Technology is wonderful and amazing and can bring me right into my parents living room and I can almost feel the rug and smell the tree and taste the coffee cake--almost.Actually, Christmas was a very poignant time for me to reflect on my life that sometimes feels split between two worlds.
Being here in Zipolite feeling so at home at Piña Palmera and in every way swept up in this film and this way of living, it was strange to see my family smiling back at me in the glittering rectangle of my computer remembering all the times we've gathered together during the holidays and during the rest of the year. Slowly, slowly, day by day what we do becomes our lives. Spending so much time away, in Mexico, at college, it feels like the comfortable regularity and tradition of Christmas in my parents' living room that I saw in that rectangle is a distant memory. And it felt rich and powerful to talk to them and see them and hear their voices as if they were coming to me from a past life. I think that's all culture shock is: changing gears super quickly moving from one way of life to another. It affected me during Christmas because this is my first Christmas away from my parents and to be thrown back in with the tree and the coffee cake was like doing a 180 sitting here on the beach in 70* weather speaking Spanish and eating animal crackers and coffee.
Regarding the project, I'm going to a rural community tomorrow to visit some ex-patients of Piña Palmera and do some filming. I spent the day today with the lifeguards, who are hoping to celebrate a year with no deaths for the first time in the history of Zipolite on Thursday. Cross your fingers.
3 comments:
I really appreciate reading these thoughts of yours.
Earlier today I was with a friend's brother who's dying of cancer at 58. He's living at a hospice center and was very ornery today, asking repeatedly to be taken out of there. He wanted to go to the local emergency room to see another doctor. He's trying to dodge death. What can you tell him? I just said, "Wherever you go - there you are". But I don't know if that was helpful at all.
People becoming Buddhists traditionally mark that passage by "taking refuge" in the three jewels - the Buddha, the Dharma or teachings, and the sangha or congregation of Monks and Nuns. Trungpa Rinpoche taught this as "becoming a refugee". He emphasized leaving the comforts of home and habit and venturing out into unknown, often challenging territory. Territory that doesn't automatically support our personal identity. Some might call this being a grown-up.
Life is full of poignancy. I think that this is certainly a big experience of it, but the older I get the more the whole world seems infused with it. It was a milestone for us too!
(Also, as I remind myself, it doesn't mean that you'll never be home for Christmas again.)
The coffee cake seems to have meant a lot to you. I had no idea!
Crossing our fingers for Thursday.
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