ya esta?

there's a last time for everything

So it was about that time when we stopped and looked around at the newly-greened grass and jagged rocks and golden-hour tinted orange-brown buildings and wondered why we traveled so much during the semester.  Why did we ever want to be anywhere but right here?

"I don't know," my friend said, trying to justify our restless behavior. "I talked to people who didn't travel as much as we did, and they said that Toledo got kind of boring.  I guess you just run out of things to do here."

We half-smiled at the concept and realized right then, during our last week of calling this place home, that it really, truly, dearly had been home.  In every sense of the word. 

Lately, I've been obsessed with the aspect of the Eucharist being exactly what it is because it's ordinary. Boring. Bread and wine.  And I've been trying to find that--that same supernatural essence--in everything else I call ordinary.  This semester it's been difficult.  Nothing that has happened this semester deserves the title "ordinary."  It was that concept, that idea of Toledo being boring and routine with nothing really to do that made me realize I had picked the perfect place to spend the past three and a half months without even knowing what I was choosing.  I guess it just kind of found me.

Ordinarily, there was a crazy man who rolled his own cigarettes and sang to himself outside the Church beside my school.
Ordinarily, there was an alarm hidden somewhere inside my closet that rang every night at 11:30pm.
Ordinarily, there was an old man who sat with me as I waited for my English student right as the sun set on Monday evenings and never smiled back.
Ordinarily, there was a faceless, rough-voiced man who frequented the bar outside my bedroom window.

Those little, neutral, ordinary things that made Toledo less of a vacation and more of a home.  There weren't bad, nor were they necessarily good, but they feel the same way a really old scar feels, slightly raised and comfortable and part of you.  And I'm sad to let them go. 

I'm thankful to have studied in a place where there's less to do.  It left me with more room to just be.  And that's all anyone really wants, anyway. 

Fro-yo after Fi-lo

Here in Spain, it is always sunny. 

So sunny that my friend from Madrid doesn't own an umbrella and doesn't really know how to work one.

So sunny that my philosophy professor comes into the classroom wearing sunglasses and complaining that he wouldn't mind a more subtle, a more gentle cloudy day every once in a while.

So sunny that I feel an accute dissonance when listening to Christmas songs that summon down the snow.

So sunny that here in Spain, on days where I choose to sleep with my heavy shutters open, I am woken abruptly by the sunrise. 

After nights where I have a good long chat with a friend and laugh a little with my host family over dinner and finish reading the poetry of Fray Luis and say my Night Prayer and fall asleep early

The sun rises

After nights where I try my hardest to do my homework, but simply can't get anything done becuase I only wish I were somewhere else, with someone else

The sun rises

After nights where I can't really tell you what happened because I don't really remember, and all I know is that I feel guilty and wish the night had gone differently

The sun rises

Here in Spain, it is always, always sunny, and no one deserves it.

And that is the Sacred.