Oh geez, Invisible Audience,
So much to say…so hard to summarize.
I’ve been making the rounds and saying goodbye to all the
people I’ve known in Boquete before I leave, and it suddenly feels like almost
two years has gone by in a flash. That, or I’ve been here for a lifetime. It’s
all wrapped up in one.
I have passed houses of friends that have moved on, smiled
at memories in restaurants, at swimming holes and up hiking trails, and stood
on the bridge where I stood on my first day here, bathed in the light of a full
moon, and felt something that had been wound too tight inside me start to release and unravel.
In daylight, many, many days and memories later, I put my hands on the
railing, heard the river rushing by below me, and looked up the valley, a
completely different person than the one who arrived.
Every piece of the puzzle I received here has felt
monumental and essential, and it is hard to believe that I was able to pack
all I have learned into such a short time period. I have met so many people who
taught me so much: so much about myself, and also about the world and how it could work, if I just got out of my own
way -- out of my own head -- and let it.
Linda, my chiropractor but also my friend, may have summarized it best:
“I am not going to say I will miss you, because that indicates that I
will feel the absence of your presence. That’s not true. Instead I will say
that I will never forget you, because that is far more accurate. You will
always be here with me. It has nothing to do with physical distance.”
I will never forget you, Panama, nor all the people you have
brought me. I can’t remember every rainbow anymore, but I will always remember
and talk about living in a place with a whole season of rainbows. More
than one taxi driver has told me that he has actually driven THROUGH the end of
the rainbow, something that science and our Western thinking tells us is
absolutely impossible. Then again, many things I thought were impossible have
come to fruition here, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the end
of the rainbow is something you can find here -- that the proverbial pot of gold may be
a metaphor for many other types of treasures that are reachable if you simply let go of the idea that they are not.
“So, you just didn’t like it here enough, huh?”
A lot of people have asked me this question. And the true
answer is very simple: I loved it here, until one day I didn’t. And that day
stretched on into another and another, and, because it has happened to me many
times before, I knew what it meant. I came here to learn something, although it is only now that I know what it was: I came here to rest,
rejuvenate and find myself. I spent a blissful couple years here, and now it’s
time to go. I have done what I came to do. Whatever is next in this
ever-changing and ever-evolving journey, this wild crazy adventure called life, it will
happen somewhere else.
I guess that’s all for now. I have a lot to say, but a lot
has to go unsaid. When I lived in Spain in my early twenties, I told the people
I was studying abroad with that I hated the idea of having to summarize an
experience into a sentence, because it could not possibly encompass all the
joy, the ecstasy, the grief, the tears, the growth, the laughter and the smiles. So it
wouldn’t matter if I wrote volumes about it, invisible audience. As much as
words serve me well, they can only describe what happened. They cannot replace
it. So just imagine having lived at the end of your own rainbow, perhaps, and
then realizing that you can carry that rainbow with you wherever you go. Maybe
then you’ll understand what I’m trying to convey. Maybe then the words will be
enough.
Love and rainbow kisses
Morgan
