I wish I knew English like you do!

From a website on motivating yourself to learn English...

***

You're having a great moment with your girlfriend. You're sitting close to each other, your hand is around her back. The radio is playing a beautiful song. You can understand every word of it. Your girlfriend asks: "What's the song about?". "It's about love, honey", you reply. "You're so smart. I wish I knew English like you do", she says. You feel loved and admired.

***

Oh, learning.

Shiny, Happy People

Grandma Lucy read me my horoscope in Spanish this morning while in the car, on our way to our first official family outing at the Saltos del Laja. It said something like this....

Cancer
You will find yourself in a better mood this week, because you know you have things to do. You tend to stay inside, but this week is the perfect one in which to search for things that will stir the storms of passion inside of you.

The storms of passion, eh? It has been raining an awful lot lately. Which means a lot of staying inside, a lot of subtitled Friends reruns, and a lot of knitting. It's comforting to have something to get lost in when I'm about 89% not sure what's going on around me, whether it's at school or in my host family's house.

At some point this week I set aside the knitting and.... started to make more lists. One list for teaching stuff - my site observation with la otra Meghan was eye-opening and helped reconfirm some things I'm startled to find I've forgotten already. I came up with a kick-ass idea for an extra-curricular activity I want to start in my liceo that makes me hop-from-foot-to-foot excited just thinking about it (school newspaper, anyone?) ...

I also made a "feel-better-about-life" list, because if list making has its limits, I do not yet know them. On top of the list is more visitas . There are some people and relationships I've been neglecting in the past 2 weeks, relationships that I've come to realize will define what Chile means for me when I'm back in gringolandia, trying to paint the picture for everyone else. Senora Isabel, former host mom of Corey and current host mom of Don, is among these people. Her smile and wry sense of humor, one that transcends the language and culture boundaries I sometimes think are insurmountable, never fail to warm my heart.

Luckily yesterday we shared a night of waffles (pronounced waff-les in Spanish) and wine with Don and Viviana la loca, niece of Isabel and best friend of my mama (oh the small world that is Yumbel) which culminated in a nighttime trip up to see the statue of the Virgen on the hill overlooking Yumbel. The rain had stopped and the southern hemisphere stars peeking out behind the clouds and the white hood of the Virgen is a sight I won't soon forget.

The meaning of refuge.

A question that Chileans seem to love asking me is what religion I am. Catholic or protestant? They ask. My parents didn't really raise me with any religion, I say, although I do believe in something. I don't know how to say I don't know what that something is yet. Imagine the confusion if I told them I was once the co-president of the Buddhist club! At the very least it might give them something else to chew on besides the fact that I actually (gasp!) enjoy taking walks and (bigger gasp!) showing up on time to class! Oh, those wacky Chileans.

It will take another two weeks for my school schedule to go back to normal, or as normal as it gets round these parts. In this time I will watch my liceo celebrate its anniversary with a nearly week-long fiesta and the following week I will celebrate Chilean Independence Day with my family who are becoming more of a family every day (remember, friends, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.) I will gather my feet back under me, and my sense of humor too. I've stopped counting the days, but can I take a moment to say that I've been in Chile almost 8 weeks already? I will listen to the falling rain and the wind from behind my eyelids. I will make cookies for the staff room and ask about weekends and have another cup of tea already. I will read this poem, and take or make the time to reflect.

Monastery Nights

by Chase Twichell

I like to think about the monastery

as I’m falling asleep, so that it comes

and goes in my mind like a screen saver.

I conjure the lake of the zendo,

rows of dark boats still unless

someone coughs or otherwise

ripples the calm.

I can hear the four AM slipperiness

of sleeping bags as people turn over

in their bunks. The ancient bells.

When I was first falling in love with Zen,

I burned incense called Kyonishiki,

“Kyoto Autumn Leaves,”

made by the Shoyeido Incense Company,

Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like

earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine

a consciousness ignorant of me.

I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs

for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl,

which had been empty for a while,

a raku bowl with two fingerprints

in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate,

the massive door demanding I recommit myself

in the moments of both its opening

and its closing, its weight now mine,

I wanted to know what I was,

and thought I could find the truth

where the floor hurts the knee.

I understand no one I consider to be religious.

I have no idea what’s meant when someone says

they’ve been intimate with a higher power.

I seem to have been born without a god receptor.

I have fervor but seem to lack

even the basic instincts of the many seekers,

mostly men, I knew in the monastery,

sitting zazen all night,

wearing their robes to near-rags

boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread,

smoothed over their laps and tucked under,

unmoving in the long silence,

the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled,

field of sentient beings turned toward candles,

flowers, the Buddha gleaming

like a vivid little sports car from his niche.

What is the mind that precedes

any sense we could possibly have

of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance?

I thought that the divestiture of self

could be likened to the divestiture

of words, but I was wrong.

It’s not the same work.

One’s a transparency

and one’s an emptiness.

Kyonishiki.... Today I’m painting what Mom

calls no-colors, grays and browns,

evergreens: what’s left of the woods

when autumn’s come and gone.

And though he died, Dad’s here,

still forgetting he’s no longer

married to Annie,

that his own mother is dead,

that he no longer owns a car.

I told them not to make any trouble

or I’d send them both home.

Surprise half inch of snow.

What good are words?

And what about birches in moonlight,

Russell handing me the year’s

first chanterelle—

Shouldn’t God feel like that?

I aspire to “a self-forgetful,

perfectly useless concentration,”

as Elizabeth Bishop put it.

So who shall I say I am?

I’m a prism, an expressive temporary

sentience, a pinecone falling.

I can hear my teacher saying, No.

That misses it.

Buddha goes on sitting through the century,

leaving me alone in the front hall,

which has just been cleaned and smells of pine.