Had my mother not made the choice of moving to Yelapa, I would have lived this entire life without having been best friends with Yeni Chavarìn. Had my family not picked the little palapa up river behind my Tia Carmen’s cinder-block house, my memories would not consist of sneaking over to Esperansa Chavarìn’s house for a bowl of frijoles and fresh ground corn tortillas and maybe a cup of atole before dinner at our palapa.
This life: We make a small choice that directly influences and affects the friends we make, the food we eat, the places we walk barefoot and the laughter we hear…
I cannot help but wonder what kind of human I would be today, this second-to-last day of 2010, had Yeni and Esperansa Chavarìn been absent from my warm, fresh-ground-corn-tortilla-smelling memories. What would my life be like had my mother made a small choice of living somewhere else on this planet? Yeni and Esperansa would have lived their life and I would have lived mine. None of us aware of the other’s existence… My life would be so much less warm without them as part of my past…
Had my plane returning from Morocco in 2008 made it to JFK instead of plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean and landing haphazardly on the Azores Islands, I would have never known such Divine Islands stood like precious life-saving gems in middle of that enormous body of water. Had I not made it to Guinea in 2005, I would have never met Papis Fofana and learned 10 heart-wrenchingly gorgeous songs from him that I still share with my dance students today before he died at 27 years old only months after I left Guinea.
Had I not: my life would be so entirely different… There are so many of these possibilities…
And my point is: we make our choices. We are in control or our story. We get to decide if we want to live Heaven on Earth and walk our Waking Dream today. We get to decide who we want to hug and who we want to support and what we want to eat for dinner and what photo to post on our facebook profile.
And I also cannot help but wonder what awaits me as I make my choices today? I am so excited to find out!
All these little choices: they add up and they co-create along with our Breath this eclectic and savory bank of memories which gift us the power of influence for our choices and inspiration for our life.
Our choices do not define us as an Authentic Individuals, perhaps. Because we are naturally Who We Are, choice or no choice. But it seems to me that our small and big choices weave and color the beautiful patches in this dynamic quilt we call our Life.
Because I made the choice to move to Tucson 5 years ago, I am a part of this Tribe Called Love.
