My tiny apartment is located on the top floor of an old yet well-maintained building at the corner of Ghiberti and DaVinci streets. Ghiberti was named after the Italian Renaissance sculptor, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and DaVinci after none other than Leonardo Da Vinci. A couple of blocks over is Rodin street and then Kandinsky.
It has been unwaveringly fixed here in the working-class neighborhood of Surquillo for more years than I have been alive. Surquillo is one of the safer barrios in Lima, a city with a population of 11 million people. It borders Miraflores, Surco, and San Isidro, which are considered the most affluent barrios of Lima.
My humble building has five floors. There is a sense of security, having to navigate three different securely locked doors—from the front entrance to the third and fifth floor doors—before ever reaching my apartment. An intruder would have to go through many doors and people before ever getting to me.
The perimeter is also surrounded by live electrical wire along a ten-foot brick wall encircling the property. This seems to be the norm in Peru, yet I have always felt quite peaceful and safe in this neighborhood.
In my building, there are two older ladies, Carmen and her sister. Carmen is thin and frail, while the other sister is, well, let’s just say she doesn’t miss any meals. I think their mother may also live with them. They live on the second floor, and their niece, who is younger, lives in the apartment on the first floor. There is another woman on the third floor who mostly glares at me and never responds to my greetings, but she seems harmless. Another couple lives on the fourth floor. The ladies, especially, have been very kind and welcoming to me. I clearly sense this amidst their rapid South American Spanish, which I listen intently to in order to pick up a few sentences here and there.
Returning to the rhythm of my days in Kyoto, once the sun begins to set here around 6:20 p.m., everything goes silent. I say that for my quiet little building, not the neighborhood at large. My tiny apartment offers a Zen temple of silence and solitude in the early morning and golden evening hours, away from the surrounding urban jungle of traffic and chaos in Lima.
The diversity of birds in the park, which my apartment overlooks, begin announcing the day at about 4:30 a.m., then again at sunset on my terrace as I watch them return to the trees for their evening sleep.
My small apartment measures only 150 square feet, and yet the epic panorama of trees and nature across the entire park below my terrace is priceless. All of this for less than the car payment I was making just four years ago.
Most mornings, I begin the day like a Zen monk, sweeping the entire space, which has become covered in a layer of black soot in just 24 hours from the air quality of living amidst so many cars and people. After that, I silently enjoy a meditative cup of coffee with the birds, then begin my morning lessons with students in Japan who are ending their day on the other side of the world.
From my apartment, everything I need is within walking distance—markets, grocery stores, endless restaurants, my gym, cinemas. They know me by name now at the small neighborhood market on the corner, where I buy my bananas, juice, and water. If I don’t have cash on me, they write down my name to pay next time.
The energy of the world outside my door can be intense and overwhelming. Challenges await me every day in a city of 11 million people, almost all of them speaking rapid Spanish.
Yet in this tiny apartment, I have found a quiet and peaceful space to return to, 150 square feet of silence and solitude, hidden within the urban jungle of Lima.
Field Notes
Calmness is the rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals.
Calmness comes ever from within. It is the peace and restfulness of the depths of our nature. The fury of storm and of wind agitate only the surface of the sea; they can penetrate only two or three hundred feet, — below that is the calm, unruffled deep.
When the worries and cares of the day fret you, and begin to wear upon you, and you chafe under the friction, — be calm.
Stop, rest for a moment, and let calmness and peace assert themselves.
If you let these irritating outside influences get the better of you, you are confessing your inferiority to them, by permitting them to dominate you. Study the disturbing elements, each by itself, bring all the will power of your nature to bear upon them, and you will find that they will, one by one, melt into nothingness, like vapors fading before the sun.
The glow of calmness that will then pervade your mind, the tingling sensation of an inflow of new strength, may be to you the beginning of the revelation of the supreme calmness that is possible for you.
Then, in some great hour of your life, when you stand face to face with some awful trial, when the structure of your ambition and life-work crumbles in a moment, you will be brave.
You can then fold your arms calmly, look out undismayed and undaunted upon the ashes of your hope, upon the wreck of what you have faithfully built, and with brave heart and unfaltering voice you may say: "So let it be, — 1 will build again."
When man has developed the spirit of Calmness until it becomes so absolutely part of him that his very presence radiates it, he has made great progress in life.
-The Majesty of Calmness, William George Jordan, 1898
Published Travel Articles
Enjoy published articles from my last five years of travel.
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Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama , Ciudad Colón or Cusco, Peru.
On these pages, I share my observations of kindness and beauty from my adventures in the world and invite you to listen quietly for the call within you to explore the places that beckon your soul.
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