Up all night to finish a rush job which precedes a fair amount of work in the coming months… involving literary figures in various visual verandas for a school library that was recently built.

This project does tie into the recent spate of robberies that my life underwent, in a richly ironic way that (I hope) portends a great upturn.  More on that later tho… as I have a printer to meet and paint to buy.  Plus there are new events I’d like to share around those robberies (one of the thieves was caught).

So, for now… I’ll leave you with a chivalrous man of delusion and his (mostly) trusty sidekick…

Where I have called home has been robbed three times in the last two years… once in Santuario and now twice in Mundo Nuevo, outside of Pereira.  Twice in less than two weeks, mind you.  This time they got my sewing machine, blender, Hector’s new pair of shoes, along with meat and chicken from the freezer, milk, dental floss, mouth wash… they went through everything.  The frustrating part is that they managed to sneak by my neighbor who had said he would keep an eye out.  The thieves put a piece of guadua (bamboo typical of Colombia) against the side of the house (that faces said neighbor) and used it to climb into an upstair window.  They took their time, terrorized my pets (who were unharmed, and that’s what really matters), ate my cookies and … went through everything.  The worst part, the absolute worst part, is that one of them left the gas open on the stove, downstairs.  There was a candle burning upstairs.  If it weren’t for the huecos (holes) that kept the house ventilated, then I would have had another home burned down.  That is the worst part, that these people wanted so badly to cause us harm.

It was a process to get the police to the house, and a longer process just to get a crew to the house to dust for fingerprints.  I called the police at 2:30 in the afternoon; the ‘science crew’ showed up after 11 pm.  The police here… have been no help.  Is that common round the world?  That our police don’t do much good in situations like these?  Seems to be so.

No fingerprints were viable – seems as though the thieves rubbed some sort of substance on their hands.

The next day I packed.  The day after that we moved, with help from a moving company that wrecked some of our stuff and then wanted full payment because they come so highly recommended.  Bairon’s Moving Company  of Pereira, Risaralda – I do not recommend.  There, now it’s online.

Last night was the first decent sleep I’ve had since the robbery.  We have a new home in a safe area (24 hour watchmen on every block!) that has six parks and lots of little shops and restaurants to enjoy.  I’m loving it so far… along with a bigger house that actually has a… water heater!!!!!

Getting anywhere in Colombia seems to be a continual process.  From travel to getting insurance to cover what ails.  Me being from the U.S. and how we prize efficiency there… I never realized what I was taking for granted.  I never realized the trust that was mostly inherent in every-day American life.  Just the trust to walk down the street safely without being marked as a potential target and to not come home to a house robbed.  Sure, I’ve been in bad areas and even lived in some (like the time my new roommates in a house on the edge of the Four Points district of Denver surprised me one day by deciding to erect a meth lab in our kitchen – yes I moved), but I’ve never been somewhere that required such vigilance.  Maybe that’s the lesson, and that’s why I am here.  I don’t know.

I’ve had a few fights with God over all this.  I mean, I meditate, I do yoga, I’m reaching for deeper and higher and truth and light… doesn’t that count for something?  My pride thinks so… my mind thinks so.  Funny that the shit hit the fan like this after I began a steady meditation and prosperity practice.  I hear that happens at times, starting in a new direction can bring a lot of stuff to the surface in surprising ways.

I won’t pretend to understand it all.  Honestly, I keep coming back to faith that things will work out for the best and that is what all this is for anyway… the absolute best.  Day by day it seems to be so… I even had a solid half-hour today where I felt a real compassion and forgiveness for those that robbed my things.  I do miss sewing, and I do miss my computer… those were some pretty things.

I still choose the light.  I may get mad and even despair, but those moments doesn’t last long (this time, a few days).  Indeed, those dark feelings seem to hang about less and less.  I refuse to live in fear.  Funny that it took coming to a place as wild as Colombia (I hear there are many places more intense in the world, such as India or Ecuador) to get me to come to this place.  I refuse to live in fear, I absolutely refuse it.

That doesn’t mean I won’t keep my eyes open, though, especially now that I have an even better idea of what to look out for.  Loud on the inside – bright all around, dammit.

However, we do have eyes and ears at the local black market, where ladrones (thieves) take their stolen goods to get rid of them.  That is one of the nice things about marrying a Colombian and living here: the family connections.  It is so different here how one’s family is the primary source of a social life as well as resources for getting ahead in life.  Second and third cousins, great uncles and aunts, everybody is in the mix and everybody matters. You never know which connection will lead to success, like with moving.  We need a cosigner on the house we are looking to rent who is a property owner (not to mention five references for signer and co-signer, a letter from place of employment stating how much is earned, photocopies of state identification and the rental contract notarized).  It seems a bit much to me, as a former landlord and long-time renter in the U.S.  I find it to be a bit standing in the way of good business… especially since the property owner who co-signs can’t owe any money (as in a mortgage) on the property he/she owns.  That’s the part that gets me… and where lies the challenge (lots of family has property, yet have a mortgage).  If someone is looking to rent, odds on they don’t have their own fully-paid-for property on the side.  I get where these rental companies are coming from though… thievery and fraud were so common in the years of violence that are still way too fresh for most people, so they are erring on the side of paranoia… I mean, the woman at the rental company talks to you through floor to ceiling bars – you can’t actually enter the business.   It is common here, bars covering the windows and many of the storefronts.  And how I can bitch about that when I just got robbed?

Which isn’t the first time someone has tried to rip me off.  Awhile back in Medellin a guy jumped me and tried to take my back-pack.  He said he would kill me if I didn’t let go (in Spanish).  Hector punched him in the face and he took off, I gave chase but didn’t catch him as he jumped on a moving motorcycle driven by his buddy.  I still have dreams of catching the guy and beating him up (ahh, rage).

The downsides… with just a laptop between us and Hector needing it most of the time for work, I am a lot less plugged in.  This actually turns into a big part of the upsides.  I’ll get to them.  The thief(ves) stole my cameras.  That means not posting any of my new work, like what I’m doing in my sewing classes, with yoga, painting, etc.  All the info on that computer: new music and artwork and photos, that is the part that really bums me out.  I’ve been kind of hard, emotionally, about the whole thing, but yesterday I finally broke down and a few tears made their way out of my eyes.  I hate that someone broke into my home and tried to hurt me.  I cried on a bus yesterday.  No sobbing, no (a gringo sobbing on a bus just will not do).  After a week I am now letting it out, how disappointed and frustrated I am by it all.

Yet, with every storm there does come the sun.  I am a lot less plugged in.  Less time spent watching movies or browsing the internet and wasting time looking at what celebrities wore.  Less time spent in front of a screen, and instead in the last week I’ve spent more time doing yoga, meditating, sewing and painting.  Not to mention having some great conversations with my husband.  Honestly, when I consider these things, I feel like the thief did me a favour.  A big huge favour.  I’m happier without my computer-lifestyle in a lot of ways.  I can’t deny that, and in the long run maybe (ok, probably) that is what is most important.  My pride isn’t thrilled with all these developments, but my soul… happier.

A mixed bag.  I do want my computer back, definitely, and all the information it contained.  That part hurts.  What doesn’t is a life more fully lived, that part feels so light.  Maybe, right now, what it comes down to is which of those parts I dwell on.  The light or the hurt.

It’s a no-brainer.  I choose the light.

Our house was broken into this past Sunday evening.  They stole our new I-Mac.  Came right into the house, didn’t bother to really even look around it seems, and took everything on the computer desk.  Needless to say internet access isn’t as accessible as it was last week.

We might get it all back… we are looking into the black market scene here to see if it turns up.  And of course I have been using my energies to call on Higher Powers for help.  Is it bad of me to be undergoing a crisis of faith after months of  challenges?  I find out tomorrow about the electronics, the faith I don’t know when (but I’m going to keep trying)…

You know, this is a crazy place.  It is.  Driving here is crazy.  Living here as a foreigner is crazy.  I end up sticking out and being a target…

We’ve come to the conclusion that we were being targeted for awhile, and it is quite likely that the thieves were spying on us beforehand.  That is an unsettling feeling, isn’t it?  Luckily our dog, the cat; we are all ok.  That is what matters, and even if we don’t get our fancy new computer back, I know that what is important and truly valuable is right where it should be, safe and sound.  Or at least as safe and sound as can be managed here in this third world country.

I am nervous here.  There is an element of chaos in everyday life that I have never known before.  How insulated we are in our nice United States neighborhoods.  Most of us never see extreme poverty unless it is on city streets asking for cash; it is so easy to keep on walking.  Here it is huffing glue (freaks me out every time I see it) while I walk into a grocery store, it is exposing intense looking wounds and severed limbs begging for change, trying to wash your car windows at any busy intersection, eyeing you as you walk down a city street because a). you are white, a gringo, hence a foreigner and b). must have some of those first world riches on you.

Driving here is/has been one of the most non-stop stressful experiences… people here do not follow any traffic laws (and there are some) and it is pretty much every man for himself.  That is the vibe you get on city streets too, every man for himself.  It can be really really hard to be around… I wonder how all this is changing me.

Now I ask myself how to live without fear and anxiety in a land that kind of incites it.  How do I find calm here?  How do I know peace here?  Is it possible?  I think so.  Not sure how, at the moment.

Me?  Been painting a bit, sewing more than that, cleaning some and walking a lot.  So much walking over city streets and country roads that my legs have been hella sore for days and days.  Yoga is my salvation for these tired legs; a slow dive into the SRF Lessons on meditation (and lots of other things) a salvation for everything else, as things seem to be changing.  Things being my health, my attitude, my capacity, my interests, my drive, my relationships.

I want to change things up around here, too.  Why I blog now isn’t why I started this blog, which was to get my art out there, to push myself to keep working, and document the process of becoming successful, what I called ‘eagle.’

I don’t feel like documenting it anymore, maybe… I’m there.  I’m drawn more and more toward learning new things.  There is space now in my heart, head and soul and I’d like to give way to an abundance I’ve never known before… just hinted upon.

Painting.  Letting go of all that trying to ‘impress the right people’ shit.  I found the ‘right people’ to be poor judges of what makes art good art and usually very insecure in their positions of authority.  Letting that go, I’ve begun to remember why I liked painting in the first place.  I’ve found room to play, as well as explore the idea of painting as a resource to heal.  I’d gotten stiff in my visages over the years, trying so hard to find a way to ‘make it happen.’  A few weeks ago…

I did some research concerning sexual abuse.  Most cases aren’t reported.  It is hard to prove, especially if it happened in childhood.  If things happened as a very young child, memories tend to come back as ‘snap-shots’, and can be confusing.  The process of ‘letting it go’ is a lot different than how most people confuse letting the past go with burying it all (pushing it down, not dealing with it, not addressing feelings that are so difficult to talk about, like shame, guilt, rage, terror).  I had been told by more than one person (friends, family… people I had tremendous love for and thought I could trust; sadly these type of responses are common) to ‘let it go’… and what they meant was to ignore it and bury it so they didn’t have to deal with their own emotions, or deal with me dealing.  This stuff takes time and some effort to get through.  There is so much information out there on the web on all this.  One website I found helpful was this one.  Although not as slick as other web sites, the author came across as genuine and she got me to pick up a brush and face this stuff in a way I hadn’t in a long time.  I used to do so intuitively – art therapy – nowadays I have a clearer grasp of my process.

I told my family a few years ago.  They didn’t believe me then, and it hurt.  So I wrote a letter which caused all kinds of drama; I got extremely specific as to why I felt certain about what happened.  They still don’t believe me, won’t talk about it, they believe I was duped and hypnotized into thinking it all happened.  I used to feel judged as some sort of weak, oversensitive guy who just couldn’t get a grasp on life.  The funny thing is, as I’ve come to ‘get a grasp’ on what happened, that has led a much more stable, satisfying life.  I didn’t have the words at the time to articulate just how deeply those betrayals hurt.  Now I do.  Disempowering.  Enraging.  Emotionally overwhelming.  I better understand the source of those betrayals too, and can better ‘let go of it’ (for real).  It wasn’t really about me; like a horse to water… can’t be made to drink.  Like I said, these type of responses are in no way uncommon, and can cause a whole other sort of trauma to deal with, on top of what already happened.  I’m happy to say that lately, it hurts a lot less.

I’ve been painting over the rage…

…and it feels good.  Layer by layer, peeling that onion back over the course of twenty years to find the truth… I began my search for answers at 19; a wild ride and some alarming discoveries along the way,                                                                   to be sure.  Nowadays, I want to learn new things and grow; I have a much better grasp of who I am.  Of course there is keeping the house straight and my amazing husband fed and loved.  The dog walked.  The cat healthy.  A deeper yoga practice – pushing myself physically, mentally, spiritually.  There is still a drive for success; I haven’t given up on the outcome however the definition of success is undergoing a renovation.

I liked this website, too.  A common theme on many of these websites is to trust yourself.  That ideal has been a steady lesson in my life; every time I do take the leap I am rewarded with more strength and peace of mind.  Experts say if ‘you think something happened,’ then it probably did.  It was nice to read these trained professionals talk about the unlikeliness that anyone would want to make any of this stuff up, which for the past few years I was accused of regularly.  It was great to feel like all this should be taken seriously, not lightly, not as a fabrication.  Even websites that warn of the proliferation of false memories instruct people to take all accusations seriously.  I’ve learned a lot lately how people will avoid a confrontation by disempowering the person who wants to deal with the problem.

Ah well.

It’s nice to be painting again without holding on to a specific outcome.  It is really nice to see my body healing from severe metal poisoning and some bad medical treatments I received as a kid (if it wasn’t so costly and difficult to sue over what happened, man I would).  It’s nice to learn how to let go of things in a way that means ‘healing’ vs. ‘avoiding.’  Lots of things are nice nowadays, even when they don’t seem to be so.  I got a ticket the other day from the transit police because I had tinting on the windows of my car.  The previous owner told me (and I asked) that the tinting wouldn’t be a problem.  Lo and behold… it was.  So I went to a traffic class to reduce the cost of the ticket (by half) and found that there are some great traffic laws in place here.  Not that everyone follows them, but at least now I know the law and have a better understanding of how to access it.  Driving here in Colombia has been an adventure in what I thought was a lawless land, so to speak.  Glad to know that driving here is changing; Colombian drivers have been one of my greatest sources of agitation and angst of late.  There are gonna be some unhappy crazy drivers  once they get a smack down from their traffic cops.  Like in five years.  Aaaand we come back to the title of this entry: ‘it is a process.’

I started this blog as a means to push myself to keep creating; it has become a vehicle that has helped me in exercising my voice and believing in how I experience the world.

PGE has gone in so many directions, from art gallery to confessional, comic strip to photo journal, documenting interests to documenting the process of (re)creating a life in a very foreign country.

I’m a bit at a loss at the moment of where to go next.  Some of my passions have changed, or rather, refined themselves in the prior doing.  I’m not ready yet to show ‘the latest’, mainly because there isn’t a lot to show besides projects in various states of beginning; I don’t feel as pressured as I once did.  How fitting, because lately I feel like I’m getting a new lease on life.  Along with making steady progress in the area of health after having been pretty sick the last ten years, I’ve also begun meditating regularly.  These progressions have engendered a clarity leading me to let go of ideas doing no good sitting up in my attic.  Seems to be having an effect on the life around me and how I’m living it.  Hurrah for that.  Hurrah for Love.

So I guess I’ll leave it there for now.  We’ll all see what comes next!

Today was much much bigger fare…

I don’t know what these birds are called.  I’ve only caught glimpses twice before during my two and half years in Colombia.  Their spotted tails fan out during flight…

This gal was curious… definitely eyeing me as I did her.  I was surprised that I had the time to grab my camera and snap a few photos.  I moved slowly and smoothly.  It wasn’t until I got up out of my seat for a different angle that she decided to fly off.

… do you ever feel that way, when a wild animal takes an interest in you and the two of you share your attention on each other that there is something to it?  For me those experiences eclipse the day to day illusion with a hint that there is so much more to know.  That, or the animals here are as fascinated as the people by a lily-white gringo.  Hm.

With the onset of a new school year (in Colombia, the school year starts in January, after a very long Christmas break), Hec had to decorate his classroom.  He called on me to see what I could do with the white walls, and after tossing a few ideas around I decided to play with my new favorite font, Sick Capitol Vice (and a couple of others), and the school’s ‘Characteristics of an International Bi-lingual Student,’ along with a couple choice quotations…

I’d never done something like this… it was a little slow-going at first and I wasn’t sure if I was pleased with the results.  By the third day working (spread over a couple of weeks so as not to interfere with classes) I was getting the hang of it – the letters were smoother and easier to lay out…

I had this other idea floating around in my head.  The last day of work and with only an hour left, I decided to go for it.  The dimensions weren’t perfect upon completion, but I like it anyway and was happy that I got her down on the wall in a relatively short amount of time.  I wanted the kids to have something a little more tangible and spirited than just floating words… according to me, of course.  Why wouldn’t an angel sport a hoody?  They are so comfy…