There is any number of adjustments you make when living abroad. In the initial months you wake up anticipating what is hard to accept because you cannot change anything. Slow and sure, you end up realizing that even back home there are things you could change with greater facility. Nonetheless, you didn’t used to -- or, you wouldn’t have anyway.
Albeit my time in Peru amounts to roughly 17 months, I have spent 13 of those months where I currently live. It took less than a year to assimilate, and to be able to differentiate between what ticks and quirks are seemingly part of the culture from those which surface only when relating person to person. I don’t wake up with the same hang-ups as I used to, and I’ve become freer and disburdened from things which took only time to let go.
I don’t feel like I see things anew or with a greater perception or depth. But pieces of things I used to think and know are resurfacing!
Example: just this Friday I stood on the edge of the Temple’s patio steps which jet out just above the plaza, and they look down the street to where I live. I felt like I was witnessing a scene from a Latin American short story or novel or poem I have read once upon a time. Parts of things from the many works of art I’ve read or seen in photographs or heard in songs all start to become part of the reality and for the first time really.
The tale of imperium is present. The cobblestone streets from the 18th century lead present-day wanderers to the Temple which the Inca conquered before the Spanish ever thought to plant their palm trees at two miles in altitude.
I live in an Andean hamlet, with the village church and it’s forever tolling bells. The wind incessantly carries the scent of something which burns, a rain which comes, or the smell of the adobe homes baking in the noonday sun.
The characters fill the scene like water does an arroyo as the ladies who knit and sew between their bouts of gossip flood the plaza every morning. The small town goodwill ambassadors are drinking up their beers at eleven o’clock, having been awake for five or six hours already. The children are playing in the streets on their way to their respective schools, some with farming implements in hand for fieldwork after.
The music is always playing, a pig is always squealing, and the green mountains are always too massive to have anything other than the pages of a revolutionary novel recount their majesty. There’s no lack of inspiration or morals to be captured in this corner of Latin America and its beauty can only be rivaled with the great artworks which occupy their museum thrones out of hubris and other weird political currencies.
Unlike other things that give us great pause, time here is alone in passing. Here, the rest of the world may come know this treasure in a poem’s line or a novel’s chapter, but the beautiful here doesn’t exist for a show or a placard; it is so long as no one lets it die. The spirit of the art is not overtaken by the art itself here. It is a testament to conscientious choices and well-formed priorities about life itself.
