Things I Know About the World

1. Compassion is a universal language. 

2. Some things are meant to be let into our minds; others are meant to be let into our hearts.

3. Exercise and sweat can cure any mental ailment. 

4. Everyone should watch the sun rise every now and then.

5. Play is for all ages. 

6. Role models can't do anything more or better than us. Rather, they motivate us to find the better within ourselves. 

7. Family doesn't mean you've known them your whole life. Sometimes family means that you all need a place to go on Thanksgiving. But that doesn't diminish its worth. 

8. Sometimes crying makes you feel better. Sometimes it just makes you want to cry more. 

9. Sometimes we feel really alone. And we are. But that's not a bad thing at all. 

10. Sunsets are always beautiful, regardless of where in the world we witness them from. 

11. The desire to care for others is an important part of the human condition. Even more important is the ability to direct this same urge towards ourselves. 

12. Home is where we feel safe. It changes, sometimes too quickly for our own comfort. 

13. If it warms the heart, it can be called a friend. 

14. The most beautiful things can be found on the driest, most deserted roads. 

15. I have never regretted telling someone I love them. 

16. We find more fulfillment when we live to learn, rather than living to teach. 

16. Taking risks is really fucking fun. 

17. Hard work doesn't always equal happiness. Some of my happiest moments have been while doing nothing at all. 

18. If we never look back, we might never see the beauty we missed at first glance. 

19. Other people make our lives worth living. Which means that we make their lives worth living, too. 

20. There's a lot that I have yet to learn. Which makes me feel very, very lucky. 

Ingredients of a healthy soul, as told by random woman on shuttle

On Saturday, March 1st, after thirteen hours of air travel, I arrived in Guatemala City. I then caught a shuttle to Panajachel. After the driver tied my backpack to the roof of the van, I hopped into a seat by the window. There were about four inches between my seat and the seat in front of me, and the back of the seat was almost as tall as my shoulders. There would be no sleeping during this five hour drive.

The last person to get on the shuttle was a woman with dyed blonde hair. She peeked her head in the van, then declared in loud and rapid Spanish that she would be far more comfortable riding shotgun. Once seated, she turned around and smiled at me. I gave her a thumbs up and smiled back. This half sarcastic move would be the beginning of a loud and exhausting five-hour friendship.

She spoke to me in English, and I responded in Spanish. Both of us would claim that we were just practicing, but in reality we just wanted to prove how bilingual and cultured we were. So it tends to go. She told me that she was a biologist, and she was currently heading to the lake to visit her daughter, who was an actress and always seemed to be a little annoyed that her mom spent so much time in rainforests.

She asked what I did, and I told her that I worked for a nonprofit that focuses on women's empowerment. Her eyes started to tear up. Then she was sobbing. After about five minutes, she turned around and looked at me again. "Thank you," she barely managed.

That was two hours into the drive - we didn't talk for the other three. When we finally arrived in Pana, I was the first stop. I climbed out of the van and waited for the driver to get my backpack down from the roof. He handed it to me, got back into the car, and started to drive.

When the van was about twenty feet away from me, it stopped. The woman got out of the front seat and ran back towards me. "I just wanted to give you this," she said. "It's the ingredients of a healthy soul. I learned it in a yoga class once." She handed me the envelope from an internet bill that had handwriting on it. Then she ran back to the shuttle and it drove away for good.

Here is what was written on the envelope:

I read it over, then put it in my backpack. It was a nice gesture, but I felt like I had read those very words in every self-improvement article I had ever read. Yeah, peace and love. It's what makes the world go 'round.

I rediscovered the envelope at the bottom of my backpack yesterday. I read it again.

1) "Divine love = compassion for all." Love is not what another can do for us. It is what we give to each person we come in contact with.

2) "Divine light = discern between right and wrong doing." That knowing the difference between what is right and wrong--not even acting on it yet--is such a difficult and pertinent task in itself that it is divine. So often I have found myself thinking that I always know what's right and wrong, and the hard part is choosing which to act on. But I'm realizing more and more that this isn't always the case.

3) "Divine power = the willpower to act correctly." The greatest power we have is power over ourselves. And our actions are solely up to our own willpower - no external forces involved. I like this one because of the tremendous (and deserved) credit it gives to personal accountability.

Maybe you've already learned all of this from your own yoga teacher. Maybe none of this speaks to you the way it spoke to me. But that random woman I knew for five hours on a shuttle cried when I told her that I work for a nonprofit. She stopped the van and chased after me to deliver a message scrawled on an envelope. And then she left, and both of us knew that we wouldn't meet again.

Why the urgency to share such a message with a stranger? Why did learning that yet another do-gooder had made her way to Guatemala take such an emotional toll? I don't know.

But if someday I have a message so important to share with someone that I jump out of a moving car, and if someday someone says something so simple and meaningful to me that it brings me to tears, I will be very, very lucky.

Home is where you park your bicycle.

Two weeks ago, I boarded a plane and flew to Colorado because home was calling me. Not for good, of course - I still have many travels ahead of me this year. But I thought it couldn't hurt to visit my family for a bit, enjoy the winter, and touch base with some friends. Maybe it would be good for the soul. So I came "home."

That I came "home" literally means that I flew into DIA and drove to Carbondale, to where, in June of 2013, I had moved my clothes, my books, my 3rd grade self portraits, and my bed. It is where my parents are now employed and my brother is enrolled in high school. My bike is parked in the garage, and my graduation picture sits on the mantel in the living room. It's where I sleep. But I can count the number of nights I've slept in this house. And I did - it comes out to about 34 nights total. Almost 5 weeks. A quarter of the number of nights I spent in Guatemala. Half of the number of nights I spend as a counselor at a sleep-away camp every summer. And that got me thinking. About all the different "homes" I've had, about what home means to me. And, consequently, when I get to thinking about something, I write about here for all of you to enjoy. So, home. Let's talk about it.

Last week I saw Abbie in Denver. Abbie and I grew up five blocks away from each other in Congress Park neighborhood right in the heart of Denver. On snow days we'd each walk 2.5 blocks to meet in the middle, then build a massive snow fort/cave/dreamland on the side of the road. She moved to Fort Collins when we were ten, and eight years later I moved to the mountains. On Friday we ate dinner at Tommy's Thai (if you haven't been there, please go, it's delicious) and realized that we were just around the corner from her house.

So we drove by and parked in front of her old driveway, in between the two "No Parking" signs on either side of the driveway that her dad had petitioned the city for because he kept getting blocked in. The notes he had us, eight years old at the time, write and put on the windshields of the perpetrators' cars just weren't enough. The light was on in Abbie's old bedroom. I asked her if she remembered when we had drawn with sharpies all over her bed sheets and the wall behind her bed when we were four years old. Of course she did - they had finally painted over it just before they moved out six years later. We noticed that the new residents had gotten a new mailbox. But the old basketball hoop was still there.

Next we parked in front of my old house on 11th and Clayton. The one that, almost exactly six months ago, still had my clothes and books and 3rd grade self portraits and my bike parked in the garage. No lights were on. The bushes by the front steps had been cut back, and the address block was moved upward. The wooden playground that my dad, Nicholas Bollen, and I had built when I was in 5th grade was still there, but the monkey bars were now growing vines and there was a hammock where the swings used to be. Abbie asked me if I remembered when I tried to do a backflip off the monkey bars and instead just fell straight on my head. Of course I didn't. But I remembered regaining consciousness and her standing over me yelling "That was awesome!" The old wooden bars probably weren't strong enough to support a daredevil child anymore.

And then there's all the trouble we got into that our parents still don't know about.

I told Abbie about my house in Guatemala. My dog, Kinak, whom a former volunteer had found in a trash can and adopted as her own. Kinak was passed down from one volunteer to the next, along with the house. My two roommates, Kayla and Patrick, who I could get into trouble with like I was ten years old again (no drawing on the walls, of course). How I could see the stars out my window when I was lying in bed. And how my clothes never dried because it was either rainy season, so it would begin to pour before I had time to take them off the line, or windy season, meaning that five minutes after I hung them up they would blow off again. There were always butter wrappers littering the backyard that Kinak had dug out of the trash can, and many of our pans were taco-shaped. We had to hold them on the stove so they didn't topple over.

When I think of homes that I've had, these three come to mind: Abbie's house on 13th and Adams, my house on 11th and Clayton, and Casa Bourbón in Residenciales. And of course there is my home that's not a house but a collection of cabins and dirty bathrooms where 6-15 year-olds pass their summers (talking about the JCC Ranch Camp, where I voluntarily spent ten of my summers and will return to this summer for my third year as a counselor). So what is a home to me? That's easy.

Home is where you eat food out of the fridge without needing to ask anyone. It's where you get into trouble with your friends. Where you can watch four episodes in a row of Grey's Anatomy. At the end of a long day at school or work, it's the reason you're excited to leave. Home is where you know all the secret tricks - like don't open the door too wide or else Kinak will bolt, and where Abbie's mom keeps the chocolate hidden. "Home is the place where," in the wise words of Robert Frost, "when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Here's to more adventures this spring. And many more homes.

Eliza and Abbie, age 3, pick their noses and watch four episodes
in a row of Grey's Anatomy.