fiesta en Casa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

quotes: Luis Alberto Urrea

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

corn maiden

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

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

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

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

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

one part steampunk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a natural death

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

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

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

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

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

the soldier's dream

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

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

trading songs

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

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

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

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