Carrying Light Together

by | Dec 12, 2025 | Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Hagiography, Mapping, Potpourri, The CAMINANTE Project

St. Lucia Day has always felt like a soft interruption in December—a small lantern held up against the long night. But this year, I find myself thinking about the day not just as a celebration of light, but as an invitation to rethink the structures that shape the darkness.

The stories of Lucia are full of quiet defiance: choosing generosity over scarcity, service over status, courage over compliance. They aren’t just moral tales; they hint at the possibility that ordinary people can resist the logic of systems that normalize exhaustion, inequity, and the dimming of our collective imagination.

If anything, the world doesn’t lack light—it lacks the conditions that allow light to travel. We live within arrangements that reward speed, extraction, and individualism, while sidelining care, rest, and interdependence. Yet on December 13, this feast day quietly insists that illumination is not a solitary act. Lucia doesn’t walk alone; the procession follows. The light moves because many carry it.

I’m trying to sit with that truth: that the worlds we inhabit are neither inevitable nor fixed. They are constructed—often without our consent, but never beyond our ability to reshape. Celebrations like today remind me that imagining alternatives is not naïve; it’s necessary. The future is not something delivered to us from on high. It’s something we co-create, choice by choice, gesture by gesture.

So I’m marking St. Lucia Day with a kind of hopeful scrutiny. What are the systems that dim our capacity to care for each other? Where can we intervene with a small, steady light? And what happens when many of us decide that the light we carry is not for ornament, but for orientation—toward a world that honors dignity, gentleness, and shared responsibility?

And maybe there’s something grounding in marking this together, quietly, across time zones and borders. So on December 13, I invite you to light a candle at 9 p.m. local time (wherever you are)—not as a symbolic fix, not as a performance, but as a reminder that illumination grows in community. A reminder that even scattered across the globe, our small flames can echo one another.

Imagine what could be and act—however modestly—in alignment with that vision. Light does not banish the night, but it helps us walk together toward a dawn of our own making. That feels like a celebration worth returning to every year.

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St. Francis of Assisi and the Making of a Global Citizen

by | Oct 2, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Hagiography, Pedagogy

On October 4, communities around the world celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. He is often remembered as the gentle friar who preached to birds, wrote songs to Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and lived with radical simplicity. But St. Francis’s legacy reaches far beyond the pastoral images. His life embodies values and practices that we might today call the marks of a “global citizen.”

At a time when education is grappling with how to prepare young people for a fractured, interdependent world, Francis offers a surprisingly relevant guide.

A Vision of Interconnection

Francis saw the world as woven together in kinship. He sang to the sun and moon as siblings, called fire and water his companions, and treated all creation as family. In a modern context, this worldview resists the fragmentation that divides people from nature, and one community from another. It reminds us that global citizenship begins with the ability to see connections: between our choices and distant consequences, between our communities and the fate of the planet. To live as a global citizen is to recognize that “my life is bound up with yours.”

Empathy Across Boundaries

Francis’s embrace of the poor and the outcast was not charity in the conventional sense. He chose solidarity, stepping down from privilege to walk alongside those pushed to the margins. In doing so, he modeled a form of citizenship that is not defined by status or wealth, but by shared humanity. Today, when societies wrestle with inequality, migration, and exclusion, Francis’s witness speaks urgently: the global citizen is one who crosses boundaries of fear or indifference to stand with others.

Dialogue in a Time of Division

Perhaps the most radical moment of Francis’s life came in 1219, during the Crusades. While armies clashed, he traveled unarmed to meet with Sultan al-Kamil in Egypt. The meeting did not end the war, but it created space for dialogue where violence reigned. This act of courage reveals another mark of global citizenship: the willingness to enter into dialogue across difference, to risk encounter rather than retreat into hostility. In an age of polarization, Francis’s example calls us to imagine citizenship not as allegiance to one side, but as a responsibility to seek understanding across divides.

Living Simply in a Complex World

Francis’s radical poverty is often misunderstood as mere asceticism. But at its core was a conviction that endless consumption and the pursuit of wealth distort human community and devastate creation. His choice to live simply speaks directly to today’s crises of climate change and overconsumption. To live as a global citizen today is not to replicate Francis’s austerity, but to embrace sufficiency, sustainability, and care. His life invites us to ask: what do we truly need, and how can we live in ways that allow others, human and nonhuman, to flourish?

Education for Belonging

What does it mean to bring St. Francis into education today? It means more than teaching facts about global issues. It means nurturing habits of empathy, reverence, dialogue, and responsibility. A classroom inspired by Francis might ask students to trace the story of their lunch across continents, to listen to migration stories in their own community, to debate with civility across difference, or to imagine sustainable futures together. The point is not to memorize the world, but to belong to it.

Francis as a Guide for Global Citizens

Francis’s life was not easy. He was criticized, misunderstood, and often pushed to the margins even of his own movement. But he persisted, guided by a conviction that the world is one family, that peace is possible, and that humility is the path to freedom. In our own fractured time, his witness reminds us that global citizenship is not an abstract ideal. It is a way of life—seeing kinship, practicing empathy, crossing divides, living simply, and caring for the world we share.

On this feast day, then, St. Francis should not only be remembered with pet blessings or environmental prayers, as meaningful as these rituals are. He should be remembered as someone who embodied the virtues our world needs most urgently: a citizen of Assisi who lived as though the whole earth was his home, and all creatures his companions. In that sense, he was not just a saint. He was, and remains, a model global citizen.

Roots in the Sky: Returning to The Fountain in Granada

by | Jul 20, 2025 | ASKing the World, Film Review, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Hagiography, Potpourri, Spain

There are films you return to not for plot, but for weather—for their atmosphere, their gravity, their pull on your interior tides. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is one of those films for me. I’ve seen it at least ten times. Each time, I enter its spiral a little differently. Each time, it offers something else.

This time, I watched it in Granada.

Not in a theater—just me, a screen, and the layered hum of a city that refuses to stay in one time–unless, of course, you ignore that palimpsest. I’ve walked through the Albaicín, traced the patterned shadows in the Alhambra, listened to church bells echo through streets once shaped by mosques. Granada is a city that doesn’t forget. It blurs. It folds time inward. And so does The Fountain.

Watching it here, something shifted.

Where You Are Shapes What You See

I’ve always believed that place changes how we experience a film. There are movies that resonate because of when you see them—but others because of where.

Watch Talk to Her in Madrid and it becomes a meditation on distance.
Watch Pan’s Labyrinth in Segovia and the stones seem to whisper Franco’s afterlife.
Watch The Spirit of the Beehive in Castilla and the earth itself feels hollowed out by silence.

And watching The Fountain in Granada?

It felt inevitable. Not like discovering something new, but like opening a letter I’d kept folded for years.

A Familiar Spiral, Seen from a New Angle

I know this film. I know its cuts, its rhythms, its grief. I know the way Izzi smiles in the snow, the way Tom trembles with denial, the way the star—Xibalba—burns with something more than light.

But here in Granada, surrounded by centuries of conquest, devotion, beauty, and erasure, the film felt different. It didn’t just move through time—it held it. It mirrored this place where empires once chased permanence and instead found decay. Where a civilization imagined itself eternal, and was turned into ornament.

The film’s refusal to separate love from death, empire from myth, felt at home here.

Izzi and Isabel

There’s a detail I’d noticed before, but never felt quite as sharply: the Queen in Izzi’s novel-in-progress shares her name—Isabel. In the film, she’s regal, serene, sending her conquistador to find the Tree of Life in Yucatán. In real history, Queen Isabel of Castile sent explorers westward for her own tree: legacy, salvation, dominion.

And Izzi—Rachel Weisz’s Izzi—is dying, but she’s the only one at peace. She understands that death is not the enemy. It is her partner who can’t accept it, who rages and clings and unravels.

Two Izzis. Two Isabellas. One seeks transcendence through conquest. The other, through surrender.

Granada, once ruled by Isabel the Queen, becomes a strange echo chamber for this film. The question lingers: What is the cost of trying to outrun death?

The Tree, the Star, the Stone

The Tree of Life sits at the center of all three timelines in the film—rooted in the past, glowing in the future, decaying in the present. It offers healing. It demands sacrifice. It transcends.

Here in Granada, trees hold history too. The olive, the cypress, the orange blossom. They survive regimes. They outlast architecture. In the gardens of the Generalife, they feel like quiet gods.

And then there’s stone. The stones that built this city, that carry verses and scars. The kind of stones that outlive their makers, but not their meanings.

The film asks: can you live forever through what you build, what you love, what you plant?  Granada doesn’t answer. But it gestures. It points to the ruins, and then to the sky.

Death Is the Road to Awe

There’s a line I’ve always carried from The Fountain:  “Death is the road to awe.”

In Granada, that line stops being metaphor.

Here, we might think of everything as awe. The light on tiled walls. The curve of an arch built for vanished prayers. The hush of twilight in a square where languages once braided together.

But everything is death, too. Not as absence, but as transformation. This city isn’t preserved—it’s composted. Its beauty is rooted in what it’s lost, what it’s blended, what it’s become.

This time, I didn’t watch The Fountain to understand it.  I watched it to stand inside it. And Granada made that possible.

 

#   #   #

 

After ten viewings, I thought I knew The Fountain. But Granada taught me otherwise.

Some films are just films.  Others become companions—haunting you, changing with you, asking new questions as your surroundings shift.  Here, The Fountain wasn’t about escaping death.  It was about learning to carry time—in your breath, in your grief, in the trees you plant knowing they’ll outlive you.  

And in that, it felt like a conversation with this city.  One rooted in the soil. One burning in the stars.

Not a Pilgrimage: A “Visit” to the Capilla Real

by | Jul 13, 2025 | ASKing the World, Hagiography, Language, Mapping, Political Geography, Spain

Granada, Spain — July 12, 2025

On July 12, I visited the Capilla Real in Granada—the final resting place of Isabel and Ferdinand, the so-called Catholic Monarchs. As someone from the Americas (having lived extensively in both the north and south), I arrived not as a passive tourist but as a participant in a longer, more complicated performance of memory and power. The encounter felt layered, conflicted, and deeply political.

To think through this space, I turn to the work of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, whose concept of “theatre/archaeology” invites us to consider how sites are not just static remnants of the past, but staged events, constructed through layers of material, narrative, and embodied experience. The Capilla Real is not just a crypt; it is a scripted space—a performative apparatus where empire, religion, and heritage rehearse themselves daily.

I wanted to ask: What is being remembered here? And what is being made to disappear?

What is being memorialized—and what is being forgotten?

The Capilla Real monumentalizes the Catholic Monarchs as founders of modern Spain—unifiers of kingdoms and “champions” of Christianity. Yet what is absent from this narrative? The expelled Jewish communities, the forcibly converted Muslims, the erased plurality of late medieval Granada.

What does the architecture tell us? Its late Gothic grandeur stands in symbolic contrast to the nearby Alhambra. The site doesn’t just remember a royal couple—it stages a victory of Christendom.

Ask the site: Who gets to be buried with marble and gold? Who was exiled in silence?

What does it mean to come from the Americas to this tomb?

To stand here, as someone from the Americas, is to feel the afterlives of 1492 humming in the walls. Colonization, extraction, forced conversion, genocide. These are not footnotes; they are structural echoes.

But I visited not on October 12—the official “discovery” date—but July 12: my own day of encounter. This reframes the act. It refuses the commemorative choreography and inserts presence in place of celebration.

Ask yourself: What is my role in this story? Observer? Descendant? Witness? Disruptor?

How is the site performing itself to me?

The Capilla Real is deeply choreographed. Light filters carefully across stone. The tombs are elevated, silent, inaccessible. Reverence is built into the room.

Where are visitors positioned? What are we allowed to see, and how? What narrative are we meant to accept?

Ask the architecture: Who choreographed your gestures? Who wrote your script?

What traces and residues resist the dominant story?

What if we look beyond the polished surfaces? Cracks in stone. Uneven wear on the floor. The proximity of Moorish Granada just outside. Are these material residues that refuse to perform the official memory?

What might be uncovered if we listened for unofficial histories—graffiti, whispered anecdotes, contested memories?

Ask the material: What are you hiding beneath your polish?

What would a counter-monument look like here?

If we were to build a counter-monument in this space, what form would it take? Would it honor the Indigenous peoples of the Americas? The forcibly silenced voices of Sephardic Jews or Andalusian Muslims?

Would it be performative? Ephemeral? Sonic? Could we interrupt this royal narrative with something more plural, contested, and alive?

Ask history: Who else demands to be remembered here?

A Presence That Interrupts

Standing in the Capilla Real, I did not come to venerate. I came to witness. To mark presence. To speak into a silence that has lasted too long.

I stood before the crypt of Isabel and Ferdinand—the monarchs who set in motion the Reconquista and the conquest of the so-called “New World.” Their bodies rest beneath carved stone, sealed in royal dignity. But outside those tombs, across oceans and centuries, the legacies of their decisions are unburied, unfinished, and still resisted.

And so I said, quietly—perhaps to them, perhaps to myself:

Do you know that peoples in the Americas have resisted your conquest and colonization for over 500 years?

That resistance is not metaphor. It is not memory. It is alive.

Pearson and Shanks remind us that archaeology is not merely about ruins, but about performance, disruption, and presence. In that spirit, I offer these questions—not to find answers, but to refuse silence.

To Isabel and Ferdinand: 

  • When you cast your crowns toward heaven, did you see what fell to earth in your name?
  • What prayers passed your lips as you signed the expulsions—were they for mercy, or for dominion?
  • Did you dream of gold or of glory—or did you simply fear a world not shaped in your image?
  • When you imagined the Indies, did you imagine us—the ones who would inherit both wound and wonder?
  • Did you know your empire would splinter—yet still echo in our languages, our borders, our gods?
  • What does empire sound like when it speaks back to you—not in Latin, but in Nahuatl, Aymara, K’iche’, Guaraní, Garífuna?
  • Can you hear the music now? The fusion of drums and strings, tongues and prayers, born of resistance and necessity?
  • Did you know that seeds carried in your ships would take root in every kitchen, every story, every body? What about the diseases?
  • Did you build a world, or did you scatter one?
  • And when I stand here—an inheritor of what you set in motion—do you see a subject, a stranger, or a question?

This visit was not a pilgrimage.
It was an intervention.
And the performance isn’t over.

Or, in the Guarani…..

Ko jevy ndaha’éi peteĩ ñemomba’e rehegua guata.
Ha’e kuri peteĩ jehasaha.
Ha pe ñoha’ãguasu ndopevéi gueteri.

Kevin of the Valley, Kevin of the Birds

by | Jun 3, 2025 | Geographical Imaginations, Hagiography, Language, Mapping

 

Today (June 3) is St. Kevin’s Day. My name saint. St. Kevin of Glendalough.  Not a figure from obscure Irish hagiography, but a presence who has, over time, shaped how I imagine attention, how I hold questions, how I understand stillness.

There’s no grand sermon in Kevin’s story. No fiery conversions. Just a man in a stone cell, one arm outstretched through the threshold, and a blackbird that comes to nest in his palm. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t shake her off. He stays—long enough for the eggs to hatch and the young to fly.

What kind of listening does that require? What kind of patience?

Seamus Heaney turns this moment into something more than legend. In his poem St Kevin and the Blackbird, he wonders whether Kevin is “self-forgetful or in agony all the time.” Whether he still feels his knees. Whether he’s praying—or simply becoming the prayer itself.

“To labour and not to seek reward,” Heaney writes,
“he prays, a prayer his body makes entirely…”

That line gets me. Not because I think it’s something to achieve, but because it names something so few of us are taught: that attentiveness—costly, embodied, quiet attentiveness—might be the most necessary thing. To let something land. To let it stay. To not flee discomfort or mystery. To become hospitable, even to the wild.

The miracle, if there is one, is not in the bird. It’s in the stillness. In a form of presence that does not insist or interpret, but holds. Not grasping. Not passive. Just utterly available.

I think that’s why I walk(ed) as a pilgrim to Glendalough. To Kevin. Not as a seeker of escape or sanctity, but to be in the presence of a witness—one who stood for a way of being: the long patience of love, the unshaken hand, the refusal to close.

Today, I say his name with quiet reverence. Kevin of the valley. Kevin of the birds. Not a figure to admire, but a silence to be met. A name to carry. A story to return to.

Perhaps I shall walk the valley of the two lakes again—with a bird in hand.  Again.  And again.