The indentations on my fingertips almost match the horizontial lines snaking across the hillsides in the distance. Even the color, slightly red from the pressure applied to new guitar strings, suits this arid landscape. There was a big afternoon thunderstorm a few days ago that added excitement and depth to the drum circle that I was participating in with Luix and two friends in the workshop outside of his house. Wind rushed through some broken panes in the floor to ceiling windows, while hail bounced off of aloe plants, nopales, and dry, dusty earth.
Apart from that particular day, the clouds have only blown by in the afternoons, hardly cutting the already intense heat of the springtime sun. Now I am watching the hillsides turn pink as the sun slips behind the ridge on the opposite side of the little valley in which Malinalco is nestled. I can hear the Saturday evening music pick up in the plaza downtown from the hammock of my rooftop perch at Luix´s house, and I am reminded that I have been here one week. Last Saturday, however, the music wasn´t floating lazily on the evening wind. Instead it was rattling the windw frame of my hotel room overlooking the plaza as I tried feebly to block out the streetlight with a blanket and find sleep. I was disoriented and lonely.
Now, I understand the space and the community that fills it a bit better. Although Luix told me via email that he didn´t have much work at the moment, he also said that I was welcome here if i needed a place to stay. None of the other farms that I contacted had space, so I took a plane from Puerto Vallarta to Toluca (an unpleasant overnight stay in a strange city) three days after Mom flew home to Tennessee. The next morning I took a two and a half hour bus ride through a seemingly empty, arid landscape dotted with rocky ridges, brown rolling hillsides, and giant agave.
I spent two days exploring Malinalco, its Mexica (me-shee-ka) ruins, and a small museum in which I learned that the town is named after a plant called malinalli. This comes from the verb malina, meaning to twist. So malinalli means twisted herb. The Mexica (who spoke Nahuatl, also spoken by the Aztecs) believed that this plant was the medium between which the planes of the universe communicated: the underworld, the terrestrial, and the celestial. Through the malinalli the currents from above and below (the two extremes of the cosmos) twist together on earth. The plant is the expression of the two opposite but complementary worlds. The Nahuatl belief is that the current that flows up from the underworld is cold, aquatic, and femimine; while the current that descends from the celestial world is igneous, warm, and masculine. Between these two extremes is the earthly world where the life of humans unfolds.
Education is amazing! I left the museum feeling as though I had cultivated a sense of place by learning a bit about its history. As I walked back to the hotel, the streets looked more familiar and welcoming, and Isabel, the proprietor, greeted me at the door and showed me the view of the mountains from her living space. Malinalco felt more real.
Earthsoundz believes that through drumming, and the creation of rythym within a group, personal learning is achieved. It is the manifestation of Luix´s personal paradigm and the realization of his dreams. He builds drums out of all sorts of organic materials, including: bamboo, gourds, animal skins and bones, seeds, ect. He sells his instruments. He also facilitates drum circles, traveling all over Mexico and beyond. He works with groups as varied as corporate executives, the staff of spa resorts, Montessori school groups including parents, students and teachers...all in one circle. He volunteers in prisons, drumming with inmates. He also leads traditional sweat lodge ceremonies in a cob structure called a Temazcal, built by previous WWOOFers. I will be helping him lead a ceremony for a Mexican family of 13 people. I will help manage the fire (used to heat the stones that go inside), deliver the stones to the lodge from the fire after brushing the ashes away with a eucalyptus branch, fill buckets of water to pour over the stones, and provide sips of a sweet anise tea and drumming inside the sweat. I don´t know what to expect, but I knowthat Luix believes deelply in this process, and sees the sacrifice of personal comfort in the heat as a prayerful offering to the well being of the world. Sounds good to me.
We have become friends easily, and Luix says that he feels like we look like cartoon characters when we are together- often laughing as we go back and forth between Spanish and English (both of which he speaks fluently after 13 years living in the US). He grew up in DF (Districto Federal), a chilango, as people from Mexico City are called, and we took a two day trip there so that he could buy supplies for upcoming projects, and pick up some drums that an american drum company called Remo donated to his prison drumming project.
The road trip took about three hours total, with a detour through a town called Tepotzlan- new age mecca and home to frequent UFO sightings- to pick up three huge bags of hard shell seeds that a woman he knows there had collected from the hills. We also had an amazing lunch at his favorite market stand: a ¨mexican pizza¨ called a sope. You gotta love a hippie town´s spin on mexican favorites. The muchacha working behind the large round tortilla pan patted out fresh dough balls and fried them over hot coals. Then we chose our toppings- salsa roja y verde, potatoes and mushrooms on one, and steamed squash blossoms and huitlacoche (weet-la-ko-che) a popular mushroom that grows on corn. They were topped off with Oaxacan cheese (a stringy, white cheese) and crema. While these were cooking we walked a few stalls over and bought fresh fruit juice. I got piña and Luix got alfalfa...sweeter than you´d think. On our way back we bought an avocado and sliced it on top of the sopes. De-lish!!
I picked up a strong little coffee on the way out of town, my first cup in a while, and we shared it and talked politics and philosophy with caffinated enthusiasm for the last hour of the drive into DF in Luix´s little maroon VW bug. We parked at the house that belonged to his late father, and the home where he had spent the later part of his teenage years. A short walk and a ride on the metro brought us to El Centro, downtown, where Luix helped me pick out a small guitar, which I bought for 455 pesos, about $40 dollars US, including a case. It is a quinto, or fifth, which means you count up 5 notes from a regular guitar...I´m still wrapping my mind around that little bit of music theory. Meandering home through quiet neighborhood streets, Luix said that I needed to name it. Since it is a small guitar, in Spanish they say "guitarita" and so I named her Rita. Rita la guitarita. Luix laughed approvingly.
The next morning Luix dropped me off at the metro with specific directions on where to change lines and where to get off for the Anthropology Museum, and he headed off to run business errands. I navigated the metro easily, with a little help from a generous face, and I didn´t once feel nervous or uncomfortable. On the contrary, everyone was smiling that knowing smile reserved for greeting a visitor to their city. I even got a few handshakes.
The museum was amazing. I spent the whole two and a half hours in the Mayan room. I realized that I had to focus my efforts, and just plan on coming back some day to explore the other rooms dedicated to: Introduction to Anthropology, The Population of the Americas, Preclasic Times in the Central Altiplano (nomads in Mexico´s central highlands), Teotihuacan (the Aztec city where Mexico City now resides, and the most powerful city of that time...the Rome of Latin America if you will), Las Toltecas (before the Aztecs), Mexica (the Aztecs), Cultures of Oaxaca, Cultures of the Gulf Cost (more aftican influence), Western Cultures (Pacific coast indigenous cultures), and Northern Mexican Cultures (which were a bit fluid with southwestern US tribes). You could spend a week at least in that museum.
Luix picked me up outside the museum at 2pm, and before hopping back into the VW bug, we watched the flying Veracruz dancers...very impressive (see my flickr page for photos). Mushroom soup (sopa de hongos) and quesadillas on the road, and a yoga class in a friend´s studio in Malinalco concluded the road trip, and we are back at the Earthsoundz home base. I have been helping Luix organize and clean his workshop -a wierd love of mine, as some of you know, and something that the space desperately needed. Because of my knack for cleaning and organizing Luix has called me a jewel and his hero.
I am looking forward to moving on and starting my work on a farm about 30 min from here in a town called Chalmita. It is a certified organic farm with an orchard, and they make and sell juices and jams. However I am grateful for the two weeks I will have spent here at Earthsoundz with Luix, another beautiful twist in the road that has enriched my experience and my circle of friends.
As always I don´t know what to expect from the next phase, but I strive to find peace in the unknown, learning my lesson of the hour, patience, over and over again. A phrase inspired by my lesson and invented in one of many mealtime conversations has become a motto around here: la paciencia es la ciencia de la paz.
Patience is the science of Peace
*****
Alice came to a fork in the road.
"Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don´t know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn´t matter."
