emptiness vs repletion

repletion


Silent lightning filled the night skies in Belize, like a quiet and oppressively still warning before the destruction of everything (apocalyptic calm before the storm during the storm: as though time has warped and eaten itself, plump and rosy with repletion). The thickness and temperature of the air is like the Pine Island spring oxygen I remember: the melding of Gulf and Caribbean breath - but more alluring, seductive. After dark the hum of creatures grows louder and wider, and the energy caressing your skin twists and becomes nearly eerie, when the humidity of the tropics intermingles with the exotic and intrinsic people. At this time, San Ignacio holds the same rawness and sticky, trashy sex appeal of the South, and yet with an edge of class and chastity.
Steamy virtue, perhaps.
The color and the form of the natives is plentiful and rich, so sumptuous that you cannot refrain from longing to run your hand along the smooth dusk of their spirit's pigmentation. As we drove through the moonless backcountry, festive lights sporadically appeared, glowing through the dim; they seemed inseparable from the black as though they were born of it. They hover and sway in the mysteries of the breeze like glow-sticks in the backyard of a gradeschooler's slumber party on a balmy night in the summer.
Here, sometimes the air got too heavy and my throat would tighten,
and amongst deeper gulps of it
I could see my veins more clearly beneath my browning skin as they filled with the satiation of oxygen.







Michael and I both are learning more than we foresaw: about one another, ourselves, about the state of humanity and the world, about the Mayans and countless other poverty-stricken and subjugated indigenous peoples, about suffering and loving and faith and the vitality and necessity of hope above all else.
This journey is giving the both of us new direction and a stronger sense of purpose and place in the world. This is my first time to experience impoverished areas of the world, and it has been a constant struggle: with acceptance of the state of destitution across Latin America, guilt ("Weatern Man's guilt"), the lessons of dealing with beggars and the far less fortunate, learning how to process and learn from and act on the information I learn and the things spread before my eyes on a daily basis.

Our adventures through Guatemala, Belize and the Southern parts of Mexico in the Yucatan have revealed to me far more than anything I could ever have imagined or conceived of.
It would be truly difficult to ignore the signs of repression and tribulation that are vastly prevalent all throughout these countries, woven into the jungles and capricious villages like the whisperings of the last sad sigh of concession into an enemy's ear.
You can see the determination etched into the weather worn features of the once thriving Mayan people, as though they have long since learned to drown the relinquishment- the injustice and exploitation of absolution, past and present alike-with tenaciousness.
It is a sad stubbornness and purposefulness, a forced sort of acceptance that makes them all the more vibrant and poignant, yes, but also also all the more afflictive to observe.

The beauties of the Mayan culture and the cultures of these communities are perishing slowly because of depravity and selfishness, the same sickness that is especially sweeping through society in the Western World- a preoccupation with (attaining and controlling)More, More, More.
The value of culture in general, everywhere, is disintegrating in overproduction, in an avalanche of quantity, in the madness of (over)abundance. Everyone so consumed by the desire for repletion, and yet for some- for the blind and the corrupt and the unconscious- it is a bottomless desire that feeds off of itself and only grows more vehement with need and greed. Although this is a quandary I have always been aware of, it was never made so blatantly clear as it has these past weeks; being exposed to the reality, stripped bare and without sugarcoating here, within my own sight, has made the degree and extent of the damage and threat unavoidable and painfully obvious. And I am no longer okay with remaining in my circle of comfort and benefaction, simply leaving things as they are without attempting to do something to help, even if it's minute and on a local, community level.







Emptiness is looked upon to be vast and abyssmal, the fear of death, the loneliness of infinity itself-
but perhaps true emptiness is not as awful as it is made out to be. Perhaps emptiness in its true and pure form is not such a bad thing, is really just the ability to feel full and sated without the pollution of overflow, superabundance, More More More. To be happy with less, with the diminutive blessings and gifts we are given every day. Maybe true emptiness is serenity, is repletion is disguise.

I have been learning an awful lot about darkness lately.
However, if anyone knows about darkness, it's Helen Keller, and she said: "Once I knew only darkness and stillness...my life was without past or future...but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.”



This adventure into Central America and Mexico has made me realize that my quest for peace and repletion is not, firsthand, a journey simply into myself, a journey based on merely a desire to live and selfishly unveil myself, to me.
My surroundings and my company have helped me to come to the revelation that there are much better, more beneficial ways to improve oneself than through the preoccupation with flaws and areas in need of improvement, through the guilt of mistakes made and choices made in the past. In the process of moving that small step beyond selfishness, the attempts of singular rebirth, and your contemplations revolving around the self- that is where the true evolvement occurs. Not only within you, but rippling outwards from you to spread veins and tendrils across everything surrounding-your surroundings, humanity, and yes, even the world.

I came searching for some"Truth," yes.
But my principle and my personal truth automatically reveals itself and is founded on the realization that my own quality of life is vastly improved through the bettering of others' lives, even in simple and seemingly meager ways.

To avoid sounding like a broken record, please note that I realize most of us are well aware of the injustice and forlorn actualities of the world; that is not something I wish to inform anyone of, my idealized hopes for the changing the world. I suppose my point, at the root of things, is in itself very transparent: Something seemingly meager and very uncomplicated can make all the difference in another's world. And maybe that's what world domination is really all about.