Animales en la Calle!

Granada is blessed to have animals everywhere you turn.  Cats on the roof, dogs on every corner, goats, horses, and cows, all wandering the streets, negotiating traffic with buses, people in cars, on bikes, and on foot.  Below is a small sampling…

The Motmot, the national bird of Nicaragua.  This guy had a broken wing, and was being cared for by friends.

Hally – this dog is lucky enough to have a place to call home and regular meals and human companionship, but there are many street dogs in Nicaragua.  So many, in fact, that a local artist was inspired to create a series of portraits of them which grace many restaurants, businesses, and homes in the area. Continue reading “Animales en la Calle!”

Un Dia en la Vida

Roosters in Nicaragua behave much as dogs do in the States.  When one crows, they all begin cock-a-doodle-doodeling up and down the street.  There’s one rooster that appears to come from next door and has a voice that sounds like a person doing a poor impression of a rooster.  He’s always second to chime in when the string of cock-a-doodle-doodeling starts up.  Between these guys and the geckos that sound like knuckles rapping at my door and mangoes falling on a tin roof, I slept poorly last night.

My alarm went off early, but I was long awake gazing at the sun shining in the patio garden and the mosquitoes fighting for entry on the opposite side of the mosquitero.  I whirl-winded myself up and to the bathroom, dressing fast so that I’d be ready for the taxi driver at 7:15.  On a whim, I opened my front door at 6:55, and the taxi pulled up 5 minutes later.  Hola! Continue reading “Un Dia en la Vida”

Life in Nica

A friend was sharing a story about getting into the wrong taxi at the airport.  He was in Managua, and chose the taxi that was a fancy car, with a driver who was dressed in nice clothes and wore a good watch.  My friend said he chose this driver because he felt he had less of a chance of getting robbed.  At the time, he was traveling with some friends from North America.  He said the taxi drive was long, going over a dark road through the middle of Nicaragua on a dark night, with nobody around.  Somewhere in the middle of this road, the taxi driver pulled the car over, pulled his gun out, and took everything from the boys in the backseat.  My friend and his companions were left standing in a dark road in the Nicaraguan night,  minus all their belongings.

“How awful,” I gasped at this point in the story.  “So, how did you get back with no money and no passports?”

“Oh,” said my friend, “they always leave you with your passports and some bus money.”

Continue reading “Life in Nica”

La Tortuga and the Power of the Breath

Flying into Managua looked like flying into any other city in my sense memory.  Bright city lights twinkling and busy roadways entering and exiting the city.  If it wasn’t for the two men on either side of me who didn’t speak English, I could almost have fooled myself that this plane’s landing was like any other.  Then, I caught sight of a very small tienda with the store sign  en espanol, and my pulse quickened.  Numerous doubts raced through my mind — or maybe just one phrase, repeated over and over like a mantra:  I must be crazy to sell all my things and move to Central America with such a small plan.  Crazy:  loca gringa, muy loca gringa!  I practiced some pranayam to return my heartbeat to normal and quell the shaking in my hands.  Some deep breathing in and out of the right nostril while chanting silently Om Surya Namaha reminded me that my entry to the land of the sun (as Mehtab called it in the Vedic Astrology reading I had last year) has been as clear a path as one can hope for in this world.  Calmed, I struggled with my much-too-heavy bags through customs, and left the airport to meet my friend and his family, and to go to the yoga studio I will be staying at for the next few months.

The studio is beautiful.  A divided central courtyard is lush with mango trees, jasmine trees, a large egg-laying duck, y una muy grande tortuga named Snoopy.

He's 55-60 pounds!

 

Continue reading “La Tortuga and the Power of the Breath”

On Ego & Attachment

“Somewhere there is a place that will change my life.  It’s physical beauty will shock me into seeing my world in a wholly new way.  The lives of the people there will be so sharply different from mine that they will be a mirror to me, and in that mirror I will see all my faults and fears, and gather the courage to eradicate them.  This place will be so untouched by my civilization that I will be renewed just by coming to know it.  To visit it will be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, a necessary adventure of the soul…”

~  Charles Monaghan, “A South Seas Adventure.”

In an effort to reach this soft place in my heart that yearns to live in a different culture, under a warmer sun, a life with minutes that seem to pause and stretch and last a little longer than the minutes here in North America, I have spent the last few months letting go.

The release started simply enough.  The clothes in my closet that didn’t get as much mileage as others, pictures in boxes that hadn’t hung on any walls for months, and jewelry and kitchenware all gathering dust.  Then, I began to get a sense of my attachment to the material when it came time to release items associated with precious memories: gifts given to me by people dear to me,  t-shirts and letters from old loves, souvenirs from life-changing moments.   The commercial below seemed to mock my efforts, proclaiming that “you are your stuff,”  so you’d better protect what you’ve got.  After all, once you let go of your stuff, what identity can you claim?

In yoga, Patanjali speaks about the Yamas and Niyamas, simple rules designed to address the basic human condition, and assist us in living a happy, healthy, and holy life.  I’ve often felt my life swing like a pendulum from focusing on one or two of these rules to another.  Continue reading “On Ego & Attachment”