So Long, Farewell

I am not above excoriating myself for the amusement of my readers. Thus, I produce Exhibit A: my swizzle stick collection, amassed over several years of elders’ visits to hotel bars, airlines and casinos and preserved in a (now) vintage Levi’s denim drawstring pouch which could probably be sold on Ebay for at least $20, if I did that kind of thing – which I don’t. Exhibit B: two pieces of chewed gum, each tied safely in its own sandwich bag and labeled with a piece of masking tape indicating the date and the objet d’amour who gifted the gum that was subsequently chewed and stored away for posterity. Travis Nutt, Travis Smutt! He’s probably fat with ten children and debt. Exhibit C: dozens of journals filled with bubbly handwriting (mine), describing obsessions of the mind and heart, details of Plathological self-loathing and neuroticism long since left behind (obviously), and lists of ways in which I was determined at age 17 to change the world, make it better – and more importantly, to reinvent myself.

I’m far less sentimental today than I once was, which is why most of this stuff is being recycled, burned, donated and otherwise disposed of. A rolling stone lets go of her childhood memorabilia. Speak now if you are seeking microscopic ivory elephant statues that fit inside a hollowed-out soybean, various fanzines from early ‘90’s indie rockers, worry dolls, Russian reissues of Led Zeppelin Zozo from Eastern Siberia or a rainbow crocheted hackey sack from Portland’s Saturday Market.

For years, I’ve managed to dodge the dreaded task of sifting through the accumulated material of growing up and coming of age in a time when the physical universe was still observed and revered – times of photographs you could hold in your hands, journals, fanzines, handwritten letters, record albums, photo albums. . . all things I imagine will not be the burden or the fascination of adult children visiting their parents’ homes 15 years from now. My parents finally excavated my childhood bedroom – this, after years it served as a dumping ground for everything the family didn’t know what to do with. Naturally, I don’t take this personally or read anything into it. But here on the dawn of a new decade, the first 18 years of my life – the things I didn’t take when I moved east for college – are consolidated in these seven or eight boxes.

So goodbye childhood, goodbye 2009, goodbye ‘aughts.’ It’s been fun, but we’re ready for something new. Show us how it is. . .

Firemen, Strippers and the Crown Chakra

It’s hard to be original. No matter what you think, how you feel, or what you do, someone has thought, felt, or done it before – and probably better than you. Yes, it kind of sucks. Maybe being original isn’t that important; I’m not really sure. I just remember being taught in film school that there are actually only ten stories and all the different myths we live and tell ourselves through books and movies are just variations of one of those ten fundamental plot lines.

More than being original, these days I’m focused on the realization of things – and specifically, uncovering the paths that lead from thought or feeling to manifestation on the planet Earth. I’ve been lucky enough to get myself around the world on non-business related missions for more than half my life – winks, handshakes, lots of faking my way through languages of which I had little more than folk song knowledge. . . and lots of interest accruing on my student loan debt. Every time I return to New York, I feel a little stressed about where my next paycheck will come from, but more, I feel happy that if I died in a freak accident or found out I had a rare fatal disease, at least I would have just gone on vacation.

Speaking of student loan debt, I bought this book about Sardegna when I was in graduate school. I’m not sure what prompted it – probably the photo of the surreally turquoise Mediterranean Sea on the cover. I’m not above being seduced by packaging. The purchase is also dated because it was before I adopted Lonely Planet as my guide of preference. The Eyewitness guides are arguably more bougie, heavier, and kind of weirdly organized but they have nice photos.

I bought the book and did little more with Sardegna but think about it for the last seven or eight years – I hadn’t returned to Italy since I left at the end of my junior year abroad (a cliché with much redeeming value), although Italy had always been my first choice for the location of Bacchanal 2010. The Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the coast of Sicily, were the site of its conception -- somewhere on the shores of Lipari or Salina. Incidentally, Salina is where Pablo Neruda was exiled until he returned to Chile -- if you’re into poetry or rebel artists.

I decided then that one day I would have a villa by the sea and would invite my friends from all over the world to come and eat olives and drink wine and dance and play music and swim and run around naked. Giving myself 13 years to get through school, pay bills and acquire coastal real estate seemed adequate at the time. If you’re reading this, you probably already know all about Bacchanal 2010 and may have even started pricing plane tickets to various potential locations – given the exchange rates and the cultivation of my Latina persona in recent years (salsa dancing, Spanish language schools, gold hoops, extensive time spent in Mexico and South+Central Americas), Argentina, Mexico and Colombia are all in the running, as well. It will also probably be a rental villa. Stay tuned.

But I digress. . .

One of my yoga homies – hilarious, fun, talented, Italian, and full of wanderlust – mentioned that she’d be in Sardegna for the month of August and invited me to visit. I figured this was the time to realize my dream. I considered the politically incorrect decadence of a three-day trip to the white sands and crystalline waters of the Costa Smeralda on the island of Sardegna and decided to do it anyway. After spending the night in my headphones, reading Hamlet and eating dark chocolate in a coffee shop in a London airport, I arrived to a beautiful, colorful morning in Santa Teresa de Gallura -- the proverbial Bloody Mary to my travel hangover. By the time lunch in the outdoor courtyard of my hosts and fellow Pisceans was over, I felt my Italian persona reawakening, started remembering verbs and the operatic inflections of Italian speech that found their way into my ears and my heart so long ago.

I followed on my newly-acquired motorino as Cristina and Claudio led the way on sun-kissed mountain roads to Capo Testa, the point furthest north in all of Sardegna – the crown chakra. Claudio read a book while Cristina tossed me a snorkeling mask and ushered me into the luminous waters to explore the world below the surface. We emerged later – first for a nap, then for a yoga photo shoot on wind-sculpted granite rocks that reach up out of the sea like the calloused hands of Neptune.

With Cristina and Claudio and their friends, we ate frutta di mare and risotto, drank vermentino, swam naked in the dark of early morning, then rode home along a winding moonlit highway that wrapped around the sea below like a lover’s arms.

Getting back to the topic of originality, I heard a funny comment the other day while sitting in a lobby in Manhattan. A man and his wife were sitting next to each other and the man was reading the newspaper.

“The Daily News is all worked up about firemen being asked to wash elephants,” he told her. I considered this.

“Why shouldn’t a fireman wash an elephant?” I thought. Fighting fires and washing elephants both involve a command of large hoses. (Engage the metaphor if it pleases you.) I could see the logic. Of course, logic isn’t exactly the handmaiden of emotion – much to the collective chagrin of humanity. And thus we suffer. . .which leads me to my final point.

I watched “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” the other night. If you haven’t seen it, you should. One of many best lines, spoken from friend to recently dumped friend who had developed a crush on a concierge in a resort where he was staying, “I bet you think strippers like you, too,” sort of sums up the illogic of the heart. We believe what we want to believe about things, live some variation of one of those ten plot lines, getting caught up in the details that make our stories unique. Should want of originality stop us from doing things like junior year in Florence or sitting in cafes in Paris or falling in love or being seduced by the Mediterranean lifestyle? I don’t think so. We still want to experience these things, even if they're not unique. Maybe it just means that we have to make more visits to the crown chakra, literal or metaphorical. Maybe this is where we can at least achieve a clearer perspective on things. . . as long as I can get there on a motorcycle.

Heart-Shaped Bones

My nephew Owen is six, and a budding geologist -- full of facts and replete with treasures to show and tell. When I visit them in the countryside west of London, Owen and his younger brother Rhys greet me in the mornings; we lie on my bed and talk while I wake up. Owen informed me this morning that the fastest a six year old can run is 15 miles per hour; the fastest man, 23. Through my young nephews, I’ve received an introductory education about several subjects of general inquiry – animals, fast cars, obscure Japanese toys. . . they are versed on several topics of wonder. While other kids like to be lions and tigers, Rhys is fond of hanging from bars and pretending he is a sloth. I’m constantly reminded of where there are holes in my body of knowledge. I read up a bit on meerkats – one of the boys’ favorite animals -- and have discovered that the meerkat and I actually have a lot in common: We are long-limbed mammals with broad peripheral vision and are partially immune to certain types of venom. We are known to engage in social behavior such as wrestling matches and foot races. Furthermore, meerkats are commonly misclassified, so we share that mishegoss. Really, we are more similar than we are different. It’s easy to forget these things.

The boys have a trampoline in their backyard, which I guess is the big trend for kids around Reading this summer. I can’t resist a trampoline. I also remember being smaller and the distinct thrill of an adult who was willing to play. It’s easy to forget what it feels like exist in a world that is limited and yet to be vast in imagination. It almost seems that this relationship inverts as we get older – the outer world of relationships and experience becomes vast but the imagination more limited. We get stuck in ways of being and both forget what it was like before, as well as failing to imagine what it could be like down the road.

I’ve been to Paris several times, and in the last three years have been visiting at the end of each summer with a dear friend. We roam through winding streets, across bridges and through regal gardens from one loosely defined destination to the next, discovering some little or big thing of beauty everywhere we look. To add to the elevated aesthetics of their environment, Parisians themselves seem to have a preternatural talent for effortless glamour. Forays into Parisian pharmacies have confirmed my suspicion that the women spend a lot of time and money on skin care -- and I have taken note, made my investments. . . but I also marvel at how a sulky greasy-haired girl wearing a neck scarf and smoking a cigarette can look like Coco Chanel's grandaughter.

One of the great things about returning regularly to a strange place that is familiar -- as Paris has become for me -- is that it becomes a way of charting your own shifts in perspective, your own transformations and achievements, firmly rooted patterns and neurotic compulsions – and and I usually return home from it all with something new to wear. My friend and I spend time taking stock of things, charting course for the months until we’ll meet up next. Even the way I relate to Paris is a study in old habits versus new discoveries – I find myself wanting to return to places we’d been and to honor certain established traditions and rituals, while also being eager to discover something new. We eat escargot and steak, drink wine, sit talking in cafes for hours, visit our favorite works of art, shop for shoes and lingerie. Sometimes we meet interesting characters. I was visiting a friend in a popular bar the other night and was approached by a man from Bordeaux who identified himself as the Archangel Emmanuel, and then proceeded to tell me pretty much his unabridged life philosophy, followed by an animated recitation of Rage Against the Machine lyrics. I seem to attract eccentric creatures in all parts of the world.

The problem with new things is that you don’t know whether you’re going to like them or not, while at least with something that’s familiar, you know what you’re getting. It is a distinct certainty that Paris will be attractive and charming, expensive and filled with hotels bearing lame cramped bathrooms. Sometimes my friend and I make up stories about monuments whose history we don’t know. I’m pretty sure some of our stories are more entertaining than the ones we could read in a guide book. It’s sort of like when Owen tells me about a dream he had, in which he was visited by aliens on a river in the sky. Who knows – in other people’s stories or in the stories we tell ourselves -- where embellishment might overshadow truth, or where embellishment and imagination might reflect truth of another kind.

Another benefit of returning to the same place is in noticing things that might have always been there but that for whatever reason, to which I was blind. We see things when we’re ready. I’m pretty sure the Seine has always run right through the center of Paris from east to west, but it was only last week that I understood this orientation. I guess before I embraced maps as one way of finding my way around, I relied heavily on an instinctual sense of direction, archangels and gas station attendants. . . and now meerkats.

Among my findings on the inquiry is that this member of the mongoose family is also known in some parts of Africa as the ‘sun angel,’ for its protection of villages from the ‘moon devil’ or werewolf – which is believed to attack stray cattle, or lone tribesmen. As such, I bury the albatross, keep the monkeys off my back and a meerkat on my shoulder.

Will and Testament, Poetry and Prose

My dad is a lawyer.  Among other things, he helps people decide what to do with their stuff when they die.  As I learned, he also helps them decide what should be done with their bodies, should they reach a state where decisions about living or dying are necessary.  I started thinking about this in the last few days – never before.  I’ve never had anything of significance to give away, so writing a will hasn’t been of great concern, and I’ve always kind of hoped my body would just dematerialize after it was raided for useable organs.  I embrace a little bit of chaos with regard to my dying, although I realize this is selfish.  The main things I’ve considered have been of a more egotistical nature -- who would be sad, who would miss me, who would regret not having cast me as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes” in 1992, who would cry, who would want to read my journals.  . . that sort of thing.

Visiting my 93 year-old grandparents in Seattle last weekend gave me pause for a couple of reasons -- it made me realize that while everyone around me is at work populating the planet with people who will care about them when they get old (ie, their children), there are still a few who don’t now and may never have anyone like that who offers the promise of being looked after in old age.  Of course, one could argue that people who don’t get married and breed don’t usually live as long as those who do, so maybe these considerations will simply be irrelevant – wouldn’t that be nice!  Honestly, I wouldn’t mind dying younger, less decrepit and less hideous-feeling than my familied brethren might.  We never know for sure how things are going to work out.  In case I do live to be old, I’ve made arrangements with my younger cousin and some of my former babysitting charges.

Another manifestation of my reflective state has been my re-reading of Hamlet, which I haven’t read since high school.   A friend is fond of offering Shakespearean analyses of the dramas and conflicts I am wont to lay at her feet – she is a scholar, while I read the Spark Notes for various works of literature the way a passenger in a burning airplane would scan the emergency landing instructions.  There is need.  I need to know that someone has been grappling with the vagaries of human nature long before I have, that someone has learned something from it all, and exactly what that thing is.  I had a love/nemesis in film school whose self-awareness unfortunately didn’t detract from his recklessness in matters of the heart, but who at least acknowledged that he was ‘playing Hamlet --’ referring to the old ‘no delay, no play’ aspect of the prince’s character.  The duality of his hesitation and his impulsiveness made Hamlet a dynamic if vexing character – and of course the conflict created by this duality is part of what made the drama we know and love.

Shakespearean drama aside, Portland is a shockingly pleasant place.  Even though I grew up here and visit a couple times a year, I always find myself surprised by how friendly everyone is, how easy it is to get around and get things done, how often I find myself using the word ‘nice’ to describe people I meet and places I visit.  What other North American city has a chain called ‘Clogs n’ More?’  That kind of says it all.  Its ease leaves me feeling a little on edge – waiting for someone to make a biting sarcastic remark or to be assaulted by some deafening noise, demand or movement.  No such assault is forthcoming – just mellow people with beards, great coffee, vintage Mercedes running on vegetable oil, and the progressive politics of a large liberal arts college campus.

This leads me back to Hamlet and the subject of will.   When things come too easily, is there a danger in not knowing how to want?  What motivates a character who doesn’t acknowledge or hasn’t grappled with his/her own desires?  How does truth, when uncovered, necessitate change?  To add to his complexity, Hamlet was a man who feigned insanity in order to leave those around him confused about his motives.  If I didn’t know otherwise, I would assume he had been trained in the evasion techniques of U.S. Military operatives.

I went to a poetry reading/musical performance last night in the Wieden and Kennedy building, where my friend Willy played a few songs between recitations from The Burnside Reader, a long hallowed poetry anthology.  We concluded that poetry is a tough medium, and we chased the event with a large fully-comped meal at Nel Centro, where my friend Lee is the pastry chef.  I remembered how good it is to be in the restaurant business and the three of us had a meaty panel discussion on the death (and perhaps imminent rebirth?) of the music industry.  Although its ease has been somewhat of a detracting factor for me for fear I would be lulled into sleepiness, Lee and Willy are fine examples of productive people who live in Puddletown and open restaurants, put out records and publish novels.  .  . along with quilting, raising horses and other cool Oregon stuff.

Perhaps after all, it’s too early to draw conclusions about what motivates people in their decisions – either in life or in death.

 

 

 

Where You're Going, Where You've Been

I’ve been having dark thoughts. . . though I’m happy to report that in times of existential and global turmoil, creativity is my parachute. One of my mentors in college gave me an assignment once when I went crying to his office like the Tracy Flick-ensian neurotic that my conditioning to date had rendered. He told me to take a deep breath, go home and to write one hundred times ‘Art will make me strong.’ And so I did . . . and I guess it has.

This is my fourth winter-spring in Guanajuato, which – for those of you who are new to the Ill Hil seasonal blog – lies in the northwestern highlands of Mexico. Yes, the Mexico of which I speak is the same one you’ve been hearing about in the news, what with the latest media hysteria about the flu. Though predictable, it’s a topic that this week is impossible to avoid.

My dos pesos: more people have probably died in the last week from overeating, depression or guilt than have died from this new virus. Are these infirmities? If so, are they contagious? Who can say? In any case, I’m not convinced that walking around wearing a paper mask, breathing my own recycled air is better for my health than relaxing, getting plenty of sleep, and waiting for this to pass. At the risk of fomenting conspiracy theories, it’s hard not to wonder if there might be a subtext. Those of us who have tolerated two stolen presidential elections and the attendant terms in office, not to mention the months and years of media sensation following September 11th, have ample experience with the power of the media to distort the truth, shape reality and sway public sentiment. I’m not saying that the flu isn’t real – of course it is, and we should take reasonable precautions to avoid its spreading.

My lack of expertise in viruses and disease notwithstanding, there are things we can learn/remember from this: First, we are connected -- no getting around that. Maybe this is part of being a ‘global community,’ or does that only apply when corporations want to modify trade regulations or side-step environmental laws? I suppose a wise consistency has never been a defining characteristic of humanity. Furthermore, fear remains the most powerful and most often utilized mechanism of control. There is no faster way to mobilize and manipulate millions of people than by inciting the fear of death and destruction. I suppose our response to fear is indeed an important function of our survival – but our evolution depends on using our brains and our equally fundamental capacity to reason. It has occurred to me that disease is a form of population control (isn't it?) and it could be the unfortunate cause of my untimely death (though who's to say what my time is?). I could be exposed to this super virus and I could drown in a cytokine storm because of my youth and good health. While I hope this doesn’t happen, if that is my fate, then there it is. I control the factors that are within my control and have the best and most interesting experience of life that I can imagine . . . imagination being the only limiting factor.

But really, what are we supposed to do? A friend who was recently here in Guanajuato is a biogenetic scientist. She says that 99% of viruses are transmitted through the eyes. Maybe we should wear goggles? I guess all we can really do is wash our hands, sneeze with our mouths closed and do all that those of us who live in densely populated petridish-like city environments are accustomed to do anyway.

I was reading about the Mexican folk art tradition, which is celebrated in the collection at Casa de Espiritus Alegres, one of the two bed-and-breakfast hotels managed by my friend Hugo here in Guanajuato. Most of us are familiar with the paper maché skeletons with moving joints, which are usually associated with the Day of the Dead -- a day to honor and remember those who have passed away, and when the spirits of the dead return to Earth for a visit. While there is an element of ‘hanging on’ that could be inferred by the tradition of making skeletons that maintain the earthly identity of the deceased, there is more in this tradition that embraces the duality of life and death than in our culture of infinite youth and preservation in all things (mostly in our food). Pre-Hispanic manuscripts and artwork depict both the god of life, the earth and the sky, Quetzalcoatl -- and the god of the underworld and the dead, Mictlantecuhtl. They appear together – equally important and complimentary parts of the same whole.

I’ve also been reading The Wisdom of the Dream, in which various scholars and psychologists discuss and debate the interplay of Freudian and Jungian psychological traditions. Freud is characterized as being mostly concerned with where you’ve been, where Jung is concerned with where you’re going. Aren’t both of these important in understanding where you are? Although I try to avoid footnoting myself, these thoughts bring me back to my yoga-stoner realization from a few weeks ago – that everything is everything. Why must we always default to binary oppositions? Must one always dominate the other, or can there be some kind of graceful unity between opposites -- for isn’t it from within the tension between opposites that everything interesting is born? Just asking . . .

Getting back to creativity. . . Hugo and I have been living ‘art camp’ for the past week, spending hours in his studio making felt and making prints from copper plates. The felt-making process is rife with metaphor – carefully arranged tufts of wool are bound together in a process that involves agitation and ‘shocking’ with extremes of cold and hot water. The agitation stimulates the barbs in the wool to bind together, forming something stronger and more unified than it began. Think: dredlocks -- same principle. We’ve also used silk as a base for the wool. The barbs of wool adhere to the silk, resulting in an end product that is, at once, strong and delicate – a harmonious union of opposites. Perhaps it is in this type of union that we have a vehicle -- not only a form of transport between where we're going and where we have been, but a way of getting around wherever we are.

Permanence, Impermanence, and the History of Love

Most travelers – even loners-with-social-tendencies, like myself -- are audience to a fair bit of storytelling. Some of it is cautionary, some of it fantastical, some of it predictable. I’ve heard a hundred stories about people getting their stuff stolen, getting sick here or there, missing this or that connection and the wild adventures that ensued. Then there are stories of love lost or found, new life paths discovered, histories transformed. We can become the closest friends – if even for a couple of days. We can tell each other secrets, make promises to stay in touch. . . and indeed, these promises are sometimes fulfilled.

I took a long journey from Guatemala to Mexico about a week ago – by boat and van and foot, I arrived in the afternoon rain to San Cristobal de las Casas, in the Chiapas state of Mexico. Most people know Chiapas for its revolution in the early ‘90s -- in which the Zapatistas, led by Subcomandante Marcos (formerly a university professor. . . see how dangerous are the educated!) emerged from the forests and took control of San Cristobal. Supposedly the goal was to overturn the centuries-old control of the oligarchy and to give power and land back to the indigenous populations – which have been exploited and abused in Chiapas as they have been everywhere else in the world. I made it my business to become a regular in a couple local establishments – namely, the rebel café, Tierra Dentro (great coffee, lots of people with laptops, others having important-seeming conversations. . . probably about revolution, and lots of young bohemians with asymmetrical haircuts). I also ate twice at the local Argentine restaurant, saw a documentary about Fidel Castro, and took shelter inside a tin-roofed supermarket on the edge of town to escape the afternoon deluge while enroute to the Mayan Medicine Museum.

What left a deeper impression than anything in San Cristobal was the nearby Canon de Sumidero, where I went by boat along a river that had carved its way through the earth – and where now the plastic Coke bottles compete in population with the herons.

I left a Semana-Santa-weary San Cristobal on a night bus to Pochutla, where I would get a taxi or a collectivo to my recommended spot above the ocean. I had been assured it was a safe night trip, so I figured I’d go for it. About three hours into the ride, we were delayed by a collision between two tour buses. We sat in the road for hours, engine off -- the only lights the flashing of ambulances passing back and forth. Reports from fellow travelers were that 16 had been killed and several more injured. I felt lucky for just losing a few hours rather than my life, and settled on a plane ticket for my next move.

I woke up the other morning, looked out the picture window to the Pacific, and left my cabana built on the rocky cliffs above the Playa Aragon to go to the lovely private composting latrine. I couldn’t help but feel some alarm upon noticing that there was a world of large black ants marching across the patio in formation, and also in both the toilet and shower sections of the bathroom. ‘Take heart -- you’re in nature!’ I reassured myself. And onward I went, sustaining minor bites on the feet while brushing my teeth. I dressed and went up the hill to the main house -- where Mario, the charismatic, worldly and energetic owner and host of Rancho Cerro Largo had asked me to lead the morning yoga class. Normally it’s his gig, but he insisted that it would be fun for everyone to have someone different teach, so of course I obliged him.

Before class, I mentioned the ant issue to Chofo, the Karate-chopping multi-lingual Zapotec manager of Rancho Cerro Largo. He assured me that the ants would pass, that they make their way up the hillside every so often, ‘cleaning the earth,’ finding worms and other small delicacies of the soil to take back to their holes and feed on in the rainy season -- which is fast approaching. He said that by the time I had taught yoga and eaten breakfast, they would be gone. This was a fascinating phenomenon – that the ants would simply clean up and leave? Jesus, maybe they could work on my desk in Brooklyn, pay a few bills, dust. . . Sure enough, by the time I returned to my little pied a terre on the Oaxacan coastline, the ants had indeed passed.

What makes us move? What makes us stay in one place? What sustains some connections while others are fleeting? These are the things I’ve been thinking about the last few days. I got really sick after a glorious day on the beach in San Agustinillo, followed by an evening of food and some kind of delicious Mexican grappa and music and storytelling by Mario and the other guests – one, a chef from Mexico City who is married to one of the most famous singers in Mexico, and another restaurateur from Oaxaca City. They were telling me about the hootenanny that preceded my arrival, which was led by New York’s very own Mark Ribot – unfortunately he and his wife and their teenage daughter left the day that I arrived. Those remaining sang some boleros – which aren’t necessarily sad, but are always romantic. The thing that always gets me about Mexican love songs is that so many of these dudes cheat on their wives. . . please! I mean – do what you have to do. . . it’s just hard to take the pleas to love and longing very seriously in light of things. . . but the music is nice.

Though it was a shame to spend an entire day sick in bed, it wasn’t the worst place in the world to convalesce. . . sea breezes sweeping through the open windows, a hammock when the bed became tiresome, and privacy for my misery. . . save for the insects. I can’t seem to develop love for insects of any kind, and they don’t make good company. They just poison you and gorge themselves on your blood -- then they disappear, they move on.

There are a couple of things that have been making me think about transience and connections. One is a book I read while I was sick called The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. After wading (pun intended) through Moby Dick for the last month and a half (brilliant though it is), I needed more of a page-turner during my suffering. It’s about two lonely people in New York – one, a teenage girl who’s trying to help her depressed mother find happiness again, and the other, a Holocaust survivor whose survival had depended on a) being invisible and b) his love for two people in the world to whom he could not make himself known. I guess it’s also the passing from one place to another that’s been making me think about the formations and rhythms in which we march across the earth. I have seen more of Guatemala than the average Guatemalan, and also more of Mexico than the average Mexican. Mario told me about one of his Zapotec friends who lived in a village in the mountains just a few hundred meters above the beach where he has his eco-villa (delightfully reminiscent of the as yet undrawn but oft imagined blueprints for the locale of Bacchanal 2010. . . which may have to become Bacchanal 2012 in light of the Mayan calendar), and this man had never seen the ocean.

Sometimes it seems like keeping your world a little smaller might have some benefits. The only problem is that once you leave – as the saying goes -- you can never really go home. Things change. Rivers carve their way through stone and paved highways replace dirt roads and populations of ants clear the surface of the earth. Everything transforms. People aren’t any less dynamic than the places they inhabit. I guess all we have is the moment -- some addresses and memories and bug bites and a few beaded bracelets.

Calling Cards

The ceiba tree is heavily symbolic in Mayan culture, and unlike any tree I’ve seen in the States outside of Dr. Suess books. The Mayans believe that these trees provide the link between the underworld, the earth, and the heavens – vis a vis its roots, trunk and branches, respectively. If we accept this basic idea, then clearing the forests of North, Central and South America takes on a whole new significance – maybe an unconscious attempt to sever the links between these different realms? Who can say for sure, but the Cartesian- Newtonian paradigm probably wouldn’t recognize the value of trees as essential conduits or pathways anymore than it would recognize the fundamental connections between the body, the mind and the spirit. . . which is why the coming of 2012 and the attendant new paradigm is critical.

Yes, I’ve been hanging out with hippies for a few weeks now. . . it’s true. Can you tell? I’m still operating as an independent freak, though – no cult memberships have been codified, nor do I anticipate them. That said, being in Guatemala and seeing all the variety of lives forged by locals and ex-patriots and even just other travelers who aren’t from New York is always enlightening, and is always a reminder of how much choice we have.

I met some awesome English artists in their 20s who were recovering from a bad acid trip after a full moon party and we brought them back into the light singing in rounds on a little porch up above the volcanic Lago de Atitlan – where I spent the last several days. The girls ended up leaving the village of San Marcos and coming with me to La Iguana Perdida in Santa Cruz, where I had achieved alumni status. They got jobs painting murals of iguanas to pay their room and board. Once back in the village of Santa Cruz, I met four Norwegian girls – probably distant relatives -- on Saturday night in the midst of the weekly drag ball. The four friends had sought refuge from the late winter in Oslo in the lake house owned by the family of one of them, and came to the Iguana for the infamous Saturday night rager.

After an evening of drinking, dancing and sharing confidences, the ladies invited me to come over the following morning to practice yoga. The owner of the Argentine-designed lakeside palace is a yoga teacher, herself, and also runs a yoga studio in Oslo with her mom. We celebrated Easter by hiding out from the massive processions in the cities and practiced in a gorgeous open-air room above the water, our vaguely-hungover pranayama echoing the gentle breezes off the lake. I struggled to understand how this oasis of beauty, luxury and comfort could exist in such close proximity to the tin-roofed huts of local Mayans further up the hillside, or even the thatched roof hut I slept in a little further up the lakeshore. I guess these are just economics and have their corollaries everywhere else in the world.

One of the girls and I went in search of bananas with the promise of espresso-banana-chocolate smoothies by our host. In lakeside villages, most food comes by boat – and Easter weekend had halted the flow of goods, so we would have to rely on the kindness of strangers. We started with the house next door and were greeted by a very friendly older gringo couple with a bunch of green bananas hanging outside their open front door. We got to talking and established that the woman had lived in Portland and ran a hotel on 9th and Salmon. ‘What hotel?’ I asked. She told me it was a Rashneesh hotel. My associations with Rashneeshees -- a community or cult, depending on your point of view – are from my childhood in Oregon in the early 1980s. I remember being taunted with ‘Rashneeshiiiiiiiii!’ by my classmates when I dressed all in red – which happened to be my color (though not particularly reflective of the environment where I lived, which is another theory I’ve heard bandied about -- that people tend to dress in colors that reflect the environment where they live. . . explaining the uniform black-grey-denim of NYC). Anyway, I thought, ‘Hmm. . . what a nice lady. Can’t imagine she would have partaken in poisioning people,’ which is something the inhabitants of Rashneeshpuram were accused of having done – eventually leading to their disassembly and expulsion from the town of Antelope where they had built their commune on a 64,000 acre plot of land.

I hadn’t thought about the Rashneeshees at all until last year in Argentina, when I met a guy in the grocery store who started talking about ‘Osha,’ and someone else more recently in Colombia. ‘Osha,’ it turns out, is another name for the late Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh --the Indian guru and leader of the Rajneeshis.

Later that evening at the Iguana, I ended up talking to this rad guy from New Mexico who, it turns out, had grown up in Rashneeshpuram – his parents were big hippies and followers of the Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. I started asking questions and he explained that there were loads of former Rashneeshis on the lake – which I guess kind of makes sense, given the hippie vibe. He seemed totally level-headed and broke things down a bit; I don’t know the whole story but I’m willing to believe that it may not have all as sinister as it was made out to be. More than one side to every story. Then again, another thing my travels and conversations and reading have confirmed is that the politics of humanity are the same everywhere in the world, throughout history. I’m not sure this is something that will ever change. . . which brings me back to the ceiba tree.

All this coming and going has gotten me thinking about roots and connections. Most of us are pretty disconnected from the natural world – not just people in the cities, but even people who live in the hills and landscape the earth with Doritos packages. A lot of us live far from our families, and our money/achievement-driven lives threaten to shunt us even from ourselves. The traveler is rootless. It’s funny how you can spend time somewhere and become part of a ‘community’ for a few days or weeks or months, only to pack up your bag, put everything on your back and be gone without a trace. Maybe we leave calling cards or mp3s or digital photos or whispered sentiments. With these, we draw our paths across the earth, seeking the shade and firmness of the trees that offer passage from this terrestrial realm to the world above and the world below.