leaving for guatemala, i had many ideas about what i was going to get myself into down here. one of them was that i had no idea - that i´d be discovering the plan along the way...going with the flow as they say.
what i discovered is that having no plan is harder than it sounds. for me anyway. put on the table in front of me a blank calendar for the next three months and i can certainly walk away from the table without writing anything on the paper...but my brain already automatically filled it up with names dates and places. so i say, sure i´ll just go where i´m called to go, but i find that more often i´m going where i thought i woulda gone when my mind done formulated its route map a month ago. within that there´s still plenty of room for spontenaeity, but now is a chance to see where the universe takes me if i really listen, which means dropping that premeditated mental mapquest.
i did it. i grinded the gears to a halt and stepped off the train. in palenque. i thought i´d be there for two or three days. but palenque kept offering me another thing to stay for. first it was the impending arrival of mr. bryan cole and his lovely sidekick allison. (you can slap me for that one later allison...if you by some longshot see this.) we perused the ruins and tore up the nightlife scene in one wild twenty-four hour period before they hightailed it north and left me to fend for myself versus my not-as-stereotypically-goofily-japanese-as-he-appears-in-this-photo friend gen. the next reason to stay was to go for more walks in the jungle. which at first appeared frightfully full of venomous treats, but upon second inspection can actually be friendly enough to walk barefoot or linger long enough to watch the moon come up from below the trees. (granted, palenque roadside jungle ain´t exactly the amazon.) next, it was a community of heartfelt folks working in the local vegetarian restaurant, with whom i enjoyed some meditations, some dancing, and some plain old kindred spirit type friendship.
just when i thought it was high time to get out of tourist-land and back into the hills, another possibility blew into town, by way of atlanta, GA. (sproleses represent!) a quirky visionary mud house building poet named ratsack, and his band of six atlantans on their first trip to mexico arrived in town, touting their project as one that could ultimately change the world and the entire social economic save-up-your-whole-life-to-buy-a-house system. i was down with that, but also they were good people and it had this self-expression element that i felt i should investigate. the plan was to build a mud structure on some fortunate soul´s land, not by working our asses off, but rather, by dancing, making music, and eating good food, during which celebration miraculously would be built this fine house. this was where i had to confront my pre-made travel plan and see if i could actually let it go.
i signed on for a few days to see what would happen. during the first week we bounced from a ranch outside palenque to a local indigenous community outside palenque, back to palenque, and around palenque again, trying to decide on a location and a date for our building festival. the six atlantans had arrived partly to contribute to this project, but as it turned out also with their own intentions and desires for their short one week stay...which made coming up with a group agreement rather...well, it didn´t happen. still that first week was interesting and i loved the people. (although they were somehow convinced i was a cia agent and trusted me only sporadically.) then four of the six atlantans headed out of town, leaving just the leader/poet/crazy guy (in the nicest way for reals), his earnest basketball star assistant ryan, and the delightful nora hill, professional crochet guru. somehow in the deal we picked up our fifth member, saskatchewanian movement scientist and friend of mine, kyle "ala" syverson.
a couple more days and several more frustrating leaderless meetings later, we had our plan. build a mud bench/wall at the hotel accross the street. it would be in the public eye, so tourists would have to stop to see what the excitement was about, and we would invite our friends from the indigenous community to partake. our team of five forged ahead slowly, a pace which the jungle and our lack of leadership seemed to dictate, and made the preparations for sundays big event, "fiesta de barro 06".
i could go into all the details of how you build a mud house, what the heck you could do to hopefully make the event more fun than work, and tell you about that day´s party, attended by 100 lucky locals, both tourist and mexican...but really the event and all that lead up to it for me turned out to be about dealing with the group. group dynamics...leadership...relationships... i loved all of our people, but somehow we didn´t all work that well together. it´s no mystery really, everyone had their own level of commitment ranging from semi to quasi, and nobody wanted to be in charge, including me, even though i clearly saw at just about every moment that there was a gaping gap where the leader should have been standing. ratsack was the de facto leader...it was his idea, his vision, his baby...but his community-minded mind prefers to let things happen and let others step in where they will, rather than make things happen or tell folks what to do. it´s not the way things happen on wall street, but i wanted to stand back and see how it might work. as you can tell by the aforementioned 100 gleeful participants, it did work - but in the process i was bombarded by massive frustration nearly every day, when things didn´t happen as i felt they should have. still, i wouldn´t trade in the experience, it was priceless. and i learned so much from each of my palenque friends and teammates...i even have a more-than-slight urge to visit atlanta.
after the party, i felt i had given what i could to this particular mud-bench-fest, and i was finally ready to leave palenque, after 25 days. the urge to get back on the road, whether following some shard of the abandoned original plan or inventing a new one day by day was too strong, and there was no longer any reason to resist it. the future of team mudfest 06 is unclear...but as i head north, or maybe south, i definitely take them with me in my heart and i feel it´s not the last time i´ll see their achiote-seed-paint-covered faces.
grácias otra vez.
