Al Fin (In the End)

The interior of Honduras has given my trip a welcome blast of adventure. The scenery is spectacular and the town of Copan Ruinas is beautiful and refreshing. After a week of muggy island living, the afternoon rains are a nice change of pace. This morning I got up early and visited the Copan Ruins, which is an unsettlingly tranquil spot filled with elaborate Mayan architecture. This settlement was the most important one in Honduras for a long time and it is famous for producing the stone sculptures that are found throughout the region. Wandering around the town is also fun because it has a distinctly different feeling than life in Guatemala, even though the boarder is a few miles off. Along with the excitement of this new discovery comes the feeling that it is impossible to see enough of Central America, to dive deeply enough into the life of it's people, or to understand the systems of government, nature, and society all converging under the same sky. 

There was an amazing book store in Antigua that I stumbled across and I wanted to read every book on the shelf about this place and its painful history, which would inevitably lead me on an intellectual journey across the world and through the human psyche. An overwhelming thought is just how many different regions of the world there are out there to 

explore, with parallel complexities and histories to this small piece of the whole. Each day, billions of people are experiencing life in an infinite amount of ways, and I can't help but observe how powerfully our lives are influenced by where and to whom we are born and be inspired by the incredible strength of people all over the world who are finding their own innovative ways of changing their condition. My good friend wrote these words when we were fourteen: "If something is etched in stone, all you need is a little dynamite." She has given me strength to believe that there will always be people who will find a way to overcome even the most atrocious injustices, and I am bearing witness to that in Central America today.

One more quote, but this one is in Spanish: "La vida is corta, pero ancha." Literally, "Life is short, but broad." Just how "broad," or deep, life actually is seems to be  a matter of how we seize it, how we process our experiences, and who we have to remember our moments with. This trip, although it is at its end, seems to be unfolding more with every day. It will be a part of the direction of my life, as is the case with everything we do. It is nice to look at the end of something so moving as this adventure on foreign soil and see it as an opening. It makes me blink away those silly nostalgic feelings that make leaving difficult. And so, it with these open-ended feelings and reflective thoughts that I smile more freely than before and step with a little more energy in the direction of home.