Destination

So I've been spending the past few weeks doing an English teacher training course here in Buenos Aires (the capital of Argentina) and have just recently found out in exactly which tiny town I'll be stationed. So on March 15th I'll start teaching at a language academy in Laboulaye, Cordoba.

Laboulaye: located in southeast Cordoba
Population: 19,908 (about the size of Carrboro, NC)

I'll be living with a family with two teenagers? I'll be teaching children, teenagers, and adults. That's all I know. Right now I'm up to my neck in past perfect-participle-simple-perfect progressive/continuous-gerund-stative and modal verbs. I'll swear on my grammar books that we never learned this jibber-jabber.

The Master Cleanse

So considering that I´m nearing the end of my stay here in the lovely Capilla del Monte and hence ending another portion of my Argentinian journey,  I decided to do a 3 day juice fast to clear out my body (like detox...). and MAN is it hard. Right now I´m nearing the end of day three (my final day) and my body is really looking foward to eating again.

There´s this fast called "The Master Cleanse" which consists of drinking lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper for several days (it´s supposed to be 10 days but I just did it for a few to try it out) to help remove toxins from the body. It was hard to get used to but now I feel like I could probably continue it for a few more days if I didn´t feel so weak. Here are excerpts from my journal during the 3 days that I´ve fasted:

Day 1: So this is juice fasting. I miss eating. It´s amazing how big of a part eating plays in our lives, I mean like 3 hours every day we either eat or prepare to eat! All of a sudden I´m filling these empty hours trying not to think about food (I live right next to the kitchen.) The concoction I´ve made doesn´t taste terrible but I wish I hadn´t associated it with vomit earlier. Plus you´re supposed to drink lots of laxative and digestive teas (THAT´S been fun) as well as the juice and water. But other than that I feel fine. Chammomile tea is a treat for me now (something I never really drank before.)So the lemons are supposed to provide vitamins and minerals as well as making the body more alkaline and helping the body cleanse. I don´t have maple syrup so I´m using a healthy sugar substitute syrup that´s hard to get used to. It´s supposed to give unprocessed good sugars that provide micronutrients, calories, and to keep the blood sugar and energy level up. The cayenne pepper acts as a cleanser for the digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems.

Today I came back from a special ceremony in San Marcos de las Sierras where a man from Texas (Daniel) headed up a group playing crystal bowls and meditating on our intentions. It really is refeshing to have found people in Argentina who share my view of the importance of being healthy and respecting the Earth. This sis so reassuring that coming to Capilla has been like a recleansing of the mind, body, and soul before I go out and begin teaching. I really felt unhealthy in Chile, like I wasn´t caring for myself as I should have. It´s funny that now that I´m not eating food, food is ALL I think about. And I thought it was bad before! HAH!

Day 2: My whole body feels tired. I´ve been doing silly things all day like forgetting which plants I watered and starting to water other plants again. It´s clear that my body functions better with food. Or perhaps I am not adding enough syrup to my juice. All I know is, I feel fuzzy and dumb. (These are side effects of the first few days.) Today Margarita and I distracted ourselves with some backwalking (a form of massage) and giving bones to stray dogs. We pretty much talked about food all day.

Day 3: It´s funny that I went from learning to cook exciting meals to eating nothing at all and living the boring life of lemons. The hunger pains eventually do subside though. You learn to just wait them out and to listen to real things: dizziness and fatigue. Today I´m better than yeterday but I definitely feel week. It´s a similar feeling to when you´ve been caving for the past 5 hours and you´re about to start the final stretch to the exit. Life is pretty boring here when you´re not eating. I´m always either working with food in the garden, preparing food, eating food, or researching what to make next. Otherwise there´s not really much else to do. I can´t really go exploring because my body feels so heavy. This morning Margarita and I made the would-be easy hike up to the swimming holes and we were exhauuuuusted when we got back. I came home and took a 3 hour nap. It makes me wonder about other countries that incorporate fasting into a part of their daily lives. For example, Tibetan monks eat nothing but "tsampa", a mix of black tea with barley and yak´s milk. It´s so basic, it keeps them alive and able to seek enlightenment! It´s incredible what some people live on; what some people have to live on. [Here I wrote a HUGE rant on farms and corporations and how little we know about the food we put into our mouths. Coming later.]

Tomorrow I start again with food. It´s good to really honor the body when you´re coming off a fast, even if it´s just for a few days. The plan is to just eat fruit and veggie soup with really cooked down leafy greens while still drinking juice. The idea is to NOT go on a rampage. But when I´m ready, I´m eating ice cream.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I lost a bet to my mom a few months ago and instead of betting money I was instructed to make a list of the reasons why I love her. I didn´t do it right away, because I feel like these things are better when I miss a person and when I´m in a rational state of mind. I wrote this surrounded by willow trees.

I wrote about this in an essay in freshman year of college but let´s just revisit it. I was talking with Margarita the other day and she was telling me about how she had such a rough childhood. Of course that makes me think about my mom and how I can´t even imagine what it would have been like to live her childhood. She worked so hard while I was growing up (still, as I am still growing) to make up for every mistake her mother made.

The reasons why I love my mom:

1. Mom, I love how you delight in treats. In going out for coffee at Ollie´s bakery, going out to eat, in getting ice cream and watching your favorite tv show.

2. I love how you make little songs that represent joy (Daddy coming home from Charlotte on Wednesdays and how that meant we could go out to La Carreta, songs about our animals, songs about the beginning of summer)

3. I love how much you love animals and how they love you. It seems like if there´s ever a problem with one of our pets the solution is to always have you present.

4. I love how excited you get when your plants start growing. I love how proud you are of your garden and how you delight in taking the long way home that goes by the backyard so we can drive "Slooooooowly!" by it and Oooh and Aah over your hardwork.

5. I love that you try so hard to listen to whatever Haley and I are upset about, if we´re crying or sad or simply menstruating.

6. I love how you rub my back when I cry.

7. I love how you and Dad made sure that Haley and I experienced literally every extracurricular sport or activity no matter what our money situation was. Honestly that is very impressive.

8. I love it when you get excited about snow days and you leap around the house so that your sandals fly off your feet as you scuffle, dance, clap and sing.

9. I love how when you´re laughing you cross your legs and slap your knee for emphasis (I get this from you.)

10. I love that you´ve had the tenacity not to make an ultimate plan for yourself. You see this as a weakness, perhaps: how you changed majors in college and then did a bunch of jobs that haven´t affected your rediscovered Spanish career. But I don´t think that´s a weakness at all. That´s living. You do what you want to do and then when things don´t work out anymore you change. I´m so glad to have inherited this value in life from you.

11. I love how similar we are. I love that I can see some of my strong strengths coming directly from you: my love of animals and nature.

I know we argue a lot, but there´s a notion out there that we choose our parents for the lessons our souls need to learn. Our idea is that we argue so much because we´re both so stubborn and refuse to give up control. Maybe our souls have just needed to learn similar things from different people, and I´m glad my soul chose you.

The Power of Now

I promise (although I can´t really promise) that this is the last philosophical thing I´m going to put on here for a while. I´ll give it a break, I swear. It´s just that when I have so much thinking time, I´m more susceptible to find things that are meaningful to me on many levels.

So I was at my friend Margarita´s (Peggy´s) house yesterday and she travels with a book called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. It asks simple questions and proposes thoughtful answers.

"Does it matter whether we achieve our purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world?

It will matter to you as long as you haven´t realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it."

Margarita read this quote to me and struck me as unbelievably true. There are times when I think I think I realize a glimmer of what my inner purpose may be, my reason for being in this world. At these moments I feel so carefree, so joyous. One time I was at camp and had just spent the entire rest hour writing in my journal about what I hoped for in life, in my future. Afterwards, I was so inspired and filled with energy that I left my cabin in full sprint at the clang of the bell. Running as fast as possible seemed to be the very best I could do to express the surge of energy and inspiration that filled me at that moment. If this is but a glimmer of my inner purpose, I can´t even imagine the motional fireworks of discovering one´s true reason for being on this Earth. Even if it doesn´t reach me until the day that I die.

Agua: un tema.

Spanish phrase of the month (heard by generally ANYONE in Capilla del Monte every day all the time): "No hay agua." (There´s no water.) We´ve been in a huge drought for about 4 years now. The municipality cuts off everyone´s water supply around 6pm, so you´re out of luck unless you have a well. We do have a well that taps into the underground river, but it´s running out too. Right now we´re in our rainy season, that´s what´s particularly troubling. If water doesn´t come now, then they will be in even bigger trouble during the dry season.

People ask me what I do here on the farm, and honestly, I water. I water every morning, all morning, until our allotted water amount for the garden is gone. This takes about 4 hours. Working this farm is like a constant dehydration WFR scenario. Today I watered the beets 4 TIMES! The soil sucks the water down like a drain.

It´s sad because I just think about all of the wonderful organic, innovative things we could do with the farm and the garden. There just isn´t any water. I beg anyone who reads this to do a rain dance for us down here.

An Analysis

I wanted to provide a little bit of insight for why the story below feels to pertainent to me right now.

Essentially, I am the stream and the sands are everything new that I experience. I left my home in Carolina del Norte and arrived in Chile wanting to keep a firm grip on my identity while at the same time gaining new insight and knowledge about the Spanish language and Chilean culture. Of course, the possibility of "losing one´s individuality" (identity) when traveling and changing in someway is thrilling but also nerve wracking, considering that you never know how you´ll turn out afterwards.
It did not want to lose its individuality. And once having lost it, how was one to know that it could bever be regained?
The stream (not yet a river, obviously still young) wants to cross the desert in the ways that it knows. The whisper says to the stream that it cannot remain the same stream it is today under any circumstances.
Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one."

Why fight changes when we don´t know how our future will turn out anyway? Traveling, adopting new customs and relinquishing old ones seems to me to be one of the truest forms of discovering which part of me is essentially Gillian. The act of being carried away by the wind, no matter how timid or unsure I may be, will carry on the essential parts of me and leave only residue -- bits fallen off, discarded, no longer important to who I am -- in its path.


I remember being young and in the backseat of a warm minivan during a rainstorm. Perhaps I am coming back with my family from a late night dinner party, or driving home from the airport. Rain batters the windshield as the wipers pump out a persistant rhythmic shlosh. On my window highlighted by the highway streetlights the rain patters, racing down and out of site. One drop falls, picking up speed as it connects with others, zig zagging across the window leaving behind only a trace of liquid residue. In that moment I connect with that one drop and cheer it on as it skids and skirts past all others. It disappears from view and is immediatly forgotten as my eyes dart to the top of the window to cheer on another little stream. Hours of raindrop races pass. And then we pull into our driveway.

Tales of the Dervishes

In the past few days I have managed to stumble across 2 of the (I have no idea how many but they´re scarce) other North Americans in Capilla del Monte. They are Margarita (Peggy) and Daniel, both hippies (somewhere between 50 and 60 years old I´m assuming) from California, although Daniel spent most of his life in Hawaii. They´re wonderful. I went over to their place last night and we spent hours squeezing orange juice, talking about life, about traveling (they´ve literally been all over the world), about music, about health and diets, about politics, about everything under the sun, and about philosophy.

Daniel right now is utterly obsessed with a book that he found in a hostel called Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters over the Past Thousand Years. They loved it so much that they made 3 copies, one of which they have given to me to read. It´s full of short little tales that could imply zillions of meanings about life and about the questions life poses. I´m well on my way to becoming just as enthralled as they are.

Here´s a tale that particularly speaks to me at this point in my life as a traveler, as a student, and as growing young woman. Let´s see if you all can guess why.

"The Tale of the Sands"

A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, as last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.
It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: "The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream."
The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.
"By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination."
But how could this happen? "By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind."
This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?
"The wind," said the sand, "performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river."
"How can I know that this is true?"
"It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream."
"But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?"
"You cannot in either case remain so," the whisper said. "Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one."
When he heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly, he remembered a state in which he - or some part of him, was it? - had been held in the arms of the wind. He also remembered - or did he? - that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do.
And the stream raised his vapour into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many miles away. And because he had had his doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in his mind the details of the experience. He reflected, "Yes, now I have learned my true identity."
The stream was learning. But the sands whispered: "We know, because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain."
And that is why it is said that the way in which the Stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands.