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.

We Come Out at Night

The Cogees are one of the indigenous tribes in the Caribbean part of Colombia. They choose their spiritual leaders as children and proceed to keep the children indoors during the daylight, letting them outside only after darkness has descended. Living the first nine years of life in darkness, they reason, will help the chosen few develop intuition – an important quality for a spiritual leader to cultivate.

Cross-dressing seems to be a trend in the second world -- though this, too, happens only in the dark. Of the three hostels I have stayed in since I arrived in Guatemala, two have weekly cross-dressing parties. I realize we cannot rightly draw too many conclusions from such limited research and data, but it’s the best that this amateur anthropologist has to offer.

I mentioned my alternative education, which came complete with what seemed like bi-monthly drag balls and daily bi-whateverism, so the scene of our first night at Hostel El Retiro in Lankin – an hour’s drive on a dirt road deep in the Cahabon River Valley – was nothing out of the ordinary. If anything, I re-lived the sensation of standing dumbly before a noisy roomful of men in skirts – some with dredlocks, -- trying to figure out where to sit. . . much as I experienced my meals in the dining commons at Hampshire. Recent vegetarian cafeteria excursions have been, however, more amusing than torturous.

I’ve been talking a lot about college, and perhaps it’s because several of the people I’ve encountered so far have been closer to college age than I am – which has made me reflect on that period. I’ve also been struggling to resist the temptation to draw conclusions about age or national stereotypes, but some encounters on the traveling circuit have made that difficult. To forge identity in a world where we are wont to commodify ourselves -- we imitate, conform and generally grope for emotional organization vis-à-vis our Facebook profiles and wardrobes and arsenals of electronic gadgets. We scramble through the darkness, lit only by the soft but persistent glow of our Ipods.

After a day at Lake Atitlan and a journey into the bi-weekly market in Chichicastenango, Hanneke Hermans and I decided to sign up to explore the legendary caves of Semuc Champey -- just down the road from the communal hippie camp where we were hanging out with the cross dressers. Armed with nothing more than candles and blind faith, we joined an international group and plunged into cold underwater caves with a long-haired Guatemalan man named Elvis as our guide. We swam through the pitch of dark, holding our torches above the water while using intuition to avoid pedicure-destroying confrontations with the rocks that lay beyond our field of vision.

Following this expedition -- which left me resolved to eat my way beyond any future bouts of hypothermia -- we warmed ourselves in and around a descending series of pools just beyond the caves, where Guatemalans kicked off Semana Santa with their families. These pools form where one river flows beneath the other, separated by a limestone land bridge. Some have theorized that if 3,000 people stood on the bridge at once, it would crumble to ruin and the rivers would merge. Once again, no real empirical research to substantiate this theory, but it's interesting anyway.

The less charming members of our hippie camp left in a mass exodus following our journey underground, which made for a blissful Sunday. After a morning of hammock swinging, coffee and more plentiful vegetarian food, we followed an Irish Huck Finn and his dog, Caleb, up the river to a turquoise swimming hole where we cooled ourselves in the magic hour light.