Domesticating

We live in the campo now, and I have been adjusting to the non-center of the city life. Our house is on a little hill overlooking canyons and volcanoes and terraced fields in the distance. Crazy plants envelop our little hobbit hole of a dwelling and sweet, unknown bird calls greet us first thing in the morning.

This charming little life contrasts sharply with what I expect to find in Lago Agrio, where we will travel tomorrow to learn the ins and outs of our mycoremediation work. As far as we know, the oyster mushies are growing like mad and eating up oil. We have high hopes for their mushie-miracles but know their task is a vast one....The biggest oil spill in history extends throughout much of the petroleum-rich Oriente (Eastern Ecuador), covering formerly lush Amazonian jungle, suffocating plants, poisoning animals and causing cancer in humans.

Although mycoremediation can slowly go about eating away petroleum, breaking its toxicity down into environmentally friendly molecules, the road ahead is a long one. In the meantime, we will seek out innovative ways to transform and heal the situation which our own society´s energy addictions caused, such as:

Help affected community members grow mushrooms and thus generate the income they need to get the hell away from there, restore the fields from which they eat through mycoremediation, and avoid exposure to the swimming pool-sized open, unlined waste pits which contain raw petroleum. Black toxic sludge creeps from the underground into drinking, washing and bathing water - all this, so that Americans could drive across exburbs in the desert more cheaply. Lack of safety precuations means drastic profit increases for petroleum companies.

Tomorrow we will go, meet people, see the situation, and have a clearer idea of how to best serve and defend this land of incredible cultural and biotic diversity. I will be wearing a respirator and tall boots to keep toxins off my skin. This is my privilege, to be able to protect my health, and I know that the people I will meet tomorrow will not enjoy these defenses. I hope we can make friends even if I look like an alien in my respirator contraption.

Volcano-land!

I am packing up my Portland life and moving to the equator. Intriguingly, this is the fulfillment of a prophecy issued when I was 11 and my parents brought my sister and I to consult with a shaman in the Amazonian forests of Ecuador. I was to return someday, and here I go.

There is another prophecy worth noting, which a friend recently recounted: the story of the Eagle (N. America) and the Condor (S. America) told by many First Nations people. When the se two unite, the Earth will awaken. Eagle and Condor messengers are called upon to *become the bridge* in order for this union to occur. And so I go. I will aim to manifest the promise of the Eagle and the Condor in my own tiny ways.

My days and nights have been filled with dreams about my life's newest chapter. Brian and I will be leading study tours for learners to witness different ecological and cultural features of Ecuador as well as the political and economic injustices that threaten them. And we will be helping coordinate the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, an exciting attempt to call upon native oyster mushrooms to break down the oil pollution carelessly and shamelessly allowed to happen by sloppy oil companies over the past 25 years. By fighting the pollution, mycorenewal fights the destruction of arable land, devastating prevalence of cancer, and economic and cultural despair which the petroleum industry leaves in its wake.

I plan to dedicate myself to these wonderful projects but I also have other dreams for my time in Ecuador. I want to become familiar, even intimate, with the dazzling array of people, plants, fungi and waters that make the Amazon what it is. I dream of learning how to call upon the plants to heal, and unit this insight with my friends' knowledge of herbal medicine in the North. I want to witness the shamanic lineage that has granted these types of insight, and be overwhelmed by the glorious diversity that makes life worth living.

Sweet little Laos

So now I finish up with my last stop (aside from 10 hours laid over in Bangkok, then 8 in Korea...blech). I am in Vientiane, Laos and have just returned from the South where I was visiting some projects. The area, Salavan, is full of numerous hill tribes living in the mountainous uplands. These ethnic groups each have their own language, spiritual traditions, and belief systems. Their populations are small, numbering only a few thousand each. They have been extremely isolated from the outide world (a 10 hour truck ride along the bumpiest possible "roads" helped me understand why.)

In fact, this road is the former Ho Chi Minh trail, and was bombed every day for 8 years during the U.S. Secret War on Laos during the Vietnam conflict. Considered a "threat to national security" by the geniuses in the U.S., the peoples were bombed to hell and their mountaintops destroyed with Agent Orange. To this day, no trees grow on the vast, poisoned lands.

The biggest irony is that the people had absolutely NO idea why they were being bombed. The word communism means nothing to them. They still don't know...most of them don't think of the world as a big planet like we do...don't think about how it is round and multicultural and crazy. They are just hungry and spend most of their days searching for food in the forest, as well as for scrap metal from bombs, which they sell to Vietnamese traders and loggers who come to illegally sack Laos' still-abundant timber.

When our Laos director came on a speaking tour of the US this year, she asked the villagers what they wanted her to ask the Americans. One man said, "Can you ask them to drop more bombs? We are almost out of metal to sell to the Vietnamese, and that is our only income." Yet these are the people who were thought to be a threat to the American way of life, for whom so many young soldiers and civilians died. Cultural misunderstanding kills us!

Puja

When I visited Subiksha I was taken down down down into the deeps of real Indian worship. Twice actually. A puja is "the act of showing reverence to a god, a spirit, or another aspect of the divine through invocations, prayers, songs, and rituals." Basically, any intentional spiritual act. An essential part of puja for the Hindu devotee is making a spiritual connection with the divine.

This photo is of a village holy man, who led me and a temple full of women in a long chant where we continuously chanted Om Shakti-e! (power) between his verses. The chant started out slowly, light-heartedly enough. Naively I looked around the room, smiling to the women staring at me, trying to establish visual connections and alliances.

Eventually, the repetitive chanting grows louder and hypnotic, trancelike from all the repetition. Some voices begin to crack...hands shake....eyes squint...I stop taking pictures and join the collective mood overtaking the tiny temple.

This photo is of the other holy man and the women lighting candle after candle after candle. the more candles in the puja, the better. The flickering lighting is calming and secretive, reminding us devotees that the gods we worshipped were whispering to us and we only need listen.

The other puja I was part of happened in a woman's house, in her tiny common room. It was organized by a self-help group of women. The groups are organized by Subiksha, and which I help find support for. They take part in microfinance activities, local leadership, empowerment...basically anything to improve their communities! So inspiring, I am so honored to witness Subiksha in action. Anyway, this particular self-help group of 30 women decided they wanted to do a semi-fast for 30 days, for peace, unity and to honor Muruga, the rain goddess who was having her festival at that time. For Muruga one wears yellow and saffron, bright as the sun. Each night they were holding puja at a different woman's house, then eating a light meal together.

These are photos which I was graciously invited to take. Privacy is not much of a concept in crowded India, and having sacred moments photographed is, in my experience, seen as an honor rather than an intrusion. So I was able to save the images and share them now.

To the left you see the Amma, the mother, the spiritual leader of the group. She was leading the chant, Om shanti, om shanti, om shanti (peace)...Again things started lightly...women and children coming in and out, smiles and chatting arising casually. But sloooowly, the chants became more urgent, more real. Amma's voice took on a strong, soulful quality as the other women's faces contorted with the look of not just faith and devotion but of the invoked spirit itself taking over, displacing their composure and making them stand up and sweat and weep. Amma arose, swaying, and went to the altar to greet the gods. Her legs buckled and other women held her up her collapsing body.

And then boom! Like many things in India it ends abruptly. Amma comes right back to us fully composed but with a lighter expression on her face. The women clear their throats, smooth their saris, and ask me questions, thank me for coming. I attempt to express my incredible gratitude but they say no, no, thank YOU for visiting. Namaste namaste and goodbye.

These invocations are commonplace here.

Preserved thoughts

After a week in an airport graveyard, my pack decided to pick itself up and come find me. I know it wasn't such a big deal to lose it, its just that I was feeling like a snail with no shell. So I'm glad it decided to return.

I can't blog fast enough to keep up with my experiences. I've already trundled out to a far corner of the bumpy Earth and back since my last post, but I'd like to memory-capsulate India first.

Here are some thoughts I trapped with my thoughtnet. Most slipped out but these were the fattest ones, so I saved them:

...Like one who looked wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in the city. With sea-secrets in his eyes. (From Arundhati Roy's beautiful and sad book The God of Small Things)

Then there is the hardened heart's confrontation which each bump on each bumpy road...infinite patience-testing...and the shouting, Indian men bellowing from behind their mustaches. I do not know if one can bellow out of a kind place. But they may be.

All words take on different, sometimes opposite meanings in a country of strange speakers. Realities reverse similarly.

Then there are the distant, almost non-existent women but for their ornaments, who show up just to prove their servitude, then tiptoe away as if they could ever go unnoticed with anelts jingling like that. They speak too softly for me to hear, and smile too demurely for me to comprehend.

But indeed, here there are the brightest smiles in the universe, which can blind you because you know the despair they disguise and the pain they override, crowd out.

People here are unkind and loving. Loud and gentle. Aggressive and non-violent. Fat and hungry. Exhausted and still dancing. I hate India and love it and do not understand it and notice every little clue but miss many of the big details. Except the ones that explain and paint the ways in which this is the land of the soul, the spirit, the Om Shanti!

I am the foreigner but this is the strange, specific land where a billion people all follow the same obscure traditions, the random ones which still stand because no one could find reason to reject them. Culture's natural filter. There must be rhythm to the randomness but what, and how can I learn?

Flowers and coconut oil in the hair. Spot on the third eye. Head wobbling emphatically. Burping loud and proud. Pissing anywhere. Wiping ass with hand. Eating food with other hand. Small clues.

G.O.D. Generation, Operation, Destruction. I am living in the O and trying to stick around. I invoke Os big and small. Ds can wait for me, though they push through quickly in places where quickness and agression are expected from everyone, including the cousins of death.

Losing the anchor

When you spend months traveling with only a backpack to accompany you, strangely intimate connections develop between you and your possessions. So when you suddenly lose all of them, it is uncomfortably uprooting, like losing part of your diminished travel identity. Not to mention the painful pang of knowing that all the sentimental little items and memories you have painstakingly collected over the last three months are gone, vanished.

I guess this is the universe's (or Bangkok Airport's) way of telling me, "You're moving too fast, at a faster pace than your tired old pack could keep up with. Now it's just you kid, no inanimate backpack as a buddy, no comforts to pad your heavy, constant landings. You get to keep your wallet, passport, computer - all the important, costly stuff. But you lose everything you could cuddle up next to."

So this is my newest obstacle on a challenging course. I am being challenged to cut those materials bonds, which only exist because I am privileged in the first place. I can increase my weightlessness and its wisdom, which unifies in solidarity with the possession-less masses I encounter on this assignment. It is out of my hands so I have to figure out how for it to be a blessing, this dangling in the empty-handed from a wire over the middle of the planet.

And wow, oh yeah, damn, I am in Laos. I love this quiet country. 5 million countrypeople now, not 1 billion. The silence confirms the lower number of lives. Here is one of the few non-overpopulated places on the Earth, where one doesn't get the feeling that humans have totally conquered and where drastically beautiful birds, frogs and bugs don't feel quite so endangered. My org's work here focuses on enabling tribal people to protect and manage their precious traditional lands, as greedy Chinese business men and toothless Vietnamese loggers encroach daily to rape some of the still-bountiful resources in vulnerable little southern Laos.

I will visit these places for the next few days and collect stories, information, songs. It hurts that my voice recorder, along with the legends and melodies it has been capturing in so many tongues, is gone. Sorry, but they will have to live in my memory and in the mouths of those who still speak them and keep their flames alive. I'll write to let everyone know how the visit goes. Just me, no junk and no trunk.

Then there are bumpy roads and head pats...

And I feel degraded...patted on the head, my ass sore from torturous roads not meant for vehicles...