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.