Thanks be to God by the end of that long week I was able to find a live-in caregiver position with a family whose mom/grandma needs mobility assistance and all kinds of other support, which was such an incredible chance given my funky schedule, lack of experience, and the amount of caregivers searching for jobs on Care.com! I spent the following week in an airbnb in North Miami prior to moving in with the family. Here is a journal excerpt from that time:
June 22, 2023: Hello on a Thursday from the dining table at my tiny Airbnb in North Miami / Biscayne Park ?
I am so grateful this little place was available. My bedroom is a tiny, windowless closet, but the space is perfect – I am alone – they gave me a bike – there is a lovely window in the kitchen/dining space looking out to green – and it was so affordable. I am looking forward to moving in with the family – these days I am experiencing my journey as sweet cherishing of the present mixed with an overwhelming eagerness for the future!
My online Haitian Creole class started three days ago. I am enjoying it – the professor is so funny and precious, and I am amazed that I can understand essentially everything that he is lecturing us about! And I really enjoyed last night’s homework – studying the song Bon Bagay by Beethova Obas. In it, Beethova sings about how the people of Haiti need to free themselves of the yoke of foreign powers and transform their own situation – that they have what they need to create a better future for their children.
One month later – looking back over this time!
July 25, 2023: This chapter of the journey has been challenging because I am not particularly involved in anything that I love or that deeply interests me – my extended stay in South Florida (while a delightful and exciting vacation!), has been a time to focus on the 4-week Haitian Creole class that I took (wow! it came and went fast!) and gather the financial resources to continue onto Mexico and Central America. So lots of library stops, random site seeing, and reading different books in my downtime (I highly recommend Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe, and the Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins by Mark & Louise Zwick). I just finished the Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution (Don’t tell my Cuban friends!).
I am also being challenged in this work, mostly because it involves waking up multiple times in the middle of the night to accompany Miss S to the bathroom. The reading helps me stay mentally grounded along with lots of podcasts (The Daily & Today Explained as well as the newly discovered Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel) and (thanks Professor Leger!) Haitian music.
Another gift of this past month and a half in Miami has been the deepening of one of my friendships with a Cuban family I met in previous work in San Diego. My friend is a musician and so I have been able to go to some amazing live music (yay dancing!) and have spent quality time with his parents and extended family too. Lots of rum, homemade food, and politics (ha ha…). I am so grateful for this friendship which has offered me moments of community, laughter, ease, and closeness amidst this time of being relatively isolated and disconnected in my living/work space.
One other activity I have been involved in this past month is my participation in intense fitness classes! In the interest of my mental and physical health and my sleep, I got a one-month membership at a studio that offers yoga classes, cycling, and pilates (among other activities that are much too advanced for me). Every single class totally kicks my butt – in fact three times they left me so sore / blistered that I had to take a couple days off! What I am especially grateful for is the chance to get really connected to my body, to pray through physical challenge, to stretch myself in a way I have not done in a very long time (or ever?). The mental strength that is required to push oneself when the body wants to give up (picture doing sprints or holding a painful plank!) is something I almost never tap into, and I have found it extremely profound and euphoric to enter into that struggle.
In case you are interested, here is a little glimpse into my mind as I motivate myself during the cycling sprints when my body wants to quit. I made the discovery that even intense physical challenge can be a prayer! The music is so loud that I can barely hear the instructor, who is yelling. The lights are dimmed with a blue glow coming from the floor. I am peddling as fast as I possibly can and in closing my eyes, it feels like I am going fast enough to run around the world. To push through the pain, I imagine Super Hero Brinkley – I run (or bike?) all around the world, to all the war-torn places, dragging an enormous mesh net behind me that somehow collects all of the guns and all of the bombs and all of the weapons of destruction. My body wants to quit, and I say keep going. I run through Haiti, through Israel and Palestine, through Ukraine, through the United States, through Mexico. I keep running and collecting all the manmade objects that are meant to kill humans. To keep myself from quitting, I imagine myself running and spreading energy of healing, of peacemaking, of fraternity to every corner of the earth, and I am praying and praying and praying for a new dawn. Then the instructor says “annnnnd slow it down” and I almost fall off the bike as I try to slow down my legs which have totally run away from me.
Thoughts that I have after exercising in a studio 3 times: what if all the bodybuilders and intense physical trainers and everyday gym goers channeled all their energy and strength into uplifting our brothers and sisters in crisis and nonviolent peacebuilding, what a world we could live in!
My time in Florida has been totally different than the rest of my pilgrimage, funky and challenging and confusing and new, crawling with lizards and lush with a diverse abundance of tropical flora. It is truly beautiful here, even when the thunder and lightning and rain roll in and the humid heat crawls under my clothes and the mosquitos bite at my ankles. I am departing in two weeks (with my beloved Antonio! eeeeep!!) to head back west, full of gratitude and perspective and new discoveries, ready to move into the final chapter of my Pilgrimage in Mexico & Central America… 🙂
Hopefully the people of Florida can liberate themselves from the yoke of tyrannical leadership and transform their society with all of the potential it has soon!!