Sleeping During Storms

Saturday night in Guadalajara, mi compañera Delia and I got back to our AirBnB fifteen minutes before a hailstorm started. According to a cabbie who was quite clear about the science behind climate change, the last time it hailed in Guadalajara was at least 20 years ago. I watched the purple sky flash like a camera in a high-fashion photo shoot until two in the morning, when the wind and rain became a lullaby. The next day we found our way to a colorful shopping suburb called Tlaquepaque, where the ice in some places was still two meters high, at two in the afternoon, in 80 degree heat. Some kinds played in the piles until their hands and faces were gray with road juice.

Two days later, I visited the Jesuits-in-training at Casa Pedro Arrupe, which houses nine Jesuit novices from Latin America and the US. I attended a mini-Mass they organized in their capillita, and the encargado read a Bible passage about Jesus sleeping during a storm, then waking to calm the waves when his apostles were too terrified. A Jesuit from Costa Rica with a clear, smiling face used the passage to share his experiences visiting fozas in Honduras. Fozas are shallow mass graves on the outskirts of large cities, where thousands of bodies are poured when the police fail to identify them. Kids often go there looking for their parents, mothers for their jovenes. I visited one in 2012 and remember a young man telling me death was like buying avocados in San Pedro Sula, the murder capital of the world. Totally normal. This Jesuit disagreed—que nunca sea normalizada, la muerte injusta. May unjust deaths never be normalized.

This two-week trip to Mexico has been a vacation of contrasts. Mi novio Ben and I stayed in a Mayan community’s ecotourism cabins. All we could find to eat after 6PM was packaged food from corner stores, the only lights at night were those of stars, hundreds of jumping tick-like bugs held a rave on our shower floor, and Ben decided to name a scorpion (Rupert) he escorted off the premises with an old yogurt container. A few days later, I stayed in one of the most luxurious apartment complexes in cosmopolitan Guadalajara, in a glass building with a 360-degree view of the city and the red mountains surrounding it.

Somewhere in there, I danced for three hours on the median of a busy street with 150 other salser@s, on a street that reminded me of the highest-end parts of West LA. I visited a migrant shelter, rocked by the news of a father and his three year-old who were killed swimming the Rio Grande running out of money to apply for asylum from the violence they were escaping in El Salvador. I played fusbol with some Jesuit novitiates and a Honduran who had a major concussion from being hit by a car when he had fallen off the train heading north to the US border.

In June, I graduated with a Master’s degree in public policy from Oregon State University. I can’t shake the impression that people think I sail through school, life, vacation, friendships like a costeño on a wooden kayak through the mangroves of Celestún on the Yucatán peninsula, a natural native to the adventure. I would like to correct that impression right now. My friend’s suicide, my father’s bike accident, changes in my hearing, joints, nervous system and mental health, made this the hardest year I’ve lived through yet. Living in Nicaragua was harrowing, but mostly in a solidarity sense; I sometimes fell apart considering the role I and my people play in upholding systems of oppression worldwide. This year, suffering became personal, visceral. I remember telling several people that I no longer doubt not only the importance, but the necessity, of mindfulness, living in the present, and slowing down, because some nights I was drenched in dread of tomorrow. Connectedly, I now have a renewed, solidified sense of empathy and justice, one that is more personal, because I don’t want people to feel pain and fear like I did.

On the other hand, this year I grew closer to my resilient family. I fell in love. I earned a Master’s degree, despite thinking I’d drop out of the program. I found a job I actually think will challenge me to grow in the ways I need to, and through which I will earn enough to pay for self-care and personal space. I became a Cuban salsa dancer. I learned to pay attention to my body and my senses in ways that have woken the healthiest parts of me. And I saw Mexico for the first time.

Some friends who are aficionadas of Mexico warned me that many people think of their favorite country as rather singular, a colorful block between the US and the southern hemisphere, a little too close or too scary for adventure. Really, the country is more like a continent, a triple-rainbow of diversity and opportunity, a world power, a place that has figured out things we don’t even know we’re missing. I saw two states and many facets to this beautiful maze of a place. Some nights I collapsed into my pillow in giggles after flavorful, sensual nights. Others I stayed awake with diarrhea, or distracted by tinnitus, or chewing on the reality of the effect of climate change on farmers and the urban poor. Some days I needed more than two hands to count the beggars who asked for money or food; others I wined and dined on the finest comida yucateca.

My therapist thinks my life is going to get easier in the next year. I’m not so sure. Myself aside, I’m no stranger to the IPCC reports on the decline of global ecosystems and its disproportionate effect on marginalized populations. Some storms are going to recur, even worsen. Such thoughts live under my skin and pinch me unpredictably.

But the remarkable thing I walk away from, thanks to Mexico and the ribbon it tied around the beautiful chaos of the last two years of my life, is that I can dance, love, persist, breathe, and sleep during these storms, like I did during the hail, like Jesus did on the boat. Not only can I, I must. I think I’ll drown otherwise.

Though I no longer identify as religiously Christian, there are some things that will always move me about the faith. Do you know what the most common phrase in the Bible is? I remember a priest telling me some years ago. It’s be not afraid.