It has been a very long time since I posted in HeartsforMexico
I have wondered if it was time to give up the dream of my land of promise, and go on to give my heart totally over to my next adventure. Indeed many opportunities and responsibilities have replaced our yearly treks to Oaxaca, including earning my Bachelor Science Nursing degree, dedicating myself to being a grandma and also exploring new means of artistic expression by getting my hands in clay and sitting at a potter's wheel.
Still I am afraid I identify myself as a nurse, and more specifically a nurse who longs to return to Mexico.
I have recently started a new nursing position that gives me flexibility not only in my hours and days of work, but also in what I do, sometimes admissions, sometimes floor work, sometimes floor supervisor.
I continue to enjoy and interact with our grandchildren. I feel that they present a major responsibility to guide and opportunity to establish important relationships.
Eddie enjoys retirement, being a grandpa and whatever he finds interesting to do, which these days is creating things, wooden things, for our shop and property, and running our Riverclay Studio.
My most recent adventure was accompanying my father on a river cruise on the Danube, preceded by some time in Prague, Czech Republic, then from Linz, Austria to Budapest, Hungary. It was an amazing trip. It was during that trip I found myself longing to return to my writing, and so to this blog.
The John Lennon Wall
So there I was, on a tour that would soon take me into the lives of those who lived behind the iron curtain, traveling with my 81 year old father, and many others of his generation, when I walked down yet another cobblestone street, round a corner, and came face to face with a powerful symbol of my own generation.
Nothing on my latest European adventure impacted me as much as this wall. I knew nothing of its existence until I was standing there with my mouth just slightly open in stunned silence. Sure the Beatles still have the most important place in my musical past, but this goes far deeper than the days of flower power, hippies and (for me) the Jesus Movement.
This took me back to the days of bomb raid drills in school, while other children across the planet were starting to experience the oppression of a terrible totalitarian regimen. And as we both grew in the shadow of the Cold War, we sought self expression. I am afraid that I cannot compare the grievances of my adolescent peers to those who bravely painted their protests on this wall and by doing so, truly took their lives in their hands to do so.
But as I gazed at this wall, I knew that we had shared a solidarity with our brothers and sisters behind the iron curtain, just as we shared in the sense of victory and the joy as we watched the Berlin Wall fall, and then the oppressors of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and the rest fall away.
All this from a simple ever-changing beautiful wall.
