Luis Andres Henao
Radio commentary_rw
04-16-09



What is found now is found then.
And if you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death."
-Kabir

(These lines from Indian poet Kabir make me think of a common thread…)

There’s a common thread weaving together my native country, the people that have influenced me, the books I’ve read and the situations that I’ve encountered:

a constant celebration of life amidst death and chaos. I was born in Colombia and saw my parents put on black suits because another friend, another judge like them, had been murdered moments after signing an extradition order for a drug lord. There was nothing glamorous about the tragedyor about the more than 3 million refugees forced to leave their homes by guns and drugs.

But my parents lived. Time didn’t allow more than a day’s weeping. Amid the chaos, those who were forced into extreme situations like my parents could only jump into experience, forgetting their lease in the apartment of death. In many ways, it was a blessing being born into a country with a 50-year old war. We danced and conversed intensely, lived through music and the arts despite the horrors,. But above all we relied on humor.

I moved to Ecuador when I was 11. There I was inspired by my Geography and English teacher, Bill Oliver, a man with a Hemingway beard and green popping eyes, who only stopped laughing and mountain climbing moments before cancer took him. In life, he had encouraged me to write.

I found his spirit reading Whitman. Then I left for college in Europe. With time I began to think more about the importance of living fully, and in the words of Kabir, the Indian poet. jumping into that experience.

In Spain, I read Unamuno’s book On the Tragic Sense of Life. He resented the classification of men into the social contractor of but spoke of the real man, "of flesh and blood,” the one who is born and dies but is always “seen and heard.”

I saw that man in Butler Waugh, a nihilistic 80-year-old Miami college professor who laughed every time he told us how he walked at night because he had never seen a man die while standing up. In his literature class, we read Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech author that worked as a bellboy, a train attendant, and a brewer and who after a long full life remarked in one of his books: “It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.”

When my dad lost his job in Guatemala and we ran out of money, we couldn’t help but laugh. We were both unemployed. One day, he came into my room and told me that when he was a manager of the film academy back home in Colombia he had met several Cuban directors. He suggested that I should apply for a seminar. A month later, I dropped my bags in a government owned apartment at the film academy outside of Havana. In class, we were taught to edit film, but in the city, I learned that the movie (what do you mean by this?) was the street, the people, and culture.

I arrived in Boston six months later to fulfill a long dream of finishing my education. There I met Sina, a Persian friend who introduced me to the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz. Like Sina, the poets were drunk with love for this world, for a divine creator, and luckily this love for the world was contagious. Now, I read them out loud every morning.

I later moved to the British Virgin Islands on a reporting assignment. There, too, I found a way to pass on some of the energy I felt for life.

Years before I had been inspired by a documentary called Born into Brothels. , In that film,a photographer gives kids in a Calcutta slum disposable cameras so they can record their own visions of the world. Inspired by the photographer’s work, I decided to meet with 10 kids at a Youth Center in the island of Tortola We shared two cameras and took turns between taking pictures and playing cricket.

One day a lady called the office and asked if anyone wanted to learn how to dance flamenco. I knew nothing. But after some lessons I tapped the floor with the island’s community theater group.(Why did you do this? What did it teach you?)

It’s one more experience in a life I have tried to grab with both hands.

I am ready for others. Today I turn 28. And like my favorite poet Kadir, I will not think twice. I will also jump into experience while alive.