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.
