behind a wall of American dollars I have brought with me for protection. For the moment, though, the wall is visible and I am hoping and praying for the courage to burn it down - to destroy the lie of a comfortable fantasy and rejoin the truly painful work of living in the light of the way things Truly are.