partidos

WWOOFer one and three (in relation to when I arrived, me being two) have departed. Now that my Olmue world has shifted, I feel less grounded, less tied to this place and time. For a while it felt like nothing was moving--I wouldn't call the feeling stagnancy, but something more like continuity. Which I suppose is still motion, but you know what I mean. Now, I feel anxious to go forward, south, elsewhere. And I still find it pretty amazing that as long as you put yourself on a moving vehicle, you can continue to do simple things like sit, read, eat, and sleep, and within a few hours you can put your feet down in a different city.

Departure is a strange thing. I've lived together with these two WWOOFers for the past five or six weeks. Besides the short trip they took last weekend, we have been almost constantly together: eating, working, driving, short trips to other cities. Now that they are gone, I am not sure where and how to place myself. Ademas, this weekend I have to say goodbye to everyone I've met in Valparaiso, since I am departing Region V next week. I'm trying to wrap my head around this idea of never seeing people again. I have thoughts of constantly returning to Chile, of spending boatloads to be in Valpo for New Year's, and I think part of me is afraid of being part of something that doesn't promise perpetuity. It's tiring, and difficult, and somewhat painful to constantly adjust my patterns of being, but I suppose it's also wonderful that people can make connections that continue to affect them in such a short time.

Maybe that's part of why I was a history major: this small fear that things, places, people, importances will be forgotten. Pablo Neruda says forgetting is so long, I hope he's right.

In any case. The other day, while shoveling dirt in heat so strong it was almost visible, I watched sweat from my face pooling in my sunglasses and thought about China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston (which I inexplicably found in the library of the Institute where Britain and Meg work), and about the men who cleared Hawaii for sugar cane fields and the men who blasted through the Rockies to lay railroad track. To give so much for the stuff of dreams. They knew our country with their bodies, their aches and their fortitude. And now I am learning a small, tiny, tiny part of Chile with my shovel. Until next week, and then perhaps I will learn the Pacific...!