>>>>>

one day again
maybe soon
i will be the Phoenix
for now
still ash

the end of time

This post will be a bit behind the times.  I didn't find the time to write all this week.  Hopefully it will be timely enough still to be relevant.

We're pretty attached to our concept of time, no?  Often without even being aware that what we have -- maybe all we have -- is a concept. 

Yet we talk about it as if it were something we have.  All these very common expressions in which we use the word like an object we could both know and possess.
Give me a little time.
I don't have the time.
Take the time to ___.
If it's important, you'll make time for it.
(most annoying, right?) Time is money.
When the time is right..
It's about time.

What do we know, really?

I know that what I call time frequently escapes, evades, or confounds my best efforts to engage it.  I also know it expands, in ways my rational mind can't grasp, to once in a while accomodate things that are truly important.  I even know, as many people do, that it doesn't always move at the same speed.  And that in certain beautiful contexts, it's entirely possible to step out of it altogether.

I accept that, two days ago, something essential in what-we-perceive-as-time shifted.  I haven't studied the subject as much as have many sincere students and seekers.  My respect for the perceptions of ancient peoples doesn't need to be augmented with minute intellectual or esoteric information:  it's sufficient to know that their understandings grew from a living relationship with processes of  earth, sky, season, community.  Giving them astronomically (ha) greater likelihood of deep knowing than we could ever possibly extract from our worldview driven by media, technology and ego.  And control.

One thing I surely don't have time for is the noise of dramatic, reactionary voices ranting about the end of the world.  Gross misinformation, impoverished sources, fear.  Intentional superficiality.  Things this world already has way too much of.

But I have a few theories of my own.  Maybe they're valid, maybe not.  They seem useful, if only that just thinking about them allows me to inhabit my own small...shifts. 

One.  Maybe our unintentional-time's-up.  That is, maybe for reasons which Life holds and we don't, we now have no more time to waste.  In shallow distractions.  In actions that serve an insular "self" with no greater context.  In fear and divisiveness. In necessary words unspoken.  Maybe we just passed an intangible-but-undeniable marker, past which whatever we do seriously matters.  Is seriously needed as part of the whole.  Even more than before.

Two.  In more anxious moments, I imagine this:  maybe it's that we have no more time to lose.  For the earth.  For our own potential collective survival.  For the oceans, the four-and-two-leggeds, the trees, the cycles of precious water.  Maybe all time for talk has passed, and whatever action that we take -- or don't take -- from right now onward directly creates the earth we have to live with.  Or even, that our action or inaction has already created that earth and from this moment we will only continue to see the unavoidable results.

Three. Maybe time as we know it has ended:  as it can be known.  Maybe time is its own now. Time, its own Now.  Perhaps we're no longer at liberty to
make time
save time
take time
invest time
like we do money. Maybe, from the perception that we call "this moment" forward, Time is its own being. To be met on its own terms. To be received, with reverent spaciousness, as a sacred Other, rather than consumed as a commodity. Perceiving in this way would give hope to those of us who already respect time as an entity not entirely controllable or even very often predictable. Those of us already working, for some time, to learn what a magical and even powerful existence it might be to go with the flow. 

I've wasted so much time in this precious life.  And had it wasted for me.  This shift, for me, is simply an intention to do -- or not do -- whatever it takes to change that.  To inhabit what time is yet given to me, or I am given to.  As present, as grateful, as heart-fully as possible.  In that last sense, maybe it will be clear what I mean when I say:  I hope, and pray, that I'm in time.

a crash in Mexico

I have got to write some words that are more alive than I am right now.  Now is not an easy time.  Just a few moments spent somewhere (sometime) more breathable would be such a help.  Hopefully future nows will merit such a descriptive.  But for the time being that means going back, at least 3 or 4 years.  Writing being, after all, both spatial and temporal travel. Accessible when other forms aren't.  I've said that before, haven't I.

*******

It's June 2008.  I'm sitting in a rather upscale cafe/bookstore called El Péndulo, in the heart of the Zona Rosa, Mexico D.F.  I've avoided these nicer places for the most part, considering economics and also the leftist voices in my head, those that mutter of class violence and privilege and, at this moment, are hissing "turista!" in my ear.  No really. I do want to live here like the people do.  If a gringa can begin to approximate that at all (and I know I can't).  Maybe at least to approximate the sort of precarity that I achieve at home, riding my little wave of not-quite-impoverished abundance.  But what gets me into an establishment like this one is a particular luxury that the voices as well as the locals might not get, but to which my tired body and my privileged self are accustomed:  drinking a decent cup of coffee while sitting down. 

Because I need not only to rest the weary legs, but to write.  Restart the brain from its daily sensory overload.  Today I'm helping that process by turning the thoughts back home for a minute.  On the shelves I've found a tour guide for visitors to New Mexico.  In Spanish.  This is fun.  How will they see us?  In addition to praising our natural beauty and mix of cultures, the guide offers that "People in New Mexico speak English, but with a Spanish accent".  Haha.  Excellent.  I wish they would've included that a few lifetime New Mexicans also acquire a Spanish accent while never speaking a word of Spanish.  But maybe they'll have to come here to learn about that one.

Two 20-something guys walk by my table.  As they pass they glance my way.  Several feet past me, I hear one of them whisper to the other:  "Voy a hablar con ella".  Great.  I don't really feel like talking at the moment, much less flirting or politely refusing same.  But the guy who reappears is surprisingly courteous.  "Excuse me", he says (in Spanish, of course) "but may I ask where you're from?"  I answer him as I've learned to, after many misunderstandings:  country first, then my state (our similar names being too often confused, leaving puzzled looks and protestations that I surely can't be Mexican):  "United States:  el estado de Nuevo Mexico."  (In neither of two countries do they know where to put NM.  One more thing I love about calling this state home).

"Oh!" says the guy.  "I have un buen amigo who lives in Albuquerque."  Very cool, that's where I'm from.  We talk a bit about travel, and how I hope to get to know some new areas of the country on this visit.  As much as my time will allow.  "Can I ask you something?" he continues.  Then he says something that sounds like "Tienes un crash en Mexico?"  Um.  No, I haven't had any accidents here.  So far.  I'm not even driving.  But how could he know that -- then I get it.  "Ah, me preguntas si estoy enamorada con este pais?  Pues ¡sí!"  Am I infatuated with this country?  Well sure.

But I did have a crash in Mexico.  An unforeseen, unimaginedly intense low point that took a while to recover from.  It came a little later on that same trip.  And something brought it back to me it just this week.  With a bit of a shock, not unlike the aftershock of an accident you thought you'd left behind you.

My friend Tona the sun deity brought it back to me.  Having just completed a partial circuit of the planet (Europe, Jordan, Palestine) on his earnings as a high-end bartender in la Colonia Roma, he arrived back in La Capital to the chaos and angry clashes of a new president's installation.  A PRI president, that is:  yet again.  In my not-really-expert view, the import of Peña Nieto's election, hotly contested by many and despaired by basically all those not already in power, is the equivalent of we in the U.S. waking up one morning to find another Bush in the White House.  Only with the weight of 70 years of that fundamental dismay, instead of 8 or 12.  So yes, there was righteous indignation in the streets, and institutionalized violence at the ready, and tragically, many innocent bystanders as its victims.  Tona decided to go hang out in Tepoztlan for awhile.  When he messaged me from there, and I told him I'd spent an afternoon in that small town and might go back someday, he offered:  "There's a lot of organic agricultural projects going on around here".  Permaculture and Earth-reverence being a common thread in our conversations.  But yeah, I'm aware of that.  Didn't I tell you mi historia loca about Tepoztlan?  No, he laughs, tell me...

But I was going to talk about my crash in Mexico, not my crush.  Right.

An afternoon in early July '08 found me speeding down a narrow Morelos highway in the back seat of an old station wagon driven by a man I'd only met an hour earlier, who I was pretty sure was an alien.  Jack spoke articulate, well-educated Spanish in a soft, almost ethereal voice.  But I couldn't place his accent, and his sharply angular features and unusual skin tone -- a deep, almost purple bronze -- looked like no one I'd met anywhere in Mexico.  His obvious high intelligence paired with unexpected pauses and misunderstandings of simple Spanish added to the question. And when we arrived at his house -- a site he had acquired through grants and visionary proposals -- the books and posters on numerology, sound healing, color therapies, historical predictions and other esoterica I'd never even encountered only suggested confirmation of my theory. 

The house was a story in itself.  As we sat down to eat with four other young worker-volunteers, he told us that it had been the vacation home of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.  Salinas, perhaps best known in this country as the signer of NAFTA, is also remembered for devaluing the peso, general financial corruption at possibly new lows even for Mexico, and (according to wikipedia) the coining of a new euphemism for electoral fraud ("se cayó el sistema"/"the system crashed") after a suspiciously narrow defeat of leftist candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. 

If I didn't know all this history at the moment, one look at Salinas' home-away-from-home was enough to begin the tale.  The 20-plus acre site, on a gentle slope covered in lush vegetation, was entirely surrounded with a wall of reddish volcanic stone, 12 feet high and 3 feet thick.  No exaggerating.  We drove in under a tall arch fitted with a gate of solid wrought iron, and a guard station.  Three houses were spaced evenly about the property, equidistant from a small central lake:  one for the president and two more for his friends, Jack told us.  Each house, of the same massive stone construction, had several spacious rooms and its own swimming pool.  The president's house, in which Jack had just taken up residence, was sprawling, two-storied, with balconies on the upper bedrooms and a long portal in front twined with pink bouganvillea.  It must have been a grand sight, in its day.  Grand, and unconscionable.  In 1994, Jack related, perhaps encouraged by uprisings a little to the south, the local people rose up and ran Salinas out of their state.  Earlier we had passed a section of the massive wall that actually looked as if it had been pushed over.  Apparently, the people had left the place alone after their collective action.  Now, the houses were empty, windowless, their floors dirty and their walls and ceilings streaked with black mold.  The heavy walls, which might have created warm, cozy rooms when they had furniture and carpets and fires in the fireplaces, now just made the spaces feel cold and oppressive. 

The entire site, in fact, had a heaviness to it that, over a couple of hours, seeped into my pores and leadened my bones with an intensity that I've never felt anywhere else.  It's hard to explain, but as afternoon slanted into evening, both light and shadow grew weightier by the hour, somehow foreboding and traumatic.  By sundown I had started to feel like I was dying.  Or maybe, in the presence of someone dying.  I tried to shake it off.  I had come here to spend a couple weeks helping to create a beautiful new effort.  The place's synopsis in my WWOOFing guide sounded like the pinnacle of a summer which I had hoped to dedicate to labor and learning and the raising of consciousness.  Jack was dreaming on a grand scale:  organic gardens and greenhouses that fed dozens of inhabitants and whose surplus was sold to keep the effort funded; eco-festivals drawing teachers and learners from around the globe; agriculture demonstrations to inspire and remind the locals of old and sustainable ways; traditional and progressive practices weaving tapestries of new human paradigm.  I wanted to be a part of this lovely vision.  But as I went with another young woman on the first task Jack assigned us, I was beginning to have my doubts.  He sent us up to one of the smaller houses, with 5-gallon buckets, to gather pond scum from its stagnant swimming pool.  His plan was to use this flourescent green slime in an algae-water-processing experiment.  All I could think, as we leaned over invisible depths in that sad golden light and stirred waters long untouched, was that if this were a movie we would soon see a body float to the surface.  Some poor guy who had tried to cross those in power and had never been heard from again.  I wondered why the people of the surrounding towns hadn't occupied this place after they cleared it out.  Maybe they knew stories about what had gone down inside those walls that we didn't.  All afternoon my thoughts grew morbid like this, though I tried to shift them.  An hour before sunset they got a little relief when the boys in the group suggested walking to the nearest store, a couple miles down the road, for a soda.   As the five of us trekked through a tangle of overgrown greenhouses and abandoned fields yet-to-be-restored and reached the highway (about a mile from the house), one of them pointed out where the local colectivo bus stopped on its way into Tepoztlan, which was half an hour to the north.  I am forever grateful to this kid for that simple remark in passing. 

Back at the house, we heard more plans that, for me, only highlighted the abyss between future dream and present reality.  Food forests would thrive one day, but right now seed containers still had to be hammered together.  Eventual infrastructure would support, sustainably, a hundred or so visitors without harming the land -- but for now, he really needed some of us to start digging trenches for outhouses.  Most of the cooking was done outside, as the kitchen was in such disrepair, and as I watched dishes being washed with a garden hose I started to wonder about health conditions.  When we finally went to bed, I covered the rope-and-board cot with my down sleeping bag (perfect in the cloud forest of Veracruz, but not the ideal choice in this near-tropical climate).  My roommate exclaimed, "What, you didn't bring a mosquito net?  You're gonna have a hard time here..."  

No, the volunteer guide did not mention anything about mosquito nets.  Though well it should have.  As darkness closed into the claustrophobic space, it hid the mold streaks on the walls, the grime and mouse droppings on the floors, and the bats that flew in and out of the open windows to roost in the ceilings' high corners.  It did not hide the stench from the bucket toilet in the closet, our only bathroom at present.  And it had nothing on the mosquitoes.  They zoomed around my head, under my clothes, into my ears, and, after I zipped the sleeping bag to the top and covered my head, leaving only a mouth-sized opening at its drawstring-top, they somehow still found their way inside it to sting me over and over.  Each time I finally dozed off, their buzz or bite would wake me again.  Between their incessant tormenting, the questions about the scope of the project at hand, and my increasingly distressing and inexplicable bad-energy-exchange with the place, I didn't sleep more than a minute or two all night.  Long before first light I had resolved not to stay there another day.  In the afternoon's downward spiral I had been sure that, after another 24 hours in such an oppressive state, I wouldn't be able to move at all.  But that hellish night was all the motivation I needed.  As soon as I could see, I got up and packed my things without a sound (not waking my roommate, as far as I could tell), tiptoed out of the house, ran through the green tangles into the sunrise, and almost immediately saw the bus coming up the road.  I felt like a successful prison escapee.  Rarely have I been so grateful for the awareness, the return, of simple freedom of movement.

I didn't once regret leaving the place, even though I had dearly wanted to see, and assist in, the birth of its new vision.  I did regret leaving my host with no communication -- human or not, he was nice enough, and I respected greatly his intelligence and intentions for the place.  But time went by and I never got around to writing him.  Really I wanted to just forget the place, except perhaps as a fine travel-horror story to tell to a few friends.  But the other day, after talking with the friend now in Tepoztlan, I started to wonder.  So I looked it up.  For the first time in 4 1/2 years.  And oh my.  They've done it.  They've actually brought the dream to life.  In one sense, watching the video I found was very strange, painful in fact:  I could have been a part of this, if I'd only had what it took to stick it out.  But I know, and knew, that I didn't.  Not just the guts to deal with the slime and dirt and mosquitoes.  The inner strength it takes to shift on the fly, to catch an inner state in the making and restore oneself to equilibrium despite acute discomfort.  Which, I am belatedly discovering, is one of the confounding but basic skills required of a good traveller.  As well as the quality of heart, of optimism and perseverance and faith, that's asked of people who engage a vision from its beginning.  I admire those who have such abilities.  Maybe, with a little more healing and continuity in my life, I'll cultivate them better in the future.  And, mixed emotions and all, I send my deep admiration and very best wishes to Jack and the community of Quinta Piedra, who, as this video demonstrates, are well on the good road to bringing a dream, out of conflict and destruction, into beauty and life.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjmbYi6h48g 

unobstructed

Unnecessary precaution..human clutter and fear ever trying to speak louder than the stillness...blocking of the seen and the not-seen and the nonexistent (and the no longer existent)...distracting signs where there are only openings...projecting the corrupt and the forgetful that we ourselves bring...or maybe, only, neglecting to clean up our own signs and symbols so we can walk unobstructed and free.  This is how the fearmind wants us to see the road:

Earth invites.  Welcomes.  Embraces.  Leaves the door always open.  Like this:

immigrant

From another intellectual gathering where I sat in the back row in my leather jacket and scrawled highly subjective notes in the dark: some entirely unacademic thoughts on migration.  On the many meanings of being an "immigrant" or an "outsider".  On the spectrum of choice and no-choice, of needs inner and outer, of searches practical and spiritual, that heave us travellers onto all our very different roads.  This came from a talk a few years ago at the Santa Fe Art Instititute.  Their fall lecture series was titled "Outsider:  Tourism, Migration, Exile" and featured, on this particular night, Iranian professor/writer/producer Hamid Naficy.  Documentary footage which Mr. Naficy shared, about a young woman from India attempting to assimilate in this country, contained the resonant line "she will not use the language of her tradition".  These words still reverberate in my head, with their significance to any of us who left behind our cultures of origin. Along with their languages (of prejudice, of violence, of smallness) which were unconscionable for us to continue. Those who migrate because physical safety or practical necessity says that they must are followed, at a reverent distance, by those of us who receive the same mandate from conscience and from heart.  All of us starting over, often with next to nothing, taking on the labor of the search for new voices and new homelands (geographical, emotional, spiritual homelands) that are safe. That allow us to thrive.

Connecting also with a favorite line from T. S. Eliot:  “For last year's words belong to last year's language/ And next year's words await another voice.”  As well as the declaration to "speak your truth, even if your voice shakes".


impervious border defenses only defy with this:
the crossing denied is worth all imagined risk
hostile walls accost with their heartache stories
of an other motherland
for those who are living without

her past will not uphold her
and there is no future in the familiar
no nurture in nexus of home
the dry wells they have given her to draw from
do not quench or offer growth
she quits the austere earth of her known
for an unimagined country
silences the words that dessicate, dominate, and desecrate
obscuring all the sacred
she will go free, mutable, and if need be, mute
but she will not use the language of her tradition
this land lets a new expression rise
this here's words await another voice
choice of pure presence though imperfect
now is all the power that she owns

forward out from fear
she will speak and stumble
accept the stubborn strength
of a yet unmastered tongue
to shape approximations of her real
from an unseasoned lexicon
in a voice that shatters, shakes, diminishes, returns
but belongs to her and here
alone

changing planes

Master storyteller Ursula LeGuin has a collection of short stories about people who travel to strange and varied places by way of a common interdimensional portal, which happens to be an airport.  The book is wonderfully titled Changing Planes.

I had a little of that kind of travel last year.  Just about a year ago, in fact.  How did I not write it down yet?  Since all of this writing is an attempt to give thanks for Life's crazy gifts, in whatever form they arrive?


It's my last night in Portland, Oregon.  I've spent ten days here catching up with all the friends who I haven't seen in the almost five years since this city was home.  It's been a beautiful time.  We've affirmed that those threads of connection, fragile though they may be, can bear stretching out over time and distance, when enough love and goodwill spin them.  I've waded through several waves of the nostalgia and what-if that let me imagine dropping everything and moving back here, and now I'm ready to get home to New Mexico.  I've walked and bussed all the familiar old streets, from SE to NW, right now bejeweled with gorgeous falling leaves of gold and copper and garnet under rapidly silvering skies and the coming winter rains.  I've drunk the best coffee and bought some used books and cheered for a poetry openmic and viewed a Zapatista documentary and danced with all the good hippies at the Laurelthirst.  These last few nights I've been a guest at the very quiet Whitefeather House, a cooperative home started by an activist, UP professor, and a former catholic worker housemate.  It's so good to know that the doors I helped open before are still open to me.  I've felt grateful, in good company, at peace.

But this morning jolts me awake out of strange dreamtime journeys.  Several companions and I are leaving the city, heading into the mountains, in a beat-up 70's station wagon.  We're hurried and apprehensive, glancing over our shoulders.  As the highway starts to climb and the canyon narrows, following the river, an object hurtles out of the sky and crashes onto the pavement just ahead of us.  Then another, at our back.  Large jagged pieces of an airplane are falling from the sky.  One lump of metal looks like part of an engine, and another is clearly the tail of a Southwest Airlines plane:  blue with red trim.  Our driver grips the wheel and fixes his eyes on the road.  But then with a bang! a tire blows, and we skid to the asphalt's edge.  We laboriously repair the tire, which has exploded into frayed edges, and continue on.  More plane parts thud awfully all around us.  Then the tire goes out again -- but this time, when we stop, we find that it's only popped off the rim and is an easy fix.  If we can just keep moving, surely we can outrun whatever disasters are unfolding, in the city at our back and in the skies above us...


Waking is paralysis and pure disorientation, the first few moments.  I can't tell where I am, or if I've escaped the danger.  Then the reality of this space replaces and I realize:  I'm due at the airport -- on a Southwest flight -- in two hours.  What in the world is going on here?  Why such a disturbing dream at a tranquil moment like this?  Should I be terrified?  I decide to put off that last question until I've had breakfast and some coffee.  At the diner down the street, I call the friend who's offered to take me to the airport and ask if he's got a little extra time to meet me here and talk.  He is kind enough to get there 30 minutes early, and listens to my dream story with interest.  He's got a similar respect for the dream world and its guidance.  We agree that maybe proceed-with-caution is more or less the best option.  And perhaps, as the dream seems to suggest, to keep the eyes open for a repeated opportunity, whose second iteration appears less serious than the first.

Two nights earlier, this same friend invited me to the event of the trip that most fed the soul (and for Portland, that's saying a lot).  We saw Latif Bolat, a Turkish Sufi singer, in concert at a Buddhist temple.  Mr. Bolat had saturated an already sacred space with the beauty of his voice and his playing of the traditional stringed baglama, with stunning photos from the Turkish tours he leads annually, with humble and witty stories of his country and his religion.  It was hard to leave such a lovely venue, when the evening was over.  And it's a surprise, now, to see him standing at the other side of the airport waiting area.  Cautiously I approach him, introduce myself as having been at his show, and thank him for his performance.  He's as nice in person as he was onstage, and it turns out we're waiting for the same plane.  His next stop is Santa Fe.  Surely this flight must be blessed, with such a luminous passenger as this one.  Maybe I'm wrong to worry about tragic skyborne accidents.  Maybe I should clear my mind, remember a lifetime of undeniable protection, and get on board.  Or, maybe there's a message here that's only mine to consider, and doesn't affect the others on this flight...

Then our plane wheels up to the gate, below the wide picture window.  The sight of that red-and-blue paint job sets the adrenaline flowing again.  I take a walk down the hallway and put it out of sight for the moment.  I breathe deep, and ask for just a little more clarity.  Just then a woman's voice comes over a loudspeaker.  With our sincerest apologies, Southwest passengers, we seem to have overbooked this flight.  In the next half hour before it leaves, we welcome any volunteers whose schedules are more flexible to come up to the counter, and exchange your seat on this plane for another one later today.  We'll give you a travel voucher for your cooperation. 

Alright then.  Seven of us approach the desk, are thanked and checked off the list and shown another waiting area.  The red-and-blue plane begins boarding, and Latif Bolat and the others leave the room.  I say a sort of prayer for them, that maybe the singer's light will diffuse over all the passengers.  The seven of us are informed that we'll have a 3 to 4 hour wait.  I call my friend and tell him about developments, and he offers his wonder and affirmation (two qualities that have always made him a fine fellow traveller on the life-trip).  I hit 'restart' on my worried mind, and remember myself into the flow of mystery and magic and providence.  All is well.  When our new plane rolls up the window -- still Southwest -- it's painted in blue and gold this time.  We board and fly to Albuquerque without incident.  And a week later I receive an email from Southwest with a voucher of equal value to the flight just completed.  Which will open the portal to a return trip to Mexico, a few months later...but that's another story.

After some time, I got past the irrational fears enough to check the one proof I have that the first plane also arrived safely:  Latif Bolat's website.  And he does seem to be alive and well.  http://latifbolat.com/bio.php.  It seems that Life, for its own mysterious and unseen reasons, only needed me, at that moment, to get on another plane...

fiesta en Casa

Mole rojo, ensaladas, nopales, agua de jamaica and pastel de 3 leches.  Teresa told me that she asked the women of the neighborhood if they could bring something for the meal and they all said yes, sure.  And then when she asked what they would bring, they all gave the same answer:  "Algo".  Something.  But of course, all the somethings fit together perfectly.  As they usually do, in a community with so much goodwill and shared effort.

They've cleared out the side yard, usually overflowing with spare furniture to be shared around, tools, and the items for the perpetual yard sale that helps keep this effort going.  Now the gravel is raked, and the small space is full of folding tables and chairs.  People start arriving about an hour before dark.  All down the block the neighbor kids are running, biking, making happy noise.  All the kids, that is, who aren't already here because they're part of one of the programs, or following their parents in for classes.  These kids are running in the garden and picking tomatoes (the garden I helped start three years ago, which now others have taken on), while the adults converse with each other, and with the community center's new English teacher and computer instructor. Everybody's here thanks to Teresa's untiring 12 years of work and welcome, and the majority are here because their status as undocumented immigrants makes this unofficial neighborhood center one of not too many places they can find work, continuing education, and community.

Teresa takes her rightful (and always calm and humble) place as Maestra de Ceremonias at the head of one of the tables, and announces our reason for gathering here:  yet another Burqueño is heading to Nicaragua to join the Peace Corps, after being the community's volunteer English teacher for 3 years.  He's 24:  that's some dedication, for that age.  A round of "3 Cheers" in Spanish goes up for him.  He's brought his parents and his grandmother, who are visibly proud of him as they are introduced.  He makes a short speech, part in English and part in Spanish, thanking the people, hoping they will keep learning, wishing them well.

Then Teresa announces that the guys from Ecuador are going to play music for us.  All the years they've been living here part-time, on their migratory paths, and I didn't know that Pedro sang, or that Humberto played guitar.  Only that they quietly take their handmade imports -- clothes, jewelry, knitted hats -- to sell at the area markets, and go back precisely when their visas expire.  They occupy a minimum of space in their seasonal rooms here.  They don't take up a lot of space bodily, either (they're both shorter than me), so they are able now to squeeze without much trouble, instruments and all, under a stairway, the only remaining space in the courtyard.  Both are dressed, as usual, in jeans and tennis shoes, their black braids nearly waist-length.  Pedro is wearing a t-shirt with a photo of Sitting Bull, which reads "Sure we can trust the government...just ask an Indian."  Humberto's has a graphic of an army tank -- with underneath it the words "You Very Much."  They do a really nice job on several songs that must be classics, as even I recognize a couple of tunes from the Andean music in my collection.  Pedro plays Andean pipes and a flute, and does most of the vocals.  When they finish one of the women calls out, asking them to please play a particular song again, as it sounded so pretty.  Which they do.

Later I talk with them a while, squatting on the asphalt near the front door, while the party gets cleaned up.  The two of them share a concrete parking-space marker, as if it were a park bench.  Humberto is flying back to Ecuador the next day.  This time they only gave him one month on his visa.  Last time I think he got to stay 3 or 4 months.  One of these days I have to learn more about these legal matters, and why they seem so capricious.  I've probably mentioned my ever-present wish to return to Mexico in this conversation, as in so many others.  Pedro asks when I think I'll visit Ecuador.  Ah, me encantaría, I tell him, but so far I don't know how to come up with the funds for that kind of travel.  They both smile, and Pedro says, just $800 for the plane ticket, and once you get there you won't need much to live on.  Well that's really nice, I reply, but $800 is a prohibitive amount for me and most people I know.  Really, I wonder how they do it.  Probably staying at the center here, for one.  Probably, too, living far more carefully than I've learned to.  Even though (maddeningly at times) my own efforts at simplicity continue to put me in a permanent limbo between the people of this country and the people from elsewhere who I have the gift of knowing.  Like these two.  We talk more about imaginary travels; I say I also dream of going to India and they ask why.  I try to describe how the combination of beauty and poverty draws me, and end up saying, "I just want to learn how the people with less are living in this world", well knowing how ridiculous this sounds coming from an americana, even one who lives close to the "poverty line" but saying it anyway because it's true, and from my heart.  I think, from the way they smile and nod, that maybe they hear that from me.  I wish Humberto "que te vaya muy bien"; Pedro wishes me luck on future travels -- including, he adds, to South America. I get a smile from both of them when I reply, "Cuando gano la lotería, quizas."

The party's winding down now.  The leftovers have been carefully saved, and the dishes returned to their owners.  Teresa invites me to walk with her around the corner, taking a plate to an older woman who can't get out much.  On the way she greets kids, construction workers, and rumored drug dealers with the same equanimity and graciousness she shows everyone.  She is without conflict in this neighborhood many in the city call "The War Zone".  She is living faith, in her simplicity of life and her refusal of fear, at a level which not that many people imagine possible.  And also, in the fact that she makes nothing of it. For me, she is a particular member of my chosen family: I think of her as a madrina, a godmother. Not only because she prays for me and offers me good counsel, but because her quiet force for peace, justice, and generosity show me one face of infinite divine Love.

Before I can leave, they all load me up with food, their blessings, and a few more future collaborations to dream on. And a few more lessons learned.  The monotony of so many days is just making a living, stayinng housed, staying out of trouble. For me, and surely much more for the others here. This, today, was Life like it's supposed to be, something beyond all that. Shared and simple and beautiful and abundant.

quotes: Luis Alberto Urrea

A long time ago I read this bit of advice to aspiring novelists:  If you want to learn to write excellent, realistic dialogue, just listen to real people and real conversations wherever you go, and (surreptitiously) write down what you hear.  The moment that I decided to try this, I began to hear some of the most bizarre actual conversations I had ever imagined could occur.  So odd, in fact, that I soon gave up the practice, convinced that no reader would ever believe they could have happened.

Maybe truth really is stranger than fiction.  But I've come to admire, and to be fed by, those writers whose fiction is as strange as truth.  Or, whose strange (and often quite simple) fiction..awakens truth.  If you haven't experienced this, I'm not sure I can describe it.  But I will offer here one small example, just encountered in Luis Alberto Urrea's novel The Hummingbird's Daughter.  Followed by one of the finest and most ridiculous pages of dialogue that's come my way in a while.  And which sounds, in fact, quite a bit like some of the "real dialogues" in my own overhearing.

***

"Don Refugio Moroyoqui never explained himself.  Even when he was teaching...he stayed quiet even while speaking.  A particular knot could be tied but one way.  The grain of the wood allowed but one shaving.  Some roads, despite appearances, went in only one direction.  Don Refugio did not speak of dried-out riverbeds."

***

(The dialogue is between Tomás, the patrón of a great Sinaloan rancho, and his lifelong friend Aguirre, "the Engineer", visiting from the North.  The story takes place just before 1900.)

"I was afraid I'd miss your party," Aguirre said.  "Things are complicated on the roads."
"Did you see bandits?"
"Only in the form of government agents....The bandits are all dead," Aguirre informed him.  "And many Indians.  Americanos are buying land in Chihuahua and Sonora on deeds from Mexico City."  He waved his hand before his face.  "There are department stores."
"What is this?"
"Germans selling coats and underpants and pots and toys all in one great store."
"No meat?"
"No."
"No steaks?"
"No! No meat at all."
"What kind of a store sells no meat?"
"Tomás!  Por Dios!  Pay attention!  A department store."
"What do they sell?"
"I just told you what they sell."
"No meat."
"Correct."
"German underpants."
"Well.  As a figure of speech."
"Ah."
"Things, in other words."
"Ah!"
"It is very North American."
"No meat," said Tomás.  "It is the end of ranching."
"No, no," the Engineer said.  "There will be department stores of meat!"
Tomás raised his glass.
"Let us drink a toast, then, to the future!"

corn maiden

About finally having a real garden, I could say many things.  I thought people had a thousand ways to break your heart, but that was before I started working in earnest with plants.

The greenhouse experiment that I built, rebuilt, held together (literally) in windstorms, and finally surrendered and dismantled.  All the places indoors and out where fragile seedlings tried to find a home for their first weeks.  The dozens of seeds that never sprouted.  Nine gorgeous and healthy zucchini plants, the first to take off and thrive, which were completely devastated, eaten down to the ground by a squashbug invasion.  Sweat and dizzy labor under midday sun, since my work schedule doesn't allow me much time mornings or evenings. 

The lovely deep peace that comes while carrying water -- a three-gallon bucket and a green watering can -- out to the rows on occasions between irrigating.  (We've all been trying to run the well pump just once a week here, those of us who share this land.  Sometimes that's not enough).

Thoughts going out to all the women and children around the world who, right now, are carrying water by hand over uneven ground, because they have no other choice.  Prayers that we wake up and realize, many more of us, the preciousness of our water.

Imagining that my work is more than fun, more even than learning experience.  That my community depends on the success of my labors, to eat.  What a fantastic responsibility that would be.  Right now, our diet would be all green and leafy:  spinach, basil, cilantro, chard, lamb's quarter, epazote.  But a little later in the summer, just maybe...I've learned not to count seeds, blooms, plants, as any of these might be gone tomorrow.  But if nothing happens, nothing more than the ordinary mystery of rootdeep and rainfall and photosynthesis, there just might be corn.  Sometime soon.  Almost two weeks ago, Corn Maiden graced me unexpectedly with her presence.  Only after I took this photo of the new ears did her image become clear. Giving me hope.  And gratitude for the chance to labor along with the Earth in this little way.

one part steampunk

I never had a steampunk dream before today.  Only know of the scene from reading of events on the theme (mostly in Portland, of course).  The iconoclasts among my community of inner voices have created, of their aversion to trends, a sort of pop-culture early warning system.  It picks up on certain signals and symbols and sounds the alarm, and that's that.  Off the radar.  But something about the steampunk trend got my attention. I think it was the perceived wish to tap into a few of the best currents in the river of human culture.  To recollect or to rescue a few of the more human details from a world otherwise too often inhuman.  Resourcefulness.  Inventiveness.  Community.  Fun, even.  Cool costumes.  If that's true, then they've got a little of my ambivalent respect, even if they're trendy.  And my gratitude, today, for the psychic props that provided a fascinating trip into the dreamtime.  A trip that featured something of the genre, on one of its sides at least.  And that was, in its own way, was about rescue and recovery.

***
I've travelled far, on foot and alone.  I come seeking work and also something more in the great central industrial City of this past-future world.  My path follows the shallow river, somehow yet uncontaminated and clear, that marks the boundary between the open lands and the City's smokestacks and blinking light towers.  It is night, and no stars are visible through the lowering amber-grey clouds that mingle with factory effluent plumes.  But on my side of the water the air feels clean and breathable enough.  I seem to be walking a line down the middle of a world half given over to massive industry and technology, and half yet in its natural state. 

My goal is the newspaper office, which I understand also serves as the central communications center, and perhaps in fact as a sort of Central Command.  I intend to ask for a job as a photographer -- I'm carrying my equipment with me -- which will neatly serve as the cover I need for my real and more essential work.  But as I reach the City's outskirts, a fortuitous meeting with the head photographer of the newspaper convinces me to alter my plans somewhat.  He is at work in an office and laboratory space that is at once indoor and outdoor, under the smoky dark sky.  Shelves and tables stacked with complicated-looking equipment surround him, although he stands with his feet on earth.  He wears a white linen shirt, open at its short collar, and a long leather apron like a chemist might have.  With his square jaw, longish blonde hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, and wire-rimmed glasses (which sometimes morph into aviator goggles), he would be textbook (or comic book) handsome intellectual, did I find that type attractive.  But I approach him with caution and courtesy and (playing only a little on the mutual attraction factor) engage him in a conversation that informs me well of the situation here.  This exchange provides the opening that I need to approach the Manager of the facility, a little further down the path.  If the post of photographer is already occupied, I can alter my trajectory slightly and still make this work to my advantage. 

The Manager also looks like a comic-book character:  tall, broadshouldered, dark hair and pale skin, similar glasses but with a hawk's glare behind them.  His long-fingered hands are busy laying the heavy type in an ancient manual printing press, but his mind is clearly monitoring larger and more complex intrigues.  I know that, despite the simplicity of appearances, he is linked to a vast network of visible and invisible technologies that make him one of those who give and take the power this world.   He is intimidating:  direct, short with words, suspicious of newcomers.  But he listens to the glib speech I spin him, infused as I am with the confidence gained in my previous meeting.  Grudgingly, he offers to give me a chance.  I will work here, apparently, as a sort of courier.  My first assignment on the job arrives in short time:  a Re-entry.  I'm elated at the news:  this is a more auspicious beginning than I had hoped, and a clear opportunity to engage with the real Work for which I came here.

Presently, the object is brought that will be at once sign of my office and tool of my mission.  It is an entirely rusty but solid iron pipe of about three inches in diameter, 1/2 inch in thickness, and six to seven feet long.  Carved along its length, as I know there will be, are various words, designs and unfamiliar markings that tell the story of its travels and its purpose, from past to present.  As I examine these markings, the story of the woman I am about to go in search of fills my mind, immediately and naturally, as if it had always been there:  she is one of the outcasts, among the women sentenced (for some unspecified aspect of their background) to live and work in the fields outside the City, growing the food that feeds its citizens.  I also know, in this moment, that as part of their ostracizing, the names of these women have been taken from them, and they have been given numbers that identify them instead.  A deep sadness descends on me at the infusing of this knowledge.  But there also comes a grounded confidence that I can complete my mission, which is to inform just one of the women that the powers-that-be have decided her time on the outside is finished, and she is free to return and reclaim her life.  I examine the iron pipe, looking for the digits that represent her on its augural surface. Thinking myself a bit ahead of the game, I venture to the Manager, "I believe I'm going to be looking for a number here, is that right?"  I hope he will be impressed with my insight, but he apparently sees me as very belatedly informed, of matters I should perhaps have been tuning in on the nets.  "I thought you rather naive," is his brusque reply.  But he's cleared me to go, and I set off, again on foot, for the fields.

As the women sent here must sleep where they work, with no infrastructure provided, a series of tents has been improvised.  It looks like a collection of old bedsheets hung from clotheslines which parallel the garden beds.  They seem to sleep on more tattered sheets and blankets spread on the earth, among the rows.  Here there are no signs of the overriding technology, and only hand tools are used for the work.  The women are a varied group - they do not seem to be from one ethnic group or economic class, but rather to have coalesced here out of a kaleidoscope of stories which, sadly, I will never know.  They are not yet old, and their drawn faces, ragged clothing and hair caught up in scarves do not hide that several of them were once quite beautiful.  They greet me with a wan and weary wariness, but soon recognize that I come in peace.  The one I am here for steps forward, tremulous, unbelieving.  The news she has waited all this time to hear is yet too good to be true.  But when I point out her own number, carved on the side of the metal pipe by an unknown hand or force, there is no denying it.  She embraces the other women quickly, and then steps forward as they all watch, bittersweet expressions of happiness for their companion and grief for themselves.  I show her how to set the pipe on her shoulder, as I am carrying the other end of it on mine.  It must be done in this way:  it's the sign that I do have the authority to take her out of this place, for any who might question, and it is also the link that will hold us together when we pass through some sort of dimensional portal to regain the world outside.  As we walk, she tells me through her tears that her Re-entry means she will be given her family back again.  All her children, who were taken away.  And the sweet baby girl, who she has missed the most, and who now she can nurse without fear and sleep near at night.  As part of her reinstatement to society, she will be given all the supplies and resources she needs to care for her family and not to live in want anymore.

The woman stays close beside me as we regain the newspaper compound and wait the necessary while for the final approvals to be processed.  I will stay with her, as a sort of mediator and perhaps protector, until her permission arrives and she passes through the great wood-and-iron Door that connects this office with the free world.  The Manager's glare falls our way now and then, and she all but hides behind me to avoid it.  We both laugh at another woman who passes through on her own way to freedom with her young daughter.  This woman talks nonstop, nervously, laughing, while her little girl is silent.  She's outfitted for the anachronism:  floor-length purple velveteen dress with high collar, blonde hair done up nicely, and we even know that she's been given impressive old family connections to see her on her journey.  But her glasses appear to be plastic, and her accent (which perhaps should be Victorian London?) sounds like someone from Texas or Louisiana.  It almost seems that she is hiding something: at what ploy did she just succeed?  Although her manner is irritating, I half hope that whatever it is, she gets away with it.  She is still talking as the door swings shut behind her.  We sigh in relief.  My companion will be the next to go.  Any moment now, if nothing else happens.  I don't know if she will go into the darkness and noise of the City, or out into the green landscape.  Only that where she goes she will be happy because she will be free to live again.

a natural death

sueño de morir de viejo y no de soledad -- Juanes
(I dream of dying of old age and not of loneliness)

A subject that interests few, and upsets many, and naturally concerns every one of us. Interesting, that.
How are we going to die?  Not "if", of course.  Not "when"; neither "from what causes".  Though we might have some options, depending on what we do before the fact.  But, if we do have the choice -- in the moments that lead up to and follow that one moment -- how?  Whatever our views, or lack of same, about what comes after, is it possible to see death as a transition?   As movement along a continuum, in which intention, awareness, and -- not least -- the people we love have their part?

The couple I'm visiting are probably close to 70.  The husband, who might be a few years older than his wife, is confined to his home, to a recliner and to the constant watch of a caregiver.  I don't know his story, but he seems to be in the grip of some debilitating physical condition.  His mind is not his limitation:  that's clearly still a bright light.  He recites transcendental poetry with a glint in his eye and responds to our greetings in a clear, if quiet, and measured tone.  We've come here for a ceremony of remembering, so that we can share the time with him too.   We're sitting around him now on the rug, sharing hummus and bread and blackberries and talking of many things.  The conversation in the afterglow of this heart-full time weaves among luminous and hopeful topics.  Then his partner remarks, so casually that her words take a moment to sink in, "We've been talking a lot about our death."  Now she's got all of our attentions. She's smiling -- the peaceful, sunlight smile she's worn for most of the short time that I've known her.  "We want to plan for it in advance", she continues, "and so we've been investigating sustainable options for what happens afterward."

Why don't people think on this more?  And why don't they talk about it with their friends?  Not as a depressing subject, or a desperate one at the point when it's too late, but as a natural aspect of the journey we share together?  Why isn't it a conscious level of interaction with our loved ones...with our financial choices...of our bodies with the earth, in the most literal and intimate sense?  Why don't we see it as, perhaps, a partial antidote to all of those continuous little deaths we pass through, collectively or individually:  of job, relationship, failure of hope or expectation.. With all the times we die in part before we die completely, and too many of those we endure alone, why, when it comes to the final and unavoidable taking of leave, wouldn't we accompany each other more? 

I'll leave that question as it is, for now:  open.  And just offer this link to one of the natural options these friends told us about.  A vision for more harmony with community and with Earth.   http://www.lifeandlove.tv/article.cfm/aid/1081.

the soldier's dream

A story I heard several years ago, told as true.  True or not, it certainly left its mark.  In fact, and unfortunately, it's taken on a little more significance for me in the last couple years.  About relating to other humans, and the beautiful promises they too often make.

A soldier in wartime was knocked unconscious in an explosion.  He was rescued, but remained comatose.  He spent several months in that state, under the care of doctors and nurses who worked patiently to keep him alive and to revive him.  Suddenly one day, he woke up.  As far as everyone could see, his wounds were healed, and even his memory was intact up to the point of the accident.  To all appearances, he was more or less his old self once again.  Except for this: when the doctors and his family and friends asked him, what was it like? being all that time alive but not exactly in this reality? he replied that over and over again, while in that other place of consciousness, he dreamed that he woke up.  Day after day, without change, the same dream of waking.  "Well, that's alright then," they told him, "because you're awake now."  The soldier smiled slowly, a smile that almost looked like delight except it was also something else and answered, "Yeah, right..."

trading songs

Until my own voice returns, here are words from another that was my companion this week.  This book by Susan Brind Morrow called to me from one of Bradley's boxes at Winnings, and there was no refusing it.  Yet another book showing itself to have, or be a part of, perfect timing.  Sparse, spacious, austere, but abundant with color, image, birdsong, and in these excerpts, people's songs, from the author's desert travels.  From The Names of Things:  Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert.

"Dr. Hatikabi...began to teach me old Sudanese songs that he knew.  The music sounded strange, when I first heard it, antique, more Indian than Arabic. 
As he sang, tribesmen came and sat around us.  I began to understand that year about trading poems and songs.  It involved giving, that intangible, freeing human thing:  giving something priceless, even to a stranger, for nothing.
A few months before, I had sung to a room of Egyptian engineers who were building an aluminum factory in Edfu.  They had given me dinner and had sung to me, tapping their glasses with their forks for rhythm.  Then they waited, expecting me to sing something back.  I sang the old Ruth Etting song from the thirties, "Mean to me. Why must you be mean to me?"  They all laughed wildly and applauded on "Awh Honey, it seems to me" (honey being the one word in the song they understood).
A decade later I was with my friend Nina West in the Tien Shan Mountains, between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang.  Everywhere we went we sang -- on buses, in the high rich green mountain fields, walking along a road.  And in response, everywhere we went people sang to us.  They traded beautiful Kazakh and Uighur songs for "You Go to My Head" (Nina's favorite) and "If Tomorrow Wasn't Such a Long Time" (mine).
One night in the snow at Heaven Lake, in a concrete shack where we fed together on a sheep's head, we started to sing Beethoven's "Hymn to Joy".  And to our surprise everyone else in the room sang with us -- Russian, Chinese, Kazakh, Mongol -- not the words, but the music, for everyone knew it."

[later, another trade]
"At the geological survey station in Marsa Alam, I have just come up from the beach, where the director, Mr. Rifaat, and I were sitting in the dark, against the hull of an overturned boat.  We were singing to each other, songs that brought tears to our eyes.
'Let us walk on the beach and sing moving songs', he had said after we finished our supper of tomatoes and cheese."

[yet later, with a nomadic family encamped near the ocean]
"Hassan Karr is singing softly, sweetly, as he fetches trays and bowls and fried fish..."Il dunya helwa, helwa", he sings.  The world is beautiful, beautiful."

San Ysidro

Thanks to Raquel for posting these wonderful photos from this year's procession honoring San Ysidro, and our farmers, and our acequias as they bring us the water to farm.  It was yet another odd and lovely time with la danza, as prayers, songs, and blessings were offered from the Aztec, Catholic, Native American and Buddhist traditions.  The flowers, the community and of course the dance itself brought their beauty to the day.  But one thing I like most about these occasions is that it's like living, for just a moment, in some parallel dimension where coexistence, and even willing collaboration, between all the spiritual paths is simply the norm.   http://cascabeldecobre.blogspot.com/2012/06/san-ysidro-procession-photos.html

Pátzcuaro

Less than an hour from Morelia.  A world away if you´re not in the know.  You can't catch the second class bus at the regular station; it takes off from an unmarked curbside at the edge of a bypass in a rundown colonia called Xangari.  Which is also the name you look for on the windshield of the combi.  $3.50 one way, or 5 dollars round-trip.  That $1.50's a welcome return for a traveller; the generosity of unsolicited helpful information even more so.

Sunslant and dust-brown, all the road there, greening at the curves..never dream a lake sating these sere horizons...pure red earth, dried-out agave-hills, tilled but vacant fields and tall dividing windbreaks..brittle stalks stacked in spiralling pyramids, last season's harvest, sun-drying...round a curve and there! turquoise-overflowing bowl of green.  Miles away yet but it fills the view: dome, island, near-perfect-symmetry, Janitzio.  Houses red and white complete the spectrum.  Morelos, stone fist raised into cloudlight, summit of its arc of memory.  You cannot take your eyes off the island, once you´ve seen it.  It is at once the oddest sight in this vista, and the thing most completely in its place.

Some factual assistance from wikipedia (as far as a place can be known by its statistics):  "The Lake Pátzcuaro basin is of volcanic origin...(its) watershed extends 50 kilometers east-west and 33 kilometers from north to south. Lake Patzcuaro lies at an elevation of 1,920 meters, and is the center of the basin and is surrounded by volcanic mountains with very steep slopes. It has an average depth of 5 meters and a maximum of 11. Its volume is approximately 580 million cubic meters."  The area is home to over 200 species of birds...water diversion (urban and agricultural) and logging, over the last 50 years, have reduced the depth of the lake by about 7 feet...

My friend who grew up in Michoacan painted a distressed picture of the lake she loved to visit as a child.  She said that, in her day, all the boats that ferried tourists and locals from the pier at the town of Pátzcuaro were like large canoes.  But over the years, the people had started using gasoline-powered launches, and these had polluted the waters to such a degree that she could hardly stand to go there anymore.  I approach with a forboding vision of oil slicks and floating fish.  But am relieved to see the same green-blue in the waters, at close range, that shimmers up from a distance.  What she saw here 50 years ago I´ll probably never know.  I´m sure it was even more gorgeous at that time. 

But such a thing, from my two afternoons round its edges, is hard to imagine.  From every tiny pueblo encrusted on its circumference it takes a yet more lovely glow.  This paved roadway is only the circlet for a queen of astonishing beauty, and the towns her willing admirers, and of course the light. Every side is her good side, and on every side she bestows her favors.

Every side every facet a portal, an opening.  "The natives believe that the lake is the place where the barrier between life and death is the thinnest." Veils so thin here, translucent, inviting in...drawing spiral...this circle road's a dance..a rise into green and downslope cruise back to aquasilver...wind rises, cloudswaths rain-blue sweep the ridges round, shadows build, and sun leans into slantwise dance with spent clouds leaving every surface sweating gold and aquamarine...every edge and outline caressed with brilliance..every form breathes color pure, intense enough to tear the eyes though they cannot tear themselves away from its completeness.  Storm signature, sweetness distilled.  Inundated atmosphere, incandescent flower-lush bouquet, no name, no word but every every memory waked, evoked, inhaled and in the moment lost again...tear the senses from this feast and resign the body north again before the light-and-color-symphony fades to visual silence...

combis

So this how I described it to my sister back in New Mexico:  Imagine you just came to Albuquerque for the first time.  You have the address of some friends-of-friends that you want to meet, but you have no idea of the layout of the city.  Your friends live, say, on San Mateo SE.  You don´t have a car, a map, or a phonebook.  You´re imagining the city, from a single point on its surface. You could find a computer and look it up online, or just start walking and hope you get there, or ask at random of people on the sidewalk. 

You´re about to start doing the last of these when a white Volkswagen minivan passes you.  It´s packed with people and looks like it´s going somewhere in a hurry.  There´s no company logo painted on its side, no sign up top to give it an official appearance -- only, in the lower corner of the windshield, a placard, like the ones you´re used to seeing with the words "For Rent" or "Garage Sale".  This one says, "Nob Hill Ridgecrest Trumbull Int´l Dist."  Now, if you _lived_ in Albuquerque, you´d have no trouble knowing where this bus was going.  You might even stick out your arm and flag it down.  But you, with your sparse public-trans experience and too many years of driving your own car, are used to thinking in terms of addresses, street names, mileages.  Of giant artificial grids, overlaid on the earth.  This list of locally-known place names means nothing to you.

That was my first impression of the combis here, the little local buses that for many people are the normal way of getting around town or between towns.  Except, in central Mexico, that list of names on the card might be something like "Yucuchito Culhuacan Ozolotepec Anenecuilco".

I was avoiding the combis, around the Capital, until the day I got myself good and lost in its far southern reaches.  In order not to spend another couple hours walking unknown streets overdosing on carbon monoxide, I had to swallow the poor ego (so proud of its self-sufficiency and its illusion of knowing), and ask for a little help.  To be fair, this wasn´t an entirely new action.  Being car-free for three months this winter, and re-learning to use buses in Albuquerque and Portland, was a refresher course in the level of human interaction that public transportation requires.  The other riders had reminded me, happily, that (even in New Mexico!) it´s common to wish your bus driver a good day on boarding, and thank him or her as you get off.  This only left translating those little courtesies to Spanish, and figuring out where in the world those unknown stops might be.

Or, a little more than that.  The things you take for granted.  Once on board, I realized these mini-buses don´t come equipped with a signal, a cord to pull or a button to push, that informs the driver of your stop.  What to do?  Of all things: communicate. I finally got it that day in the City, when an old man wobbled up suddenly from his seat and shouted "BAJO!"  "I get off here".  Okay, I can do that.  Or, I can pay attention, and hear the slightly more subtle ways other passengers make it work.

The day that I followed the winding road around Lake Patzcuaro to make an acquaintance 3 years in the waiting, combis were the only option.  Actually, the couple living off-grid in these green hills had told me, via email, that a rather expensive taxi was an option.  But the fare they quoted was the needed motivation to make the people´s mode of travel a habit.  It really wasn´t that bad.  A few inquiries at the plaza and I´m on board the first one.  That takes me to the town's central station, where I board a second combi for the next smallest village, Erongaricuaro.  En route, a young woman tells me about ruins nearby that are worth seeing, and a man who hears our conversation offers to walk me the couple blocks to the next combi stop.  This one´s an even more diminutive bus (my head almost scrapes the ceiling), to a similarly proportioned town, Yotatiro.  On the 15-minute drive, a friendly woman opens up more conversation than my Spanish is ready for:  comparing the state of public education in Mexico and the U.S.  This is prompted by half a dozen students who have joined us, who as the woman informs me, have to pay combi fare to get home from school, while "your kids there have busses they give them to ride".  En serio?  I knew there were often other expenses not covered by schools here, like some books and materials, but I never thought of not taking schoolbusses for granted.  The woman checks her information with the boy next to her, and says yes:  they do have to pay, although they might get a discount rate.

That afternoon cruising the silver green shades of Patzcuaro´s shores leaves me daydreaming of a job as a combi driver.  What a simple life:  greet your neighbors, take a few coins, and wind around these gorgeous roads at a pace slow enough to breathe in the beauty..  Driving´s what I do.  Surely I could do this.  Except so far, I haven´t seen a single woman bus or taxi driver here.  And in this country it seems the odds might be slightly against that happening. 

A few days later, in Morelia, I get a chance to ask.  The quiet young guy driving a colectivo (which I think is its proper in-town name, though my friends here call them all combis) gives me an unusual opening.  The bus is crowded, traffic is noisy, and we can´t hear each other´s queries on fares and destinations.  So he asks if I'll climb up in the front passenger seat, and we get about 15 minutes of really pleasant conversation.  I question him about his job (you don´t have to join a union, or even take a driving test -- only know how to drive).  He asks where I live, says he has relatives working in the Southwest.  He describes the local scene for me:  the stripes of varying colors on the combis combing Morelia represent different companies (red, blue, purple, and they must´ve started to run out, because there´s also "cafe" and "crema").  And from now on, he smiles, you should always use the Green Line.  And he grins again when I say it looks like a fun job, and ask if they let women drive.  "No hay muchas, pero si, hay algunas.."  Yeah, there´s a few. 


My point in all of this:   it´s about communicating.  And that entering such simple exchanges present to the moment may open more than the intended doors.  Surely, one of the traveller´s fundamental lessons.  My limited bus experience in the States seems to suggest, better to keep your head down, don´t meet any eyes, try to tune out surrounding conversations.  But then -- why is it that the surrounding conversations, on U.S. buses, are so often about drama and betrayal and suffering?  Are people in Mexico constrained by a social code of courtesy and acceptable public behavior, or are they actually much more practiced in harmonious coexistence?  Either way, that imaginary 10-foot boundary doesn't work here.  You can´t make it shuffling head-down, ignoring your fellow humans and keeping them at the distance of an electronic signal or a prearranged set of regulations, as we´ve somehow learned to do and accept in the States.  Here, more likely you´ll have to state your needs, and clearly.

But more than practical observation, I´ve been touched by so many unnecessary kindnesses in my short public-trans experience in Mexico.  That first driver in the Capital who offered me two options for a stop and told me how to walk from there to my goal, all while negotiating heavy traffic.  The riders in Morelia quietly passing a new person´s fare forward, hand over hand, to the front.  The guys with a juice stand in Yotatiro who yelled and stopped the return combi when they saw me coming, from the other end of the street (who knows how long I would´ve had to wait, otherwise).  That woman on the road from Eronga, who not only told me where to get off but that she had a friend in the _next_ village up the road with a rental house that I should keep in mind.  And the Morelia driver who, when I got to my stop and asked the fare, told me with another quiet smile, "Don´t worry about it."

Sal Terrae

First night in Morelia, I´ve taken the extravagant measure of a night in a hotel (250 pesos) to catch up on sleep after 5 restless nights in the City, El D.F..  Seen a little of this town's Centro Historico alone and on foot.  But I came here in search of a community.  My friend in Albuquerque sent me:  her sister, who I´ve met twice before, lives in an informal spiritual community which exists in that amicable and less-clearly-defined mid-zone that I´ve so come to enjoy, somewhere between "organized religion" and heart-centered, personally-manifested work of service and sharing.  The only information I have is what she gave me:  they call themselves "Sal Terrae", and they live on Avenida Tata Vasco, next to the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. 

I hail a taxi and give him these specifics.  He has no idea of the place I´m talking about.  He asks me what colonia it´s in, and I in turn have no way of knowing.  While downtown, I consulted a tourist map and saw the church at its edge, next to the massive stone aqueduct, the city´s original water source, that zigzags one of the major streets.  We drive awhile in this direction, conversing about Morelia, as he continues to verify that I don´t know the colonia, and I realize that he doesn´t know where he´s going.  We come to the city´s edge, and double back toward the center.  He pulls over to consult a mapbook, then asks a fellow taxista for help.  Finally we arrive at the intersection which I guessed as being the closest, as he says, "This church here is San Diego; I have no idea about La Señora de Guadalupe.  What do you want me to do?"  I bite back the less-courteous responses that come to mind, about being expected, as a driver myself in a city the size of this one, to know my streets and not to waste customer´s time (and money) like this.  He´s charging me quite a bit for the ride, apparently for nothing.  I only say, "I guess just let me off right here". 

Right here, not for the first time, turns out to be right where I need to be.  The diminutive Santuario adjoins a side wall of San Diego´s church, which is now a college.  But the kind older men there think the place I´m looking for is closed today, for some reason.  It´s a short street, but none of the neighbors know their exact address ("mas alla...", "por el otro lado..."), and there is no sign for "Sal Terrae" or any other indication.  I´m carrying a pretty heavy backpack, and the day is heating up.  In an internet room down the block I look up their address.  Sure enough, it´s the one door that´s closed and locked.  Although this place looks more like a restaurant than a spiritual community (a small Coca-cola sign and a bag of food garbage at the curb are my guess).  But in the 15 minutes that I´ve been checking my email and then come back for a last walk down the block, the door has opened.  I tell a woman inside that I´m looking for Sal Terrae, and for Saluca.  Knowing no more than this about me, not where I´m from or how I know them or what I want, they welcome me in.  Wait just a minute, they say, and you can come with us, to the place where Saluca is.  "Vamos a un picnic!" one of them tells me happily.

I picture these half-a-dozen women, plus-or-minus 65 or so, spreading a blanket in a park, under trees.  But we pile into a taxi and head up a steep hillside road that climbs in switchbacks all the way to the top of one of the ridges that surround the city.  We stop in a parklike setting, but as I follow them into a building I learn that we´ve arrived at the Seminary of the Diocese of Morelia.  In an expansive inner courtyard of pearl-colored stone, sheltered with a wide black shade-cloth overhead, about 400 people are seated at long tables.  White and blue tablecloths contrast with the dark red pullovers of 100 or so teenage boys, the students.  Women move efficiently between the tables serving plates heaped with roast beef, rice, beans, fruit, salsa, and a tasty relish of pickled vegetables.  A hum of talk swirls in the slanting light.  It appears that I´m a guest of the Diocese for the afternoon, with the bishop of Morelia as guest of honor.  And the women of Sal Terrae have volunteered to cook and serve for the whole crowd.  They seat me at a table, put a plate of this abundance in front of me, and disappear.  Across the table from me is a giggling group of teenagers.  "What´s the occasion here?" I ask one of the girls.  "It´s the 100-year anniversary of the birth of...somebody important..." she replies, and goes back to flirting with the guy next to her.  The bishop, decked out in a long black robe with hot-pink sash and cap, moves around the room shaking hands.  I am quietly grateful he doesn´t come to our table in the back corner.  Up front, incongruously, a man on keyboard and a woman with a microphone provide the entertainment, singing 80´s pop songs in Spanish and English.  I try to tune out the mild discomfort of Billy Joel and Olivia Newton-John (en serio!), and fill my hungry stomach with much gratitude, while enjoying the dream-like strangeness of the environment in which I suddenly find myself. 

After a while, Saluca appears, exclaims with surprise, greets me warmly.  Then she hurries back to the work.  Another woman approaches, her lined and smiling face full of kindness.  "Te sientes bien?" she inquires, grasping my shoulder, with great sincerity.  Do you feel alright?  Oh, si.  Muy bien.  These moments of being-not-alone are the rain and sunlight that keep a weary traveller from wilting and giving up.

Following a speech or two from the bishop, the crowd of guests disperses. I offer to help with the cleanup.  Bussing tables for 400 seems like a job for an entire afternoon, but the group of women, along with some upperclassmen, make short work of it.  It turns out to be lots of fun, with so many people weaving in a sort of dance among the tables and each other.  Every bit of usable food is carefully sorted and saved - the little bowls of salsa and vegetable-relish from each table, the unfinished two-liter bottles of soda, the uneaten stacks of tortillas.  Plastic is recycled, and compost separated from other garbage.  Younger boys, now dressed in shorts and soccer jerseys, appear with brooms and sweep the expansive floor of the courtyard, then start kicking or tossing a ball around the now-empty space as dust swirls through the late-afternoon sunbeams.  "No eres de aqui, verdad?" a boy asks me.  No, I´m from los Estados Unidos.  "I thought so," he says.  "You have an Estados Unidos accent."

Finally we stack ourselves (literally) in another taxi for the ride home.  The women joke and trade memories all the way, making evident their years or decades of friendly relationship.  They all have nicknames:  Cata and Margi and Che and Vecina (neighbor).  There´s a story about a rich rancher who brought a lot of trouble on himself which ends with the affirmation, "Better to have nothing and sleep with a clear conscience than to have it all but have no peace."  At their house, they give me a simple room shared with one other woman, off the tranquil center courtyard which glows with clean red tile and flowering plants (geranium, rose, hibiscus, and the gorgeous cream-white lily that, until this trip, I had only seen in Diego Rivera´s murals).   Rest awhile, they say, and then we´ll eat again.  Again??

I spend four nights in this kind house.  Several other guests are here, at various times:  travellers, a visiting priest, a few who seem ill or handicapped or just old, perhaps with no other place to go.  The meals are simple but healthy, shared at a long wooden table.  The conversations over food are animated, although with my poor comprehension I can just barely follow.  (I do catch one joke, however.  The priest, who seems thoughtful and intelligently informed on social issues, remarks, when the talk has turned to national politics, "Well, as we all know, we weren´t taught to pray asking for our daily PRI.")  Best of all, the place is completely quiet at night, such a relief from the overwhelming buzz of the city.  The women seem to divide their days between cooking together, going to mass across the street or in their own tiny chapel-room, and making visits to family or others, around the city or in nearby towns.  The name Sal Terrae, "salt of the earth", seems ideal for them, in both its connotations:  the biblical, which (in my would-be diplomatic translation) refers to the members of a society who work toward the raising of the collective consciousness.  And the social, which means something more like "of the common people". 

The front room turns out to be a restaurant after all, and a primary focus of their energies.  It´s their income, and also part of their service to the neighborhood. Especially to the students and professors from the two or three nearby schools, who will crowd the small space over the next few days to ask for tortas de pollo con mole, quesadillas de calabaza, gorditas de nopal, and cafe de olla.  All the food is fresh, healthy (more vitamins here than I´ve seen in all the sidewalk restaurants of D.F. combined), and made usually the night before and early in the morning.  And made, clearly, with lots of love.  I try to help out in the kitchen wherever I can, and ask lots of questions.  The kitchen, spacious and near-commercial quality, is full of the same light and jokes and constant banter as everywhere else I've seen these women occupy.  The first day, they let me chop a head of lettuce.  The second, they give me the great honor of allowing me to make quesadillas on the comal -- unsupervised -- for the merienda, the late evening meal.  I feel like a 12-year-old again, learning to cook by following my grandmother around.  But I remember what I can from watching Cata the day before, and she compliments me by saying the quesadillas came out pretty okay. 

My second night in this place something shifts, breaks loose.  I´m just watching them chop vegetables, set the table, work in the harmonious coordination of people who have coexisted over many years, and suddenly I´m crying and can´t stop.  A woman with a square jaw and a 50-year smoker´s voice (I never learned her name) comes by and asks, with a not-unkind note of humor, "What´s wrong? Are you crying for what you left, or for what you still want?" Saluca is sympathetic, and joins me for a moment as I try to explain...too many things.  The deep wish to live in community, tangled with all its challenges.  The razor edge of desire and detachment, a conversation already begun with her sister who sent me here:  between dreams of family and a partner, and the beauty that might be found in a life apart, of surrender and compassion and liberation and service.  The pain and outrage that still surface when I ask what the hell I spent the last 3 years of giving and failed relating for.  Equally present with gratitude for the Mystery that brings me to totally-Other contexts such as this one, in which I feel right at home somehow with a bunch of single and content Catholic women.  And the dream of living in Mexico, which I forgot over the three years that were just about keeping my head above water.  The dream which has returned, since my first night here, in a rush of sight smell and sound overwhelming me daily in the streets.  And is somehow amplified even further, now, by the calm dailyness of this place.  Saluca hears me out, even though she´s got so many tasks to finish.  Then she quietly takes me around the room and introduces me to two or three more of the women who I haven´t met so far, saying "This is another of my friends, and they´re yours as well". 

Everyone here has welcomed me, but on this night, when the tears won´t seem to stop, another face moves into my swimming vision.  It´s the woman who asked if I was feeling alright, at the "picnic".  Her name is Celia.  She looks right into my heart with eyes of deep black that have obviously known pain, and, apparently, sees me immediately as some sort of kindred soul.  The first words she says to me (did Saluca send her over? Did she hear us talking, or does she just know?) are these:  "You know what?  I have a house all to myself in Mexico (in the capital), and you are welcome to come and stay with me there for as long as you like".  This of course makes me cry even more.  She sits down with me awhile, tells me a little about her life (and yes, it´s been a hard one), and listens generously to me.  She speaks in a voice that is straightforward and unapologetic, of her faith in God and her hope in Life despite all the losses, and also of the essential importance of loving oneself.  I hear her, because these things for her have obviously come not out of any easy ideology but out of the kind of soul-deep struggle that either kills you, or makes you Real.  She talks of one of the central transcendental practices of this contemplative tradition, of seeing the Christ in every person, then tells me with a smile (I still haven´t stopped sobbing though I try), "I am going to call you mi Cristo llorón."  My weeping Christ.  Whoa.

At the end of four days in this community, all the needs and their remedies are weaving naturally together:  rest and stability, excellent food and caring company, sufficient time for the soul´s poor wounded trust-capacity to come creeping to the surface and realize...it´s alright to open up.  And the language capacity so inextricably tied to this emotional frequency is also improving.  I start to comprehend more of their conversations, their inside jokes.  I offer a little more about my life, and they question me with courteous curiosity.  I get more into the work of the kitchen, and Cata says, on my last day, "If you wanted to spend more time here, you´d be welcome.  And we´d teach you a thing or two about cooking."  I´m sure they would.  I half-jokingly suggest that I could bring some of my favorite Indian recipes and see what the students thought of a daily special that was something a little different.  And I wonder if the young people would have an interest in English classes.  I question Saluca, when she repeats this offer of welcome: is it possible?  That this country, unlike my own, might not be so mired in its bureaucracy and xenophobia and judgment that a non-paisano could find a quiet corner to live in, to live simply, to possibly even earn a few pesos and offer something in return?  Sure, she says.  It´s not like los Estados Unidos here.  It could happen.  Think about it.

On packing for the trip, I came across a nice greeting card I had bought for the next time I needed one.  A lovely red-and-gold embossed design of Japanese maple leaves and swirling river currents.  I leave it for the women as a thank-you note, wishing them blessings, asking them to remember me.  And to let me know, if they should have use for another pair of hands in the restaurant.  Possibly -- just possibly -- sometime in the not-so-distant future.