Nossa senhora!

Tudo mundo-

As a grey matting of clouds reveal the afternoon sun, Im in brazil, two weeks into the culture and the language, sitting in a small alabaster wall internet cafe. Trance music blares our the doorway onto the busiest street in Matão, a neighborhood of maybe 10,000 people on the outskirts of Campinas. Campinas itself is a city of nearly 1 million, a city like any other, busy, loud, everyone sweating from moving so much in the sun. Here though is much more like Iowa, a small community of mostly poor Brazilians working industrial jobs and drinking cervejas like water.

Its difficult to know where or how to start on something so grand and magnificent as my life has been these past weeks here. Since i have arrived, i have seen the entire east coast of brazil all the way north to Bahia travelling in a large Agencia BonFim bus with my Capoeirista friends on the way to a annual Capoeira event on the beach near Ilheus, Bahia. As a state Bahia has the only significant mountain range in Brazil. Stretching from the coast and the waters there all the way to the farms of Salvador and the tropical trees that grow near the equator there. To get to the sea our bus traveled nearly 20 hours through small towns centered around the local church adorned with figures of Christ with wings. I dont understand why yet, but in Brazil figures of Christ usually appear with wings. I feel like this holds some real meaning for me somewhere down the road.
The real beauty of the trip was being so close to the sea. Ilheus is a city settled on the sands of the east coast of Brazil with beaches spanning thousands of Kilometers, wrapping around mountains and villages. If you start at Ilheus you can travel nearly thousands of miles south down the east coast of Brazil without your feet ever touching cement. There i spent many nights walking alone under strange stars (the stars are different south of the equator if you didnt know) and listening to the sea crash at my feet.
The highlight of my trip there was my experience at the Fazenda Cultura, Ouro Verde, nestled away from the highway miles into the mountains. It is surrounded by Beriba and thousands of species of tropical flowers and plants. The only noise you hear is the clatter of birds and insects in the foilage and the occassional outburst of laughter from children jumping into the many lakes created by the unequal distribution of rain water in the valley. Here, people train Capoeira and eat fruits for every meal and work the land, repairing the lake ecosystem or growing vegetables, whatever is needed to live well from the earth. I was invited to return in the coming month and live for a while in a tent near the water, to train capoeira and study portuguese. I will return within the next month and be out of touch for probably another month, because it has no electricity. There so much beauty and silence waits for me, it will be an experience i will love my whole life.

Now, i am living with the family of a Capoeira instructor in the area in a house of bricks and mud and sloppy tiles. His mother, father and two brothers are staying there as well, living through the days of heat together. The space is extremely small, but this is my first lesson of how life is lived down here, and how much ive longed for this closeness. The idea of personal space is alien here, the idea of time alone is chuckled at. Much of my academic lifestyle is only thought here, from waking to faling dead tired onto my mat in a room with two other guys there is no room or time for real reading or space alone. Privelege takes on a strange face of ugliness here. Space to yourself and time alone seem to be luxury, even excessive, a middle-class academic commodity i used to value like gold. Now, my heart is shifting, blooming. Community is truly beautiful, a collaboration between peoples against the distance which money and affluence places between the hands and minds of people. Music, food, space, knowledge, passion and time is shared, valued collectively, and in doing so multiplied, like water, life here flows into each individual until it cannot be contained. Here, at the verge of community is where most simply retreat to their rooms, their books or the open road. Not that i am not guilty of this, i have often put intentional space between me and the people i love, but being here, for merely two weeks, the hands and hearts of these people are so obvious i have had to exist with equal tranquility, allowing myself to come close to who would otherwise be complete and serious strangers. This idea is hard to understand. My mind has learned through so many years of striving to carve out a place for myself in this world that i have missed the true beauty unfolding around me. Every single other individual, living breating human is trying and putting their energies to the exact same struggle. Some with more passion and love than others, some more corrupt and dishonest, but all struggling the same. I think that the roots of my social justice experience here will take hold in this idea of community.

I want to give you all every single bit of this beautiful place i can. Flowers bloom on the sidewalks in colors you couldnt imagine. People stare at the sky for hours in the afternoon in the shade, simply sharing space. Time here, if you find the right space, is not money. My productive American mind has broken and deconstructed on the wind. I feel now that my dedication to work and energy for being useful has been somewhat misspent. I see now that before anything else, joy, love, god and community should be persued with trutfullness. This tight, certain package of time we are given by our consumer society is designed only for profit, production, and quantity. I prefer to start my day with fruit and sun, not thoughts of what I must be doing with my life. I will strive to communicate this idea more clearly in the time to come.

Until then, I hope you are all beautiful. Be well, write me an email please.
Mark