Cartoon 32: Alien Encounter

              From Leticia, Colombia to Pucallpa, Peru, I traveled for about 9 days on a series of boats down the Amazon River.  I think this was the most disgusting experience of my life.  I hope to share my honest experience while being respectful and expressing my deep appreciation for the people who work and consistantly travel on these boats.  They were my famlily for those days which for me, were a real test.  They helped me keep laughing and playing. They shared their stories and experiences and taught me to find an inner calm that I coundn't imagine was possible. 

     But dang ya´ll this ish was narsty. (Translation: Man, this boat was gross!) Not all the boats are like this but the one we 200 strangers were stuffed on one that was built for 100.  It was soooooo stinky that when I came off of it and got to my destination a week later, my new students asked me why I smelled like dead fish!  The bathroom and the shower were one and the same so all the surfaces were covered in brown wet goo, origin unknown.  Everything was covered in the feathers of the chickens who were dismembered daily on the deck in front of our very eyes and then thrown into a pot to feed us.  We slept in hammocks so close together that swinging had to be a boat-wide coordinated effort.  There was a family that slept under my hammock because their was no other space.  The walls were covered with drying clothes because the women of the boat did laundry and washed their babies daily in the 3 bathroom sinks.  It felt like being trapped inside of a vibrating tuna can because the old old motor made the entire boat shake uncontrolably.  And it was so HOT that I left puddles anywhere I sat down.  I don't mean to be negative, in fact as I write this I'm sitting here laughing at myself, poor little gringa girl who thinks she's hard staring at the ceiling at night completely overwhelmed by the other realities of the world. 

     All that said, I hope that ya'll can feel why the following story is so important to me.  On day three,  a man came up to me as I was taking air on the front deck.  I had just seen a toddler taking a poo in a corner and I sprinted out front to try not to vomit. I think he noticed my upset and he said 'Hey girl, draw a squiggle.', and handed me a piece of paper.  I did and gave him the paper back.  In under a minute the paper was back in my hand again and the man had turned my squiggle into a super funny expressive cartoon character's face. 'Wow!' I said, 'Let me try!' and thats how it all started.  The man was the nightwatchman on the ship.  He spent the dark hours on top of the boat watching out for river pirates.  And from that point on, I spent the first hours of every night at his side. His name was Roman and it turns out that he had always dreamed of being a story teller and cartoonist.  He showed me notebooks filled with characters that he had drawn in the wee hours of the morning while the passengers slept swaying slightly to delicate waves of the Amazon. His favorite character to draw was an alien named Tito.  Every night, he would tell me a different story about what happened when the character that I draw meets Tito.  Below you will find my favorite one... 

Cartoon 31: A Light One

 

This is an image that was gifted to my sleepy eyes one night as I brushed my teeth outside of my little borrowed bamboo cabin in the pitch black deep inside the thick forested mountains of Boyaca, Colombia.  In the stillness of the drizzly night, a monk made his way through the trees illuminating his way by a candle whose light rose and then expanded around him as it bounced off of his clean white umbrella.  He looked like a little bubble floating through the forest completely surrounded in darkness.  He didn't know I was there, I didn't really know if I was there. The image was so unreal.

I was at a Taoist temple which I sought out in an effort to learn some new tools to help me maintain my center during this crazy trip called life. I made an instructional video with the monks about how to find balance, strength, flexibility, and relaxation through aerial dance. 

The community was really incredible. It was made up of about 600 people with no cellphones, no T.V.'s, no "aggressive" music (for them this included reggaeton, rock, rap, punk, salsa).  Everyone wore loose fitting clothes and got up at 3 every morning to pray and do exercise until the sun came up. Then they would go about their business and again at midday, one hour of exercise before lunch. Then one last time at 5pm they do a bit of exercise before dinner. Three times a day they would eat sweet corn soup and homemade whole wheat bread.  They drank the fresh water of the mountain which had an amber color from all of its minerals.  They breathed clean air and used only diet, exercise and herbs as their medical care.  I had never been in a place like this and it seemed so revolutionary the idea that we could just decide to remove from our lives anything that might contaminate our mind, body or spirit.  From the outside looking in, it seems like the monks dedicate their lives to being positive, healthy, and strong (wow you should see some of the martial arts flips that this one monk could do)and therefore contribute to the overall uplifting of humanity. Of course their lifestyle is very depthful and strategic and I only got to know a small bit but either way, I am leaving this community with a renewed dedication to making choices in my day to day life that will truly serve me in the long run.  The internal space that these choices create can be my temple for a now... 

Cartoon 30: Be Careful, Not Afraid

 

 

 

 

  

 

I headed out to Colombia on my own about 2 and a half months ago and to be honest I was scared silly.  I said to myself, "I could eat bad food or get bitten by a huge bug and get sick and die!! What if I get robbed?? I could get kidnapped!" I was so scared to be the only one responsible for deciding what to do in an emergency situation.

I can now officially say that I have eaten bad food that made me sick and I got better.  I have been bitten by so many bugs that my legs match my favorite polka dot dress and I haven´t died yet.  My good friend was robbed and said it was the best thing that ever happened to her cuz she doesn´t have to deal with so much STUFF anymore.  And I was even kidnapped in Medellin! A guy was borrowing his friends taxi to drive himself home and he saw my friend and I looking for a cab. He thought we were cute so he decided to pick us up.  About five minutes into the ride he confessed that he was not actually a cab driver and that he had no idea how to get to where we wanted to go.  My heart stopped in my chest.  My friend spoke up fast saying, "Hahahaha you´re so funny, well why don´t you come get drinks with us?" (Her idea was to get us out of the car as soon as possible without causing the guy to escalate.) He agreed and we went to a bar.  After hanging out for a while he turned out to be a very nice kidnapper.  Just a normal guy with a really wierd way of picking up girls...

So I was really scared when I left for Colombia.  And fear is so powerful, after meeting so many people on this trip I would say that its got a pretty strong grip on most of us.  The first thing that people tell me about the places I´m going to are the dangers. They tell me about all the bad things that could happen there.  What´s up with that? 

Fear is so powerful.  In my vida, I have lived in fear of many things: being alone, getting sick, hurting myself, making a mistake, not knowing the right answer, not having what I need (money, companionship,_____). I have often lived my life trying to prevent these things from happening. I feel like life is teaching me that I can´t prevent them and once they do happen, they aren´t so bad.  Traveling alone has opened me up to be cared for by so many people. Its taught me that we are a generous, loving, protective species and adios to the few that are lost and trying to take advantage of others.  

When I first arrived to Colombia, I confessed to a friend my fears.  I said, "Everywhere I go I find people who tell me there´s danger at every turn. ´Be afraid of this!´´Be afraid of that!´ they say. How could I not be afraid of this world??" And she said, "Do they say ´Be afraid.´or ´Be careful.´ Although I do believe that we need to start talking about the fabulous things in the world instead of the dangers, what my friend said was just the redirection I needed.  The key is to be careful, full of care and attention in everything that I do.  Trusting the wisdom of my actions helps me let go of the fear that breeds anxiety and inaction.  

So thank you to Natalia and to life for teaching me to be comfortable as a lone cowgirl holdin´on to caution but throwin´fear to the wind.   

Cartoon 29: Dancing Police

Huge shout out to Colombia. It has been one of the most profound places that I´ve ever been.  The amount and quality of the public art, the diversity of cultures and ways of thought, the intense natural beauty, and the generosity and fighting spirit of the people leaves me awed...
AND...
Can you imagine ever seeing a scene like the one above in the US?? This is an image I rode by while on the bus in Bogota.  I asked the guy next to me what was going on and he explained that the police are trying to do 2 things:
1. Find creative ways to teach people the law and,
2. Change the image that people have of police as oppressive authority figures.

So they hire stilt walkers and sing and play music in the street!! I died laughing picturing the APD, NYPD, LAPD, ETC. doing something similar. HAhahaha! I love it.

Later I found out that all young men here are obligated* to serve one year either in the military or the police upon graduating fom high school.  So the po-po dancin´ in the streets were probably some of those guys who don´t carry guns and are known as ´Auxiliares´.  But either way what a frigin´awesome vision to stumble upon. :)


*As always there are all kinds of exceptions that make it much more likely that only certain populations actually end up serving, i.e. poor folks.


P.S.  As you can see I didnt have a way of scanning the cartoon this time so its not all perfect like I might want it to be but hey a theme of mine lately has been embracing imperfections so here I am, imperfect!

Cartoon 28: Old Baggage, New Tools

Can you believe its been a year already since we started virtually crossing borders together?? At the year mark I was so thankful to go home for a bit and sit my butt down.  I got to take a look at myself and see what the first year of travel has taught me.  Literally and figuratively, I got to drop off old baggage that was weighing me down and conscientisize the new tools that I have acquired.  I apologize in advance cuz this is gonna be a long entry, but I guess thats a good sign cuz it means I´ve learned a lot! So I separated the entry into sections so you can read what interests you…

I´m leaving behind…

Uno.  Striving for ¨Perfection¨

One time Daniel, Joaquin, and I were hired to do a circus cabaret in a bar.  Fifteen minutes before the show was supposed to start, we hadn´t talked about lights or music and the boys were still painting their faces. I was so stressed I thought my head was going to burst.  I couldn´t understand why everyone was so calm! Just before show time, we quickly told the owner of the bar which songs were for what acts and we ran off  to start the show.  It was amazing! As we did our thing everyone, the waiters, the owner´s wife and even the audience organized around the success of our show. (Everything is relative of course cuz I think Daniel and Joaquin, both Mexican,  felt that the place was tough because people expected a well put together show…) Lights came on when they were needed, the music was adjusted as we went, and when we made mistakes, we smiled knowingly at the audience and for the most part they smiled back, enjoying our shared humanity. What??! You mean perfection is not expected?? I could talk for hours about how this space to mess up has calmed my mind and spirit. What a healthy thing to feel that my humanity is valued and that the goal is not to execute tasks like a flawless machine.

Dos.  The Fast Life- Impatience

A very smart man told me that impatience is born in priveledge. When you gotta wait for the bus, which is not tryng to accomodate you, you can learn fast that impatience doesn´t serve you.  In my experience down here, I can be as impatient as I want  but it ain´t gonna change the fact that people are  gonna stop and chat with neighbors and enjoy their morning coffee and arrive to our appointment when they get there.  The buses are gonna run late and maybe not even come and the excuse of traffic will always be a valid reason for tardiness no matter how long one has lived in the same city with the same amount of traffic.  So I have no other option than to sloooow down.  After getting used to it, it´s pretty great.  I find that I experience more fully each moment because I´m not so worried about what time I have to arrive to the next moment.  Of course I will admit that sometimes it drives me batty because things take FOREVER.  Even in the restaurants (nonturistic), they aren´t necessarily trying to accomodate you.  You could sit in a restaurant for 30 minutes before the waitress even talks to you and then it will take another 30 for your food to come out.  Uufff and if you ask for a change to your food thats different from what´s on the menu, good luck!!  But I really think that this slower rythym of things and less accomodation has helped me focus less on what I want and more on what I have.

Tres.  Not Honoring My Needs

You´ll never guess what I´ve found out that I need at this stage in my development…

I don´t need to know how I´m getting from Colombia to Peru or who I´ll be living with a week from now.  I don´t need more than a backpack of clothes for a two year trip.  I don´t need a job or a house or a car.  But you know what I need? Nice shampoo.

Sometimes I´ve judged myself for spending the $ that I could use to eat for a week on a bottle of nice shampoo, especially when I´m meeting groups of people who dont even use soap. They bathe themselves in saunas using their own sweat to cleanse themselves of toxins.  They smell like coffee and sweet corn.   They use the natural oil of their skin to keep their skin soft instead of fancy Victorias Secret lotion. Honestly, I think that makes a lot more sense but you know what? It brings me peace and happiness to run my fingers through my soft hair and I cant WAIT to get home to be able to use my delicious smelly good lotion!!!

Cuatro. Shame About Being From the US

Okay let´s face it, we don´t not have the best reputation in the world.  Down here, among many things, we are known for what´s on T.V., Hollywood, tourists who unknowingly support the exploitation of the people and land of a nation, and the actions of our government which more often then not are so heavily based on our financial interests that they clash with cultures whose tend to place more value on human relations.  I love my country and the people in it but because I was always so blind to the actions of my government outside of our borders, it was a huge shock when I arrived to Mexico and began to learn why people perceive us as they often do.  Sometimes its been hard to stay grounded in the things I love about my country when learning about the countless US supported genocides and our government´s tendency to support the policial party that most suites our financial and power interests regardless of how horrifically oppressive the regime may be.  And when I say support I don´t mean ¨Yeh! Go team!!¨ from the side lines.  I mean providing the ammunition and training to kill civilians and execute leaders that have been chosen by the people.  This is so hard for me to stomach.  And I was ashamed that I didn´t know that all this was done in my name.

But I´m leaving that shame behind.  Part of the reason I´m on this trip is to educate myself about these realities and there are plenty of people all over the world that don´t know what their government is doing when they are not looking.  The US is a beautiful place where incredible things are born and I am standing tall saying that I´m from the US and showing that we are so much more than many think we are.

And finally… Cinco. Disappointment at the Lose of My Team/Anger at Joaquin

What can I say about this… I guess just simply that I was carrying around a lot of weight from the disappointment of the lose of the original team I planned to travel with. And a lot of hurt for how things went  down with Joaquin.   (See Cartoon 16: Holy Shit).  But at this point in my healing I am so thankful that we decided to jump into this crazy dream together.  Just because it didn´t turn out how I ´d hoped doesn´t mean it was unsuccessful.  Joaquin and I did an incredible amount of learning together and I would never be on this amazing journey without his influence.  I would have never learned that I, and I believe everyone, have the ability to find what we need (food, clothing, shelter, love, and nice shampoo) wherever we are because the world and its people are generous and we don´t need half of what we think we do.  Feeling grateful to him (and Daniel) has helped me release the pain and find love and amazement in its place.

So for those of you who have made it all the way to the end of this entry, I greatly appreciate your patience. I know this is a fast world and it means a lot when we find the time to witness each other and share our experience.

Cartoon 27: Rest in this WildLife

One of my favorite things to do during my time with America Latina Cooperativa was to hang my head out of the window of the motorhome as we travel just letting the landscape wash over me.  I could feel the stress of traveling, of learning so much so fast, of meeting so many people with incredible and intense stories and of living a rather intense one myself wash away as my eyes glided over the awe inspiring lush lush nature of Mexico and Central America.  In Mexico we met a caterpillar (pictured in the bottom right hand side of the drawing) that was unbelievable!! He was the size of an elongated hotdog with bright yellow and black strips and his belly was brilliant red-orange!  As we drove down, I watched the incredible beauty fly by, taking in the deep deep greens and watching the flowering trees change from yellow to orange to red on our way toward Costa Rica. In Nicaragua we met these amazing trees that actually weren't trees but groups of vines that had surrounded a tree and taken it over leaving only the vines in the shape of a tree. Wow! 

Now I have parted with the folks from America Latina Cooperativa.   We became a family for three months of intense work, accompanying each other in every part of our lives. Sharing with folks in the different communities living incredible stories, seeing things that someone from where I´m from was never meant to see.  As my gramma would say, what a priveledge. I read a great quote the other day, ´Life is not about finding ourselves, it´s about creating ourselves.´ This trip has continued to create me in a million new ways, and I just keep watching the rolling mountains that remind me that no matter what I´m going through, the capacity of life is just so so huge that the stress just isn´t that important. It´s time to go home for a Rest in this Wild Life...

Cartoons 26.1, 26.2, 26.3: Things That Are Crazy Different in Latin America Thus Far



 Going to the bathroom is wow different depending on where you are here. Basically everywhere public, there are no seats on the toilets and either you bring your own paper or you have to pay to use the potty and they give you paper.  Then you throw the used paper in the trash can beside the toilet.  I don´t quite get how but for real it usually doesn´t stink.  Then in a lot of rural places, you are given a bucket of water that you dump into the toilet bowl which makes the waste go down.  It has taken me about two years to figure out the necessary angle and velocity you have to pour the water with to create the vacuumy force that sucks the poo down.  I must confess I´ve had some sh%&ty experiences in the learning process ha! (Okay sorry that was way obvious but a girls gotta find a way to laugh about learning curves that include unpleaseant splashes yuuuuck!) 
Moving on... there is much less privacy around going to the bathroom in my experience here. One place we stayed the house was basically a cement box and there was barely a curtain between me on the pot and everyone else.  It´s really good though because it´s forced me to release a lot of shame that I´ve had around the natural processes of my body.  I used to not even want my boyfriend of five years to hear me pee.  Now, Joaquin, my most recent boyfriend, used to call me ´Little Moon´ after one of the many times he came to be my lookout as I exposed my round pale booty to the moonlight. :)  



The showering system is also pretty different.  A lot of times there´s no separation between the shower space and the sink and toilet.  Its kinda handy to have the toilet there so I can sit down down and wash my feet :) But I can´t seem to figure out how not to soak everything in the bathroom while showering.  I think I´ve seen like two tubs since I´ve been here, seems that houses generally don´t have them. And there are a couple of different systems that I´ve seen for heating the water:
1. Turn on a small gas-powered hot water heater about 20 minutes before you wanna shower and then turn it off before you get in.  You have about 5 to 10 minutes of hot water so you´d better be fast!!
or....
2.   There is an electrical heating device attached to the showerhead that heats the water as it comes through.  Definitely the most efficient but the water pressure has to be pretty low for this method too work.
There´s lots of conciousness about saving water here cuz, well, they can´t just consume to their hearts content.  One time when we were living in San Cristobal (Chiapas, Mexico), we went without running water for like a week in a middle class apartment in a good sized town.  We caught rain water to flush the toilets and wash the dishes.  From what I understand, the government sends enough water to fill the storage tank generally located on the roof of the house and if it runs out before they decide to put more in, you´d better hope you´re resourceful.  I almost got cussed out one time at a Circus Convention using the public shower.  I didn´t turn the water off at any point during my shower and a girl yelled, "Hey, we turn off the water when we soap up!!!!" I can definitely understand the woman´s frustation with me being that in the US we consume like 70% of the resources taken from the earth each day....oh dear...
Hmmmm, other miscellaneous stuff...the lights go out like once a month, heating and air doesn´t exist in most places- folks just put on more clothes or take them off as the case may be... oh yeh! This is kind of random but one of my favorite things in Mexico is that when you walk into or out of a restaurant, you almost always address the other people in the place by saying, "Probecho!" which means "Enjoy!" Cool right?



The last thing I just have to share is something I kind of touched on in Cartoon 23.  People are so frigin' generous!!! One time I was in the plaza in San Cristobal helping Joaquin and Daniel after a show and a woman came up to congratulate us on our work.  I thanked her and then I complimented her earrings and she said "You like them? Take them!" And she took them out of her ears and gave them to me.  And then she continued to invite us to her home on the beach if we ever wanted to get out of the city! And she meant it too. 
At parties, often people just buy a cajuama, a big bottle of beer, and pass it around the party.  You let yours go and within 5 minutes another one circulates back to you.  Pretty much everytime you go to someone´s house even just for a moment, they offer you food and drink.  Countless people that we´ve stayed with have offered to lend us their bikes or cars whenever we need them without even asking about our skills as riders and drivers, little do they know I crash at least once everytime I get on a bike :) 
Many times I´ve told people about the trip that I´m on and they offer to take to lunch just because they know that moving from place to place without a steady stream of finance can be tough.  And people are also way generous with their time.  In fact they often laugh when I say the phrase "Thank you for your time". "My time?", they say, "Time is not mine."   When asking for directions, people are generally so helpful and will often say "You know what, I´ll just take you there!" I see endless support for social projects too, people just pitch in when they see good work being done.  This kind of brings me to a topic I´m going to explore in one of my next cartoons but let me not get ahead of myself.  I´ll just finish up today by sending out a ginormous shout out to the people of Mexico and Central America..."THANK YOU!!!!"