Many people ask me why I have not written anything since August. I fumble and excuse with poorly rehearsed lines, confusing myself as to why my spool of memories has failed. With a familiar start I realise almost four months have passed since I made the decision to leave Guatemala and re-enter the western world. So many philosophies, so many moments, unrecorded. They dance underneath my eyelids, taunting me with half-formed answers. I reach to grab them and my fingers close over empty air, the moment vanquished.
The truth is, every time I sit down to write, a Mind Fisherman, high up in the clouds, stabs his hook through my skull and pulls, hard, until I find myself floating several feet above the ground and unable to reach the keyboard. There I stay, sometimes flailing, sometimes still, waiting for the fisherman to either pull me up for inspection or release me back into the wild.
For months, I have been the subject of examination by those above, who comb my brainwaves for meaty morsels, judge me on the beauty and fleshiness of my thoughts, while I stare at them with shiny circle eyes.
After each encounter I am left confused and decompressed, with a hole in the head, leaking words in a stream of empty metaphor and overly descriptive expression. I am fit only for laughter or tears, or both, in a manic combination of emotion too strong to withhold.
But for now, I am free. Finally I am able to finger those thoughts, squishing them and rolling them in search of meaning.
America... America was, well... not so bad, actually.
I enjoyed myself. I made a lot of friends. I'll probably go back. But I'm not in a rush.
Most Americans are wonderful people. They have travellers, just like the rest of the world. Except this generation of travellers all have the same passport.
They don't seem to mind that every town looks the same. The landscape is, as they say, awesome.
We went to some festivals unlike anything I've ever seen. We drove around with a group of kids from Indiana. We stayed high, high up in the mountains. We ran along deserted beaches. In three months, we stayed in just three hotels. The rest of our beds were donated by the seemingly endless generosity of the locals.
America certainly is the country of superlatives. Biggest. Wildest. Most Generic. Craziest. I saw a lot of crazy things, actually. Naked people riding bicycles through the desert. A greenhouse brimming with fresh marijuana.
San Francisco, the city that everyone raves on about, was mediocre. A city, really. A nice one, sure, but full of twitching meth-addicts and shiny-shoed fashion victims, alongside slow-walking tourists and over-priced chips. I smiled blandly as person after person warned me of the horrific dangers of Mexico, and stared at the corner of Union Square where a German tourist was shot dead outside Macy's department store the month previously.
I admired very much the hippy mentality of northern California. There, amidst stunning mountain backdrops and small, colonial towns, a subculture has become a monoculture and everyone buys organic. The people are unbelievably jovial, love yoga and religiously re-fill their shampoo bottles at the corner store.
But despite the similar vital statistics, I did not fit in, even there. Everywhere I went, I found ego to be too huge a part of life. People seemed obsessed with labelling themselves.
There, you do not just like yoga, you are 'a yogi'. You are not just an independent, free-spirited woman. You are A Goddess. You cannot say, "I like to paint" without someone replying, "Ahh, so you are An Artist". And everyone asks you what your star sign is, and nods knowingly when you reply. Even if you lie.
To be honest, harsh though it sounds, I just got bored of people talking about themselves. Perhaps it was just the people I met. Ironic really, for me to write this in a blog of My Take On Life. But at least I see the satire.
Despite this, I loved almost everyone that I met. Some of them were incredibly inspiring. Take Jay - the man who picked us up as hitch-hikers on the road from Yosemite. He had just finished scattering his wife's ashes to the wind. I sat down in the front seat of the car and promptly broke the urn. For some reason this meant something to him and he drove us six hours west to Santa Cruz and gave us a bed for the night.
He talked of his struggle to make his life his own since his wife's sudden death a year previously. He'd started by getting up at 4am every morning. He had pictures of a year's worth of sunrises, seen from the beach. The light from these suns shone from his eyes as he talked. Then he made a vow to rid himself of 'two square inches of surplus stuff' per day, in order to recover his house and his mind from a dead person's weight. I understood every nuance.
I cooked him chickpea tagine and told him stories, and watched his face animate in front of me. He later told me he'd started to cook again for the first time since she died. He dropped us off in San Francisco with two new rollmats (a rather large 'two inches' he cheerfully cried), sheets hemmed by his wife, and forty bucks to buy myself a jacket. We were left to hitch on Golden Gate Bridge, hidden by the mist and the bewilderment of a man who gave everything just for love.
Now I find myself in England. It was, as always, almost an accident. A split-second decision. By coincidence or design, I can't be sure, but I arrived home exactly a year after I first left.
I've a ticket booked back for January. I have, dare I say it, A Plan. But of that, I will refrain from writing. That is a morsel best conserved for me. I currently have both feet firmly on the ground, fingers rooted to the keyboard, and mind free from molestation. I spill my guts voluntarily, this time.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
The Second Circle
One of the last notable things to happen to me in Mexico is another stranger giving me another crystal. This time it is amythyst quartz, an angled finger of glasslike transparency, tipped with the purple tint of the seventh chakra.
The crown chakra is the representative channel of energy from the universe through the top of the head down through the body. A purple and white stone like this is said to resonate with that chakra and is ideal for meditation.
The gift comes at a time when I have so much energy focused on meditation and my seventh chakra that it seems almost absurd that I was not given this stone previously. I hold it in my hand that whole day and my palm turns hot and sweaty around it as I fall asleep on my last night in this country.
I spend this night in the same hostel as always - my third visit. The return is yet another closure; of a circle looped twice before with my arrival back in November and Mike's arrival in March. Unknowingly I have completed a figure of eight around the country, centred on Mexico City. My physics friends might call it an infinity symbol.
Tomorrow I travel to the airport to meet Michael again as he returns from Veracruz. Another chapter in our near-far relationship, stretching our bonds only to ping us back like plastic toys on the end of an elastic rope.
I haven't spoken to him in a month; our Time Out bringing silence and personal growth to the two of us in an intensity neither of us has experienced for a while. It is hard to tell what the transition between solitude and constant companionship will be like. The typed version of him I read through my computer screen resembles very little of the original man.
I force myself to take each moment as it comes.
I fall asleep, crystal hard in my flesh, dreams punctured by the horn beeps and fried chilli scents of Mexico City.
The crown chakra is the representative channel of energy from the universe through the top of the head down through the body. A purple and white stone like this is said to resonate with that chakra and is ideal for meditation.
The gift comes at a time when I have so much energy focused on meditation and my seventh chakra that it seems almost absurd that I was not given this stone previously. I hold it in my hand that whole day and my palm turns hot and sweaty around it as I fall asleep on my last night in this country.
I spend this night in the same hostel as always - my third visit. The return is yet another closure; of a circle looped twice before with my arrival back in November and Mike's arrival in March. Unknowingly I have completed a figure of eight around the country, centred on Mexico City. My physics friends might call it an infinity symbol.
Tomorrow I travel to the airport to meet Michael again as he returns from Veracruz. Another chapter in our near-far relationship, stretching our bonds only to ping us back like plastic toys on the end of an elastic rope.
I haven't spoken to him in a month; our Time Out bringing silence and personal growth to the two of us in an intensity neither of us has experienced for a while. It is hard to tell what the transition between solitude and constant companionship will be like. The typed version of him I read through my computer screen resembles very little of the original man.
I force myself to take each moment as it comes.
I fall asleep, crystal hard in my flesh, dreams punctured by the horn beeps and fried chilli scents of Mexico City.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Is anybody else scared of America?
The week has passed like a slow-time camera shot of a highway; red and white headlights smearing into lines of hurried intention.
I've rushed from here to there in a smooth path from Lago Atitlan in Guatemala to San Cristobal in southern Mexico, and then to Mexico City via that old favorite… the womb-like night bus.
On Tuesday I will be flying to San Francisco, California, via Miami, Florida, and Chicago, Illinois. The decision, like most of mine, was fluid and fast, and the reasons why I did it have escaped me, like perpertrators at a crime scene.
Wednesday brings a new kind of life.
I am scared of the States. Simply the nickname 'America' makes me nervous - that pseudonym so easily grabbed, with no attention for the fact that Mexico and Canada are also both part of the continent of North America. I find myself face to face with the bully of school - a bully in the form of a too-clean, polished blonde with sharp nails and an alarming ignorance. I can feel her already looking down her nose at my ragged clothes, scraggly hair, small wallet.
I feel my loneliness when faced with her - that longing to be both at once a part of her and as far away from her as possible.
And yet she resides within me. Politics and stereotypes aside, I cannot deny my roots.
My mother's family is from Connecticut. I spent a shiny string of shimmering Christmasses there as a child, my once-a-year reconnections fading with the death of my mother in 2004. Since then, I have had little contact with her brothers and extended family, who still live along the east coast, and other than my brief sojourn to Texas at new year, no basis for adult interpretation of this country whatsoever.
Thus I am torn between the eyes of an impressionable child and an empassioned young woman - two fires within one girl.
America used to be magical. Literally.
One uncle had a mountainside log cabin in Vermont, the other a mansion in Virginia with a jacuzzi on the deck.
We would traipse through snow-glittered maple woods, ice-skating on frozen lakes and warming up by a log fire. My sister and I would have gifts lavished on us by my grandmother's friends, enraptured with the two little English girls who skipped through their neighbourhood every festive season. We were princesses and this land was everything our doodling imaginations could create.
America was fairy lights and snow boots, ice-cream parlours and new clothes, McDonalds happy meals and as much food as a greedy child could eat.
All that seems like another world. It has been frozen in black and white and archived deep in my mind, crumbling from reminiscence. The strange and unintentional severance of contact with half my family has had the effect of killing this country in my mind.
Mom's ashes are buried in Vermont. One day I will go.
Until then, my attitude has been to reject everything that country represents. Frequently mistaken as an American in the latin world, I quickly refute: "No soy gringa!" (I'm not a yank!)
I hide my passport like a sin.
From where comes this racism? For indeed that is what it is; just because the US is part of the 'first world' doesn't mean this worldwide xenophobia isn't in most cases as grossly misplaced as all other instances of race-based stereotyping.
Of course, aside from the bible bashing, gluttony and consumerism, the glaringly obvious answer is their interference overseas. They have become the world' s police force. And no one likes the pigs.
The sentiment, however, rather than outright racism, stems from a kind of advanced resentment borne of fear and helplessness.
It has grown surely and in many cases fiercely over the last years, particularly amongst my own generation of Europeans - which is of course the only voice I can really lay claim to understanding at this stage.
It appears to be fairly common to view Americans as, in the (fairly derogatory) words of my favorite comedian, "happy idiots." The natives themselves largely do not help their case, often remaining ignorant, particularly regarding the appalling state of international affairs wherever the US military is involved. Most of them do not even own a passport and show little interest in the world around them.
In contrast to skin-crawling atrocities such as Guantanamo Bay or the US funding of wars worldwide, the Americans we see on television build themselves an image of a happy, simple zombie, cooing under the power of the fluttering stars and stripes. They do not appear to have noticed that the governmental hold on their country is alarmingly similar to that of Germany in 1938.
Never has patriotism been so terrifying.
But. The big but.
I shrink from such wide-spread accusations of a nation.
How can I possibly write the above, let alone brand it to my name on the internet?! How could I possibly judge a nation of 300 million people on George Bush's delightfully-punchable face?
If this is the face of the States as seen from the outside, I cannot wait to see it from the inside. I cannot wait for my stereotype to be disproved. I cannot wait to meet the freedom-fighting gringos bubbling under the dead-pan of the newsreader's face.
I know that for whatever reason, my heart is drawing me there - even despite my somewhat irrational fears.
Yes, I am scared of returning to the 'real world'. In my eyes, I've been swimming happily in raw life juice for the last nine months. Those cold, clear waters are where I belong. I don't want to be drawn in to the sparkle of the new world. The idea of getting off the plane and spending a week's worth of Mexican accommodation money on a meal, just because its what people do, makes my breathing shallow.
Bigger fears lurk over the superficial ones. I am running out of money and don't know how to make it back. Thus America might be the end, at least for a while. Plus, facing the dream means disturbing it. Even if it is wonderful, it will still never be the same as it was as a child.
Even more daunting: Michael is getting ever more successful with his music. If he wants to pursue it, it seems like life will make it easy for him to do so in the Promised Land. But I don't want to settle yet.
So, once again, the bigger flows make themselves felt and having committed to following my own goals and heart there is nothing I can do but relax into them and see where they take me this time.
Your world is what you make of it… as every day here teaches me. If I'm scared, then those things will drill into my brain and leave holes, just as I fear. I need to remember that wherever my heart takes me I will be safe.
And what about Mexico… my love, my home.
In Mexico I feel like I have discovered the heart of the world.
There is just so much. I struggle to express the feeling Mexico inspires in me. It is universal love. I look at her swooping mountains, wild beaches, stark deserts, chattering jungles, and I can feel my whole body contract with yearning and respect.
More than just love, this feeling alone has led me to places previously unachievable during meditation and has been critical to my spiritual growth.
This kind of love is something I've only ever felt for the land around my house in Cornwall.
The energy fields across this enormous country sway and band like ribbons, streamlining the people underneath it and drawing them to exactly where they need to be.
There is a deep knowledge here, rising with the lava in its volcanoes.
Many things will come to pass in Mexico in the next few years. I feel the imposition of a future pushed and pulled by enormous forces; earthquakes, hurricanes, political explosion, people's rebellion. Water flows. Spirituality. The knowledge of the ancients, returning to imprint its symbols on a modern day nation of passion and raw beauty.
Somehow I know there is more for me here. Thus, I sign out under the knowledge that these winds will blow me right back here where I belong, as soon as I've gathered what I need from its bigger bitch of a sister.
Mexico, Mexico. I do not abandon you for her.
I leave as a messenger, of the strongest intentions. I will stay only long enough to pluck what I need for you and your people. I leave to learn - for how can I form a full picture of the world without having been?
Reading over the strangeness of these words, I wonder what I have to learn that is so important to bring me to California?
I've rushed from here to there in a smooth path from Lago Atitlan in Guatemala to San Cristobal in southern Mexico, and then to Mexico City via that old favorite… the womb-like night bus.
On Tuesday I will be flying to San Francisco, California, via Miami, Florida, and Chicago, Illinois. The decision, like most of mine, was fluid and fast, and the reasons why I did it have escaped me, like perpertrators at a crime scene.
Wednesday brings a new kind of life.
I am scared of the States. Simply the nickname 'America' makes me nervous - that pseudonym so easily grabbed, with no attention for the fact that Mexico and Canada are also both part of the continent of North America. I find myself face to face with the bully of school - a bully in the form of a too-clean, polished blonde with sharp nails and an alarming ignorance. I can feel her already looking down her nose at my ragged clothes, scraggly hair, small wallet.
I feel my loneliness when faced with her - that longing to be both at once a part of her and as far away from her as possible.
And yet she resides within me. Politics and stereotypes aside, I cannot deny my roots.
My mother's family is from Connecticut. I spent a shiny string of shimmering Christmasses there as a child, my once-a-year reconnections fading with the death of my mother in 2004. Since then, I have had little contact with her brothers and extended family, who still live along the east coast, and other than my brief sojourn to Texas at new year, no basis for adult interpretation of this country whatsoever.
Thus I am torn between the eyes of an impressionable child and an empassioned young woman - two fires within one girl.
America used to be magical. Literally.
One uncle had a mountainside log cabin in Vermont, the other a mansion in Virginia with a jacuzzi on the deck.
We would traipse through snow-glittered maple woods, ice-skating on frozen lakes and warming up by a log fire. My sister and I would have gifts lavished on us by my grandmother's friends, enraptured with the two little English girls who skipped through their neighbourhood every festive season. We were princesses and this land was everything our doodling imaginations could create.
America was fairy lights and snow boots, ice-cream parlours and new clothes, McDonalds happy meals and as much food as a greedy child could eat.
All that seems like another world. It has been frozen in black and white and archived deep in my mind, crumbling from reminiscence. The strange and unintentional severance of contact with half my family has had the effect of killing this country in my mind.
Mom's ashes are buried in Vermont. One day I will go.
Until then, my attitude has been to reject everything that country represents. Frequently mistaken as an American in the latin world, I quickly refute: "No soy gringa!" (I'm not a yank!)
I hide my passport like a sin.
From where comes this racism? For indeed that is what it is; just because the US is part of the 'first world' doesn't mean this worldwide xenophobia isn't in most cases as grossly misplaced as all other instances of race-based stereotyping.
Of course, aside from the bible bashing, gluttony and consumerism, the glaringly obvious answer is their interference overseas. They have become the world' s police force. And no one likes the pigs.
The sentiment, however, rather than outright racism, stems from a kind of advanced resentment borne of fear and helplessness.
It has grown surely and in many cases fiercely over the last years, particularly amongst my own generation of Europeans - which is of course the only voice I can really lay claim to understanding at this stage.
It appears to be fairly common to view Americans as, in the (fairly derogatory) words of my favorite comedian, "happy idiots." The natives themselves largely do not help their case, often remaining ignorant, particularly regarding the appalling state of international affairs wherever the US military is involved. Most of them do not even own a passport and show little interest in the world around them.
In contrast to skin-crawling atrocities such as Guantanamo Bay or the US funding of wars worldwide, the Americans we see on television build themselves an image of a happy, simple zombie, cooing under the power of the fluttering stars and stripes. They do not appear to have noticed that the governmental hold on their country is alarmingly similar to that of Germany in 1938.
Never has patriotism been so terrifying.
But. The big but.
I shrink from such wide-spread accusations of a nation.
How can I possibly write the above, let alone brand it to my name on the internet?! How could I possibly judge a nation of 300 million people on George Bush's delightfully-punchable face?
If this is the face of the States as seen from the outside, I cannot wait to see it from the inside. I cannot wait for my stereotype to be disproved. I cannot wait to meet the freedom-fighting gringos bubbling under the dead-pan of the newsreader's face.
I know that for whatever reason, my heart is drawing me there - even despite my somewhat irrational fears.
Yes, I am scared of returning to the 'real world'. In my eyes, I've been swimming happily in raw life juice for the last nine months. Those cold, clear waters are where I belong. I don't want to be drawn in to the sparkle of the new world. The idea of getting off the plane and spending a week's worth of Mexican accommodation money on a meal, just because its what people do, makes my breathing shallow.
Bigger fears lurk over the superficial ones. I am running out of money and don't know how to make it back. Thus America might be the end, at least for a while. Plus, facing the dream means disturbing it. Even if it is wonderful, it will still never be the same as it was as a child.
Even more daunting: Michael is getting ever more successful with his music. If he wants to pursue it, it seems like life will make it easy for him to do so in the Promised Land. But I don't want to settle yet.
So, once again, the bigger flows make themselves felt and having committed to following my own goals and heart there is nothing I can do but relax into them and see where they take me this time.
Your world is what you make of it… as every day here teaches me. If I'm scared, then those things will drill into my brain and leave holes, just as I fear. I need to remember that wherever my heart takes me I will be safe.
And what about Mexico… my love, my home.
In Mexico I feel like I have discovered the heart of the world.
There is just so much. I struggle to express the feeling Mexico inspires in me. It is universal love. I look at her swooping mountains, wild beaches, stark deserts, chattering jungles, and I can feel my whole body contract with yearning and respect.
More than just love, this feeling alone has led me to places previously unachievable during meditation and has been critical to my spiritual growth.
This kind of love is something I've only ever felt for the land around my house in Cornwall.
The energy fields across this enormous country sway and band like ribbons, streamlining the people underneath it and drawing them to exactly where they need to be.
There is a deep knowledge here, rising with the lava in its volcanoes.
Many things will come to pass in Mexico in the next few years. I feel the imposition of a future pushed and pulled by enormous forces; earthquakes, hurricanes, political explosion, people's rebellion. Water flows. Spirituality. The knowledge of the ancients, returning to imprint its symbols on a modern day nation of passion and raw beauty.
Somehow I know there is more for me here. Thus, I sign out under the knowledge that these winds will blow me right back here where I belong, as soon as I've gathered what I need from its bigger bitch of a sister.
Mexico, Mexico. I do not abandon you for her.
I leave as a messenger, of the strongest intentions. I will stay only long enough to pluck what I need for you and your people. I leave to learn - for how can I form a full picture of the world without having been?
Reading over the strangeness of these words, I wonder what I have to learn that is so important to bring me to California?
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Buds bursting
I look over at Felix and his frizzy blonde locks, bobbing as he laughs from his cross-legged seat on the ground. Under his overalls squirms a kitten, running lumps through the material as it tries to fight its way out.
The kitten has been brought here from the neighbouring village, on a motorboat, in someone's pocket, to kill the rats.
The rats have been brought here by the recent addition of human food to this land.
The humans have been attracted by the unusual flatness of the terrain; hard to find on the shores of Lago Atitlan but a necessity for an eco-village.
From the almost-whole shack - the only building on the land as of yet and the base of operations for Green New World (GNW) - the future seems tiny with long-distance perspective. But it is growing, fast.
GNW, a charity focused on providing much-needed help to the ailing lake, have just purchased the land and are finding their feet. Through them I have already helped with a basic-level sewage project for San Marcos, stopping at least some of the raw effluent from running into the lake. Now, I find myself on the side of a mountain, observing the fetal stages of a proposed eco-village. Like many in the area, it hopes to set an example to the locals by providing easy, green solutions to traditional problems such as farming and washing.
Right now, they lack even basic facilities.
Without these, much-needed volunteers are repelled. Without volunteers, the project struggles.
I don't have long but I want to help. I lay stones for the kitchen floor and cover myself in clay in a long day of digging and hauling in the toilet pit. Once in use, the toilet will be kept dry with sawdust to allow decomposition. Once full, the pit will be closed off. Unbelievably, after two years, a full pit of sewage will turn to rich compost that can even be used to grow vegetables. Such a simple idea, and yet the lake is about to go toxic from hundreds of years of human waste settling on the bottom.
We drink creek water through a clay filter and I try to understand where it all went so wrong.
I realise how much I love the simplicity. There is no electricity and our only music is the whisper of the wind through the avocado trees. We eat from the forest floor and piss amongst the coffee leaves. I haven't seen a mirror in days.
Sitting here, the view of the lake sparkling between the trees, I understand that it is nature, pure and simple, that gives me my truth.
The trees whisper an ancient language. The bees fly lines of interconnection. The rain washes webs of oneness, united and yet barely noticed by those who are a part of it all.
The earth speaks to me in musty tones, humidly rising warm through my being.
The kitten has been brought here from the neighbouring village, on a motorboat, in someone's pocket, to kill the rats.
The rats have been brought here by the recent addition of human food to this land.
The humans have been attracted by the unusual flatness of the terrain; hard to find on the shores of Lago Atitlan but a necessity for an eco-village.
From the almost-whole shack - the only building on the land as of yet and the base of operations for Green New World (GNW) - the future seems tiny with long-distance perspective. But it is growing, fast.
GNW, a charity focused on providing much-needed help to the ailing lake, have just purchased the land and are finding their feet. Through them I have already helped with a basic-level sewage project for San Marcos, stopping at least some of the raw effluent from running into the lake. Now, I find myself on the side of a mountain, observing the fetal stages of a proposed eco-village. Like many in the area, it hopes to set an example to the locals by providing easy, green solutions to traditional problems such as farming and washing.
Right now, they lack even basic facilities.
Without these, much-needed volunteers are repelled. Without volunteers, the project struggles.
I don't have long but I want to help. I lay stones for the kitchen floor and cover myself in clay in a long day of digging and hauling in the toilet pit. Once in use, the toilet will be kept dry with sawdust to allow decomposition. Once full, the pit will be closed off. Unbelievably, after two years, a full pit of sewage will turn to rich compost that can even be used to grow vegetables. Such a simple idea, and yet the lake is about to go toxic from hundreds of years of human waste settling on the bottom.
We drink creek water through a clay filter and I try to understand where it all went so wrong.
I realise how much I love the simplicity. There is no electricity and our only music is the whisper of the wind through the avocado trees. We eat from the forest floor and piss amongst the coffee leaves. I haven't seen a mirror in days.
In the silence of the forest I find my retreat.
Although I'd originally planned on committing a month to a meditation centre, I realised quickly that organised spirituality is exactly the kind of practice that I reject, no matter how good the intention. Instead, I practise yoga underneath a morning mist that breathes lightly over me, fishermen my only observers, paddling dugout canoes with tender strokes.
Sitting here, the view of the lake sparkling between the trees, I understand that it is nature, pure and simple, that gives me my truth.
The trees whisper an ancient language. The bees fly lines of interconnection. The rain washes webs of oneness, united and yet barely noticed by those who are a part of it all.
The earth speaks to me in musty tones, humidly rising warm through my being.
I resonate.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
The other side
Lago Atitlan is the most beautiful lake in the world.
So proclaim a history of writers and explorers, drawn here by the mystery of the morning mists over the water. Ancient volcanoes sleep at its edges and the Mayans, isolated to the extreme, appear to live as they have for thousands of years. From village to neighbouring village, one's ears prick with completely different dialects. Weak sunlight glints from the sparkling fabrics of the ladies, who keep their spirits alive in the startling threads of the full, traditional costume.
I first came to Guatemala in 2008, on a trip designed as a test for this current journey.
At that stage my hula-hoop loop was just a twinkle in my eye, and the perspective of that holidaying office girl painted a perfectly-proportioned picture of my future quest.
I spent ten dreamy days on the shores of Atitlan in a sleepy village called San Pedro, absorbing myself in the solitude of single travel and the intense peace of the rocks.
I had rarely seen such beautiful evenings.
Today I return, this time in the middle of a moody rainy season that paints the mountain-scratched skies with emotion. We enter San Pedro on one of Guatemala's famous chicken buses, painted beautifully kitch colours and packed eight across.
I barely recognise the town.
From the emptiness of the Christmas weekend two years ago has birthed a town for tourists, crawling with white faces and shamelessly-plugged memorabilia. The locals unsmilingly rip me off at the market and, in sharp contrast to the rest of Guatemala and Mexico, flatly refuse a bargain.
I am shocked at the difference between this town and my memory. Not only that, but I quickly discover that the lake has turned toxic and is only weeks away from a devastating algal bloom.
It is as if this postcard memory has been decomposed by first-world scum.
The worst is the singing. Every morning at 6am, the loudspeaker cries of Evangelist churches echo in symphony across the lake, blasted from each village in a call to convert the few remaining Mayans.
The 1970s left a crater of devastation in the wake of civil war and natural disaster, providing vulture-like missionaries the perfect conditions in which to descend. In the midst of destruction and agony, new religions proliferated and churches, foreign-funded, were often the first buildings up in the most hard-hit areas.
Converts tell tales of miraculous healings. Gifts of money and American trinkets.
Now, perched smugly upon the old houses of San Pedro, a church more like a wedding cake than a building shits over the spirits of the lake.
I am disgusted.
The same thing has happened to virtually all of the indigenous traditions across Mexico and Central America. No doubt to the rest of the world.
While to the untrained eye, the locals may look as they always have, in reality the addition of new religion has divided neighbouring villages, keeping people under strict, unofficial laws (in many villages the church owns the land, dictating where the villagers may work and live and when they may leave).
But (I pathetically justify to myself) this is nothing new. Catholicism, unsurprisingly, is the principal religion of the region, brutally imposed by the conquering Spaniards hundreds of years ago. Indigenous practices survived this steamrollering by learning to adapt and unite in a deeply interesting combination of traditional beliefs and that of the Vatican. Up until the second half of the last century, the music of the ancients continued to sing in this syncretic meld of faiths known as costumbre (custom).
Somehow, however, the loudspeaker ceremonies of the Evangelists seem unbearable in comparison.
The voice of the ancients, crushed under the pretence of development. I am left slightly flustered, wondering what to do.
Nothing can take away the beauty of this lake.
But the changes within myself have been highlighted by my return.
I realise how uninspired I am by the idea of going out to drink in cute, themed bars. I watch old hippies, drawn by the energy of the lake, overtly take photographs of the locals as if they are no more than animals. I see how repulsed I am by the damage the rest of this world has done to the culture of this village.
I do not want to make it worse.
When Eva and Toño leave after a few days, I happily board the boat away from this town.
I seek retreat.
So proclaim a history of writers and explorers, drawn here by the mystery of the morning mists over the water. Ancient volcanoes sleep at its edges and the Mayans, isolated to the extreme, appear to live as they have for thousands of years. From village to neighbouring village, one's ears prick with completely different dialects. Weak sunlight glints from the sparkling fabrics of the ladies, who keep their spirits alive in the startling threads of the full, traditional costume.
I first came to Guatemala in 2008, on a trip designed as a test for this current journey.
At that stage my hula-hoop loop was just a twinkle in my eye, and the perspective of that holidaying office girl painted a perfectly-proportioned picture of my future quest.
I spent ten dreamy days on the shores of Atitlan in a sleepy village called San Pedro, absorbing myself in the solitude of single travel and the intense peace of the rocks.
I had rarely seen such beautiful evenings.
Today I return, this time in the middle of a moody rainy season that paints the mountain-scratched skies with emotion. We enter San Pedro on one of Guatemala's famous chicken buses, painted beautifully kitch colours and packed eight across.
I barely recognise the town.
From the emptiness of the Christmas weekend two years ago has birthed a town for tourists, crawling with white faces and shamelessly-plugged memorabilia. The locals unsmilingly rip me off at the market and, in sharp contrast to the rest of Guatemala and Mexico, flatly refuse a bargain.
I am shocked at the difference between this town and my memory. Not only that, but I quickly discover that the lake has turned toxic and is only weeks away from a devastating algal bloom.
It is as if this postcard memory has been decomposed by first-world scum.
The worst is the singing. Every morning at 6am, the loudspeaker cries of Evangelist churches echo in symphony across the lake, blasted from each village in a call to convert the few remaining Mayans.
The 1970s left a crater of devastation in the wake of civil war and natural disaster, providing vulture-like missionaries the perfect conditions in which to descend. In the midst of destruction and agony, new religions proliferated and churches, foreign-funded, were often the first buildings up in the most hard-hit areas.
Converts tell tales of miraculous healings. Gifts of money and American trinkets.
Now, perched smugly upon the old houses of San Pedro, a church more like a wedding cake than a building shits over the spirits of the lake.
I am disgusted.
The same thing has happened to virtually all of the indigenous traditions across Mexico and Central America. No doubt to the rest of the world.
While to the untrained eye, the locals may look as they always have, in reality the addition of new religion has divided neighbouring villages, keeping people under strict, unofficial laws (in many villages the church owns the land, dictating where the villagers may work and live and when they may leave).
But (I pathetically justify to myself) this is nothing new. Catholicism, unsurprisingly, is the principal religion of the region, brutally imposed by the conquering Spaniards hundreds of years ago. Indigenous practices survived this steamrollering by learning to adapt and unite in a deeply interesting combination of traditional beliefs and that of the Vatican. Up until the second half of the last century, the music of the ancients continued to sing in this syncretic meld of faiths known as costumbre (custom).
Somehow, however, the loudspeaker ceremonies of the Evangelists seem unbearable in comparison.
The voice of the ancients, crushed under the pretence of development. I am left slightly flustered, wondering what to do.
Nothing can take away the beauty of this lake.
But the changes within myself have been highlighted by my return.
I realise how uninspired I am by the idea of going out to drink in cute, themed bars. I watch old hippies, drawn by the energy of the lake, overtly take photographs of the locals as if they are no more than animals. I see how repulsed I am by the damage the rest of this world has done to the culture of this village.
I do not want to make it worse.
When Eva and Toño leave after a few days, I happily board the boat away from this town.
I seek retreat.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Hitch-hopping
On the first of August I leave Michael and resume the trail solita. He has his work to do, I have to explore my soul. Both of us need to do this alone.
I'm not quite alone though… Eva and her banda boyfriend Toño are heading towards Guatemala. It's with them that I find myself waiting for a lift in the rain, on the highway leading out of San Cristobal, sipping thick pozol (chocolate-tortilla drink) that sends curls of steam into the misty air.
It takes us just two days and four rides to make it to the border. We share pick up trucks with tarpaulins, small children and, on one particularly memorable ride, several hundred cans of pizza sauce, around which we contort ourselves in the storm-force winds.
I duck down to protect my face and when I raise my head I am captured by the most beautifully brief moment… a rainbow in the field next to me, hanging clean and sparkling and radiant with stunning colours, perfectly poised for a moment before it is whisked away in the slipstream.
I am left with the traces of a kaleidoscope smile on my lips.
We swerve to avoid a cow in the road.
In the next town they stop to haul a pizza oven into the back of the truck. I assume they want us to leave, but they insist they can make this work to meet everyone's needs. They spend half an hour levering the enormous hulk of metal into the back, shifting can after can after bag of pepperoni in a tetris solely designed to ensure our (relative) safety.
I do not understand why people would go to so much effort, just to make sure there are three squares of space for a few bums they've picked up, when clearly the addition of the 2-metre square pizza oven to the truck is a strain alone.
Eva says simply: "Because they can."
They drop us at a border town, where a fairground has just pulled up. The need for the pizza oven becomes clear. We are left in the flashing lights of a pathetic-looking rollercoaster and the enticing oil smells of fresh-fried churros.
For la banda, every hour can be a work hour. Toño plays drums at restaurants as we pass, begging for a few pennies to buy himself a beer. We see the same two skinny girls that we met on my birthday, twirling their fire, seeming small and out of place at the semaphoros.
We eat popcorn and hula hoop under the tinny sounds of the fair and I feel wonderful to have regained my independence.
I miss Mike but I am glad I am here alone. Crouched under the lights, echoing fairy lights from a time long gone, I realise how important it is for me to have the space to be truly me, not cramped or compromised by another.
I have a fire inside and I need to feed it. I cannot wait for Guatemala.
I'm not quite alone though… Eva and her banda boyfriend Toño are heading towards Guatemala. It's with them that I find myself waiting for a lift in the rain, on the highway leading out of San Cristobal, sipping thick pozol (chocolate-tortilla drink) that sends curls of steam into the misty air.
It takes us just two days and four rides to make it to the border. We share pick up trucks with tarpaulins, small children and, on one particularly memorable ride, several hundred cans of pizza sauce, around which we contort ourselves in the storm-force winds.
I duck down to protect my face and when I raise my head I am captured by the most beautifully brief moment… a rainbow in the field next to me, hanging clean and sparkling and radiant with stunning colours, perfectly poised for a moment before it is whisked away in the slipstream.
I am left with the traces of a kaleidoscope smile on my lips.
We swerve to avoid a cow in the road.
In the next town they stop to haul a pizza oven into the back of the truck. I assume they want us to leave, but they insist they can make this work to meet everyone's needs. They spend half an hour levering the enormous hulk of metal into the back, shifting can after can after bag of pepperoni in a tetris solely designed to ensure our (relative) safety.
I do not understand why people would go to so much effort, just to make sure there are three squares of space for a few bums they've picked up, when clearly the addition of the 2-metre square pizza oven to the truck is a strain alone.
Eva says simply: "Because they can."
They drop us at a border town, where a fairground has just pulled up. The need for the pizza oven becomes clear. We are left in the flashing lights of a pathetic-looking rollercoaster and the enticing oil smells of fresh-fried churros.
For la banda, every hour can be a work hour. Toño plays drums at restaurants as we pass, begging for a few pennies to buy himself a beer. We see the same two skinny girls that we met on my birthday, twirling their fire, seeming small and out of place at the semaphoros.
We eat popcorn and hula hoop under the tinny sounds of the fair and I feel wonderful to have regained my independence.
I miss Mike but I am glad I am here alone. Crouched under the lights, echoing fairy lights from a time long gone, I realise how important it is for me to have the space to be truly me, not cramped or compromised by another.
I have a fire inside and I need to feed it. I cannot wait for Guatemala.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Nos sentamos en la calle
I turn twenty six on the twenty seventh of July. It is raining in San Cristobal de las Casas. At 6200 feet the drops fall cold and the ancient rocks of the pavement seem slicker than normal.
Michael and I spend all day looking for plush hotels and decide at the end that we'd rather spend the money on food.
Eva is here; my long-lost buddy with whom I spent December. It is wonderful to have a friend, although I've spent enough time here now that I recognise faces on the andador. We pass the evening on the slick streets, drinking maiz spirit and coconut juice out of plastic bottles and hula hooping through the puddles alongside la banda.
La banda. What a wonderful phenomenon to be part of during my travels here in Mexico.
It literally means the band, and is a term used to describe Mexico's hobos: a network of young pirates, dreadlocked, pierced, dressed in an assortment of rags. They travel their country in the back of pick up trucks, conjuring pennies to live by working the streets, the restaurants and the buses.
You're not banda unless you have a prop - a tambor drum, a fire stick, a roll of macrame bracelets. I have a hula hoop, therefore I am accepted as one of them. Whenever I travel with Eva, we listen for the sound of drums.
Like a subtle web of entertainers for the nation, these kids are always present, always audible. Their tambors sing the same rhythms in every town. Their jewellery glitters under streetlights. Traffic light junctions are fought over as the best location for fire spinning, where the perpetrators spend hours in exhaust fumes and whirls of flame, paid five pesos each by the most generous drivers.
Tonight my attention is caught by a pair of girls. Their collar bones show sharply under stained t shirts. One of them has shaved the sides of her hair and allowed the rest of it to dreadlock in a kind of parrot's tuft. The other wears a coloured scarf round her head and has eyes that move too fast. They pass a stolen cigarette between them and try to blend in. They are only seventeen.
I've seen them on the semaphoros, one with poi and the other with a fire stick. They look like they might break. They sit in the puddles like scruffy dolls, seeking their adventure in dark streets, far away from any family they may have had.
They dance well and guzzle their beer with prowess. They have the urchin look down to a T. The only thing that belies them is the nervous darting of their eyes.
I wonder where they came from…where any of them came from.
Some run, bored, from families with big homes, rejecting the streamlined world of the rich mexican for the grit of the streets. Others have no relatives at all. Some just haven't come up with anything better to do yet. These details don't appear to matter because each is accepted within the greater family of la banda.
They are the people's army; the underbelly, proudly displaying the happiness that having nothing can bring. They proclaim the alternatives: that you do not have to have a regular job, a safe house and a non-descript image to be happy.
The conditions for the movement are perfect - anyone with a grain of sense can earn money in Mexico, albeit at different rates. There is no web of legislation to climb through -- if there is, no one cares. Hitchhiking is commonplace, and pick up trucks form the greater part of Mexico's fleet.
Life on the road is exhilarating. There is no purpose to it other than to live and continue to live.
I am happy to flit in and out of the situation. Their company is interesting for a while but as Eva points out, one can become bored easily when faced with too many nights of sharing caguamons and paying for things with handfuls of change.
A stranger might look at me, hair wraps, hula hoop and holes in my clothes, and place me in their box.
For me, the difference is subtle and comes in a cup.
I am happy to have included the luxury of coffee within my budget.
For la banda, the coffee shop is on the other side of their grimy viewing window. They peer through it with interest, knowing they would never choose to fritter away hard-earned beer money on a meaningless hot beverage.
Rain splats the glass as they sit, crouched, waiting for the customer who will whisk them away.
Michael and I spend all day looking for plush hotels and decide at the end that we'd rather spend the money on food.
Eva is here; my long-lost buddy with whom I spent December. It is wonderful to have a friend, although I've spent enough time here now that I recognise faces on the andador. We pass the evening on the slick streets, drinking maiz spirit and coconut juice out of plastic bottles and hula hooping through the puddles alongside la banda.
La banda. What a wonderful phenomenon to be part of during my travels here in Mexico.
It literally means the band, and is a term used to describe Mexico's hobos: a network of young pirates, dreadlocked, pierced, dressed in an assortment of rags. They travel their country in the back of pick up trucks, conjuring pennies to live by working the streets, the restaurants and the buses.
You're not banda unless you have a prop - a tambor drum, a fire stick, a roll of macrame bracelets. I have a hula hoop, therefore I am accepted as one of them. Whenever I travel with Eva, we listen for the sound of drums.
Like a subtle web of entertainers for the nation, these kids are always present, always audible. Their tambors sing the same rhythms in every town. Their jewellery glitters under streetlights. Traffic light junctions are fought over as the best location for fire spinning, where the perpetrators spend hours in exhaust fumes and whirls of flame, paid five pesos each by the most generous drivers.
Tonight my attention is caught by a pair of girls. Their collar bones show sharply under stained t shirts. One of them has shaved the sides of her hair and allowed the rest of it to dreadlock in a kind of parrot's tuft. The other wears a coloured scarf round her head and has eyes that move too fast. They pass a stolen cigarette between them and try to blend in. They are only seventeen.
I've seen them on the semaphoros, one with poi and the other with a fire stick. They look like they might break. They sit in the puddles like scruffy dolls, seeking their adventure in dark streets, far away from any family they may have had.
They dance well and guzzle their beer with prowess. They have the urchin look down to a T. The only thing that belies them is the nervous darting of their eyes.
I wonder where they came from…where any of them came from.
Some run, bored, from families with big homes, rejecting the streamlined world of the rich mexican for the grit of the streets. Others have no relatives at all. Some just haven't come up with anything better to do yet. These details don't appear to matter because each is accepted within the greater family of la banda.
They are the people's army; the underbelly, proudly displaying the happiness that having nothing can bring. They proclaim the alternatives: that you do not have to have a regular job, a safe house and a non-descript image to be happy.
The conditions for the movement are perfect - anyone with a grain of sense can earn money in Mexico, albeit at different rates. There is no web of legislation to climb through -- if there is, no one cares. Hitchhiking is commonplace, and pick up trucks form the greater part of Mexico's fleet.
Life on the road is exhilarating. There is no purpose to it other than to live and continue to live.
I am happy to flit in and out of the situation. Their company is interesting for a while but as Eva points out, one can become bored easily when faced with too many nights of sharing caguamons and paying for things with handfuls of change.
A stranger might look at me, hair wraps, hula hoop and holes in my clothes, and place me in their box.
For me, the difference is subtle and comes in a cup.
I am happy to have included the luxury of coffee within my budget.
For la banda, the coffee shop is on the other side of their grimy viewing window. They peer through it with interest, knowing they would never choose to fritter away hard-earned beer money on a meaningless hot beverage.
Rain splats the glass as they sit, crouched, waiting for the customer who will whisk them away.
And then there came...
Eight months down the line, I'm done with large-scale wandering. For the moment, at least. The last few months have been a paintbox of thoughts, blobbing vivid emotion through my days. I've hopped and skipped and last-minute-escaped so many towns that they are beginning to look the same.
Although I have no intention of stopping, and still pump the thrill of a long-distance bus journey through my heart at every beat, I sense the need for a purpose.
Purpose.
That dreaded word.
I remember proclaiming loudly and perhaps slightly smugly at my work leaving party, fifteen months ago, my need to experience life without a purpose. When asked by puzzled faces what on earth I planned to do, I replied easily: I plan to have no plan.
But the P words are pursuing me with persisting pestilence. I know deeply that something needs to change.
Unintentionally we seem to have made our home in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
The cheerily nicknamed San Cris hosts hoards of tourists, who come here for the quaint cobbled streets, rainbow houses and mountain-fringed vistas. They are helped in their explorations by organic coffee companies and delicatessens that are run by a high proportion of ex-pats - a.k.a. travellers who never escaped.
Under the too-clean streets lies a fractured past, marked recently by the Zapatista rebellions of the mid-90s in reaction to the large-scale governmental seizure of land from the huge indigenous population. This land is much more like Guatemala than Mexico but there is something inherently genuine about it, as if it is more Mexican than La Republica.
We move between our friend's unnecessarily large, isolating house and noisy, centre-of-town hostels. We punctuate our stay with two-week long trips out, during which we leave behind all but a change of clothes and our passports (just in case).
In doing so, we fall in love with Chiapas state.
Endless, deserted beaches. Tiny Mayan villages, high in the cool mountains, where life continues in the same way it has for centuries. Scattered emeralds and sapphires of God's jewel basket, twinkling in the Lagos de Montebello.
Steamy jungles hide the endangered Lacandon culture amidst deadly snakes and undiscovered ruins - just rocky humps in the knotted jungle. We eat lunch on a cracked Mayan calendar at lost Lacanja and swing on liandas in the Indiana Jones land of Yaxchilan.
We loop around dusty border towns ruled by cartels, who hop the river to Guatemala every time the police invade and stand there waving under foreign safety.
We straddle the border ourselves to renew visas, then hop back when we realise how much we miss Mexico. There is a strange pull towards 'home'.
We return to find Nantzin in our villa.
Nantzin is a Mexican-American midwife. She is here on a volunteer mission, learning the ways of the people here - reconnecting with her roots. She has just been given a job working in a woman's refuge in town, taking care of mothers who have no where else to go.
I spy a book on natural medicine on top of a stack of interesting titles and understand why we needed to return.
Nantzin is a powerful woman to have by my side. She knows where she is going and what she wants to achieve. She has been in Mexico for less time than me but has achieved all of the things I dream of achieving, including apprenticeships to Medicine Women and volunteering with her healing skills. You can read her blog here.
From Nantzin I learn basic home recipes and share veggie food, experiences and giggles. She represents more than one part of me that I've felt missing in the last month or two. Not only is she a curandera to look up to, she is a friend. Watching the world pass by with her on the pedestrianised Real de Guadalupe makes my coffee taste that bit sweeter.
I see that this is part of the next step for me and at the very least a pointer to where I should place my attention. I feel this to be a further confirmation that healing is my path; at least for the moment.
Nantzin represents for me the beginning of the shifts. The persistence of possibility.
The beginning of Purpose.
Although I have no intention of stopping, and still pump the thrill of a long-distance bus journey through my heart at every beat, I sense the need for a purpose.
Purpose.
That dreaded word.
I remember proclaiming loudly and perhaps slightly smugly at my work leaving party, fifteen months ago, my need to experience life without a purpose. When asked by puzzled faces what on earth I planned to do, I replied easily: I plan to have no plan.
But the P words are pursuing me with persisting pestilence. I know deeply that something needs to change.
Unintentionally we seem to have made our home in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
The cheerily nicknamed San Cris hosts hoards of tourists, who come here for the quaint cobbled streets, rainbow houses and mountain-fringed vistas. They are helped in their explorations by organic coffee companies and delicatessens that are run by a high proportion of ex-pats - a.k.a. travellers who never escaped.
Under the too-clean streets lies a fractured past, marked recently by the Zapatista rebellions of the mid-90s in reaction to the large-scale governmental seizure of land from the huge indigenous population. This land is much more like Guatemala than Mexico but there is something inherently genuine about it, as if it is more Mexican than La Republica.
We move between our friend's unnecessarily large, isolating house and noisy, centre-of-town hostels. We punctuate our stay with two-week long trips out, during which we leave behind all but a change of clothes and our passports (just in case).
In doing so, we fall in love with Chiapas state.
Endless, deserted beaches. Tiny Mayan villages, high in the cool mountains, where life continues in the same way it has for centuries. Scattered emeralds and sapphires of God's jewel basket, twinkling in the Lagos de Montebello.
Steamy jungles hide the endangered Lacandon culture amidst deadly snakes and undiscovered ruins - just rocky humps in the knotted jungle. We eat lunch on a cracked Mayan calendar at lost Lacanja and swing on liandas in the Indiana Jones land of Yaxchilan.
We loop around dusty border towns ruled by cartels, who hop the river to Guatemala every time the police invade and stand there waving under foreign safety.
We straddle the border ourselves to renew visas, then hop back when we realise how much we miss Mexico. There is a strange pull towards 'home'.
We return to find Nantzin in our villa.
Nantzin is a Mexican-American midwife. She is here on a volunteer mission, learning the ways of the people here - reconnecting with her roots. She has just been given a job working in a woman's refuge in town, taking care of mothers who have no where else to go.
I spy a book on natural medicine on top of a stack of interesting titles and understand why we needed to return.
Nantzin is a powerful woman to have by my side. She knows where she is going and what she wants to achieve. She has been in Mexico for less time than me but has achieved all of the things I dream of achieving, including apprenticeships to Medicine Women and volunteering with her healing skills. You can read her blog here.
From Nantzin I learn basic home recipes and share veggie food, experiences and giggles. She represents more than one part of me that I've felt missing in the last month or two. Not only is she a curandera to look up to, she is a friend. Watching the world pass by with her on the pedestrianised Real de Guadalupe makes my coffee taste that bit sweeter.
I see that this is part of the next step for me and at the very least a pointer to where I should place my attention. I feel this to be a further confirmation that healing is my path; at least for the moment.
Nantzin represents for me the beginning of the shifts. The persistence of possibility.
The beginning of Purpose.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Searching for Dragons
Dan turns up at the end of July. Film-maker Dan, with whom I spent February and most of May. Dan, the man with the van, who left us in June to continue "searching for dragons" on the final leg of his 4.5 year journey to Panama.
Now he is returning, finally. You can tell by his energy, which no longer scouts but feels buried into the idea of home. He pauses long enough to meet Nantzin, who is one of the last jewels in a necklace of synchronicity that has taken him from Alaska to Panama and half-way back again.
A year ago someone told him to seek out a shaman named Don Lauro. Don Lauro, born to the Mayan heartlands of Mexico, was taken to Tibet as a child by monks. There, he became Red Dragon, the famous martial artist. Now, he owns Las Montañas Sagradas (the sacred mountains) to the south of San Cristóbal, seeding a sustainable community of permaculture and flowing fields, where he heals the flocking public with his powerful energy.
For one reason or another, Dan never met him. However, when Dan meets Nantzin, on his way out of San Cristobal, she unwittingly informs him of her plans to see a shaman named Don Lauro the next day.
Dan is accustomed by now to the strange synchronicities of fate. Given the first pointers to this man a year ago, he seems relieved to be able to close this circle. I am not surprised when, the next day, I find him and his assistant Forbes still in town, waiting out this seemingly prophesied meeting.
I am invited along to the meeting. After a month or two of stagnancy, I begin to feel wheels turning again. Dan has a strange ability to make one feel like every moment is meant to be.
We sit around the kitchen table and put together an offering, based on the teachings of Dan's adoptive Blackfoot (native american) father back in Canada. We burn sage and sweetgrass, cleansing ourselves and imprinting prayers for Don Lauro's family into the red-wrapped bundle of copal and tobacco. Then we wait.
Don Lauro is sheathed in mystery. Everyone we ask replies with a mysticism that suggests him to be more like a spirit than a man, appearing here and there when least expected and never available to be found.
We wait for three days. Four visits.
While we wait I explore Don Lauro's kingdom. Domed buildings lurk under bright, alpine growth sparked with rainbow ribbons. A small garden, working the best of permaculture, is a secret uncovered from the back of the kitchen. The place is mostly empty.
We celebrate the beginning of the Mayan new year with some of the residents. We gather around a sacred fire, into which we throw seeds, candles and all the dirt from under the fingernails of our souls. We emerge renewed to the year of Red Overtone Moon - a modern interpretation on the classical Mayan calendar system, suggesting this year to be the catalyst for uncovering the 'great teacher' within, who will guide us to our rightful path.
The days pass easily and I feel a resonance with the place that comes from more than just the legend. I ask about staying, but space is at a premium and the only option is to live in a tent on the very top of the mountain, where the rainy season sloshes down in giant balls of hail.
I think about my options as we wait.
The company of three unexpected friends does me good. They can see that something I'm doing right now is not quite settling right with me, and they encourage me to rediscover myself through the things I already know within.
Although it does not seem quite the right situation for me here, it makes me realise what it is I'm looking for. The waiting in itself has given me direction. I jump up and down: 'Life is good again!'
Nothing like a bit of sitting still to organise one's head.
Don Lauro turns up at the end of the third day. He is short, round, with slitted eyes and far too few teeth. He shouts at dogs and moves quickly; a man clearly distracted by larger dragons than ours.
We are relieved. We don't really know what to say. We hand him the offering.
He bows at each of us in turn and tells us his house is our house.
Before we can say anything else, he leaves.
We are left with an anti-climax that makes us laugh and shake our heads.
Dan is not worried. "He is a man, just like us. Just because some people show up, feeling that this meeting is destined, does not oblige him to do anything other than greet us graciously as he did."
I consider the life of a famous shaman, sought out by people from all ends of the earth who expect deliveries of wisdom and deeper meaning, and in doing so realise that the wisdom lies in seeing that we are all the same.
Even shamen are just men.
Now he is returning, finally. You can tell by his energy, which no longer scouts but feels buried into the idea of home. He pauses long enough to meet Nantzin, who is one of the last jewels in a necklace of synchronicity that has taken him from Alaska to Panama and half-way back again.
A year ago someone told him to seek out a shaman named Don Lauro. Don Lauro, born to the Mayan heartlands of Mexico, was taken to Tibet as a child by monks. There, he became Red Dragon, the famous martial artist. Now, he owns Las Montañas Sagradas (the sacred mountains) to the south of San Cristóbal, seeding a sustainable community of permaculture and flowing fields, where he heals the flocking public with his powerful energy.
For one reason or another, Dan never met him. However, when Dan meets Nantzin, on his way out of San Cristobal, she unwittingly informs him of her plans to see a shaman named Don Lauro the next day.
Dan is accustomed by now to the strange synchronicities of fate. Given the first pointers to this man a year ago, he seems relieved to be able to close this circle. I am not surprised when, the next day, I find him and his assistant Forbes still in town, waiting out this seemingly prophesied meeting.
I am invited along to the meeting. After a month or two of stagnancy, I begin to feel wheels turning again. Dan has a strange ability to make one feel like every moment is meant to be.
We sit around the kitchen table and put together an offering, based on the teachings of Dan's adoptive Blackfoot (native american) father back in Canada. We burn sage and sweetgrass, cleansing ourselves and imprinting prayers for Don Lauro's family into the red-wrapped bundle of copal and tobacco. Then we wait.
Don Lauro is sheathed in mystery. Everyone we ask replies with a mysticism that suggests him to be more like a spirit than a man, appearing here and there when least expected and never available to be found.
We wait for three days. Four visits.
While we wait I explore Don Lauro's kingdom. Domed buildings lurk under bright, alpine growth sparked with rainbow ribbons. A small garden, working the best of permaculture, is a secret uncovered from the back of the kitchen. The place is mostly empty.
We celebrate the beginning of the Mayan new year with some of the residents. We gather around a sacred fire, into which we throw seeds, candles and all the dirt from under the fingernails of our souls. We emerge renewed to the year of Red Overtone Moon - a modern interpretation on the classical Mayan calendar system, suggesting this year to be the catalyst for uncovering the 'great teacher' within, who will guide us to our rightful path.
The days pass easily and I feel a resonance with the place that comes from more than just the legend. I ask about staying, but space is at a premium and the only option is to live in a tent on the very top of the mountain, where the rainy season sloshes down in giant balls of hail.
I think about my options as we wait.
The company of three unexpected friends does me good. They can see that something I'm doing right now is not quite settling right with me, and they encourage me to rediscover myself through the things I already know within.
Although it does not seem quite the right situation for me here, it makes me realise what it is I'm looking for. The waiting in itself has given me direction. I jump up and down: 'Life is good again!'
Nothing like a bit of sitting still to organise one's head.
Don Lauro turns up at the end of the third day. He is short, round, with slitted eyes and far too few teeth. He shouts at dogs and moves quickly; a man clearly distracted by larger dragons than ours.
We are relieved. We don't really know what to say. We hand him the offering.
He bows at each of us in turn and tells us his house is our house.
Before we can say anything else, he leaves.
We are left with an anti-climax that makes us laugh and shake our heads.
Dan is not worried. "He is a man, just like us. Just because some people show up, feeling that this meeting is destined, does not oblige him to do anything other than greet us graciously as he did."
I consider the life of a famous shaman, sought out by people from all ends of the earth who expect deliveries of wisdom and deeper meaning, and in doing so realise that the wisdom lies in seeing that we are all the same.
Even shamen are just men.
Monday, July 19, 2010
And then there came...
Eight months down the line, I'm done with large-scale wandering. For the moment, at least. The last few months have been a paintbox of thoughts, swirling vivid emotion through my days. I've hopped and skipped and last-minute-escaped so many towns that they are beginning to look the same.
Although I have no intention of stopping, and still pump the thrill of a long-distance bus journey through my heart at every beat, I sense the need for a purpose.
Purpose.
That dreaded word.
I remember proclaiming loudly and perhaps slightly smugly at my work leaving party, fifteen months ago, my need to experience life without a purpose. When asked by puzzled faces what on earth I planned to do, I replied easily: I plan to have no plan.
But the P words are pursuing me with persisting pestilence. I know deeply that something needs to change.
Unintentionally we seem to have made our home in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
The cheerily nicknamed San Cris hosts hoards of tourists, who come here for the quaint cobbled streets, rainbow houses and mountain-fringed vistas. They are helped in their explorations by organic coffee companies and delicatessens run by a high proportion of ex-pats - a.k.a. travellers who never escaped.
Under the too-clean streets lies a fractured past, marked recently by the Zapatista rebellions of the mid-90s in reaction to the large-scale governmental seizure of land from the huge indigenous population.
This land is much more like Guatemala than Mexico but there is something inherently genuine about it, as if it is more Mexican than La Republica.
We move between our friend's unnecessarily large, isolating house and noisy, centre-of-town hostels. We punctuate our stay with two-week long trips, during which we leave behind all but a change of clothes and our passports (just in case).
Endless, deserted beaches. Tiny Mayan villages, high in the cool mountains, where life continues in the same way it has for centuries. Scattered emeralds and sapphires of God's jewel basket, twinkling in the Lagos de Montebello.
Steamy jungles hide the endangered Lacandon culture amidst deadly snakes and undiscovered ruins - just rocky humps in the knotted jungle. We eat lunch on a cracked Mayan calendar at lost Lacanja and swing on liandas in the Indiana Jones land of Yaxchilan.
We loop around dusty border towns ruled by cartels, who hop the river to Guatemala every time the police invade and stand there, waving under foreign safety.
We straddle the border ourselves to renew visas, then hop back when we realise how much we miss Mexico. There is a strange pull towards 'home'.
We return to find Nantzin in our villa.
Nantzin is a Mexican-American midwife. She is here on a volunteer mission, learning the ways of the people here - reconnecting with her roots. She has just been given a job working in a woman's refuge in town, taking care of mothers who have no where else to go.
I see that this is part of the next step for me and at the very least a pointer to where I should place my attention. I feel this to be a further confirmation that healing is my path; at least for the moment.
Nantzin represents for me the beginning of the shifts. The persistence of possibility.
Perhaps, the beginning of Purpose.
Although I have no intention of stopping, and still pump the thrill of a long-distance bus journey through my heart at every beat, I sense the need for a purpose.
Purpose.
That dreaded word.
I remember proclaiming loudly and perhaps slightly smugly at my work leaving party, fifteen months ago, my need to experience life without a purpose. When asked by puzzled faces what on earth I planned to do, I replied easily: I plan to have no plan.
But the P words are pursuing me with persisting pestilence. I know deeply that something needs to change.
Unintentionally we seem to have made our home in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. The cheerily nicknamed San Cris hosts hoards of tourists, who come here for the quaint cobbled streets, rainbow houses and mountain-fringed vistas. They are helped in their explorations by organic coffee companies and delicatessens run by a high proportion of ex-pats - a.k.a. travellers who never escaped.
Under the too-clean streets lies a fractured past, marked recently by the Zapatista rebellions of the mid-90s in reaction to the large-scale governmental seizure of land from the huge indigenous population.
This land is much more like Guatemala than Mexico but there is something inherently genuine about it, as if it is more Mexican than La Republica.
We move between our friend's unnecessarily large, isolating house and noisy, centre-of-town hostels. We punctuate our stay with two-week long trips, during which we leave behind all but a change of clothes and our passports (just in case). In doing so, we fall in love with Chiapas state.
Endless, deserted beaches. Tiny Mayan villages, high in the cool mountains, where life continues in the same way it has for centuries. Scattered emeralds and sapphires of God's jewel basket, twinkling in the Lagos de Montebello.
Steamy jungles hide the endangered Lacandon culture amidst deadly snakes and undiscovered ruins - just rocky humps in the knotted jungle. We eat lunch on a cracked Mayan calendar at lost Lacanja and swing on liandas in the Indiana Jones land of Yaxchilan. We loop around dusty border towns ruled by cartels, who hop the river to Guatemala every time the police invade and stand there, waving under foreign safety.
We straddle the border ourselves to renew visas, then hop back when we realise how much we miss Mexico. There is a strange pull towards 'home'.
We return to find Nantzin in our villa.
Nantzin is a Mexican-American midwife. She is here on a volunteer mission, learning the ways of the people here - reconnecting with her roots. She has just been given a job working in a woman's refuge in town, taking care of mothers who have no where else to go.
I spy a book on natural medicine on top of a stack of interesting titles and understand why we needed to return.
Nantzin is a powerful woman to have by my side. She knows where she is going and what she wants to achieve. She has been in Mexico for less time than me but has achieved all of the things I dream of achieving, including apprenticeships to Medicine Women and volunteering with her healing skills. You can read her blog here.
From Nantzin I learn basic home remedies and share veggie food, experiences and giggles. She represents more than one part of me that I've felt missing in the last month or two. Not only is she a curandera to look up to, she is a friend. Watching the world pass by with her on the pedestrianised Real de Guadalupe makes my coffee taste that bit sweeter.
I see that this is part of the next step for me and at the very least a pointer to where I should place my attention. I feel this to be a further confirmation that healing is my path; at least for the moment.
Nantzin represents for me the beginning of the shifts. The persistence of possibility.
Perhaps, the beginning of Purpose.
Friday, June 25, 2010
One fine day in Chiapas
This time, we get out of bed the moment our eyes are first prised open by the waves on our doorstep. It is not as hard as we imagined. How quickly one can forget the trauma of an early morning alarm clock. How dramatic the improvement a pelapa-thatch roof and the sound of pounding waves can be on one's awakening.
We play chess while we eat our eggs next to the silent lagoon, twenty metres away on the other side of the sand bank from our hut. I lose again. Today, that does not frustrate me as much as usual.
A baby manta ray has found its way in to the shallows and basks in the bath-like water, camouflaged against the grey sand.
We take a lancha across the lagoon to the mainland, watching the spit of sand that has housed us for the last week slide slowly into the horizon.
It is like a tongue, licking the sea, the palm trees its taste buds, studding skinny barrenness with spiky bursts of flavour.
The Frenchlings come with us in the boat. They have been our casual companions this week. We decided to stop drinking for the month of June and this has in some way caused an impenetrable rift between us and any potential friends. On the other hand, the rift could easily have been Mike and I's reluctance to do anything other than be with each other, playing chess, writing music, exploring.
But this morning, however, their presence makes a difference. It means that when a taxi arrives, there are six of us waiting for a lift.
This does not matter in Mexico. We pack ourselves in, four in the back, Mike and I sharing the front passenger seat, the driver, wallowing in space, peering through a cracked windscreen with one surplus arm waving in the car's slipstream. As we accustom ourselves to the speed and the proximity, he introduces himself as Francisco with a wide smile to each of us in turn. He is visibly exalted to be sitting next to Mike.
"Miguel! MIGUEL!" he cries in happiness, patting Michael on the back and laughing. Michael appears to be enjoying the attention and replies in return, "Pancho! Panchito!"
Our driver looks about to wet himself with pleasure at being called the diminutive version of his nickname.
To celebrate the occasion, he turns the mariachi up. Stoic men in gold buttoned suits and white cowboy boots serenade us through the speakers in penetrating shades of brass and strings. Halfway through the joyful anthem, Pancho realises this song will not quite fit and slows the car to a halt. He unceremoniously removes the CD from the player. After a few moments of searching he inserts a new CD, forwarding to track number 8. A tune almost entirely alike the one paused earlier starts blasting from the speakers. Satisfied, he begins to drive again.
He appears to have installed a sub bass in the boot. The Frenchlings in the back are squinting from the volume.
He begins to sing.
He suggests going for a beer. One of the Frenchlings is in a hurry and says no. The driver is disappointed. He changes the song.
The third song hits the spot. He begins to yelp.
He pats Michael on the back again and cries his name into the wind, swerving to avoid potholes in the road. He buys chopped chili mango through the window, from a boy stood at a speed hump, and passes the bag around like juicy chips. Whenever the energy within the car seems to drop, he begins yelping again. Mike looks at me. "This is the most inspiring taxi driver I've ever met!"
I lean further out of the window in a failing attempt for more air. There is not much to do but laugh and sing along, which we do for almost an hour of back twisting, fist clenching, life dripping Mexican experience.
Michael looks like he's on drugs, such is the admiration and aspiration he has for this man. Rarely does one ever see someone so high on life as our Pancho. When we leave, uncrumpling bones in the square at Tonala, he kisses everyone on the cheek and thanks them for the pleasure of their company on this fine morning. We shuffle slowly away, marvelling at the spicyness of our early morning adventure.
But the day is not over yet. We leave Tonala having looked at a large-scale map of the area and pointed to a place down the coast with another lagoon and an interesting name.
The man in the sweet shop waves us towards the market. The man in the market waves us on to the car park. The man in the car park waves us on to a mini bus that drops us two hours later on a motorway, where there is another man who gives us the keys to a shop with a toilet and points towards another minibus going south.
That minibus leaves us in the rain. Once again, the human sponges, sloshing along in slippery sandals.
The women on it tell us we need to carry on our journey from the centre of town. We are hungry and we still haven't bought proper rain jackets. So we take refuge in a cute looking restaurant where a young man with one and a half arms serves us shrimp and black beans.
When we are finished he begins, as they all do, to ask our story. Where are we from, where are we going. Do we like Chiapas. The thing is, we're not at all sure where we're going. We picked a name from a map, that may or may not be possible to get to. So he invites us to talk to his parents, who are sitting just behind the restaurant, celebrating fathers day with their son and their nephew.
We walk into the room and they greet us with huge smiles and make us take our place at the table. They offer us coca cola and beer. They rattle off the same questions as their son did moments earlier. They are delighted with our answers.
The mother has never been on a plane and never will. The men tease her about her fear and she giggles into her beer bottle. "I like Chiapas and Chiapas is where I will stay. I won't go in a plane. Unnatural things." I agree with her and feed her glee with tales of our fifteen hour journeys to get to Mexico from London. England is grey anyway, and cold. She shivers with delight. "Yes, yes, Mexico is beautiful. Stay here, chicita, where the wind is warm." They ask how old we are and cannot believe the answer. To Mexicans we look like teenagers. They ask if we are brother and sister. We laugh a lot. Then their daughter sticks her head in the door and asks the same, and we realise that we all look the same to them in the same way they all look the same to us. They laugh with us.
Then they tell us they will host our wedding. "You must have the party here! Here in Chiapas we know how to party. We will fill this room with people and keep going for three days!" We are like Alice stumbling across the Mad Hatter's tea party, apart from these merry-eyed people are not mad, not even drunk, just high on life and happy to have such unexpected guests at their afternoon table. We leave them with sparkling smiles all around and promises for invites to our future (never-going-to-happen) wedding.
The next bus is driven by a young man who tells us he does not go as far as today's mecca. The village before it, where he lives, is called Zapotal. "Zapotal it is," I reply, and ask him if there are any cheap hotels. He laughs and looks sideways at the woman in the passenger seat, who turns out to be his mother. "Zapotal does not have visitors, but I have a restaurant, and you can stay with my mother if you like."
When we arrive we understand. This is the sleepiest little village I've had the pleasure of stumbling across yet. Thatch huts house snoozing families draped two-to a hammock, televisions barely cutting through the shrieking of the cicadas. Children sit barefoot in the pavement sand. The empty beach, just a continuation of the hundreds of kilometres of identical beach along this coastline, lays silent and unexplored next to the restaurant.
We sit at a plastic Corona table on a small cement patio with a bare lightbulb shining invitations to the mosquitoes. The bus driver turns waiter and lights a cardboard egg carton to place on the floor next to our table. The bites slow in frequency and we get out our homemade chessboard.
Within moments a steaming plate of garlic prawns, the cheapest thing on the menu twice in one day, arrives in front of us. We do not stop our game. This time I win one in four games. I make my head hurt and begin to see everything in terms of chess moves (...thank God the table is in the way of me and Mike's chair - it could take me in one move and I have no back-up. But he should be careful too. His eyes are just one L-shaped Knights move from being taken by his mouth.)
We are presented to the grandmothers bed, a small island under an enormous empty space of a house that looks more like a petrol station forecourt than a residence. As I prepare for bed I am watched by two small grandchildren from behind a curtain that serves as a door, who dart away like fishes whenever I let their attention be known.
The water tank has a turtle in it.
The night presents a continual stream of spectres to keep us awake, under satin sheets slipping against hot limbs.
The power goes off and with it the fan. Without the wind, the mosquitoes move in, burrowing into ear canals with dentist drill wingbeats. The grandfather arrives home and cannot figure out who is in his bed. The grandson, called in to help, shines a mobile phone in our faces and then apologises profusely. The cicadas grate their endless song, drilling through the concrete walls.
Eventually sleep's long fingers begin to take me. Silhouettes of our phantasmagoria of a day creep along the walls. Squinting through the warm waters of a lagoon. A cackling taxi driver and his love for music. Rain, beating on the windows of a minibus. A salad made of chopped hot dogs on the lace tablecloth of a laughing family. The kindness of an old woman and her scampering granddaughters, sleeping in an unknown location under our corrugated cathedral.
Just when we begin to doze off, our host's alarm begins to bleep.
4.30am. Time for another day.
We play chess while we eat our eggs next to the silent lagoon, twenty metres away on the other side of the sand bank from our hut. I lose again. Today, that does not frustrate me as much as usual.
A baby manta ray has found its way in to the shallows and basks in the bath-like water, camouflaged against the grey sand.
We take a lancha across the lagoon to the mainland, watching the spit of sand that has housed us for the last week slide slowly into the horizon.
It is like a tongue, licking the sea, the palm trees its taste buds, studding skinny barrenness with spiky bursts of flavour.
The Frenchlings come with us in the boat. They have been our casual companions this week. We decided to stop drinking for the month of June and this has in some way caused an impenetrable rift between us and any potential friends. On the other hand, the rift could easily have been Mike and I's reluctance to do anything other than be with each other, playing chess, writing music, exploring.
But this morning, however, their presence makes a difference. It means that when a taxi arrives, there are six of us waiting for a lift.
This does not matter in Mexico. We pack ourselves in, four in the back, Mike and I sharing the front passenger seat, the driver, wallowing in space, peering through a cracked windscreen with one surplus arm waving in the car's slipstream. As we accustom ourselves to the speed and the proximity, he introduces himself as Francisco with a wide smile to each of us in turn. He is visibly exalted to be sitting next to Mike.
"Miguel! MIGUEL!" he cries in happiness, patting Michael on the back and laughing. Michael appears to be enjoying the attention and replies in return, "Pancho! Panchito!"
Our driver looks about to wet himself with pleasure at being called the diminutive version of his nickname.
To celebrate the occasion, he turns the mariachi up. Stoic men in gold buttoned suits and white cowboy boots serenade us through the speakers in penetrating shades of brass and strings. Halfway through the joyful anthem, Pancho realises this song will not quite fit and slows the car to a halt. He unceremoniously removes the CD from the player. After a few moments of searching he inserts a new CD, forwarding to track number 8. A tune almost entirely alike the one paused earlier starts blasting from the speakers. Satisfied, he begins to drive again.
He appears to have installed a sub bass in the boot. The Frenchlings in the back are squinting from the volume.
He begins to sing.
He suggests going for a beer. One of the Frenchlings is in a hurry and says no. The driver is disappointed. He changes the song.
The third song hits the spot. He begins to yelp.
He pats Michael on the back again and cries his name into the wind, swerving to avoid potholes in the road. He buys chopped chili mango through the window, from a boy stood at a speed hump, and passes the bag around like juicy chips. Whenever the energy within the car seems to drop, he begins yelping again. Mike looks at me. "This is the most inspiring taxi driver I've ever met!"
I lean further out of the window in a failing attempt for more air. There is not much to do but laugh and sing along, which we do for almost an hour of back twisting, fist clenching, life dripping Mexican experience.
Michael looks like he's on drugs, such is the admiration and aspiration he has for this man. Rarely does one ever see someone so high on life as our Pancho. When we leave, uncrumpling bones in the square at Tonala, he kisses everyone on the cheek and thanks them for the pleasure of their company on this fine morning. We shuffle slowly away, marvelling at the spicyness of our early morning adventure.
But the day is not over yet. We leave Tonala having looked at a large-scale map of the area and pointed to a place down the coast with another lagoon and an interesting name.
The man in the sweet shop waves us towards the market. The man in the market waves us on to the car park. The man in the car park waves us on to a mini bus that drops us two hours later on a motorway, where there is another man who gives us the keys to a shop with a toilet and points towards another minibus going south.
That minibus leaves us in the rain. Once again, the human sponges, sloshing along in slippery sandals.
The women on it tell us we need to carry on our journey from the centre of town. We are hungry and we still haven't bought proper rain jackets. So we take refuge in a cute looking restaurant where a young man with one and a half arms serves us shrimp and black beans.
When we are finished he begins, as they all do, to ask our story. Where are we from, where are we going. Do we like Chiapas. The thing is, we're not at all sure where we're going. We picked a name from a map, that may or may not be possible to get to. So he invites us to talk to his parents, who are sitting just behind the restaurant, celebrating fathers day with their son and their nephew.
We walk into the room and they greet us with huge smiles and make us take our place at the table. They offer us coca cola and beer. They rattle off the same questions as their son did moments earlier. They are delighted with our answers.
The mother has never been on a plane and never will. The men tease her about her fear and she giggles into her beer bottle. "I like Chiapas and Chiapas is where I will stay. I won't go in a plane. Unnatural things." I agree with her and feed her glee with tales of our fifteen hour journeys to get to Mexico from London. England is grey anyway, and cold. She shivers with delight. "Yes, yes, Mexico is beautiful. Stay here, chicita, where the wind is warm." They ask how old we are and cannot believe the answer. To Mexicans we look like teenagers. They ask if we are brother and sister. We laugh a lot. Then their daughter sticks her head in the door and asks the same, and we realise that we all look the same to them in the same way they all look the same to us. They laugh with us.
Then they tell us they will host our wedding. "You must have the party here! Here in Chiapas we know how to party. We will fill this room with people and keep going for three days!" We are like Alice stumbling across the Mad Hatter's tea party, apart from these merry-eyed people are not mad, not even drunk, just high on life and happy to have such unexpected guests at their afternoon table. We leave them with sparkling smiles all around and promises for invites to our future (never-going-to-happen) wedding.
The next bus is driven by a young man who tells us he does not go as far as today's mecca. The village before it, where he lives, is called Zapotal. "Zapotal it is," I reply, and ask him if there are any cheap hotels. He laughs and looks sideways at the woman in the passenger seat, who turns out to be his mother. "Zapotal does not have visitors, but I have a restaurant, and you can stay with my mother if you like."
When we arrive we understand. This is the sleepiest little village I've had the pleasure of stumbling across yet. Thatch huts house snoozing families draped two-to a hammock, televisions barely cutting through the shrieking of the cicadas. Children sit barefoot in the pavement sand. The empty beach, just a continuation of the hundreds of kilometres of identical beach along this coastline, lays silent and unexplored next to the restaurant.
We sit at a plastic Corona table on a small cement patio with a bare lightbulb shining invitations to the mosquitoes. The bus driver turns waiter and lights a cardboard egg carton to place on the floor next to our table. The bites slow in frequency and we get out our homemade chessboard.
Within moments a steaming plate of garlic prawns, the cheapest thing on the menu twice in one day, arrives in front of us. We do not stop our game. This time I win one in four games. I make my head hurt and begin to see everything in terms of chess moves (...thank God the table is in the way of me and Mike's chair - it could take me in one move and I have no back-up. But he should be careful too. His eyes are just one L-shaped Knights move from being taken by his mouth.)
We are presented to the grandmothers bed, a small island under an enormous empty space of a house that looks more like a petrol station forecourt than a residence. As I prepare for bed I am watched by two small grandchildren from behind a curtain that serves as a door, who dart away like fishes whenever I let their attention be known.
The water tank has a turtle in it.
The night presents a continual stream of spectres to keep us awake, under satin sheets slipping against hot limbs.
The power goes off and with it the fan. Without the wind, the mosquitoes move in, burrowing into ear canals with dentist drill wingbeats. The grandfather arrives home and cannot figure out who is in his bed. The grandson, called in to help, shines a mobile phone in our faces and then apologises profusely. The cicadas grate their endless song, drilling through the concrete walls.
Eventually sleep's long fingers begin to take me. Silhouettes of our phantasmagoria of a day creep along the walls. Squinting through the warm waters of a lagoon. A cackling taxi driver and his love for music. Rain, beating on the windows of a minibus. A salad made of chopped hot dogs on the lace tablecloth of a laughing family. The kindness of an old woman and her scampering granddaughters, sleeping in an unknown location under our corrugated cathedral.
Just when we begin to doze off, our host's alarm begins to bleep.
4.30am. Time for another day.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The Void catches up
June brings a loss of direction. My world becomes black and white and blurry.
I plunge headlong into the Void.
I have felt it tracking me for a little while, catching me unawares with flashes of barely-provoked anger and periods of dizzying emptiness. When it finally slips itself under my feet, I fall, rag-doll-like, through its dank depths.
The Void has engulfed us all, once in our lives. You know it from the creeping shadows around your heart. The imps in its employ, sniggering on your shoulders, whisper insults into your ears until you believe them to be true. The tremors of uncertainty blurs lines between reality and nightmare.
This time it comes to me in a disabling lack of self-belief. The path in which I had so much faith seems to have faded.
My self-confidence, boisterous only months ago, has vapourised, leaving me achingly aware of how loosely constructed it must have been.
What, on earth, have I been doing? Why the hell am I here?
I have been out of work for well over a year. I have been rolling around Mexico for seven months. My money is drying up, like the daily puddles spat down on us by June's heavy clouds, and I have no concrete plan for how to replace it. I know I can't go back to work in an office and this thought, once so liberating, terrifies me.
I have had so much time, and yet seemingly done' nothing apart from convert tacos into spare tyres.
Michael encourages me as best he can. He reminds me of all the things I have developed that cannot be written on a CV, such as my healer's hands and my understanding of myself, as well as the things that can, such as my mastery of conversational Spanish.
He tempts me with ideas for how to turn my writing into a career, but I am shocked by my own lack of motivation. I just don't want to do anything. I just don't think I can.
My listless lack of a plan, once so peace-inducing, has become a growing emptiness.
It is during this time that we find ourselves house-sitting a three-bedroom villa (complete with the luxuries of fridge, hot shower, fireplace and beds with real duvets). I cannot remember the last time I was in a room with four walls and no holes.
I throw myself into my long-term passion for cooking, producing elaborate feasts for my boyfriend, who largely sits in front of his computer, working. Mikey, annoyingly, has it sorted. He gets paid for remixes on the road. He deals with them easily and with style. At the same time, he gets handfuls of offers for his new tracks.
His need for the computer and my need for safety means we spend most of our six weeks in San Cristobal indoors. I quickly realise how incapable I now am of doing this.
We argue frequently. Admittedly, the times between arguments are still idyllic and there is no doubt that we are madly in love. But I am strong enough to know that these moments of pain are indicators of deep knots in our lives that need to be massaged out for risk of becoming crippling.
I am also able to remind myself that this journey is and was always going to be about balance - particularly the yin-yang balance of positive and negative forces within my path.
So when I feel myself slipping, I recognise the signs enough to throw out a hand. I catch myself before I fall, like I have done so many times before.
And there, I swing.
I hang on to the edge for a long time, caught between fear of the nothingness below, and fear of the choices above.
You can travel as far as you want, but wherever you are, you will still be you.
I plunge headlong into the Void.
I have felt it tracking me for a little while, catching me unawares with flashes of barely-provoked anger and periods of dizzying emptiness. When it finally slips itself under my feet, I fall, rag-doll-like, through its dank depths.
The Void has engulfed us all, once in our lives. You know it from the creeping shadows around your heart. The imps in its employ, sniggering on your shoulders, whisper insults into your ears until you believe them to be true. The tremors of uncertainty blurs lines between reality and nightmare.
This time it comes to me in a disabling lack of self-belief. The path in which I had so much faith seems to have faded.
My self-confidence, boisterous only months ago, has vapourised, leaving me achingly aware of how loosely constructed it must have been.
What, on earth, have I been doing? Why the hell am I here?
I have been out of work for well over a year. I have been rolling around Mexico for seven months. My money is drying up, like the daily puddles spat down on us by June's heavy clouds, and I have no concrete plan for how to replace it. I know I can't go back to work in an office and this thought, once so liberating, terrifies me.
I have had so much time, and yet seemingly done' nothing apart from convert tacos into spare tyres.
Michael encourages me as best he can. He reminds me of all the things I have developed that cannot be written on a CV, such as my healer's hands and my understanding of myself, as well as the things that can, such as my mastery of conversational Spanish.
He tempts me with ideas for how to turn my writing into a career, but I am shocked by my own lack of motivation. I just don't want to do anything. I just don't think I can.
My listless lack of a plan, once so peace-inducing, has become a growing emptiness.
It is during this time that we find ourselves house-sitting a three-bedroom villa (complete with the luxuries of fridge, hot shower, fireplace and beds with real duvets). I cannot remember the last time I was in a room with four walls and no holes.
I throw myself into my long-term passion for cooking, producing elaborate feasts for my boyfriend, who largely sits in front of his computer, working. Mikey, annoyingly, has it sorted. He gets paid for remixes on the road. He deals with them easily and with style. At the same time, he gets handfuls of offers for his new tracks.
His need for the computer and my need for safety means we spend most of our six weeks in San Cristobal indoors. I quickly realise how incapable I now am of doing this.
We argue frequently. Admittedly, the times between arguments are still idyllic and there is no doubt that we are madly in love. But I am strong enough to know that these moments of pain are indicators of deep knots in our lives that need to be massaged out for risk of becoming crippling.
I am also able to remind myself that this journey is and was always going to be about balance - particularly the yin-yang balance of positive and negative forces within my path.
So when I feel myself slipping, I recognise the signs enough to throw out a hand. I catch myself before I fall, like I have done so many times before.
And there, I swing.
I hang on to the edge for a long time, caught between fear of the nothingness below, and fear of the choices above.
You can travel as far as you want, but wherever you are, you will still be you.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Outtakes
My mind flicks images like film memories. I close my eyes and watch the last six weeks flash by in a montage I'd give anything to record.
Scaling the pyramids of Palenque in the searing midday heat, jungle rising on all sides under a deep, indigo sky.
Crouching next to the fire in our borrowed, three bedroom house, burning pine copal incense and a list of all the negativity we want to spring clean from our heads.
A moment's interrupted sleep on a concrete patio on the beach, four-way-sandwiched between a rollmat, a mosquito-net, Michael, and a love-deprived cat, who shows his appreciation with a sharp-clawed massage and purrs as loud as the waves behind.
Rejecting Saturday night drinking in San Cristòbal de las Casas, in favour of apple juice and mariachi in the square and a packet of ham for the street dogs.
Eating termites from a jungle tree, mouth bizarrely filling with the taste of buttery, peppered carrots.
Laughing as the heavens open on the first day of the rainy season and squealing with delight and blessed relief as I am soaked to the bone. Retiring to a hammock under the shelter of a rustling pelapa roof, darkness so thick I am aware of my friends only from the sound of their breathing. The evening strobe lighting - so familiar now - flashes images of my swinging feet in snapshot stills.
Running through a forest that blooms a green carpet in three days of solid rain.
Hopping the fence to the restricted area of the ruins of Monte Alban; the highest pyramid of all. Being ordered to climb down. The surreality of the pale brown, pyramid studded landscape far below, as if it belongs to the future rather than thousands of years in the past.
Crumbling fresh-baked cookies in front of a log fire, clothes steaming, rain teeming.
Sitting on a bench in the rain watching the embroidered skirts of the Mayan ladies, like colourful dolls, crouched in front of piles of vegetables and coal-grilled corn.
Plunging my hands into giant sacks of dry black beans, cool and liquidlike.
The dampness of the sheets around Michael as he moans with the aches of Dengue fever. Reversed roles when I contract a stomach infection the following week.
The utter silence of a mountain morning, lit by the ethereal beams of sunlight through a tent door.
Burying feet deep into sand the exact shade and fine texture of wholewheat flour, lapped by coral-slowed, translucent waves.
Running through the drenching rain in San Cris, where the cobbled streets flow like rivers and the lightning freezeframes the mountains around us; fairy lights in the central square twinkling through the blurred darkness.
Crouching next to the fire in our borrowed, three bedroom house, burning pine copal incense and a list of all the negativity we want to spring clean from our heads.
A moment's interrupted sleep on a concrete patio on the beach, four-way-sandwiched between a rollmat, a mosquito-net, Michael, and a love-deprived cat, who shows his appreciation with a sharp-clawed massage and purrs as loud as the waves behind.
Rejecting Saturday night drinking in San Cristòbal de las Casas, in favour of apple juice and mariachi in the square and a packet of ham for the street dogs.
Eating termites from a jungle tree, mouth bizarrely filling with the taste of buttery, peppered carrots.
Laughing as the heavens open on the first day of the rainy season and squealing with delight and blessed relief as I am soaked to the bone. Retiring to a hammock under the shelter of a rustling pelapa roof, darkness so thick I am aware of my friends only from the sound of their breathing. The evening strobe lighting - so familiar now - flashes images of my swinging feet in snapshot stills.
Running through a forest that blooms a green carpet in three days of solid rain.
Winning my first ever game of chess in style on a home-made board (card, marker pen and nail varnish). Subsequently winning again.
Breakfasting on pork tortas by the side of the road, from plates that have "unimpressive" printed around the edges.
Watching the live chicken stalls in the covered market, birds passed upside down by their legs to bargaining old ladies. Shock deepening as we compare this apparently cruel treatment to the western style 6-to-a-box, beaks-cut-off factory tradition. We buy a bag of fake meat and retreat.
Crumbling fresh-baked cookies in front of a log fire, clothes steaming, rain teeming.
Running after my inebriated friend to save her from the clutches of a man. Feeling my feet slide from beneath me. Smacking the stones of the polished pavement with outstretched hand and smashing bracelets.
Sitting on a bench in the rain watching the embroidered skirts of the Mayan ladies, like colourful dolls, crouched in front of piles of vegetables and coal-grilled corn.
Plunging my hands into giant sacks of dry black beans, cool and liquidlike.The dampness of the sheets around Michael as he moans with the aches of Dengue fever. Reversed roles when I contract a stomach infection the following week.
The utter silence of a mountain morning, lit by the ethereal beams of sunlight through a tent door.
Running through the drenching rain in San Cris, where the cobbled streets flow like rivers and the lightning freezeframes the mountains around us; fairy lights in the central square twinkling through the blurred darkness.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Rain, rain, clean my brain
In the middle of May, the rains began.
Until that point, the world held its breath. It pushed as far as it could under an airless environment -- began to swallow down on barren lungs.
Everything was brown. Plants were skeletons that crumbled at the touch. Even those that remained green -- banana palms, coconut, papaya -- seemed almost frozen in a vacuum that pulverised the life from us.
We flailed limply, like damp dishcloths, drinking in water by the gallon only to vaporise it almost instantly from our pores.
In Mexico, the dry season, although one of the wettest on record, was the only reality I could conceive of. It had always been dizzyingly hot. Rivers had always been dusty. I had always balanced the dry heat of the coast with an escape to the cool, pine-clad mountains forming the spine of the country.
But in the month before the rains came, I barely moved. Things stopped quietly around me, without me really noticing. Wasps lurched drunkenly from one melting pastry to another. Ice cream paused briefly in its frozen state, before giving in to the shimmery air in a sticky slide of white along the forearms. Even birdsong became lazy.
When on the coast, the only way to survive was to stay under cover. Ideas came and went, too slippery for the lazy thinker to clasp his sweaty fingers around.
The world around me and within me was pregnant. Pregnant and uncomfortable, with all the things that could be and that weren't.
Energy built up and intensified and waited; steam in a closed kettle, whistling with impatience.
My head pounded.
And then, in one day, everything changed.
I was at a petrol station at the time, on the side of the carretera running down the Pacific coast, having just crossed into Chiapas, the southernmost state. We were packed in the back of film-maker Dan's van, sulking on the bunk under the weight of the cloying air. I had stepped out for a little respite and to clean the windows. The grease on them almost obliterated the waving palms and swelling mountains taking over the landscape with heavily approaching footsteps.
I had just picked up the bucket, much to the amusement of the macho service men, who hollered and stared as I took their job from them.
Within less than a minute I was soaked to the point of dripping. Or was it flowing? Hard to say. It was more that me and the water were one and the same; I was wetter than I would have been if I had just climbed fully clothed from a pool.
The air was my sea. Around me, people fled like animals from a fire.
Dan banged on the window, urging me to get inside.
I just stared at the sky, blinking the water from my eyes and feeling the streams running down my cheeks.
This rain was to me the sweetest gift in a long stream of beautiful moments. I had waited for a long time. With it came the release of a million trapped thoughts and the relaxation of muscles turned taught by stagnant energy.
Bizarrely, I remained the only person outside on the petrol forecourt, washing the windows with soap that slid off the sodden glass in an instant, laughing at the ridiculousness of all those damp souls hiding under shelter, staring at me with confused faces.
The interest they offered me evidently discarded memories of just hours earlier, when they had all hung desperately from car windows, tongues flapping in the wind like dogs, or fleshy sails breached wide to catch the wind.
The concrete soon ran with inches of warm water that sluiced residue from roads in greasy channels.
Eventually these new rivers would find their way to fields, where earth lay waiting, imitating rocks, anticipating the day when the water would release their particles in crumbling mini-avalanches.
Under that earth lay seeds, dormant, parched. Many were dead.
But for some, the water brought life. As I jumped up and down in the Petrol Station Lake, tiny proteins started forming within them, deep below the ground. All over Mexico, seeds began to germinate.
By the time I climbed, sodden but happy, into Dan's van, laying a towel on the bunk to catch my drips, things had already started to grow.
The windows were sparkling and so was I. I watched the mountains stand straighter, like pictures of evolution from monkey to man, becoming more confident as we progressed, and yet smudged into doubt by the rivers of water that raced in diagonals down the windows.
Water dripped through holes in the roof. The bunk grew damp. The road became rapids, but the cars did not slow down.
And in my head, the thoughts that had been hanging unattached like dust for so many months began to congeal, like the earth in the fields.
Within them, awaking from the incubation of many months, things began to germinate.
Until that point, the world held its breath. It pushed as far as it could under an airless environment -- began to swallow down on barren lungs.
Everything was brown. Plants were skeletons that crumbled at the touch. Even those that remained green -- banana palms, coconut, papaya -- seemed almost frozen in a vacuum that pulverised the life from us.
We flailed limply, like damp dishcloths, drinking in water by the gallon only to vaporise it almost instantly from our pores.
In Mexico, the dry season, although one of the wettest on record, was the only reality I could conceive of. It had always been dizzyingly hot. Rivers had always been dusty. I had always balanced the dry heat of the coast with an escape to the cool, pine-clad mountains forming the spine of the country.
But in the month before the rains came, I barely moved. Things stopped quietly around me, without me really noticing. Wasps lurched drunkenly from one melting pastry to another. Ice cream paused briefly in its frozen state, before giving in to the shimmery air in a sticky slide of white along the forearms. Even birdsong became lazy.
When on the coast, the only way to survive was to stay under cover. Ideas came and went, too slippery for the lazy thinker to clasp his sweaty fingers around.
The world around me and within me was pregnant. Pregnant and uncomfortable, with all the things that could be and that weren't.
Energy built up and intensified and waited; steam in a closed kettle, whistling with impatience.
My head pounded.
And then, in one day, everything changed.
I was at a petrol station at the time, on the side of the carretera running down the Pacific coast, having just crossed into Chiapas, the southernmost state. We were packed in the back of film-maker Dan's van, sulking on the bunk under the weight of the cloying air. I had stepped out for a little respite and to clean the windows. The grease on them almost obliterated the waving palms and swelling mountains taking over the landscape with heavily approaching footsteps.
I had just picked up the bucket, much to the amusement of the macho service men, who hollered and stared as I took their job from them.
Within less than a minute I was soaked to the point of dripping. Or was it flowing? Hard to say. It was more that me and the water were one and the same; I was wetter than I would have been if I had just climbed fully clothed from a pool.
The air was my sea. Around me, people fled like animals from a fire.
Dan banged on the window, urging me to get inside.
I just stared at the sky, blinking the water from my eyes and feeling the streams running down my cheeks.
This rain was to me the sweetest gift in a long stream of beautiful moments. I had waited for a long time. With it came the release of a million trapped thoughts and the relaxation of muscles turned taught by stagnant energy.
Bizarrely, I remained the only person outside on the petrol forecourt, washing the windows with soap that slid off the sodden glass in an instant, laughing at the ridiculousness of all those damp souls hiding under shelter, staring at me with confused faces.
The interest they offered me evidently discarded memories of just hours earlier, when they had all hung desperately from car windows, tongues flapping in the wind like dogs, or fleshy sails breached wide to catch the wind.
The concrete soon ran with inches of warm water that sluiced residue from roads in greasy channels.
Eventually these new rivers would find their way to fields, where earth lay waiting, imitating rocks, anticipating the day when the water would release their particles in crumbling mini-avalanches.
Under that earth lay seeds, dormant, parched. Many were dead.
But for some, the water brought life. As I jumped up and down in the Petrol Station Lake, tiny proteins started forming within them, deep below the ground. All over Mexico, seeds began to germinate.
By the time I climbed, sodden but happy, into Dan's van, laying a towel on the bunk to catch my drips, things had already started to grow.
The windows were sparkling and so was I. I watched the mountains stand straighter, like pictures of evolution from monkey to man, becoming more confident as we progressed, and yet smudged into doubt by the rivers of water that raced in diagonals down the windows.
Water dripped through holes in the roof. The bunk grew damp. The road became rapids, but the cars did not slow down.
And in my head, the thoughts that had been hanging unattached like dust for so many months began to congeal, like the earth in the fields.
Within them, awaking from the incubation of many months, things began to germinate.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Medicine woman
I know from the moment I see Catalina I know I have to talk to her. Something about her seems familiar.
Seven decades of wisdom are concealed in long, grey braids and a still-beautiful face. I am slightly intimidated. I feel as if I know her. I don't understand her Spanish, spoken through lisping, wrinkled lips, but I sit below her on the garden steps with my morning coffee, attempting to follow her growling dialogue as she rules over her tiny, exquisite empire.
On the third day after her arrival I spend the morning picking capers to pickle from the nodding nasturtium plants crawling over her terraces. She does not see me.
That afternoon she calls me over to talk to her. She bends down to the nasturtium flowers and asks me if I know about the plant. I tell her about the capers and that I like to put the flowers in salad.
She tells me the leaves cure cancer.
Instantly I know she is the owner of the notebook I found on the shelf a few days ago. And before I even think about what I'm about to say, I tell her bluntly: "I want to know what you know."
She does not seem surprised. In fact, it is as if she expects it. I wonder what brought her to tell me about the nasturtiums in the first place.
Instead, she tells me she will give me her notebook, in exchange for a present. I ask, "what do you want?" and she replies again, "a present," with a shrug of her right shoulder and downturned lips. I understand that this is more that just wanting something new. She is testing me in some way; seeking my character. "Bien. Gracias." I nod. So she gives me the notebook.
This time I open it not with trepidation but with hunger.
I have been after this information ever since I bowed gracefully from the Rat Race early last year. Given the magic that has occurred since, I am not surprised that it has arrived in this fashion.
I am, however, slightly surprised at the turn things have taken. Ever since Marcos told me to learn to heal with my hands, back in Guadalajara's cloudy January, I have been the subject of a series of people who want to teach me. Guide after guide, I am sucked into hula hoop loops of wisdom, almost effortlessly.
From Guadalajara I travelled to Patzcuaro, where I met Luis, who told me I was a kind of shaman and that he was my chosen guide. From there to Mazunte, where James spent a month downloading his knowledge of energy healing and massage. From James to Cristina, who taught me about symbols and vibration as methods of healing. From Cristina to Catalina, who hands me a leather-wrapped pile of papers, tied with a beaded thong. I have barely input anything.
The next day I sit in the sun and the quiet to copy the notes. I understand about fifty percent of the Spanish. When she asks for her book back, I have still not acquired a present, but she does not appear to mind.
I go into her room anyway. I sit on the floor. She hands me a jar of honey and tells me to drink from it. I fill my mouth with the globby nectar of the divine, the taste of the mountains clogging my senses.
She begins to tell me her stories. She tells me of the time she cured Parkinson's in three days using leaves. The time she cured a child dying of gastritis. The time she evicted a dark spirit by speaking mantras into the person's eyes. I am beginning to understand her Spanish a little more but I still struggle, asking her to repeat things in her gravelly voice. She puts her drink down in a patch of sunlight on the floor. I know she is going to ask for my hand and I hold both of them out ready for her to read.
She tells me I am lucky. I am lucky in money, and I shall never want. In fact, I shall never want for anything, as I have Jupiter, king of the gods, looking out for me. He will always come when I ask.
She tells me I will get married twice, perhaps more. This discredits everything she has said, as I do not believe in marriage and believe it would be a mistake for my fickle mind to ever be joined with another. But then she goes on to say that I will not marry for love, but for documents. Perhaps to become a resident in Mexico, as she once did. Perhaps to give my own visas to another.
I raise my eyebrows. The truth of my situation - my desire to live in a country I do not belong to legally - reshadows her words with credibility.
She peers closely at my left palm, as if searching for something. She looks and looks and then sits back, satisfied that she has found what she needs.
She points to a tiny cross between my upper and middle horizontal wrinkles. She tells me that healers have this cross. As if to confirm, she asks for my other hand, and smiles when she sees the results. I have three crosses in a line on this hand.
She shows me hers. The three crosses on her palm perfectly mimic my own.
She tells me I need to charge for my healing according to the means of the person to be healed. I feel uncomfortable bringing money into something so pure.
But she tells me, "You have to eat too. I healed for many years before I was able to buy my land, my house."
And suddenly, it hits me. The similarities between us. It is as if she is me, fifty years ago. I look around at the terraced garden, the house, with its cosy refuge and space for a community. The kitchen. The plants. The peace. I cannot believe I didn't notice it before. But this place exactly fits the dream in my head. This could be the home I asked for on Punta Cometa on the 21st, and the haven that has occupied my thoughts ever since I left London a year ago. And back and back, perhaps even before I was born.
I had no idea how I would make this dream happen, only the faith that somehow, knowledge and means would arrive. And now, slipping its folds around me with a finger over its mouth and a giggle behind its dancing eyes, the vision has arrived, so smoothly I did not even notice.
I think she has just told me how I can earn the money I need to make a place like this happen for myself.
By this time I have sunk into silence, content just to listen and continuing to concentrate hard on her low, low voice. She recounts stories that mirror my own. She left Spain when she was young, following the spiritual path. Had her very own Luis. Married to become Mexican.
Then she says something that makes me go cold.
"Do you know about the eagles?"
I didn't. Until two months ago, when I saw three eagles in a short space of time. Luis told me this was a sign. I asked him what the sign meant and he answered with a story.
He told me that they live for many years. After surviving for forty years in the desert, they fly to the mountains to find a place to hide.
There, they hit their beaks against the rocks until they break. They scrape their claws until they fall off. They render themselves unable to eat.
They rid themselves of everything that aided them to survive in their old life and they sit and wait in pain until a new beak and claws grow. When they do, the eagle is renewed. It is reborn, like a mage of its species. They go on to live another thirty years as the most powerful thing in the desert.
Luis said I'd seen the eagles because this is what I will have to do. I ignored him at the time, because I did not want to hear this kind of prophecy.
When Catalina tells me about the eagle, in relation to my palm, I suck in a deep breath. I hold it for the entirety of the metaphor. I release it slowly. I look outside and see things crystallise in sharp corners. One of my possible destinies, presented to me clearly.
Catalina gives me one more key to add to my growing set. She assures me I already have everything I need to be a doctora naturista. In principle I can heal with energy, herbs, massage, and more.
Although I am cramped with doubt and self-belittling traps, everyone I have worked with tells me I have powerful energy. I have the knowledge; I just need to start practising. She tells me to start as soon as I can. For now, my fear of myself keeps me contained.
When I leave I hand Catalina a necklace, beaded in the colours of the fierce Mexican sky. In doing so I feel I am completing a kind of circle.
Under the same skies, back in bleaching Zacatecas, that necklace was placed around my neck by Luis.
Seven decades of wisdom are concealed in long, grey braids and a still-beautiful face. I am slightly intimidated. I feel as if I know her. I don't understand her Spanish, spoken through lisping, wrinkled lips, but I sit below her on the garden steps with my morning coffee, attempting to follow her growling dialogue as she rules over her tiny, exquisite empire.
On the third day after her arrival I spend the morning picking capers to pickle from the nodding nasturtium plants crawling over her terraces. She does not see me.
That afternoon she calls me over to talk to her. She bends down to the nasturtium flowers and asks me if I know about the plant. I tell her about the capers and that I like to put the flowers in salad.
She tells me the leaves cure cancer.
Instantly I know she is the owner of the notebook I found on the shelf a few days ago. And before I even think about what I'm about to say, I tell her bluntly: "I want to know what you know."
She does not seem surprised. In fact, it is as if she expects it. I wonder what brought her to tell me about the nasturtiums in the first place.
Instead, she tells me she will give me her notebook, in exchange for a present. I ask, "what do you want?" and she replies again, "a present," with a shrug of her right shoulder and downturned lips. I understand that this is more that just wanting something new. She is testing me in some way; seeking my character. "Bien. Gracias." I nod. So she gives me the notebook.
This time I open it not with trepidation but with hunger.
I have been after this information ever since I bowed gracefully from the Rat Race early last year. Given the magic that has occurred since, I am not surprised that it has arrived in this fashion.
I am, however, slightly surprised at the turn things have taken. Ever since Marcos told me to learn to heal with my hands, back in Guadalajara's cloudy January, I have been the subject of a series of people who want to teach me. Guide after guide, I am sucked into hula hoop loops of wisdom, almost effortlessly.
From Guadalajara I travelled to Patzcuaro, where I met Luis, who told me I was a kind of shaman and that he was my chosen guide. From there to Mazunte, where James spent a month downloading his knowledge of energy healing and massage. From James to Cristina, who taught me about symbols and vibration as methods of healing. From Cristina to Catalina, who hands me a leather-wrapped pile of papers, tied with a beaded thong. I have barely input anything.
The next day I sit in the sun and the quiet to copy the notes. I understand about fifty percent of the Spanish. When she asks for her book back, I have still not acquired a present, but she does not appear to mind.
I go into her room anyway. I sit on the floor. She hands me a jar of honey and tells me to drink from it. I fill my mouth with the globby nectar of the divine, the taste of the mountains clogging my senses.
She begins to tell me her stories. She tells me of the time she cured Parkinson's in three days using leaves. The time she cured a child dying of gastritis. The time she evicted a dark spirit by speaking mantras into the person's eyes. I am beginning to understand her Spanish a little more but I still struggle, asking her to repeat things in her gravelly voice. She puts her drink down in a patch of sunlight on the floor. I know she is going to ask for my hand and I hold both of them out ready for her to read.
She tells me I am lucky. I am lucky in money, and I shall never want. In fact, I shall never want for anything, as I have Jupiter, king of the gods, looking out for me. He will always come when I ask.
She tells me I will get married twice, perhaps more. This discredits everything she has said, as I do not believe in marriage and believe it would be a mistake for my fickle mind to ever be joined with another. But then she goes on to say that I will not marry for love, but for documents. Perhaps to become a resident in Mexico, as she once did. Perhaps to give my own visas to another.
I raise my eyebrows. The truth of my situation - my desire to live in a country I do not belong to legally - reshadows her words with credibility.
She peers closely at my left palm, as if searching for something. She looks and looks and then sits back, satisfied that she has found what she needs.
She points to a tiny cross between my upper and middle horizontal wrinkles. She tells me that healers have this cross. As if to confirm, she asks for my other hand, and smiles when she sees the results. I have three crosses in a line on this hand.
She shows me hers. The three crosses on her palm perfectly mimic my own.
She tells me I need to charge for my healing according to the means of the person to be healed. I feel uncomfortable bringing money into something so pure.
But she tells me, "You have to eat too. I healed for many years before I was able to buy my land, my house."
And suddenly, it hits me. The similarities between us. It is as if she is me, fifty years ago. I look around at the terraced garden, the house, with its cosy refuge and space for a community. The kitchen. The plants. The peace. I cannot believe I didn't notice it before. But this place exactly fits the dream in my head. This could be the home I asked for on Punta Cometa on the 21st, and the haven that has occupied my thoughts ever since I left London a year ago. And back and back, perhaps even before I was born.
I had no idea how I would make this dream happen, only the faith that somehow, knowledge and means would arrive. And now, slipping its folds around me with a finger over its mouth and a giggle behind its dancing eyes, the vision has arrived, so smoothly I did not even notice.
I think she has just told me how I can earn the money I need to make a place like this happen for myself.
By this time I have sunk into silence, content just to listen and continuing to concentrate hard on her low, low voice. She recounts stories that mirror my own. She left Spain when she was young, following the spiritual path. Had her very own Luis. Married to become Mexican.
Then she says something that makes me go cold.
"Do you know about the eagles?"
I didn't. Until two months ago, when I saw three eagles in a short space of time. Luis told me this was a sign. I asked him what the sign meant and he answered with a story.
He told me that they live for many years. After surviving for forty years in the desert, they fly to the mountains to find a place to hide.
There, they hit their beaks against the rocks until they break. They scrape their claws until they fall off. They render themselves unable to eat.
They rid themselves of everything that aided them to survive in their old life and they sit and wait in pain until a new beak and claws grow. When they do, the eagle is renewed. It is reborn, like a mage of its species. They go on to live another thirty years as the most powerful thing in the desert.
Luis said I'd seen the eagles because this is what I will have to do. I ignored him at the time, because I did not want to hear this kind of prophecy.
When Catalina tells me about the eagle, in relation to my palm, I suck in a deep breath. I hold it for the entirety of the metaphor. I release it slowly. I look outside and see things crystallise in sharp corners. One of my possible destinies, presented to me clearly.
Catalina gives me one more key to add to my growing set. She assures me I already have everything I need to be a doctora naturista. In principle I can heal with energy, herbs, massage, and more.
Although I am cramped with doubt and self-belittling traps, everyone I have worked with tells me I have powerful energy. I have the knowledge; I just need to start practising. She tells me to start as soon as I can. For now, my fear of myself keeps me contained.
When I leave I hand Catalina a necklace, beaded in the colours of the fierce Mexican sky. In doing so I feel I am completing a kind of circle.
Under the same skies, back in bleaching Zacatecas, that necklace was placed around my neck by Luis.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Flowers, clouds and clues
The sign on the door at Casa de Doña Catalina is peeling. I wonder if Catalina herself is dead.
In the garden her geraniums nod happily. I long to meet the carer of this paintbox of plants.
Sometimes we end the day in a cloud, an explosion through which the sun stretches dying fingers. We float away in our wooden boat in a wispy flood of white.
It feels as if we are lost.
Once again, a vortex of energy has sucked us in to a slow whirlpool of routine.
Over the last few weeks we have watched the sinking slopes of the valley ahead of us emerging and disappearing into clouds of a hundred different variations. We have explored the mountain trails through the pine forests, neon lichen and huge cacti like great, tentacled aliens, resting on the red carpet of the forest in surreal colour clashes.
We have continued to function without running water, pouring buckets of dirty dishwater down the toilet bowl and washing from a bowl of rainwater. Like so much of Mexico, Oaxaca state is not so far from seasonal abandonment for lack of water. Prophecies echo from state to state: the next world war will surely be over water.Night rushes in, velvet skirts rustling and star-splattered. We retreat from the terrace to the cosy, low ceilings of Catalina's living room, walled in on all sides by psychadelic murals, bookshelves, musical instruments and brightly woven cushions. The lightshade is a carefully-arranged plastic bag. Against the window is a wide ledge filled with soft things for sleeping in.
In the other corner stands a bookshelf, with titles in a handful of languages, ranging from Carlos Castaneda to Madame Bovary.
The spine that grabs me belongs to a small notebook. I open it. The first thing I see is a piece of paper dated 1958. It is someone's Mayan horoscope. Whoever owns this book has the same energy as me: in modern Mayan interpretation, Yellow Sun, representing the Enlightener. In ancient readings, Kame, representing the beginning, harmony, vision, cunning.
The next page is a list of diseases.
It takes me a moment to realise that besides each of the diseases is a cure, encoded in Spanish. I wonder whether this belongs to Catalina. The looping script shows me my place and I feel I am prying.
I snap the book shut, but fail to forget.
After about a week we consider leaving and play cards for the decision. The cards tell us to stay.
That afternoon, Catalina herself arrives home from a month at the coast.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
The cottage in the sky
From the land of the water in Mazunte, where we learnt to flow together again, we have moved to the land of the air. A time of thinking and of learning.
They call this town San Jose del Pacifico, because some days you can see the Pacific; a thin glint on a laminated horizon.
Our home for now is Casa de Dona Catalina. 200 pesos for a double bed in the dormitory at the top of the log cabin as well as whatever meals or drinks come our way during the day. 200 pesos for the two of us wanderers to become a valued part of the fizzing household, made up of a few long term residents and assorted drifters, who come here to socialise - in the most laid-back of senses - whilst sampling the botanical delights of the ethereal pine forests.
Each day the group changes, morphing its way through a rainbow of atmospheres. Each day brings more points of view, more shades of social interaction.
Dona Catalina is a witch. She understands plants and spirits. She is conspicuous in her absence - for the last month, watch over the land has been held by the residents.
When we walk in on the first day, fresh from a cloud-forest journey from Mazunte, the first person we find is Shaman Marcos. We sit down underneath a floripondio tree, otherwise known as angel's trumpet, with large orange flowers hanging from it like gramophone horns.
Marcos tells me the flowers are the dark side of hallucinogenics; without care, one can drive you mad. My eyes widen and I ask him if he'd ever taken them. "I had three this morning!" he cackles, and looks at me with kaleidoscope eyes.
The dark side indeed. Shaman Marcos has a wonderful heart, but his 'shamanic practises' have taken him so far beyond this world that I doubt he will ever return.
I wonder what his coincidental appearance means for our experience here.
They call this town San Jose del Pacifico, because some days you can see the Pacific; a thin glint on a laminated horizon.
We are living in a bubble 2000 feet up, shrouded in nature's cocoon. The clouds rise and fall, an elevator between the valley floor far below and the comforting peak behind.
Our home for now is Casa de Dona Catalina. 200 pesos for a double bed in the dormitory at the top of the log cabin as well as whatever meals or drinks come our way during the day. 200 pesos for the two of us wanderers to become a valued part of the fizzing household, made up of a few long term residents and assorted drifters, who come here to socialise - in the most laid-back of senses - whilst sampling the botanical delights of the ethereal pine forests.
Each day the group changes, morphing its way through a rainbow of atmospheres. Each day brings more points of view, more shades of social interaction.
Dona Catalina is a witch. She understands plants and spirits. She is conspicuous in her absence - for the last month, watch over the land has been held by the residents.
When we walk in on the first day, fresh from a cloud-forest journey from Mazunte, the first person we find is Shaman Marcos. We sit down underneath a floripondio tree, otherwise known as angel's trumpet, with large orange flowers hanging from it like gramophone horns.
Marcos tells me the flowers are the dark side of hallucinogenics; without care, one can drive you mad. My eyes widen and I ask him if he'd ever taken them. "I had three this morning!" he cackles, and looks at me with kaleidoscope eyes.
The dark side indeed. Shaman Marcos has a wonderful heart, but his 'shamanic practises' have taken him so far beyond this world that I doubt he will ever return.
I wonder what his coincidental appearance means for our experience here.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
A year of unusual events
Today marks one year since I left my job, my flat and my life. A year ago I ceremoniously left my well-paid job in London, surrounded by a faithful army of friends, my sister close by and a social calendar that still spears cravings of nostalgia through me at the most unexpected moments.
In celebration of this fact I would like to post something I wrote early last year. I find the juxtaposition of these words with my current position reassuring. No offence is intended to anyone left behind - I respect that each person has their own choices and the same situation for another person would have meant something entirely different. I also appreciate and value the fact I had the opportunity to live this kind of life, and the choice to realise it was not for me, when so many do not have the choice. This is merely my opinion brought on from a soul-drowning job and a fire inside that needed to grow somewhere else.
I wake up full of a nervous energy. My insides vibrate as if I am listening to a deep bassline. But my room is silent. As the last tendrils of my dream slip away, I have the sense that I have been looking for something, fervently, all night.
The thoughts fold under themselves like waves in the multiple snooze of my alarm clock, and become lost in the rush of the morning. My fevered mind remains vaguely mesmerised by what, in the blurred moments of waking, had seemed the most important thing in the world.
Now I just feel a lingering sense of confusion and a longing to be back in that lost dreamscape.
I dress myself in skin-tight shades of grey, slick hair and shiny lips, masking myself with the strangling uniform of business. I take the bus in to the office, mechanically changing vehicles on the Euston Road, staring out unseeing at the concrete and the rush of occupied minds.
I say occupied here to indicate the fact that people in London seem to be shut off to anything that is not included within their own agenda. From the moment they wake up, their brains are full of tasks.
But occupied also means conquered, subjugated, dominated.
Under enemy control.
This dual definition is appealing. The word becomes stuck in my head. With no other thoughts in there to challenge it, it repeats itself incessantly for the whole of the journey, until it starts to lose meaning.
Occupied. Occupied. Occupied.
My day passes, as they always do, in a mundane blur of traffic and computers. I procrastinate on my task list until four, when I am able to cross off half of it in a flurry of hastily-dialled phone calls.
My job filled me with excitement when I first took it, 18 months ago. The people were bright and the company new, and every day had felt like opening a present.
Now it just feels like it is stealing my life.
Every day it forces me into the synthetic, waxy mould of a corporate doll. My soul feels empty and I can’t do anything about it.
I am trapped.
Even the hours outside of work feel like they belong to someone else.
Sometimes I scream out loud, pulling at my hair like a mad woman, diving at the people sitting blankly in their desks and venting my frustration at this calm acceptance of a robot’s life. Then the world swirls back into reality and I realise I am in fact sitting quiet and accepting in my own desk, in a row of quiet, accepting people, and no one has even blinked.
One day I think I might actually do this.
I cannot wait for the day when I hand in my notice. I think of that moment at least once every hour. Perhaps more like three or four times. Some days it is all I can think about. I picture myself going into the CEO’s office, letting him wax falsely lyrical about my supreme consultancy abilities, trying to build my confidence so I seduce the clients more effectively. I imagine myself springing it on him mid-flow. Like flirting with someone for hours and then turning away when they try to kiss you.
I would thrust a letter in his hand which detailed methodically and unashamedly all the corrupt twists and suppressive rules of his beloved company. I would laugh at the blind devotion to a loosely-concealed totalitarian regime. This virtual furnace that consumes souls and spits out money. My words would reduce it to a pile of ash.
I just haven’t found quite the right ones yet.
The thing that pains me most is seeing the sparks of my co-workers (my love for whom still remains loyal enough to keep me here) condensed down to the same, standard-issue ambition as him. They will complain about the money-driven mentality, the repression and being told what to do by a self-centred, clueless manager, but they will remain silent.
The London in my head is an eerie toy town, operated by Stepford Wives, dolled up and twinkle-smiled and ‘yes of course, Sir, anything you want, Sir’.
They will be fucked up the arse until they bleed, and they won’t notice because their eyes are on their glittering futures; dreams grossly deformed by that pre-ordained framework we rarely dare to question.
As a child, we are consistently asked what we would like to BE when we grow up. Our entire lives, we relate our future job to the verb 'to be'. A career is part of our fundamental make-up. It is an apex to climb, in order to prove our worth as a person.
And thus, we dutifully tick the boxes.
School, college, university. Education, packaged prettily.
Job.
Soon we will have a great CV, that menu of clichéd attributes, and a fantastic social life that spans the breadth of London’s pretentious wine bars. A well-matched partner to take Sunday walks with, and a pile of savings which we will watch grow until they die.
All these people, building their career. A career that occupies them. Conquered and subsequently dominated for the rest of their lives. They will be promoted to managers and they will have finally made it after all these years. They will buy a house and have a lovely wedding in a country manor and end up with gammy-mouthed kids who will go on to do the same.
Security. They need to know where they are, otherwise they lose themselves.
This kind of thing terrifies me.
Isn’t your ‘career’ just what you’re doing right here, right now?
What I’m doing right now is utter bollocks.
Old people say life is what happens while you are planning your future.
I think we should listen to old people.
I think I’m so different. And yet still I put myself through the excruciating pain of getting out of bed at half past six every day to go into a place I despise.
In celebration of this fact I would like to post something I wrote early last year. I find the juxtaposition of these words with my current position reassuring. No offence is intended to anyone left behind - I respect that each person has their own choices and the same situation for another person would have meant something entirely different. I also appreciate and value the fact I had the opportunity to live this kind of life, and the choice to realise it was not for me, when so many do not have the choice. This is merely my opinion brought on from a soul-drowning job and a fire inside that needed to grow somewhere else.
I wake up full of a nervous energy. My insides vibrate as if I am listening to a deep bassline. But my room is silent. As the last tendrils of my dream slip away, I have the sense that I have been looking for something, fervently, all night.
The thoughts fold under themselves like waves in the multiple snooze of my alarm clock, and become lost in the rush of the morning. My fevered mind remains vaguely mesmerised by what, in the blurred moments of waking, had seemed the most important thing in the world.
Now I just feel a lingering sense of confusion and a longing to be back in that lost dreamscape.
I dress myself in skin-tight shades of grey, slick hair and shiny lips, masking myself with the strangling uniform of business. I take the bus in to the office, mechanically changing vehicles on the Euston Road, staring out unseeing at the concrete and the rush of occupied minds.
I say occupied here to indicate the fact that people in London seem to be shut off to anything that is not included within their own agenda. From the moment they wake up, their brains are full of tasks.
But occupied also means conquered, subjugated, dominated.
Under enemy control.
This dual definition is appealing. The word becomes stuck in my head. With no other thoughts in there to challenge it, it repeats itself incessantly for the whole of the journey, until it starts to lose meaning.
Occupied. Occupied. Occupied.
My day passes, as they always do, in a mundane blur of traffic and computers. I procrastinate on my task list until four, when I am able to cross off half of it in a flurry of hastily-dialled phone calls.
My job filled me with excitement when I first took it, 18 months ago. The people were bright and the company new, and every day had felt like opening a present.
Now it just feels like it is stealing my life.
Every day it forces me into the synthetic, waxy mould of a corporate doll. My soul feels empty and I can’t do anything about it.
I am trapped.
Even the hours outside of work feel like they belong to someone else.
Sometimes I scream out loud, pulling at my hair like a mad woman, diving at the people sitting blankly in their desks and venting my frustration at this calm acceptance of a robot’s life. Then the world swirls back into reality and I realise I am in fact sitting quiet and accepting in my own desk, in a row of quiet, accepting people, and no one has even blinked.
One day I think I might actually do this.
I cannot wait for the day when I hand in my notice. I think of that moment at least once every hour. Perhaps more like three or four times. Some days it is all I can think about. I picture myself going into the CEO’s office, letting him wax falsely lyrical about my supreme consultancy abilities, trying to build my confidence so I seduce the clients more effectively. I imagine myself springing it on him mid-flow. Like flirting with someone for hours and then turning away when they try to kiss you.
I would thrust a letter in his hand which detailed methodically and unashamedly all the corrupt twists and suppressive rules of his beloved company. I would laugh at the blind devotion to a loosely-concealed totalitarian regime. This virtual furnace that consumes souls and spits out money. My words would reduce it to a pile of ash.
I just haven’t found quite the right ones yet.
The thing that pains me most is seeing the sparks of my co-workers (my love for whom still remains loyal enough to keep me here) condensed down to the same, standard-issue ambition as him. They will complain about the money-driven mentality, the repression and being told what to do by a self-centred, clueless manager, but they will remain silent.
The London in my head is an eerie toy town, operated by Stepford Wives, dolled up and twinkle-smiled and ‘yes of course, Sir, anything you want, Sir’.
They will be fucked up the arse until they bleed, and they won’t notice because their eyes are on their glittering futures; dreams grossly deformed by that pre-ordained framework we rarely dare to question.
As a child, we are consistently asked what we would like to BE when we grow up. Our entire lives, we relate our future job to the verb 'to be'. A career is part of our fundamental make-up. It is an apex to climb, in order to prove our worth as a person.
And thus, we dutifully tick the boxes.
School, college, university. Education, packaged prettily.
Job.
Soon we will have a great CV, that menu of clichéd attributes, and a fantastic social life that spans the breadth of London’s pretentious wine bars. A well-matched partner to take Sunday walks with, and a pile of savings which we will watch grow until they die.
All these people, building their career. A career that occupies them. Conquered and subsequently dominated for the rest of their lives. They will be promoted to managers and they will have finally made it after all these years. They will buy a house and have a lovely wedding in a country manor and end up with gammy-mouthed kids who will go on to do the same.
Security. They need to know where they are, otherwise they lose themselves.
This kind of thing terrifies me.
Isn’t your ‘career’ just what you’re doing right here, right now?
What I’m doing right now is utter bollocks.
Old people say life is what happens while you are planning your future.
I think we should listen to old people.
I think I’m so different. And yet still I put myself through the excruciating pain of getting out of bed at half past six every day to go into a place I despise.
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