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.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
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
Saturday, November 24, 2012
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:
Earth invites. Welcomes. Embraces. Leaves the door always open. Like this:
Thursday, November 15, 2012
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
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
Saturday, November 10, 2012
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...
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...
Monday, October 1, 2012
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.
Monday, September 17, 2012
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!"
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!"
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