The coffee of my reflections

I have always enjoyed the contact with nature, I love the sunsets at the seashore and watching the movement of the mist going up the mountains.

That taste for natural environments motivated me to be a very active hiker. As a teenager I had a group of friends with whom I frequently climbed the Cerro del Avila, a large mountain that surrounds the northern part of the city of Caracas.

We used to spend several days on Avila, camping in very rudimentary tents near a small creek. Our equipment was very basic, a can opener, knives to cut and spread, a few rickety pots, two or three flashlights, several boxes of matches and the inevitable bag to brew coffee.

Making the coffee was quite complicated, we had to light the fire in the old style, gathering branches and dry leaves to form a small pyramid. It could take up to an hour to achieve a fire strong enough to boil the water, this task was done in the morning and in the evening, before going to bed.

But the coffee I enjoyed the most was in the afternoon, when the fog rolled in from all sides and fell on us like a white blanket. It was in those cold afternoons, when I began to think about interesting things.

I remember very well that while sipping my cup of hot coffee, I would look at the whiteness and wonder if all that wonder was really God's work; other times I would think about what would become of us once we died, and I also wondered many times why some were so rich and others so poor...

Many of the concerns that have accompanied me throughout my life arose in the mountains while I was enjoying my cup of hot coffee...

Years later, life allowed me to have an excellent group of friends, people from the university environment... Every Friday, at about eight o'clock at night, after classes, we would meet in a house. There we would talk until one o'clock in the morning, always accompanied by several cups of coffee.

We kept those meetings for more than twenty years, and between sips of hot coffee, while we ate a muffin, our minds did not stop producing ideas. As time went by, those meetings were the basis for consolidating a research group on the Venezuelan social reality. In those conversations, many investigations took shape and were later translated into articles and books. At present, a group of the younger members still continues the research work and occasionally we meet again to talk, think, and drink coffee...

For some years now my wife and I have had a little ritual, every afternoon between three and four we sit on our porch to enjoy a good cup of coffee. While we drink it we talk about many things, we review our lives, we talk about our children, granddaughters and friends, we make plans... And since we are both in HIVE it is inevitable that we also talk about things here. Many of our posts stem from something we've talked about over our afternoon coffee.

As you can see coffee has always been a great companion when it comes to triggering my reflections, it helps me to find concentration. There is something in this bitter liquid that helps me to center my thoughts, to focus, to keep me on the idea and not to disperse me. No other infusion manages to make me feel that way.

I am convinced that without having a steaming cup of coffee by my side many of the ideas I have shared with my students and in my writings would perhaps have remained dormant.

As always I have enjoyed writing the publication. I thank friends in the @cinnamoncupcoffee community for letting us have this initiative to commemorate international coffee day.

Thank you for your time.