It's hard to believe that one week from today I will be back in the US of A for two whirlwind weeks of Christmas and New Years. In a few days, I will officially be four months through this crazy Casa journey, one third of my one year completed. Four months in, and I feel like I'm just getting started. I finally feel established in my role here: familiar with the faces, the food, the rhythm of life. This place is warm and open and quirky and dysfunctional, in a comforting kind of way. This place has a "good vibe" or buena onda (as some backpacking would-be guests recently reassured us when they turned down our one available room due to its shared bed). More than anything, this place has come to be very special to me, and in the 8 months that follow, I hope to appreciate the unique opportunities that living in a Quaker hospitality house in Mexico City has to offer. It is not forever that I will get to do this. It is not forever that I will be able to work as a volunteer, take care of the most adorable one year old in the world, live in a beautifully bilingual setting, and interact with such a diverse crowd of people. It is not forever that my most stressful days will involve cooking from scratch for large groups or conferences (someday I'll probably have to do academic work again, but for now, I am taking a deep and long breath of fresh, post-college air). As I prepare to go home and hug my family til it hurts, laugh and catch up with friends, and seek out all of the foods that I've been craving, I realize that I am incredibly lucky to find myself here. I've been challenged and stretched and supported and loved in just four months with this community, and I still have eight months to go. Eight months to continue what I've started- to learn and process, to deepen relationships, and to try to give my all to this place that inspires people like Nico and Jill to sacrifice sleep and sanity in order to keep it afloat.
Since I've been trained as a student all of my life, I am inevitably forced at this end-of-semester juncture to turn an evaluative eye to what I've done in the last four months. What have I learned, and how have I changed? Before I embarked on this journey, I was very conscious of the fact that the new experience I was about to dive into was going to mark a new chapter in my life. This time at the Casa was going to accompany my transition into all things post-college, encompassing the altering of my beliefs, attitudes, worldview, etc... but, could this slow and slippery shift be charted? After my semester in Ecuador, I could sense a real change and maturing within myself, but it was incredibly hard to understand or express concretely. Despite the difficulty of putting words to change without the benefit of years of retrospect, I will now attempt to hit on some of the lessons that I suspect I've been learning this fall:
1). Community. This has been my first real experience in community living, and it has alternately left me feeling both soul-soaringly content and connected to other people and miserably isolated and removed. To live in community is to live in a fishbowl, and as Matt Conner so eloquently puts it in his Relevant magazine article, "I Live With Another Man's Wife," community at times leaves us "an open wound of insecurities, sins, and fears." "Your heart is exposed. Your best intentions are found lying on the floor." At my worst moments at the Casa, I've lamented the lack of privacy I had to work through my struggles on my own. It seemed like my most inner thoughts and feelings were public knowledge; it was as if I didn't get to screen the people I wanted to let see the sides of me that I was less than proud of. Pretense disappears pretty quickly when the walls are paper-thin and you see people 24/7. Yet, for me, this was ultimately healthy and humbling. It forced me to embrace my imperfections, to accept myself for how I am. It forced me to be more in touch with my insecurities and hopeful for my potential to grow and change. And it forced me to be more realistic about the fact that people, even the ones who I've only known for a short time, will not abandon me once they know the not-so-pretty things happening below the surface. We are only human after all.
On the flip side, community offers a richness of life that makes the challenges seem more than worth it, in the end. I love waking up and saying hello to the same people everyday, one by one, as they appear at the breakfast table, or in the reception, or in the hammock on the roof. I love feeling part of something bigger than myself. I love eating together, and I love always having people around to combat my natural instinct to sit in my room and get depressed. I love that those people help me to see outside of myself, outside of the realm of my infinitesimally small concerns and crises, and gain the perspective that everyone is going through something (so it's best to forget yourself and focus on others). I love the multigenerational nature of the Casa community: trying to make a baby laugh and listening as a nearly 8o year old woman tells me her life story. I love how we all are so different but bring unique and necessary strengths and weaknesses to the communal table. I love the fulfillment of finding my niche and doing what I do well, contributing my little responsibilities to the overall functioning of the Casa.
2). Identity. Though I'm cautious to say it, I think that at the Casa I'm continuing on the elusive path towards self-confidence that, for me, began in college. I am ever so slowly in the process of becoming more like the person who I want to be. College meant travel and drastic change in worldview and learning to know and accept who I am. I was helped incredibly by amazing friends who loved me deeply despite my weirdness, erratic sleep schedule, and the fact that I have a knack for bringing up the wrong thing at the wrong time. I staked a lot of my identity in those friends, in the bonds that we forged as we spent semesters away and questioned and listened to each other ramble about jobs, boys, and the future. Security and acceptance came from those conversations, and I began to feel comfortable in my size 9 1/2 shoes in a way that I never had in high school. Yet, I was learning a lot about things that I had never been exposed to before: alternative ideas about how to live, eat, interact, and consume. Though I was inspired by ideas such as simplicity, community, service, and aligning with the poor and marginalized, I aspired to those beliefs more than I owned them. I felt like a big fat phony professing semi-radical ideals without ever having put any of them into action.
The Casa has allowed me to find my identity in being a member of a community that "promotes peace with justice, fosters understanding between groups and individuals, and supports the human dignity of every person." Don't get me wrong, I don't harbor any illusions that I am doing incredible, ground-breaking work here. To sum up: I make a lot of food, answer questions in the reception, babysit, and go to meetings about migration in the city. Yet, despite the small scale of the work I am doing, the lifestyle change has allowed me to believe that I am living out some of the ideals that I most aspire to. I buy food at outdoor markets and from vendors that I know, hang my clothes to dry, do more baking from scratch, share a kitchen, bathroom, and washing machine with a houseful of other people, interact with guests who are amazing or crazy or at the end of their rope, etc. These small adjustments in the way that I live and the kind of people that I meet have made concepts such as community, simplicity, diversity, and buying local real instead of just appealing.
3). Vocation? So, how close am I to knowing what I want to do with my life? Wasn't that the point of this whole thing (you might ask)? Well, I've realized that the expectation that I had that this year would be a journey towards spiritual growth and discerning my vocation was just a tad, shall we say, lofty and naive. Life just doesn't work like that (and I'm beginning to think that God is a bit more mysterious than He is obvious, too). I've met plenty of fantastic people, anywhere from 5 to 30 years my senior, who don't know what the future holds or what they want to do next. Needless to say, decisions have to be made eventually, but as of yet a scroll hasn't floated down from the sky with my future occupation scribed in gold ink. As of Christmas '08, this is what I think that I know: I want to write, I want to speak Spanish, I want to work directly with people, and I want to live in community. Suggestions as to what kind of job or life that might add up to are welcome!
Well, as usual, I've been a bit too candid for my own good. For fun, here's a little semester's end report card I've drawn up with randomly chosen subjects:
Blogging: C+
Bread baking: B+
Casa hospitality: A-
Casa program work: C
Exploring the city: D
Going to Quaker meeting: C
Healthy living: C-
Keeping in touch: B
Mexican food consumed: A+
Spanish: B-
Vulnerability: A
2 comments:
Don't sell yourself short Heather,if I were your teacher, you would receive an A+ for keeping in touch! Love you!
this is the worse report card ever. A+ for blogging you nut job.
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