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.
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