Paloma, Pochote Garden, Oaxaca 2008

Sencillo is not a simple word.  The dictionary, bored and unimaginative and unburdened with discerning cultural context during post-fiesta tlayuda binges, declares the translation “simple.”  But sencillo is far from simple.

Simple can have a negative edge to it – “she’s a very simple person, to her everything seems so simple”, “it’s quite plain and simple”, “I did it in the simplest way possible” – simple describes something easy, uncomplicated and uninteresting.  A straightforward, obvious message.  An ingenuous, one-toned person.

Sencillo is different.

In Spanish if I were to say, “la comida estaba simple” – the food was simple – this is saying it lacked flavor, character, dimension.  If I say, “la comida estaba sencillo” this is saying that the squash flowers were sautéed just enough to be crunchy, and their sweet, buttery flavor sung.  I didn’t need to use extravagant spices or sauces.

Sencillo refers to something pared down to its essence – without aesthetic or intellectual or sensual adornment.   Something natural, fluid, unsaturated by pretension or over-analysis.

A decision can be sencillo, and so can a tlayuda.  Friendships can be sencillo, and so can philosophies and coffee and goals in life.

People can also be sencillo.  These are the types of people who you’d trust instinctively on the first meeting.  They lack pretension, they’re not cagey or secretive, they’re not trying to size you up or flatter you or slyly undermine you.  They’re earnest.  They’re the type of people who, as an American would say, go with the flow.  With them you can also let yourself go a bit, stop worrying quite so much about what you’re doing or who you are or the nation’s health care plan.  They put you at ease.

I often find myself striving towards sencillo.  As an American, the tendency is to go, go go!  Quantity over quality.  Do as much as possible as fast as possible and then do MORE!  And then if you need to, set aside that time to relax—ready, go!  Go get coffee, ok sit, ok think, ok journal, ok what time is it?  Good, I put in zen time for today, check!   The question “what did you do today?” sums this up.  How many times have I gone through this question in my head, putting together the bits and pieces of my day in list form so as to chalk up progress?   Packing everything neatly into moments with neat little captions – “read for an hour” “thought about future life decisions” “spent 45 minutes googling ESL jobs in West Africa.”  For many Americans this obsession reaches a point of dementia, in which the mental list measuring progress becomes totally detached from the substantial reality of lived moments, and actually replaces them.  More important than the moments are the justifications ensuring they’re evidence of progress.

At least in my case.  This is why I need to feel out and appreciate the word sencillo.  I thought about this the other day in a caption-less moment born out of an afternoon rainstorm.  Jorge and I had a dialogue that has become one of the motifs of our relationship:

Jorge : “It’s going to rain.  Don’t you see the clouds?”

Me: “It’s not going to rain.  C’mon, lets go.”

Jorge: “When are you going to learn to read the clouds?  That massive front is definitely, definitely going to open up and it’s going to rain.  Hard-core.”

Me: “Nah, it’s not.  Lets go.”

This conversation probably reveals innate parts of our personalities.  I know it’s going to rain but thrive at stubbornly, intellectually denying it.  I have a side, maybe as part of coming from a culture that’s not so dependent on or attuned to natural rhythms, that thinks that things like weather come from some random whimsical netherworld with no rhyme or reason.  May rain, may not, depending on the caprices of the universe.

Jorge, meanwhile, is dead set on the fact that it’s going to rain.  He can tell by the clouds and that’s that and if we go out we’re going to get wet.

We always end up going.

So there we are with the dog on the corner of Reforma and Constitucion and the curdled sky lets loose with rain.

We take refuge in the small entrance patio of the botanical garden.  There are stone steps leading to the huge open square of the garden with its cactuses and orchids and flowering trees.  We sit on these steps and wait.  Behind us it looks like its pouring rain in the desert with all the shades of brown and cactus-green in the garden.  In front of us are the wet cobblestones of Constitucion, the peeling maroon walls of an abandoned building on Reforma, people hurrying along under umbrellas, some laughing, some not.

In the first five minutes of sitting there I was just waiting, ready to move along into the next moment of the day.  But then my eyes seemed to focus in one of those moments that comes on like a switch of glasses at the optamologist – one minute it’s all blurry, and the next you see.  I saw a yellow bike leaning against the iron doors of the botanical garden.  The doors have a similar framework to the windows, with patterns of leaves and flowers painted a faded turquoise so familiar in Oaxaca.  The bike and the doors seemed to be in an embrace, intertwined in a pact no one could see until that moment in the rain.  I looked up at the windows, and seeing the white-gray sky through their turquoise bars I felt like a nun in a convent.  It wasn’t a bad feeling; I felt very small, offered up to the world.

People kept rushing by ducked under coats and newspapers.  Their world felt very far from my world in that moment.  I wasn’t all swept up in the forward-moving stream of today and tomorrow, ready to check off this walk with the dog and go home and cook and read and sleep and wake up and run and….I was just there.  Seeing things and hearing things and with my mind floating in a moment.  It felt very sencillo.

And then, of course, it stopped raining and we walked home, bought red pepper bread and ate mushroom soup, and I read and slept and woke up and made coffee and ran and wrote and walked the dog…but with sencillo on the brain.  Sencillo isn’t simple, and it’s not easy.  But you’ll know it once you’ve found it.

It’s the fall of a single leaf walking through the woods.  Meg, my stepmom, told me she had once read a book in which the author was constantly referring to a single leaf falling in the woods.  She thought it never happened.  But then, after moving to the farm to live full time, she started seeing it all the time.  I think sometimes its hard to believe in sencillo.  It might take quite a bit of work learning to see and feel and rip yourself away from a sense of urgency to get there.  But when you do, you’ll know.