Yellow Flowers

I've been always fascinated by how life and beauty blooms even in the most harsh circumstances. It is in a way a certain kind of resilience, a genuine manifestation of adaptation and survival. In Mexico City, even as polluted and populated as it is, you'll always find yellow flowers blooming in between the concrete blocks on the sidewalks. In the same way, you'll always meet people that have managed to find joy in what appears to be hostile routines. "I love cinema, artistic films and reading science fiction," a taxi driver told me as he drove me from Condesa to Polanco in Mexico City, "I read during traffic lights, and take advantage of the long hours I spend stuck in traffic". Ten years ago my mother, grandmother and me made a road trip in search of our roots in Jalisco. We drove to Platanar, a small village two hours away from Guadalajara that came into oblivion when a highway was built destroying its plantations and making it impossible for drivers to drive through it; or even know of its existence. Manuel, my grandmother's cousin, still lived there and took care of his parents, who must have been almost a hundred years old. They lived in a house in ruins, most of the ceilings where long gone, and the interior patio of a once colonial house was covered with fallen walls, bricks, oxidized pieces of metal and long-stem wild grass. I was surprised to find out that Manuel appeared content with his life, and even more so to discover that he could easily talk about black holes, fractals or bio-technology. Everything he had done all his life was to read every single publication that made its way to Platanar; this included years of volumes of Selection of Reader's Digest. Nobel Prize writer Wole Soyinka spent 27 months in jail before fleeing his native Nigeria to the United States. He was denied access to books, paper and ink so he tried to remember every possible mathematic equation to keep his mind alive. These stories remind me of one of my favorite movie scenes from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: I survived because I held to my own humanity. That's all I could do because that is all I had. Like you. Cling to your own humanity and you'll survive. Like yellow flowers blooming from concrete blocks.