Todo a Pulmon: Reflections on Retirement – Year 1

 What a whirlwind of a year!! After a short family visit to Brazil in January (2022), during a second visit (in April) to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 90^th birthday we put our house on the market, and three short days and five offers later we put up the sign: “SOLD.” Next we prepared and took off for a three-month stay in Portugal, including the 12-day, 170-mile walk from the city of Porto in northern Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain (the route of a millennial Christian pilgrimage). And then, after a short stint back in the U.S. we are back in Brazil to spend several months with family again.

To begin my retirement (on my birthday - December 29, 2021), I chose as my retirement anthem a song by Argentine troubadour Alejandro Lerner, “Todo al Pulmón” (literally “at full lung,”) or “life to the fullest”. I have returned regularly to hear again this melody and its charged lyrics, the “musical muse” for my vision and commitment to live fully into these years, to make the most of life, to engage in meaningful actions and associations, to write well, as the muse reminds me, these “stanzas of my final song”.

As those closest to me know and as a dear Cuban friend, Geosvanis, put into words, I am “not your average American white boy.” Formed by a childhood of growing up multi-culturally and among Indigenous Xavante Natives in the outback of Brazil and later influenced by studies of Marx and Latin American Liberation Theology, and with personal heroes that include Winnebago Native activist and spiritual leader Reuben Snake, Argentinian/Cuban internationalist and revolutionary Che Guevara, and Central American martyr Monsignor Oscar Romero – among others – I describe my perspective on the world as “critical” and “deeply skeptical of U.S. imperialism.”

And this brings me to the present moment. The last year has been a whirlwind and we aren’t quite at a settling place yet. But as I consider our world and the mess it is in – with imperial and oligarchic interests funding unending wars and fanning the flames of racist, xenofobic, ultra-nationalist and fascist tendencies around a world already facing the existential threat of climate holocaust, the call to a retirement of action stands at the fore. How and where can I engage, how and where WILL I engage so that these next stanzas of my life sing loudly and clearly on the side of anti-racism, of justice with and for the marginalized, of a healthy, liveable world for our children, grand-children and great-grand-children, a world in which community and the well-being of all human beings and all living things including our Mother Earth are our first and highest priority? To invest myself in this way is, for me, to live “life to the fullest,” “Todo a Pulmon.”