PICAFLOR:
FINDING HOME IN SOUTH AMERICA by Jessica Talbot
Review copy kindly provided via Booksellers NZ
by Picaflor Press
Picaflor is the South
American Spanish name for the hummingbird – ‘a snacker, nibbler, pecker of
flowers’. When Jessica Talbot first arrived in Peru at the age of 32, she identifies
immediately with this little bird, calling herself ‘a restless searcher of
sweet nectar’ in her attempts to find some sort of meaning and contentment in
her life, a place to call home. She has no idea if South America is it, but for
this native New Zealander, her life as she has lived it to date in New Zealand
and Melbourne has not brought her the peace and reason for being she so
longingly craves. As a psychologist she
is well used to analyzing the human mind, but this does not help her in
understanding herself. Since her early twenties she has been drawn to South
America, and so one day, after a particularly difficult time in her life, she
packs her bags and goes to Peru ‘because it seemed exotic and wild and
mystical’ for a three month holiday of sorts, first working as a volunteer with
street children in the city of Trujillo and for the last month travelling
around.
Her gut instincts
prove spot on. Everything about where she travels – Peru, Colombia and Ecuador
completely captivates her. A holiday romance with the delicious sounding Paco ultimately
leads to her packing up her life in Melbourne and moving to Buenos Aires. She
learns Spanish, makes friends with the locals, retains her sanity with her
other expatriate friends, falls in love with the equally delicious sounding
Diego, marries and has a child. She has found her place to call home, living
and working in Buenos Aires since 2004 and this book is the story of how she
found that inner peace and stability. End of story, happy ever after.
This is not just a
travelogue though. Although for anyone considering a move to South America,
particularly for a woman, it is great reading. This book is very a much
personal journey of self-discovery and growth that we could all take a lesson
or two from. After all, Jessica left a
successful career, a comfortable life, family and many friends to go on some
sort of wild goose chase in search of some sort of unknown intangible, based
essentially on a gut feeling. But the way she tells her story, she was dead
inside living in Melbourne, and realized for her own personal survival she did
need to change something. This major decision that resulted in her life taking
such unexpected and different paths also enabled her internal self to deal with
a lot of long buried family stuff, resulting in some much needed resolution
between herself and her family.
It would have taken
some courage to write this book, and maybe that is why it has taken ten years
from when she went to Argentina for her to do so. She works through a lot of
‘stuff’ in this memoir and would appear to come out a happier, healthier, more
contented person. Most of us are not really in very deep touch with our inner
selves, and her analysis /coming to terms with all this ‘stuff’ is just as
interesting and touching as the family ‘stuff’. Being the type of person that
prefers reading plot driven books, at times my eyes did glaze over a bit when
she was yet again visualizing or angsting about something, for which there is
no shortage of material. I did find her
ongoing ‘letters’ to her one time love Daniel annoying, but if this is what
helped her process everything going on, then I hope it helped!
Despite my initial
doubts, thinking it was going to be another ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, I did really
quite enjoy reading this book. I got to like Jessica, and I know this because
at the end I was smiling to myself, thinking how great it was that things had
turned out for her, how far she had come since she got her picaflor tattoo in
her second month. As she says in her author’s note at the very beginning – ‘my
intention has always been to write a warm, human story about overcoming a
difficult past and creating a brighter future’.
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