Solo por ser mujer...

Greetings from La Paz, Bolivia, most of you I don’t know in person, but I´m so enjoying your entries - everything from Rumi, a dear friend of mine, to bizarre drunken slaps in the face. Strange world. Strong girls.

I have a story to share.

Somewhere in my Bolivian adventures I fell in love with a Peruvian anthropologist. It’s my first time at being in love, and it couldn’t have been more beautiful nor more painful. I hate to say it chicas, but I now totally get what those damn songs are all about.

I live in the capital here, but travel regularly to a small town where I do my research. Part of the problem with the Peruvian is that I had to wait for him for over a month to get his act together on the other side of the country. But while waiting I was traveling to the little pueblo, and befriended a young Bolivian woman, who is a campesina and Aymara, but speaks Quechua and Spanish. Her name is Roxanna. She has a son who is about 7 and a younger set of twin daughters. There is some zeal about her that always gives me hope for Bolivia. But as long as I’ve known her, there's been no husband, father or man around. One day during the waiting, I broke down and shared with her my lovesick heart and most of all how the Peruvian kept vowing to show up, but had yet to make good on his promises of “tomorrow”. It turns out she was in a similar situation -but I’d argue worse.

When Roxanna was pregnant with her son seven years ago, the father cheated on her with another woman, and I don’t know if it was a break up so much as that he left her, and she never told him about the baby. The week before I shared my story, the father had returned to said Pueblo, met up with Roxanna, saw the son, knew immediately it was his, re-pledged his love for Roxanna, told his son that he was not fatherless and would have his name (latin America has the whole two name system and thus the child had only his mother’s last name). He told Roxanna that he loved her; he had ended things with his “mujer” and was coming back Huari (their town) to be her husband and their son’s father.

Well, when I returned to Huari two weeks later, I hadn’t seen my Peruvian and Roxanna hadn’t seen her “husband”. Because we love them, we hope for the best and make excuses for their failure to come through on promises.

But for a moment Roxanna’s hurting compounded my own and the pain was fierce. We sat in the Plaza and listened to a heartbreak song by Ricardo Arjona (“El Problema”) that has tearjerkers such as, “the problem isn’t that you lie, its that I believe you/the problem wasn’t getting you, its forgetting you/the problem isn’t your absence its that I miss you/how do I run away from you, when we’re already so far apart.” Yeah, pathetic, I know. But tears welled in both our eyes, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if we were crying for love or if it had something to do with what it means to be a woman – a woman in love perhaps – but a woman nonetheless. We agreed that we would trust them until we just couldn’t anymore and that if things ended, at least we had been honest and we had been the ones to love with open hearts.

Eventually my Peruvian showed up, though her husband still hasn’t. I won’t say that “sometimes love just isn’t enough” because that would make me hate love. And I won’t be angry with the Peruvian or Roxanna’s husband because though they may deserve it, it won’t make anything better.

Instead, I’m moving outside the tangle of fear thinking as our beloved Rumi suggests. Here’s hoping each of you does too:

“There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
Of walking in the noisy street,
And being the noise

Drink all your passion.
And be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
To see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
If you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
The shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wonders.
Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “she left me.” “he left me.”
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
Widening rings of being.”

-----rumi