When I walked into the grocery store today I was greeted by a huge display of mangoes.
As I looked up at the mountain of Platonic,
palm-sized fruit, I tried my best not to think about Paraguay. I rushed to gather a few into a bag but when I smelled their tangy
sweetness and felt their soft skin for the first time since I left
South America, it drew me right back and down into a flood of
memories. And right there, in the middle of the produce section at the local
Rockville Giant, I became hopelessly lost in a stifling Paraguayan afternoon,
swimming in an ocean of my own sweat, punch drunk on summer fruit,
and high on hand-rolled cigars. For a brief moment, I was once again sitting on the porch with my dog
as we polished off diner, gnawing at bones and surveying the night as
it slowly descended on the forest. I was sitting with an old man, sipping tea and
talking about the weather. For hours. For days. For lifetimes.
And in my mind there is no music. Just
a few words and crickets and birds, a crackling fire, screaming
cicadas, howling monkeys, and when it storms, the tremendous drums of
heaven.
I walked out of my house this morning
with the sun in my face and for a second, before my eyes adjusted, I
thought I was back in the jungle. I thought that somehow I had been
dreaming this whole time and that today, finally, I had woken up at
my home—a small little shack surrounded by pasture and swamp and
forest that smells like sugar cane with the northern winds and rain
with the southern. Instead, I opened my eyes to suburbia Americana
and I knew that if I did not get
out of this place soon it would kill me. Through its comfort, its
unadulterated comfort, it would kill me by means of complacency and
nothingness and sheep-like apathy.
You
see, I know my time in Paraguay was far from perfect. In fact
sometimes it almost killed me, quite literally. Still, I wonder how
much of life we surrender with the ease of modernity, of progress. We
express ourselves in 140 characters, finding cheap pleasures in
consumerism and commodities—bought and sold—and living
vicariously through fictional characters on TV.
This
is my hell.
While
I don't want to idealized my time in Paraguay with its slew of
hardships and challenges, it was a level of existence I had never
previously experienced. It was liberating and empowering, in a very
Walden-esque sort of way, because no matter what happened, good or
bad, it all came down to a few basic things: me, the few people
around me, the weather, the necessities of survival, the necessities
of sanity, the natural world, and my own mission and convictions. All
of these things were at least a little more comprehensible and
visible without the chaos of this collective, social American
conglomerate.
My
time in Paraguay was like time spent in love. A fever-like insanity,
as much from the heat and the struggle as from actual disease, in
which you loose track of both time and space. But it was also
nurturing and fulfilling, showing me parts of myself and the world I
had never previously known and graciously giving me time to mull them
over. It was day and night, summer and winter, and everything in
between. I froze, I sweat, I laughed, I wept and I did so all with an
audience of trees and an endless sun.
I
have as much desire to return to Paraguay as I do to be in love
again. That is, despite all my inclinations towards personal health
and safety, I want it so desperately sometimes it hurts. But like
love, wanderlust cannot be captured, it must surrender to you on its
own accord and in its own time. And so, for the moment, I
wait—hideously disfigured in a strange world that I no longer
recognize, caricatured by the skin-deep facade, hollowed out by a
disconnect from nature.
Either way, something is going to kill me, I
know that. Its just that I want to die in the right way: with singing
birds in my ears and love in my heart.