enter Coyote

Okay, so I wake up this morning in Tlaquepaque in the state of Jalisco, planning to have a look around and then head west to Colima (in the small state of Colima) to look at their pre-Columbian pottery. But it´s palm Sunday and there´s just not much to see in Tlaquepaque except the church goers and the women making palm leaf decorations outside the churches. I think to myself, ´¨It´s probably going to be much the same in Colima, and tomorrow´s Monday so the museum I want to see there will be closed in all likelihood. I really should have planned this trip better. Maybe I should just head back into the city center to see the symphonic performance at the Teatro Degollado this evening. Then my taxi driver who´s taking me to the new terminal in Tonola where I´m supposed to catch the bus to Colima keeps talking about how beautiful it is in Manzanillo, just one hour beyond Colima on the Pacific coast., four hours in all. And I think, maybe a couple days at the beach is what I need. I can do the reading and thinking I´ve been wanting to do there... When I get to the terminal I ask a woman how I can get directory assistance for Manzanillo and call the hotel the driver mentioned. They´re full, but they commend another which has a room available. I go to the ticket window and ask when the next bus is to Manzanillo-- fifteen minutes, great. The only seat they have left is on the aisle in the last row. I recall that that´s just outside the bathroom at the back of the bus, but this is ¨Primera Plus,¨ shouldn´t be a problem.

We´re just leaving the station, easing our hulk over some speed bumps which is causing us to rock a bit, like on a ship at anchor, and I´m feeling rather satisfied with myself for being able to change my itinerary on a whim, when Coyote enters, stage center. A small plump boy, about nine years old, comes hurtling toward the back of the bus, a look of desperation on his face. Another bump, he staggers, his terrified eyes lock onto mine, and he spews, projectile vommiting a bright pink liquid into my lap, drenching me from shoulder to knee. He gasps in some air, heaves himself through the door and goes on chundering noisily. My seatmates all look at me astonished at my misfortune and half-embarrassed that I alone got it. For a moment I just sit there, not knowing what to do. The woman next to me says there´s a sink through the door which there is, but there are, alas, no paper towels. The hunky youth across the aisle from me, rips off a few of the little cloths that are meant to save the seats from being stained by hair oil and hands them to me. I do my best to clean myself off, rinsing off the cloths in the sink and reusing them to sponge off first my clothes and then the seat and then the floor. The boy goes on retching in the toilet all the while.

When I finally return to my seat I´m thoroughly wet from all the sponging, but fairly clean after all, if a bit smelly. The hunky youth points to my rucksack. ¨Do you have another shirt in there,¨ he asks (in Spanish). I don´t. All my clothes are in the luggage compartments below. So he pulls off his T-shirt, revealing muscles and tattoos along with a white tank top, and gives it to me. I strip off the wet T-shirt I was wearing and put on his dry one. ¨Muy amable,¨ I say, and he gives me a big smile. The ice has definitely been broken and we talk and joke quite a bit along the way. Fortunately I´ve had a larger than usual bite of Sushe cookie before boarding, so nothing´s going to spoil my day. He gets off the bus in Colima, not even asking me for his shirt back, and I don´t at first notice that he´s gone. (There´s an Easter-themed Jesus movie on the monitors.) When i jump off the bus to return his shirt to him he seems almost disappointed.

Haven´t sorted out what I think of Manzanillo yet-- a sprawl of a beach town with a population of about 150,0000. It reminds me of Miami Beach at its lowest ebb. More later...

the only gringo in Tlaquepaque

I've heard that Tlaquepaque, a town of artesans now incorporated within the sprawl of greater Guadalajara, is a tourist magnet, and there are apparently a lot of tourists here, but not gringos. Tonight it seems I'm the only gringo in town. My cousin gave me the name of "a neat little bed and breakfast run by some very cool gay guys" here, but they were booked out. They suggested a couple of other places, only one of which had a room available so I booked here at Quinta don Jose. Turns out to be way too upscale for me, costing more than double what I usually would spend. (I hate paying for a color TV I never turn on.) But no worries, I'm here for only one night en route to Colima which is about half way to the Pacific coast. I'll get a bus (de primera plus) midday tomorrow, Sunday, which should take about three hours. But first I'll go to the cathedral here in Tlaquepaque to see how they're going to kick off Semana Santa-- the week before Easter that's a big deal throughout much of Latin America.

Pre-Columbian ceramics from Colima are what first got me interested in making sculpture. Sophisticated, humorous, emotionally expressive, they're my favorite of all the world's ceramic creations with which I'm familiar. I've been taking lots of photos in museums here so I can show you what they're like when I get home.

The city of Guadalajara proper-- I'm speaking now of the old historic center-- has a lot going for it, to be sure: a pleasant climate, reasonable prices, few tourists, good museums, an exceptionally beautiful concert hall (Teatro Degollado).... I could go on, but I think you'd have to be a heavy smoker to be entirely charmed by Guadalajara. It's choked with exhaust and as if that's not enough people smoke absolutely everywhere. Also, it's fairly dirty, is largely in a state of disrepair and is difficult to find one's way around. More later...

Heading on...

Only have a moment so I´ll be brief.
Had a great time in SAN MARCOS on lake Atitlan, doing yoga everyday, eating good vegetarian food, breathing the sweet air. On my last night I was taken by a Rainbow sister to a Mayan ceremony to activate a piece of land as a ritual site-- it went on for about seven hours.
From there I went north to the rainforest and the Mayan ruins at TIKAL-- fabulous. Loved every minute of wandering in the rainforest, birdwatching, making notes on the plant communities, watching the spider monkeys playing in the treetops, listening to the howler monkeys frightening sounds (they used them for the dinosaur in Jurrassic Park.)
Tomorrow I´ll fly on to Mexico to see the sights of Guadalajara. Will keep you posted.
BLESSINGS,
W

Lake Atitlan

Now I´m at Lake Atitlan at the little lakeside settlement of san marcos and am feeling for the first time that it was a good idea for me to come to Guatemala. First of all the place is spectacularly beautiful-- one of the most beautiful places I´ve ever been. When i checked into the mostly open air Hotel La Paz, the young Brit who showed me my room told me the first thing to get if i didn´t have one is a torch (Brit for flashlight) in order to be able to negotiate the complicated paths after dark. Then he suggested i climb up the hill above the hotel to get a good overview of the place. i did and when i got to the top i found four hippie types, two men, two women, lounging around at a restaurant which was closed for the afternoon. it looked like there was a good view from the promontory beyond them so i asked if i could pass through and they said of course i could, that i could come up and hang out with them any time i liked-- this immediately after first laying eyes on me. one of them was strumming a guitar and they were all as sweet as could be. i think i´m going to like it here. There are lots of places to practice yoga, many masseurs and masseuses, a selection of vegetarian restaurants. Lovely.

The president here is a shaman.

That´s right. The new president of Guatemala is a Mayan shaman, even though he´s not Mayan. He´s also a medical doctor. And for the first time-- they´ve now had six democratically elected presidents-- he won because of the rural, rather than the urban vote. He´s only been in office a month, but he´s looking pretty good so far. There are about three thousand other Mayan shamans, mostly women, mostly illiterate. That means their teachings have been handed down in an oral tradition that their calendar shows has lasted for over five thousand years. As for what it means his being a Mayan shaman, I don´t really know. There´s been very little ethnographic work on the subject. A book is soon to be published in Spanish, however, so we may soon find out.

I´m at 5,000 feet elevation here in Antigua. I plan to go to Chichicastenango on Thursday for the market there so I´ll get even higher.

Don´t buy Lonely Planet´s Guatemala guide!

In case anyone´s thinking of traveling to Guatemala, don´t buy Loney Planet´s Guatemala guide. The ¨current¨ edition is so outdated it´s outrageous. Several of their top picks for restaurants don´t even exist any more. Even the bus station they sent me to to get from Guatemala City to Antigua has been closed for years, and the new terminal is miles away. They say the hotel I´m staying in here in Antigua (they give the wrong address) costs $15 a night for a single. In fact it costs $35-- more than double what they quote. I could go on, but you get the picture. In 2008 Lonely Planet´s Guatemala guide is a good ten years out of date.

Guatemala, first impressions

Antigua is so unrelentingly picturesque and so thronged with tourists busy buying things that I might not have warmed to it on some other occasion, but after just one day in unrelentigly ugly (not to mention scary) Guatemala City, I am delighted to be here.

Antigua reminds me a lot of Firenze (Florence), but there are jacaranda trees in bloom here, the air is better here and the views are spectacular with three gigantic volcanoes looming over the city. The fountain in the plaza near my hotel has a circle of nude women holding up their breasts as jets of water stream out of them. Children with Mayan faces play around it. One can hear many languages spoken as people pass by. The streets are all cobbled. There are ruins almost everywhere you look from the big 1773 earthquake or from subsequent ones. Modern building is strictly regulated (as it is in Firenze) so the ciy feels very eighteenth century (or earlier) despite the hum of computerized cash registers. A good deal of the old buildings are in a style they call Earthquake Baroque-- no more than two stories high and with thick walls so they won´t easily fall down.

I am not using any contractions in typing this because I cannot find where the apostrophe is on this keyboard. The letters are all in their predictable places, but every other key produces something other than the symbol shown on the key itself, which is a little crazy making. I wonder how it would be for you if I ignored that fact? Let us see.

<i went to a place this morning in Guace where thereçs a large topographic map of the whole country thatçs about the size of a small city lot with the mountains the tallest mountains rising to a height of about seven feet. <it was great to get an overview of the topography of the land== what a lot of different ecological zones. Rainforest, bayou, tropical beaches, high plateaus, super high volcanoes....
<much to see....<more later.

To vote or not to vote, that is the question.

We strive in yoga practice to rise above the anxieties that intrude upon our tranquillity at other times, like a lotus blossom rising above the rippling surface of the pond in which it grows. We hope that the serenity we achieve will infuse our life outside of our practice as well, that we will be able to remain calm under the most trying circumstances. Fine, this is surely a desirable goal.
But some yogis and practitioners of other spiritual disciplines say that we should seek always to rise above the concerns of this world. They argue that the world we live in is nothing but illusion. We read of saddhus and sen-nin who have gone off to mountain hermitages to seek transcendental bliss, never minding the social, economic or political crises that troubled them back home. And we wonder, “Is that a good idea?”
When your government is killing and maiming people for what seems to be no good reason, when it is dismantling environmental protections while the environment seems more fragile than ever, when it is aggressively undermining civil liberties, it is hard to think that the best response is to earnestly seek enlightenment. It just doesn’t seem practical.
For one thing, you don’t know how long reaching enlightenment is going to take. What if things get really bad before you get there? For another, enlightenment changes only your perspective, not the world around you. What good is satori if you can no longer drink the water or, worse, if there’s no water left to drink?
Today one sees a lot of woo-woo writing that puts forth a variation on the theme that the suffering of this world is illusion, namely that the world is actually perfect as it is. It’s hard to imagine that any of the thousands currently starving in refugee camps are achieving that perspective, no matter how profound their meditations.
Is the only point of life transcendence? Or is this world we live in, if not perfectible, at least capable of being improved?
If we think we are powerless to bring about change, we will do nothing. But even if we see ourselves as powerful, we will still choose inaction if we think there’s no point: All is illusion; don’t bother yourself about it. But we wonder, “Is there no point to hope?”
Lotuses lift their blossoms above the water they grow in because that is their nature—unless of course the water becomes so polluted that they fail to bloom at all. But we are beings of action, not locked in lotus position. We can choose to address those things around us we think should be changed or we can choose to ignore them. Which shall it be?