The End of the Panama Experience

On a stormy humid day, Peep and I balanced frantic packing with luxurious, last chance sight seeing until the sun finally set and we said goodbye from the window of a plane. As always, the feeling of packing up belongings that have stayed in one place for 8 months and leaving the cozy home an empty shell, gives me a sense of chaos like I am pulling up my own roots.

These were good roots: made from prevalent tropical rains, plentiful exotic fruits, a new kind of coffee each week, people from all over the world who lived in that small place and cared about us, and spectacular natural beauty.

It's difficult to reflect on such a grand scope experience after only a few days of distance. I will need to let it slowly unravel for about 6 months probably. What I can see now is that it was a time and place for the growth of me. It wasn't that interacting with Panama "taught me things about myself" or anything expected, things I've already experienced. This time wasn't about learning, it was about trying. It was about doing. Perhaps this is a milestone in the growth of all humans: at some point, the focus of your energy shifts from learning to doing. I may have made that shift in Panama - not because it was Panama, but because it was a place where no one was watching me. I wasn't judged because I was "outside the system." No matter what I did, I was a weird foreigner.

This gave me freedom to take unexplainable risks. I have started 3 projects and taught myself new skills in my time in Panama. My projects are still in their stages of infancy and therefore it still takes courage to explain "what I do" in my own cultural social context. But in Panama, I was extremely well educated and experienced. I realized there for the first time that people 3 decades older than me often don't know what I know, and would be lucky to get to pay for my brain.

My journey into Panama and back out again was not a hero's journey: it was not the intense experience that I went through in order to return home transformed. I did that already in high school. It is as if I've traveled too much: too many "incredible experiences" in a row, that I can never return to normal life, and I will permanently have a wider definition of home. So Panama was not an interruption that gave new life to the regular flow, rather it was part of the regular flow of an irregular path.

It is a path that will wander the world without it being "a big deal", without fear to overcome, a path that makes itself a few hours before I walk it.

I will miss looking out of car windows to see orchids and bromeliads clutching tall sprawling tree limbs. There will be weekends in Austin when I will wish I could pile some friends in a car, drive for 2 hours and get to a paradise Caribbean beach. I will miss my small privileged piece of one of the prettiest colonial mansions in Panama. I will miss casual meetings and barbecues on my terrace with a view to the Panama Canal and the causeway. When I procure my next "nest" here in Austin, I will shop for tropical plants and be aghast at their prices.

Here in Austin, I catch a glimpse of a sign in Spanish and it makes me feel so different than it did before. I just realized it today, but I used to see such signs and think "those are for 'other' people to read". Without knowing it today, I felt like they were talking to me.

I also notice here how grocery stores have free samples of food and they stay there for hours - wouldn't happen in Panama. I feel comforted by the lack of poverty. In a poor place, even if you yourself have enough, seeing the poverty of others affects you. It made me feel like we were all poor. And here I feel that we all have enough.

I bought morningstar veggie corn dogs as a first american treat. Then my brother in law explained how he'd read "Omnivore's Dilemma" and they are so bad for the environment because they are so processed and therefore energy consuming. I thought about my days in Soloy where lunch was the nearest chicken walking around, served a few hours after it's head was chopped off alongside yucca that was just pulled out of the ground. Books like that are written for spoiled Americans.

My cup is so full here from all the family. I have so much family: there are so many people, so much love, so much good food. It is so opposite to my previous quiet two person haven-from-the-world.

In fact some of those people just ordered pizza and tipped the driver and are waiting for me. I'll go to them.