Carrots and Melons and good Karma

So my roommates have been on a super big juice kick since the new year started.  I have been watching them make their concoctions every day, and feeling envious when I am thirsty and hot and have no cool juice to sip on.  One day, I wanted a snack and decided to use the supplies I had to make myself a juice. What that meant is I threw a carrot and some melon into the blender with cold water and VOULA!  Awesome juice.  I highly recommend it.  Plus, if your blender doesn´t chop that well like mine, you can get a few yummy carrot chunks as you sip!  Yuuuummmmm.

But enough about random juicing. 

I believe in karma.  I think if you are a good person with positive energy, you will attract good things into your life.  I also believe that when bad things happen, the person or people responsible will be punished somehow by the karmic universe.  It is my small way of believing that the universe has some sort of balance and equality within all of the maddness, greed and environmental destruction.

Because I am ¨an anthropologist¨ (or at least, that is what I studied in university), I also recognize that when you look for evidence to believe in something, especially religions or things like karma, it is easy to find and to convince yourself it is real.  Many anthropologists that want to study and immerse themselves in a religion so as to understand it, fall into a common trend of joining and really beginning to believe in that particular relgion.  They start to see things and the world the way the believers see it, and find evidence of it in their everyday lives.

Y así soy yo con karma.  A few months ago, I went to Iquitos for the Great Amazon Raft Race (more on that in another entry) and at the end, during the awards ceremony, I had my camera stolen.  This was my third camera that was stolen in Perú.  I was frustrated and sad for weeks because I had spent all of my birthday money on picking out and buying that camera.  I decided it was a sign that I shouldn´t buy another one, and therefore spent the following months without one.  I thought it was karma for buying a camera in the black market that I knew had probably been stolen from someone else.  I´ll never forget how my boyfriend took my aside and warned me very seriously ¨Carolyn, before you buy this, you should know that it was probably stolen¨, to which I replied ¨Ya well, I´ve already had two cameras stolen that people probably ended up buying in the black market too!¨ Bad Karma Carloyn, bad karma. 

One day, a few months back, I had people over for a little get together for Halloween.  Someone left a camera case for a small cannon camera in my room.  I asked around, but no one ever claimed it or came looking for it.  I kept it there in my room, in a place I could see it so that if anyone came over and recognized it they could claim it.  But after several weeks and then months passed and no one said a word, I kind of forgot about it and it blended in with my things. 

Then I went home to America.  My parents were generous enough to offer to buy me a new camera when they realized I didn´t have one and had no intention of buying another one.  So, I went to the store and scanned the cameras for sales.  I wanted a cannon or a lenux because I find they tend to take better pictures, so I asked the person working at Target that day if there were any on sale.  He stuttered and didn´t seem to know so I looked around, and saw on the bottom shelf a sign for a cannon camera on sale for $80.  I asked him to take it out, and he seemed surprised to find a the last little camera on sale for so cheap.  I played with it and decided it was perfect for what I needed; cheap, clear and with a good zoom. 

I have enjoyed that camera since then (thanks again, Mom and Dad!).  I was keeping it in a sock to protect it.  Yesterday, I noticed that camera case again on my shelf while I was shuffling things around and it hardly registered in my mind.  But then I paused.... I noticed the brand was Cannon.  I picked it up and examined it closer and realized it was the exact size of my new camera.  I took my camera out of the sock and put it in the case and wow!  It was the perfect fit.  So random. Such a sweet realization. Such a small thing that made me feel so good, like it was all meant to happen that way. 

Karma. 


***Of course, if you were at my house for a halloween party last October and forgot your camera case and you are reading this, please come claim it from me at any time!