“Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo, y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente, pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo, ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.” These words of Ruben Dario, the iconic Nicaraguan poet who revolutionized literature in Latin America and died an alcoholic, capture the essence of my discontent in being born into this sentient life. I was born September 4, 1961, the dawn of a new era of rebellion and discord, attempts at transformation through the destruction of traditional structures and constructs. It is the year the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional came into existence, and a group of idealists began to plot the bloody overthrow of a decades-long dictatorship in the country of my birth. The Nicaraguan civil war will rage as I enter my equally forlorn adolescence, as will the war within my family, and the endless battle for the right to take up space, to breathe my own air. War, external and internal, will rip apart everything that held me together in one piece, giving me a sense of permanence, solidity and identity. I will be grasping for years at some sense of meaning and belonging in the midst of global cultural and political upheaval, old concepts falling away while a collective birthing process of new ideas rocks the world with labor pains. The Russian missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion (with Nicaragua as a launching pad), JFK’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, the Vietnam War, protest marches and the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, the birth of feminism, the death of racist structures, transcendental meditation, LSD and psilocybin psychedelic explorations into altered states of consciousness, peace, love, rock & roll and flights to the moon.
This is the world I was born into, the daughter of a Nicaraguan-born German whose parents escaped war-torn Germany in the 1920s and lost their German citizenship because they refused to recognize Hitler, and a Nicaraguan mother from a family of 11 children whose father died when she was nine (of an alcohol-related highway accident or a politically-motivated assassination, no one knows for sure). My father wore pleated pants and pencil-thin ties in black, brown or navy with a starchy white shirt. My mother was a hippie-wanna-be painter who grew marijuana in the back yard. Fifty years later, they are ultra-conservative, right-wing, born-again and still married. I have come full circle from my socially conscious upbringing by the Teresiana nuns. After searching for a true identity through various cultures and cities, I have come home to myself - or should I say, my Self. I have embraced my existence and love this journey called the human experience. I even love this body that I used to condemn and despise, for it is the vehicle for a Pure Consciousness that is sweet and enduring. I know who I am, why I am here, and how to serve. In the words of Andrew Cohen, I have embraced "the mysterious compulsion to become more conscious." A far cry from Dario's words that the conscious life is the most painful thing to endure.
