Dear Caminoheads,

This Monday post on a Tuesday was supposed to be out yesterday. A few days ago, I got an email from our Steve-O with a poem that he found interesting. I found it too! I thought to post it to share with all and yesterday by mid-morning, it was clear I had to post it yesterday. You see, on Mondays, I usually get to the city early. I work for a bit in a coffee shop in the corner where the coffee is nice and the waitress is a girl from Venezuela. I turned on my computer and right away got a chat from a work colleague from Portugal who lives in Germany. Before disconnecting, I emailed my “right hand”, who is an Italian girl who lives in Canada.

After coffee, I went to see my therapist. We talked about missing others, either because of loss or for being far away physically, mentally, or emotionally. He highlighted that probably we are all missing someone or something all the time. He also said that grief is a unique tool, because all of us have to face with grief sooner or later in life, and what is good about grief is that if we do “grief work” it will “open the gate of feelings” and our vision of the world and our loved ones will refresh. We talked about ways of grieving, some cultures dance to grieve, others dress in black, our -modern culture- hides grief and behaves as it doesn’t exist.

All he said was so right. The Venezuelan girl in the coffee place, my Portuguese colleague in Germany, my Italian right hand in Canada and me, we were all missing something and someone. And the poem talks about the ways each of us grieve. This is why this email should have gone out yesterday!!!

Praise be to God for confounding our tongues and scattering us into exile 
like chaff in a stray wind or the fig seeds dropped by a green iguacaon on a hogplum.
Confusion is sweetest chirimoya on a dry tongue. 
Hymns of disorder bring bountiful harvests in times of drought, 
And perhaps only cross-eyes can see in chaos serene mandalas. 
I shout from the top of my Babel’s tower sown as a kapok tree— 
Blessed are the dialects, the patois, the argots, and the pidgins; 
the half-breed word-hoards and the mongrel grammars; the geechees, 
the calós, and the ghost words; those hallowed languages gone dead 
or worse extinct because of genocide or conquest or just time’s erosion, 
yet how we must mourn each one in our bones, hearts, spleens; 
then join hands by the sea at dawn to chant their names in flames 
of gumbo-limbo, O so many to remember: Elmolo, Mawa, Ba-Shu, 
Koibal, Guanche, Calusa, Wichita, and the Taíno of my own island—
Kubanakán—whose words linger past the cyclones of our sadness
like flotsam chromosomes or castaway fossils of such beautiful amber 
as barbacoa, canoa, fotuto, hamaca, iguana, malanga, tabaco, yuca.  
With these words I make machines of memory in flesh and marrow. 
With these words I glide and cleave the tidal waves of history.  
With these words I take root in the quicksands of diaspora.  

‘Tower of Babel’ – The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds, by Orlando Ricardo Menes

Common loves,

Cris