Enlightenment is Orange

It's not that I don't have anything to say, but rather too much. My thoughts are an unruly, I can't even call it 'team', of percherons I've not yet managed to get hitched up to my wagon, let alone reign them in to do any useful work for me. Fortunately, I've just been set free by a suggestion of a framework from curious blogger Sabio Lantz. Ahhhh! Sweet relief in the form of a form! The game is afoot to see if I can insinuate some of what I had wanted to say into the suggestion that I write a personal perspective on responses to strangeness.

How do I respond to newness, foreign circumstances and change? A bit like Alice, I suppose. Curiouser and curiouser. Twenty or so years ago I lived in Uruguay for 18 months. If you must know, I was a proselytizer for the Mormon church, with which I'm no longer affiliated. After two months of grilling Spanish verbs I was dropped out of a plane into the heart of Montevideo. I'm a quiet girl, those who know me might say, so first I watched. I took in the look of the streets, the faces of passengers as I rode a bus to Nueva Palmyra on the banks of the Rio de la Plata. Anyone who knows much about learning a language knows it doesn't happen in two months of grilling verbs and memorizing the gender of nouns. Words swirled around my head like elevator music. My companion, Estrella Díaz of Puerto Rico, stopped at a small almacen to buy some yogurt, bread, milk. I tried my skill at requesting "vainilla" and the clerk stared at me blankly until Díaz stepped in to save the day. And so it began.

Now let me say my "mission" came at a time of nascent skepticism for me. It actually helped that I was the stranger, I was the foreigner, to see that my perspectives and beliefs are just a few in a long line-up of interpretations of the facts of being human. I was in a new culture, to be sure. Other missionaries I knew seemed to experience the place as though they were zipped up in a sandwich bag, hardly touching or seeing anything except through the film of their established preconceptions. Uruguayans were "lazy" for taking siesta seriously. Shops close for indeterminate lengths of time at mid-day so people can enjoy a leisurely lunch with their families, sip yerba mate, shoot the breeze with neighbors, and maybe even take a nap. I embraced this laid back aspect myself, particularly because it meant less time feeling guilty about not wanting to venture forth peddling a faith about which I was feeling increasingly ambivalent.  

I have rich, rich memories of this time, and I think my openness to the new and strange made this possible.  In Pando I met Gustavo who offered my companion and I ice cold Coca Cola which we had to refuse according to mission rules. Gustavo shared his belief in numerology and astrology with us, and we listened. He took the time to type up an eight-page full numerological study of both of us. My skepticism also extends to numerology, but all these years later I still take to heart Gustavo's opening quote--Plato--encouraging me to wander "en vías menos públicas." In other words, take the road less traveled, and I believe I have.

On another sunny day in Pando, a Monday, our day off, my companion and I rode our bicycles to a lush park where we could dissolve into some solitude surrounded by giant eucalyptus. We had brought some wooden flutes purchased in a previous jaunt to Montevideo and were attempting to make something resembling melody when a vanload of young Catholic priests in training arrived with guitars. Next thing we knew they were joyfully teaching us songs about María and we shared with them the LDS children's classic, "Soy un Hijo de Dios." Let's see, in La Paz I learned to knit. In Paysandú I met Mai y Pai, our amicable landlords who taught me a few rudimentary phrases of Portuguese, which I believe got me that desired transfer to Quaraí, a Brazilian town just over the bridge from Artigas. Another language and culture I had the pleasure to experience. It was here, following another long bike ride to an isolated farmhouse in the sticks, I had the pure joy of "The Orange Feast." An orange feast is like enlightenment. You can't plan for it. You can't even really prepare, though I think it helps to be open to the strange and new. We had been invited to lunch and were served the usual feijoada--black beans and rice. Maybe there was a salad. We sat at a rustic table in natural light from a window that looked out on selva. The dishes were cleared away and our host came back carrying a large bowl overflowing with ripe oranges. Naranjas. We, all of us, dove into the bowl with a wordless fury, smiling, laughing, over nothing more complicated than the ecstasy of the flavor of citrus on our tongues and in our throats. Sweet juice ran from the corner of our hosts grinning mouth and dripped onto the table.  We each devoured two, three of the sunny orbs then sat back in satisfied silence for who knows how long. In memory it seems like we sat there forever.

Well, who knew I'd end up here today? I don't know what allows one person to face the new and strange with curiosity and another to shut down. If I take what my latest read in meta-ethics to heart, and I most likely do, the answer lies in experiences beyond that person's ultimate control: genetics, early established patterns, even evolutionary adaptations. I consider myself lucky, then, to have inherited the inquisitive gene or whatever other mysterious conditioning has made me who I am today. This isn't to say it's all a pretty romp through Wonderland. It's uncomfortable and disconcerting and extends to inner landscapes as well as physical ones. I've taken looks at foreign perspectives, new ideas, that have taken me to the margins of my social networks, made me feel vulnerable and disconnected at times. Some of these ways of seeing can feel bleak. That's a hard sell for even the best persuasive writer or earnest purveyor of "truth." And yet it's still all right. Seems I've got the adaptive gene to experience joy even here.