“Thank you for reading and listening to my Flash💥Devos during September. As my gift to you, I invite you to walk with me around our neighborhood in Antigua, Guatemala. In this article, recently published on FieldFare on Substack, I talk about how I’ve become acquainted with this foreign place in a different time zone with its own climate, geology, languages, people, buildings, history, and cuisine. If we were together, we’d also witness the Divine presence everywhere. I pray that you enjoy wherever you are today as a gift of God; share it with someone new! ❤️‍🔥” Words and images: Marianne Abel-Lipschutz
In the Land of Eternal Spring
by Marianne Abel-Lipschutz
We spend most of each year at 5,000 feet above sea level in Antigua, Guatemala, a UNESCO World Heritage city. Known for 16th-century colonial enterprises that spread across Central America, Antigua prizes its Spanish-Baroque architecture with tile roofs, small buildings connected by plazas, and lush manicured gardens. Mystery embellishes history here, where about 46,000 people live in the Panchoy Valley. Our immersion into this city’s life makes the tropical part of our year distinct from our other home in the rural upper midwest of the United States.
Whenever we return from the States, it takes me a few weeks to remember what I like about living in Antigua. Elaborate gates and decrepit-looking walls conceal mansions or parking lots. Sometimes the city appears to be disintegrating, as if an older civilization is being recycled. Walls span centuries with degraded adobe, pitted colonial stone, and disintegrating brick rising up from cobblestone sidewalks, eras and peoples smooshed in a slow erosion. Archaeologists complain that the way Guatemalans salvage materials makes time a shifting kaleidoscope that resists order.
Thousands of people transit alongside our neighborhood at the city’s northern entrance every day. Street life criss-crosses between ancient and modern times. Ruins of cathedrals and convents lend a sacred presence to secular venues from restaurants and schools to hotels, rock piles, and empty lots. Tired medieval church bells ring a dull thud for early morning services. A statue of St James the Apostle, the patron saint of Antigua, fills a wall shrine inside the McDonalds restaurant, while Ronald McDonald lounges in the plaza outside.
We share an alley and walls with the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, a thriving destination hotel and convention center created from the rubble of the first convent in Latin America, dating to 1538. On clear nights I can hear choral music piped through the hotel’s loudspeakers, conjuring supernatural spirits and howling ghosts. A subliminal spirituality animates my thoughts toward hope and restoration.
For now, this place is my other, the entity outside myself that shelters my coming and going. It is not mine; I don’t belong to it nor it to me. We greet one another anew with each visit. Returning to our home base in Antigua reignites my compassion, knowing that people work around the clock to maintain the environment we share. I imagine monks and nuns kneeling on scuffed pews behind crumbling walls, praying for everyone’s wellbeing. One of my Spanish teachers grew up within the ruins of a 16th-century cathedral—her dad was the caretaker. Pigeons and tourists alike tottered through what she thought of as home. Tourists come for the architecture but it’s the people who make this city worthwhile.
Antigua is always being reinvented, a living monument to perseverance and survival. Undaunted by recurring floods, earthquakes, and volcanic explosions, Guatemalans have been reconstructing this city with the debris of its previous landmarks since before documentation began. Across every sector, areas are roped off for demolition, almost everything needs maintenance, and city policies mandate restoration wherever possible. It’s all part of the work-around, an orientation of reuse and recycle within Guatemalan culture. Antigua is a city that will never be finished.
*****
Living in Guatemala is a dance between intimacy and separation. I often feel alienated from the subtropical highland environment that, even after ten years, remains unfamiliar. Having lived most of my life in northern humid continental or subtropical climate zones, I feel sensitive to the disorientation experienced by migrants, refugees, and exiles. All of us try to find places in the world where we can feel whole.
Most scenery keeps me at a distance. Postcard-quality mountain vistas, winding roads, dense jungles, and fuming volcanoes decorate many horizons. Highly managed and wild places clash visually. Vegetation prospers so freely that epiphytes subsist on electric cables and single-stalk plants propagate in the volcanic ash on clay roof tiles. Jungle has an omnivorous hunger that consumes itself in ferocious reproductivity. Jungle is tough to enter or escape: encroaching, enveloping, swarming, all-encompassing. I imagine the masked and mythical Mayan ancestors slipping through the shadows.
Nature no longer provides relief. Downsizing to two seasons instead of four destroys my reliance on a fixed internal calendar. Called the “Land of Eternal Spring”, our winter is their summer. Trees flower after leaves have dried and dropped, not before or during the greening time of leafing out. I can’t imagine not having rain or a drink of water for six months, yet each year I witness this world shrink before the rainy season begins in June. A statuesque walnut tree in our courtyard at Casa Philippi—one that looked dead just weeks before—erupts into foliar delight when the first rains fall.
Corn palms from Africa, philodendron from Central America, coleus from southeast Asia, and schefflera from New Zealand—plants that I know from interior spaces in the US—grow here as cultivars and weeds that fill ditches or function as living fences. A spider plant colonizing the lawn becomes a mirror of questions: what is a spider plant, a native of South Africa, doing here? What is its history?
Encountering plants that represent my old life blends welcome and annoyance. I wonder if my presence is as intrusive as these species may be. Years ago, I tended a hanging spider plant in my college apartment alongside an anemic schefflera that favored the bow window overlooking West Philadelphia. I never imagined we would all meet again in Guatemala. Nature offers traces of my changing place in this world.
Here I coexist with plants as if we are wary of forging a deeper acquaintance. I delight in the waist-high bird-of-paradise flowers that look like neon origami cranes tiptoeing on evergreen stalks, native to Cape Provinces in South Africa. The improbably designed, turquoise-flowered Strongylodon vines, originally from the Philippines, dangle like a giant’s necklace awaiting pollination by bats. Dried leaves the size of paper clothes from the indigenous Monstera set off motion lights in the night breeze, unsettling me as if a phantom tossed its cloak into the brush. Gnarled roots crawl up buildings like desiccated serpents.
My favorite place in the neighborhood is the plaza of the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo which features a colossal ceiba, the national tree of Guatemala. I can see it from my window and feel thrilled to be its neighbor. A symbolic ancestor for the Maya, its name is Yax Che (Green Tree or First Tree), a mighty force that connects earth and sky. Expansive and generative, its canopy offers a safe harbor. Roots reach intricately into the living power below where earthquakes shimmy the planet’s mantle. Tourists take selfies in front of this great being, a trivial act that seems misaligned with the tree’s sublime majesty.
*****
Some days we sit with Gustavo in a nearby pocket-book park, on the far bench he likes for reading his La Prensa newspaper with the mid-morning sun. A former municipal administrator, he greets us grandly. Call him with any concern, he assures us each time; he knows people. I wonder if we would ever need those people. Conflict and bureaucracy seem alien in the park as students snack and scan their phones between classes while kids circle scooters around the fountain. Lovers entwined on the grass giggle and tighten the tender hold between them.
It’s rare that we are the only ones in the park. We ourselves feel loved and loving just seeing parents carrying children’s backpacks, friends holding hands walking home after work, couples embracing at the corner, every moment used for expressing care and affection. The great grackles cackle their social songs high in the treetops or waddling along ceramic roof tiles. Butterflies skim the breath of air. A monarch makes me wonder if we’ll meet again in Iowa, another place we both call home.
Around midday, we keep an eye out for Margarita the tortilla lady, who sits for an hour between two tiendas, selling out of a wingspan-size basket. As we buy a few quetzales’ worth, we could be bystanders in a tourist’s snapshot, alongside the chicken bus belching black smoke, the wild dogs skittering by, and a moto dodging upturned stones along the Alameda Santa Rosa. On our way home, we shop with Ester, the abuela who loves my husband. She saves avocados for Harry, a potato or two, and gives him free cilantro for his soup because, she winks, “You need this for your caldo.”
As a United States citizen, I will always be out of place in Guatemala. I accept that I am a guest here while acknowledging that parts of my own nature remain foreign to me. Some nights while reading on the sofa, the ventilation system at the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo shuts off and the city quiets down. I hear crickets, and cloistered sopranos harmonizing canticles piped through the hotel’s loudspeakers. Living alongside this medieval convent bestows unexpected blessings. I pray for a spirit of welcome and discovery in myself and in the world’s future taking shape around me.
Published on Fieldfare 19 September 2025 https://substack.com/home/post/p-174018957
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