somewhere under the sky

returning part infinite

i returned to Saraguro, one of the loves of my life, and my favorite place in all of Ecuador. this blog actually came out of an email i wrote to a good friend today. i realized something about my love for this town, and maybe about love in general, but it will be hard to tell.
when i stepped off the bus, i was in familiar territory, it was a place i knew well and one i dearly love. i was of course, a bit nervous about going back to the organization i had volunteered with because i had only contacted one person to tell him i was coming again. i need not have worried. i walked into the office, one year later, and asked for people that i knew and upon finding them, we entered conversation like it was two weeks ago that i left, which is what it felt like to me. what worries me about this phenomenon is that in one year i have learned, changed, and grown. but i walked into this town and to me it felt like no time had passed. does this invalidate the year i spent growing and learning? well of course not. but it frightens me, because among people then, the year becomes much shorter. "leah, what´s new?" "oh, not much, i graduated and i´m on vacation now until i start my master´s program in the fall." that whole year condensed into one sentence. but it´s not important that every person knows every detail about my life. with good friends much is shared and that is all that is necessary.
i lived with an indigenous family for a total of 2 weeks time last year, and i fell in love with them. i returned this year, and they did not know i was coming back. i walked to the house in the dark, and encountered the kids in the pathway to the house, who naturally were frightened at first. i said "i´m the gringa that was here last year, i´m leah!" it took the boy a while to believe it, "you´re her???" and there were hugs all around.
coming to Saraguro is like taking a deep breath. people here live what i believe in-connection to the land and to the spiritual. i have a theory that humans (but when i say that, i mean the majority of the united states citizens) have become disconnected from both the earth and from the divine. obviously i´ll save it for another blog. but regardless, the reason indigenous people fascinate me is because they live close the land and close to the divine. the land is Mother Earth, literally our mother because she gives us food. every living thing has a spirit and should be respected because it is living.
the father showed us their system of plowing. they use 2 bulls with a wooden yoke attached to them and a long, wooden trunk with a very large and sharp point coming off the end that sticks into the ground. the person leans on this point while another guides the bulls and it is this point that digs into the earth and tills it. the father said that they don´t use machines because that puts a distance between them and the earth.
air, he said, is necessary to breathe. why am i going to pollute the very same air that i need to breath?

this entry is all over the place. what i wanted to say at the beginning was that love can sometimes be separated. i love Saraguro. but i spent a year in a very different life, living in a way that these people can´t imagine. yet i always kept that love in my heart and when i returned, that love resurfaced as if i had been gone a week.
i go to Saraguro often to visit. i want to live there because it is one thing to be a tourist, to always be able to return somewhere where life may be more "convenient" and "comfortable." but it is another to live among the people. Saraguro has captured my attention. while i realize that the greater picture is that i love indengenous cultures and philosophy, i hope one day to settle there for a time and live a life that i only know in passing.

posted by leah v @ 6:36 PM