Brazil

Whenever I'm in the midst of an intense experience, I always wonder what it is that I'll need to write about.  Most of my writing is reflective, a way to process the world and the people around me, my method to life's large and small madness. This year I've also gotten into the habit of writing more with pen and paper, started in January with the purchase of a perfectly pocket-sized notebook during a rainy day in New Orleans, and more recently due to a beautiful leather journal given to me by my fiance.  Paper is a bit more private and a bit more precious.

But sometimes my thoughts are broader than the poems and missives I jot in notebooks. Paragraphs are usually better suited for a keyboard.  The trouble with that is that I sit, well over 24 hours now back in the US after my latest adventure, and the moments of "I must write about this" blur in my mind. But I must give a few their due, so I'll begin...

Only a Year?
I sat on a plane to Brazil with my fiance five days after the one year anniversary of our first date. I've never been one to support the idea of proper romantic chronology (date for X amount before you're exclusive, be exclusive for X amount before you get serious, be together X amount before you get engaged, etc.).  I credit that flippancy with my mom's early marriage.  She married at 19 and I think it's natural for girls to imagine their lives as a kind of mirror or vague approximation of the timeline of their mothers.  Hitting 22, 27 (not to mention higher numbers) with no marriage on the horizon, it became clear to me that the timing that shaped my mother's life would not be the same for me.  There's a freedom in that, and a terror.  But it's the freedom I felt most strongly.

All that flippancy as to proper dating timelines aside, sitting next to a fiance on a trip out of the country with members of his family was not what I would have anticipated of my life a year ago. Surely that's a speedy leap. Not only do I feel overwhelmed by the love that has come to me, I'm overwhelmed at how easy it is to be taken care of, how natural it feels to want to take care of someone else. I always imagined it to be impossibly difficult, that level of care, but it seems to have bubbled up naturally alongside the love. To not only feel and want to give that care but to receive it, feels genuinely holy.

These Rocks Remind Me of Those Rocks
Walking on the rocks at one of the beaches we visited in Buzios, I was reminded by the rocks I piled on top of each other when I hiked the glacier trail in Zermatt, Switzerland.  In one location I was slathered in sunscreen and walking barefoot in a swimsuit on a crowded beach, and in the other I was bundled up and felt like I could hear my own heartbeat in the silence and solitude around me. But my brain still connected the two, saw the rocks, their shape and color, the tumble of little stones along the coast, and recalled the similar shapes on that hike and the peace I felt in laying on the cold ground in those mountains, stacking stones while I muttered prayers.

But it wasn't that connection that made the real impression.  What halted my step for a moment was the fact that I connected them at all.  To be walking in Brazil and be reminded of Switzerland, what kind of glorious existence have I been blessed with? To have both images alive in my experience, to hold both close enough to want to fit them into the puzzle of rocky landscapes of my life, it just makes me so overwhelmed with gratitude.

Home is Everything
In the middle of our trip we made our way to Campo Mourao, the small city where my fiance was born and raised. Specifically, he grew up on a small campus for training seminarians and providing orphanage care. We spent time at his childhood home and I could picture him running from one building to the next, picture the red dirt caked on his knees.  I saw him hug and laugh and tell stories with men and women who'd known him since childhood, people who'd known and loved his family, people who recognized the ring on my finger was worn by his mother. It was a home clearly steeped in love and devotion and he relaxed there in a way you can only relax in surroundings you fully understand and embrace.  And it struck me that that's one of the things any marriage would want to construct, a home that allows two people of vastly different backgrounds and experiences to relax, enjoy, embrace, and be comforted. A tiny portion of the world within which you can each be seen and heard and cherished, even if the heater is making noise or the laundry has piled up. Seems like a tricky thing, home-making. Tricky and exciting.

And finally...

No Wondering This Time
On every adventure since my first trip abroad to Russia at 14, I've wondered the same thing.  Is this the first and last time I ever see this place? Will I ever return? Is this moment once in a lifetime?  When I studied in England in college, my dad said something on the phone that always stuck with me.  I was (very dramatically) begging for money to travel to Ireland with classmates over a weekend and I used the phrase "once in a lifetime" probably a bit too heavily to the parents that were generously paying for me to study abroad in the first place.  My dad responded to my "once in a lifetime" plea with a short, "that's your choice." He went on to say something along the lines of it being my decision whether or not something would be a once in a lifetime experience, at least when it comes to travel.  If I wanted to go to Ireland someday, I would go (on my own dime). I know I must have been upset with that answer but it was actually very sound advice and a good reminder that while there are some experiences that may truly be of the once in a lifetime variety, many are not.  They are only "once" because we choose to make them so. We have the power to determine whether we want to experience something, whether it's worth our effort and investment. Life doesn't just happen to you.  You build it yourself. [Side note: I did go to Ireland, this year! On my own dime and with my own dear friend, Sandy, beside me. So Dad was clearly right.]

But that's a bit of a burden, too.  To know that I will choose to not return to places I've loved in favor of new adventures is a bit sad.  So that's what made the wondering so much more fun this time around.  Brazil (Brasil, for Chester) will be a part of my life for all my life, because it is home to my future husband.  We won't be able to go back every year but we have every hope of going back every few years to see friends and do more exploring.  We'll see places Chester has never seen, we'll fly to Argentina and Chile to get more stamps in our passport and finally spend time in Patagonia.  We'll likely stand in the same place at Iguacu Falls and take pictures again someday (see picture), soaked again by that massive storm of water. And that shifting of wonder, to a when, as opposed to an if, feels like a great gift.

And that's the sum of every thought about this trip, really.  It all feels like too great an experience to boil down into paragraphs here and into poems scratched in journals at the beach. It all feels like a gift, laden with farofa and sweat and bug spray and bad plumbing and grilled meat and mud and laughter and new freckles and love.