Waterlogged

We close the farm for two weeks as July swans her way in on a chariot of thunderclouds. Morale is low as the wet season's sickness sets in and the realities of living on an isolated farm, with far too much to do, become less bearable.

Besides, my visa is almost up.

Mexico calls me with her brassy tones.

A year ago, I left San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, for Lago Atitlan, Guatemala, hoping to find my truth. Now, I leave my truth to get perspective in Mexico.

Sweet symmetry.

I learned early on that to read the last page of a book first ruins the story. Thus, I usually steer clear of divination. However, before I leave I get out the medicine cards - each one with an animal and a story from Native American tradition.

The frog hops out at me, symbolising cleansing. That makes sense, I suppose, thinking with downturned mouth as my eyes trace the artwork on the card. It tells me to be careful of becoming waterlogged, caught up in emotion and logistics.

Reading this makes me nervous, as I am facing a return to San Cristobal de las Casas, my home of last summer. So much happened there and it wasn't always positive. The streets will be paved with memories. I wonder if the nostalgia will be too much.

As I hop over the border with my amphibian legs I am captivated by drifts of clouds, snagged on the furry green of the northern Guatemalan mountains. The land flattens as we cross the border and the sun burns my arm through the window. The rain starts, as usual, in the early afternoon, and I watch as the road flows down a hill.

I'm not sure what I expected but I am somewhat underwhelmed on my arrival. I quickly move through the market and the french bakery and then find myself at a loss. Although it is pleasant to return to a town I know and love, I understand instantly that I'm going to have to look elsewhere for my inspiration.

The ghost of my former self runs barefoot along a street flowing with rain, hand in hand with the ghost of my former boyfriend. But the vision raises little emotion. Perhaps my frog skin is thicker than I thought.

The restlessness of indecision plagues me for a day before I decide to simply start walking to the bus station. On the way there I pass a banda boy I said hello to in a shop earlier. I recognise him because his legs are strange in some way, the feet bent and small. He has an inviting smile under tiny glasses.

I stop to say hello again and the greeting turns into a coffee. By the end of it I have a page of scribbled notes and an instruction that starts with getting the night bus to Mexico in 45 minutes.

I'm on the move again.

Two days later and I'm in a nameless city on an unseen map, somewhere on the Gulf Coast in Northern Veracruz. I've wandered the streets and indulged in my first bit of shopping for months. I've written a poem. I'm damp.

The rain hasn't stopped since I arrived, alternating between a light, but quenching mist and furious sheets that fall so hard they fill the air with spray and turn the streets into instant rivers. At the farm, I frequently talk about how much I love the rain. Now, I remember what it's like to travel in it. Once wet, always wet, as they say. Who says? Only me, perhaps.

But its true. You just have to get used to being damp. Or sodden, as is the case during today's visit to the El Tajin ruins. The site is different to the other ruins I've seen; so different in fact that archaeologists cannot understand who built it. The temples are covered in spirals.

My attempts to dodge raindrops fall flat as I feel my trousers sticking to my legs. I try to evoke images of bustling streets in pre-Colombian Mexico, building the temples up in my mind, drawing energy through my feet as I slosh through the puddles. I sit down on what was once someone's house to eat a huge mango and I think about how clean everything is underneath the water.

After two hours I collect my pack from the entrance with a sigh and trudge through the rain to the motorway, trying in vain to mentally ascertain an onward route from a plan that doesn't exist, on a map that I have never seen.

I duck into a collectivo going to the nearest town and wipe the steam from the window with my sleeve.

I see a hotel and impulsively tell the driver to stop. The room is cheap but has hooks to dry my clothes. I make myself some guacamole and ground down, pulling myself together, solidifying my thoughts from their fluid-flowing escape. When I am satisfied and more-or-less dry, I go out.

It is still raining.

I am wandering the streets of this new town, trying to make the most of my decision to stay, when I remember about the medicine card and laugh out loud.

Waterlogged. They have to be joking.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

   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.

   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.