07 March 2014

3 for $10 (but not till Friday)

I hate to wait.

I'd finally reached the register after navigating last Sunday evening's Whole Foods clusterf*%$ and the kind-faced Ethiopian cashier was about to ring up my three bunches of hot-pink-Springtime-please-come-quick tulips -- and then,

"You know the 3 for $10 deal is on Friday, right?"

My inward groan was plastered on my face and I mumbled something about fine print and trickery and shoved my dream of tulips into a closet that seemed an eternity away: the weekend.

And every day since, I've wanted the tulips. But I haven't gotten them. Because it hasn't yet been Friday.

But today is Friday. 
And I woke up thinking about the tulips.
Today is the tulip day.

And it seems (from today's vantage point) that the old ESPERANZA is the truest of true. The hoping and waiting entangled together and nearly killing us with anticipation, but in the end:


01 August 2013

Eating at Chili's in Cairo

Six days after I turned 14, Christmas came. That one I remember well because it felt a little rotten. 28-year-old me wants to tell 14-year-old me that that Christmas itself was pretty normal, and it was ME who was rotten, but we all are pouty for a bit, and that was my bit.

The world became decidedly less rotten a few days after Christmas, though: my parents called me into their room late at night (looking back, it was probably 9p) and handed me Microsoft Publisher's finest -- a scroll printed on parchment in HEIROGLYPHICS for me to decode. If you knew me at the time, you knew that my life's goal was to become a badass archeologist with a Jeep and two Rottweilers and a closet full of khaki, so (unlike at Christmas) my parents were seriously speaking my language. 

It was an invitation on a trip, but really, it was an invitation to let the world become small.

I stepped through that first customs booth in the Cairo airport like I have stepped through many since, to find that on the other side was a world I didn't know yet. One that, if I was able to see beneath and beyond and between the cracks, would teach me to see more clearly in the one that I did know.

Our trip to Cairo blew my mind. We climbed minarets, rode the obligatory pyramid camels, rollerbladed through Heliopolis and drank Turkish coffee. I was angered and inspired and more than anything: completely amazed.

On our last day in Cairo, we ate at Chili's.

25-year-old Hanna had strong opinions about what this implied, the Westernization and degradation of culture and yada yada yada, but present-day me loves that we did it. We ordered Southwestern Eggrolls and sat in booths that could have been in Austin or Ashburn or Boerne or Burke, under framed photos of Texas Chili Cookoffs filled with '80s hair and cutoff jeans. Beside us were hookah-smokers and hijab-wearers, and we flipped coasters off the table and just laughed and laughed at the irony of it all.

Looking back, it's so obvious: every new place we go is just a backdrop, a setting to experience life in. To de-mystify the universe and thus actually taste it, to glorify the little things and then realize they're the truest ones -- these are some of the ways to shrink the world smaller. 

People mean different things when they say the world is small, but to me, it means there's enough room for as much as we can each let in. The more we let in, the smaller it gets, but the richer it tastes. Friends laugh and cry around tables and living rooms and sidewalk cafés in any city (and I feel lucky to have laughed and cried in some killer cities), and when memories are attached to a million spots, the world (and it's customs halls) becomes your backyard. And you can't help but see your old normal with new eyes.

So, thanks, Mom and Dad, for a lousy 14-year-old Christmas that ended in you taking me to Chili's. In Cairo. Because to me, now every Chili's is sweaty, beautiful Cairo -- and every unknown place is a laugh-filled dinner waiting to be unlocked.

21 March 2013

A Prayer before the Prayer Breakfast

Calm and peace and wide-eyed quiet: now at rest before the wildness comes. I love the silence and love the wildness. I love them both with equal difference. The buzz and the lull and the laughter that tethers both. 

- To be calm in the wildness and wild-spirited even in the calm. This is the rub and the goal and the quest. 

- This week, to be settled at soul even in the swirling madness. All weeks, to be adventurous of spirit even in the daily monotony. 


- To experience the days with an honest soul, stripped of expectation and iced with joy. 


- To greet new faces as old friends and old friends as those about whom I still have much to know. 


- To leave name dropping and mental hopping at the door and to know all the times as just what they are. 


- To be present and imaginative and always knowing reality and yet always dreaming of the more and the most. 


- To be gentle with the annoying and patient with the really-annoying and admitting that everyone is always experiencing something. 


- To sit with confidence at the table before me and be aware of the others to invite to join me there. 


- To, with simplest simplicity, lift the name of Jesus up, with all belief in his power to draw the people to his own heart.