You don`t have to know someone for a long period of time in order for them to impact your life. Radiance and intensity outshine the social constructs of time. A single interaction can leave a mark on you for hours. You can fall in love within days. And sometimes a person can spark you in such a powerful way to impact you for the rest of your life. So meet Margot, the woman I have been honored to live with and learn from over the past two and a half weeks.
Margot is from the United States. I do not know her entire history, and I will not share all of the details that I do know. Margot, a woman in her fifties, has lived a long life filled with adventure and heartbreak, ecstacy and sorrow, enlightenment and confusion. From Mexican decent, she grew up in New Mexico with a family which, for numerous reasons, she has divorced herself from. She hitchiked accross the United States multiple times. She researched the impacts of breast feeding in Nicaragua. She went to graduate school in Stanford as a single mom. She worked in health clinics in New Mexico and Boston. She has lived in cooperative communities in Boston and California, and has traveled around the world. She has two daughters, but lost her oldest in a tragic car accident about ten years ago. She is brilliant and passionate, and will work your ass into the ground. She has made countless difficult decisions throughout her life, the toughest being her most recent move to Argentina, and does not pity those who feel obligated to maintain their current unhappy, unsustainable lifestyles. She has never stopped learning or growing, and will continue to do so even though she will stay on her farm in Argentina for the rest of her life.
Which brings us to today. Margot now lives in Tunuyan, Argentina. Even she claims this is a strange place for her to end up. She began Huerta de Vida three years ago with her daughter Vida who created this project as a place where people can come, realize that nature loves them, realize that they should love nature, and realize that it is possible to love themselves. The timing of the project coincided perfectly with Margot`s desire to leave the United States, a country she has come to despise for its foreign policy, its consumerism, its denial over its future collapse, and its population of sheeplike followerers. Her life here has not been easy. The winters are long and lonely, and every personal high and low is experienced in front of groups of strangers who have come to the garden to volunteer and learn. It is a life without electricity, running water, or heat. She works to grow her own food, and she shits in a bucket outside. And as she will tell anyone (although it is obvious already)...she has never been happier.
This superwoman never loses that spark in her eye. She lives with a fiery passion. A passion for laughter, as seen in the wrinkles next to her eyes and as heard in the booming sound of her constant laughs. A passion to teach, evident by her claim that the entrance fee of the WWOOF organization is yet another bureaucratic wall between people and their desire and need to learn to farm. A passion for love, expressed strongly through the way she looks at her daughter whom she describes as the most brilliant, intelligent, wise, hardworking young woman that has taught her so much about life. A passion for intelligence and wisdom, which means that she will be merciful, compassionate, and caring to anyone willing to live at peace with the universe. A passion for faith, which you can hear in the way she speaks of her relationship with the Divine, of her experience with angels, and of her distaste for the way any organized church claims to own God. A passion for connection, because she believes that the whole world is connected through webs of energy and we are therefor never alone. A passion for integrity, and she wishes more people would actually do what they say and say what they do. A passion to learn, which is obvious by the amount of wellused books she has in her small home in the middle of Argentina. A passion for life and for death, so rather than fear death she finds it a fascinating and beautiful continuation of life. And a passion for community, because we all have the responsability to live as citizens to each other and to bring out the best in those we meet.
Her ideas, her emotions, her zest doesn`t translate well into words. So you`re probably not as impacted as I. You would have to meet her. To see her deep eyes. To hear her true laughter. And to allow her to love you for you. Then it would click. Then you would feel blessed. And then you, too, would believe that everything happens for a reason. That I am here now for a reason. And that you are there now for a reason. And that if we have integrity and passion and love and humility and strength and courage, we will be at peace.
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