my life is a spiderweb

Hello friends. family. neighbors. lovers.

I love spiderwebs, but I don't understand them. Twice I have watched spiders make a web, and literally stood immobilized in fascination. Once was in the corner of my living room at home looking through the bay window. I saw the whole thing, and kneeled there on the chair for about an hour. The other was in Chicago on the Fullerton platform waiting for the train. There was orange light somewhere.

Spiderwebs are strange and strong and intricate. They are vulnerable and sticky and simple. They catch, cling, and withstand. In the process of making a web, the spider continously has to move back to the center. Webs are beautiful, yet designed by creatures towards whom I often react rather violently.

My life here is beautiful. Everyday something connects. Sometimes its painful, sometimes its funny; always absurd. So much is speaking to me right now, and things often feel unbearably light and beautifully heavy in the same moment. It's like when Harold asks Maude if she prays, and she says, 'Pray?...No, I communicate.' Harold: with God? Maude: with LIFE! I'm communicating with both; you can't separate them here, or anywhere really. In El Salvador, God is horizontal, living deeply within everything - incredibly close, rooted, in constant communication, flux, flow. People often tell me stories about the war, about living in poverty, living through earthquakes and floods...Pause: water here is so interesting. There is a community that we visited called Las Nubes (the clouds) on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano, fairly near to Antiguo Cuscatlan. They have no running water, and praise God when it rains. Without the rain, they have to climb the hill with water on their backs, a nearly impossible feat. There is a community nearby in San Ramon that is currently working to improve this situation. But when it rains, it pours, and floods. And it immobilizes everything. Like snow. Like buckets and buckets of rain and mud. So it is a blessing and a curse. We have run out of water before in my house, several times, but we also have the resources to get the problem fixed in no time. I wash my clothes by hand, and there are no dryers. It is the rainy season, which means that everything feels and smells wet all the time. Water. ...So, as I was saying, people tell me stories. And God moves in their eyes, feet, hands. I say God, not because I understand it or see it clearly, but because at the end of each story, Salvadorans thank God, for everything, and especially the present moment. If I say to someone, 'see you later,' a Salvadoran will typically respond, 'God willing' (primero Dios). And it doesn't make sense really, for people who have suffered so much to have so much faith. Maybe it makes sense. I am currently exploring those questions.

The air here is thick, ripe, saturated, and dense. Salvadorans often speak of pain in terms of weight. They carry so much. So many memories, so many vivid images. Food - on their heads and backs, often uphill. Children - there are so many children. In general, my Spanish has been pretty good here. I can understand most everyone, except for two kinds of people: children and old people (most of whom lack teeth). A lot of what these people in particular have to say, though, is not expressed in words.

So what am I doing here? I mean that literally; answering that question philosophically is, well, not really something I feel like writing about today. But even answering this question literally is not easy. So much has happened within and around me that I hesitate to write or think or pray or reflect. In many ways it is too much, and there is a great temptation to table all of it, save it for later, to look back on it all at once. But I remember my one regret from last year: not writing enough, not sitting each day deep within my thoughts (I suppose Ignatian spirituality has already creeped its way into me. Vamos a ver.) And, I am afraid of coming back and having one of you lovely people ask me how things went, and me staring at you blankly, depressed because I wished I would have shared bits and pieces along the way. So I am forcing myself to remember - to put into my heart again - all that I have seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt. So, the senses I suppose.

I have seen...a lot. green mountains. rain clouds. fruit trees. flowers. The trees on my campus look like water color paintings - like sunsets and rain have seeped into the bark. They are dripping with color, layered and peeling, but smooth to the touch. Tall and skinny, lime green, deep red, awkward purple, all at once. So many colors. A spider in the shower. A spider in the living room. Ants on my desk. A giant brown moth. What appeared to be a bat flying through the kitchen. Lots of bugs and critters in general. Trash. So much trash, just dumped in random places, cluttering dirt roads. Graphic photgraphs of the women and priests that were killed at the UCA (University of Central America, the school I am attending here) in 1989. The clothing they were wearing. The rose garden to remember them by. I've seen the altar where Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed in 1980, the pictures, his clothes, his bed and car and half empty/full tube of toothpaste. That's what really got to me. Even more than than the bloody pictures and clothes, it was that damn tube of half-used toothpaste. Lots of tears and smiles. Missing teeth. Purple, veiny meat. Kevin and Trena's chickens and children and new puppy. A million buses with Jesus messages all over them.

I've heard a lot of songs here. Let's sing them when I get back. We always sing before each meal, and yesterday, Edith - one of my Salvadoran roomates - played the guitar as we sang. Eight beautiful women singing in Spanish. Lovely. Birds, and so many birds. Car alarms, sensitive even to thunder. And of course, a mountain of Spanish. More exhausting than I thought.

I eat meat now. I figured that would happen, and aside from the purple veiny serving (I didn't even try), I have been quite pleased with the flesh-eating.

Everything is damp. Thus, a lovely mildew accompanies our house and beds and clothing throughout most days. Shower, sweat, rain. Shower, sweat, rain. On Fridays the cooks make sweet bread and I have smelled that, too. One day I stepped in something horrific and mysterious, and there was no cure for my right shoe save two thunderstorms and some sunshine.

I was sick the first week. In fact, nearly everyone was sick. No need to pass along the details, but it has since passed, and I hope to never feel such shivers or rumbly in my tumbly again.

My life here thus far. Perhaps you can imagine it more clearly. Still, these are bits and pieces.

Paz y solidaridad,
Abi