New York City

The United States of America, I regret to say, has been uninspiring in terms of a place of permanent residence, for a long time. In its defense, this probably has less to do with its normalcy and more to do with its perceived singularity, its place as part of a much larger whole. I have yearned for other places, and the many things -- overly-philosophized as they are -- that come with travel and movement. This attempts to explain the constant coming and going, the life free of exhorbant possessions, that has been the past few years. It also explains why this past week in New York City is so significant to me.

The moment I landed I had this refreshingly free, innate desire to put on shoes and walk and walk and walk and walk. The first day I walked four hours from Park Slope in Brooklyn to West Village in Manhattan, and the days that followed, followed suit. It seems unimportant, but I distinctly remember arriving in Marsailles -- the then declared cultural capital of Europe, or some award by a similar name -- one day last August, and planting myself on a hostel couch with a book for five days. My periodic adventures out would be to buy food I would cook later in a kitchen. I could not be bothered by the exploration one was supposed to do, the things one was supposed to see. I remember not ever wanting to feel that stagnant again while traveling, so how different New York was.

The grand parks and the prestigious universities and the tallest skyscrapers and amazing food around every corner and then the tragic memories of a day now more than ten years old, they inspired me, for the first time I can remember, to be my own citizen again. It won't happen for some time, but it was nice to imagine home, in a futuristic sense, that may yet someday come. It was nice to stand on some real American history that happened one day back in 1776 when Washington marched troops to protect the little island from redcoats. It was good to walk through Chinatown and only find out later one of the major intersections was the setting for Gangs of New York. It was good to settle my long time personal quarrel of traveling to far off cities without seeing the greatest city on Earth just at my doorstep. It was great to just be and be excited.

But for now it is Belgium, and later somewhere else I do not know yet but that is not my country. A friend told me that they did not know how I do it; their heart would hurt all the time. A fair statement, because it often does hurt, as it did on a plane with the New York skyline fading in the distance, the Empire State Building and Liberty Tower presiding above the rest. But we are never really alone on trips like these, and I often end up curiously stumbling after someplace new where I do not know anyone, again.

Mayan Ruins And A Few Goodbyes

The day I left Guatemala began with a beautiful morning. Smog and haze from the capital had not yet blown in, leaving every detail of the three surrounding volcanoes visible from base to peak. Fuego, our ever-active friend in Antigua, remained calm without any moderate eruptions. Tuktuks rattled along the cobblestone streets. You could smell fresh banana bread outside Doña Luisa. Things were like they were the day I arrived.

Then in a rare display of Guatemalan punctuality, my taxi driver showed up 20 minutes early and we were off, ascending the hills that surround home before descending into the hustle and bustle of a sprawling Guatemala City. A few hours later Cuba was outside my right side window and a few hours more I landed where it all began.

The transition feels stronger, maybe harder, than those before and it has kept me quiet since the day I left. Driving along the same suburban roads I have driven more times than I can remember, I thought about 24 hours earlier passing miles and miles of poverty-stricken shanty towns that themselves surround gated communities of the few but powerful European ancestral elite. While buying a suit and a new smartphone, I thought about a ten year old I saw once lugging firewood on his back alongside a highway near the Honduras border. It is contradictions like these that characterize Guatemala as a whole for me and when other things feel far away as they are now, those polarities still feel near.

I love the story of a 16th century Spanish explorer who, during his travels through the Guatemalan jungles, stopped late one evening to rest under the stars. He awoke with the sunlight the following morning to giant stone temples covered in thick vegetation -- the ruins of ancient Mayan cities long ago abandoned and swallowed. I walked those ruins one Saturday morning, 500 years later, and found myself taking comfort in the very normal fact that I am but one person of many who has come and had to say goodbye.

Lago Atitlán

Some years ago I went to a psychic who, among other things, by way of a seemingly coincidental flip of cards, told me I would change residencies soon and travel over the course of my life more than I could currently understand. A month before my first international move, I found it peculiar, but certainly more appealing than other things she said. I have thought about that old woman in her strange house by the highway many times since in many places. If I am being honest with myself, I recognize she has some strange hold on me that I cannot shake. I would not ever say I believe her, but I certainly would not say I don't.

One such place she came to mind was on Atitlán this past weekend, deep in the heart of Guatemala. I went back a second time for a number of reasons, but there is never a bad reason to go to the lake. Nestled beneath three volcanoes and bordered by unstable cliffs, the view changes spectacularly from every corner and crevice and small town. The long breakfasts are a cause for celebration. The lake is smooth like paper in the morning with the sunrise and by afternoon it gets choppy with wind. I would relax there with a book on a balcony, sitting by a beautiful girl who makes me happy, sipping on a cold beer, any day, and I hope that my life always has time for such things in such places.

Sometime during the course of my four days there I discovered I would not be going back to the lake for some time because I will be leaving the continent as a whole. It was night after a good day, and as I sat back in a chair next to a simple girl, relishing the many moments of my simple little life, thinking about the silly state of blissful romance I had fallen into, the phone suddenly made a subtle noise signaling an email from a job I knew if I got I would have to take. It was very much the sound of life growing complicated again.

I think back on those moments often: those where one minute your life heads one direction and the next it takes a turn. Sometimes they are positive and other times negative, though Marcus Aurelius would argue they are neither. Constant change is neutral and the natural order of the world, the same way a fire burns wood and turns it to ash and the same way a baby becomes an adult and later an old man. It's certain to me that we would believe very little of our changes before they actually occur, and who the hell knows what's right.

This change is itself many things, and it would take a lot for me to get up and leave a life only in its beginning stages. But it is how I love to travel and the style of life I love to live. While the world continues to boggle my mind in its bittersweet flow from place to place, full of goodbyes and hellos and arrivals and departures, images of the lake and her radiant smile are burned into my mind and soon they will be joined by other images, fueled by this strange need to be with everyone in every place at the same time.

Colonia Virrey

My house is surrounded by one of the most peaceful (and manageable) gardens in memory. The walls are tall, made of stone, and what I imagine old colonial residencies to look like. You can vaguely hear noises from the outside -- an occasional car or dog or piece of music from a neighboring house -- but overall the walls do their job and create the illusion that your space is yours, enclosed and impenetrable by distractions or influence. For this reason I sat and read in the garden today. I did the same yesterday with the same book. I have devised the perfect positioning system for a long bench and its cushions, where it falls under direct sunlight for most of the afternoon until the sun itself disappears in that distinct moment behind the trees as dusk.

The garden is made possible by a gardener who lives out back in a small wooden shack lit by one bulb. He is old, going on blind, and spends his days living harmoniously with his little green creations. The image of him preening shrubs from a ladder is imprinted in my mind as much as the plants themselves, and his absence I believe, this far in, would certainly change the essence of our little paradisiacal escape.

I was told recently that all his sons have been killed in Guatemala City, an hour up the road. There are a million reasons one could speculate, but the sad fact is it happens all the time there. It is one of the most dangerous capital cities in the world, sprawling out in various zones rampant with corruption, narcotics, and gang-related violence. While newspapers and other things bring it close, it all feels very far away in the garden.

I drifted off into a nap today and woke up to a breeze and a significant drop in temperature. I was also a shade darker and coaxed in that layer of grass, sweat, and soil that comes with prolonged time outdoors. Then I got up, walked inside the cabin, and shut the door in an act separating the gardener's world from mine. There are those omnipresent doses of perspective that arrive each day in Central America if you give yourself enough solitary moments in a quiet garden.

On the Road

I finished On the Road recently and did not much like it. There are plenty of people who adore the best known Kerouac, praise it as defining a generation, as one of the great works of travel literature. I found it empty, really.

Part of it was the style of writing: lengthy and wordy, coming from someone who often talked badly about Hemingway. There was a strange overuse of the word mad, and dig, and other words I relate heavily with hipsters on fixed gear bikes in Los Angeles, Austin, or Melbourne.

Part of it was the characters too -- not the fact that they had faults, but that the book seemed to idolize their mediocrity. Dean Moriarty bums around the country, frolicking, chasing, abandoning responsibility and commitment without any explanation other than that he is mad, and somehow we are supposed to make him the hero of our tale like he is of the narrator. He is the kind of guy I would hate in a bar and as I discovered, would hate to read about just as much.

There is something deeper there too, embedded within the story itself. The characters move along an ambiguous road that could be any road in a type of travel I do not really consider travel: going without any money and trying to survive by penny-pinching, stealing, and relying on stranger's hospitality for as long as you possibly can; in a hurry to do everything and arrive everywhere at the same time. You can be physically moving on a road and see nothing, and I get the feeling that through the drunken gaze of real-life Kerouac and real-life Cassidy, New York to Los Angeles and back went something like this.

Whenever your favorite part of a book is its introduction, it is not the story that gets you. This particular introduction explains the Beat Generation, and what drove Kerouac to that three week typing rampage that became a published work. I have romantic notions of this: locking myself in a dark room with beer and scotch and cigarettes at a typewriter and seeing what happens. Something about that thrills me, and I hope if I do the same thing one day I get a result more suited to me.

I love the concept of a good road. I like straight, perfect roads in suburbs and cobblestone roads in Spain and dirt mountain roads in Guatemala and red roads in the Outback. I love discovering slowly where they lead and sometimes pulling off a road I know and taking one I do not. I really love when they are open and without traffic and you can put a car in cruise control and go until you need to fill up with gas and then fill up and go further. Being on the road means so many things and can lead so many places and it is really a shame such a good metaphor can be taken to such low and vacuous places.

I Woke Up This Morning

I woke up this morning to a medium-sized wolf spider – completely harmless but ugly as hell – as he sat sunning himself in the sun that comes through my transparent aluminium roof. Perhaps a few weeks ago I would have jumped up and swooped in for a kill and let my mind wonder what else could be around, nesting under my covers or in my rafters. Here I just sat entranced, watching him for I do not know how long. He crawled up to a crevice where wall became ceiling and I had this distinct moment where I knew I would not be able to get him in a few moments more and I was just okay with it all. I drifted off to sleep, waking some time later, the spider gone.

I am not sure if this constitutes giving up or acceptance, though perhaps those are the same thing after a few weeks in Guatemala. Insects are not preferable, but they are part of the natural order of things. They outnumber us, are older than us, and more often than not are harmless to us. My thoughts might change if I wake up one night in excruciating pain from a scorpion sting; statistically speaking this will not happen. Though when speaking of statistics, it is almost certain a small millipede, spider, or beetle has wandered astray in the night, crawling onto my arm, then crawling off, without any climax, all while I slept unknowingly. Maybe this morning I realized it is time I guide my fears to more deserving things. The bugs would much prefer a tree outside swaying in the wind, as we would prefer them there.

For a long time I avoided my room and stayed in the large, sprawling common area that includes couches and hammocks that look out on the volcanoes. Part of this was the feeling I was sharing my room with unwanted visitors, but also that people and action and energy lay upstairs. Common areas are where we are supposed to go and supposed to talk and supposed to do a lot of things; it is the same way this lodge is a place you are supposed to love to be and want to work and live. “You have a dream situation up here,” I have been told more times than I can remember.

It is a beautiful view really -- one of my favorites. The lights from Antigua twinkle at night and during the day you periodically watch a volcano spew steam that blends into the nearby clouds. The travellers are mostly wonderful and the owners are beautiful people. The concept is visionary and refreshing --one of true philanthropic action and change -- amidst a lot of idealistic jargon that never gets done. But it is funny how these things go. There have been many dream moments in life where I would not be anywhere other than where I was, but they are hard to predict in advance, and what should be it often is not it at all.

My morning with a little wolf spider was not radical, or beautiful even, but I felt awfully content tucked away with no one around -- more content than I have felt in recent weeks on chairs that point outwards at a considerable view. I will be living in Antigua soon and the moments there will be simple with lots of typing and text and isolation, and I do not know how long it will last, but frankly, I am excited as hell to get off this mountain that seems to be some hazy and heavenly dream to everyone who finds their way here in the afternoon and leaves the next morning.

El Hato from a Distance

There is a wonderful set of indigenous Guatemalan girls that live in the small mountain town of el Hato that cook and clean at the lodge I reside. They smile and giggle at everything that anyone does and they just seem happy for no other reason than life swarming around them. I heard recently about a documentary that creates a formula; once a certain level of basic needs are fulfilled, everyone has the same actual quantity of happiness. I found it to be a lovely thought because it says what we already know -- a mansion does not make us happier than a hut if the right person is inside of it and you are warm together by the fire.

I asked one of the girls today while she swept if she had ever been outside of Antigua and she said she had not, but only 20 minutes down the road to sell things at the market. She had not been the capital 45 minutes away by bus, and certainly not outside Guatemala. I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, someday, when she has more money.

I thought about it then and again later and again tonight more and I wonder how someone even begins to conceptualize a world that is six square miles. I suppose the answer to that is that it is easy to conceptualize a world so small. You probably know all the details and the hidden paths and the best places to escape the noise and find some quiet, but what happens when someone describes an airplane that takes off from a runway and goes over a large ocean for hours and then lands on some set of land where they speak different languages? How does that enter your brain and make the slightest bit of sense.

This though isn't a new thought or an old one really. The world was bigger for people before Columbus's time and it was also just as small. But part of me wants to buy them all a two-way bus ticket on their day off and all of us go into the capital together. We won't leave the car really because it is dangerous as hell, but we will just look out the windows and watch the people and slowly make our way back to the hills around Antigua. I'm not sure what would happen. Probably nothing. Though I can bet there would be more smiles and laughs and then things would carry on like they always have.