one day again
maybe soon
i will be the Phoenix
for now
still ash
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Sunday, December 23, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
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
*******
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
