Guatemala: Accidental Snapshot

(I’m traveling and blogging from Guatemala right now, so expect a number of posts from me specific to this region. – XJ).

I’ve spent much of the past week in a K’iche’ Maya village in the highlands. One of the children there took this snapshot on my iPhone by accident, I’m pretty sure.

I love it. We were gathered around the wood hearth, trying to stay warm. I was watching the women of the household slap tortillas from corn grown in the nearby milpa. I’d offered the kids my iPhone — a foreign, seemingly magical device (their dad described it in those words, anyway).

I was showing them how to play around with some apps. I didn’t actually show much, they figured things out on their own. Their favorite apps, btw, were: Eno’s “Bloom,” and “Koi Pond” (Which I learned would be called “Uk’ob’al Kar” in the Kiche’ language, that’s how you’d say “small pond full of fish.”)

I’m blogging the photo because — I don’t know. I loved the composition, the dreamy-floaty quality. It reminds me of a painting I saw in a famous person’s home in LA a few weeks before I left the USA. I like it a lot more than most of the “real” photos I’ve “deliberately” taken on this trip with “good” cameras (yes, I love over-using quote marks).

Sometimes accidents, or chance creations in the hands of children, are better than things we might choose or control.

I’m heading back to the pueblo shortly, but here is another phone-snap of where I’m sitting and typing now. Guatemala is extreme beauty, and extreme suffering.