[The next installation in my ongoing series of "Guest Traveler" posts by people I've met along the way.]

Name: Nicole Bruskewitz

Hometown: Elgin, Illinois, USA

Where she is traveling: After studying for a semester in Oaxaca,Mexico, she has been meandering with a backpack gradually southward, she was last spotted in Bolivia, but even at the speed of the internet she is probably somewhere else by now.

Trip duration: Over a year and a half since she left home in Illinois.

Where our paths crossed: Iowa City, Iowa USA before she departed for Mexico in Jan 2006.

* * * *

I recently received an email updated she sent to her friends and family. She writes…

“In the Marseilles tarot deck the Fool is the archetypal wanderer, one foot off the cliff, eyes to the sky, knapsack in one hand.

It has been a long time since we spoke. Foolish, I know. But so I have been lately…

One of my feet has just touched Bolivian soil, the same that composes the cliff sides stacked with houses in the chilly heights of La Paz. I am here to see my best friend, the partner of youthful follies. Soon to be the accomplice in more. My other foot hangs off the edge of this continent, toes still reaching for the heat of central American terrain.

Four months I lived on the beach in Guatemala, volunteered in a conservation project hoping to save the sea turtles, or that small corner of the world. I lived with Brits and Spaniards. We lived amongst Guatemalan fisher folk, wood storks, sand fleas. Together we watched our plywood toilet blow over with the fierce north wind, the birth of endangered sea creatures, lightning on the sea. We roasted a thanksgiving chicken on a spit in our sand-floor living room, shared a new years bonfire, toasted mallows (a novelty there) with the children of the town. From the fishermen I learned to make nets, got tangled up with them, their stories. The one about the plane crash and the cocaine; the one about the dwarf who braided horses’ manes on “the little island of the dead” in the estuary; the one about the brotherfathercousinson gone north to work, the family divided.

The fool has just set off on his inner journey. He is uninhibited, unbothered by the opposing forces represented in the world and within him: the desire to be still, to move; to be loved, to be alone: to speak, to be silent; to make others happy and to please only himself.

My father came, shared a month of my reality. Together we jumped off a waterfall, went to a trance party, tipped a canoe, smoked cigars, climbed a volcano, befriended a dutch backpacker, got robbed on a school bus. We moved with the freedom I had enjoyed during my travels alone. This surprised me. I am in awe and admiration of him, of us, still.

He left and I retreated. For one month I lived on the shores of the magical Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. I bathed nude every morning in the water, the color of jade, the texture of the wind. There, where ex-pats have left 9-5 behind and devoted their lives to the arts of the New Age: yoga, reiki, meditation, massage, kinesology, astrology, holistic house painting, aura-friendly internet shop management, and the production of granola with ovens powered solely by energy channeled from The All– I commemorated the one year anniversary of my wanderings.

I realized it had been a year with my big blue pack, the same sandals, hundreds of found fruits and señora-sold vegetables, hundreds of buses and their strangers turned friends, hundreds of moments of loneliness and more than their sum of moments of passion for Now, the sight of my mind out the window with the those mountains, that sea, the sunset that filled me so full with the Beautiful, the Alive, the Wanderlust. When that moment of a year gone came I was finishing a month long retreat of yoga, meditation and metaphysics courses at Las Piramides spiritual center on the magical lake. After three weeks of stretching and breathing and deliberating on the possible secrets held in other dimensions–or maybe after a year of it–I went into a five day retreat of silence and fasting. The whole experience brought me to a little spirituality, a lot of gratitude. Instead of passing my anniversary it sort of passed me in the midst of thoughts of where I had come from, to whom I was grateful for all my good fortune, my good travels. All alone, meditating on the shores of that marvelous lake about the pacific shore, the sierra madre, the Mayan temple, the coffee plantations and corn fields—those places far from home, far from loving company—I thanked for good world, great home.

As a card, the Fool ultimately stands for a new start. When it turns up the Querent might be about to make a move, not just to a new home, but new job, new life. There’s more than just change, renewal, and a brand new beginning in the Fool, there’s also movement, a fresh, exciting new time.

For lack of another destination, curiosity, the habit of movement, maybe the same force that started this post graduate rambling…I’m still not sure…I hopped a bus for Nicaragua. I traveled with a Catalan pedagogue who dreams of a school without walls. We inspired each other. We slept for free on ferry decks, my tent, the cots of a former naturalistic clinic in the military barrio of Mangua. We ate gallo pinto, drank Flor de Caña rum, talked about autonomous governments and the Zapatistas in Mexico–the first theme that united us in our talks six months earlier when we met in the Yucatan before this reunion. . We were always talkin ’bout revolution (Nicaragua’s and ours). When he went back to Spain I was left to the libraries, beaches, the benches of the earthquake-fissured, solitary ” old Managua” with my Nica poetry books and the memory of our conversations. I stayed in Nicaragua for a month and a half exploring “social movements,” more NGOs, thinking of where I might help save the world, asking if it even need it. In the end I did a project taking pictures of school children, interviewing rural teachers for an article about a cultural exchange/environmental ed program on migratory birds that the island does with classes in the states. To complete it I walked forty km around a volcano, accompanied mostly by chattering magpie jays and howler monkeys…at least until I reached the houses of perfectly generous strangers, went fishing with a family of 15, and ate the most delicious rice and beans of my life, and stayed the night.

Further south still, Panama City had a fascinating gradient. I walked from the district of polished baroque, governmental facades, to the crumbling remnants of the first Spanish buildings (Havana Vieja style). Amongst the smell of stinking fish, the Negroes in their street puestos were selling anything from super glue to bird cages. I ate a snow cone which cost me one “cuater”, chatted with some old toothless men selling toilets. My presence provoked a benign shouting match between these guys, and before I wet myself laughing at them, I had to move on to the sidewalk markets, the streets filled with garbage in some barrio they told me I should leave. I eventually made it along the malecon to chat with a young indigenous boy selling artesian to pay his way in school. We admired the modern perfection of sky scrapers on the other extreme of the city, its clean windows, new cars parked in front, air of prosperity. It could have been any big city skyline in the states –except that it was not.

It was Panama City, full of people of myriad origins, all of whom are latino at heart. It seemed an apt place to be ending my stint in Central America; the mixture of chaos and development surrounded by “calor humano” is what I have lived in this in the past year, what this chica form the cold north has come to love…The Fool is likely have no idea where they’re going or what they’re going to do. But that doesn’t matter. For the Fool, the most important thing is to just go out and enjoy the world. To see what there is to see and delight in all of it.”

—-In an email to family and friends written by Nicole Bruskewitz, April 2007.