29 (or semana santa.)

I stopped at the vista yesterday morning on my way to the Institute. Sat on the rock and looked over the valley with the ocean swallowed by the sky. They're the same color in the mornings.

And then I hear Manchita and Carlitos, the little rascals, chasing and barking at the parade of taxis and turismo vans going up the reserve. The doggy gang.

Take breaks from the Institute by going over to Alan's to watch howler monkeys and cook food and draw and talk about jobs with Annie and it all seems so plausible.

Staying, living, being.

Over Semana Santa I went to Turín with Maribel and Ariel. Vast farmland with a vast amount of family and I spent the day exploring old gold mines and riding horses to the river with Brazel sitting in front of me (he's grown up so much in four months!). After lunch I sat on the front steps of the main house drinking coffee grown, harvested, roasted, and brewed by the same hands that served it to me, on the same farm.

The seeds are sewn and I wonder if the sprouts can survive the season without me.

I dig my heels into the ground and try and keep time from pushing me over but it's impossible to stop so I just choose not to sleep.

Which isn't the best strategy for the final week. But I need these channels to be open. I sacrifice something either way, and I'd rather give up on dormancy than on my support.

At La Pension Diego says he doesn't want to see me like this. Ten to twelve hours at the Institute and I come over looking tired and not so much broken but filled with a painful hopefulness. I tried to explain the whole "growing season" thing and he asked me if I thought living here was a fantasy. I was taken aback, somewhat offended, because the point is it isn't a fantasy, I don't want it to be a fantasy. This is real. This is my life. I have something here but it's so separate from my life in the States that I wonder if it will just be like a wormhole and close. This place will not stop existing, I know that, but I'm scared that as soon as I step back through that door into the noise, the heat, the concrete, this chapter in my life really will turn into just a dream, a blip. I can't let that happen. I've gained too much ground for myself to let it all slip away.

So I won't.

This is nothing new, this travel and meet and move but plant and grow and pick up and let go and risk and see. And I asked in the first entry, pre-departure, if this trip was any more consequential than the rest. Is it? I don't even know what I meant when I asked about its consequence.

It's just another landmark, another stake in the ground for this garden.

Growing roots.