Fight or Flight?
24 May 2012 Leave a Comment
I would be lying if I said I’ve loved every minute of every day of being a Peace Corps volunteer. And I would be lying if I told you that I don’t seriously consider abandoning this journey in search of greener pastures on a semi-regular basis.
Don’t get me wrong. There are many wonderful things about the Peace Corps, and about the Caribbean and St Vincent, but there is also a list of challenges equally as long to match. Lately these struggles have been getting the better of me and every day I find myself questioning what I’m learning from the challenges I face.
For almost two years now I’ve lived in a village over an hour’s van ride from Kingstown, in a rural fishing community nowadays best known for being the hub of SVG’s … “alternative agriculturalists.” It’s basically as far away as you can get from the cultural epicenter of St Vincent on this side of the island, and the van ride is NOT easy. Whenever I’d meet someone in town and tell them where I live, the response is always astoundingly consistent. “Oh, that’s so far,” they’d tell me, with a look of surprise/confusion on their faces. At an event I attended a few months into my service I met an American ex-pat who’d been living here for some years and I asked her why I always received such a response. Very few people who live near town ever go all the way down to Chateau, is what she told me. Plus, she added, they’re probably also wondering if you work on a ganja farm.
As soon as I got here I knew my post was going to be a major lesson in patience and learning to sit still in one place for a while – a cruel joke to a compulsive wanderer! But I’ve managed to have experienced periods throughout when I’ve felt deeply connected to my community, stable and secure here working in multiple projects simultaneously and spending the majority of my time around the village. So much can be learned from living in a place like this, so radically different from where I was raised. The limited resources, the family connections, the local rumor mill… it can teach a person so much about community living within the means of what’s available to us. But the wanderer in me still remained and it’s this side of myself that’s felt incredibly cut off from a lot of other learning opportunities St Vincent has to offer. By mere nature of where I live and the limited transportation, I quite often feel unfulfilled on many different levels, seeking intellectual conversation and yearning to surround myself with beings whose energetic vibrations ignite positivity and inspiration…
It’s no wonder why most of my secondary projects have been outside of my community, around town and at the college. Creating spaces and linking with other sensitive individuals who share a mission to heighten awareness and expand our collective consciousness – for this I’ve gladly suffered through many a loud, sweaty, spine bending, roller coaster van ride, for making those connections are what’s kept me afloat here.
With five months left, I question daily what my purpose is in the time that remains, and the wanderer inside is anticipating the impending transition with some anxiety. Five months to some may seem like nothing, but my inner restlessness is speaking loud and clear – How much longer do we have to stay?
But with no idea yet where to wander off to next, patience and stillness again are the lessons to which we return, continuing to question and reflect on what will be of most service to us and those around us.
So until we settle on a new place to flee, it’s back to fight the good fight for now. At least the view’s not so bad…
Mother teachers
13 May 2012 1 Comment
My neighbor children came by for a visit today while I was busy with some typical Sunday house chores – laundry, cleaning and cooking. They picked up their feet as I maneuvered the broom around the legs of the table and chairs and I smiled with amusement recalling my own childhood memories of my mom mopping our kitchen floors, paper towels under her feet, while I sat on the sofa in the living room watching.
Here in St Vincent on this wet, rainy Mother’s day I’ve been filled with emotion as I reflect on the many teachings we receive from our mothers. From mine I’ve learned independence, strength and spiritual faith, despite some critical differences in opinions and beliefs; while I also recognize in her where my less desirable qualities like absent-mindedness, clutter around the house, and nervous laughter were inherited. But she has also been a pillar of inspiration in some of the most challenging life lessons of healing and forgiveness, for which a daughter in her coming of age years must be endlessly grateful as she encounters her own difficulties on a personal journey that she herself has chosen with the freedom and blessings granted to her by her life’s blood.
This week that journey presented some of the most gratifying communal experiences in the nurturing presence of our Nature Mother, whose highest teachings are available for all of us to receive, as long as we are present and open. In a mission to record the visual and energetic stimuli of different heritage nature sites in St Vincent and Bequia, I joined the heART room family as we embarked on the first steps toward erecting an historic Kingstown mural representing the country’s unique and mystical offerings. Brought together by this creative opportunity to express and offer a shared love for the islands, I was moved and inspired by the dedication and sense of community that came forth from the youth participating in this endeavor. Each site, while unique in its cultural significance to SVG, is rooted in nature and each individual in the group seamlessly found her/his connection to the sacredness of the environment as we all worked hard to document our personal experiences.
In this way of being with and observing her gifts, Mother Earth teaches us in whispers of the wind through trees, in the gentle touch of the water in the sea, and in the majestic wisdom of emerald mountain rainforests that what is most precious to us is that we are all connected to her, that we are all one and that it is our urgent responsibility to protect and share her gifts for the greater good.
i heart yoga art
08 May 2012 Leave a Comment
Last year I wrote a post about how Bob Marley’s song No Woman No Cry got me through a difficult time while I wandered through the Botanical Gardens near Kingstown. This song has become a sort of anthem for me during my time in St. Vincent as I return to it whenever I need to be reassured that Everything’s gonna be alright. It’s certainly one of the most beloved songs to have ever come out of the Caribbean, and the people’s reverence of Bob Marley’s lasting legacy is really quite humbling. A few weeks ago Sheridon said to me, “Teacher Camille, in school we learned that Bob Marley was a peace maker. I want to be like him and make peace too.”
The video below was created as a personal expression of the song’s message. Along with the grounding energy of the mountains in the backdrop and the sacred gifts revealed through a dedicated yoga practice, these are the treasures that have continued to help me strengthen and support body, mind and spirit in this journey.
After I posted the video to Facebook last month, Grenadian yogini/teacher/artist Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe featured it on her wonderful and inspiring blog, Groundation Grenada: Action Collective
The outpouring of support and encouraging words I’ve received in response to this video have been incredibly humbling, especially since the idea for it was initially conceived as a personal side project to fill my time after passing on my role as editor of Serious Ting. Eventually this process, creative in its essence, led me to realize a new dimension that Yoga has taken on in my life. The practice for me expands now beyond a moving meditation done in private, and has evolved into an invaluable tool for expression of self and emotions… Yoga as Art. How grateful I am to have been given this as a gift that I hope to keep sharing.
one love
camille aragon, yoga artist
breaking points
03 May 2012 1 Comment
The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. – Hunter S. Thompson
The last few weeks have taken me on a detour, on a journey in which the focus have been on lessons far and away from working, striving, reaching and achieving.
For all of last week I was bed-ridden by an infection on my right leg coupled with a twisted and swollen ankle and shin, from falling down the stairs in my house twice in one day. It was a perfect storm and it knocked me down, hard.
I spent the beginning of last week in denial about my situation, convinced I would be back on my feet in no time. But the tears that would come involuntarily as my leg throbbed with pain each time I tried to stand, along with the words “hot mess” that the Peace Corps doctor used to describe it, made me start to realize that I would be out of commission for longer than I had initially thought.
The nature of being a peace corps volunteer is difficult enough in and of itself. There is an underlying feeling of vulnerability and loneliness that come with being put into a community of people who all knew each other before you arrived. Sometimes those feelings are quieted by connections created and relationships built. Other times these insecurities can be magnified by circumstances beyond one’s control.
I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life to have never so much as broken a bone or suffered from any majorly devastating medical concerns. So to be debilitated by these recent health issues was excruciatingly challenging for me. I couldn’t move freely, do any work, or practice yoga. My only job was to rest and heal and to absorb the spiritual and emotional lessons that were the real reasons this had happened to me.
Nothing in this life, or any other, happens at random and lessons are always delivered when they are meant to. My brother Matthew’s birthday was last Monday. He passed away in a freak accident when we were teenagers; he was 15, I was 13. Every year on April 23rd I feel an overwhelming sense of pain and loss on a day that should be filled with happiness and celebration. But this year, on what would have been his 30th birthday, I felt the depths and darkness of a pain and suffering unlike any I’ve experienced since his passing.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Sometimes I wish I had the ability to shield myself from hurt and sadness, and do realize that on some level I guard with ferocity the most vulnerable parts of my being. But I also know from experience that the heights of true happiness cannot be fully felt without also having learned from the mysteries of sadness and despair. This is the spectrum of the human experience.
And so the journey continues, the healing goes on, and the strong get stronger as I give thanks for the blessings that emerge from the beauty in these lessons, for myself and anyone else also healing themselves from something unimaginably and unspeakably painful…
Because, aren’t we all healing from something?
Isle of Spice
14 Apr 2012 1 Comment
After spending a few days on Union island for the Easterval festivities, Katie and I travelled by sea to our neighbors in Grenada by way of their sister island, Carriacou. In Carriacou we explored the town and enjoyed Paradise (beach, that is) before hopping on a rain-soaked Osprey ferry ride that would deliver us to Grenada proper.
Arriving towards the Spice Isle, the rain let up just in time for us to take in the breathtaking views of the leeward coast as we sailed south toward St. George’s. Nearing the journey’s end we were gifted the sight of an enormous arc of a rainbow which seemed to touch and extend beyond both sky and sea. It was a remarkable way to be welcomed to a new country for the first time.
Our three days in Grenada were packed with activities that gave us an opportunity to observe and appreciate the island’s majestic beauty and the level of creative consciousness that is being cultivated by its people. We hopped in a hired van on day one with some other PCVs and their visitors for a tour of the island and visited a local rum distillery (where we learned that it is impermissible to travel out of the country with bottles of rum higher than a 69% alcohol content, though bottles of higher contents are sold), an abandoned and defunct airport site from the 1983 American invasion, the Grenada Chocolate Company (which was also home to monkeys, parrots and a mango-eating tortoise), the Concord waterfalls amidst the hills of the island’s interior, and some other fun stops along the way. Later that evening I got a chance to catch some dance vibes as I tagged along to our host PCV Stephanie’s regular modern/folk dance practice held at the UWI open campus.
Some of the other highlights of the trip included Yoga class at the La Luna resort and their chocolate-coffee-milk deliciousness enjoyed in quadruplets, happy hour waterfront rum punches and family style dinner with volunteers and friends at Patrick’s, the Women Make Art Exhibition which featured all female artists living and working in the Caribbean and abroad, and a hike in the Grand Etang National Park with unbelievable views of the island’s interior and coasts. There was also the denim-clad itinerant at Yellow’s bar who taught me how to hover a beer bottle in the corner of a room and then proceeded to demonstrate a raunchy dance for me and a few others before we noticed he had a giant hole in the crotch of his overalls and he wasn’t wearing any underwear… Despite the many differences, St Vincent and Grenada have a lot in common too….
Now it’s back to my life in Vincy time to take on the rest of the school year. Feeling re-energized by the euphoria of post-travel fatigue that will keep me thinking about the isle of spice for a while.
Pictures to come…
Fresh toes
07 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
I’ve officially passed the point at which I’ve gone from counting how long I’ve been here, and switched to counting down the time I’ve got left. In about seven months, I’ll be sprung from the throes of accountability to Big Brother, i.e. the United States Government, and will return to the life of being a normal civilian – free to drive vehicles, hop on a plane or boat and spend the night away from home without the fear of getting ‘fired’ or being expected to report such things to my APCD (who also happens to be my neighbor). Whether or not I will be back in America, I’m still not completely sure, but I’ve been getting some recurring advice from returned volunteers about how to prepare for the transition. “Don’t go straight into your next big thing,” they’ve told me, “Take time to process your experiences and decompress.”
So decompress I shall, quite possibly in another warm beautiful place by the sea, and reminding myself of this advice takes quite a bit of pressure off of the feeling that I need to figure out my next steps, like, yesterday and keep my focus on the here and now.
Seeing that the here and now have been quite hectic, putting off future plans is really a good idea for the time being. I’ve been busy for the last few months working on Serious Ting - a biannual magazine published by Peace Corps Volunteers in the Eastern Caribbean. Taking on the new issue has been a great way to connect with folks all around the six islands in our region, and to collaborate on a big project that we can all be proud of. It should be distributed online and around the islands by the first week of April, and it’s something I’m crazy excited to share with everyone.
With that and the other projects I’ve got going on, the first couple months of the year have flown by. Randomly I’ll document the moments I know I’ll want to remember, though in the controlled chaos of my daily life the documentation of events occur in scattered frames of mind.
Today I found this scribbled on a post-it:
“It makes my toes feel like they’re fresh. (Cracking them.)”
Sheridon said this when we shared a yoga practice one afternoon. Luckily, there are other times when we’re more prepared to capture awesome moments.
Thanks to Courtney for snapping this image. Open hearts and giant smiles.
One love.
Sweet hearts
14 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
Happy Valentine’s Day from the precious hearts in Chateaubelair.
with love…
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Love is a consistent passion to give, not a meek persistent hope to receive. The only demand of life is the privilege to love all. – Swami Chinmayananda
Bequia Music Fest
30 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Peace Corps, Photography, Travel
A weekend of beach and blues and other jams…
