in five weeks I’ll be gone for five months
Time move’s quickly and, in an effort to keep up with myself, I’ve thought about keeping up with this blog as best I can. I’m currently five weeks from leaving home again to be someplace I’ve never been before. Feelings of being sixteen years old and on the verge of being on my own for the first time are spotting my meditations and I can’t help but smile. I’ll be in Puebla, Mexico; a decadent colonial city about a two hour drive southeast of Mexico City. I’ve never been this far south and the thought of being in a year-round temperate climate stretches that smile even further.
I’m gonna make a pact with myself right now to explore the history of my future surroundings as best I can. In the last year I’ve tried to read whatever’s been brought to my attention about Latin America. By far the most informative book I’ve read so far is Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano. The book subtitle is Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent and gives you a pretty good idea of what it’s about so I won’t go into more detail about it besides to say that it’s pretty astounding what I’ve learned from it. I’d like to share a passage from the introduction to the book that I’ve found leaves me beaming every time I read it. It comes from his Book of Embraces but is used in the introduction as an example of his playful writing style, which makes the history in the book a bit easier to read:
There was an old an solitary man who spent most of his time in bed. There were rumors that he had a treasure hidden in his house. One day some thieves broke in, they searched everywhere and found a chest in the cellar. They went off with it and when they opened it they found that it was filled with letters. They were the love letters the old man had received all over the course of his long life. The thieves were going to burn the letters, but they talked it over and finally decided to return them. One by one. One a week. Since then, every Monday at noon, the old man would be waiting for the postman to appear. As soon as he saw him, the old nab would start running and the postman who knew all about it, held the letter in his hand. And even St. Peter could hear the beating of that heart, crazed with joy at receiving a message from a woman.
