Another Thought on Light :)

This last Thursday bands, dancers, floats, and people from many different places in Costa Rica came to celebrate the festival de la luz in Monteverde. It is a celebration of the coming of Christmas time, the celebration of light. The whole down town around 6:00 blended into a blob of red and white santa hats standing on the sides of the street. On top of the fences were the teenage boys, up in the restaurants were the tourists or elderly people. Sitting on the roof of a restaurant was an old Santa Claus comically drinking beer. On top of the telephone booths, level with the kids on their parents shoulders were more teenagers climbing to get a good view. An announcer stood beneath flashing lights narrating loudly who was doing
what and were they were from, trying to shout over the remix techno versions of hit songs in the United States. Police forces from all over Costa Rica were there too, looking intimidating. Everyone came out for the festival of the lights. There
was fire, spotlights, fireworks. There were those glow sticks, the ones you have to break and shake up until they are free of themselves and able to shine to their full potiential. There were Christmas lights, destined to shine only in their time
of festivity, though they are magical year round. And then there were the lights that caught the most attention, the lights of an ambulance. I never did find out what happened, but those red, white and blue lights spun around clearing everyone out of their path. After the ambulance passed through, the colored disco lights projected once again on the pavement and the glowing Star-Wars-like swords lit up. It isn't to say that the ambulance passing through the parade didn't have
an affect..it took some minutes before the party really began again.
I wrote about it a couple months ago I think, what it is like to live in the light and how powerful it is. It's something I have to remind myself to do every single day. It's hard. I know God is there, I know God's light is real and yet I am on an endless search to fully know it. I love being here in a place still new to me and working to understand His light. A young man I knew went out running a couple of weeks ago. I was on my way walking home and I was watching the sun set, a beautiful orange and red, revealing itself after weeks of rain. When I got near my driveway I saw the one police car that is in Monteverde, and many friends that I recognized gathered around this young man who in the last couple minutes had died of a heart attack. I caught the eye of his brother, and withheld from crying when I saw the confused look on his face. There were no tears, and only a tint of sadness. It seemed he couldn't understand the sunset. When the sun rose that morning, his life was different. The sunrise brought a day of work and of the busy passionate life that he lives. I don't imagine that to him, he expected that the sunset would look like this and bear the death of his brother. The next day I asked my teacher Rita who is also in his family how they were doing. She replied by asking me a question right back, if I had seen the sunset. When I replied how beautiful it was, she told me that there is the answer to my question. Her family is fine because there is no doubt that her nephew is with God, and that he really is resting in peace.

The colors, the light of that sunset painted a little more my picture of life and death. Light is emotions and beauty, a shallow thought and the most profound one at the same time. It can be emotions, or reality. It's a lot like God.
I think that's why He is called light of the world.

Language

"If I could speak in tongues of angels and men, but have not love I am nothing."

My host dad speaks English. He works blowing glass and selling what he makes to tourists up in the rainforest and in town. Last night he acted out his interactions with English speaking tourists...
Tourist: "Wow, did you make this?"
Angel: "Yes, I make."
Tourist: "How much does this cost?"
Angel: "20 million dollars" (smiling)..(it's one of the only numbers he knows)
Tourist: "How long did it take you?"
Angel: "Usually about three hours."
And so on for a couple of minutes until the familiar questions run out. This is how he speaks English.

Many kids at my school are billingual, having taken classes to learn English most all of their lives. We speak Spanglish to each other, Spanish to most teachers, and English to some too. Some kids were out playing soccer and ran into each other, and were both crying. One girl was saying what she wanted and needed to comfort her in English and the other boy in Spanish. When you are hurt it's hard to speak in your second language...you just want to speak in your first and have someone understand you, so they both explained their needs in their first language.
Then, like yesterday, on Abolition of the Army Day, there are moments of silence too. On Abolition of the Army Day it was a silence of remembering wars, of lost loved ones in battles, and to think about where hope among all this is found. Other times silence is open and wandering, wordless. If you think about music, it wouldn't exist without silence. It's as big a part of it as all the notes.

Language is hard to define. It's full of motions, meanings, words. So much to always be understood, but with love...it's universal. With love, we can know that just because we don't understand what someone is saying in a different language or because of something else, it doesn't mean there isn't meaning and thought behind it. Sometimes the love is hidden beneath the words and other times it doesn't have to do with words at all.
In Nicaragua to call someone over, instead of moving your fingers toward you like your fanning your face, you motion downwards with your wrist, as if you are telling someone to duck down. Which is what I did the first time I saw this signal. After crouching down on the ground at the Nicaraguan border so confused as to what was going on, the man calling me over told me "Venga!"..a word I understood means come. It takes patience and listening to be open to language and to learn meaning behind it. There are barriers, flaws, smiles, frowns, bad words, good words...so much to be defined. But one language we all speak is love and that is greater than all these.