“What we have to be is what we are.”
― Thomas Merton

I have become a victim to a humble state of fatigue. After days of resisting, I have finally given into going to the doctor tomorrow.
The thing I despise about being sick is that many of the emotional walls I have constructed fall and emotions surface. Its amazing how events from years ago still are buried deep down within. It makes sense I guess. We dont have time to properly mourn pains that should be grieved. And sometimes, even after we think we have properly grieved, we realize that the human heart isnt capable of completely erasing memories.
But to the credit of repression, we also cant function on a daily basis with being plagued by the past.
I tried to search and find a thread through the emerging emotion; was there a common element in the memories that were continually gnawing on my heart?
I realized in an instant that all these memories I was grieving were due to the loss of innocence; whether a part of my own or the loss of someone else's, what is it so deeply within humanity that wishes to maintain something that can never be returned?
I had a memory of an image. The image was the same one I had seen one night riding the bus in Buenos Aires about 9 months ago. I imagined one of my friends 10 years ago before I knew him. Now a man calloused by the world, a man possessed by an ambition that has already planted a deep seed of hatred towards himself, I saw him as he would have been ten years ago eating ice cream.
There he was, sitting on a table outside an ice cream shop, eating the melting ice cream illuminated by the city street lights. In the dark I stood across him. While speaking to each other, the words in the image were mute because the significance was within one simple moment. Bending over his cone, I saw an innocent boy who understood nothing of the complexities of life, and in that instance I suddenly knew that it was this simplicity that eternity is composed of.
I quickly turned my head from the window. The rain in the dark blurred my view and reminded me that I would never see his innocence.
What did thomas merton mean when he wrote this phrase: what we have to be is what we are? Did he mean, as the great writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote,“In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”
Or was it that we are destined to become whatever virtue or vice is developing our character?
Regardless, I have concluded that though people will eventually lose their childlike innocence, it does not mean that they cant cultivate a simplicity or sincerity about life that are both forms of innocence. And while I can grieve over the calloused hearts that have taken over so many people, I can have hope that God will one day restore.

Goodbye Argentina

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..." rainer maria rilke
I used to believe that one day I would put a white dress on, and in a single moment, give my heart away. But as many ideas we discover to be illusions as we journey through life, I have slowly found that this is not the case. If to love is to be vulnerable, then love is something given away year by year. The deepest pain is seeded in the reality that a large part of our heart has been distributed before we are aware of it.
As if once upon a time, my heart existed as a mirror which served only to reflect my own ego. Looking back, the truth has surfaced that my heart was indeed, in the beginning, fully mine. But the mirror has been shattered. Piece by piece, I have given my heart away. How strange it is to arrive at a place in life where I see the necessity in grieving each piece in order to find peace.
Maybe even stranger, I have discovered that part of my heart has been given to a country.

Confessions

that “which thing I was sighing for, bound as I was, not with another's irons, but by my own iron will. My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and bound me. For of a forward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom; and custom not resisted, became necessity. By which links, as it were, joined together (whence I called it a chain) a hard bondage held me enthralled. But that new will which had begun to be in me, freely to serve Thee, and to wish to enjoy Thee, O God, the only assured pleasantness, was not yet able to overcome my former wilfulness, strengthened by age. Thus did my two wills, one new, and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual, struggle within me; and by their discord, undid my soul.”
Then one night, Augustine finds himself alone in a garden weeping.
“I cast myself down I know not how, under a certain fig- tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the floods of mine eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to Thee. And, not indeed in these words, yet to this purpose, spake I much unto Thee: and Thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord, wilt Thou be angry for ever? Remember not our former iniquities, for I felt that I was held by them. I sent up these sorrowful words: How long, how long, “to- morrow, and tomorrow?” Why not now? Why not is there is hour an end to my uncleanness?
So I was speaking and weeping in to most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, 'Take up and read; Take up and read.' Instantly, my countenance altered, I began to think most intently whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find...I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence. No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all darkness of doubt vanished away.”

- st. augustine

excerpt from dark night of the soul

“...God desires to withdraw them from this base manner of loving and lead them on to a higher degree of divine love. And he desires to liberate them from the lowly exercise of the senses and of discursive meditation, by which they go in search of him so inadequately and with so many difficulties, and lead them into the exercise of spirit, in which they become capable of a communion with God that is more abundant and more free of imperfections. God does this after beginners have exercised themselves for a time in the way of virtue and have persevered in meditation and prayer. For it is through the delight and satisfaction they experience in prayer that they have become detached from worldly things and have gained some spiritual strength in God. This strength has helped them somewhat to restrain their appetites for creatures, and through it they will be able to suffer a little oppression and dryness without turning back. Consequently, it is at the time they are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favor is shining most brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and the spring of sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as they desired. For since they were weak and tender, no door was closed to them, as St. John says in the Book of Revelation [Rv. 3:8]. God now leaves them in such darkness that they do not know which way to turn in their discursive imaginings. They cannot advance a step in meditation, as they used to, now that the interior sense faculties are engulfed in this night. He leaves them in such dryness that they not only fail to receive satisfaction and pleasure from their spiritual exercises and works, as they formerly did, but also find these exercises distasteful and bitter. As I said, when God sees that they have grown a little, he weans them from the sweet breast so that they might be strengthened, lays aside their swaddling bands, and puts them down from his arms that they may grow accustomed to walking by themselves. This change is a surprise to them because everything seems to be functioning in reverse.” - St. John of the Cross

Stanzas of the Soul

1. One dark night,
fired with love's urgent longings
- ah, the sheer grace! -
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

2. In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
- ah, the sheer grace! -
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

3. On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

4. This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
- him I knew so well -
there in a place where no one appeared.

5. O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.

6. Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

7. When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
- St. John of the Cross

Picasso's kiss

Confused cubes
distort the imagination
neither yellow nor blue
always green


“to paint and nothing more”
Regardless of production
nothing existed before
“divested of useless realism”


the lines blur
the canvas tainted
the body frigid
the mouth opened


misplaced emotions
a wasteland
when a hunger for meaning
wraps its hands around my waist


"Neither the good nor the true"
colors that create nothing
my lips are void
“neither the useful nor the useless”

A Franciscan Benediction

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth bodly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.

And the blessing of God the Supreme Majesty and out Creator, Jesus Christ the Incarnate Word who is our Brother and Savior, and the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide, be with you and remain with you, this day and forevermore. Amen

the reality of memories

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Sometimes I really miss being home. I miss the fields of bluebonnets outside of my house, I miss the coffee my parents brew every morning, I miss swinging on the back porch with my sisters.
I miss the smell off the heat dying off during a summer nights, I miss the sound of crickets in the countryside.
I am discovering more and more that this is not my home. But then the reality that when I go home it will not be the same is almost more frightening than living in a foreign country.
In Victor Frankl's “Search for Meaning,” he writes about the deep depression that many holocaust survivors faced after finding that the homes the returned to after years of suffering were not the same.
Frankl laments over this sense of idealism we build in our minds when we hold our memories to be a current reality. How could someone's memories be so strong that they sustain a person through such a hell? How could something hold someone together, give them strength to fight day to day, provide meaning through suffering, when that memory no longer exists?
And this is the struggle of living overseas. The people who are related to my memories our real; the love I feel towards them still “is”, but this ideal life I look back on, the accumulation of all the good moments, never was. And what is even more sobering is to realize that those moments have led me to where I am now.
I am at this point where I realize, in some ways, I am still that. But now, I am this also.
Its the analogy I have used before: my native country is yellow, this foreign country I live in is blue, and now I will just be green for the rest of my life. I can learn this country's history, I can learn the language, I can analyze and study the culture, but I will always be an outsider. Also, I can go home, but I will never be the girl I was before. I will compare and have part of an outside world always living with me. And most discussions will be tuned out in my mind by this repetitive saying when people begin discussions with me that, while this is the reality of their world, this is not the reality of the world.
Sometimes I wonder if this kind of introspection is harmful. I get so frustrated with people because they never want to have these kinds of conversations; but I question if in the end there is any kind of intrinsic value to these observations. Perhaps sometimes it is better just not to think about it. Besides, what kind of memories are made out of contemplating memories?

La soledad de America latina

Today I would like to honor Gabriel García Márquez.

Here is the speech he gave in 1982 after receiving the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Solitude of Latin America
Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.

This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.

Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

My Name Is Asher Lev-the struggle between who and what you are

A few months ago I read "My Name is Asher Lev" by Potok Chaim. Potok presents a young boy, Asher Lev, who is a kind of child prodigy artist. From a very young age, Asher Lev compulsively draws very profound pictures. His parents, who are Hasidic Jews, hope that their son will eventually give up his childish hobby and follow in the footsteps of his father.
As the story progresses, the son becomes more and more obssessed with art which fuels the tension between father and son. Asher, who loves his father, wants to please him, but also struggles with this gift that has taken him over.
Throughout the story, Potok sets up a dictomy between "who" and "what" Asher is.
As an Hasidic Jew, Asher is destined to carry out the traditions and bloodline of his family because this is WHO Asher is. But as an artist, Asher is obligated to paint the world as he sees it because this is WHAT Asher is.
Finally, one night Asher's father discovers drawings of Christ and naked women. Astonished, he questions his son about the blasphemous art. Asher responds,"Because I'm part of a tradition, Papa. Mastery of the art form of the nude is very important to that tradition. Every artist who ever lived drew or painted the nude. . . . "Idont want to sit in a room painting for myself. I want to communicate what I do. And I want critics to know I can do it." . . . "I respect you,Papa. But I cant respect your aesthetic blindness." Asher's father refutes his son by exclaiming that it is better to be aesthetically blind than morally.
For the last few months, I have been contemplating the complexity and application of this dictomy. It appears that many people develop this tension between who and what they are. But why is that some people are able to come to terms with it better than others? Perhaps because of the nature of extremes, some are able to blend who and what they are, while others have to chose.
An interesting point is that, while it is obvious that Asher's father is condemning his son's love for art from a moral framework, it seems that Asher also develops a kind of worldview from which he observes his surroundings.
Asher's teacher, a man who serves as a type of role model states, "I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I seem them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they are not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world."

For Asher's teacher, art becomes the only objective reality from which he views everything else. And so also for Asher, art takes the place of religion to justify his existence. "Listento me, Asher Lev. As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing,except to yourself and to the truth as you se it."
What does it come down to? What matters is which one the individual finds more meaning in: who or what they are. For Asher, art became his reality.

Interestingly, his father views his son choice as something that he should morally evolve beyond to chose against. Asher Lev's father states,"An animal can't help it, " my father said. "Do you understand me, Asher? The Ribbono Shel Olom gave every man a will. Every man is responsible for what he does, because he has a will and that will he directs his life. There is no such thing as a man who can't help it."

The "what" Asher is fighting against, in his father's opinion, gives the importance to "who" someone is. Part of the esoteric truth discovered in religion is the importance of sacrificing what you are individually for the collective "who".

His father's frustration is displayed when he states, "It's difficult for your father to hate something the world seems to value so much."
For the Lev family, who they are is everything the world isnt. But then it begs the question: is the moral claim Asher's father is making against the world valid? Is the "what" Asher's father is trying to save him from only destructive in the sense that it opposes his religion, or is it initally destructive in "itself?"

The reader is stuck with a dilemma: From the father's perspective, sacrificing "what" you are is the choice many people have to make in order to find the blessing in "who" they are. Unlike animals, people have free will to chose what is morally right against what is aesthically pleasing.
From Asher's perspective, he is chosing against his very existence if he stops drawing. Art is his fate leaving him with no choice. He concludes that he "would not be a whore to [his] own existence."