bear tales

Hola! Well it´s been a week since I last wrote and what a week it´s been. I´ve learned so much castellano, and there´s still a long way to go. It´s been hard for sure; learning a new language takes so much mind energy. last week when i had six hours of classes a day, i did feel a bit crazy. this week i am studying on my own most of the time, and have one hour of review each day with one of the english speaking people at Gaia. i am grateful to the language for being much more consistent (with the rules) than English, but there are still a lot of irregularities. Overall, I feel good about how much I´ve learned so far. The frustrating part is that I still can´t understand everyone in usual conversation. It sounds sooo fast, as it always does when you´re learning a new language and your mind is computing the language slowly. I see this process of learning as anologous to a growing civilization. At first there are just a small group of people living together (a couple words in my mind) and I have a handle on that. hola, como estas, que pasa, a-okay. Then the community starts to grow (new words and understanding) which necessitates more rules and social structure (language rules and structure). Then the community blows up into a city and everything goes crazy! Some people are running with their heads cut off, some are stealing from others, some have jobs and others don´t. . .it is chaos, which will hopefully turn into organized chaos in the long run. well my learning of castellano has had its initial blow up (through all day immersion and lots of studying) and is currently quite chaotic! hundreds of words and phrases and rules running around my mind, some of which i have a better handle on than others. i trust this chaos will organize itself with time.

Gustavo and Silvia, a couple with a two year old boy Tobias, are head of Gaia. They are very smart and hardworking. Silvia speaks English fluently and is one of the two who spend an hour each day with me. She said a couple days ago that she learned English through her many travels around North America and Europe. "It´s hard to learn a new language, but it´s amazing to see different cultures and it gives you humility," she said to me. I couldn´t agree more. I am so humbled to be in this amazing place with nice people who speak another language and have their own habits and norms. We all know of course that there are thousands of cultures and languages in the world, but it really hits me now that I am part of a new one. I feel like a kid in many respects. No one here knew me one bit when I arrived. A fresh start. The first chance since arriving at Acadia 5 1/2 years ago that no no one has expectations for me to be a certain way. It is an odd feeling; it makes me wonder who I am exactly. So it is a rebirth of sorts. Add that on to learning the language from scratch, and you can see why I feel like a kid. At meals I generally sit quietly and listen to the table conversation. Most everyone talks a lot and tells good stories so it´s easy to listen. At this point I´m understanding about 1/3 of what people are saying. Grow, fraction, grow!

I wrote a couple haikus in castellano the other day. Haikus are three line poems of Japanese origin, with the lines being 5-7-5 syllables. Some of my lines don´t have perfect syllablization, but it´s close enough. i´ll leave it to you to try to figure out the meaning or to translate it on the internet.

me siento bien
en un lugar hermoso
se llama Gaia

siempre cantando
la musica llena
el corazon

hormiga negra
trayendo una flor
blanca, que lindo

estoy cansado
aprendo castellano
esponja cerebro

Gaia is well known in the ecovillage world. There are often people coming for tours on the weekends, and two men even came yesterday to film the place for an Argentinian TV show! I think the show is called De Costa a Costa (from coast to coast). It was quite strange. They filmed us setting up lunch outside and starting to eat, and then they had lunch with us. They did some interviews, but not with me, since a super slow bumbling spanish talker is not going to catch the viewer´s eye. Maybe they´d like my rustic North man charm though. Who knows these days with TV, I sure don´t. I wonder what the show turned out like. Let me know if you find out.

All six men (including me) at Gaia have beards. Gustavo has the biggest; it reaches half a foot or more from his chin. People generally wear plain, easy going, well worn clothes, and i guess you could say we look like a group of hippies. Not nearly as flamboyant or colorful as the sterotypical sixties hippes though. As far as I can tell most people in Argentina are clean cut and the men don´t have beards, just like in North America. When the TV men arrived, with short well groomed hair and beardless faces, it reminded me of this fact. It was nice to see them getting along with everyone and laughing together at lunch. Appearances often matter so much, but it´s up to us to believe whether they should or not.

The three kids at Gaia are adorable. Tobias is 2+, Suyai (pronounced soo-shai) is just about 2, and Cecilia is 4. They play all the time around the dinner table and teach me words, and sometimes ask me how to say things in English. Very smart. They, especially the two younger ones, alternate between fits of laughter and fits of crying. Boy oh boy, it´s hard to imagine having a two year old of my own. As my mom and dad tell me, I was a very tempestuous two year old, having long fits of screaming-crying. Thanks for being so good to me mom and dad, and props and respect to all you other parents out there.

Gaia is a sort of wildlife sanctuary in the locale because wide-open, unprotected crop and grazing fields surround us for miles. The eucalytpus-like trees that I referred to in my last installment really are eucalyptus. they are huge and beautiful, and i like the smell so much. Reminds me of a beautiful park in San Francisco to which we would take Pepsi to run wild with other dogs. Anyway I have seen a lot of interesting wildlife. Birds of all kinds non-tropical, toad eating lizards, foxes, armadillos, tarantulas, and bugs bugs bugs. The other day I saw a swarm of tiny ants ripping apart a beetle a hundred times their size. When i noticed the scene the beetle was already in two, and both parts of its body were moving and fighting for control. nature can really be gruesome at the large and the small scale.

Hope you are all well! Amor,
Jeremy