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.

Morelia

My first impression five years ago of Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, was a condensed, almost archetypical expression of the word "Colonial".  You walk through El Centro Historico (which has in fact been named a UNESCO World Heritage site for its concentration of Colonial architecture), and see almost nothing but stone on stone.  The massive right-angled buildings overwhelm the narrow sidewalks, which drop into narrow streets, some of which are still cobblestone.  The skyline, where you can see it looking up out of these lanes, is liberally punctuated with church towers ("How many churches does this city have?" I asked a taxi driver yesterday.  "Phhhooooo!!" was his you-got-me answer.)  In between are universities, museums, and former houses of famous officials (I did not realize that the city, formerly called Valladolid, was renamed for Morelos after the Revolution, as he was born here). It would be easy to spend a week here with a camera, solely capturing the angles of light on rock-face and wrought iron. I could also imagine hanging out here a few months, closed up in a wood-beamed room with a view of the rooftops or at one of the many sidewalk cafes, writing a novel.  Morelia´s probably not a place I could call home. But it feels like a home for the mind.

I gave the place a less-than-fair evaluation on this visit, though:  I arrived after dark, when most of the shops were closed.  What in daylight is imposing can at night feel downright forbidding.  The place actually looks abandoned.  There are no signs to tell what this building or that might be, no windows through which you can see if there are people inside.  You feel like the medieval traveller arriving late on your dusty horse, calling out "Water! Lodging!" while anxious women quickly bar the shutters overhead.  But, thankfully, I had found a hotel in advance, and it did in fact have water (though it was cold).  A deep sleep restarted those perceptual clocks. With a reemergence in early light, it´s another city.  Because, as I completely forgot, all the life is contained inside those buildings.  This is such a simple but profound shift for those of us used to built environments that communicate more outwardly, with their round-the-clock advertising and high-maintenance landscaping and expanses of parking lot.  Here, massive wood or iron doors open only in daylight to reveal inner courtyards verdant with trees, gardens, fountains, columns, stairways.  The tiny shops essentially squeeze themselves inside out, pushing carts and counters out to sidewalk´s verge and hanging signs that were brought in for the night.  Suddenly it all takes a form that makes sense.

And the city in its entirety is much more modern and diverse.  Outside the historic zone are the same tire shops, cellphone stores, and microbuses competing for a lane as in other cities.  And outside that is another layer of green: the city rests in a wide valley surrounded by irregular hills.  Viewing the place as a whole (as I had the chance to do yesterday, from a higher elevation), I realize that only the center is squared and stone-faced.  Really, the city`s a series of concentric ovals.  El Centro`s four quadrants form an elongated shape that is enveloped on all sides by the crowded newer city.  Which in turn is centered in the valley, which is held by the green hills.  The green shows itself at the furthest edges, and then at the hidden centers: the life of the land preserved in miniature, in living spaces that are only half-indoors. And the layers inbetween take the brunt of the noise, the constant movement, and the too-too-concentrated car exhaust, leaving (hopefully) some quiet greenness...sound. I think there´s a metaphor here.  For the constructed society, and for the structure and maintenance of inner lives.  It´s what I´m meditating on, as I walk these stones with my worlds inside and out.

imagenes

There is no possible way to recount, summarize, or (much less) offer commentary on my last few days travelling.  There is only here - Mexico D.F., centro del universo...only Now - this day and this moment, whatever those things blessedly return to when we lose the clocks...and only sense - color, noise, light, smells, and motion.  Here then are just a few images from this feast for the imagination.

Music on the Metro: Everybody with a different way to make a peso.  A young man playing accordion welcomes me in from the airport, at the end of 14 hours´ travel.  One blind man after another paces the length of the cars with disc-player backpack and a fistful of bootleg CD´s.  A tiny, wrinkled, grey-haired woman in tank top, skirt and flip-flops boards the last car at a stop and begins singing, with no musical accompaniment, in a clear, confident soprano that sounds just like a girl of 10 years old.

Walking El Centro:  every shop and vendor competes for decibels, and everyone wins. Except perhaps the pedestrians.  Car horns blare and engines rev and jackhammers rattle the concrete.  A book shop broadcasts an English-learning cassette.  A slow, patient woman´s voice exhorts, "Keep repeating the names of the fruits: ´Strawberry´. ´Fresa´."  Squeezing down a precipitously narrow sidewalk, I pass a 50ish man who extends his arm over my head, as if giving me a blessing.  No, I think, surely he´s just waving at somebody across the street.  But a couple feet past him I hear a friendly, almost teasing voice remark, "Cabello Verde". Green Hair.

Food:  Caldo de pollo that defies description with squash, brocolli, cauliflower, chipotle, melon and epazote.  The grandmother with the tiny grocery market down the block from the Casa sells me a kilo of rice, two onions, two limes and a large chayote squash for $1.80.  The most extravagant meal so far is also found around the corner here in the neighborhood.  The recommendation for this place is that, for unknown reasons, the comida corrida includes a daily Iranian special.  Yesterday that was "couscous", but on arrival it looked exactly like two rounds of grilled polenta.  Excellent, though, golden-tasting and accompanied by soup, salad, fresh tortillas, guava juice, cappucino and a tiny square of jello for dessert.  All for just under $6.  A little more for the man who came through with a guitar and played a song, and extra-good tip for the young server who the manager sent out, after greeting me, accompanied by an 11-year-old boy to server as translator, just in case I didn´t make it through ordering in Spanish. Maybe they´ll share it.

Zocalo, sunset: the drums of the danzantes sweep you up out of your Metro cave and you feel like a flower pulled irresistibly out of earth by sun.  A 70-year-old woman calls out nonstop, hey hey looky here, nice cotton socks just 10 pesos.  A young woman from Chiapas welcomes me to kneel at her tarp on the concrete.  "Go on and look, without any obligation."  The embroidered huipil I pick up is a flower-mindtrip the likes of which I´ve never seen anywhere.  Practically three-dimensional representations of blooms in every shade, with shadows and texture stitched in.  $66, she tells me.  I´m sure it´s worth that, I reply, laying it very carefully down.  The English-lesson woman continues, from another square of the sidewalk, "Now try saying the months of the year.  January.  February."  A comedian has roped off a cobblestoned area, with mic and spotlight and a little backstage tent where he apparently does costume changes.  He´s quite the professional and has a big crowd laughing.  I only get there for his last couple of jokes. I don´t know the verb he uses, but he says something like, "And now my brother, a great romantic, is going to grace you with a poem."  Another man walks out, dressed dramatically all in black, carefully grasping a single sheet of paper, wearing an extremely somber expression and a red clown nose.  Tragically earnest mariachi music begins to play.  The man gazes at the audience, and then slowly waves the paper over the heads of this side, then the middle, then the other side of the group.  Then he bows deeply, and disappears backstage.

Xochimilco:  Today´s Life Class has been, Using Public Transportation.  Actually, the class is a continuation of the ongoing "Learn to Ask for What You Need", and public trans is just this week´s homework.  The normal mode of Metro travel is nearly flawless.  Today also included the Tren Ligera, the light rail that picks up where the Metro ends and takes you another half hour or so toward the outer reaches.  But from there, you´re in combi territory: little green busses that seat about 12 people, spew exhaust, stop when you wave at them, and announce their destinations via a card in the windshield with a list of 4-5 place names that you won´t recognize if you´re not from around here.  Or, if you left your guesthouse thinking you could go with only a cursory glance at the map.  The third one I try, looping north and south again to spiral in on my goal, has a driver kind enough to advise me of the stop I want, and give me two options where he can let me off.  Late enough in the day that I don´t go into Parque Ecologico de Xochimilco, but the view from the pedestrian bridge across the Periferico (the freeway looping around at least half the city) is the Visa-commercial´s conclusion of "PRICELESS".  Well worth the last several hours of trudging and mis-judging, to stand there in the late light above the rush-hour exhaust and take in grass, trees and ancient waterways, pretty much as far as the eye can see in three directions.  Flocks of white wide-winged birds wheel over cattails and sun-reflections.  Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl, the magnificent pair of snow-topped volcanoes named for Prince and Sleeping Princess, tower over the southern skyline.  Deep green hills dwarf Reforma´s near-invisible skyscrapers to the north and west.  I carry two lovely purple and white African daisies bought at the greenhouse-city of Cuemanco, at the bridge´s other end.  They´re gifts for friends I will be visiting, but back on the Metro, these flowers will open up friendly and curious conversations with 5 people.

Bus and Metro back to city center:  a chaos of cars attempts to exit the greenhouse and adjoining park.  A lone man in a baseball cap stands precariously at the intersection of four directions of traffic.  He wears no uniform, but clenches a whistle between his teeth and gestures grandly, like an umpire would, waving first this line and then the other of cars forward seamlessly.  One or two drivers reach out their windows as they pass, and hand him coins.  A spray-painted sign at the park`s entrance reads, inexplicably, "VIVA VILLA CABRONES".  The micro I catch this time takes me on a straight sweep north, all the way to the Metro´s southern end.  En route is 45 minutes of tree-lined neighborhoods, tiny shops, disturbing flashes of U.S. stores like Starbucks and Home Depot.  Sun slants lusciously through those tall trees whose hairy grey-brown trunks and tossing branches remind me of horses.  At a stop, a good-looking young man with a newsboy cap and gypsy features boards with a guitar.  He plants his feet in the back of the center aisle and sings two or three familiar pop songs in a fine mellow tenor.  We all give him coins as he exits several stops later.  I arrive back at the Casa just before sunset, to the sound of drumbeats and trumpets from up the street at the Monument of the Revolution.  A drum-and-bugle corps is practicing their synchronized moves at the gigantic arch´s base.  They are boys and girls, and they all look 16 years old.  And they´re really good.  There is no end to the diversity and no imagining how it may express itself around the next corner, and the next, and the next...

riven

riven (adj) fml split violently apart:  The whole community was riven by the strike, which some men had joined and others had not. (Longman's Dictionary of English Language and Culture)

4 a.m.


He goes willingly, at his time. My once-companion steps forward from the group, resplendent in red and white, light prisming around him, clamoring for his edges, unnoticed. Somber, dedicated, he moves with purposes equally hidden and seen. As it is with all of his actions. He was chosen to be first, but did he also offer to go before the others? How many others are leaving, through la puerta into the impervious darkness of the beyond? Our time here is finished. All has been decided. There is no turning back. There is nothing to return to. Every step now, from this point, is enacted with greatest care, with the near-tenderness of the leave-taking ritual that allows us all a profound detachment and so, mercifully, presence.

We wait in formation, at the entrance. La puerta has the appearance of a squarish cave in the smooth, pale volcanic rock face. The opening, about seven feet in height, seems to have been plastered with clay round its edges. There is nothing foreboding about its form. But its nature there is no mistaking:  that darkness is as gone as forever. The men stand side by side, closest to the shadow. The women sit in a line just in front of them, also facing outward toward the setting sun. We are six or seven in number. I sit at the left side. We are all close enough almost to touch, just short of contact, but the currents between us are palpable, as they must be for fellow beings who have endured so much together. The wan sun is let down gently, as if held in the palm of a hand, on the other side of the wide basin into which we face. The clean expanse of stone and sand in pale pink-orange-golds smoothes across to low mesas of dark grey and chocolate, holding us all as if in an earthen bowl. There is not a sign of anything green and growing, or that anything has ever grown here. This place has no fecundity; it is in essence emptiness. It is here to hold the essence of emptiness.

He looks around, signalling he is ready to begin. There is no sound; all from now on happens by unspoken agreement. Inhaling a deep, appreciative breath of the copal smoke, he accepts the clay platter that holds the single heavy fruit. Its round melon-sphere and lumpy nopal-ridges have already been broken apart, leaving a jagged and dripping parabola of a verdant green only ever seen in spring's most extravagant blush. Gelatinous seeds and algae-like, ruby-iridescent pulp spill over the edges of the soft rind. He gazes at it, and scoops out a spilling-over handful that takes more than half the fruit, although it it is to be shared among all those who go. We understand. The plant represents the sorrow of all once lost, the total solitude of silent passing, and the mercy that yet remains for that road. His passage will be the hardest, for where he has been and where he is going, and he will need its potent, calming toxicity to aid him on the journey.

Next he negotiates our group, exactly as prescribed, taking quiet farewell of each in turn. First, the two longest his companions in the struggle. Of each he takes their hand, and looks long into their eyes without a word. Then the one I would forget, the one who did not replace him but only filled my emptiness with rage and noise. These two also know each other in terms of battle: side by side they have fought, in realms I cannot comprehend. Grasping this one's hand my first companion says, with an odd mix of affection and irony, "mi hermano en la muerte". This brother will be the next to leave. To the right of the group, la sahumadora waits, tending the fire and its guiding smoke, her face a mask of serenity, her presence full of kind concern.

He straightens, looks toward la puerta, as if to step on through. But he has more yet to perform.  He drops to his knees in front of me, lays his hands on the object symbolic of offering/sharing which rests on another earthen plate on my lap. Murmurs phrases that at first are nothing more than required by the ceremony. Will he go, with no more than this? But then, at last, he meets my eyes, and speaks to me a few words arrowing so direct from the heart that they alter the angle of the light around us. Reality's current shifts now.  He offers his hand, and I take it as expected, but then I squeeze it in a crushing grip that breaks the calm of the ceremony. No one expects this: my one wordless act of profound negation and protest.  If he must go, he will not go without my part in his battle being written in collective memory as it is written on my body and soul. I will write it in the memory of earth itself: as I tighten my grasp of his hand, an irrational strength awakes in me, and a shudder rises from deep underground, through the soles of my feet, up through my spine, shakes loose all my bones and convulses the land around us like a tremor, almost audible, and then the quake finds voice in me, emerges as a sky-splitting cry from my lips that rips the light and momentarily disjoins the continuum. Earth-time's recoil reiterates itself as I cry out again, while behind me the others remain fully silent, in respect for what unfolds and for my place in it. The sun lowers visibly, alights on the razor edge of the highest mesa. At our backs the puerta is darker than any night. By the time my cries have stilled, he is utterly gone.


Later, others arrive to walk with me on my grieving circuit of the network of smaller caves that have been our home until now. I pace ceaseless, and do not stop the violent weeping that echoes echoes echoes between the pallid stone walls and their cool blue-gold shadows. The first to accompany me is a kindly teacher, arrived from some other place, well-intentioned but his words do not soothe me. Some time after that arrives the younger woman who was companion to that second one in my own history: her heart has quit the dimension with him, just as mine has flown with that one who left in today's dying light. Somehow in her own silent suffering, she has found a glimmer of compassion for me. She keeps step with me in the passageways, listens intently (do I speak, or does she hear past speech?), then stops suddenly and embraces me, sweeps me in a wave of sincere, almost childlike kindness. Startled, I return the gesture, wrapping around her slight shoulders these arms that have become filled with such unbearable strength I can scarcely control them. My embrace lifts her, unintentionally, off the floor, and my bone-racking sobs shatter the silence again, ricocheting off still walls of the near-empty rooms where our group has almost finished packing its posessions to leave. I would split these stones with my sorrow's unreasonable force, given a few more moments. Rend the peace of this place as I am riven and rip space-time's threads of continuity with the power unsought of my furious desolation. And yet, even through spasms of grief comes the awareness that the time of leaving nears.  And that this young woman's gesture of kindness allows just such a release, skims just such a surface off the sorrow that perhaps I can remember, and contain these forces enough to travel soon, without inadvertently destroying myself or my surroundings. The others who remain are waiting even now for me to rejoin them, with immeasurable patience in one of the adjacent spaces of stone. They wait for the time and the light to shift, for these seismic tremors once more to still, for our journey's next stage into all unknown to begin.