More Photos

Sa Mo!

More Guatemala (Caribbean, Tikal, etc)

Mexico



And extra, from our trip to New Mexico and Amarillo earlier in the summer:
Amarillo

NMexico

First set of Photos

here are some pictures from Guatemala (for those who don't already have facebook)- more will be added later so be sure to check for updates,
when we get more uploaded from other places we'll post more links


Guatemala Photos

¡Basta!

Resting in the heart of the poorest state in Mexico (The 1993 United Nations Human Development Report mentions Chiapas as an extreme case of deprivation on the Human Development Index, obviously things have improved over time, but there is much to be desired) San Cristobal de las Casas is both alive and vibrant with revolutionary history and progressive efforts to empower the indigenous Maya descendants who live here.

In 1994 the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, (EZLN) marched into San Cristobal dressed in hand made uniforms and black masks, heavily armed and ready for whatever lay beyond them, and declared war "against the Mexican state." Most Zapatistas are indigenous people who are deeply concerned with the misrepresentation of indigenous peoples in government, as well as unfair distribution and exploitation of their land. Though their main spokesperson is a quirky, pipe smoking, non-indigenous masked man called "Subcomandante Marcos." The Zapatistas claimed they were "fighting against 500 years of oppression and injustice. ¡Basta! (Enough!) they cried, made the first public document the objectives of their armed struggle: work, land, housing, food, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice and peace.

These demands were formulated the same day that NAFTA entered into force, and at the beginning of that fateful year in which presidential elections were to be held. No doubt the significance of the timing of the uprising was not lost on the Zapatistas, and it certainly spoiled the triumphant sense of entitlement with which the Salinas administration was entering its final year in office. Over the next few days a number of small battles were fought. The federal army overcame its initial surprise and retook the initiative. The Zapatistas withdrew their forces and retreated to the rural municipios in the region known as Las Cañadas (the canyons) whence they had emerged. Informed estimates place the number of victims killed in the fighting at around one hundred and fifty, not many by current genocidal standards of mass killings and ethnic cleansings, but enough to alert Mexican public opinion to the seriousness of the situation and the intentions of the revolutionaries."

After the war the Zapatistas actually appeared in the Mexican congress to voice their problems and demands. While, then, President Fox boasted he could solve the problem in 15 minutes more or less, Marcos was not the one to take the podium that day. It was an indigenous woman named Esther. Though most of congress either explicitly stated that they would not hear peasantry defiling the processes of the congressional tradition, or conveniently involved in some other affair that day, the Zapatistas stated their demands bluntly and simply: to release Zapatista prisoners, close seven military bases in Chiapas, and to recognize the San Andres accords (which granted Chiapas more power in how indigenous lands were handled and used.)

In 1996 the Mexican government approved the accords, though they never came into place (more on that at a further date). Thus through political forgetfulness and mishandling of funds directed into Chiapas to assess the problem of poverty by means of a complex peace process that is still being dragged out today, the indigenous here have become to most of the world, objects of mindless tourist photography. Even in its own birthplace the Zapatista revolution seems more of a postcard sentiment than an actual war that took the lives of more than 100 people fighting for simple human rights. But I am told that deep in the country side the Zapatista blood flows quiet and strong and the descended Maya are working with one another to provide a community by which sustainable living is possible and fruitful, and where indigenous life does not have to sell out to modernistic facades. These rumors are places where the old way coexists with the new way.

And at night when the fireflies begin to light up and cast shadows of the masked Zapatistas mounted on their horses into the dusk air, I find myself, in some form or another, regressing to morning and reliving the day in search of a beacon of hope in some disguise for my own being. Hope is indeed an ideal, but for the people here in Chiapas it is as real as the wind, constantly moving everything. The fresh wind that sweeps through San Cristobal each night seems so deeply reminiscent that it was even formed by the labored breathing of a race due 500 years of penitence, and I can feel that wind burning my cheek as I walk through these brilliant streets. Though I may be an idealist, I believe World history is evidence enough of great people, even civilizations dying for ideals and living for them too. This is a wind that will not cease to blow so long as solidarity retains its meaning. Hope remains not an ideal, but a manifested network of survival and struggle to live right, fighting daily to discover and keep sacred a dignity foreigners should never fully understand.

cities and desire

In the measuring of my laundered bones





In the brisk and sweeping valley of Jovel, nestled between the mountains of southernmost Mexico, huddles a beguiling little town with harlequin haciendas that are skintight and snug among the cobbled streets and sloping hills. In every bend and crook there resounds echoes and vestiges of the modern Maya, lavishly implanted not only in the slopes of mountains where the Maya villages thrive thick with tradition, but in the bustling colonial city center brimming with animation and a luscious vibrance. This borough, made famous in 1994 by a brief Zapatista takeover, stays chilly year round at 2100m; and when the scent of burning timber & trash invades nostrils, or the echoes of far off drilling and the collective singing of the townfolk at the Cerro de Guadalupe fill the crisp air,
I begin to sense the form and structure of my soul: a line of laundered sheets not nearly as far in the distance as they look, patterning an idiosyncratic rainbow, all identical and hanging symmetrically in a row: grey, slate blue, light blue, canary yellow, pale navy, mossy teal, pale orange, dark red, fluttering in the whips of breeze.

Yes, I would have to commit with decisiveness to the following as being my favorites about this town:
*The vibrance and radiance of its smorgasbord of colors, a simple and delicious gaudiness that invades every fragment...every fingerbreadth of the calles and the striped woven goods, the plushy shawls and hand-sewn sweaters of the vendors.
*The rooftop laundry.

In 1528 it was founded as San Cristóbal, and took on the honorable surname de Las Casas after Bartolomé de Las Casas, a man appointed bishop of Chiapas 17 years after the town's establishment; Bart de Las Casas became a candid defender of the indigenous, thus the city dons its full name proudly like a hand-sewn and slaved over wedding dress.
The natives are in the habit of living simply, but with a vigor and verve that rivals children on the playground during recess after weeks of continuous rain.

Here, the jazzy street candy/gum/cigarette vendors wear their shops strapped across their chests, or their embroidered blankets and beaded belts piled high across their arms. Men, women, and children alike, they walk the busy side alleys and main belts in the belly of the town, adding to the brilliance of its multicolored allure (the dwellings with lavender, or violet, or forest, or saffron trims). There are corn-still hot-on-the-cob eaters and small local boys that sell little unfamiliar handmade animals in bars...you think at first they are wooden, but at closer inspection are revealed as clay so hardened, its nearly metallic. The bands play loudly, from the hearts of family quarters and neighborhoods into the heart of the night (no need to fret over curfews, the cops are too busy enjoying themselves at the very same party). The faded chroma of blue and white banner flags criss-cross the squatty building tops and the women of vernacular suck the ripe peach remnants off their fingertips as they walk. At times in the cafe region there are whiffs of perfumes and sewage reminiscent of France, or the heady redolence of primitive incense.

And for over a week, I awaken every morning to the chiming of the belltower, the echoes of squuezebox music comically cheerful, and Paco the parrot's warbling demands of loud screeches for his breakfast of sunflower seeds. There is clattering downstairs in the kitchen as our Mexican grandmother,Celsa (the woman we stayed with for a weeks time while we went to Spanish immersion classes), starts the morning's breakfast: yogurt with fruit, or eggs with elojes and salsa and tortillas, or tostadas, always with juices of mango or pineapple or watermelon, every ingredient fresh and homemade. The house we have called home for a week is settled into a cozy nook in the long lines of connected buildings along the streets, only separable by the change in their polychromatic tones; all similarly possess an internal beauty and intimacy hidden within themselves and shrouded by the black-iron barred windows and doors I have come to (surprisingly) adore so much. The haciendas themselves are vivid but modest chunks of rainbow accommodations that are really much larger than they fool you to believe, and the homey charm that resides in each seems to stem from the fact that each, although humbly furnished, is designed to comfortably fit an entire (not so humble) family within. This aura of comfy nostalgia in Celsa's home, specifically, seems to emanate from the divine splashes of knickknacks and mail ordered ornaments-gold edged ceramics, lace endtable cloths, ornate mirrors, copper novelties and glass angels-that seem to fill our vision and hearts just like the exact reminiscences of our grandma's abodes.

Our lovely host herself was a gracefully aging woman with short maroon hair and slightly wizened face, in which her kindly knowledgeable eyes seem to be set just right. With a huge family, mostly all still nearby, and children already grown and out of the house, as well as an international bus-driver husband- (plus, she's Mexican) its a given that the woman knows how to cook...and I can already tell that I will, from this point on, be spoiled when it comes to (real) Mexican food. Everything she put in front of us was more delicious than any TxMx cuisine I have experienced...flautas, tostadas, baked pescada wrapped in saffron and chard, tortas, soups (such as sweet maiz) and all kinds of pollo-shredded or fresh, "en jugo" (for Michael)....fresh blended salsas with coriander and rice with chopped vegetables and beans of every style and oven-burner warmed tortillas. Celsa, who was in the process of teaching herself to read and write (with so many kids, she never had time or money) knew just what to whip up for our ailments- for infections, she blended a juice of piña, apio, perejil, and nopal:pineapple/celery/parsley/cactus.

The outside facade of her habitation is painted bright orange, similar to her living room wall-trims (throw in some garish yellows, however)...and the impressive array of hanging plants and potted flowers strung along her terrace mimic the open entryway of her double-storied halls. All the floors, and the narrow wind of staircase (you have to duck your head) are smooth lines of ecru tiles that get icy in the early hours when you pad rapidly to the bathroom, which is done in marine colors Italia style with the shower built into the wall and non-separated from the toilet, as well as a tiny, dirty skylight in just the right place. Our designated room is simple and sweet, with a flat bed with flatter pillows and peach sateen sheets.

For tea in Celsa's house, an old tin open-topped kettle is used, and i only snuck one box of apple nectar from her in-home shop, all the rest i paid for (ok, other than maybe one roll of crackers). She often made us a tea seeped straight from the long blades of lemongrass, and our first morning she brewed a delicately honeyed homemade coffee with canela, or cinnamon. The best part of her homestead in whole was the miniature upstairs altar, glorious in all its proletarian grace.

And during Spanish class (only after irregular verbs and "presente progressivo" of course) we share insights in separate languages on existence...on the prospect of phantasms, or astrology, or the brutality and primal propensities of the indigenous (the sad reality of the "negro mercada" in Mexico), on drugs, on sex, on love, on racism and prejudice, on cooking, traditions, and customs. We matriculate the local idioms, digest the dialect, and adopt the slang- this is best done through playing a rowdy fútbol game with the native chavos, learning how to better gulp and process the thinner mountain air.

Some of the town's inhabitants, whether civic or foreign, are nearly tribal in appearance...
subversive tendrils are woven throughout the fibers of the people, with their contemporarily ornamented bodies and dreadlocks (guess I fit right in) and head wraps and rat tails and shoulder bags and scarves. There are grown men that play with paper airplanes in the street, short women of Mayan descent with armloads of prismatic wooden beads, street vendors with cotton candy the shades of the plastic of Barbie's dream mansion, shelves of voodoo dolls; there are carts of neoteric fruits and veggies and gummies and nuts, wide-eyed children whose gazes never seem to lose your step, unpretentiously proud restaurants with basket lights and paper lanterns where the Zapatista hope evidently still thrives, pretentious Spanish tapas bars, and a favorite bar by the name of Revolución with gypsy jazz of cello, accordion, and beautifully cacophonous voices. On a regular old Tuesday evening, there is a pint-sized zipline set up in the town center, where the little ones can feed their pint-sized hunger for adventure and attention, the beginning of their simultaneous thirst for and fear of vertigo.

There are coolers stocked full of local popsicles in the family owned shops speckled among the streets- made by hand with fresh ingredients, chunks of fruits, bits of nut, creamy leche and sometimes sprinkles, if you're lucky...flavors of all breeds and tastes: coconut, pistachio, watermelon, cherry, neapolitan, hazelnut. There are showy colors of undistinguishable flavors, and because i long to try them all, we formed a daily ritual (substituted only occasionally for gelato) of grabbing one as we roam the alleys and shop the international music store and toasty bookshops. As we walk and sink deeper into the exotic pigments of Chiapas, little girls in uniforms run past us covered in chalk, or proudly carrying miniscule silver windmills that shine in the sunbeams and spin circles; we watch a small boy pee on the side of La Catedral (The Cathedral). At dusk the muchachos lean against the doorways to their plain domiciles or the cramped shops and watch the sway of hips, (regardless of whether one is clearly taken) emanating friendly but fairly impervious lust. Back in the backroads in our temporary home, we feast our ears on the lush, nubile beats and notes of African or Cuban music and voices, but only after lunch with Celsa and telenovellas in the afternoon. Our first afternoon in town, I experienced my first viewing of a young Mexican child walking alongside his grandmother, proudly carrying a slain chicken by its limp legs. Proud vegetarian or not, it filled me with a glee I couldn't possibly comprehend or describe.

There is a myriad of trade-crafts spread upon the coverlets and wreaths hand-threaded and wreathed by the locals in their black sheep skirts and vests, with their prevailing tenacity and loyalty to antiquity. Their conjoint energy,often quite fearless in nature,
plunges the town in its own past, which it once tried in vain to refuse (interweaving with the past of neighboring cities, not fully pure yet pristine). There are balloon men and flower shops a plenty, and children leaning against the tiny balustrades of window cages, clamoring happily.

There rumbles in the cool shades a deeply rooted, smudged sense of justice, emanating from the resplendently shaded skins of the locals, the history blended into the budding moment-by-moment; the proof that drums hope into veins, and then of course, there are the nights:
the nights are poignantly sultry.
Mexico after dark possesses a dirty sexuality that seems to reside in all things, even the trash in the sidewalk cracks. There is a dense and mystic sensuality, a lighthearted mystery, in the Spanish scrawlings on the back of the wooden bathroom doors in the bars, in the pastelerias:the cakeshops, in the old women with missing teeth, in the communal video game shops where the boys sit for hours submersed in the flickering violence.

I began to anticipate our daily route, with the old woman and her sidewalk spread of painfully fresh nuts and ripened fruits, tender vegetables on the crux of vitality- she greets you in passing: "Buenos Diiiiiaaaaaasss!!" The gas and water trucks with their loudly abrasive advertisements of dragging chains and metal widgets behind precede the smell of homemade pyrotechnics in the morning and burning wood at night (everything on fire). After the sun has made its descent and the tierra burns deep blue, your eyes widen and glisten with the far-off sparkles of lights along the slants of mountain land, or the strings of small Navidad bulbs in the palm trees edging the square.
At times the winds off the peaks bring a music of marimbas, low drums, tubas and polka;
there almost constantly can be heard the pop of firecrackers of daily festivals, like the rattle of the gunshots of revolution and Zapatista spirits, celebrating this Saint or that liberation or some ubiquitous revelation...take one of each or pick and choose; I may just, for the first time, allow myself to pray to on the bus ride-but only once, just to be safe.

San Cristóbal's dogs, drunks, unsanctioned lovers scamper along the backbones, the persistent familiarity of gravel roads with sporadic patchy grasses of routine, waiting with patience for the golden moment when the solidity of meat slides off the bone and hits the rock of bottom; voracious curse of yearning sustained or gratified only when the pulp of pity, or desperation, or (com)passion has mercy.

I found a safe haven on Celsa's roof, but it was not a safeness that was founded on the complacency of someone kept free of disturbance or uncertainty or pain. It was a place I could be at peace being alone with my thoughts, and face my doubts and aversions without driving myself (or anyone else) crazy. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that, on that rooftop, I could sit for however long I felt the need or desire, not plagued with any concept of time or right or wrong, and be just fine with being crazy. There, there was no such thing as definitions or adequacy or understanding or or cowardice or knowledge or struggle. I simply fought my way through the labyrinth of fluttering laundry dancing on the maze of wire-lines, sat in the tiny, shiny wood chair I found in a clutter pile, and listened to the world.

The rooftop did not consist of much, but perhaps that is exactly where it derived its endless charm and hypnotism: there were half-dead plants in pots and wooden barrels and crates; a decrepit, sandy sink, once mauve but now just the color of caulk splatters; stacks and craters of loose terra cotta tiles; lines of arcane piping...but most importantly, a splendidly breathtaking view of the surrounding neighborhood and thickset houses embedded in the hills, and the cathedral on the top swell of the crests, perhaps the highest point in the city minus the distant peaks of mountain tops. The gold of the cathedral twinkles mustard in the fading light of day, alongside the proud and ethereal white of time, spire pointing up as a reminder (you can always look up). I'm plenty happy to look down and see my bare, dirty feet; I'm happy to be up here, flawlessly alone. Alone with the mountain winds, simple and simply content to soak up the easy beauty and sounds suddenly growing familiar and comforting: the children laughing and clattering, the oddly strident and cartoonish music of the gas and water men in the rumbling trucks, the flap of the Mexican laundry behind me, the rooster crowing, the dogs hollering and birds trilling (Alive Alive Alive). I can hear the thump of a soccer ball being kicked and walloped around as the sun breathes in the exhales out upon my warming piel. What I am experiencing up here in my retreat is similar to what I felt invade my senses and fill my being in Germany; a sense of nostalgia, only for a place I have never before been. A faculty of ease and serenity,a piece of nativity and joyful solitude. I reveled in the brick stacks, and the invigoration of air rubbing against my body, and the melodies in the rustling leaves and the rich indigo house in the distance, and the gentle modesty of the virile dwellings in the hills, and the quiet of merely the land and I and nothing else, and the incomplete completion of the milieu, and the vitality in the climate and atmosphere.

Here, I even revel in the fact that the natives like to play dumb and pretend they have not the slightest of ideas where a certain place of inquiry is, or how they seem to purposely point you in the wrong direction so you get turned around and frustrated and perplexed. The disregard of the people along Guadalupe and the families linking arms, forming nearly impassable walls, creates a certain anonymity that I have learned to savor: it creates a sudden realization that perhaps it is my turn to feel this way, feel like an outsider even for the briefest of moments (mostly everyone here is beyond friendly, though)- because now, I can view things from the perspective of those alien to my place of birth and origination, those who are treated poorly and misjudged merely for their extrinsic properties, or the difference of their inception, or colors of skin. (We all have the same blood.) I suppose the outside looking in feels right sometimes, I can't explain it.
Even if it is frustrating being purposely being pointed in the wrong direction, I suppose it is not an uncommon game, acquiring a laugh at the expense of the supposedly mentally challenged tourists. It's worth getting lost anyway because I savor the bulbous lights in the sidewalks and the hills in the streets like home, and the view of the church standing illustriously on the hill with a halo something like idealism (the same quality i fell and fall in love with another place, another time, and repeatedly).
-Him. Him, and then suddenly, a hope unlike anything ever imagined.

Here, the people always clatter-knock on the black bars of doors and shop-entrance grates with keys, and the Mexican women and teenage boys can be so loud that you decide it's okay for sleep and peace of mind to not always be a necessity.
In fact, one of the most distinguishing characteristics of this town is its noise, its sound- the sierra of pitch is either obscenely loud, or gorgeously and restfully silent.
There is constantly the clink of the same dishes and forks, seeping from household doors open to the peek of a stranger's wandering inquiry or a neighbor's watchful and common solidarity.

One of my favorite memories was coming home from class one day to find a house full of Mexican women, all helping make a huge vat of tamales and drinking spectacularly large jugs of Sol- the beer of choice here.

The string of Mexican men that reside along the hill across the street from the neon tangerine hacienda like to spend most the day perched along the concrete curb, making cheerful chatter with the passerby in the hopes of pitying out a peso or two. Referred to by us as "los barrachos," they were easier to avoid and chuckle at from a distance than to get involved with...once they get you laughing, it's game over, digging in your pocket for spare change. One of the men seemed to thoroughly enjoy sleeping (incoherently and consistently) beneath Celsa's den window, soaking up the afternoon heat in his dusty and stained week-old clothes.
Sometimes the streets branching out along the hill brow beneath the stairs of the Guadalupe cathedral would be speckled with taxis, all with matching balloons tied sporadically to their windows and mirrors and back-seats full of random nameless plants. Sometimes, I have discovered, it is perfectly acceptable not to have a reason to have a parade; in Mexico, the celebrations do not establish their fraternity (nor their consistency) through justification.

There seems to be a penchant for bare lightbulbs, and the market near Santo domingo is sheltered by the awnings of tents and is flush with jewelry fashioned by every imaginable stone, mineral, bauble and ore.
The deafeningly boisterous kickball games right outside Celsa's front door remind me of a time when there was no necessity or place for worry, when the jovial innocence of childhood desires promoted simplicity and jubilance at their best. It isn't until later that felicity evolves and you realize how much more rewarding and kosher happiness is when it is attained post-struggle.
Tonight, Michael said, after getting stabbed in the ass with an inch and a half long needle: "No pain, no gain...and with no gain, you lose your (beloved) sense of capitalism." Ha.

One of our last weekend nights in Celsa's, we snacked on a smidgeon of South American wine like tongue blood and cheap tequila in a packed bar,internationally flavored and overflowing with local reggae (the locals sang along to a song about their hometown). Afterwards we walked home slowly savoring the emptying streets, the breeze was tender and rapidly cooling as the clouds tiptoed closer to the ground- such high altitudes and sooner or later the elements lock limbs (and occasionally you swear your heart stops for one breath.) Back in the once sparse room we had grown contentedly accustomed to, and had equally contentedly and messily made a nest of, I laid on the bed and listened to it all come in;
the calm of the wet pieces of earth beginning to surround, every inch in motion.
The rain on the roof sounded like the planes of (my small) world shifting, an earthquake in each bone, a city of earthquakes. Its only natural you see...
Like the flowers in the room on the stool, the ones he walked all the way across the square and center of town to get me, acquired at one of few open shops: four orange and maroon birds with dirty faces and long necks, with feathered heads and leaf ribbons. On a night after the discord that tends to arise during long travels in close quarters, he disappeared for an hour...and returned with them, residing in a basket and surrounded with yellow baby's breath and false snowy leaves that are identical to the ones on the tippy-top of Mommy's mantel at home. Now slightly less fresh, but just as breathtaking:dying flowers, that should be an incense scent, i would buy it.

Yes, there are the fishbones...small and meaningless it seems, picking them out of the seams of the meat of things. We take things as they come in their natural forms, savoring the rawness of the provisions, relishing the work it takes to receive. It is easier to get discouraged and break things into bits, separating the parts from the whole and deeming them worthwhile or unsubstantial; to push away the rest, discard what becomes simply carcass. However, i know I am not the first to find that is essential to get dirty in order to find the essence.
The best part is, even if you don't find the gist, the much-revered "core"- you come out hot and bothered and sweaty and smudged with the stains of freedom: the freedom of knowing there is a joy to not having answers, to not having a method to madness, or a course, or a reason, or a organized vision.

When I am in the mountains, (or perhaps just more so when I am traveling) my soul rises to the surface and I feel as though I understand myself better in and through my dreams- in them, I am more in tune with the desires I deny, the thoughts I excuse and write off, the subconscious I refer to in abstract instead of prodding. [It's scary, prodding unidentifiable, obscure creatures and objects, you never know where they derive their texture, if their movements or genus will be a threat to you...it is an accepted fact that we are terrified of the unknown, and therefore often entranced by it. I suppose this journey has been the first one where I have gone beyond recognition and scrutiny of what truly scares me, and realized that there is absolutely no reason to allow fear(s) to govern your life.]
When I awake from my dreams, I awake feeling as though I have never really been asleep to begin with, but am merely stepping out of one skin and sliding into another.
And I dreamed of life, growing inside of me, and death, right before my eyes with no escape and no sympathy, and sickness, the kind that shoots pains throughout your abdomen, your sides, and slides out of you through detox...so thick and clinging that you imagine it is pulling with it all your vital tools of living. Once, I dreamed in all Spanish, and woke up feeling for the first time truly at home.
Sometimes we wake up with cramps, sometimes crass, or nauseous, sometimes we wake with plans or dirty feet and a bloated sense of overwhelming fullness; but always we find ourselves beyond the borders of the sort of complacency that blinds. We are learning to be okay the kind of joy that comes through struggle and through viewing and experiencing struggle with an open mind, and coming out clutching hope even if we don't understand fully its source or grain.


I am ok with not being consistent. And maybe even unimpressive, yes, perhaps. Adaptation at its finest: at some point you have to learn to be okay with what you love, and stop focusing on what loves you.
[Of course, if you are like me, you don't always accept things or admit to them with ease; my archaic side starts to show from time to time.
I can't quite explain why, but sometimes I like to grab my lover's beard and cradle it in one clenched palm like it is a small, trapped animal...slowly ceasing movement and struggle as it realizes its imminent demise.
Seriously, you should see the thing, its beastly- and beautiful, a rightful source of pride.]

When I climbed between the thin and gaudy covers (with their pastel geometric patterns) the last night at Celsa's, before we move on to a hostel in another part of town...the gangs of dogs were incessantly nonsense-barking as usual, the shower head (regardless of water pressure lack) was still dripping, the in-home altar still lit and creepy with its strangely shadowed dollfaces and framed photos of religious symbolism and a crucified Christ with black skin and long curly locks a lot like my own matted knots. And I have no better way to explain my saying,
I have never been this content in all my life.

emptiness vs repletion

repletion


Silent lightning filled the night skies in Belize, like a quiet and oppressively still warning before the destruction of everything (apocalyptic calm before the storm during the storm: as though time has warped and eaten itself, plump and rosy with repletion). The thickness and temperature of the air is like the Pine Island spring oxygen I remember: the melding of Gulf and Caribbean breath - but more alluring, seductive. After dark the hum of creatures grows louder and wider, and the energy caressing your skin twists and becomes nearly eerie, when the humidity of the tropics intermingles with the exotic and intrinsic people. At this time, San Ignacio holds the same rawness and sticky, trashy sex appeal of the South, and yet with an edge of class and chastity.
Steamy virtue, perhaps.
The color and the form of the natives is plentiful and rich, so sumptuous that you cannot refrain from longing to run your hand along the smooth dusk of their spirit's pigmentation. As we drove through the moonless backcountry, festive lights sporadically appeared, glowing through the dim; they seemed inseparable from the black as though they were born of it. They hover and sway in the mysteries of the breeze like glow-sticks in the backyard of a gradeschooler's slumber party on a balmy night in the summer.
Here, sometimes the air got too heavy and my throat would tighten,
and amongst deeper gulps of it
I could see my veins more clearly beneath my browning skin as they filled with the satiation of oxygen.







Michael and I both are learning more than we foresaw: about one another, ourselves, about the state of humanity and the world, about the Mayans and countless other poverty-stricken and subjugated indigenous peoples, about suffering and loving and faith and the vitality and necessity of hope above all else.
This journey is giving the both of us new direction and a stronger sense of purpose and place in the world. This is my first time to experience impoverished areas of the world, and it has been a constant struggle: with acceptance of the state of destitution across Latin America, guilt ("Weatern Man's guilt"), the lessons of dealing with beggars and the far less fortunate, learning how to process and learn from and act on the information I learn and the things spread before my eyes on a daily basis.

Our adventures through Guatemala, Belize and the Southern parts of Mexico in the Yucatan have revealed to me far more than anything I could ever have imagined or conceived of.
It would be truly difficult to ignore the signs of repression and tribulation that are vastly prevalent all throughout these countries, woven into the jungles and capricious villages like the whisperings of the last sad sigh of concession into an enemy's ear.
You can see the determination etched into the weather worn features of the once thriving Mayan people, as though they have long since learned to drown the relinquishment- the injustice and exploitation of absolution, past and present alike-with tenaciousness.
It is a sad stubbornness and purposefulness, a forced sort of acceptance that makes them all the more vibrant and poignant, yes, but also also all the more afflictive to observe.

The beauties of the Mayan culture and the cultures of these communities are perishing slowly because of depravity and selfishness, the same sickness that is especially sweeping through society in the Western World- a preoccupation with (attaining and controlling)More, More, More.
The value of culture in general, everywhere, is disintegrating in overproduction, in an avalanche of quantity, in the madness of (over)abundance. Everyone so consumed by the desire for repletion, and yet for some- for the blind and the corrupt and the unconscious- it is a bottomless desire that feeds off of itself and only grows more vehement with need and greed. Although this is a quandary I have always been aware of, it was never made so blatantly clear as it has these past weeks; being exposed to the reality, stripped bare and without sugarcoating here, within my own sight, has made the degree and extent of the damage and threat unavoidable and painfully obvious. And I am no longer okay with remaining in my circle of comfort and benefaction, simply leaving things as they are without attempting to do something to help, even if it's minute and on a local, community level.







Emptiness is looked upon to be vast and abyssmal, the fear of death, the loneliness of infinity itself-
but perhaps true emptiness is not as awful as it is made out to be. Perhaps emptiness in its true and pure form is not such a bad thing, is really just the ability to feel full and sated without the pollution of overflow, superabundance, More More More. To be happy with less, with the diminutive blessings and gifts we are given every day. Maybe true emptiness is serenity, is repletion is disguise.

I have been learning an awful lot about darkness lately.
However, if anyone knows about darkness, it's Helen Keller, and she said: "Once I knew only darkness and stillness...my life was without past or future...but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.”



This adventure into Central America and Mexico has made me realize that my quest for peace and repletion is not, firsthand, a journey simply into myself, a journey based on merely a desire to live and selfishly unveil myself, to me.
My surroundings and my company have helped me to come to the revelation that there are much better, more beneficial ways to improve oneself than through the preoccupation with flaws and areas in need of improvement, through the guilt of mistakes made and choices made in the past. In the process of moving that small step beyond selfishness, the attempts of singular rebirth, and your contemplations revolving around the self- that is where the true evolvement occurs. Not only within you, but rippling outwards from you to spread veins and tendrils across everything surrounding-your surroundings, humanity, and yes, even the world.

I came searching for some"Truth," yes.
But my principle and my personal truth automatically reveals itself and is founded on the realization that my own quality of life is vastly improved through the bettering of others' lives, even in simple and seemingly meager ways.

To avoid sounding like a broken record, please note that I realize most of us are well aware of the injustice and forlorn actualities of the world; that is not something I wish to inform anyone of, my idealized hopes for the changing the world. I suppose my point, at the root of things, is in itself very transparent: Something seemingly meager and very uncomplicated can make all the difference in another's world. And maybe that's what world domination is really all about.

and so the Mayans

Pretending to understand the fortune of the Maya from behind a computer screen is arrogant. Even further, I am a white descendant of the very people that brought so many indigenous cultures to their knees in a fury of conquest in the name of the Lord God, but the obvious repression and slowly nurtured mistreatment of the Mayan people throughout Guatemala, Belize, and Southern Mexico is unavoidable. Understanding the depth of the problem is next to impossible without and though you may disagree with where I stand on the situation, at least give it a thought.
As we, (the lovely Christina and myself) have traveled through the jungles of the Mayan sun, illuminated by violent red blooms through the canopy of trees and echoing with the calls of rare toucans and finches, the tiny cement blasted indigenous villages where the Mayan people have been tossed into the country side whisper injustice with slow persistence. And according to a great variety of local thinkers who we have met, the shame many Mayan descendants now feel for being part of their once proud race is staggering. Most refuse to speak their native tongues and even those who do, their children refuse to speak it because at school they are looked down upon by peers and scolded by teachers. With the slow death of language follows the slow death of culture. Though In certain areas the Mayan traditions are still practiced and the many languages passed down are vibrant and alive as ever, they are still few and far between and furthermore representation for the Mayan descendants by the Mayan descendants in the Guatemalan government (as well as Belize and Mexico, but Guatemala is the most heavily concentrated) is virtually non-existent.

So why are things the way they are for the indigenous people of Guatemala?

In 1954 the United States CIA funded and backed a coup in Guatemala to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the popular democratically elected President. The reason for the coup rallied around the fact that Jacobo´s "government put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants, that the U.S. intelligence community deemed Communist in nature and, suspecting Soviet influence, fueled a fear of Guatemala becoming what Allen Dulles described as a "Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere". Dulles' concern reverberated within the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, in the context of the anti-Communist fears of the McCarthyist era. Arbenz instigated sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based multinational company United Fruit Company, which had large stakes in the old order of Guatemala and lobbied various levels of U.S. government officials to take action against Arbenz. Both Dulles and his brother were shareholders of United Fruit Company."

Still what's the point of all this?
Well, the fruit plantations are obviously in rural areas, as are all farms of size. Ironically so is the majority of Guatemalas population. And in a further coincidence, the Mayan descendants make up most of Guatemalas population. What better employees than cheap Indians who are familiar with low wages and don´t mind the sun on their dark skin?
The sizable rural population is directly linked to the historically large indigenous (Amerindian) presence in Guatemala; persons descended from the Mayan Indians account for 56 percent of the nation's total population, making Guatemala the Latin American nation with the largest indigenous population relative to total population. The Mayans were never conquered by the Spanish, but rather were already dispersed to small rural populations when the conquistadors arrived. Even over the hundreds of years since the arrival of the Spanish, the scattered indigenous tribes of Guatemala were extremely difficult to round up and Christianize, and the Spanish were content breeding with the remaining indigenous urbanites, thus leaving the rural population to become an exploited workforce of the society's land owning aristocrats. Today most of the Mayan descended population are either field workers or market vendors in tourist centers. This means cheap fruits and coffee from Guatemala available in the U.S. are grown on the backs and watered by the sweat of underpaid indigenous "Guatemalan" citizens. Your local grocer most likely doesn't have a sticker explaining this system of labor to put on the bananas though. The indigenous people of the country were never given a chance to assimilate or fight against Spanish culture in any organized way. The other 44 percent of the national population is consequently mestizo (of mixed Amerindian-Spanish descent, also called ladino in local Spanish). Traditionally throughout Latin America, ladino means nothing more than an Indian who lost his way and took up Spanish tradition. It seems the Spanish simply came to settle down and over time became a callous breed of half Indians without any sense of historical identity, but rather an unyielding obsession with impressing themselves by creating a mediocre bourgeois full of crass ignorance to the history of the land they call Guatemala and home. It seems no surprise then that despite the the concentration of the population in rural areas, close to 80 percent of physicians are located in the metropolitan area, making health care difficult to access for rural inhabitants. Additionally, water supply and sanitation services reach 92 percent and 72 percent of the urban population respectively, while in rural areas they reach marginally more than 50 percent of the population.

All of these sadly unsurprising facts echo the Guatemalan civil war that stretched on from just after the coup in the year 1960 to 1996. Strangely enough the war was fought and dragged out over the very issues of human civil rights and strengthening the rights of the country´s peasantry. And still today, though Guatemala fronts itself as a democratic country offering equality for all, Guatemala's political legacy is one of authoritarian governments often owned by, and dominated by the oligarchy that makes up about 2% of the country, yet controls 65% of the land. Throughout most of Guatemala's post-colonial history, external political opposition was simply not possible and as a result small covert revolutionary movements grew within the political infrastructure. Armed guerilla movements have been a political presence since the 1960's. In 1982 many small Guerrilla factions joined to form the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG).

So where do the great Mayan descendants stand in all of this? Most of them can be seen walking up and down mountain roads with 100 lbs load of firewood draped over their backs, strapped by a leather strap to their foreheads. And as far as I can see, the hope that dwindles between their cultural abandonment and cultural exploitation into tours of ancient ruins and tourist-bought textiles is small and meek. But one candle can light an entire room. Perhaps someday, with some kind of political backing from the United States, the Mayans could live proud again as they once did as the strongest indigenous force in all of Central America. I suppose it´s enough to arouse second thoughts the next time you buy a bunch of bananas.

emptiness vs repletion

emptiness


In the sombre and modest downtown of San Ignacio, I stumbled upon a dog. I cannot properly refer to the animal as he or she, being as the body was so emaciated, the sex organs were nearly unidentifiable. Because I could not bear to refer to this animal as "it", I am going to choose to speak of her as though she was of my own kind.

My heart broke instantaneously upon setting sights on her; although I have seen some very hapless, haggard and starved creatures since traveling, none have thrown me into such a state of near despair.

She was so thin that each rib was plainly discernible beneath the tightly fitting sheath of skin and patchy, scant fur. Her tail was meager and feeble like a bone near breaking with age and prostration, she had clearly been battered and denied and kicked and eaten at by insects. She gazed timidly but eagerly up at passerby, including us; following a few steps slowly behind, there was a clear sense that she was barely clinging to a miniscule and faded shred of hope that someone, anyone may take pity on her and toss her a crumb, an unwanted and stale sliver of meat. Or perhaps touch her head in passing, scratch behind her neglected ears, decrepit, blanched, and wasted away as they were. Uncaring and ambivalent, cruel and callous ....even the few sympathetic, or the even fewer horrified (only foreigners, such as myself) were too terrified of disease to go near enough to offer a smidgeon of comfort or tenderness.

She trotted and stumbled on meager, unsteady legs after us slowly, watching us with ears pressed back to her head in humiliation and gentle desperation. When we walked too far for her to keep her wayworn eyes upon us in wait and despondent aspiration, her crippled form hobbled to a stop along the curb as she spotted a crushed piece of wrapper and tried to pick at it in vain, hoping for any kind of sustenance. As with the thousand times before, there was no sustenance to be found on these roads, in these alleys and markets and tiendas and bottomless holes; there was nothing life could offer her except for emptiness.

While waiting in line to use the ATM, I could not tear my eyes from her. I nearly broke down in public.

I watched as she nearly got ran over because she was slow to cross the road,
I watched as another dog appeared from the din, a dog that was beyond healthy;fit, with a robust and rich brown coat of fur, shiny and full...a steady and quick gait, alert and lively eyes. I watched her regard him in weak excitement and approach him tentatively, once again seeking some semblance of accord, alliance, or rapport; I watched as she was once more negated, as her strong and virile fellow progeny regarded her with uncomfortable indisposition and moved away from her curious nose and gaze.
I watched her and saw her as more than just one dog; in my eyes she became the widespread carnage, the populace and locality, the indigenous, the starving and diseased, the forgotten, the neglected, a panoramic view of the far less fortunate. I was the hardy dog with lustrous chestnut hair, ignorant of my own blessings, blind to the annihilation right under my flourishing snout.

This instilled a disquiet in my spirit unlike anything I have ever experienced or been able to shake, the witnessing of this dog and the resulting realizations that have followed it like dominos crashing and collapsing into one another (as the steady but inevitable crumbling of an empire). The mental photograph, the supposition-they have possessed me, quietly and subtly, and although indiscernible most times, it has become a savage plague.

I can't stop seeing it.
In my head, it hounds me- the guilt, the shame, the bedraggled image-now slightly faded with age and overcast, hazy and weak and staggering along the littered canals of my mind like a discarded ribbon of film stripped of its carrier and sent spiraling down the dirty streets of the city center of the capital of Cayo.
Every time I think of the food on my plate,
every time I look in the mirror at my healthy frame and feel even the remotest of discontent,
at any given point in the day for vague reasons beyond my perception and cognizance;
It will not leave me.
The impression on my memory, haunting but not quite unwelcome, a privation- a message sent to live within me in a place that was merely prodded in the past, but never quite penetrated as deeply as necessary to leave a lasting brand.
Something so lackluster is not completely without color; learning is so often a kick and punching struggle that leaves one breathless and panting and bruised, sweaty satisfaction attained through the lost blood and muscle aching deep.
Even without the threat of malaria, everyone hates mosquitoes, is terrified by the idea of a creature (size aside) suckling their blood, draining a smidgeon of their essence.

This mental construction is my mosquito.
The unnerving sounds of it buzzing near the drums of my ears wakes me in my sleep,
as I fight the infection,
the (self) sickness.

And I know I'm not supposed to scratch it, but I can't help it, it itches terribly...no, stop, take your fingers away, it will spread, and then the antibiotics will have been trivial. Stop. Leave it. Let it heal. But the urge to prod it is nearly unbearable,
and suddenly it becomes so much more than simply a persistent and agonizing phantasm.
It swells and subsists; I feel it nag me and then fall away; it tugs at my edges and threatens to consume me each time I try to contemplate it and dissimilate it into something I can comprehend and absorb, learn from.

It is not always the mandatory nature of the medicine that leads me to plan days around the next meal; it has become bad habit, and perhaps it is far from gluttony,
but each morsel of my life (figuratively literally, of course) that I have taken for granted has begun to slowly but surely gnaw at me, chewing my insides as I feast upon and swallow the salt of benefaction.
In my eyes tonight I became merely an animal, always in wait of the next feeding time.
It is easy to find scapegoats and we can ignore the truth even as it glares acutely, straight into our irises with undeniable ferocity, but even as we stand strong in the face of the beast, we will not realize it is corroding our core; in the end the result is still destruction. The longer you hide, the more a children's game of pretend seeks delusion and volition becomes, unknowingly, beyond your control.

And I can't share it openly, it is not so simple to express, to understand and to compress into something measurable.
For days I considered sharing it with him; however, I can't allow myself that concession so lightly and so smoothly- for to bestow it onto another means it becomes less pure, less virtuous; it will become something that takes solace and consolation in the compassion of others, but it is not compassion I seek; compassion is a luxury that will only inflate and encourage my own malefaction, and this is not about me. Not nearly.
I don't want help, right now.
She didn't get any.






There is a strange and sad magic here, in Mexico,
I see women wearing purple lipstick like I used to do when I was eleven and twelve,
when I was still vastly unaware of my own vacillation,
and would look upon my own reflection and see nothing more than something to be disguised;
but I love how sugar is accompanied by spice,
everything sweet has an edge.


(C)

Search for the Mayan Spirit

Antigua's streets are littered with brilliant paint chipped away from plaster walls by endless water and exhaust fumes. And too the once great Mayan people are reduced to beggars and street vendors, selling handcraft, squeezing pennies as tourists dig through their stack of hundreds to make change for their best haggled deal on a trinket everyone will forget about until next spring's garage sale.

A woman sitting legs entwined in faded stitch work, tattered and ragged her hands raised up cupped together. Her whimper articulates the very idea of desperation, denoting that our obligation as citizens of a wealthy country is to sustain her, a citizen of a once great empire. From her glazed over eye her stare sang out a tragic past of bowing down, begging for redemption. To have walked past, brushing her hand away and feeling detached enough to let the impression pass through me is enough to reason that the Mayan spirit was shattered and remains in a state of disrepair as their history becomes tourist attractions sanctioned by Central American governments with little concern for much beyond currency. Hers was a song of displacement and of depravity, longing for a mythical dignity. Rain drops hit my jacket, bead up and splashed on to the ground, echoing my song into the night, solely of the sadness and suggestiveness my western cultivation possesses the ability to express.

As twilight dwindled into black, the realization of my improving Spanish sets in and I felt not a sinking but a recession and tried to ease off the uncomfortable feeling in great burst of laughter through my thickening beard, hearing the echoes against concrete walls, knowing that my travels have only sparked the surface of my understanding of a longstanding social injustice, desire to find the truth of the Mayan spirit, and retain some dignity by doing small bits to see the Mayan people flourish in their communities and hope for their future representation in governments throughout Central America.

cities and memory

from the twilight of my empire



It is possible to become accustomed to lungs full of the exhaust of exalt:the smells of brake fumes, burning rubber, tar, smoking wood, red dust. The Guatemalan three seats to the right of me on the back of the chicken bus is reading a pocket Bible and I can't remember the last time I was so calm in the face of death. What does it mean that hope is a hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear? See the world as yourself. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things.
All things,including my bulbous insecurities and endless questions and my weakness. All things, especially the vertigo billowing in my stomach as the bus careens sharply around the corners of roads with no barriers, no guardrails, no protection from the sudden and lethal cliff edges and drop-offs, the abyss of mist beyond the rainforest foliage and mountain torsos.
[We might call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.]
There is farming terrain in the highlands of Guatemala, on the steep hillsides overlooking the valleys and volcanos... hunched brown-skinned women walking along the narrow roads-ambivalence their survival, worn weaving fingers their livelihood. Everywhere there are tin roofs and stained seeds of humanity. Nothing is clean, but clean has no holds here, holds no meaning. And I am stunned. I am humbled. I have never been more aware of what is real, what is true. Never more alive than I am in this brief instant,
absorbing the wild matted furs of starved, forgotten dogs;
beholding the chipped cemented bricks ground from the clay of cave tunnels and molded into habitations and hearths that glow even through the disfigured, sagging scars of poverty, ignorance, and nonpartisan eyes;
observing the baskets bearing slaved-over vocations and local foods (balanced on skulls that ache with the memories of a people that once beat the rains of corrupt reigns and hardship through aligning each and every point to the Source.)

First to Panajachel, city of a thousand plaited pigments, rises above and along the deep subterranean lake Atitlan, which at its deepest point reaches over 300 meters, or 1000 feet. Mayan culture is embedded deep into the cells of the stretched skin of the Tuk Tuk drivers, and while we struggle to remember, to recall, las cosas que nosotros no podríamos comprender posiblemente (yet), we slowly begin to unravel the mystery of ourselves and one another. It is Panajachel that we consider kayaking in the raging lakewaters while the white caps of rain storm waves roll like the R's of the gods. It is Panajachel that I first began to consider the true possibility that all the glory and splendor I have been exploring so freely and fortunately will all be dust soon.

It is Panajachel that I meet an amazing German woman named Regina (the g in Regina is pronounced like an h)- a woman with bright red hair, glowing blue eyes, and the most calming and joyously genuine laugh to ever grace my ears; Regina, who speaks four languages and travels all over and is good friends with the locals of all towns; Regina, who makes natural medicines and moved her headquarters from an official building to an outdoor gazebo strewn with prayer flags and orange scarves and incense and calla lillies; Regina, who used to be a Mayan priestess, who believes and studies all religions and healed me with her hands through my first ever Reiki session while the Guatemalan rain softly rose and fell in tune with the essence of her movements. I spent much time explaining all of my digestive issues due to my ghost of a gallbladder, all the unexplainable symptoms I once had and still occasionally experience- and because of this, we started our session late. In the midst of the session, when she was working on helping me release my tension and pain-the clotted blockages in my "energy" (however crazy and new-aged ridiculous this may sound, the changes in my body afterwards were no joke)-she spoke a brief prayer out loud that simply stated "We need more time, please," and not fifteen minutes later she received a phone call from her client coming the hour after mine saying he would be late. And Regina, all she said after this phone call was "Sometimes its good when they come later." We later spoke of the power of the mind over the body, and she told me before she began working her magic "From this point on, you will be healthy." When she was finished, my limbs were thrumming with a dynamism unlike anything describable, something that broke over the core of me and my inner linings upon the gentle placement of her hands, the warmth of her pressed palm across my flesh and the wells beneath my skin.
And then, there were hummingbirds.
My eyes were closed, but he saw them...many of them, zooming around the gazebo as Regina taught me how to breathe easy again. And his voice penetrated the hypnotic calm as he watched, rang out to me like a heartsong,
and I knew in that instant that this is it.


And then once again back to Antigua, where we have come to familiarize ourselves; due to our raging digestive tracts and the lack of ability to keep food in our systems (hence:weakness), we skipped the trek up the active volcano in the thunder and downpour and instead chose to celebrate our monthiversary at La Escudilla. La Escudilla specializes in false window walls and windows to the soul, fabulous soups and outrageous corking charges- in other words, we paid extra to bring in our own bottle of light French Chianti, chosen carefully for us budgeting foreign students by the Spanish man in the winery shop who told me my English is clear and understandable....for a Texan. Here the motorcycles, bikes, and mopeds all swerve towards you in the streets, even when you match your pace to the natives', and as the droplets cool the stones beneath the soles silent feuds will erupt on the dimming streets like civil wars; wars that soon quiet themselves as love breaks across the anomalous architecture under the foamy clouds that only show their faces post blue hour, pre storm. The thunder melds into the rumbling of real blood, the blood in our bodies streaming and beating in time, synchronizing and plotting the possibilities of joined forces. One thing is for sure: passion is not lacking this night, in this city,
especially between mi novio y mi.


And upon the dawning of the morning after,
The wind opens up to the Northeast and grows sticky-warm like Caribbean balm-and the sporadic pops of palms and shared milky treats beneath the shade of folded trees means that we're moving on, on the road to Rio Dulce. Our driver speeds through the wild streets strung throughout the mantanas, only one hand on the wheel-other one tapping along to old 90s tunes- as he passes the "inflammable" trucks and buses in the opposite lane. He speaks rapid and amiable Spanish when we stop to sweat and half-picnic, and asked Miguel when we were going to have our first child before he shared his bag of Mexican candy. And now, instead of eating ripe organic bananas from Central Market with Guatemalan origin stickers on them, we are driving with a van full of diverse people who are now friends, not strangers, along a road lined with banana trees:seeing the actual, real thing(s) and beginning to connect the bright saffron fruits with the exploitation of a people that are as timeless as the intangible heritage of humanity.

The Mayans are still tough, thick and richly vibrant like their chattels of cacao cash crops and enterprises of uncut jade-but for the first time in my life, I am coming to understand the dysphoria behind their story and, as a result, respect them with a sincerity and ferocity unlike anything I could have prepared myself for before embarking on this spontaneous adventure with el amor de mi vida. Our monthiversary date and debate was subtly, but beyond significantly, one of the most eye-opening nights of my time thus far, incarnating a slow burn revelation and esoteric epiphany that perhaps had already been birthed, and has now begun stewing in my veins ever since. Afterwards, our stop at Quiriguá (pronounced: kitty-wa) only exacerbated the growing fascination; we wandered among the eclipsed temples, the archeological assemblies and relic remnants, and slowly but surely a spore began fostering life in the conceit of me.
The painstakingly etched stone monuments ached with a primeval wisdom that made the imagined Edens of ancient civilizations rise in my mind like jutting bones on truth that switched my blood's direction. The red sandstone is weather worn and paled with age, now blanched but shockingly moving and vivid regardless; encompassed by shared Connections and Constructions and Cycles and Curiosity's lovechild of apocalypse, the views of the ruins articulate newfound knowledge, transposing views, empirical ideas, regenerated conceptions, virgin beliefs.

The Spanish didn't come to Central America to do labor- and so upon their arrival, the indigenous people were forced to become slaves. However, most of the Mayans were gone by the time the Spanish got here. How exactly they slipped into the great Unknown, unknowingly, quietly and gracefully- that remains a mystery. However, when you walk the streets of Panajachel, or make the hour long drive through the rainforest roads steeply and sharply cutting through the mountains to visit the tightly packed markets of Chichicastenango, the people still speak to one another with evolved Mayan tongue in K'iche', and you see the archaic spirit of their ancestors bubbling- still thickly- among the cluttered street vendors,where you are sure to be pickpocketed by young girls taught the tools for survival from their parents. (Trust my personal experience.) In this city, where we spend two rainy-season nights, the bathroom ants disappear by morning, the drains sound like drums, and as Miguel put it so flawlessly- the locals' only chance to truly be themselves is when it rains.
Today finds us enjoying the consolidated buzzing jungle breeze off the waters of Rio Dulce, our second day on the shoulder blade of the Caribbean, tucked into a hotel that consists of little floating huts in a mangrove swamp teeming with Amazonian insects and wildlife. The market here teems with the local trademark of freshly pulled pineapple, laid beside rows of rainbow fruits with unknown names and vegetables ripe with youth and nutrients;we swat the sand flies and press warm quetzales into the dirty ashed hands of the citizen sellers among the bins of dry beans and nuts of every shape and size. And afterwards, our luggage is loaded into a boat driven by a benign-eyed man named Armando who takes us across the murky teal waters to our temporary homestead in the hidden armbend of the wild.

My skin is nothing but a sheen of sticky- the nectar of sweat, Deet, sunscreen, and the juice of a creamy popsicle laden with shreds of fresh coconut. In these lands paralleling the rainforest, so tremblingly close to God and the fountainhead, as soon as something sweet and fruitful falls, the opulence of energy and breath (Being) swarms and bursts forth in an overgrowth upon it- like a dying pine tree's last hoorah, the final burst of flourish and viability and blooms before it bows out (like the Mayans).
*The last Mayan civilizations fell on their own- they were not overthrown.
Just because you know your time does not make you conquered. You may fall, but that does not make you fallen.
Letting go and giving in does not always, in the long run, mean the disease wins.
Preserved, written in the galaxies' smile and violently beautiful, is the powerful dignity of every enduring population and every invisible city, strength and resilience sprouting from the dirt like the backwards roots of trees that unify ground and sky.


The lands are so fertile here- the soil smells like origins of birth, the earth like true religion.


Today we set out on a boatride to Livingston, a tiny virile and tactile Caribbean town at the mouth of the Rio Dulce at the Gulf of Honduras. The trip took us along little hut villages with wooden bungalows and shanties modestly rising from the depths of the river in the scrub and brush of the jungle. Along the swampy tendrils and vines of river-meets-sea, flowers break upon the water's surface and fruits hang from the branches, sustaining the leaves as the leaves respire and inject the air with virtue. The women walk to the edge of the land to wade the water and wash their family's garb each time the sun calls time, and the men build and bolster the thatched roofs and wooden walls with bare hands unsullied and only fortified by decades of hard labor. We stopped for a quick dip in a natural hot spring, and for the first time I nearly savored the smell of sulfur as the hot-cold layers of liquid shifted and turned over around and embracing my bare feet.

And then a moment in my life I will never lose, leave behind, or forget:back en route on the boat, at one point we slowed our momentum, the fluidity of pace, and suddenly a bare-boned & hollow wooden canoe fashioned out of a tree trunk seemed to appear out of nowhere, being motored forward by a little native girl with smooth skin and hair that were dark and pure as the fibers of volcanic ash. She was wearing modern clothing but had the exotic face of an extrinsic angel; she hardly spoke, only rowed her way up to the side of our much larger boat and anchored herself to the side of us, meeting our eyes fearlessly and ambivalently. In her hands was a small baby turtle, and she held him up for us to survey and study, watching our faces closely. She held him there and sat motionless, one hand holding her hand-carved barge attached to our boat, the other posing the turtle midair, eyes going from her prize to our expressions and back again. Soon two more of the same boats were upon us, the captains bearing an undeniable resemblance to this little goddess- presumably her siblings-and bringing with them in their pitted vessels handicrafts such as shell bracelets, and blue crabs that were still alive and squirming in their small, sable hands. The second arrival brought a boy that was clearly the oldest, and another small native girl with long silky curls as dusky as her swarthy skin that looked me square in my eyes and smiled. They had no shame or apprehension, and possessed not one ounce of aversion or qualm; these children came to us conveying no pretense, nothing even remotely close to insecurity or dishonesty or trepidation. Our boat chugged slowly along, and they drifted alongside for only a brief time, not speaking unless spoken to, and when addressed, responding with quiet voices that sounded like strings of bells and lines of marimbas. When the boat resumed its speed once more and they drifted off, fading back into the floating lilly layers, our voices were lost in the wind but their presence was not, seeming to me to be a reminder from God that at the core of all things is a joy lucid and elementary, a reverence for natural beauty.

The seawater nestled between the rainforest is lush and the depth of its scent prolific- enveloping and calming.

Livingston itself is a quirky and smoky secret jewel of the world- a strange mixture of Garifuna, Mayan, Indian, and Ladino people and culture, the supposed descendants of shipwrecked slaves from Nigeria. The village is Jerry Garcia’s rumored Caribbean seaside bungalow hideout, well known for its warrior dances and drums fashioned out of turtle shells,echoes of an accented pigeon pidgin English that smacks of Jamaica and and a fabulous coconut Caribbean-Creole seafood soup called tapado .The other side of Guatemala. All the shops and restaurants that line the main streets are owned by Guatemalans... The Garifuna have been relegated to the side streets, the edges of town, they live along the shore. But it’s the Garifuna culture that sells in Livingston.

In the sweltering heat that simmers in the ebony and brunette skin of the residents of this Caribbean community lives Polo, an aging Garifuna rastafarian man with a marred bottom lip and a red muscle shirt made from netting. This man leads the tourists to the boundaries of the town where ocean meets land-which takes only ten minutes to reach- to a small shack of a restaurant with one fan and only a handful of tables, owned by a woman from Mexico named Maria that had learned how to cook as a child and lived in India for many years (specializing in the best curry of your life-and yes, she WILL make you smell her spices, no exceptions). In the kitchen, a dark skinned somber faced woman with callused hands is the only assistant, sweat perspiring under her pink dress as she slaves over the ordered food;and Polo swears this is the best place in the town to get good food, the only truly worthwhile eatery (of the maybe 10 places), a cheap way to indulge in the infamous local soup. Made from coconut milk and plantains and fresh caught shrimp, crab, and tuna- this soup is spoken of widely and turned into words that spread, and the foreign visitors brave and ignore the heat rising from the streets specifically to have a taste.
Here, abused dogs with tails chewed and eaten by fleas and sagging bellies newly emptied of puppies take shelter beneath the isolated and sporadic shade; the children frolic in playgrounds of simply steel and metal, and climb trees behind the cement and wire community washing area. The homes are brightly painted but cower behind barbed wire, and the street tables bear jewelry made from string and the hulls, husks, skeletons of sea...or hollowed out coconut shells now intended to make music or tote food. The women offer braiding services for less than a dollar when they get desperate, after the first few turned down attempts- and its hard to refuse when you see how they hungrily watch you sort out your change after you pay for lunch.

And so here is where our boat journey took us-to this hole in the wall on the seaside, Tilingo Lingo, home of Maria's cooking and "Mexican lemonade"-lemonade made from the fresh puree from whole lemons. We ate salads out of coconut bowls and learned slang from the local indigenous language of the Garifunas, laughing as Polo made fun of the white statue that sat tall in the distance on an island off the shore ("you can't put a statue of a white man in a town of blacks, mon.")
Polo taught us that the Garifuna people were not a seafaring people that crossed the seas to come to MesoAmerica like so many believe- no, they came from the Caribs, not Africans, and they were here already, have always been here, from the beginning. Venezuela was their home base, and when the ships came over carrying the slaves, the Garifuna race was compromised and molded into the misconception and misunderstood breed they have become. He told us that he went to college in Chicago in 72, and Jerry Garcia paid for it, and bought him his first guitar- according to him, they would sit around and "smoke ganja and tie-dye." We spoke of primal music and his hands rattled invisible drum beats as he described to us the rolling bellies and hips and asses of the black women in the village. Much to my surprise, when the much-anticipated soup arrived and was set in front of me on our table outside under the fronds, it contained not only milky sediment and greens and whole shrimp, but an entire, mostly whole dead fish (eyeballs and all) and crab. Each bowl of soup, that is, less than US $ 6 bucks, had a huge fish warming in the broth. Suddenly I understood Maria's broken English from earlier: "90% meat, only 10% bones!" I watched our tour guide rip his fish apart hungrily, break the crab into halves and pull bits of meat and fat from the sea dwellers and although slightly nauseated, I thoroughly enjoyed the numerous bites of the soup I did manage- its only fair you eat like the locals in foreign locations, anyway.

When you first arrive in Livingston, it smells like something familiar- like the childhood nostalgia of sweet bread in Germany, or cinnamon rolls from home- and its only after an older plump Garifuna woman walks by your table and, seeing the color of your skin and the remnants of an opulent spread, offers you still-warm and sticky homemade treats made from honey, coconut, cacao, and ginger (nothing ever free, always cheap).
Sometimes it is only right to give in.
Memory is not a weakness, but living in the past is not the same thing as memory.
Very recently, the person I look up to most told me "Maybe the crossroads is this: either you continue remembering your mistakes or you decide what is important (to you) right now, and act accordingly."

Tonight I will fall asleep in forests brimming with howler monkeys, beneath white canopied beds that attempt (without success) to keep the insects out, and I will dream of the things no one understand yet, of worlds that have not quite been squeezed from between the seams of years. I will rise early in the swamp, before the sun takes its first stretch, to ride horses along bridges while it is still temperate outside, and my contentedness will be as fresh and plush as the bread we will purchase in the market on our way out, back on the road to Flores- where we will spend our last two days in this country-at least for a few weeks-before moving on to the tropics.

Guatemala has unfolded petals upon petals of my heart that I remained unaware of the presence and potential of until this past week, and it dwells within a cave of me I have always kept my distance from, in cowardice and denial and laziness.

The secret lies in the way every gaze skims over patterns following one another as in a musical composition where not one note can be changed or displaced.



Miel

PS More pictures sooooon

y cada vez más me veo teniendo visiones de viajar al ombligo de la tierra y

y ya siento flotar mi gran raiz libre y desnuda... y

each day is a growing smile

Given the right state of mind, in the progress of life and movement from day to day everyone feels connected to the core of themselves in a more intimate way than the day before. Socrates, know thyself, all that.

Some travel to run away, some travel because they don't know how they're running away, but I travel because I want to examine myself. My hopes are that Guatemala will give me a reason to hold on to the center of myself. In all the times I have travelled before, none have felt so pure as this trip. So with Christina's hand in mine and 7 other Australians and Brits, I want to breathe in every second. To open myself in a new way, to understand the people and origins of culture in Central America. From La Frontera of Mexico to the Aguila Islet, Latin America is one race separated only by the stress of modernization, translated tribal feuds into corrupt forms of democracy, and modern country borders that claim a name rather than an origin. I intend to see the beginning, the source of life in the vast landscape that make up the true and first Americas. Today begins our travels up the Ruta Maya. Today marks a new understanding of why human consciousness has taken such a strange and dark turn away from the simplicity of existing as humans have since the beginning. Today begins the journey to the source of things.

Cuidense,
Miguel

Hold on to the Center

Wake up

Form dawdles, lazily rustling and beginning to come into awareness lazily, leisurely. The city is loud in the morning. The light seeps through the window panes of indigo, periwinkle, moss, and apricot and enter the lines of flesh, eyes flutter open softly to acknowledge the sun's early advent; outside there are clicks of heels, and the chicken buses and clumsy jalopies and motorbikes rumble along the wet stone streets, clattering and blustering and clangoring and hurtling, plodding and blumbering. The constant loud pop of richocheting engines sounds like gunshots, a reminder of the short and dark faced Guatemalan who clutched his rifle by his side within the bank walls the day before. On the other side of the rich and heavily wooded hotel doors, the missionaries are chattering in familiar phrases, chuckles echoing in the tiled hallways and intermingling with the lively bursts of boisterous Spanish. The patchworks of earth tones sewn into the quilt are thin so that skin can soak in,
inhale,
revel in
the buzz of energy in the air, and a lover's even, imperturbable breaths are near the ear, soothing and nourishing as the mind delays the body's rising.

Candid laughter of your paramour is like the music of a Brazilian rosewood guitar, rare and ephemerally beautiful like a particular dying species of tree (more easily attained in these lands then the ones from whence you came.)Your dreams were full of old friends as though your spirit remembers this undiluted joy, sweet like the city's sugarcane and childhood nostalgia. When finally and begrudgingly you climb from beneath the covers, disentangling yourself from the circle of warmth, the tiles are frigid under your roseate toes, but it is a welcome rawness.

In the tiny bathroom in this little stowed away piece of paradise, which is done in all pastel and porcelain peach and pinkish salmon, a woman observes the new waves of her air dried hair; the disparate minerals in the water brought its natural fluidity to the surface like blood rising in the heat of misty nights when the moon is full and voluptuous, glowing hot. The woman could swear her teeth are whiter here, her smile filling the nooks and crannies of her face more fully and gleaming like reflections of neon fish scales in the sea.

You can see the yellows of flowers through the net of teabag, and the scent of roasted beans from a nearby coffee planatation fills the birds' throats with chirps, fills your cup with their crisp and local aroma, the taste of jubilation. All colors are more pure in the early light. The staff is taken aback when they are addressed amiably in their native language, as though they are accustomed to remaining invisible to the visiting patrons. But they are not invisible, or dead. They have whispery voices of warm almíbar, they are beautiful and alive. Two small caniches with fluff of neutral colors pounce and bound through the courtyard, barking and chasing one another around the fountain and clay pots and and leafs of greenery; they war over rubber toys and lie contentedly in the lap of strangers.

The night prior is still thickly simmering in the bellies of companions like the most expensive of Guatemalan rums, aged 23 years (yes,older than they) that they toasted to their new friends and fellow wanderers after dinner; dinner under the sway of a gauzy cloth draped ceiling and light bulbs dangling from wires, on a spread accented by brightly striped woven cloths and ceramic pots filled with coarse salt and pepper. They are rejoicing, in quiet wonder and wide eyed at their untrodden surroundings and at the instinctive and sudden self awareness, the feeling of finding their calling, of taking solace in letting go and remembering what is important. (What is simple, what is true.) The source is here.

Here, there are stomping mules in the streets and cafes with sinks that sit on top of counters near ornate glasses full of dark lavender alagappan blooms; there are delightful market lunches of fresh slices of tomatoes, red and green jalapenos, cilantro, sweet onions, the brightest and greenest avocados one will ever encounter- all spread upon soft and pungent Mexican cheese in humbly miniature and hot tortillas. Diet cokes are called "light coca-cola" and the Brits sitting close by remind you of the backbone of the language you often times leave behind in forgetfulness. You're beginning to think in mixtures of accents and catch yourself nearly speaking aloud with words that are not quite your own- but you are perfectly satisfied with that. There is no toilet paper allowed in the ancient pipes, so it is necessary to retrain your habits and cultural predisposition, to allow for the complete surrender to the phenomenon of revelation in your bones.












-Miel

Under the Shroud of a Looming Central American Winter Rain

Bees fly differently in Antigua than in Texas. Perhaps it's the air, or the sunlight through rainy season clouds. Regardless the reason, something in Guatemala makes its way into the blood stream and flows freely like Spanish off the tongue. Hummingbirds hover over winter flowers and a pair of brown eyes widens with a grin as she watches a tile fountain trickle and drip.

Guatemala is a country filled up with deeply religious taxi drivers, invisible street names, creepy old men who eye my girl up and down when walking past, and curious stray dogs who follow us back to the hostel after breakfast and rich coffee grown in the mountains protecting the city. Volcanos watch over pedestrian shoulders and each passer by politely spits a Buenos Dias beneath a whimsical grin jutted out on a strong Mayan jaw bone.

I have something to find in this place. Maybe a better patience for my scattered mind. Maybe a home to return to some day. Or maybe a piece of myself I have yet to unravel. But with the love of my life by my side and an open mind to myself and the land surrounding us, I am without doubt that my soul will find a new and happy shape here.

The sun always shines through the afternoon rains and the morning always follows long nights of travel and stress. Getting here is gone and I could not be more excited to be exactly where I am and wherever I may go.

Cuidanse,
Miguelito

la Guatemala fresca

The earth has not forgotten Antigua

Before you can truly shake hands with a city for the first time, you must lose yourself in it, purposely once, accidentally twice (at minimum.) It is also necessary to take the foreign air into your lungs and convert your breath into a reminder that home can be emulated and composed anywhere.

Amongst slow rain, the boxed and barred buildings swell proudly with a past the colors of wilting indian paintbrushes, or leathered folds of aged skin beneath a pair of Mayan eyes.
The people greet you in the streets, the movements of their tongues stimulating the rising of an unspeakable desire that laid dormant in you like two of the three volcanoes that surround the cobblestoned streets strewn with week old maraschino cherries and mango skins. The smell is familiar to him, and his Spanish bursts forth in torrents, a hidden fire that had cowered and smoldered until the perfect moment...
now, falling out of him and building a suddenly fierce fascination and need to copulate with this sensual yet simple culture. My Spanish is broken but eager, the timid toe touches to test the rippling waters; Si, entiendo mas que puedo hablar, pero tengo un magnífico profesor. Cars backfire and echo from the cracks of stiff stucco, packing heat like the rumbling of rocks down the jagged terrain, roughly rising from the catty corners of the outermost boundaries, high in the air and pitched like screams.

The birds sing differently in Antigua; perhaps they are praying for the survival of the skin of trees upon the rivulets of mountains, in case of an eruption as per Volcan Pacaya. It is invierno here, winter, but the balmy and sweat pinched air beads with dust and the sun still beats its drums to a temperate tempo, and the cemented coral fountains sing of (nuevo) Spain.
We have already seen our first hummingbird, chasing our growth, piercing our sense of fortuity, following us curiously like the thin nosed black dog this morning, trotting in search of a gentle hand or a greasy scrap.

Guatemala spreads both upward and descends below, and the hotel we are assigned to for the first night of our journey is better referred to as Villa Posada ("Los Bucaros"), given it's small courtyard terrace speckled with plants and glass patio tables, wrought iron chairs and lamps just like I foresaw in my dreams weeks and weeks ago [read my other blog, the entry titled "deliver me"]. The garden is a tableau of lucid, primitive beauty, and what is most artful about this hidden city is its artlessness- its subtle shades of sienna and jade, the quiet revelry of the sky whose smile predicts rain, the rustle of the laundry on the rooftop lines like the laughter of its residents.

No one's words are like my love,
like his. He is slowly curing me of my fear of flying, and we did not stop touching the entire way to the airport yesterday morning. His hand was there in place of calming drugs, and I happily left the Xanax my mother sent me off with in the plane seat pocket on our last flight (fearing cutoms searches but mostly just aware suddenly of how I never needed it to begin with.) I felt it wash over me while we were streamlining the heights of atlantic altitude above the Gulf of Mexico, and I wondered if he could hear the prayers in my head as he leaned his own against it. Yet my breath was steady by the last of the three flights, and I abruptly discovered a peace nestled within me that has never before shown its face so blatantly and laid bare, contentedly vulnerable and strong, stripped bare of all pretense and insecurity.Para que, y todo, le doy las gracias Miguel.
Someone I look up to once told me that traveling with someone you care about will reveal to you whether or not you can truly stand them, the ultimate compatibility factor confirmation. It will tell you whether or not the other person is someone you want always on your side.
And to that I say-
as we stared across from one another this morning, over a surprisingly cheap yet epic breakfast of crepes filled with pineapple, fresh squeezed cantalope juice, french toast, papaya, and mantaquilla (chamomile) tea-
our silence spoke volumes,
and the gleam in both our eyes said that there are anything but regrets in regards to the decision of how to spend our summer,
and with whom.

Last night we were shuttled to our hostel by a kind faced, bushy eyebrowed Guatemalan by the nombre of Jose Maria; our taxi ride through the wet strung out streets of Guatemala City in the core of evening traffic brought us a new friend. He spoke no English but we still learned about his wife and beautiful kids, he prayed for ("with") us on and off throughout the drive and spoke of the blue of the ocean, the orange land-the world's resemblance to an orange-all these things he knew and wanted to use en/por vida.

Lonelyplanet says "If you want a true picture of what Guatemala is, Antigua is not it. But you still can't miss it."
The native coffee hit my tongue this morning and I have never so thickly tasted the purity of freedom and joy.

And so our adventure begins.

Salud,
Christina