Category: Blog
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Hay veces que la montaña ruge con su presencia
(Y el cielo me guiña con un relámpago)
Y yo me siento mamífero, primitivo
Una piedra en el collar que es mi raza
Que danza honrando la forma en que emergieron los volcanes, las venas del rio y las voces del viento
Me acarician las hojas, me siento vivo, afortunado. Testigo de verdades que me enaltecen, me acobijan y me aterrizan.
Hay veces que escucho el entretejido, el son de mi presencia como vecino().
Cuando presiento llegar…la jarana y la flor
Recuerdo los momentos con mi hijo, cuando lo acosté en el pasto por primera vez. Y se rió. El mecerlo en el agua, y éramos. Agua, cuando nos mecía toda la noche. Ritmo que he encontrado.
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Retiro Voces del Corazón 2025
Hoy hemos creado fuego
cantos estallidos del corazón
brotes de baile, ritmos resonando.
Aprendiendo a vivir
Aprendiendo a sentir
Me encuentro en el árbol
Giro vaciándome
Me encuentro con la fuerza
que necesito, con la flexibilidad, con el descanso
Encuerpo la soltura, mirada
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Butterflies
Fluttering, gliding
specks of gold
Mesmerizing hope
Beautiful magnifiscence
Forest alive, a sky
littered with beauty.
A cloud passes by
and the forest shivers,
branches quiver, butterflies
alight and the sky
is speckled with orange.
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Cosmic weavings
Four days of ceremony, one day of rest in between. They worked nights and rested during the day. ‘Five days of not doing any work? Here? On my home turf?’ He thought he was definitely going to struggle with that. Sometimes Pio would leave them mind-numbing tasks, like cleaning seeds. But mostly it was just napping, writing or hanging out around the hot spring pools digesting what had transpired through the night. At times there was vivid sharing, mostly they just assimilated on their own.
‘What do you do with your watercolor paintings?’
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Ecoescrituras
Notas del curso tomado con Monica Nepote
¿Qué lenguajes son necesarios “hacer nacer” para hablar de lo que observo?
A natural diet may lead to a light and present disposition. A stock of deep breath, a deep time framework and a a geological vocabulary. A list of tweets and twangs to describe the sounds. Screeches and hums, glistening magic, animism and sacrality interwoven into the wakening of the senses. Aroused, on edge, eyes begin to glaze, as I feel my body slip into a state of blurred edges. Hazy feelings and succinct adjectives make for a wonderfully abstract realistic painting.
Verbs that follow the breath, and outwards and back in, following the contour of a spiral, closer and further from the origin with every beat.
Lo salvaje – lo no cultivado, lo audaz. Lo prístino. Lo travieso. La intuición.
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Unifying Patterns in Nature Applied to Business Poster
The Unifying Patterns in Nature were described by the Biomimicry Institute, a group of scientists and designers dedicated to applying observations in nature to human design. Traditionally applied to architecture and industrial design, I was curious if implications could be made to human organization and collaboration. Inspiration came from the fascinating Reinventing Organizations, and the course I was currently auditing at Prescott College named Form and Pattern in Nature.
Further outcome of this line of thinking has led me to:
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Magic owl in the beams
I am in the search of magic.
I’ve found it in prayer and in song,
in the rain and in a sweat. Elusive and untraceable, it evades me in the mundane. I can’t find it in a wheel of emotions. I’ve found it in a swirl, in a dance or in a breath. The veil keeps it hidden, at arms length, sometimes closer when I light a candle.
Sometimes divine when I call it by name, or harken it by senses. At times in a flash of color thru my lense or in the quickening of my heart after dipping in a river.
It may be where my heart becomes entangled, that which wakes my senses – suddenly aware of the towering mountains – seeking out the tallest trees, the name of the plants and the sparks of life surrounding me.
When I go beyond simply observing, and become involved playfully and curiously, interpreting and imagining.
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Willful equilibirum
the wakening of a conch
the intentional sound of beauty
brings me out of my regular stupor
and trivial annoyances.
As I look up into the
enormity of a million butterflies
My eyes glaze over,
and my spirit claims its place
in the richness of the world.
Soft fern – upreaching firs
Awe captured in oohs and ahs,
camera clicks and glee
Today the butterflies remind of the best in us.
Today, on my birthday, life feels harder and easier.
New challenges, but also greater joy,
more heartfelt, more intentional, more shared.
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Bendiciones
Bendición Colectiva (para enlace espiritual)
Celebrante: Que puedan crecer en su amor, en el asombro y en el gozo.
Todos: Que las temporadas de la vida los una.
Celebrante: Que su amor sea una aventura, de crecimiento y retos para convertirse en mejores individuos y pareja.
Todos: Que cada día encuentren el perdón y la risa ante los altibajos.
Celebrante: Que reciban las sorpresas de la vida con brazos abiertos. En este nuevo camino, el amor es su tótem.
Todos: Que la devoción que se tienen sea tan fuerte y bella como las montañas que tenemos enfrente.
Bendición elemental
Yo, agua, les deseo un estado permanente de flexibilidad. Sumando pueden incorporar la fuerza del río. Que puedan disfrutar del eterno fluir del néctar de la vida y sumergirse en las corrientes más dulces y refrescantes de esta vida.
Yo, fuego, les deseo que encuentren la divinidad en el consumo del fuego. Que el ardor los mueva a crear y rehacer siempre. Que puedan prender, contener y soltar la llama en todo momento.
Aire, el aliento que los manifieste. La expresión de voz y presencia, canto, risa y emoción. Aire como suspiro, como pausa, como vacío y espacio.
Yo, árbol, como representante de la comunidad de vida que los abraza en este momento, soy…
“El árbol de luz, nutrición del que sueña. Mi tiempo es el ahora. Mi lugar es el ecuador. Soy perpetuidad, constancia y felicidad. Mis ramas se menean dedicando gracia y sensibilidad a todos los seres. Mi follaje protege de los rayos del día. Mi sombra se extiende sobre cada uno que busca la contemplación. Los vientos-espíritus me soplan de todos lados, constantemente reajustando mis ramas. En esta exhibición se escucha cada melodía más hermosa, extasiando hasta el más intelectual.”
Nosotros venimos a hablar en nombre de todos los animales. Esperamos que el amor que comparten lo extiendan a todos nosotros.
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Yo Soy
Soy mexicano como el nopal
Soy suizo como el queso
Soy gringo como los cowboys
Soy las flores de campo en las que me acuesto
El viento que me traspasa como carcajada
Soy el que se postra ante la montaña
Y que recorre sus venas abiertas en búsqueda de garzas y cascadas
Soy tu rezo temazcalero, el canto universal
Soy el que traduce las costumbres
El que se estresa con el tiempo
Soy el fractal escondido en el párpado del ojo
Soy el suspiro suspendido y el llanto atragantado
Aliento de Dios, postura de yogi
Sonrisa de Budista y un poema Sufi
Soy la bolsa de Doritos,
la arena escurridiza
Soy el doble calcetín en el frío
Soy la emoción de un tucán
El misticismo de un venado
La estática del ruido blanco
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Mass Tourism
The mass tourism complex is designed to make me a massive dickhead. What do I mean? As a dickhead, I can’t relate to others, my interactions are superficial and transactional. The contact with local nature offered me is a picture with a tied up monkey or “having an intimate moment” with a trained macaw on my arm. What ever scraps of the local culture and idiosincracy I can pick up, is inbetween tips and piña coladas with the waiter and Uber drivers from one party to the next. A feeling of local merengue and bachata gets mushed together with mindless reggaeton, foam guns and animators making me want to shoot myself. Am I the bigger dickhead for not going with the flow?
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A Guava Chronicle
Guavas are tropical, little and round. In the Dominican Republic they are larger and didn’t look very tasteful. In my region of Mexico the most coveted are pink- they are the sweetest. I assume there are pink guavas in Hawai, as I saw a movie in which a pink-guava mimosa was served, it looked delicious. Very high in vitamin C, you can find them in candy, with cheese as a desert, as juice, or even as my favorite flavor electrolyte.
The town I live in proudly declares itself World Capital of the Guava. I have not found the official number, but every night trucks drive their loads to the highway where the boxes, or guacales are loaded on to semis to make their way to the central market in Mexico City. It’s a perilous affair. Risks include dirty traffic police and distributors’ arbitrary prices. I try not to bite the seeds because they’ll get stuck in my teeth for hours. Guavas don’t stay fresh for very long, so every day hundreds of tons get thrown out from la Central de Abastos. Juice manufacturers offer measly prices for third rate product – barely worth the gasoline to drive them the fruit.
We make jams, and while they’re successful amongst our guests we have a whole storage closet full of them. Some friends for a while made a craft-beer out of guava, but out here in rural Mexico there was not enough of a market to sustain their business. There are larger guacales to collect soursop, mangos, mamey, zapote and ciruela when they’re in season but 90% of the farmers have guava trees. They say the first ones came from Peru. One of the evidences used to theorize that the Purépechas from Central Michoacan are actually descendants of the Quechuas from South America. A south-north migration. Others say these theories are nonsense. And yet others have told me the elders say so themselves.
I work in tourism and take city-dwellers out into guava fields and talk about the life-cycle of the tree and colloquial beliefs about the harvesting even though I’m new to the scene. Hijo de la guayaba (son of a guava) is a national saying, and it refers to the harvesters being exposed to a certain pheromone when picking the fruit that incites baby-making mood when back home. I’ve fallen in love with the scenery – perhaps due to the hormones – perhaps due to the lively green scenery of this fertile land. Water springs and mild weather allow for growing just about anything.
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The Passion Fruit Trail
Character: The passion fruit trail
Problematic: Iguana poachers
The path from the hot springs to the waterfall was part new, part ancient. We were sitting by the waterfall the other day when out of the jungle three hunters materialized. By the look of their ragged clothes, ancient rifles and smudged faces, they were very poor. They were looking for iguanas. Just for fun? Or to feed their families? I have been appointed guardian for this space, and yet, this may be a millennial need I be confronting. How to ask them not to hunt on the property when it’s what they’ve been doing for generations? Only talking to them. I only got in a quick question as to were they were heading, before getting a grunted, ‘beyond this place’ to reassure ‘el güero’ they were leaving, but a longer conversation is needed.
A week later I was walking a group of elderly ladies down this same path. They were fascinated with every nook and flower. A solitary hibiscus found on the trail got tossed into a girl’s hair. Knowing we wouldn’t be able to hike for very far or long, we trudged slowly around the big garden, getting a close look at everything we crossed. I’d never realized before that what we call Red Flame, are really bracts- or specialized leaves- and the actual flowers spurting from the red are white. Littered along this trail are passion fruit, fallen from the overhanging vines, Granada flowers giving way to the fruit, and spectacular Golden Orb Spider cobwebs. This part of the trail is on private land. Once you cross the road, the path becomes a public walkway used by all the community to visit the waterfall.
Although less flowers were to be found on this section of the trail, butterflies were abundant. Giant White Morphs floating softly thru the air, Silkworms suspended in the air amassing their string as they crawled back up from the overhead branches, fluttering Sulphurs, Whites and Yellows, Swallowtails flashing their pink and yellow dots, Zebra Longwings dazzling their stripes. Perhaps a lack of iguanas?
I’ve never seen a lizard on this trail. We’ve seen MotMots, ringed-tailed cats, and fire-fly larvae on the stream banks. The passion fruit trail is lush and perhaps in danger. Every rain season rocks come a tumbling. Foam aggregations give a sense of human discharge and soap remains. Plastic and waste have to be fished out weekly. Perhaps, our trail is not in danger, and I am but a rookie conservation-enthusiast. Truth be told, I don’t have the slightest idea of tell-tale signs of erosion, water quality, and animal populations. But base markers have to be set.
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Coming of age – one paddle stroke at a time
If you’re ever chased by a crocodile on land, run in zig zags. That’s one of the lessons you learn growing up in a tropical country. Lush green and cloudy grey Panama. High-rise PTY, red diablos buses blasting raging plena. Spanglish spoken begrudgingly due to an American invasion in 1990 to protect its economic interests. A banana Republic that had severed its cultural and political ties with Colombia, because of foreign interests to build a canal – first French and then American.
Of course, I didn’t really perceive all of this when we moved to Panama when I was eight. As a kid of an affluent family, we were choffered to school, to karate class, to check out cds at Arrocha. You don’t really walk much in a country this close to the equator. You move from one air-conditioned room to another via a closed-windowed car. My bubble was both environmental and social.
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Velo de Novia
Gushing, throbbing exuberance
Echoes of every fall, every tumble
There’s pulsations in the fall
Lost in the static, a wavering drone
Exuberance gushes – frustration grinds
A timid bird pops up on the ledge
Overflow of the river has moistened the banks, a turmoil of mud and branches, a haven of flies.
Expanded with the rain, can this pounding be cleansing? Or is it an escape valve for overburdened clouds?
Runoff, surplus, remnants of plants’ needs – off to feed the horizon.
Water is renovation, hope to continue purer, closer to my dreams.
How many others sit at the banks of this river as it curls its way down. How many ranches, how many towns does it transerve? How many more falls can be accounted for by the remaining 1300 meters to reach sea level?
How many lovers come to soothe their quarrels by the flow of the water? How many will enjoy the sound of bubbles and eruptions on this overcast Sunday afternoon?
To this spot I’ve brought those who don’t think twice about plunging into the water; those who’ve brought offerings and prayer; those who need reminding to pick up their trash; those who are reminded of better times; those who begun to meditate.
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Winged Pharaoh
Like the brilliance of a fish, the memory of a dream can be seen with unmarred waters. Remember quickly were you have travelled at night – ask to visit before entering.
With an open heart
I present myself
As a gentle traveler with
Keen but hazy senses
I ask permission
To explore (and remember) the dream world
I dreamed of wordless messages and cat messengers (which scared me back to the Earthly realm).
I shall will myself to listen, to receive..
Who is this Holy Spirit that sings inside of me – that let’s me dance in response to music, paint in response to beauty, to serve in response to gratitude, to write in response to all that I feel?
Shedding space of contempt, anger, frustration and judgement there is this brilliant core (cave), a mystical want to help spread love.
The gifts of silence, of closing your eyes, of clarity of how to give back.