As I have stated before, there are places which I seem to return to over and over. This place I am going to mention I have not returned in about five years, but it is a place which contains the watermark of my childhood.
Antigua Guatemala is one of the many Spanish Colonial towns found in Latin America. I was to find this repeatedly glimpsing it in Cuenca in Ecuador or Cienfuegos in Cuba and the original source for this inspiration in Sevilla, Spain. They all contain a basic structure of churches, curved balconies, cobbled alleyways and streets and crumbling buildings. In Semana Santa, or holy week, they decorate the streets with colored ashes and designs and throw flowers over the balconies.
You can stroll through it’s bloody history, where you can see remnants of the repressed pain echoing through the walls. Like Otavalo in Ecuador, it is also a great place to pick up jewelry and handicrafts.
The indigenous population who speak quichua are around the parks, their beautiful and colorful clothes bright flowers popping up everywhere. Unlike the Quechua women in Ecuador, Guatemalan indigenous women are oftentimes ignored and taken advantage of .
It is an odd mix, of a Spanish forgotten ancestral town and even more ancient and dying civilization beside it. Two bookmarks of what hispanic central america would become, a mestizo of those two once great places.
Antigua has an incredibly macabre history, a lot like Toledo in Spain. You can find underground caves filled with bones of infants and nuns who buried or forcefully aborted them as they encountered priests through hidden tunnels. There are torture chambers, and creepy monasteries and crumbling churches.
You will find cobbled pathways and young students learning spanish in every corner.
I associate Antigua with my childhood, with the last escapades before my parents were separating and getting divorced. The memories are often marred with historical events and strange happenings.
One particular trip sticks in my mind even though I was quite young….
San Salvador 1989
The coup started on the day we had all gathered together to watch a television show which would feature some Bahai themes. There were at least 30 of us huddled together. I do not remember much, other than the announcement that we were not supposed to leave the house. Only, my brother had been left back in the house with the housekeeper and we didn’t want to leave him alone. We went across the night in complete darkness, in our little pickup truck, two people in the back and me squished between my parents. There was no electricity, just endless night and some prayers that we get home o.k. We did, but this left us with days at a time with nothing to do but play long games of monopoly.
In the city, the guerrillas were trying to stage a coup in San Salvador. Gun shots were particularly close, and we did not have electricity for days at a time. I remember one time, the gun shots were being fired on the street that my parents and my baby brother and me huddled underneath a small cubby hole room under the stairs . This room, where I had founded the “Boy Crazy Club” had posters plastered all over the walls. A testament to the innocence of youth that all I could think of was to prevent my parents seeing my posters…instead of fearing the soldiers and terrorists outside.
After this particular incident, my father had had enough of our self imposed exile and decided to go to Guatemala for a “vacation”.
The vacation was not without incident as my brother grew sick on the bus… or when I decided to eat chocolate ice cream at Dona Luisa’s a beautiful curved courtyard restaurant… only to make me so sick for days that I have never eaten chocolate ice cream again.
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It is perhaps no wonder that for me, Antigua is bittersweet in it’s memory. It stings with loss, and it’s ruins also contain some of my memories locked inside there. There is the time as well, that my grandparents came for the only known trip to Central America and we stayed in a four star hotel. Or the memory of going to a Summer School in Antigua straight after graduating college and feeling so out of sorts with my old life and friends and missing all the life I once had. There is the memory of watching my best friend walk away from the trip in Guatemala and disappear for three days, only to show up when we were leaving again. There is another time when we a huge group of youth went to Guatemala, and the bus broke down and we were left stranded for hours…. ( It seems like in the case of Antigua, it is also the journey which makes it so poignant)
I truly believe that a place can have a power within it’s walls, and with it comes the emotions you might pick up from it. There is a distinct and beautiful sadness to the place, but yet I always yearn to go back again and again.
“The Earth is but one country and mankind is it’s citizens”
This quote is something that has been ingrained in me since I was little tiny baby. It’s so intrinsically part of the fabric of my ideology , that I take it for granted when it might seem like an impossibility. I grew up believing that peace is not only attainable but it is also inevitable.
However, let’s leave the ” flower power- grab your hands in the field singing songs ” mentality for a bit. Real unity is going to be painful,tough and very complicated. So is it worth it? Yes, because at the rate we are going we will destroy each other, and I know that is something that no one wants.
Because I can only take from my own personal experience and my limited knowledge on the topic I am going to share a rather complex framework I am starting to develop for my own personal quest to achieve coherent ways towards unifying actions to understand how to achieve unity. Unity goes beyond simplistic lovey dovey solutions. This is only my perspective but this what I have come to understand :
Unity means unifying actions in our daily lives, which then leads to trying to unite communities, which will eventually branch out to ways to unify governments, and all branches of knowledge . At the moment, we are fragmented within threads of discord, and this is what is breaking us apart.
So, that’s the BIG picture. But on a much smaller scale you have people living their everyday daily life as good ( or as badly) as they can. So, what does unity mean for us as individuals? Here are things that I have learned along the way :
1. I don’t know the answers to that question
What this means is, I don’t have the complete answer to this. I only have a small little itty bitty comprehension of a much larger scope. This is really, something that might either stump us or break our egos. This is something that, I am sadly only learning now. You know how it is in your early twenties, you have that glitter in your eye and you think that it means you have all the answers. Sadly, no. It means only that you have a desire for an answer. It means that you know the way you live right now requires for us to work together and get an answer. We do not know what true unity looks like, we only know that through developing our qualities and spiritual side as well as action reflection methodologies then perhaps we can go onto the pathway towards unity.
One thing is true though : You have to recognize the essential essence of oneness that we all have. We are all one big body, connected through the universe. That sounds hokey pokey , (I think the hippie is poking out smiling)but essentially and scientifically we are intricately linked. What one person does will affect those around us. We are not individual beings, we are collective ones living in a society which not only harms the human race but also the planet by our thoughtless and selfish actions. Which leads to :
2. True unity means pain and sacrifice
Sure, complacency and altriuism from afar is something we do to calm our privileged guilt but in order to truly become unified it means that we have to give up our own self interests for others…. but also be just to ourselves. It means, having a balance. Coherence.
This is actually much harder for western countries to grasp than some other more community driven countries. In El Salvador, it is very natural to give up your food and comfort for others at the cost of yourself. When you go into the countryside you really cannot go when they are eating because they will literally offer the food they will be eating for a week.
I have been to many places in the world and I probably could have had a much more comfortable life. Does this mean that I am a martyr? No. It means that I sacrificed some things to gain others. I knew, that if Left that neighborhood there would be consequences. All the Manifestations of God such as Jesus Christ, gave up their own comfort to seek the betterment of humanity. Whether or not anyone believes in religion, what they exemplified was the idea of selflessness that is so lacking in our everyday interactions.
Does this mean we go live in a cave or in a monastery? Nope. It means that we find ways in our workplace, in our school, in our daily interactions to try and do things that will not just benefit ourselves but those around us as well…in a significant, long term way. Which leads to :
3) Getting out of our comfort zone
We need to stop limiting ourselves to a known experience. One of the greatest adventures has been to get to know people from all walks of life and cultures and races. Sometimes the experience was uncomfortable. It meant being offered guinea pig in Ecuador, or going through hardship or cultural misunderstandings. When you travel, or even make an effort to know someone different than yourself you can actually begin to understand the concept of unity in diversity. It does not mean that we all think the same but all those vibrant colors in the world makes us see the world in a different and beautiful way.
This means, we cannot automatically assume that how do things, how we have learned how to see the world is what is best and it is our job to impose our views on others. Rather, this diversity is a platform for us to all understand things together. 4) Flexibility and learning mode
To be honest, there have been countless countless countless times that there has been some kind of misunderstanding due to cultural differences. However, if we are willing to leave our egos aside, we can come to realize that differences even small ones can cause the biggest fights. Some of the biggest problems I have encountered were due to differences in perspective.
When we travel, or get to know other cultures we must realize that their perspective might make them see the world differently but it does not mean that we cannot see past that and get to some sort of shared vision. For example, there was someone who really was upset with me in a country in Latin america for many years. I , admittedly, did not even take notice of him. One day he came up to me and told me , extremely hurt , that I had ignored him for all this time. I hadn’t realized it, because all I did when I went into the room for years is to just say a general hello. However, in this particular country it was really bad manners not to say hello to each and every person there… Another example I can think of is in a Moroccan family in Spain, where I would talk to the father of one of my junior youth but he never responded back until he got to know me better. I would find out later it was because it was not viewed well for me to speak to a man without the wife being present.
This means that there might be some customs we might not agree with or understand but that does not mean that we should not try to put ourselves in their shoes and leave our egos behind.
4. Tolerance is not unity
To merely tolerate others is not unity. You tolerate a snake, but do you love the snake? Yeah I said love. We should love everyone, but that doesn’t mean we are going to be everyone’s best friend. I am pretty easygoing in terms of friendship and have friends from all the continents and countries you can think of but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t people who I find hard to be around for a long amount of time. Yet, I know my limitations. I know that, on some level, their actions rub me the wrong way most likely because I see something of myself in them. So, I know when I need to back off. I don’t insist on too much closeness under a pretense of “unity”.
I remember there was man in Madrid who was kind of eccentric and who did not like me for some reason. I am used to being liked, so it was strange for me ( Again this has a lot to do with ego) … Whenever he would see me, he would attack me in some way.
Now, a couple years back this might have killed me and I would have blamed myself. Now, it really doesn’t bother me because if I know that I have not done anything wrong to this person, I will learn to love them from a distance. A couple months passed, and one day we were alone and he told me that he thought I was ignoring him and that I hated him. I realized that we were borth fostering a massive misunderstanding. Which leads to…
5. Communicate Baby
This is a reallly hard one for me. Saying how I feel is a big problem. I tend to keep it inside. But this does us no good. We need to speak the truth, hard cold and sometimes painful truth. It is a vulnerable position, and we might not like what we hear. But we need to truly understand what is the cause of that conflict.
6. The power to forgive and not generalize
I have had my stuff stolen by Romanian Gypsies, I have been stalked and groped by Palestinians, Indians, Nigerians, Salvadorans and Ecuadorians. I have had been victim of bullying and abuse by Salvadorans, Americans, Italians, Spanish, and French people. I have also seen great moments of beauty , of strangers coming up to me and giving me money when I am lost , of people offering up their homes and cars and comfort, of wonderful shining beacons of lights through otherwise darkened streets. What I mean is, I have seen great ugliness and also great amounts of light. I have chosen to not stereotype or generalize ( or at least attempt not to) a whole race or culture based on a very limited and misguided experience. I have chosen as well to forgive. And forgiveness can be painful. It might mean that I might never see justice for what has been caused. But it will mean that as I weather the storm, I will be stronger.
A man was waiting for twenty years to avenge his abuser. He plotted it everyday. He stood defiant under the rain planning his revenge in sweet agony. This is all he did, this is all he thought about. When he did finally see the man, he turned to him and gave him a wicked smile. The other man smiled back and said “Hello. My name is Time nice to meet you…and you are?”
Basically, those who have done us wrong, barely give us a second thought. We just aren’t important enough to them. And if we are given a second thought it most likely won’t be on the same perspective. The most grevious of sins comes from those who do not even know the harm we have done. Which leads to
We need to stop fragmenting or compartmentalizing our lives
Sure, we might be good people in our downtime, but do we know the same for what we do in the workplace or what our actions are in all of our encounters? What is our family life like? What is it like with our friends and neighbors? Again, we won’t achieve this overnight but we have to try
Not Being afraid of making mistakes
Again, I don’t know the answers. I am going to make mistakes and fall down and do the wrong thing… but that’s not the important thing. The most important thing is that I learn from them and maybe won’t fall on the same crack the next time.
Ok… so what does this means on bigger terms
What this means if we start doing these things , all of us , in one neighborhood, this will effect a bigger sphere, and so forth and so forth and so forth. It’s not going to be overnight. It will take years and it is slow. But it is worth it. Because true change requires permanent erasing of centuries of dichotomies, paradigms and misconstrued notions. Eventually this bleeds out to all our spheres , to the branches of science, to education, to the institutions we are involved in, to women’s rights issues, to all the other inherent parts of our lives. We all have a part to play, and if we try together we can go through a new course of action.
This means, we compile our findings, we reflect on it and then we take action again. Over and over, slowly building a foundation for a better way to lead our lives and with it the world. I believe in this, it might seem idyllic, or naive. Yet it is the only way I can conceivably choose to live my life.
