Silver birds and misty mornings...

Transitions are always such a strange thing. It seems that no matter how much you examine and reexamine them, you can never quite tell what it is. This is blue, and blue, and blue and.. wait, this is green. When did that happen? This period of my life is not like a bridge crossing from one reality to another. It's more like a broken trampoline, with springs pulling in different directions, all having some sort of claim to the future and the past. Eventually one of them is going to pull hard enough that all other connections will finally let go and then I'll be off and focused in one place. At least I hope so. Kind of.

It rained in Santiago. Second rain I've seen here in three and a half months. It poured! Hail the size of your pinky nail collected in gutters and bounced off our fingers. Strident sunrays pushed their way through the nubles fuertes, and we almost watched the smog wash away.

My life is full of juxtapositions, and it all leaves me without words to express myself to anyone. Is there a word that means hello and goodbye? happy and sad? friendship and love? now and eternity? memory and future? I don't want to leave Chile, but I don't want to go back to the United States. I want to travel, but I just want to stay in Santiago. I miss all of my friends and family so incredibly much, but I just can't be there right now. It is time for the program to end, but do these people really have to leave me?

This afternoon I bought a 25 hour bus ticket to San Pedro de Atacama, leaving Thursday with three amigas. Here is what I know for sure about the next month and a half:

I will arrive in San Pedro on the 8th.

I will fly out of Santiago on the 20th of July.

When traveling through Bolivia, I should carry at least a week's worth of food in case the street protests shut down the nation.

I'm going to have the time of my life.

I feel like I've been down here for so long, always in new situations, that I should be prepared for it. But for some reason I feel almost the way I did before getting on the plane in Raleigh 104 days ago - like I have no idea what to expect. The only difference - now I'm friggin' stoked! No use being afraid of something you know you will love.

I am ready to close this portion of my life. The last week has been incredibly intense. Finishing up interviews and trying to organize the three months of thought, conversation, observation, belief, everything in my head was nearly impossible, and after five days without leaving the house, I ended up with my own beautiful 38 page paper, in Spanish, somewhat explicating the noble fight of alternative communication. I didn't get to half of what I wanted to, and still don't really know how it all concludes, but it's over and I feel good about it. Especially since I was the only one to actually turn it in on time.

After that it's been a lot of just hanging around waiting for it all to end. I painted a mural in our institute. Hopefully it will always remind René of our group, his guinea pigs of education, his sobrinas and sobrino who loved him (love him) dearly. It was inspired by Reading Rainbow. Yup, that's right. You're loving it.

We had our farewell dinner (at a Cuban restaurant... what?) with all of the families, starting with kisses and ending with dancing. Even some of the adults did some carrete this night! Like my mom and her cousins, here, dancing after dinner, which they continued to do until about 3 in the morning. Gotta love em! It is really amazing the kind of relationships that have been formed here in the last three and a half months... I never really expected all of this. Now I don't know how to leave. When I board that plane out of Santiago, I don't know that I'll see any of these people again. I guess I've got to keep living by my new favorite quote, gracias a Quito... "Si quieres, puedes." It means if you want to, you can. Life shouldn't direct you, but you should follow life wherever it takes you, wherever your feet create a trail. I will come back if it means that much to me. I will.

What started out being a summer of relaxing in my new house, working with Lizzie, and biking around Chapel Hill has now turned into a practically nonexistent summer in North Carolina. (Not that I'm complaining) That just goes to show how you can never really plan on things! In some ways I wish that I will have more time to just relax, but who else will be doing what I am doing? My heart is in all that is ahead of me. That is something that I am taking back from the Chilean people - their dedication to whatever it is they do. There are no half-hearts here.

I have learned how to laugh.

We spent the past few days in Algarrobo, doing presentations and relaxing in each others' company. There haven't been goodbyes. I somehow think we won't have them. After all, this is not goodbye. It is only a changing.

Rossanna gave us a fabulous example of this type of moving on. It's as if we're all on the Metro, squashed into TranSantiago, and when we came here on this trip we all pushed our way out the doors and onto the platform. That packed metro that is normal life back home kept going without us. Now some of us are getting back on that metro and trying to reorganize back into the comfortable rocking of adaptation. Or maybe those of us still here are just making a connection, hopping down another path for a while. Whatever it is, I'm glad I don't have to get back onto TranSantiago any time soon! Definitely not looking forward to 25 hours on a bus though. Scenery?

I have felt so inspired for the last three months. I worry that it will be lost to the jungles and people I will meet in the next month and a half, and will be buried under the social pressure and bureacracy of everything when I get back to the States. Inspiration is impossible to capture and store away. And how do I take the amazing ideas I have seen here and translate them to my personal context? It just doesn't work the same way. Inspiration, adaptation, provocation, realization.

Realization in the Spanish sense. It's more romantic, and not in the love sense.

I am not afraid of words. I am afraid that my words will give the impression of being a totality, when the constellations and waves of wine and little white flowers that are hidden by them mean so much more.

Like Liz said - There is not enough time to say what we want with our words, so instead we hug and put all of our emotions and sentiments into our arms. Into that abrazo that could last forever, but never does, and in the same moment never ever leaves.