el círculo

!Como extraño a mi círculo de danza cuando no estoy con ellos! How I have missed my circle, la danza. My most beautiful community. Today we gather beneath skies finally blue again, instead of copper-grey from the smoke of distant forest fires. The space we're given at this event (the annual fiesta of a Catholic church in Barelas, just off downtown) is mid-side-street, across from the main stage where the ranchera band plays. Fewer than ten people wander over to observe. But as always, I'm pleasantly surprised at the willingness of those coming from very different places in this life -- even from 'organized' religion -- to simply observe our form of embodied prayer and song. This is certainly not the world of angry closed minds that I grew up in.

And I've got no desire for 'audiences' anyway. This is personal: between us and Earth. La danza is an offering. And as always, it asks me to offer everything I've got. The asphalt surface starts to raise blisters, even with huaraches on, by the second dance. My legs are stronger than they used to be, but my lungs still don't quite make it, and by the time I offer my dance I'm nearly always close to collapse. I try to put mind over matter, drink air like water, welcome the copal smoke as the nourishment that it often is. But I'm swaying on my feet, under this sun that seems to have found a hole in the top of my head, and is radiating straight into the center of my brain. And I'm thinking that pretty soon, in these rays, I'll change from the only gringa in the group to la roja - the red one - and wondering if that'll be an improvement.

What in the world am I doing here? I still wonder -- and yes, at times, feel fairly uncomfortable -- about my place in this circle. Not only because it's possibly the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm not of the right genetic or cultural background for this. Obviously. Once, at some event, an observer asked our jefe more or less that question. The man's intent seemed a curiosity more friendly than otherwise (there certainly are those of the sincere opinion that nobody with my skin color should be part of any circle). El Jefe answered with his usual charisma and inclusive enthusiasm: "She is here representing that aspect of humanity that is without race or color or borders." Wow, I told him, I hope I can live up to that.

What am I doing here? Simplest answer: I'm here because, almost two and a half years ago, I had a companion whose life orbited this circle, and he invited me to join them. I soon found in the group an expression of kind community, of whole-being, nonideological prayer, and of self-challenge that left my previous definition all of those concepts in the dust.

Answer harder to put (few) words to: I'm here because, three years ago this month, I walked out of the Hostal Catedral in El Centro de Mexico D.F., el Ombligo del Universo (as I was soon informed), and plunged into a sonic ocean of heartbeats magnified ten thousand times and shooting skyward in every direction: the reverberation of the four wooden drums of four separate circles of danzantes, bouncing off the storied stone walls of El Palacio Nacional and the other four facets of this titanic and troubled diamond called the Zocalo. It was like nothing I'd ever heard, or felt. I could not move anywhere other than toward the heart of the sound, and there, seated on a low stone ledge in sight of the Templo Mayor, shoulder to shoulder with the tourists, travellers, and weary walkers of the City, to try and drink it in. First a man came by playing up the tourist crowd with a printed sheet on Mexica cosmology; I gave him a few cents for one, just to be neighborly, but when he asked where I was from and heard "Nuevo Mexico" he smiled and exclaimed "Ah, eres vecina entonces!" and I felt, suddenly, welcome.

Then, a short time later, a quiet voice materialized next to my left shoulder, and began, without preamble, a detailed, unhurried discourse on the history of the danzantes and the society in which they had their origin. The source of this voice looked like a young homeless man, my age at most, with waist-length dreds matted into one massive plume down his back, wisp of mustache over friendly smile, tattered NFL-logo jacket held together with safety pins and duct tape, holy shoes. He didn't ask my name, didn't offer the slightest hint of flirtation like I'd already seen round that block, didn't ask for anything. Only murmured, like a clear stream, an astonishing current of seasons, origins, social orders, details of dress, diet, medicine, rhythms of songs and of stars. It was a dream of wholeness, of right relating with earth, the pueblo, and the heavens. He said he had learned these things while studying to be a shaman, but had to leave off his studies. Of course, having lived in Santa Fe, a declaration like this comes of necessity as somewhat suspect. But his humility impressed me: this was obviously a guy with little to prove. As did the expanse and conscientiousness of his information. And I was later to hear many of the same details repeated by others; as far as I can tell, this strange traveller spoke well.

I spent about a week at the Hostal, and the drums pulled me back outside every evening. The dancers were there every day. In sun, in rain, in darkness at times. They didn't stop for anything. They were clearly there for the audience - some even put out little baskets for donations - but they weren't showy. There was an inwardness, a collectivity, a focus about the groups that I found attractive. I drank in the color, movement and sound at every chance that week. Not at all imagining, of course, that it had anything to do with me.

I continued not to imagine this for the first several months that I came to the circle here in the South Valley of Albuquerque. The glaring difference of my background alone was always with me, even though everyone was friendly and accepting (and although, when I started, there was another gringa as well as a Navajo woman in the group). The physical endurance was a greater challenge than I had taken on in almost twenty years, and I was sadly unready for it. The complexity of the dances eluded me for months, and when there came the time that I was asked to offer one on my own, I cringed at my lack of memory, skill, and grace. And, strange as it may sound, the 'acceptance of being accepted' by a solid, almost family-like community touched childhood psychic wounds not, at times, like healing balm, but more like the alcohol that burns away a potential infection. It took all the will I had, every week, to keep going back to what body, mind and spirit were both wary of and craving intensely, at the same time. And even coming up on two and a half years, I can still say the same at times: it's perhaps the most impossible and the most necessary effort I've ever taken on.

That's a lot about the personal. What of the bigger picture? What is the circle doing here? How, here, now, after centuries, after conquest and defeat, after materialism and industrialization and forgetting and loss and the burial of Tenochtitlan under time and earth and blood and asphalt? I can only, at this point, speak a regrettably small and subjective response. I can't properly cite and footnote, only retell and respect. I've been told of survivors of la Conquista who, seeing their imminent assimilation and their worldview's disappearance, began quietly and in secret to preserve in the collective memory the songs, dances and other knowledge of their past, often cloaking them for their own survival in the terms and forms of Church and Empire (sounding somewhat similar to the historic response that's always fascinated me on the part of the Celtic peoples). I've heard that the threads of continuity were spun out over surprisingly long years, thanks to their being woven into the structures of extended family. I've also heard suggested, and would imagine, that the effort found much of its momentum reclaimed in the years of the Chicano Movement. John Ross identifies the discovery of the eight-ton Coyolxauhqui stone with its carved 'moon goddess', during the Capital's Metro excavations in 1978, as the moment that 'set the wheels in motion for a revival of pride in the Aztec past'. With how few threads can you span five centuries and arrive, to some degree unchanged, in the now?

I could read up a lot more on this. But I haven't, maybe because there are so many books and so little time (an easy answer). Or maybe because this is personal. This isn't at all intellectual for me. I don't know if it's possible to say that, because I'm not Chicana, or Mexicana, I have no cultural or political point to make in this discussion. Maybe not. And I suppose I've taken on a similar personal responsibility, or lack of same, for the particular implications of the 'Aztec past' as I have for the particular implications of the USAmerican present: I claim marginal acceptance of categories, as an (in many ways) marginalized and barely-existent citizen. I am both victim and chooser of all my names. There isn't a clear answer. But I often don't expect that from Life, so I often don't demand it of myself.

But yes, I'm here, in a sense, precisely because I have no cultural background. I come from ancestors who immigrated and then assimilated as quickly and completely as possible. No language, no traditions, no history. Barely a few old photos. I spent almost 40 years of life without knowing the support and structure of a tradition, and then one was offered, and I met it on the terms with which it spoke to me: engagement with elemental, cyclical, humble and human bearings. And I'm here because, after I accepted the invitation, it was renewed time and time again. In the pain and the healing of muscle and heartbeat and breath. In the acceptance of the comadres and compadres who keep welcoming me. In the affirmation of luminous dreams and of momentary visions so exquisite, so intense that I feel obligated to honor them with my grateful silence. And in the reconnection that I know each time my feet speak their prayers directly to the listening earth, and the voice of the drum realigns my heart with a true pulse. That's the circle that has encircled me.