Bus rides, half thoughts and mixed metaphors

Monday, on the bus, travelling from Guatemala City to Lake Atitlan my mind spun on the layers of interwoven paradox intrinsic in the human experience, or at least my personal experience. ..

I have just spent the week lecturing, engaging with students and colleagues on watershed science, restoration, landscape, and the challenge of stewardship.  At home in the US, my pursuit of science and conservation feels intuitive -- straightforward.  It comes from a connection to the place I was raised, the rivers I played in, the changes I have experienced, and the opportunities for the concomitant rejuvenation of landscape and culture that I understand as framed into the ecological matrix to which we belong.  Challenging to articulate, perhaps, but simple and clear as an experience.  Here, in this new context, my story about who I am, why I am here, and how I can most be of service feels less familiar.  Despite my best efforts to court it, it continues to remain mysterious, averting eye contact, saying few words and in moments, existing only in the periphery of my vision. 

My father is South American, with indigenous, African, and European ancestry reflecting the colonial meanders of his home nation’s history. He came to the US for education, growth, chance, family, destiny… Maybe as an expression of some or all his history and experiences… Maybe for a reason that is too big to explain with a simple story.  Regardless, all of that: questions, answers, questions without answers, were all alloyed, melted, and poured into me, and are now permanently engrained as artifact and luster.

As a scientist from the US, participating in a project uniting people across countries, interests, histories and ages in a common effort of conservation, in another part of the world, with its own charged and idiosyncratic story, my personal history affects how I conduct these new experiences; and I notice its role in the color I express, oxidizing in this new environment.  Fortunately or unfortunately, our team mirrors the complexity of the challenges facing Lake Atitlan.  The algal blooms that drew us hear are indicative of a social, political, economic, and cultural history of continuity and discontinuity, connection and disconnection.  As an American scientist of mixed race, working in an area new to me, outside my historic niche and sense of place, I am also, broadly, an indicator of the same phenomena….  And I am curious what the addition of my variable does to this equation…  Time will tell…  For now I am grateful for the experience and the opportunity to engage in this process with an inspiring group of people…  And I believe in our potential as human beings, complex as we may be.

Meanwhile, on the bus, both of us staring out the window, my friend Annie and I turn to one another in the same instant to share things we have just seen.  She had just noticed two adjacent billboards, one an advertisement for alcohol, the other for a “[Rehabilitation Center]“.  I hadn’t read the billboards, but had noticed that next to them was an off-street junkyard full of old wrecked cars, in front, was a newly opened nursery, brimming with green leaves and colorful petals.