#75: A Lifetime After The Cow Moo'd

Jaime Posa feels so so deeply.

Jaime Posa has a capacity to let me know myself… much better

Jaime creates a space with her first words that allows me to check in and quit rushing… to slow slow slow…

…down

…and then I decidedly settle in… 

To… 

…learn from her…

I am not sure Jaime knows that she creates all these effects 

I am so thankful you do Jaime… I am so grateful…

…Pip

Jaime Posa    posa.jaime@gmail.com  

A Lifetime After the Cow Moo'd

A cow moos loud and I jump out of bed, realizing I probably overslept. Did a ‘moo’ just wake me up? I think to myself, still pretty sleepy as I catch the time (6:42am) and I turn on the water.

I do the normal morning things and then step outside just after 7:00am, step over cow poop and step onto the corner to wait for a ride to town. I'm lucky this time. It doesn't take long.

I sit down by the park to wait for the person I'm supposed to meet. I have a book in my bag. Anyways, I just sit. There's enough entertainment in watching the people go by and listening to the kids playing in the park behind me. The sun feels warmer as I consciously take it in, closing my eyes and letting it feed me. It feels that way. As if its feeding me.

When I open my eyes, my friend is beside me. I haven't seen him in some time. He's a bit older than me. A whole bit. Last time I saw him he rode by my house on a horse. The time before that he was doing yard work around the house where I used to live.  Always a smile. Always a hello. Never a not.

I've always had a bit of a thing for him, in that way that’s curious and endearing and harmless. I think it's his dedication. The integrity with which he lives and works and talks and acts. His awareness and commitment; his hard-working nature, yet the lightheartedness with which he takes the things he does. ‘Life is not all about work. You need to make time for the things you love. You don't know when you're time will be up. You need to live, now.’  I wonder what it was that made him so wise. 

I don't know how it happens, but we're sharing adventures. We're talking with our hands and we're wrapped up in each others eyes. 

He is alone and hitchhiking to the Caribbean coast. He just has a backpack. He is young again and he doesn't tell his mother where he is going. He doesn't have a cell phone. He arrives at the beach and lives there for 2 months. He buries his backpack in the sand when he goes out because they will steal it. His friends are the poachers and the beach roamers. They are the men who drink and the women who stay home.  He may have eaten some turtle eggs in his time there, too, he says with heavy heart. In honesty, he was hungry. It's not right, but hey.

They were good people, you know? The poachers. Well, maybe not good, but they treated me nice, you know? If I didn't have anything to eat a black fisherman would give me some fish. A beach man would climb a coco tree and give me coconuts. Even sometimes, rice! The neighbours would give me some rice as I walked by. We were all poor you know? I had nothing but it was nice. Que vacilon. 

Then he's down in the south pacific. He goes to work on the African palm oil plantations. He's too young, though, and they won't give him work. Anyways, he plays games on the zip lines that carry the fruits to the trucks. They get mad. It's not what he came for. He doesn't last there long. He has no money to leave so his friend and him walk almost 100 km.

He nods his head, as if to verify his story to himself, leaving my gaze and looking out into the distance. It looks as if he's looking across the street nearby, but I think he's looking down a 100 km road.

I didn't learn a lot of education from schools. I just learned stuff on the streets and on the beach and from people. And I learned to respect people. And I learned to respect food. 

I respect food. Some people don't, you know? Yo respeto la comida. I respect food. 

He repeats this line and he looks at me again. This time with quite a serious conviction in his eyes.

His words sink into me and find their place alongside my own. 

My own words are the same, in a different language; but the same- I respect food.

I know it's not the time for me to say it. It's not the time for my story. 

I trust in energy. We’re already sharing something. 

I don't need to say anything to know that he knows, too.

Suddenly, a car pulls up for him and we're both smiling and in the middle of a conversation about education and he jumps, grabs me and hugs me and says that it was "demasiada buena la conversacion para el" in a tone that resonates through my being the rest of the day. And we never finished that conversation; it felt like a movie that we were just in the middle of...

It was just too good of a conversation for me.

Did he say that?

Or did I?

And he leaves in the car. But his energy stays with me for a long time after. Presence and authenticity work like that. 

And then my phone rings; its 8:15am. And the day begins. And I answer with love and curiosity for what it will bring. 

A whole lifetime after the cow moo'd.

Jaime's first-person bio:

I teach and I write and I create things and I see if I can be a better listener more consistently every day. I enjoy using food, nature and yoga as tools for experiencing a deeper sense of joy, connection and freedom (within myself and with other beings). I began regularly referring to myself as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer in 2012, after serving more than 2 years in El Salvador, and I aways refer to that because that experience is an inflection point for when I began more intentionally living. I actually sometimes say that Peace Corps "saved my life" and I kinda sorta mean that. My biggest joy in my work is when a child's face lights up.