Hands on LivingLand

Welcome to another chapter in the green life blog! Far from Honduras, I’ve been in Brazil searching for a special place and people that’ll carry LivingLand to the next level. People, plants, and permaculture… I hear it, feel it, live it… and am committed to the calling: unite people with nature to cultivate healthy, conscious, intimate, and honest, tasty green relationships.

This green generation is everywhere near as searches for fertile conditions inside myself and Brazil are full-on glowing. So much has happened in the last couple months!

The short-version of this post goes something like this:

Here-and-Now is where everything happens.

&

To find what we seek, stop looking.

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Right now I’m bus-zipping over rolling and lush Bahia. It’s a friendly, fertile, sunny, afro-descendent, massive and magical state full of green life potentials, and I am falling in love with her daily. Near the end of a reconnaissance mission, I am stoked to say: I have found what I was looking for! In a tiny coastal municipality filled with beauty and challenge, I’ve found a space to share my spirit, skills, and sweat. I’m super excited for an asap return… to dance together again with this people and place, creating a positive culture-flow that creates more Energy and Love than it consumes.

Permaculture.

But first, tales from the green camino.

I. Knocked-out but back in the body baby!

Is it devotion to morning meditation or a delicious coconut-cacao mingão that enlightened me out of bed at dawn today? Dream travel merged to bird song and light tropical rain, found me camping in soft sand beside my friend’s adobe house at Piracanga. So I rose, thanked a palm with a pee, and flowed to the surfside yoga pavilion to meditate the birth of another fresh and beautiful day.

Low on the dawning Atlantic a dull pink glow slowly brightened to orange, then yellow, blending finally to the grey overcast skies and a balmy winter day in coastal Bahia, cultural heart of Brazil. The last weeks have penned a new chapter in this ever-shifting incarnation; the present theme has flipped from inner spirit journeys to communities of like-spirited people and gente.

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Reborn from a womb of potent re-calibrations in Lumiar, I descended to the urban jungles of Rio de Janeiro, more physically present in my body than ever before. I was still deep in trances induced by events at Flor das Aguas, where a spirit knocked the vital essence right out of my body, pulled matter and energy apart for a moment, then let them snap back together and re-unite, revealing a truthful oneness in reality. What happened up there was perhaps the most significant personal adventure yet, delivering me to nearly immediate and lasting presence, calmness, and reverence.

In those hills I survived a mysterious and unprompted near-death experience, and was shown that Here-and-Now is only experienced, and can’t really be explained or understood. When my vital Self left then returned, the voice of an energy, a spirit, a knowledge… a Me… emerged, so grateful to be in this amazing vehicle and instrument… this body. Injuries sustained via the knockout lasted weeks, and though I didn’t go to a clinic, I know at least one rib got cracked and that my right shoulder was severely mashed up… I couldn’t even lift my arm above my head for a week!

But when life’s discomforts are treated as opportunities for learning and growth all is green, and even here in heavily deforested Brazil, I can see the once edenesque, now cow-and-monocultured-to-the-horizon destruction, as opportunity not loss. How incredible will be a new world culture that is as motivated and active to care for each other and the Earth, as ours has been to enslave, and slash and burn! So as I winced with each respiration for a couple weeks and nursed myself back to health, a deep sense of grateful presence sprouted and permeated in me. I am Here-and-Now, where a calm divine loving presence flows through and fills me.

II. Rio de Janeiro – a cidade maravilhosa!

From green mystic vagabond styles with an earth brother in lush forests, crystal rivers, deep silence, serenity, and space, to cluttered, clattering, car-choatic coastal cidade, I suddenly found myself in a trance and wandering around the famous city, staying in a flat full of lovely ladies. My carioca community had become two Colombians and one Brazilian, plus the myriad loco lindos that floated by constantly.

But what was I doing here in the city… wasn’t I supposed to be on a permaculture quest?

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Duda and I had met a couple years ago at IPEC, a permaculture hub in the state of Goias. An energetic and intelligent architect, permaculture had attracted her with its synthesis of broad disciplines into holistic, healthy, and aesthetically inspiring living-system designs. Later she had an artistic epiphany and entered a rootsy contemporary dance school here. So the last time we hung out building veggie gardens in the savannah, and this time we danced in coastal babylon!

Ten floaty days in Rio… here-and-now, vital-essence-in-the-body, mind-over-matter, pranayama breath, subtle awareness, gross movements, reverence, consciousness, calmness, the human-nature relationship-paradox… woah man! I was filled with so much to think about… but what to do? Lumiar clung with me as dull physical pain and super-heightened awareness, and I just kept on observing and learning from it. My inner and outer worlds were colliding, spinning around, unifying, and carrying me along… after all, at the heart of life what else is there to do really but watch and learn?

So I flowed with bohemian dance artists, ‘subtle encounters’, and contact improvisation. I jam-danced in chic Copacabana and Santa Teresa, watched an eclipsed moon rise over the Sugar Loaf and Botafogo, shared massages with light, loving laughter, all the while speaking of sexuality, service, society, art, science, and spirit… life!

The urban realm pumped with its powerful gravitation, luring with the promise of human accomplishments in technology and cultural grandeur. Rio was tugging at my curiosity, and I explored the many possibilities… and illusions.

Exploring the conscious body’s mysteries and wisdom, I flowed one afternoon to a professional massage, then aimlessly away in a tingling trance with slow, focussed breaths. I climbed the train track I found pasted to the sides of a dramatic mountain, ascending for an hour while waving to trainloads of camera-snapping tourists, then arrived to the end of the line. Invisibly, I stepped onto the platform, over a chain, and up several hundred stairs to the feet of Christ the Redeemer, Brazil’s most famous monument. I prayed with that massive stone-faced fellow for several high minutes until a beefy hand gripped me from behind and I whirled around.

The security guard’s inner-world bells must’ve been clanging alarm. Had I paid? he demanded to know, and pay? I feigned ignorance, explaining I’d just walked right up… wasn’t that allowed? and no apparently it wasn’t. It got dramatic when I lamented for folks that can’t or won’t see beyond their job descriptions – a most grotesque over-simplification of human beings’ potentially conscious essence. Then I got booted out, so flowed back downstairs to the city. Dusk arrived, weaving an awesome day into night… this Rio trip was a decent little pilgrimage!

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To me Brazil has little to do with beaches, bubble-butts, ball, or beer. I always get served super spicy spiritual dishes here, sparse on the debauch, but heavy on the revelation and growth. Throughout the rich re-calibrations of Lumiar, my ego and future/past-obsessed mind were violently re-harmonized with my body and essential life force. Here-and-Now became integral to the psycho-physical processes of self-consciousness, and with all this, a more intentional and conscious relationship with body and Earth emerged. Calmly, my body, the earth, time, space, and Everything, are One.

In Rio I heard strong callings. Even before re-calibrations knocked fresh physical sense into me, curiosity to a profound physical practice was amassing. I envisioned yoga, massage, or dance, with the long-term feeling of integrating deep-awareness practices into my agriculture.

Although I toyed with joining Duda at the dance school, after just ten daze in Rio I was already avoiding messy babylon, and stayed mostly inside. Cluttered metropolitan energy currents overcome me, and I realized I had to get outta there! Concrete, steel, garbage, theft, traffic jams, cigs, booze, drugs, locked doors, buy, sell, etc, are not fertile places for growing epic organic, ecological, and spiritual fruits and vegetables…!

III. The recent spiritual & philosophical revelations of a vagabundo

But wait, I’m not a vagabundo… I’m Raio Verde!

After decent success in Honduras, I’d returned to Brazil all mind-fired on finding a region and some land, then ploughing The LivingLand Foundation to new levels of green production. But far from such land, I found myself swimming in stormy spiritual seas, navigating strong currents and sailing meSelf towards the ports of tranquil re-calibrations. Instead of organizing a logical, straight-lined, business model-type project scenario, my Ego and planning mind were getting blenderized and tossed around like toothpicks at sea!

Here-and-Now I’ve found a more dry and fertile landscape, and am finally settling down into a much calmer vision and participation in this miraculous reality. Looking back at all the wild and seemingly unrelated events I’ve been through, I can see that they’ve shaped and prepared me. Today I’m more ready than ever to dance with life, and to get lots of groovy green stuff done!

But I shouldn’t be surprised by any of it. Brazil always blows my out of the water and I think that’s why I keep coming back!

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A philosophical interlude…

Reductionism and logical thinking over recent centuries has advanced the current environmental crisis. Questing to understand and conquer diversity and chaos, the intellect has chopped up nature, people, and events into tiny, simplified, disconnected, but identifiable bits, then treated them independently instead of interdependently. While this has simplified things for the mind, it has reduced the depth and intimacy of experience. We’ve lost the freedom, encouragement, and training to perceive, accept, and work within the unified whole of reality, and we have forgotten how to be comfortable and celebrate our place and participation in a very mysterious Cosmos… or at least to not destroy that which we don’t understand.

Over two millennia, our deities have been converted from natural essences that interacted intimately with us, to a single patriarch God almighty who exercises ultimate power over us. Yuck! and now, paradise has been turned into a place reachable only by playing ‘the game’ and following strict rules. While paradise is Here-and-Now, it’s come to be worshipped as something obtainable only in the future, or ‘over there’, either by buying or dying!

Egological religious and scientific institutions push the popular belief that both the mind-body-spirit complex and people-planet whole are composed of separate entities. These are then further split up into smaller, ever more meaningless fragments, until what we are left with is nebulous and nearly invisible. In this way we loose control because such fragmentation keeps the human species apart from both itself and Nature. Mind is held over matter, thought is suspended over body, and man is in charge of the entire planet. It’s cosmic corruption at its best!

We exist very much in Oneness. The famous e = mc² equation shows that energy (thought) and matter (body) are One, but Ego wants to be special and unique, and sometimes behaves very blindly, selfishly, and destructively!

So Ego, please come into the light! The arrival of consciousness in us is a miracle, but we’re still connected with the Mother Everything. She’s special and sacred, so let’s treat her with our greatest love, care, and reverence, Ok?

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The developed world culture is of minds detached from bodies and spirits waiting for a promised reward for good behaviour. On average, this culture lives terribly. Enslaved to time and money, it devours dead-meat fast-food, smokes and drinks additively, tolerates suffocating rush hour, obsessively accumulates redundant and stagnating consumer products and services, and lobs lethal bombs and toxins at one another and the earth, etc…

Industrialized paradigms encourage the extraction and manipulation of Earth’s materials in ways nearly totally disconnected from Self and Sacred. But what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves: we bulldoze mountains, level forests, fish out oceans, convert our most fertile and sacred places into endless labyrinths of steel, concrete, smoke, guck, and noise, etc. When we rape ecology, we rape the Mother, and when we rape the Mother, we rape ourselves.

The good news for consciousness is that we can do otherwise, and are starting to act in Love.

Finally, many people are moving past the perpetually disappointing belief in a lasting Ah-ha! moment, when finding ‘it’ or arriving ‘there’, complete and content, we might live happily ever after. Culture’s blind desires for fairy tale and Hollywood endings is proving lethal to life on Earth. With ever-increasing force and efficiency we’ve been turning life into smoke, sacrificing the sacred for images and illusions of a permanent happily ever after that simply does not exist!

Up and down, up and down, up and down… there is only this Process… long, convoluted, and impossible to fully control, though our imaginations and actions do partially steer it. What we do have here and now is the choice and ability to create a deep contentment, a happily ever after, by seeing things as they actually are, and loving equally our sorrows and our joy.

If Cosmos has a vision for her creations or not, one thing is certain: Learning to calm down, watch, and enjoy the ride… this is a good thing!

IV. Traipsing with alternative eco-spiritual communities

Fazenda Figueira

One night in Lumiar a white witch herbalist healer told of a spiritual community farm called Fazenda Figueira, founded and run by a visionary named Trigueirinho. The witch had lived there one and off over the years and encouraged us to visit. We’d certainly learn something, she said, some arrive and stay forever, while others last only hours before running away. Then she advised we leave all expectations behind…

So following the sign, we travelled to the south of Minas Gerais to check it out and my, what a strange place!!! Different than anything ‘alternative’ I’d ever seen, Figueira is composed of five huge, fully-functioning organic farms, with associated living and teaching facilities, housing for hundreds, schools, temples, monasteries, and even a hospital. It’s not a place for ‘hippies’… in fact hippy food – substances and sex – is not permitted. The community works with unique visions of spiritual evolution, delving into a profound inner world via Trigueirinho’s doctrines. Communication with both extra and entra-terrestrial intelligences is normal, daily group synchronizations are held, various mantras are sung in both alien languages and portuguese, and diverse rituals are performed. Weekly evening teachings with Trigueirinho attract hundreds of faithful, and all residents participate with running this rather strict, silent, and somber Brazilian ashram.

Forrest and I knew right away that this wasn’t our place and people, but what a trip! Confirmations came from all directions, for all paths lead to Rome and there are infinite ways to arrive at spiritual Truth. On the drive back to Rio we shared terrific conversation, probing esoteric christianity and arriving at Christ’s central offering to humanity: that All things are Unified and death, even to a Son of God, means nothing, for Everything simply Is, and nothing can be created nor destroyed.

Still glowing there in my mind is an image of a blue and green swirling sphere of Divine Love… so much goodness… and the Unity of time and space as a Process without beginning or end, in which Everything, including us, exists forever, changing permanently…

Piracanga

I’ve awoken at five-thirty to another lightly drizzling tropical winter sunrise and more pretty birdsong in the forests surrounding this oasis near Itacaré, Bahia. I’ve meditated, feel aware, and sit to scribble, sipping a steaming eco-organic-spiritual yerba maté I received at the encontro from a white wizard with mesmerizing, swirling blue eyes. Hoorah!

When I’d finally bussed out of Rio, I followed my destiny and headed up to Bahia. When Susana, a lovely permaculture friend of mine, learned of my destination she highly recommended I check out Piracanga here on the Cacao Coast, so I did.

I was stoked to leave the ‘developed’ southeast of Brazil and to be on the road again. Since I was a lad, my way has been the highway… the paths of this green adventurer are purely-inspired plunges into the Great Unknown and Flow. After nine-months in Brazil (in three separate visits over four years), I was pumped to finally get into Bahia, the belly-womb of this massive green mother country. So I bought a sac of yummy fruits and plenty of water, jumped aboard, and twenty-seven hours later rolled into Ilheús, a relatively short jaunt from Itacaré and Piracanga on coconut-studded beaches.

Piracanga lays a sandy barefoot hour and a half hike north from Itacaré along a deserted tropical strand. The place offers teachings in human growth and evolution, featuring an off-the-grid spiritual retreat centre and emerging ecovillage where various courses and reunions happen throughout the year, and folks live in relative peace and harmony amidst ocean breezes and swaying palms. When I arrived to volunteer in exchange for room and board, there were two courses starting up: ‘Yoga, Music, and Art’, and ‘Aural Reading I’. ‘Yummy yummy,’ I thought… events like these must attract pretty tasty people… and do!

Somewhere between Lumiar and Figueira, an inner-growth spiritual chapter had phased into a people-focused community one. So amazing, I’ve been learning sweet compost heaps about harmonizing with others which is totally essential, especially here in Brazil where everything happens in groups.

In fact, a defining nuance of Brazilian Portuguese is the word-concept a gente, which translates into the people. In everyday use, gente replaces we, and verbs tenses that in English would be conjugated as we, become first-person. For example, ‘We are going to the city’ becomes ‘The gente are going to the city’. An expression of the vital essence within and a physical manifestation of belief, linguistic details are very telling of culture. While we consists of a group of separate individuals (me, you, him, and her, etc.), gente is One Whole. Solidarity reigns in this country and it’s ever-touching and sweet to be gente.

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I played a Piracanga volunteer in green agroforests and gardens, working light and revelatory, fun and calming… it was more meditation than task, living good than work. I laughed hoots with Maíra and Ragi building agro-islands and chicken tractors, repopulating a degraded landscape with happy green beings. I tended already-established plots, and taught visitors about permaculture. It was amazing fun!

Piracanga was born eight years ago when a Portuguese dream interpreter dream-visioned the centre and started womanifesting it. She gathered resources, bought a large beach-front paradise, and started design and construction. While the goal of the centre was not agro-ecological self-sufficiency, permaculture design concepts are integrated into many of the site’s structures. Here you live amongst open, energetically pleasing shapes and flows, naturally constructed houses and centre buildings, solar panels, composting toilets, a natural birthing house, free school, gorgeous vegetarian restaurant, bamboo meditation pavilions, an adobe library and community theatre, recycled-material sweat lodge, living grey-water treatment system, emerging agroforests, coconuts, a tree seedling nursery… there’s art-eco everywhere! Making a complex dream-vision real is arduous, but it’s happening here and is totally awesome to see!

But people talk a lot, especially in smaller insular communities, and with high expectations and differences of opinion for a culture based on love and elevated conduct, sometimes I heard negative mutterings. Still, overall I give Piracanga a high and shiny grade… they are doing something avant-garde and learning, are open to process, and provide a unique opportunity for magical inner growth in a country and planet that needs it mucho.

Early in my stay, I chatted with an exasperated resident who mentioned her recent disillusionment but didn’t want to go into it. From there I started intuiting a mildly negative vibe lurking around centre-wide, and tried to figure out what the issues were…

As in many such spiritual-ecological growth centres, courses are aimed at folks that can pay course fees. To raise investment capital for their business, the centre subdivided some land into lots and offered them to alumni who had arrived, fallen in love, and wanted an opportunity to own a piece of conscious paradise.

Over years of this what’s emerged is a physical and political rift between the centre and ecovillage. While the centre occupies the beachfront and business agenda, behind is a strata of about twenty-five ecohomes, some occupied by permanent residents, others by temporary or vacationing newcomers and young families. Through this arrangement a very non-ecological, non-spiritually-enlightened discordance has spouted up.

Today, the centre’s business and power-control objectives are just not congruous with the community visions. The centre’s egoism and for-profit mandate are at odds with egalitarian community desires. Some residents feel ripped off, complaining that products and services the centre purports to cultivate are not even in place where they should be… at home! On all sides, mild accusations of corruption, manipulation, deceit, poor communication, misinformation, selfishness, etc, have been popping up like pimples on the playa.

This diverse group of international ‘alternative’ people has come together to live in isolated intimacy, and in spite of incredible spiritual and ecological growing, they still rub each other a bit and create friction sometimes. Idealistically, spiritual solutions promise to make it all better but in reality, jealousy, greed, ego, strong opinions, unrequited desires, unresolved childhood and karmic issues, large personalities, etc, come up and make strong stew!

Yet to generate something positive and to learn from this marvellous example, it looks like the root of the predicament is simply a matter of right intention in design, or the lack thereof. The central vision of the centre was never to create an intentional community, and so these threads were never sewn into the fabric of the initial plan. Now however, a community has emerged with no organizational protocols or social structures, and weeds have sprouted up in the garden.

But sands shift and even while I was there, the centre hosted representatives from the Italian super-intentional community of Damanhur to give a two-week course. Both administration and community members attended, and I saw that the owners of the centre occupied front-row seats. All are keen to address these challenges and improve on the initial design.

Thankfully, openness is fundamental at Piracanga. Conflicts are normal and healthy if growth results. Like so many alternative entities (and the entire planet), Piracanga is not a finished, perfected entity. All phenomena in the universe are part of a process without beginning or end, and frankly, I have rarely met a group of people so aware of this and who are as willing and ready to discuss, work with, and learn from all of it. Bravo people for positive change and conscious evolution!

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These days my main practice is to maintain a mostly positive outlook and vibration. I’ve got no more time in this life to even whisper of bad news scenarios, no way! It’s so dense, dark, and addictive to live in regret, shame, hatred, criticism, and bad news the majority of the time… and so lovely to choose lightness and see golden opportunities to do loving, good things. When we observe and see predominantly the positive, we become owners of our reactions to life’s situations and people. Then we can proactively create the world we want, not complain of the one we don’t want.

Positive people are green people!

The Encontro

The day after I got to Piracanga, Maíra asked if I was coming with the gente to the encontro. ‘Of course!’ I said, then ‘What is it?’ So she explained it’s the biggest annual Brazil-wide gathering of people from alternative communities, movements, and projects, and I said ‘Ótimo, então a gente vai!!’

A couple months back I’d found myself feeling bewildered and a little lost, suffering with no clear way to accomplish what I’d come back to Brazil to do. I’d come to find land and a region to bring LivingLand to, but Brazil is so huge! When I called up my sweet lil sis, her advice brought human into my ecology. ‘Go where you’ll find people you enjoy being with,’ she said, so I began broadening my gaze from plants to people too.

And several weeks later I arrived to Piracanga, a place just full of lovely members of my tribe, until the next thing I knew I was being whisked off toward a national tribal gathering for a week-long roots fest, Brazil style, yeah!

The annual encontro was born thirty-five years ago to ecological agriculture parents in a time of rapidly changing land uses here. It’s now grown up a bit and attracts diverse interests: mixes of alternative healing, spirituality, art, medicine, and amidst it all, the creation and maintenance of myriad intentional communities. Like permaculture, or any movement that synthesizes diverse philosophies and practices, the ‘alternative’ or ‘intentional’ community definition is constantly evolving. The encontro invites representatives from hundreds of such definitions, so we can all share and celebrate the creation of new ways of life. Green.

Our gente was a charismatic crew of young families from Piracanga who are searching for a space in which to seed true community visions. It was awesome to arrive with such a great, green family, set up the communal camp, and hang out intimately with these lovely people, allowing time and circumstance to fertilize several emerging friendships.

Each year the econtro convenes in a different rural area and state, so the fact that it was happening near Nazaré, just 60kms away from where I’d arrived in Piracanga, was strikingly serendipitous. A week before I didn’t even know such a thing existed, and now I was right in the belly of it!

It was full-on awesome. Over a thousand colourful people camping on a mixed farm in lush and rolling coastal Bahia. Sans electricity, tout acoustic, massive vegetarian communal cooking, moonlit campfires, a gurgling river, spring water, myriad green workshops, tonnes of gorgeous garrotas… legions of inspiring stories flowed while conscious community contacts were made. Now, the map of Brazil, once a sprawling blur of maybes and where-nexts?, has become populated with shiny green luminous points. So many adobe doors and garden gates have opened and welcome me. Gratidão, gente verde!

Funny thing was that despite all the singing and praying for peace, love, unity, and freedom, it wasn’t all blue skies and spinning flower dresses. The event is fairly Brazilian hippy and the sanitation and water supply were maybe a little too organic for my sterile Canadian standards. When we got drizzled on for two days straight, the camp’s main areas became slippery cesspools of muddy mixed cocktails, with spritz’s of unknown human body fluids and baby splats to boot. Hipsters shlucked about barefoot, seemingly oblivious, or in various One-love trances where stilts would have been ideal, but lacking we just prodded along, slipping and sliding through bacterial traffic jams and oozy body juices.

At the end of a week, even though the sun had came out and mostly dried things out, our gente returned to Piracanga with several visible maladies eating them. Among who knows what else, I had a nasty staff infection, Staphylococcus, which manifested as open infections that wouldn’t heal up and go away… but I think I’ve mostly dealt with it now…!

On another occasion, the camp’s water pump broke down one day, leaving a thousand people without agua for washing, cooking, or drinking. The announcement came: ‘Gente, there’s a little water pump issue so we need help to fill the communal cistern…’ and a five-hundred person chain-gang formed to haul water up from the spring. Broken bucket by broken bucket, it took over four hours to half fill the tank!

Amidst the water-hauling hippies I couldn’t help thinking, ‘If this were Canada, half the party would’ve packed up and left for this. But on the other hand, if this were Canada, it wouldn’t have happened at all, because there would’ve been at least ten back-up plans!’ Yet, I thought, if I had organized the event myself, I wouldn’t have planned it better. The call to haul water accomplished two bonus tracks: a) it drove home the notion of fragile and precious water supplies and b) it unified the gente even more than it already was! Throughout the succession people sang, danced, chatted, and laughed together. When it wrapped up, we sang more, danced more, and then prayed for the sacred water, and snaked our way, hand in hand, back up to the cistern in a massive communal celebration… it was touching.

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The encontro has many unique traditions, one being that you can’t even publish the name of it! No photos either. And, before you can speak in the communal circles you need to have attended at least three encontros. Food is all vegetarian. Music is quiet. Peace is supreme. Ahô.

Over the week I spent many delightful hours in the giant bamboo communal kitchen cooking yummy green cuisine with a festive tribe-vibe. I’m more familiar with the production side of things, but have always been drawn to rootsy veggie kitchens. This one was brimming with beautiful women and a celebratory, productive, and loving feel. I made several of my tastiest new friends there, chopping, grating, and serving bowlful upon bowlful of steaming love-imbued dollops to nearly never-ending lines of happy hungry hippies. Hilarious, beautiful, and yummy, Oh yeah!

V. Boipeba and back to Piracanga, then… LivingLand finds Serra Grande!

The encontro wrapped up in full-blown ceremonious chaos. After two days of animated circle meetings and debate, the location for next year’s gathering was elected. As we packed up our camp, I was again asked ‘So, are you coming with the gente to the beach?’ ‘Yes!’ I replied with delightful submission to this communal destiny, ‘Which one?’

Remote, pristine, sandy tropical island paradise: Boipeba. My new gente passed four sweet, tranquil, familial days there together frolicking in the sun, swimming, hiking, camping, campfire cooking, singing, playing capoeira… getting all beachy and clean after the cesspool conditions of the festival. It was so good!

Then some of us cruised back to Piracanga for more ecolife: nude beaching, agroforesting, comunal cooking, fertilizing friendships, sharing our plans and dreams, some cool courses, gente, family… I felt so content and healthy to return to such a fertile place and people!

Then one night a green dream vision enveloped me and I awoke to my own voice murmuring out loud: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you…’ while images of sweet gente floated to and through me. I got up, unzipped the tent, and strolled the moonlit beach. It was 3am and the rustling of coconut palms was the only sound above crashing Atlantic waves. Swaying in a hammock, I watched mother moon float northwestward, inviting me, calling me to follow. I went to the tree nursery, found my precious box of seeds, held it, and knew I would be planting something soon…

Soon after, I realized that I would head back to Canada. Even though I hadn’t found the ‘this is it’ spot where I could sow my LivingLand hopes and visions, I remained content with all the amazing things that had happened. I’d desist in the search for a land and people in Brazil this time and go north to catch the last months of summer in BC. After all, it’s been a year since I visited, and oh what a year! Calling me north I felt my loving family, amazing friends, sacred spots, camping, hiking, biking, fishing, sailing, fruit, harvest, gardens, seeds… oh sweet BCness!

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So I sealed my fate and bought a ticket to BC for mid-August. It was done. Then, at dawn one morning I left my dear friends and Piracanga and headed over to the nearby town of Serra Grande to visit a few new green folks I’d met at the encontro, to check out their farms and the region.

I arrived to a sleepy little town and sat under a leaky lean-to to wait for the duo of awesome girls that was coming to meet me. An eerie contentment settled in and around me as I sat in the silence of the square, watching the tiny little villa wake up.

When Estrela and Suzana arrived we headed out to the farm, bouncing along one of the rickety dirt roads that traces the limits of Parque Serra do Conduru. Within that park, scientists recently recorded the most species-rich forest plot in the world, with a whopping 456 different species of trees a single hectare! We arrived at the farm, gorged ourselves silly on delicious jambu, checked out Estrela’s cool little tree nursery and emerging gardens, then headed down into the jungle, where I suddenly found myself naked in a gurgling stream with two gorgeous women… it was a top-quality welcoming party indeed!

I spent the next ten days falling in love with a region, a village, and a people… so much so that I am planning a return for as soon as possible!

The Cacao Coast of Bahia is quaint and lovely, with an inviting climate, lovely beaches, tropical forests, and a humble, welcoming people. But it’s what you don’t see on the tourism website that really attracts me: a tightly interwoven tapestry of complex and challenging dramas between the impoverished human population and a super biodiverse and potentially productive agroecology. Over and over, I received signs that I can help bridge gaps here… that I will encourage and support the uniting and nurturing of people and nature… with honesty, creativity, sustainability, and love.

Having already bought a ticket to BC, I had to move quite quickly. With curiosity, passion, skill, and gratefulness, I miraculously established numerous local contacts and fledgling partnerships. I am delighted that LivingLand has received welcoming green lights from several local groups including: the municipality of Uruçuca, the landless workers movement (MST), several small-scale family farms, a forest restoration NGO, the Waldorf school, a youth coalition, an ecotourism operator, an ecological food cooperative, and others…

When not in meetings, I was busy on the ground. I created an organic heirloom seed garden, completed a farm’s initial permaculture design, attended a youth congress, and made several new and promising friendships… in fact, I didn’t even have time to go the to beach!!

So now let’s see what Canada will offer. Since getting involved in the Latin American social-ecological scene, I’ve dreamed to use my nationality to help balance out the economic north and south. Canada enjoys tremendous wealth, and much of what and how we consume comes via social and ecological sacrifices in the third world. My goal now is to raise enough money to bring LivingLand back down here for at least a year to cultivate some green people miracles. Together gente, we make a world green!

…

So, returning to where this post began…

Here-and-Now is where everything happens.

&

To find what we seek, stop looking.

Love is green.

LivingLand

Three deep breaths and I awake in the hammock I strung up a few days ago in this abandoned farm shack. The old battered door hangs open to the ancient and overgrown courtyard, while early morning sunlight radiates in through the high-barred windows. Birds chirp outside, and in the distance I make out the rounded green mountain that rims this sacred river valley. Safely, sweetly, serene, I have arrived to yet another day!

As wispy dream leavings linger and swirl in my mind, I swing my feet down to the cool ground, slip on my sandals and walk out onto the dew-laden cobblestones. Beijaflor, the pretty brown horse, is nowhere to be seen. I pass through the creaky gate and make my way to the meadow, past the unkempt and heavily-laden orange trees, over the uneven ground, and down towards the frigid crystal water bathing pool.

I pass Forrest, who has risen before me and has already taken his morning swim. At the top of the bank, several meters above the river, I squat down to meditate and pray for a few moments on the swirling currents, the constant symphony of the physical world around us in each moment, and a coming dip into the dark water, submersion in the mysterious liquid realm…

The next thing I know, I’m hearing my voice being called and my body being shaken roughly awake.

‘Ryan, Ryan! Hey man, wake up!’

My eyes jolt open, blank. I am paralysed, laid flat out on my back, feet pointing uphill, head down and torqued, and I have absolutely no idea where I am.

‘Where am I?’ I stammer.

‘Bro, you’re in Brazil.’

It makes no sense. There is total confusion. I am lost. Where am I? Who am I? What is this?

My eyes start to allow a weak hold on shapes and light, and the round green mountain comes to focus, but I don’t recognize anything, and I’m so confused, so afraid.

‘What? What am I doing in Brazil?’ I stammer, tears forming…

I feel so far away… so, so, so far away, and my mind immediately asks why I’m not with loved ones, safe somewhere, known.

He shakes me again and conveys deep worry, ‘Hey Ryan, do you know who I am?’ he asks, but I have no clue.

I start bawling and stutter through the sobbing tears. ‘Someone hit me, man. Someone pushed me down here…’ More tears.

I am about 20 feet down from where I’d squatted up on the bank, and Forrest is resuscitating me. I am splayed out, on my back in a horrible position, unconscious and out cold, memory gone, hurting, and re-birthing.

He sits with me as I tremble. Slowly, heat and life return and I begin to realize that I am alive. I start to regain control of my body, to realize that I am in it, but no memory comes. Layers of being have been pulled apart and separated… things are not normal. But I trust Forrest because he explains he’s a friend and that calms me. I feel his love, and it is calling life to return to my body. And what more is there? I begin to understand that something extremely powerful has just happened to me. My right shoulder is in severe pain and my head is beginning to pound and ache. But I am back.

My body is totally frozen, the life nearly departed from it. The elements that make me are re-coalescing, re-condensing, re-connecting. Together we pick me up of the ground. It’s been about 10 minutes since we passed each other up in the meadow… but in that time the life force has been knocked clear out of my body, my spirit, has gone away, but it’s back. My body has nearly died, but spirit has come back into my body. If Forrest hadn’t found me, I would’ve died… I also wouldn’t be able to believe any of this had happened!

With his help, I stumble back up to the old house. My first instinct is to get out of there, to run as far as I can, away, but to where? so I just lower slowly into the hammock and let it support me. My mind scrambles aimlessly for a foothold, for definition to fill the void, for logical answers, but nothing comes. I try to piece together a history and slowly my memory comes back, but it takes several hours dosing in and out of consciousness before I can fully recall… who I am, how I arrived to Brazil, what I am doing. Little makes sense, but a relationship with time and space emerges.

By the end of the day it’s all coming back to me, and today, several days later my memory is completely normal and I am getting movement back into my ruined shoulder, upper back, and ribs… but it still hurts very much.

…

So, what happened?

Alone and with Forrest, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, am mostly unable, but am learning some things. I had a profound spiritual experience up there, a spirit-invoked near-death experience, which is re-calibrating my being, divine, peaceful, and content.

At first I tried logic and looked around to see if maybe a branch had fallen off the tree I was under and knocked me out, but nothing. I’ve wondered if somebody, some neighbour perhaps, sneaked up and clubbed me from behind then dragged me down the bank. My physical injuries are deep and real, as if I was hit really hard and pushed down the bank, but that isn’t what happened. The closest neighbour lives far away, and I would’ve heard someone approaching. Did I faint then and fall down? but I don’t faint… have never fainted before.

Physically I am healthy and strong… but spiritually?

Forrest and I have learned many things since that miraculous morning. We’d already guessed it, and now know that indeed, the cleared area out there in the forest was once, long ago, the site of an Indian village. Investigating around where it all happened we discovered that several large boulders form a distinct line that runs up and down the hill, terminating at a huge flat-faced rock in the middle of the swimming hole. As it turns out, when I squatted down to meditate and pray, I was directly over that line…

So I’ve wondered if perhaps I was praying incorrectly, and insulted some keepers of that place. Although I mean no harm by my prayers, perhaps I unknowingly did wrong somehow in my general spiritual ignorance and need for deep cleansing. It’s unsettling to think that in a current cleanse and clarify, heal and evolve, I could somehow err… beingness must be far more delicate and complex than I’ve ever imagined!

Or perhaps I received exactly what I was looking for… a divine teaching… a recalibration of body, mind, and soul… the blossoming of a new flower.

I am coming to terms with some things.

After finishing my work contract in Honduras I’d come to Brazil in a mild frenzy to set-up some project of another. Running, running, running, I was totally in my head and ego, searching nearly fully outside myself for what I should do, some great thing to make the world a better place, and proud of me. It’s a plague I’d been suffering for several years, so obsessed with finding something, doing something, being someone, doing the right thing. And as it turns out, an underlying lesson from this spiritual epiphany is that: everything and anything anybody is doing with their lives is perfect, ‘failure’ is impossible. We exist in many ways at once, in a multidimensional matrix that is part of a vast unfathomable process. At once we are individuals with our personal lifelong sagas and inner workings, but we also form part of an enormous whole.

So I’d been traveling around in this frenzied stupor, feeling like I was missing something, late for something, hopeless, alone, worthless, a failure… so much inner judgement, when really I am perfect! It’s amazing that our inner voices can be so incredibly unloving, ‘we’re our own worst enemies’, when to others we appear just fine! How many times have each of us counselled a friend with some horrible problem that to us seemed so trivial and straight forward? Treat ourselves with the same wisdom… we’re all doing exactly what we ought be doing, it’s not possible to do otherwise, and failure is totally impossible in the eyes of the universe!

If I look at it with different eyes, present eyes, thankful eyes, it has been a wonderful trip, a wonderful life. Sure, I’ve been lonely, lost, scared, unsure, desirous, etc., but its OK… I am human, just living my little personal story, a small part of something vast and wonderful!

It’s clear that I entered a particularly potent personal phase starting with the sacrifice and feast of a wild rooster with my dear brother Raphael at his new permaculture site in rural São Paulo. We prayed to that regal creature as we shared it’s life force, and the meat was like nothing I’ve ingested in years. The carne exploded with a thick vibration that was nearly difficult to ingest… a striking contrast to some of the terribly low-vibration food I’ve been eating over the recent years, and especially in impoverished Honduras. ‘You are what you eat…’ So true!

Since sharing the rooster with Rapha, I’ve been moving naturally through a series of deep centring processes. I’ve re-adapted a love-based diet, and am totally vegetarian again. Immediately following this shift in diet, I began to notice very positive shifts in my energy and composition. In fact, before this dietary shift, I had been stricken with bouts of lethargy, drowsiness, and narcoleptic tendencies for long enough that I’d been getting concerned and was thinking about looking for help. Nearly immediately after I stopped eating industrial meat, these symptoms disappeared. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a renewing clarity, energy, focus, and sense of well-being, calmness and equanimity.

I’ve also been praying and meditating again, much more than I have been for years… generally being grateful and thankful for the simple things in my life, and making subtle adjustments in my body, breath, and posture. At the site, Forrest and I had been cooking on an open wood fire, eating brown rice, lentils, and pinhões (brazilian pine seeds), avocado, fresh fruit, yerba maté… such simple, basic building-block food. Exposed to clean, open air, I’d been sleeping deep and dream-rich in the hammock, aware of moon, stars, and dawn… simple, rich, and green. We’d been hiking and exploring a fair bit, and with the diet, I was carried to a profound awareness of the space inside my body, the incredible exchanges of energy occurring miraculously at every second to enable it to move through the world, interact, and observe. The feeling of hunger can be refreshing and centring.

A near-death experience has the effect of bringing an intense gratitude for life to focus, and the spiritual nature of this mystical experience sheds a new and calming light on the path. I am here because I am meant to be here, when my time to move on comes, there will be nothing I do but accept it willingly. There is deep peace everywhere all around us, and whether we see it or not it is here that we live, in this miraculous body, right now.

…

So now I’m in the urban realm of Rio de Janeiro city. I left the site and Forrest a few days ago because it was time. Not by chance, I am staying with Duda, a dear friend and permaculture colleague, who is studying dance and movement here in the city. Even before I was knocked out by the spirit, then brought back into my body to be grateful in every moment and in my body, I was starting to feel drawn to something new. I am feeling called to a period of physical observation, for it is inside us that the miracle occurs! I have very little idea of what a period of body work-study could look like, only that I am super excited to come home! Something is calling me to yoga, massage, martial arts, dance… or a combination of disciplines. I’ve always loved physical presence… for that I adore gardening and permaculture. Now I am inspired to deepen my awareness of the body-mind-spirit complex in new ways, and to bring this into my earth work and life.

I am experiencing an intense and most beautiful re-calibration and find myself more present than I’ve been for years, perhaps ever. The perpetual throbbing deep in my right shoulder and excruciating pain in my ribs when I sneeze are constant reminders of what happened to me. But these physical pains are also anchors and signposts… constant opportunities that invite me, direct me, and hold me to the place where I am… in this body.

Present moments have returned to being amazing and perfect… I want only to live, and life happens here and now! Everything beyond our immediate physical presence exists in the imagination. This moment is the real thing we are looking for! Right here, right now, free and ours!

For most of my adult life I haven’t accepted or integrated the existence of a spiritual realm. My personal history raised me atheist and educated me scientist, and even today after 31 years of body, mind, and spirit adventures, the words God and Spirituality still don’t come out fluidly and kind of get caught up in my logical mind, in my ego. I’ve often felt silly talking about some of the concepts that matter the most to who I really am!

Even while spiritual blank has often filled me with confusion though, I’ve always perceived some incredibly important subtle truths as a fuzziness on the periphery… and I’ve known always of an inherent spirituality implicit in me… me as the human being I am. Something very special is happening in each of us… to be born human is incredible indeed! Although I’ve often not known what to do with these gifts, or how to integrate them with other aspects of the being I am, I’ve felt the presence and been very conscious of it.

Human being is layers of body, mind, spirit, karma, ego, history… there is so much going on! Putting too much energy in over-thinking can over-shadow the other many wonderful rings of being.

But things change.

Humanity sits perpetually on the horizon of incredible revelations. Beliefs and actions available today, yesterday didn’t even exist. Among other things, we are heading always to connections and integrations with a totally accessible contentment… when just one person becomes Calm, Loving, and Thankful, the world changes. As individuals come into contact with transmissions of wisdom, come into contact with the incredible freedom of Here and Now, come back into contact with the divine gift of Life and practice Love, the truths revealed by the processes of evolution, now becoming conscious evolution will shift our beliefs, our behavious, and our relationships.

When we ask, ‘Who am I?’ we open the window. It’s a source question that will carry the questioner on a long adventure-quest… and the answer can take a very long time to emerge, and will be told via life’s great griefs, joys, and revelations. The path of He or She gifted and condemned to this incredible journey of self-awareness and actualization can become all-consuming and fill a lifetime. Indeed, relative to a person’s capacity and karma, personal history, and attributes, life is can be a living investigation into this, Who am I? quest. And not one, but numerous ‘answers’ exist because an answer isn’t static, but the most dynamic of entities. Evolution is an active process, and while we exist in this moment, we also form part of an ongoing and fluxing sum total. Change is inevitable, it is the Way… from where we are right now we can to gaze into various reflections and observe how far we’ve come, where we are now, and to what far-off realms we may yet travel, dreaming always to divine possibilities…

And in the meantime we sing, we garden, we dance, and we eat well.

Each moment is a beautiful and perfectly precious gift. We are alive. Thank you!

June 8, 2011

Laying poolside at the hostel under the gaze of adoring African eyes I nearly fully resist the idea of leaving la Pura Vida. It’s just so lovely here, so easy, so fun! Since September, I’ve somehow managed to spend over five weeks in Costa Rica, where each moment seems to drip with great vibes… for sure, this is a hugely amazing little tropical country indeed.

And what had even happened in the weeks before I came back to Costa, back in Honduras? There was so much going on, there always was, but after three super-rich weeks here, the details are all jumbled… tangled in an array of wispy green webs and a head full of green glowing hopes and memories.

I remember we’d planted more pineapple, more papaya, more caña de azúcar and more seeds. Even now, there must be a thousand new little plants waiting for me in our nursery… tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and watermelons. I am super stoked to see it all again, and to plant ever more inspiration.

Anibal’s EcoFogones, Anteater, and the Green Team

Just before I’d left for Costa, we’d managed to close an essential project loop. When I’d arrived to Honduras six months ago, I attended an ecological stove workshop. We learned about how over half the country’s eight million people still cook on wood fires, about how the daily grind here includes the never-ending collection of firewood, which comes from virgin forests, roadway medians, old buildings, and even garbage dumps.

So after months of talk, the week before I’d left for Costa we finally did it! My good friends from Stove Team International at Copán Ruinas came down to Cuero y Salado with a truck full of their EcoFogones, super simple stoves that boast 60% less wood consumption and 90% less production of smoke over the currently-used Lorena model. The gentle giant Anibal and his lad rolled in, we loaded up the old train again, this time with a flat-deck of stoves, and choo-chooed Santa style into Cuero. Later, the tranquil night became a blur of guaro, tequila, rum, and stories… so fun!… where the stars and silence of the mangrove bade the only witnesses to our revelry… us, four small saviours of the world.

The next day after field work and demonstration set-up, Tiger Heron pulled us into his boat and we toured the majestic mangroves, saw too many sunbathing crocodiles, replete with toothy gaping grins, sunbathing turtles, a million birds, racoons, and even an anteater!

Very rare, the anteater scores big points for nature lovers… and apparently despite their gentle appearance, their ferocity is famous. Harold lamented their severely threatened status and explained that their protective capacities against K-9s make them frequent recipients for bullet and blade. In the wild, they employ their ultra-powerful arms and clawed paws to rip open ant and termite mounds, but when provoked, often by a farmer’s yappy mutt, the same gifts can rip through ribcages… only to arrive at bang-bang-slice-to-silence, for man’s best friends always take precedence to the Earth’s amazingly beautiful natural wonders…

And the Tale of Anteater made me think. We can be so enveloped in our private microcosms that we loose sight of the Great Grandeur everywhere beyond our personal realms. Obviously, a normal reaction to an attack on a loved one, be it doggie or ideal, is to attack back, with aim to kill even. Ignorantly arguing a point or tossing bombs on a country to protect our cherished ego interests… we’ll kill without much thought or feeling… and what if Pedro knew that the anteater he just hacked through was the last of it’s kind in the entire Universe? or if the last great Afghani poet fell to that stray oily shrapnel shard thrown because my god has a different name than yours…?

But the afternoon remained spectacular and green. Anibal demonstrated his miraculous stoves and we loaded them up onto the old John Deere to distribute amongst the houses of the community parcel. Within short hours many were already glowing, with smiling mothers cooking rice, beans, and tortillas in smoke-free huts… it was a tasty success indeed!

And I wrapped up the week with a calibration of the Green Team, a group of older children who I’ve been training and pay a little to take care of the thousands of new plants in the parcel. The dry season is coming fast… I can feel its dry scorching tendrils reaching out for necks and trunks. So, long before temperatures reach 40 Celsius we’ve got to make sure our green friends will be watered… and loved.

Then a varooming zoom and away from the refuge by motorbike-lightening to oops! and I bonked into a medium-sized cow on the way out, or it me, but other than that it was a quick getaway… and by 4am I was leaving my humble abode in La Ceiba, bound for la Pura Vida again… yesssss!

To Finca Rio Perla via the Common Road

I arrived tired and inspired to San Jose International with two travel options to Finca Rio Perla, where the course was being held. Spend a hundred bucks on a direct tourist shuttle, or take the longer public transit route for about four? These choices arrive all the time, and I nearly always choose the latter, which never fails to carry me to and through intriguing and educational circumstances.

In the airport I jumped on the city bus to ‘Where oh where is the bus station Los Caribenos?’ and who to ask? to a quick scan and there she was, Rebecca, late-night salsa star who led me by the hand in her gentle winds right to the station and, ‘Call me when you get back to San Jose,’ she invited, we’ll dance…

Then down, down, down we rolled from the cluttered and fertile urban highlands of coffee and vegetables to steamy Caribbean lowlands. I dozed, awoken suddenly by a flash of lightening, BOOM!, and agua, torrential rains that soaked me through a window left open. Soon through a mountain tunnel to sunshine on the other side, and eventually out I fell, off the bus at the cross roads to the town of Alegría at the feet of a cloud-shrouded volcano.

Not knowing how far up into the hills was this Rio Perla farm, I waited for about ten minutes before a rickety old labour transport jiggled and bounced by. I waved it down, for these were my brothers, and ascended the steps to sit amongst many tired and beautiful faces, each the owner of a leather-bound plantation sword. I was amongst Piñeros, the hands, blood and spirit of so many massive Dole and Chiquitita pineapple monocultures that populate and destroy these lands along the sea.

I sat next to Ronoldo Mendoza, a dark, leather-skinned man with resonating blue eyes, and we started chatting. He’d once, years ago, had his own land, but had sold it to a foreigner who’d come and bought up vast tracts of land. He thought he’d flip the cash and buy another piece, but bills slip too easily through the fingers and soon he was broke and looking for work. Left naked, he found himself without a land he didn’t realize he’d loved so much until it was gone.

‘I really care about nature,’ he’d told me in loving tones. ‘We really must plant more trees around here, give back Mother Nature her place in the sun too. Things are changing, I’ve seen it, and if we’re not careful and more respectful, they’re only going to worsen. But it’s good, at least the government supports the work. There are many state-funded programs to plant trees…’

It was true, and as we meandered up into the mountains I caught glimpses of many placards boasting various tree planting projects. But whether these were stagnant plantations, or real and diverse forests, I couldn’t see from the road. Ronoldo and I talked a little more about life and work in a toxic slave-culture monoculture, about options, and I encouraged him to Yes! partner up with his cousin who still had some decent land and to cultivate his own organic crops.

I got down off of the transport with Estevan, a young man-slave from the plantations too. Though of a very quiet and brooding demeanour, I was able to converse with him some. As I approached ever closer to Finca Rio Perla, and the site of the permaculture course, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the region, the people, and the farm.

As it turned out, work in the pineapple monocultures is much like tree planting in British Columbia -gruelling piece work- where one can earn as much as a back and shoulders can bear. Because he lived right next to it, Estevan had actually been an employee of Finca Rio Perla for three years, until he finally quit, totally fed up with the terrible management and work conditions. From there, his only viable option was toxic monoculture piece work, but at least he didn’t have to take shit from gringos, he’d told me.

So, with what I’d learned of the farm from its website, which had advertised a beautiful, lush, productive, organic production and guest service education site, and now Estevan’s dismal reporting, I was quite curious to find out what kind of a place I had signed up to learn in!

‘Ownership’, Ex-pats, Permaculture Design, and the Reign of Permanent Diversity

Costa Rica: a foreigner-turned-ex-pat’s dream country. Small. Diverse. Peaceful. Accessible. Friendly. Gorgeous. Cheap. And so it is. After my winter trip, when I’d announced my ideas to return and set up a permaculture company, Jean told me I would probably tire quickly of the oodles of gringo ex-pats that had settled here, many of whom purport to know more and better about Costa Rica than the Costa Ricans!

From what I’d seen it was partially true. Over that winter vacation I’d met many foreigners, some lovely, and some rather less so. Ticos are truly amazing though, and seemingly welcome foreigners with warm and open arms… even until so many insidious dollar-packing looters have gone and bought up most of the best parts of the country!

…

So, Finca Rio Perla. As soon as I arrived I learned that the ‘owner’, Paul, lives in Washington D.C. and works for the World Bank! Many of the remaining local neighbours openly despise him, for over the last few years he’s bought up many properties in the area and now ‘owns’ over 100 hectares of land. ‘Own’. What the hell does that mean anyway? While the farm could easily support hundreds of people in a diversity of fair and organic livelihoods, currently there are but four working there, and of these, all in a typical slave-to-the-employer type scenario. There are a couple dozen cows, some horses, a few chickens and ducks, and three tilapia ponds. There is a large and dilapidated macadamia plantation, a few scattered and uninspiring timber tree plantations. There is so much potential, but so little abundance. It’s like so much of the world these days…

Absentee landowners in productive paradise properties are a plague to the earth. LivingLands require a permanent presence… require a permanent culture… require a permaculture. Even now that I’ve returned to Honduras and have seen the state of our lovely community parcela in Cuero y Salado, I perceive a reduced glow here… the plants have missed me dearly… like fatherless children, they need so much love and attention…

…

Now enter our permaculture teacher, Scott Pittman. One of the first things I commented to him as we walked up to the dining area on Day 1 was that Finca Rio Perla was a far cry from the other permaculture farms I’d seen, that really, it didn’t do justice to hold a course in a place like that! But his response was so simple and arrow true: ‘Then we’ll have to see what we can do about that…’ Thank you Scott!

The course itself was without a doubt, one of the finest educational experiences of my life. Many of the students made similar comments, that even with the decades of education, the grade schools, colleges, universities, even the Master’s degrees, these two weeks were unparallelled in quality and depth of learning.

But why? What was it about the course that was so fulfilling?

Primarily, the subject matter. Secondarily, the pedagogy. Thirdly, the alumni.

On the first day of classes we discussed just what is permaculture. You still won’t find it in most dictionaries, and my spellchecker seems to have never-ending red line problems with it. So what is it?

In the 70′s a Tasmanian environmental geologist named Bill Mollison coined the term and thus became the father of permaculture. A rural country life as child, fisherman, logger, then university professor had put this brilliant man in near-constant contact with the natural world. He observed a nearly perfectly functioning cooperation in the natural ecosystems that surrounded him, and in the relationships the native Tasmanians maintained. He observed the healthy and complex patterns that keep an ecosystem and it’s many inhabitants healthy and abundantly productive, and he compared all this to the current and mostly destructive down-tending design methodologies and relationships of contemporary ‘developed’ human societies.

In a time when the rest of the world was obsessed with the idea of ‘competition’ (and still mostly is), Mollison observed ‘cooperation’ as paramount. Eventually, he authored several books on the methods of observing the many diverse patterns and cycles evident in healthy and abundant natural systems and the ways of integrating these observed patterns into the design of human systems.

So, permaculture is a design methodology for the creation of healthy and abundant, ‘sustainable’ human settlements, from the level of the room in a house to that of an entire city or region. In permaculture we always observe and take advantage of diverse and overlapping positive feedback loops, such that the needs of one ‘element’ in a system are met by the surplus products from another ‘element’. Permaculture systems are efficient because nature is efficient. The idea of ‘waste’ becomes obsolete. The ideas of abundance and cooperation become paramount.

In subsequent years, Bill’s permaculture movement has grown and evolved to now encompass many other factors. Today it not only covers the way in which visible structures are designed, operated, and maintained such as houses, gardens, farms, and communities, but also includes the analysis and design of many invisible structures too, such as politics, economies, and pedagogy’s.

While the class discussed at length how the various principles apply to the functioning of visible structures, one definition of permaculture that Scott gave us really stood out to me: ‘Permaculture is everything we already know, presented via a holistic pedagogy.’ Or, it’s how we teach and apply what we already know of great houses, gardens, forests, and social, legal, financial structures, in terms of whole and integrated entities, as opposed to individual, isolated structures.

I too share the opinion that as a human race, we already know enough to ‘save ourselves’, that overall, it’s the overspecialization of people and organizations that leaves such vast gaping holes in the ways we design, build, operate, and maintain our systems. What we need now is far less energy invested into analyses about how many and how fast our natural and social systems are being destroyed and going extinct or corrupt, and thus, far less energy invested in creating ever-faster ways of exploiting what remains. While we still can, we must now focus and invest mucho energy and right-intentions into efforts towards the successful syntheses and integration of everything we already know to be good.

…

The course itself lasted two very full weeks, and man, time flew… by the end, it felt like we’d all known each other for years! So many solid friendships and loves were spawned there, it was hard to say farewell, or even hasta luego! I was surprised by several things, not the least of which the crystalline cascading morning waterfall swims, smoldering Turrialba volcano, simple n’ hearty rice-and-beans diet, gentle story-teller teaching style of Scott Pittman, ample tent-sharing goings on, or the various permaculture techniques we learned, including fungi trapping…

I had known it was going to be a course attended mostly by foreigners, and all said, we were about 25 students, among them only three Costa Ricans. There was a man from Portugal, one from Chile, one Canuck, and the rest Americans. We ranged in age from 20 to 75. There were men and women: biologists, administrators, chefs, cheese makers, engineers, computer specialists, administrators, gardeners, guides, teachers, yogis, investors, activists, a hotel owner… diversity! And I loved them all!

Gringos. For all the bad rap that Americans receive, I’ve often come to the rescue. I mean let’s face it, of the over three hundred million people that live there, there are certainly more forward-thinking, peaceful, healthy, caring, inspired, honest, and green-working Americans than there are people in all of Canada! Here were represented several of them, all ecologically and socially concerned and taking concrete and smooth positive steps in the direction of the needed changes.

In the second week of the course we continued learning more practical details but also started applying what we’d learned to our applied design projects. We divided the class into four groups and selected four areas of the massive farm, each an area of about 2-3 hectares, to create permaculture designs via the processes we’d been learning. What amazing and challenging fun!

My group was the only one composed of all males, and among them, nearly all A-types. Woah! Our first challenge was to quickly design and apply permaculture principles to the invisible structures of communication, respect, and inclusion. It was a fascinating process. Often, even as someone was speaking an idea, you could tell that at least a few of us were already preparing our flagrant rejection of that idea, only to find in the end that nearly all of our ideas became included in the end-product design!

After an intense week, our site design finished brilliantly because we’d followed the permaculture design procedures and integrated all the ideas from the diverse backgrounds of all our team members. We also spent many many hours down in the site, observing, observing, and observing. Our presentation was dynamic and in depth… the most valuable result a special bonding friendship between six men who at times had wanted to rip each other’s heads off!

…

The course wrapped up with a phenomenal final assignment: a talent show, dance party, bonfire, and presentation of our certificates on the last night.

Beach Babylon, a Covert EcoMission, and Sweet Delays

I said my farewells to new loved ones and a super special Waldorf redhead, and flowed down to the Caribbean to follow up on the invitation of an alumnus to visit a little project he’d been working on in the sultry beach town of Puerto Viejo. Woah! Permapurity was fast flipped into Beach Babylon debauch fixed to design and endless eco-missions. What fun!

Compared to the overtly strict and conservative vibe prevalent in what I’ve seen of Honduras, Costa Rica is quite simply, a riot. It seems to be a country founded on having beautiful fun. Ticos are super friendly and open-minded, ready with their educated opinions and dance moves, depending on the situation. In Costa Rica, I have never felt spooked and am always keen to go exploring by day or night, whereas fear and staying in are the norms here in Honduras. There are many many reasons for this, not the least of which is that while Honduras was founded via bloodshed, exploitation, and forced religion, Costa was founded more peacefully. Later, invading gringo surfers in search of good waves in the 70s and 80s brought with them a chilled-out vibe that eventually evolved into a very progressive tourism industry and land-care reforms.

In Puerto Viejo the liquor store is open 24-7, with shots of tequila, rum, whiskey, and vodka available at a dollar each. There is always a party going on somewhere, and loads of people from all over the world flow through on their way between Costa Rica and Bocas del Toro, Panamá. Everyday is a beach day there, with some of the most spectacular scenery and pleasant waters around. A coral island continually beckoned to us, just beyond the babe-infested sands, and we regularly swam out to it, navigating the huge swells and bouncy currents to ascend the spires of the isle and cast ourselves into the deep turquoise waters below.

I checked out Will’s potential project site, a beautiful property located just meters away from the raunchy little town, yet a world away by measures of peace and tranquility. We made several trips out there, and sketched the beginnings of a permaculture design. His hopes are that the Argentine ‘owner’ will gift him the land so he can build up a fully-functioning permaculture site there… and you know what? I believe it’ll work out! I sure hope so! Go Willy green!

…

After five days of chilled out partying and cosmic recreation, I proposed a special mission and we headed out of town. Our destination was CATIE, a very well-known centre for investigations into tropical agriculture and forestry. I’d known of the place for years, and several times had thought of visiting or even studying there. But our current mission was to infiltrate, investigate, and gather up as many tropical fruit tree seeds as we could cram into our backpacks.

What pure green fun! We planned the mission just right, arriving on a Saturday so as to avoid the many weekday staff members that would certainly have thwarted our covert efforts at illicit seed collecting. We wandered around throughout the various botanical collections where I surprised myself with a decent knowledge of tropical fruit trees. By days end, we had in our possession over 20 species of fruit trees, including one I was super pumped to have found. Borojó, Borojoa patinoi,is a tree originally from Colombia with extremely intriguing properties. Full of nutrients and vitamins, the Colombians apparently make a ‘love elixir’ out of the thick sticky pulp, and enjoy its potency as an aphrodisiac… Yummy!

…

And then just like that, glowing green and smiling to all I met, I was riding the giant silver eagle back to Honduras to wrap up my placement in Cuero y Salado. But, nearly totally unable to leave the hostel for the gorgeous company I was enjoying, I arrived at the airport just five minutes before my scheduled plane was to take off… I’d let myself be very late. ‘Cummon, can’t you let me board? I’ll run!’ I implored to the cute and smiley attendant, only to find out that in fact my plane wasn’t even leaving that day, that there had been a cancellation and that I’d been called but hadn’t picked up my turned-off cell. Huh? ‘But you are one lucky boy,’ she cooed, ‘You’ve got an overnight at the Ramada, including room, meals, and transport…’ Wahoo!!! What a sweet and rather bizarre way to conclude another awesome adventure in Costa Rica. Pura vida!!

Back to the ‘Duras…

Now I’m here in La Ceiba again, and riding with very mixed feelings. The refuge is so gorgeous, and though tragedy never ceases to descend there, it will always have my heart, even as I look for my next project or contract somewhere else in Latin America.

So, what was it this time? Oh yeah…

Thieves have made off with the motor that drives the community’s deep well water pump. Now these lovely people have had to dig a bunch of very shallow wells and are surviving on water I’d call unfit for animals.

There’s another teachers’ strike, and so those beautiful children have been without classes for over a week… again. Fuck! As if striking will make any difference at all in a country where the well-to-do children of politicians, business people, and industry heads are overfed and receiving superb private school educations, paid for no doubt with money stolen from the people’s empty pockets in one way or another.

On another front, the NGO we work with here is angry with us for some unknown reason. Apparently we’ve been accused of bad-mouthing them, and taking sides with the community. But it’s all bullshit, and we know it. We are very careful and super respectful… it seems that they are accusing us of this simply to gain some sort of political higher ground. As it turns out, nearly everyone we work with and the people within the community too all badmouths them… and I can’t say they don’t deserve it either. But in the end, we’re all just doing the best we can, aren’t we?

Our gardens are growing skywards, only now showing signs of the salty, sandy, and abusive conditions they live in. It’s a big green social experiment. While some trees are spry and vibrant, others are yellow and droopy. Everywhere, the plants are thirsty, hungry, and in need of much love… like so many aspects of this country. The main mission here for my final weeks will be to give them a boost of energy and inspiration. I’ve already set up traps for beneficial microorganisms all over the refuge and will soon be inoculating the parcel with as many hyphal helpers as I can. I’ll make preparations of compost teas and bottle-feed our babies to happier health. I’ll plant the tree seeds I brought back from Costa Rica, and more madreado, frijoles de abono, and veggies. And of course, I’ll give and receive as many hugs as I can…

Give love freely, for all the world’s beings. Green.

I’m ba-ack!!!

I nearly lost my soul last weekend, but it’s back again now. Farming seems to do that to me, save me, I mean, by grounding me. I’ve been creating a garden in Cuero y Salado, a massive expression of what Cosmos must’ve intended when the earth was created. Fruit trees, vegetables, flowers… even the roosters seem to glow as they crow these days!

As blogs go, it’s been a bloggy long time. And what’s filled it? Green. Green dreams, green adventures, green loves, green plans. Green smiles, green tears, green sun, green rain. Living greenery blending at times even to green tragedies. But that’s just the way of things, yin and yan, green.

In Memory of December…

Of December, I’d write of a night shared amongst six souls in a rickety boat, floating somewhere in a teeming mangrove refuge. Dusk had fallen to twilight, heaven’s stars peered out from deepening blue skies, and a thousand shiny orbs with the croaky songs of the celebrated evening’s victory accompanied us. We flowed upstream, our guide ‘Tiger Heron’ dropping bird names like chips to a royal flush, his own eyes glowing jewels in delight of so many happy swamp kingdom subjects. We scanned the shores for the rubies of crocodile eyes that stared at us from their hiding, and spotted several. We ploughed further into the twisty vine-clad reaches of the wetland canals, egrets, herons, kingfishers, hawks, fishing bats, and bugs the only witnesses to our passing. Green.

Out in the middle of the confluence of three rivers, where the varying colours reveal diverse sediment histories carried through far away mountains and fields, we let the motor go mute and the chirping silence of night envelop us again as we drifted. Below, the reflection of stars and above the celestial ceiling, here we left ourselves lost to be found, and we travelled backwards in time to become ancient hunters, together to invent legends of the dying day and our feral companionships. Simple life in Cuero y Salado after long hard hours of working the fields of Agriculture and Ecology.

Pura Vida in Costa Rica

Of the holidays that followed I’d write of pearl-strung serendipity and magic friendship-laden adventures; of two souls united by a strange faith and fascination in travel and circumstance. Of smoothies and golden sands, scented forests and endless hours afoot, of iridescent flutterbys and cuddle-sized primates.

We’d met up again on a whim in San Jose, and knowing our friendship would flourish in the fertile volcanic soils of a Costa Rican traipse and we floated purely on instincts, curiosity, and charm to some miraculous vistas…

There were the bandit beach monkeys and racoons of Manuel Antonio, flamboyant hosts with cunning charm and an appetite for purses and tourist sandwiches. There were wanders up hills to the moon through thick coastal rainforests, old three-toes hanging out keepers of secrets over the paths, and far reaches to the sea and lust. There were splish-splash meanders away from the flames, to cool toes in midnight water frolics. And the strange characters that met us at intersecting corners: a green hermetic magician-surfer who’d replanted watershed villages; a love-flowing shamanic builder of up upside-down pyramid homes strummer of strings and rich beautiful voice past-life regression dancer; forests filled with serpents and silence and musky rotting life recycled and deep spooks with the density of it; and there were two pairs of travelling go-lucky feet to run and bounce along it all laughing.

We stayed here and there, never-sure and packing super-light, for mobility, as we watched our two weeks flip to just one, then just daze, smiling for what goodness always seemed to find us. Piña, guanábana, maracuyá, platano, sol, luna, amor… and we migrated freely to catch the feel of the drier corners where towering cacti posts cast pencil silhouette shadows to tranquil blue bay bathers and sleepy students recovering from vacation night revelry… loaded, revealed, relaxed.

After bridges suspended over falling angel water gorges and tracks cast through palm and teak, steamy jungle airs, eventually the New Year came to us thumbs out roundabout at the feet of a giant smouldering mountain. ¡Feliz año nuevo! to chink-chinks somewhere, but we no. We were cuddled just out of drizzle’s reach, our own improvised juice mostly untouched to the harmony of roof rain and deep peace excitement, arrival after happy trails to el Rancho then tomorrow First Day treks up until the mists that clung to her luxuriant hair, most of the year we figured.

And idea winners we, two spinners, we never lay to rest our scheming! Hour after hour, our talks obliterated the silence of mundane habits left alone, until finally we arrived at it: we’d come back here, unite again and project our ‘everything good’ visions to the deserving lands and hands, love and respect and riches can and do coexist somewhere near… we heard it, we touched it there. Green.

Back in HonDURAs (‘dura’ means ‘hard’ in español)

After a near collision-course landing with buildings rammed to fence of the crammed capital city airport of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with an ‘Ugh…’ and ‘Here I am again…’ I stepped out onto the street to hail a cab. Perhaps my dear family away from home, the divine Three Sisters would soothe my reintegration to this violent, God-fearing, and super biodiverse country.

Hurtling along in a rust-bucket taxi, dodging cars and trucks and asking myself what I was doing there, back in Honduras, and where or where did Costa Rica go?, I chatted with the cabbie:

He asked, ‘So señor, where did you arrive from?’

‘Just getting back from Costa Rica actually. Ever been there?’

‘No, how was it?’

‘Wow, so peaceful man, a really peaceful country. You don’t see armed men at every corner like you do here. Got me to thinking a lot about this country. Say, what do you think we could do here in Honduras to make it more peaceful?’

‘Oh that’s simple,’ he replied, ‘Introduce the death penalty and kill all the bad guys. There’s plenty of space out there,’ he enthused, indicating the dry hills surrounding Tegus, ‘To line them up and shoot them all in the head…’

Nuff said.

Sí señor, it’s an up and down ride here, or is it just me? Maybe I’m just homesick, maybe I just need some Gifiti and a hug. Who knows.

Costa Rica you reminded me what I like so much about Latin America… playfulness, energy, and charisma, while Dear Honduras, oh what happened to you friend? Is it the legacy of Jesus blood, still dripping here in contorted words and thoughts 2011 later? Or is it American arms pushers and banana republicans? Was it…is it? Why so low sweet sister?… rise up! Oh! Just the under-twenty drug runners of this country carry enough firearms to blow away a volcano, God willing. Blizzards of green empty shells to mar your pretty face. Why?

Left to thinking, to remembering the week before I’d left for my trip… it was flooding back to me now… the trainloads of plants I’d brought into the refuge. Kilometres of sugar cane, king grass, malalfalfa, seven hundred banana and platanos, and a thousand madreado trees, more. Then priming my team for a slog-shift of agroecological creation… then a near machete massacre!

I’d hired a team of men… men that had proven their interest, enthusiasm, and skill without payment in their own miniparcelas… and we were going to prepare the land and plant all the material. Well… at first there were two of them, then I hired another, but didn’t realize he was a cousin of the other guy… well holy shit… over a weekend, childish family squabbling broke out, threats were launched, and by the time I arrived the following week to continue, the one son-of-a-bitch was threatening to machete the other and I had to break it up. Then he quit, then the other suggested I hire his son (which I had to to get the stock in the ground)… and on and on… meanwhile kids and adults alike were eating up all the sugar cane I’d painstakingly hauled in!

As if the environmental challenges aren’t challenging enough… politics throw monkey wrenches in jungle agroforestry projects, big time!

…

I was however, super stoked to see how the parcela was doing. I’d pushed to get so much in the ground before I’d left for my trip so that we could take advantage of the last of the rainy season. Once the dry season comes here, they say the earth turns from green to yellow, that the mercury can reach upwards of 40! My number one objective was to get the skeleton of the system established before the big scorch came.

Designing an Eden in 2010

To arrive at the proper design for the project, considering everything, was tough. Sand, salt, sun, chickens and horses, children (that play with machetes and love to chop at things)… there are so many considerations.

I went to CURLA, the university here, a couple times and talked to some of the scientists there… soil and ecological agriculture specialists, and learned a tonne. Now I have a bunch of magic bean seeds for a green manure. Combined with what I know of the arboreal flora here and AF design, I now had the tools I need to set this thing up.

I was mainly confused about how to mesh the ‘realities of CyS’ with an idealized design. I knew that for all the wishes of a ‘perfect design’, installing it in a way that will work is the trick (due to social factors and the challenges of the site). For one thing, what that parcel needs is about 20 dumptruck loads of manure and organic material to give it the ‘bump’ it needs to be productive. The people want veggies, but the degraded sandy soils are far from ready for that (we tried a little experimental veggie garden within the parcel and it sucked!!).

To maintain interest and enthusiasm, I want them to have successful results in what they plant, and for all my efforts, they always doubt mucho that fruit trees are the way to go. The community is starving, and they tell me they need to eat, not plant trees. But persistence is paramount, and I have a design now that I am working on installing. Some ‘get it’ others criticize it.

Basically, it is going to use alley cropping that incorporates Gliricidium sepium, Erythrina sps., platanto/banano, a couple biomass grasses (king grass/malalfafa), pineapple, sugar cane, and papaya. Every ten metres, we’ll install this ‘spine’. This will cut down on wind, build soils, create shade. Interspersed throughout this matrix are hundreds of fruit trees, planted using the permaculture principles I understand, and thousands of frijol de abono. Then, in the spaces between these building blocks, the people can cultivate whatever they want, which will be mostly yuca, corn, beans, and other elements like malanga, badu, the odd huerto, etc.

Train robbers too? What the %#$@?!

So after a cramped ten-hour bus ride down, down, down, from the dry central highlands of Honduras to the moist lush Caribbean lowlands I arrived with mostly mixed feelings. A little off on Honduras’ legacy of violence and Christ, yet pretty excited to see the garden.

Well… when I got into the plot what I found first was a lot of vandalism. Plants were trampled, macheted in half, or just pulled out! Water and care for them? HA! They´d destroyed a lot of the design to plant yuca or gardens. At least that’s what it looked like. I was super upset about it and thought about leaving, saying ‘fuck it’ and getting out of there. I saw these kids running around with rotting teeth playing with machetes and thought, why are we planting ecological gardens here, these people need toothbrushes! I felt like some sort of eco-missionary, trying to convert the masses into eco-worshippers and I seriously questioned our efforts and motives… and my time and passion. Just because I see the value in celebrating Mother Earth and protecting her, doesn’t mean others do. And the coming news wouldn’t help my attitude much…

Nearly every single day I´ve been in this country some grim violent act happens nearby and it’s all over the news. Slayings, murders, poisonings, drugs, whores, pirates, you name it, front page. Not just seeing elementary school educated men with huge guns everywhere… now it was a little too close to home. I was wandering through the plot looking over the mediocre remains of what we´d done when a dude came up and started joking about me getting assaulted. This wasn’t new and I’d become somewhat numb to it. Daily, they’d joke about it: ´Rayo, you’re gonna get sniped…´ ´Rayo, they’re gonna assault you on the train tracks, steal your money, steal your camera, steal your motorbike…´ and it was getting fucking annoying. So when this dude starts telling me I am gonna get assaulted on the train track, that they´re gonna steal my bag and motorbike… and this happened whilst viewing the hacked up ´community parcel´, I told him, ´Enough, don´t talk to me like that, I don´t find it funny man… I´ve had enough of this violence!´ Well… then he told me it was true!

Just the day before, six armed and masked men assaulted the little tourist train on it´s way to the refuge. They robbed the passengers blind, put one of them in the hospital after beating him up. They’d put a huge boulder in the line and when the driver and passengers got off to move it off, they all jumped out from their concealed hiding places and assaulted them…!

I was pissed. In combo with the slump I´d felt having seen the plot, I got the hell outta there. I just got the hell outta there. You can´t trust anyone there it seems. If I were a woman, they´d joke about raping me. I am a man and they joke about robbing or killing me. Fun stuff… not.

Talking to my Honduran counterpart here, Anuar, was good though. And maybe it reinforced our bond. He is embarrassed by his people, by his country. It’s a biological refuge, but there are too many people living there, and they make and will continue to make progress there very very slow.

Uniting people and nature, or perhaps, harmonizing human desire with decency and love, is very challenging. Can we? Do we want to? Will we? Green.

So the whole time I’ve been here I’ve kept asking people about it, and they tell me ‘education’. And it struck me bluntly recently. Anuar’s been saying it since we met, ‘education’. And now I kind of get it. Imagine being us as adults. We’re 30, 40, or 50 years old… and we carry a Honduran grade-six education. I’ve seen the schools here now, I see the (un)quality. Teachers strike something like 90 days out of 300 in session. School material is pathetic at best, Dick and Jane-esque. Available books in the country are mostly Christ-based trash, for their vocabulary and modernity, tabloids are more educative. I’ve been a critic of education in Canada, but one thing is certain: the effects of education (or the lack thereof) are profound.

So… I am Ryan, 30 years old, father of 4, with a 12-year old’s level of education, Honduras style. How would I be? How would I see the world? What would my sense of humour be like? What would my priorities be? And if I could get ahold of a gun? What would I do? Work like a slave for 8 bucks a day, or…?

Honduras needs education. Basic education. Analog forests? Nature reserves? Ecotourism? No. Universal basic education.

Different inTerns

The reality of the situation here lies somewhere in between the daily newspaper headlines that show multiple bloody deaths and a tranquil afternoon in Cuero y Salado sun…

I don’t want to get hurt. Will I? I don’t know. Life is a risk and things can happen anywhere, anytime… I know that. But man, vandalizing our goodwill work is lame. And so is perpetual violence and fear. I just want to work with lovely people doing lovely work… and be supported in it and appreciated for it.

But the other interns have had different experiences. Alex has had a great time. And so has Jens. And so has Jennifer. Alex is even back for a continued contract with his host NGO… so he must like it here and feel useful and safe. Jens seems to like it. Jennifer must too, as she’s kept on. Working in Cuero y Salado Jenny eventually left… so why, what’s the difference?

I think the difference with Alex’s work (and maybe other situations with FBC projects) is that the people Alex was working with are already keen to learn. They are farmers who are moving forwards with their management capacities. The projects in CyS are different because there are a whole whack of people and not everyone is on board at all… yet?… there are many many different kinds of players. Some don’t even care that it’s a protected refuge, or that good agriculture, tourism, and restoration will make life better. We must look crazy to them… coming out of the blue and talking about how lovely the birds and bees and mangroves are, how important monkeys are, how tree-based agriculture is better than yucaculture, etc, when many people in the community shit in the woods and water, don’t own a toothbrush, work for pineapple monocultures for 8 bucks a day, pray screaming to God with a megaphone, or do nothing at all…

As for me, I’d like to work with fun people who are trustworthy and genuinely interested. Who share some of my values. And I’d like to work in a place where I don’t wonder about getting held-up or assaulted! Is that asking too much?

disOrganization and Biological Corruption?

Yesterday I was dismayed, didn’t know what to do with myself. In the morning I worked on a report about the Community Parcela and read a couple chapters of an inspirational book Cradle to Cradle by William McDunough. The former got me pumped up again on the project… it’s a beautiful design with so many benefits… the right thing to do!!… while the latter made me feel supported in my green design visions.

Later Anuar called me, said that Justo (director of Fundación Cuero y Salado) had called to have a meeting. Anuar asks me to go along, says that Justo wants to ‘talk about what we’ve been doing in CyS’.

Anuar and I meet up first and discuss many things… he’s a first-rate FBCer… in this for his people, his country, and for all the children and plants and animals that aren’t to blame for bullshit bureaucracy, that have no voice. He emphasizes the idea of education being the primary need in Honduras, that the consciousness of this country’s people is way far from civil, let alone ‘eco’. Slowly I’m getting a fuller picture of the stymie scene… and learning a tonne from it. Anuar’s hands are tied behind his back… it is sooooo hard to make progress… especially in Cuero y Salado… where his heart is and has been for his entire life. He wishes it was his refuge… or that it was controlled by a benevolent dictator… that it wasn’t so confounded by lousy politics and lazy leaders!

We head to the meeting, decide mostly to just listen to Justo, curious. The FUCSA office vibe is chilly. Justo doesn’t even greet me. Pepe (another man who’s made his money riding the EcoExpress) is there ordering about his pawns (three young university-trained men with laptops, being good office slaves, like nearly all of the staff there). I ask Pepe about the train assault and he starts to speak, then tells me in a rather belittling tone that it’s ‘classified’ and he ‘can’t tell me because it would put me at risk…’ Huh? What I pick up is that they’ve brought in the Honduran FBI to check up on it and that some guards and big wigs from Pico Bonito Park are investigating too. (I later find out it’s all BS, that nobody knows anything, and more so, that FUCSA is accusing the Community of Cuero y Salado of orchestrating the heist!!! Way to go guys!) This Pepe guy clearly has a lot of interest in maintaining political control on Cuero y Salado and Pico Bonito (hence sending in the marines to ‘protect’) and I begin to become suspect of his true motives… I don’t really trust him… money seems to ruin even the best intentions. He, Justo, the government, and the Dole Fruit squad are in cahoots in all of it… virtue seems hard to come by and those in control seldom possess it.

Justo leads Anuar out onto the balcony, and I start to hear yelling. They’re are arguing about something, though I can’t hear. WTF is going on?! I go outside to ask if they’re ok, if they’d like me to participate (even though I know damn well I am not welcome)… ‘No’ says Justo coldly, ‘We don’t need a translator…’ Totally insulting! A half an hour later, they come back in, flustered. Justo says nothing to me, Anuar gives me a WTF look, and we take our leave. Anuar is cool, but I detect fire.

When we go to the beach to debrief, he explains what just went down. The bottom line of it is that Anuar openly works for the refuge: it’s flora and fauna, and it’s people. He and the Falls Brook Centre are the only ones who actually work there, physically… we have a continuous presence now in CyS… and we’re working hard for the right values. We pay people on time (unlike FUCSA who owes back pay to several community members for months of work!!!) We live there and work there… and people are continually coming onto ‘our side’. For all the trouble that Anuar (and me, and Jenny, and Jennifer, and Emily, etc) face, we’re still there, working our asses off… and people notice and appreciate it. By our ethic and honesty, work force, and love, we are making progress and hence exposing the ineffectiveness of the FUCSA monkeys. So, the baboons are demanding that Anuar work less!!!.. and that he work more for the (corrupt?) interests of the bureaucracy.

It seems our honest, hard-working grass-roots team poses a threat to the sovereign interests of FUCSAs current directors, and they want us under their control!! It appears that neither FUCSA, nor Pepe, nor Dole Fruit give monkey shit about the genuine values of working within the wildlife refuge and with it’s people, for posterity. It looks a lot more like a huge land grab and imperial control issue… far from an evolved synergy of people who have deep social and ecological visions and the matching work ethic to turn that vision into a healthy functioning reality.

I begin to see the dynamics coalescing into a whole. When I arrived to CyS months ago I wondered why more field work hadn’t been done. Why weren’t there more gardens? more demosites? more?… hell, why weren’t there toilets for the school, or lights? why aren’t there classes? where is the teacher?… why does water conk out all the time? why are the tractors in shoddy shape? why was so much of the work we’d done diagrams and pictures of AFs and biodiversity education…?!? Why is there expanding cattle ranching in a biological refuge?! Why does the visitor centre serve crap food? It’s because as if field work there isn’t hard enough, even when you do it, from politicians to peasants, people sabotage it!!!

New ReSolutions

Dismayed, Anuar and I went to Casa del Jaguar to grab a few cold Salva Vidas, keep it real. Somewhere in there, a couple nice long shots of Gifiti were sloshed down. -Ahhh- We talked about many things. About the need here in Honduras of a properly designed, constructed, and managed educational centre… the Honduran version of the FBC. A place where in place of all this smelly trash, people would come and see something beautiful, be part of it.

Does Cuero y Salado have that potential? Is it worth protecting? YES!!! But wow… how mired in shady politics, uneducation, and violence it is!!

We pumped each other up. Moderately revolutionary, there are so many things worth working for: living hands on living lands. Fuck em, we decided, if they want us to slow down, we work harder!! We looked at our options… sit in La Ceiba all week and work on computers… get fat and lazy and lustreless… or go back out there and work in fresh air with feet planted with hearts blooming… with the people and plants and animals that we love!’

It is the second option that we elected, unanimously.

Tragedy at Sea

And then came tragedy by water, a wicked wind, and the disorganization of those ‘in charge’ of the refuge’s well-being.

The rainy season here lasts from September to March and can dump up to three meters of water via cold fronts and heavy moisture-laden clouds that roll in from the Caribbean Sea. Early in my stay here I’d seen a flash flood nearly wash out an entire town but this time was different. We’d arrived with a tonne of work to do, and rain or shine we were out at it.

The cold front came in on Wednesday with a violent wind that at night reached hurricane gusts. It was crazy to be out in it, we knew, literally soaked to the bone in a matter of minutes after leaving the Casona in the morning, boots full of water in an hour. But for the trees it was perfect… new leaves and shoots were living evidences that we’d timed our plantings well, that sturdy subterranean roots would be advancing fast towards the water table below that would quench parched summer thirst.

But I’d never seen the river rise like that in Salado Barra. Over a night so stormy I wondered if the huge mango tree would topple, it gained nearly two meters! By dawn’s light on Friday entire tree trunks were floating downstream in the usually slow-moving current, and the pier was completely submerged. Then I knew why our riverside houses were built on stilts!

At lunch we received the news that a body had been found deep in the refuge, washed downstream from who knows what tragedy up river. So, immediately the powers that be deployed the Marines’ launch to go investigate, three soldiers and one park warden.

We went back out the the parcela, and worked away in the punishing conditions, but when we got back tragedy had already struck. The marines’ launch had capsized at the river mouth, and all four men were missing!

They all died.

I’d boated with these boys before and knew they had insufficient training. Even in calm water I was uneasy with them. Not one wore a lifejacket when they went out there that day. And instead of taking the inner canal system, protected from the ugly seas, they had been ordered to travel by way of the open sea. Why? I cannot say. Apparently the sergeant was recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, and everyone knew he was highly crazed, shell shocked and loco.

To me, accidents like this are inevitable in such a poorly-run disorganization; there is no well-trained and respected presence in Cuero y Salado to make wise managerial decisions. Money and land-grabbing corruption suck at the best of times, but when our precious remaining protected areas are being logged illegally, turned into cattle ranches, and left to deteriorate; when young people’s lives are squandered recklessly for naught… Hey guys pull up your fucking socks.

Rest In Peace.

Mulching with Green Goosebumps

Last week, I lost count of the number of times my body quivered with shivers. It’s the eyes of people learning to see and understand Ecology’s subtleties, the laying of caring hands to the living lands that does it mostly, be them old leather wizened or young soft and receptive, all. Sweating already at dawn, or drenched in the downpour, I show humanity the art and beauty of selecting the perfect spot for planting a tree. Together we learn to perceive the land, see it not as a tangle of weedy shrubs and grasses to be mown down, destroyed, but as a protective blanket, alive and vibrant. A thicket island of thorny escambrón or a dense clump of gnarly grass sends the ecological gardener a message: here is a nursery! With soils ever so slightly richer near than elsewhere, the vestiges of life exist here in fungus and earthworms, beetles and birds, and under the punishing summer sun to come, thick resistant foliage will dapple shade over what fruit trees we offer. In the desert coconut monoculture, any greenery is a shrine. Offerings made here are well-received and blessed to thrive!

Together, we scour the arid and abused Dole landscape for what precious woody materials we can gather, not to burn as fast by flame, but digested ever-slowly via the enzymatic juices of lignin-munching mushrooms, bacteria, and other soil fauna. We wrap these biological building blocks around our fragile arboreal children, and to the life rings of mulch we add manure, leaves, ashes, grass, roots, coconut husks, branches, even old shirts, pants and the odd bra half rotting behind a shack… anything that was once alive. The cycling of life sustains itself, pray to it and play with it, green!

Mulch. So simple. So amazing. In nature, food and water fall from above so we observe and mimic her, rain our golden mulches carefully around so many saplings of guanábana, abiu, canistel, noni, mulberry, caimito, grumichama, jabóticaba, tamarindo, all… We’ve planted and mulched four hundred trees now, not including the hundreds of papayas, bananas, sugarcane, yucas, madreado, pito and more. We’re creating a new Eden here… and soon our four-acre forest garden will return our gifts ten-fold as the sweet sun-kissed fruits fall gently to the open hands of our children and grandchildren… who will grow up healthy and strong to sow ever more…

What a ride. Green.

It’ll be mostly fluid and rich if I tell it like it is, how I see it, how I smell it, and how I feel it… how I glow or glower in it. The revelation is steamy and fresh, yet subtly subversive. Two forces are operating on me here, each distinct and as real as the other, for my time is divided by fate to half and half… my existence oscillating between a rustic backwater outpost set on the ever-shrinking edge of the civilized world, and the belly of that same civilized beast that gobbles up the last remaining vestiges of Earth’s natural treasury. In short, I live and work between Cuero y Salado and La Ceiba, 50/50.

I’ve been struggling to write blog material for the last couple weeks. Thing is, if I could write on a Wednesday evening right after a glorious day in Cuero y Salado then the green inspiration would flow naturally and full of wonder. But there’s no power out there so I don’t write, and instead I guard the waking ideas that blend into dreaming in the deep silence that colours the long and restful nights out there. I tell myself ‘I will get ‘em down on Saturday or Sunday…’ But, La Ceiba hasn’t been very fertile that way… and by Friday afternoon when I’ve returned to my little boxy dwelling tucked into the mostly sterile upper crust barrio of El Sauce, I wane to the rasping inner cynic and grieve for the simple and inspirational days I leave behind each Friday when I trade Cuero for Ceiba…

What is it…? It’s a question that approaches the heart of this ‘Green Life Blog’… but what do I mean by ‘Green Life’ anyways?

…

One afternoon several weeks ago when I’d just been let loose to go at this project, I ambled over to the area where the community parcel was to appear and started chitchatting casually with Beto, resident of the first house along the to-be border of the parcel. Gradually our group grew to include most of the men in the area, and then and there the first steps toward ‘communal’ were taken.

Collectively, we decided that each person would go cut and bury their own fence-posts for the areas in front of each dwelling, and in return FBC would supply the wire and nails. The next afternoon Anuar and I started the process with Saturino and Nery, and very shortly after a long line of sturdy posts made of madreado, zapotón, and indio desnudo appeared. Catalysis. All of these posts will magically resprout roots and shoots to become a ‘living fence’, removing the need to replace the posts while providing shade and biomass to the parcel.

…

Many had told me and still do that Hondurans won’t work. Not for no money at least. That they’re lazy, they’re greedy, they’re selfish, they’re just about good for nothing… but the very people that told and tell me this are lost in their own history-grown beliefs!

Daily, I am finding much to the contrary, and my faith in ‘the good’ prevails. Thing is, I won’t work either, when the work is shit, and it seems like Latin America has been rather smothered in that kind of work over the last centuries. It is this international abuse that is the underlying cause of the observed ethic…

First it was Spain… rape and pillage in the name of Christianity and Gold. Slavery, come one and come all, body and spirit… but who wants to work under that banner?! Then it was the Developed World, only we’re still around here with our huge guns, corrosive mining contracts, toxic banana republic monocultures and management schemes with slave labour politics. Oh, we’ll toss you a dime, but you gotta do what we say… dig it, spray it, process it… for 5 bucks a day.

Thing is, if heart doesn’t sing to do it, body ain’t gonna want to… work or live?.. either one. In Green Life, love is where work and life become one and the same. And the benefits here are deep, meaningful and beneficial to our families and lands, like breath.

Is it really surprising that work sucks for so many people? I mean, money. Yeah, that’s not really why I want to get up and go out into the world. ‘Monopoly’ was more fun… because it only lasted a couple hours, not a lifetime. At which point did we put down ‘make believe’ things like fairy tales and the endless laughing games of childhood for the ‘real world’ of money and let’s-spend-a-lifetime-doing-something-we-despise?

No, they say a Honduran won’t work, but I didn’t really believe them. Truth lies in the semantics because I won’t work either, but I will gladly live freely and follow my truth, follow my bliss, follow what gives me life and love…

…

So the project I’ve been inspiring in Cuero y Salado is a little like that. I mean, when you arrive to Cuero y Salado you might see many things. You might notice that the welcome sign looks like it’s been through a half dozen hurricanes (it has). You might notice thin bands of trash lining the river and seashore like a bold mascara. You might notice that many children run around shoeless, sometimes suckling on a machete. Or you might notice the other things… there is a simple happiness to the place. It’s a community that lays where the sidewalk ends… only it’s not a sidewalk, it’s a rickety old train track.

Nights in Cuero y Salado are silent indeed, but it never snows. Actually, nights are silence layered with the cacophony of vibrant insect and animal chatter. So chatty and so dark! Sleep arrives at around 8 pm (on a night without rum), the pure-air dreams at around 10pm, and the first raucous rooster crow at 4am. By sunrise at 530am the peaceful little hamlet begins to stir to life, and soon after, the stanzas of children’s merry laughter can be heard in chorus with the early morning birdsong.

An odd revelation struck me last week which reflected itself in action, or the lack thereof. It was Friday, and I’d been in Cuero for four and a half days. Lurking deep in my conditioned instinct is this buzzing call to return to La Ceiba, the hustle bustle blah hole of all that is modern. But why? Why? So I opted to stay there the night. Really, beyond crashing through the door of my nice little apartment, checking and re-checking e-mails, and chasing this or that dame, what else is there really of value? A beer? Yeah, that’s nice. Something to smoke? Lips? Oh lips! Perhaps all that. Lights until 3am? If I want. At the expense of what though? Trading deep entwining dream adventures, I’ll get car alarms, barking dogs, honking horns, the constant drone… all that when chirping crickets, twinkling stars, shivering monkey calls, and the distant roar of Mother Caribe’s slippery bounty and smiling children are the reminiscent joyful buried treasures we all seek. Can you dig it?

Last night while laying in bed reading Jitterbug Perfume by oil lamp, I was drawn to another roar… the evangelical church group in the community was adding it’s voice to the myriad night sounds. What a cacophony indeed! Guttural chanting, followed by high pitched wails, followed by songs of praise, followed by clapping and laughter. While Tom Robbins’ words compel me to consider a culture unbiased by the now contorted words of a long gone wise man, there is something starkly beautiful in such a vibrant celebration of human life, death, heaven and hell. Perhaps next week I will sit amongst them and clap and wail too, albeit for the myriad gods that I sense in every moment at every junction around me, amen!

…

But the project, oh the project. What news of that entity? Ahem, that a Honduran won’t work turns out to be quite wrong indeed. Or, as I’ve been suggesting for years, that the term ‘work’ itself may be the source of strife. When does ‘working’ end and ‘living’ begin? At 5pm? Ahem again. There is no border between the two. Human reality, the stream of consciousness, lifeworkplay is a seamless flow… it’s only our mental and linguistic constructions that scatter the fabric, tear the whole.

I began the project, a ‘communal analog forestry parcel’ by feeling very wrong about plopping myself down in the community as a foreign gringo with a know-it-all we’re-gonna-save-you-all attitude. There are a lot of those folks here, just ask a Honduran about the US Peace Corps. I’d been instructed to hire some men, a ‘man-team’ to help me with the work, which is not a bad idea given that many a man needs employment in Cuero, yet something seemed amiss. I mulled over the meaning of ‘communal’, and more so, how to inspire and encourage that trajectory in a world so overrun by a me-first independence and capitalistic mentality.

We work for the slave-driver; we live for ourselves. I wanted ‘work’ in the communal parcel to be ‘life’.

…

Now, a little over two weeks later, we’ve finally finished the fencing. The last of the wire was strung up around Lorena and Melicia’s property with the help of a couple men because these women have no men living with them. Lorena’s husband up and ran off with her sister, leaving her with four kids to raise alone, the newborn twins created by the semen of an sixteen year-old father. The other, Melicia’s husband, was shot in the head with his own pistol one drunken night in another town. There are many things that bring tears to the eyes here, both heartbreaking stories of loss, and heartwarming tales of goodwill and faith. On many days these same children, created of such seemingly dire circumstances, form the base of my inspiration.

But on Wednesday morning I really didn’t feel like being with people. The day was resplendently beautiful and I opted to head off into the jungle to procure some building materials. I tossed a machete into the canoe and launched into the Rio Salado, heading upstream with long steady strokes through sultry silence and sun. Beyond, looming overhead was the majestic headwaters of the estuary, the Nombre de Dios mountain range that stands sentinel over the refuge, and to each side lush mangrove jungle flanked my passage. I shivered in sheer reverence… what serene beauty to be alive and working, er, living. Green living!

After a half hour paddle I veered to the right into a densely overgrown canal and was immediately engulfed in dark cool shade. A hand-sized golden orb weaver spider watched me pass under her sprawling web. A deadly red and black-striped coral serpent swam by undisturbed by my peaceful presence. Fifty meters into the depths I beached my canoe in the slimy mud and carefully scaled the slippery banks, making sure not to grab onto the trunks of the ultra spiny biscoyol palms that I was after.

I toiled away for a couple hours of machete work, alone yet surrounded by a jungle oozing with life. The mosquitoes were sparse, thank Cosmos, and in little time I had a canoe load of twelve foot poles. Once peeled of their needle-sharp spines, biscoyol poles are an incredible building material. Sturdy, very rot resistant, and beautiful in their purple hues, these will make ideal composters. Additionally, the fruits of the palm are delicious and make an excellent wine. I returned well satisfied and full of inspiration (and a dozen or so spines in my hands and scalp!).

Thursday I gathered a crew and we used our biscoyol poles to make the first prototype three-bin composting system in front of Lorena’s house. I wanted to offer the workshop there so that the end result would be a composter for one of the women without male help. We had a lot of fun. The nice thing about work here is that it’s an exchange. Joche, Jose, Nery, and Samuel are experts at using local materials and while I know what a good composter looks like in design, they know the best knots to secure the poles firmly together and how to build a frame that will last. Voi-la! Now the technology has been transferred and soon there will appear twenty such rich soil-makers along the newly constructed fence. Soil-building here in the sandy sandy sandy sandy sandy soils is paramount.

…

This week we continued the trajectory of last week. More biscoyol, more composters, more and more and more, until somehow, we’ll turn that sandy coconut monoculture into a diverse and rich poly culture. The key word is ‘we’. Though the word ‘international development’ is rather tasteless to us, really, loaded with the false idea that we of the ‘developed world’ are on the right track and the others ought to follow suit, it is that which I am doing I suppose. Yet I bear no political banner… I represent life on earth.

The work advances slowly, but surely. If it were my own property, my own land, perhaps I would be making faster infrastructural progress, but the goal is not only to terraform this desert into a productive polyculture paradise, but also to sow the seeds of change in a people too. Thus, I seldom do a task alone. To me, it’s far more productive to work with one or a few people, sometimes slowly, than to run around rapidly and do a bunch of things on my own.

Thursday and Friday was such days. Pouring rain, and still we worked. Pouring rain, and still they came out to help. The children, the children, the children. What is more touching that seeing soaked barefoot children working with hand and shovel to carry fruit trees to their holes and plant them lovingly…

Children believe in whatever we show them and I carry seeds and tree seedlings to show-and-tell in the community parcel.

…

Anuar is my Honduran counterpart here. Well, he’s been with the project from it’s inception, and will keep on with it long after I move on to another. One night last week we had another of our tending-to-deep conversations. Our intercultural banter can get heavy sometimes, but we usually reach new and inspirational levels of understanding. On this occasion we spoke of his hopes for better education here in the country.

We spoke of the differences between an ‘educated’ person and a country bumpkin, and of the opportunities that come via such an education. Here, my interpretation was different. When I talk to Joche, or Fatima, or any of the people that have lived in the refuge for their entire lives, I don’t really perceive under-education. On the contrary, these folks shine with knowledge and experience too. I challenged Anuar’s demands for better education. It’s true, one of the young female students who is getting 90% averages may not move beyond grade 6, the highest level offered at the faltering one-room school which is closed due to striking teachers 90 days a year, but really, 90% in what exactly? What kind of ‘education’ does one really receive in school, here or up north, and which ‘opportunities’ does it really bring?

Many are the young adults here in Honduras who find themselves pregnant at 15 or 16 years old. Many are the 30-something year-olds in Canada who find themselves single and childless, working. One has the ‘opportunity’ to learn to provide for and love a family, or run away from that responsibility I suppose as many men do, the other has the ‘opportunity’ to live the North American life, wrought with materialism and never-good-enough-always-looking-for-more.

Where and what is the ‘education’ that the world is searching for, and where does the education it receives come from? Today it comes from the state, and I simply do not trust a bunch of power-hungry corrupt lawmaker liars and industry men to create our children’s curriculum! We trade fairy tales for fluctuating bank accounts. Yuck, yuck, no thank you…

…

So here I arrive to the paradox of my existence these days, in realtime. I spend half my week in a refuge where not one vehicle exists. My life is monkish (save for rum nights), simple, and sweet. The voyage of my soul is a fisherman’s canoe rising and falling to the slow Caribbean rollers, and I can hear my heart’s voice, feel no loneliness surrounded by so many shining children and the dark magic of true nights. But always there is a longing in my mind, the lingering lurking desire to run back to Babylon in search of what opportunities my education taught me to expect in life. And on Friday I do come back…

On Friday I do come back, and so far, invariably, I ride the slow rolling wave from Cuero to the hustle-bustle smokey heart of Ceiba, eat a meal to my empty-to-full-belly’s content, arrive to my apartment and then feel ripped off.

Ripped off why? Because the modern grey lifescape we’ve created does not deliver the forever green lifescape upon which it’s been superimposed, and instead it steals it away, hides it, refuses to admit that it’s there, and that it’s good. Somehow, all the glitter and gold of our new world is holding us away from something we search, something we grope out to in hopes of holding it near once more, or anew… something that can’t be bought nor construed by human creativity and industry alone, something rich, something magical, something essential, something sane.

And it’s for this and for that LivingLand and Rayoverde roll. To touch a tangible love here on earth, love for earth. To sow and nurture the germinating seeds of the smile fruits, and usher into celebration a new global culture of conscious socio-ecological action. Slowly, we’ll drop weapons and pick up hoes and instruments… it’s only inevitable that earth culture will soon unite and put it’s hands to the living lands. ¡Vamos!

La Ceiba, November 21, 2010

Loud as hope – cover by Rayo

Hey Jean,

Just wanting to connect with you.

1. I am still here in Honduras and not misbehaving too too much.

2. The project.

I guess it’s been a little over two weeks now that I’ve been more or less on my own. By that I mean, that the three of us are mostly calling the shots now. As you must know with development work, things never go as fast as one imagines they could… still I remain pleased with the progress we’re making, and in particular with my influence on things in CyS.

Anuar and I are working well together and getting much done. The learning curve is still steep for me… thank god I speak Spanish relatively well because it would be futile without it. I am learning how to work within the community structure as a foreign male. It’s a challenge, but I am ploughing through it. There are so many things to get done, and so many contradictions to everything… my work style is organic and flexible… although I have a vision (and work plan) the day-to-day in the refuge often dictates how things actually run. Still, it’s pretty damn amazing what I’ve accomplished somehow.

The first few days I mostly just helped Anuar with whatever he was doing, I ran a little work crew over in the demo site, etc, planted some trees. And daily I do help out here and there, such that my days are always very very full. But quickly, my main focus is becoming the community AF parcel. For many reasons I see it as a very worthwhile undertaking, as wrought with political and biophysical obstacles as it is. Not only is AF written all throughout our various funding proposals, it is a wonderful tool to improve the lives of the people who live there whilst protecting nature…

So… I’ve spent several days out there now working and feeling the project out. Sometimes the ridiculousness of cultivating on sand nearly overwhelms me. Although I for one would never choose a site like that for my own cultivation/AF property, I always remember that these people have everything to gain by working the land they live on. Taking it from Dole and working it with la gente is valid and valuable work.

One hurdle I am working on overcoming is how to make it truly ‘communal’. We discussed forming a 5-man work team, but in the end, I must proceed very carefully with that. Many men in the community are starving for employment, yet if I want the communal AF project to continue after I pull out… or rather, to take off soaring on it’s own, then involving people without pay, for their own familial benefit, right off the bat is the right course of action. I want to catalyze this project to self-realize, not pay for something that will fall without financial support.

So. I am getting the community members (men so far) to take the first steps by having them each furnish a part of the madreado fencing themselves, without pay. I have successfully put up about 1/3 of the necessary posts now, and have promised to buy the wire once all the posts are up… this is the way to go… trade without pay… at least for some aspects. I am also paying some boys to rake up organic material from within the coco plantations into huge piles, which we are bringing over to start compost heaps. For that we’re using the tractor… which is a feat in itself. Winning over Moncho (the community leader and Dole cococleanup boss is key. To win the use the tractor and trailer I bought four 12 foot 1×12 pine planks and the nut n bolts to repair it. Yesterday we fixed it, and in the afternoon started hauling manure and grass clippings.

It’s slow work… but really lovely to see it. I mean, Anuar is kinda blown away actually to see men working like that, with no pay… to see Moncho letting us use the machinery… to see a communal fence going up… all of it…

And there is still sooooo much to do. It’s really challenging. I mean, even just to get the madreado… I’d first tried hiring someone to do it, and then the next day realized that (if you can believe it) he was totally mad that I’d asked him to do it… why? Because I hadn’t gotten the permission of anyone to cut the madreado from their fences (even though their ranching there illegally, and the madreado grows like hell anyways!)… So I had to backtrack and go ask permission… which I received from the son of one mean ‘ol Don Juan. You know… if someone went to cut madreado without permission they could land a bullet in their own skull, eh!!?? Same same with manure…

But such is life in CyS.

There are many other slowing challenges too. Tuesday it was 38 degrees. Today there was a hurricane warning that shooed us outta the refuge earlier than planned…. etc.

You’ll be happy to know that yesterday two men from Dole came around to make a minuta of necessary repairs to the casona… they were very diligent.

¿Qué más?

With respect to the budget we sent you… for my part I overestimated slightly… it’s a ‘best case scenario’ for progress there. The most expensive item on the list, barbed wire, is a figure that would include a fence from the Guama plantation, clear to the water tank… and that is optimistic… its a huge area and much of that has no houses near enough to inspire communal work, though I will see if I can find others from afar to take up interest in those areas… it could be that once this gets off the ground, there will be mucho interest. As for other items, it’s reasonable. There will be concessions for a little diesel for the tractor here or there, or to reward work with tools or food… really, if you have any questions about our estimations, just ask me. Really it’s a very low start-up cost for the size and complexity of the project… seems reasonable to me anyway.

And other than that??

I have a nice little dinner date tonight…

We saw Jenny and Cam off nicely… buenos suerte!

The zancudos are minimal lately!

Seedlings of many plants we sowed are starting to pop up in the nurseries!

There are probably a million things I haven’t gotten done still… after all, the world is a rather dauntingly messy place that needs much work… but poco a poco!!

And much, much more!

¡Hasta la verde siempre!

Rayo

It’s 2am Sunday night and I’ve just prepared a yerba maté. Life is good right now, but it wasn’t this morning really. Round and round and round go the thoughts, always reaching out for something… a something all too often just beyond reach. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to write this entry, how to unravel the tangle that is what I am doing here, to tell it as it is, in all it’s majesty… there are so many fascinating moments that pass by me, how to capture them, and let them onto the page?

It’s 2am Sunday morning and I’m sipping yerba maté here in my apartment in La Ceiba. I’ve had a lovely weekend all said and done, including some of the things I like best about weekends. Walks and women. Ahh, freedom is lovely, and so is long dark curly hair!

Last weekend I travelled with the son of my landlord to Olanchito, a small agrarian town about two hours from here by bus. Having talked about our mutual interest in organic agriculture, Wendel had invited me to go there and check out his property. His is a family of cattle ranchers, but the younger generation is keen to branch out and away from that avenue and into the green streets of sustainable fruit and vegetable production. We’d gone out there to have a look at the land and see if I couldn’t make a few suggestions.

The trip was fabulous. It was the first time I’d driven east from La Ceiba and what a treat. Lush tropical valleys overflowing with greenery, distant mountain peaks, and rushing rivers. I felt inspired to see a land so well suited to abundant production, despite signs of poverty everywhere. That latter, is a mystery yet to be made clear.

We met his cousin Santiago and hopped in the box of his rusty red Toyota 4×4 to head out to the ranch, climbing up into the valley of the Rio Aguán. In short, their property was a dream. Rich black topsoil over a meter deep lay in bands, deposited over tens of thousands of years by the river; a forested hill collected water in two small permanent ponds at it’s base; a lower, moist and sparsely forested area; an upper drier area divided into pastures; a watchman, his wife, and their 7-child family. All the ingredients were there for a spectacular agricultural array.

On the contrary, in Cuero y Salado there is absolutely no soil at all. It’s pretty simple out there, you have sand or you have swamp. And oh, that’s where I seem to be stationed… with green intentions in mind and salty sand or swamp in hand…

…

Off in the distance, beyond a million singing insects, fireflies, boas, bright green frogs, and sleeping village folk, the sea beats her crashing rhythm to a waning gibbous moon. Here in the casona lays one soul, his body glistening with a near constant sheen of sweat and miracles…

At 31 years now, I begin to understand a few things about this game called sentience: that things come and go. Oh, the moments pass when with gritted teeth, it’s all I can do to bear the torture of a thousand pestering thoughts, ambitions, and desires… only to be met with such moments of serene beauty that all the torture in the world is worth it…

I arrived to Cuero y Salado alone yesterday. The others of our team had things to do in the city, and I had agreed to meet with several members of the community to discuss the community parcel I am designing, implementing, and mostly, inspiring. The trip itself was arduous. I had purchased four twelve foot 2x12s to fix a broken tractor cart here, so that we could use it to go and gather organic materials for the project: manure and leaves, and some fence posts from a miraculous tree called madreado that re-sprouts whence planted, forming a living fence that never needs replacing.

Nearly everything here presents a certain unique challenge. Imagine. Just when you think you can speak a language fairly well, you go to buy hardware and realize that you lack an entire clade of the tongue… that you don’t know how to ask for ½ inch bolts, washers, and nuts… well I know that know now! But moreover, to transport this wood to the refuge was significant in itself, without a truck to carry it to the train, and then to load it on the train and carry it into the reserve… so I had to do it by municipal buses, which are basically old US school buses.

But that was the easy part. I arrived at noon to such a searing heat that the entire village seemed to shimmer in the silence of bodies hidden from the inferno. I saw nobody, and felt so very alone. Some children called ‘Rayo!’ from unseen corners, and I lugged my burden of bag and food to the casita, to settle in for a day. Within, the thermometer registered 38 degrees! and I was nearly overcome then and there.

Exhausted from the living here in Honduras, and mostly from a late night of over-thinking things in my apartment in La Ceiba, the combination of heat and solitude knocked me down. I hadn’t eaten, and really the prospects were slim. Here in Cuero y Salado, food is not taken for granted. There is no store and there is no restaurant… well… there is, but you carry a face and name there… mostly, there is no anonymity. When I am not 100%, going out there to organize food seems a nearly unsurmountable task… and this afternoon was one of those… I felt like I was running at about 30%.

So I swayed in the intense heat and realizing I was totally bagged, and had an hour before the scheduled meeting, I opted to take a brief siesta instead of eat. I was already drenched in sweat and not a whisper of a breeze appeared to blow away but a mere degree of the 38 that were rendering me useless. So I slept a half hour, then reluctantly, already feeling dismayed, rose and ploughed my way through the blaze, to the meeting place.

At least this was to be a major advancement in the project here. The week before had been momentous, and I was finally beginning to feel confident that things would work out the way I’d envisioned them. Among many things that our group is doing here, the one that grabs me the most, and with which I am mostly involved, is the community parcel. Cuero y Salado has an interesting history… well, it has an interesting present too, but the current relies on the past, as does the future, weaving a tapestry of relationships that at times is very challenging to grasp and work with.

Over the last centuries, the area became a major fruit producing region, and little by little I begin to understand it. Fruit barons and their slaves felled forest to plant a variety of things, among them, monocultures of coconut, African palm, pineapple, and sugar cane. Gradually, various companies took control over this or that section, until one, Standard Fruit, now known as Dole, became master of all. The company cut and cleared vast areas of land, included most of the area now contained within the refuge. Due to the inundated nature of the land here (it’s a mangrove swamp after all) waterways and canals were dredged as the easiest way to transport produce, and the central mustering area became Salado Barra, the small village where we live. Indeed it is in the Casona, an ex-Standard Fruit house, that I stay when I am here. From here, the train carried fruit to markets and ports.

When slavery was abolished, the workers received the right to choose livelihoods, and of those that chose to remain, most became families reliant on fishing. Today, there remain scattered throughout the reserve, about 200 families, of which most still sustain themselves on either fishing, or the paltry salaries offered by scarce work with Dole. Agriculture has never a major part of life here… nor fresh fruit and vegetables a significant part of the diet.

Eventually, WWF gained control of the land and protected it as a biological refuge, given that many areas of mangrove had regrown and much native forest still remained. And of this, management was eventually passed over to La Fundación Cuero y Salado (FUCSA), an NGO funded mostly by the European Union (and unfortunately largely ineffective at protecting nature nor people). At this point enter Falls Brook Centre.

Two years ago FBC’s Jean Arnold came here on a trip to look for potential projects. She already had various things going on all over Central America and in Honduras, and Cuero y Salado caught her interest. She was intrigued by the challenging conditions of the area: a vast biodiversity to protect and restore, communities spread throughout the refuge that live off the natural resources and often damage them, a corrupt national government, international involvement and funding, an inept managing NGO, drug traffic within, military involvement, poverty, tourism potential, scientific potential, natural beauty, etc… needless to say, there was the potential for much interesting work here.

So. My arrival here coincided with her visit to the refuge, and with a visit from the world-renown Dr. Ranil, founder of a land management-restoration tree-based agriculture called Analog Forestry. The system provides a fascinating tool to restore forest cover, while at the same time including human benefits too. Indeed in this day and age, restoration projects that don’t benefit people will nearly always fail because people are nearly everywhere and must become part of the solution.

Although the management has it’s complexities, the idea is fairly straightforward to grasp. Basically, a designer finds a neighbouring site to the one he wants to restore that demonstrates an ecosystem as close to natural for the area as possible. Using a formula, he takes a ‘snapshot’ of the architecture of the native forest, observing that major biological groups represented, focusing on plants. He then moves to his restoration area, and takes another snapshot of what exists there. Comparing the two in what is known as a gap analysis, the designer then fills the gaps in the restoration site with species that mimic, or are ‘analogous’ to the native forest, but he selects species that have human values too, and that meet the conditions of the site. In this way, the structure and function of the restoration site will eventually closely represent that of the native forest, but people will be involved too, to care for it and make a living of it. It’s a win-win: forest cover is restored and people live in harmony with it.

So. The first weeks here in Cuero y Salado were a buzz of activity and we went nearly non-stop. We call received training in Analog Forestry and as it was my first time with it, I learned a tonne. In many ways it resembles the work I was involved with in Brazil, with some variations, but in any case it is super neat stuff! We went like stink to make a few different designs, propose them to Dole, and involve the community at as many levels as was possible. In the end, a few concrete projects emerged, among them an arboretum, a mangrove restoration site, a household AF plot, and my little baby, the community parcel.

To enter the refuge one takes a train from La Union through a hodge-podge assemblage of ramshackle houses, through the ultra flooded patanal, through a massive Dole coconut monoculture and finally into Salado Barra. My first thoughts at seeing the monoculture were as always ‘Why don’t they plant more things here?’. And I would soon learn the answer.

The coconut plantation is a myth! All the trees have something known as yellow disease, and in the end, the fruit can’t even be sold!! Dole continues to tend to the trees and plant new ones to replace those that die for one reason only: possession is 9/10s of the law here. Dole has a semi-legal historical concession that gives them ‘ownership’ of the land on which they have crops growing. I suppose at some point this concession served to ‘develop’ the country, to give incentive for investment, but here? now? it’s shit!

In the end, nobody really has the right to be here, it is after all a world-respected nature reserve. But here they are, Dole, the giant multi-national, and a whole whack of very large families… they’re all here, and it is in this arena that we are working.

So there they are, all the little houses of the community that lives in the refuge… all pinned along what is the coconut plantation and the swamp. Poor fishermen, or poor Dole employees. But, this is not to say unhappy… quite to the contrary, it’s just that they would like to to learn to cultivate crops so they could feed themselves better, AND the land wants to be cared for!

It is something fascinating to chat with the various members of the community to gain some perspective over what is. If you happen to be the rich armed guardsman that trots around on your horse and patrols the plantation, maybe you’re happy to have a well-paying job with Dole, but, if you’re one of the dozens of others that lives between swamp and barbed wire and barbed wire and plantation, maybe not so much. Maybe even you’re more than a little pissed off that you can’t do anything with so much abundant land!

So, we made a proposal and we carried it right into the heart of the Dole office in La Ceiba, and we tactfully demanded an audience, which we received. And now, after much political cultivation, here we are and ready to plant our analog forests… in the salty sand.

In the salty sand.

Soil tests were conducted in the areas we are proposing to work and they results were dismal, in one manner of thinking at least. If I were to choose a worse spot to do agriculture on my own, I doubt I could find one, really. There is just about ZERO organic matter in the substrate here. I will call it substrate, because it isn’t soil, and it’s barely earth. It’s pure sand. What nutrients might once have existed here have long since been either burned away, or washed by the heavy rains that buffet the region in the humid season.

But in another manner of thinking, it’s a perfect place to work… laterally. Laterally because one of our main objectives here is to wrangle Dole into altering it’s horrendous toxic monoculture practices. As far as they’re concerned, the place is suitable for one thing and one thing only: coconuts. And that’s all they’re doing there. The thing is, much more is possible there, it just takes really brilliant organic agroforestry knowledge, and the help of the entire community.

Here, as in most permaculture approaches, the problem becomes the solution, if only one sees it that way. At the same time that cattle rearing in the refuge is wreaking havoc in several ways, mainly the destruction of habitat for ranch expansion, so thus do the cows furnish us with an essential input of nitrogenous organic material. In the same way that the continued mowing of the grassy areas amidst the coconut palms is impoverishing what’s left of the ecosystem, so thus does it furnish us with a lot of potential carbon. Carbon + nitrogen = kickass compost.

That the people from the community are incredibly poor and without land, and that they don’t have a history of agriculture also becomes part of the solution. For starters, they haven’t got anything to loose, and in fact have everything to gain from working with us. Since there isn’t a lot of work, they have time and desire to better their standard of living by cultivating fruits and vegetables, and their lack of agricultural knowledge may allow us to instil an organic holistic approach. Indeed, they’ve no money to buy agrochemicals anyways, so the available organic materials will serve as the base for our system.

So it’s been a process, and now I’m getting in with it. Last week, having helped Anuar with some of the other projects, I really started up. We hired a guy that lives here, but is not involved in the project because he doesn’t even have a house at all, and we went out to start raking up materials. In fact it was my birthday…

It must have been about 5am when I awoke to daylight and passing voices and blew out the candles that were still burning at the little bedside table. Too early to rise, I easily slipped back into the clean-air dreamworld that was mine for another hour or so, and floated away to the pitter-patter of lightly falling rain on the thin tin roof of the casita. When I awoke again, it was to a down-pouring torrent! Nothing was audible above the din, so yes, now it was time to get up. What a naturally alarming clock!

It was a Saturday in the refuge, but what was I doing here alone on a Saturday? Why wasn’t I in my comfortable little department in La Ceiba? What had happened, what was happening?!

Honduras.

Now that I am here and ever more involved with people and places a personal meaning is taking root in the soil of my mind. Less and less is it blurred by other ideas and experiences, and more and more does my own understanding grow and branch out here, collecting like sunbeams to create deeper roots, a thicker trunk, and fruit, oh fruit!

But enough of metaphors for meanings. What does this place mean to me now? I’ve been here just over a month now, and for the last week and half I’ve been left mostly on my own, well, me and our little team here, to work magic. Green magic of course. And slowly, sometimes rapidly, the mysteries and meanings unfold.

The train didn’t come last night, but my small afternoon victory was worth the wait over in the refuge. There is so much going on here, often the least of which is the planting per se. Planting seeds of consciousness? Yeah… but how?

…

Jean and Ranil had just departed. Jen had some rather brutally infected lesions and had decided to stay in La Ceiba. As she is leaving soon, Jenny too had office work to do. So Anuar and I headed into the reserve for a couple days of work on our own.

I could already tell (gracias a dios!) that the hurricane style manner in which we’d been going up till then was about to calm. Without the need to organize the coming and going of a large group of us, along with the myriad meetings and purchases we’d been involved with, Anuar and I moved more fluidly, more organically… and had a couple Salva Vida’s with lunch.

After a long and convoluted trip that involved buses, rickshas, feet, and a train, we arrived to the refuge in the afternoon and began to work. From the moment I set foot on the soil of Salado Barra, the end-of-the-tracks community where we live and base our activities out of, I felt more alive and free that I’d felt since arriving here to Honduras. I was there of my own accord, my own will, my own curiousity now, not because I had to be. Ahh, to be one’s own supervisor… it’s the only way to be. That concept as it turns out will be the key to success in the project I am heading up here too…

We worked hard and fast. First, there were several species of tropical fruit trees to plant. With Ranil zipping around pointing out candidate trees that might survive the harsh conditions Salado Barra, we’d gone on a seed and sapling gathering binge at the ‘Germoplasm Bank’ (arboretum-nursery) at CURLA University in La Ceiba, and now we needed to get some of them in the ground while the weather was humid and cool. There were seeds to be planted in the second of our community nurseries, now that we’d gotten it organized. There were several hundred zapotóns and some guama to plant over in the mangrove restoration demo site.

We put our things in the casita, took a quick sniff of rum and headed out into the drizzle. As darkness veiled us, we’d put the last of the fruit trees in the ground near the nursery, and had cut several poles to protect them from grazing. Soaked, we made our way back into the casita and enjoyed a very rudimentary meal, then lay down to rest. It was lovely… and not a mosquito molested us.

To be totally honest, my first week in the refuge had been plagued by hordes of mosquitos and zancudos (biting insects), to the point that I was looking forwards at the coming months with dread. A wetland indeed! Tropical swamp more like it. I didn’t know how I would handle it! Never had I seen so many mosquitos, which, combined with the tropical heat made for an incredible hellish existence to me. One of my karmas is that mosquitos love me, and I abhor them. There are few things that aggravate me like having a hundred mosquitos dive-bombing me in the face, or looking at my shoulders to see a dozen of them grazing! True, my first days in Cuero y Salado horrified me…

But then they disappeared! Apparently, there are cycles here, and aside from being calm and free, the last two weeks have been zancudo free too!

So we bedded down early, and instead of waking up every 15 minutes to smush a lil fucker that had somehow gotten through the mesh of my mosquito net (at 430am one horrid night, I actually watched them learn to poke their biters in and then crawl through!!), I slept more deeply and restfully than I had in weeks… with no net at all!!

The next day was the first of mine whereby I’d have a little field task of my own to manage. I was to manage a planting in the the demo site across the river with Ivan, one of the young men of the community. It went very well. It’s one thing to converse in Spanish, or read, and quite another to teach people how to plant, and motivate them to keep working in a torrential downpour! But all said and done, we got through the morning work, and planted a whole whack of trees.

The planting here is unlike anything I have ever experienced. It’s so amazing to be back at it again, working with plants and people… and this certainly heralds a great step for me! In the demo site, there is about 6 inches of sandy muddy soil, and under that, watery muddy goop. It’s probably the harshest environment I’ve planted in, save for the other area I will be devoting most of my time and energy to, which is nearly pure sand. But yeah… the planting of mangroves is dirty, smelly work. Often when you scoop out a clump of gooey dirt to plant a tree, the most nauseating sulphurous stench nearly knocks you down…

It was still raining as we hopped on the Friday afternoon train and headed back into La Ceiba. We slapped fives and Anuar descended the bus. We’d meet later on, we decided, for beer at Casa del Jaguar.

And again, oh what a pleasure to arrive home and head up into my cozy little apartment!

The phone rang and Anuar told me he had a few amigas he wanted me to meet. Sweet! Finally some ladies! So I headed out to Jaguar ready for what come. Good times were had as we sat in the open palapa-style bar and downed beers. It was sooooo nice to be outnumbered by locals again, to chit-chat about life here in the country, and to continue learning about what it is to be Honduran.

Eventually, we opted for dancing, and all buzzed up we headed to the poshest club in town, Hibou. A day that had begun with rain, sulphur goop tree planting, and a very strange Ivan, ended with a happening locale, lots of laughter, and sweet Margarita, with whom I danced the night away…!

Saturday evening was for football… soccer… the whole night sky lit up from the open-air stadium. High above hundreds of gulls soared in the lightly falling mists, surely baffled as to the intense illumination on such a cloudy night.

I was supposed to meet some friends there near the ‘sillas’, they’d said. Huh? There is nothing quite like trying to make one’s way in an unknown country, state, city, and way, and I was nearly dismayed by it all. The surroundings of the stadium were hectic, people running all over the place and…

¡Wow, what a hurricane the last weeks have been! Tropical mangroves, tree wizards, epic floods, mental breakdowns, attacks on multinationals, and the formation of VidaVerde…

I am sitting here tonight in La Ceiba pleasantly content on a full stomach of delicious pizza. It was ‘the last supper’ and I fully enjoyed it. Who’s last supper? The boss’s I suppose, but she’ll be back, and we’ll be ready with much planting done!

So, it seems like the last entry saw me poised and ready to head into the reserve. That seems like a year ago already! Since then I’ve been in and out three times… I’ve been wanting to write about it all but honestly, life has been hectic. I’ve barely felt the time to breathe it seems… there’s a lot going on!

Besides the multitudes of high adventure that has been zipping along, one of these going’s ons’s has been me trying to figure out what I am doing here… by that I mean in every way… here in the reserve, here in La Ceiba, here in Honduras, here on planet Earth, here inside a head that sometimes just won’t stop spinning! Where are the brakes?! I wonder sometimes that we can get so wrapped up in our this or that, be it managing an investment bank in Tokyo, or cooking tortillas for six kids in a rusty corrugated shack, that we forget the central theme of consciousness. There are times when that question, ‘What is the meaning of it all?’ becomes so paramount in my world that nothing else get’s through. Many people feel it’s nice to be busy… and others feel it’s nice to sit and watch the clouds… and most probably enjoy the both, just in varying doses. Well I’ve just come down off a steep dose of whirling along inside a tropical storm cloud of learning and doing, that was at once so fulfilling and rich, and at the same time tormenting!!

Throughout the last couple weeks I was reading a Vonnegut Jr. (R.I.P.) book, Mother Night, and this one paragraph reached out to me in the midst of a mild breakdown that really resonated with what I was feeling, if a couple words were changed:

‘My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing – my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.’

If you change ‘my love for Helga’ with ‘my search for meaning’… that sums up a rather significant proportion of my being throughout ‘the war’ which is human life for the over-thoughtful.

But it’s all good now. And here I am at the threshold of one chapter close and another beginning. I am being left alone down here now to create, to let my vision and passions flow across the various tropical palettes that make up my local environs. One of those palettes is the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge.

To get to Cuero y Salado you have to drive west from La Ceiba to La Union, a distance of about 30 kilometres along a highway that skirts the feet of a massive green mountain range called Nombre de Dios. It’s most formidable summit, Pico Bonito pierces the sky at an altitude of over 2400 metres… sounds simple enough, but a trip to the top would demand between seven and ten days of hard slogging through lush untracked tropical forests, replete with all manner of spiny plants, stinging insects, poisonous snakes, and predatory mammals.

As you leave noisy Ceiba and drive along the highway amidst the clouds of lawless darting vehicles you eventually pass through the battlefields that stretch from the very base of the mountains to the sea. These are the result of a centuries old war here. The old scars show everywhere and new blood trickles even today.

The machinery of this battlefield is pineapple and the commander is Dole. Monoculture as far as the eye can see. Miles upon miles, upon miles of a single species, farmed with poison and slavery, where before was a lush tropical eden’s pristine abundance. As it turns out, my mission here as secret agent RayoVerde with our green team is to go out and change things around here… Eh? Green em up… albeit little by little.

The story with piña and other monoculture slavery is deep and contorted, but I am being briefed daily. Even this evening as I chatted with my landlady here in Ceiba, the effects of the deadly pesticide Nemagon (1,2-Dibromo-3-chloropropane – DBCP) which was used extensively last century, is still being felt today. It’s use causes sterility and impotence in men, and cancer in mammals… here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

‘However, despite warnings from Dow about its health effects, the Dole Food Company, which was using the chemical on its banana plantations in Latin America, threatened to sue Dow if it stopped DBCP shipments. Dow then shipped half a million gallons of DBCP to Dole, much of it reclaimed from other users. Plantation workers who became sterile or were stricken with other maladies subsequently sued Dow and Dole in Latin American courts, alleging that their ailments were caused by DBCP exposure. Although the courts agreed with the workers and awarded them over $600 million in damages, they were unable to collect payments from the companies. A group of workers then filed lawsuits in the United States, and on November 5, 2007, a Los Angeles jury awarded them 3.2 million dollars. On April 23, 2009 a Los Angeles judge threw out two cases against Dole and Dow Chemical due to fraud and extortion by lawyers in Nicaragua recruiting fraudulent plaintiffs to make claims against the company. The ruling casts doubt on $2 billion in judgements in similar lawsuits.’

But the story became personal to me when disaster struck at the end of my first visit to the refuge.

It had been a week of paddling through the lush mangrove ecosystems of the refuge, collecting seeds, watching manatees and monkeys, visiting even more remote Garifuna communities within the reserve, eating wild tropical icaco and uva, and catching both 10-inch crabs and scuttling bats in our accommodations, etc. I had begun to understand ‘Analog Forestry’, the main land management tool that Falls Brook Centre uses for it’s designs. It had been amazing, with the participation of a mystical tree wizard Dr. Ranil Senanayake the founder of AF and world expert, many colourful community participants, plus our enigmatic own staff, we’d laid some designs for a proposal to Dole to install a highly productive biological corridor right through their coconut monoculture in the refuge.

On the train on the way out it began raining lightly, then got a little harder by the time we’d arrived to La Union. Jean, Ranil, Jenny, and the two visiting project funders from Holland left in the first car while Anuar, Jen and I remained to wait for Jorge to come and pick us up in the FUCSA truck… all the while the rains continued with increasing strength.

By the time Jorge arrived, it was a fully fledged downpour. Isolated in the reserve we’d not heard the weather report that called for a tropical storm. Even if we had heard a report, we might not have cared… they’d erroneously called for a hurricane the week before and not so much as a couple hours of rain actually arrived. But here we were, in some pretty heavy rain.

From the back of the cramped pickup Jen advised me that ‘Getting into a vehicle with Jorge always leads to some crazy adventure…’ She was spot on, drop on.

As the ineffectual wipers flip-flopped and swish-swashed the now beating rains, Jorge wiped a damp scrap of newspaper across the inner windshield to clear a thin swath to see through. He was squinting terribly behind his glasses when he admitted first, ‘I’m nearly blind,’ and second ‘We need gas…’

From behind him I was witnessing something I’d only ever heard of… a flash flood. Within fifteen minutes the road was completely covered with water. We were driving along through a brown river with a sizable cresting wake following behind us. Motorcycles and bikes were splashing in all directions, the water nearing their seats. Busses flashed lights and honked as they passed in the opposite direction, soaking us in their wakes. People were running all over the place. I had no idea where we were, Jen was looking a pale green, Anuar was on the phone with the driver of the other car then lost connection, and Jorge was trying to keep a sputtering truck driving through the coffee coloured chaos.

We came up to a section of the road that demanded us to stop… had we driven into it, the cross currents would have carried us away and into the adjacent ditch or fields, all now flooded under the maddening downpour. Lightening strikes and thunder claps happened at the exact same time… right above us… such that the sides of the truck vibrated in their resonance… and then it stalled. But we had to turn around and retrace our way, find another route onto the highway, or…?

We opened the doors. Water came into the truck! Jorge managed to get the water-logged truck started again and we sputtered around and made some clunky progress until the poor thing stalled again. But it would not start this time. We were stranded. Things looked dire.

Then we nearly got smashed into by a couple passing vehicles, all the while Jorge was wondering where we could find some fuel. Not only were we in the middle of bum fuck nowhere, but we were stranded in a titanic flood, so the chances of a fuel up seemed nil to me. Anuar got out and waded through the water to the rear of the truck to try to push it off the road. I jumped out to help him. ‘Bienvenidos a Honduras!’ he yelled as lightening flashed all around us. It was not a great time to be in water half way up my legs, rushing past me now with force. But we managed to push the truck to a slightly higher part of the road, to a corner where the waters diverted slightly… but diverted to where?

We were now stranded amidst a collection of rural concrete hovels. While the storm pounded on, men, women, and children waded around everywhere, carrying children too young to walk across to more secure buildings. Nearby, a woman was frantically sweeping water away from entering her house while the men constructed some makeshift barricades. I relieved her of that duty and began sweeping as if I were paddling in white water. They got it constructed using debris and some burlap sacks filled with sand. I waded around back to see the yard. A pig was treading water in its sty and a soaked rooster sat atop a container keeping him company looking deflated and scared.

The water had risen higher so I carried a few children from the side it was coming from to the safer ground of a school. It looked like their house might wash out completely. And it was then that we realized the true cause of the flood.

Anuar and I waded across the road to observe the source of the water and met a shirtless young man there who explained it to us. Looking out beyond the village our eyes met a scene that looked like a cut out from WWI. Partially cloaked in swirling mists and heavy rainclouds with ominous drizzle, dark soil and mud lay exposed under the punishing tropical storm. Dole had raised up the level of the land to ‘control’ flooding, and had shifted the drainage of a massive pineapple plantation so that instead of flowing toward the river and sea, not far beyond, it now flowed right toward the village. Oh, they’d built a drainage ditch designed to carry water away, but it was vastly inadequate for the sheer volume that a typical tropical weather event can deliver. Without a single tree left in what was once a lowland topical rainforest, the water and soil had nothing to hold it in place and flowed free and menacingly.

We shook our heads in a mixture of pity, dismay, disgust, and bewilderment. ‘At least it’s fresh water,’ I ventured, totally amazed and in a way grateful to witness such quantities of the precious resource. ‘Yeah, but its full of agrochemicals,’ Pablo replied. ‘All the fish in the river will be dead by morning…’ He told us of his life in the fields. ‘Dole is the only employer in the region. I work from 6am to 4pm for my 90 lempiras (about 5 bucks). They give us masks to protect us from the sprays, but they don’t work so we can’t even wear them…’

Eventually the fire department came and rescued us. Their fire truck had turned into an red lights ark, and perched on top of it we were carried into a town near the highway from which we managed to hitchhike a ride back to La Cieba.

The caring of the people of that little village was endearing next to the tyranny of Dole’s poor treatment of land and people… at the height of the drenched action, marooned in the school and setting in to stay the night without food, water, or blankets, they’d brought us some candles, coffee, and biscuits…

Ryan May

La Union, Honduras

September 30, 2010

Ahhh…

It’s 8 am here and I’ve just finished packing for our trip to the reserve. It’ll be the first of many for me and I am endlessly curious to see what, who, and how it all unfolds. Where imagination meets reality, you’ll often find me standing there staring… conjuring images of divine beauty and harmony, juxtaposed over the so often cluttered and noisy surroundings.

Cuero y Salado? The 13000ha nature reserve that lies about 30 kms west of La Ceiba. Filled with all manner of tropical phenomena, it’s a mangrove-dominated ecosystem that protects some the last remnant vestiges of a green belt that one spanned the entire Central American coast, from Florida to Brazil… now only left as here-and-there patches. Mangroves are exquisitely diverse places, indeed wherever land meets sea one finds a disproportionately large array of species, adapted to flip between the terrestrial and marine environments… species such as the manatee, gentle grazer of the vegetation that wraps the sometimes harsh hurricane-swept lands, in a soft blanket of vibrating green… vibrating with insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

But today is less about the future and more about the now… and the yesterday.

It has been quite a culture shock coming here. It’s been over a year and a half since I played in Latin America, and even then, I was in Brazil, a species of country all unto itself. No, as far as I can see, Honduras isn’t much like that sprawling giant… a sprawling giant I am so ever anticipating seeing again, perhaps after some training in getting good work done here.

I’ve been here in La Ceiba since Saturday evening. Our gringo team went out on Saturday night to eat pupusas then go to El Jaguar, the supposed choice spot for debauch. But it was only so-so… I was pooped and mostly just wanted to sing. (I will have to find a guitar soon, a medium to let my spirit fly out of me and mingle freely with the abundant mystical elements that surround me here.) So, I eventually went back to FBC’s pad earlier than the rest and lay in the hammock to sing myself to peace, a little drunk.

Sunday. It’s been interesting… La Ceiba is home for the next months and I’ve mixed impressions about it of course… riding the wave of ‘am I into this??-then-yahoo this is amazing!!’.

It’s quite different coming here as a foreigner working… a whole new kettle of fermented fish. For one thing, there are others here too, working with Falls Brook… so I have to be quite intentional with my activities. I usually travel solo, and have traditionally steered clear of internationals… but I am shifting my ideals… we all need to work together now… the time is past for isolation and judgements. But still, it was odd… I kind of lost a sense of my independence with them at first, or I felt it fleeting. For example I wanted to find an apartment and so I asked them for advice, which they had much of… and something didn’t feel right… then I thought: ‘If I were alone here, dropped out of the last adventure, what would I do?’ And so I left, walked out into the streets and within 45 mins had found a rad place… asking the locals. It’s super sweet for 200$ a month, internet, appliances, furniture, AC, a lovely Honduran family, comfortable, and safe. An urban refuge.

But more than that perhaps is another reality. I’ve been criticized so many times for my… um… sometimes brute character. I am often at odds with what I see around me, and seldom accept the status quo just because someone tells me it’s best. I can seem confrontational, and it’s been the cause of some tension here and there… still, I must say what I see and feel… and in the end, people often respect me for it.

Well, in general, what I see around me is far from the fantasy I carry in my head and heart. I won’t now outline all the world’s problems, suffice it to say that there are so many, any open-spirited person will be continuously searching for more luminous lifeways… and as such, I stay clear of what we do. One of the most potent observations I make is that it always seems we (the West) are typically try to solve the problems that a reductionist logic made by employing a reductionist logic. Clearly my time in University punished the mystic in me and tattooed a free green soul with so many formulae and spreadsheets, statistical significances, and thesis. But round and round we go… trying to ‘proove’ beyond doubt that this system is better than that one by elucidating the components and measuring them so meticulously, when an open sixth sense would give one all the proof he or she needed!!

Um… basically that means that it’s a constant struggle to remain faithful to my truth… to keep my senses and imagination open and well nourished, in the face of such blindness. I hope not to seem overly critical of any person or entity, only invite the world to move beyond the scientific revolution to a new holistic lifeway…

…

Well then I was up at 6 for a sweaty hot jog along the Rio Cangrejal… NICE… now eatin’ oats and getting ready for a day. SOOOO many ideas of possibilities here… and yet, going with the flow is all I can do. I am looking for the switch. The switch that I can flick on that causes me to focus energy in right directions. I am ever at a loss (or gain) to know whether its me or destiny that decides… when clearly, its both.

I’ve made some great contacts so far… had some great adventures. Yoga at a riverside lushjungle retreat yesterday. A lovely local girl. Sunshine and warm rain. Smiling kids and overwhelming pollution… ya know…

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And then Monday, my first ‘work day’. So I went to FUCSA, my ‘host’ organization here. Fundacion Cuero y Salado. The FBC mostly rolls their eyes at FUCSA… there are some ten people working in the A/C office… and none living in the reserve. Still, I won’t judge until I see it myself. We (the West) are so focussed on ‘results’ that maybe we miss something Latin… I will promise to remain open to it all!

And then into town for a list of errands and supplies. It was a perfect way to initiate myself to the bustling city, and play a crude game of Spanish to get the needed items. We are hosting a group of folks in the reserve for the next couple days. A brilliant scientist, creator of Analog Forestry, Jean Arnold director of the FBC, and some Dutch donars. So, mosquito nets, coils, candles, scissors, ropes, matches, etc, etc, plus a rather massive load of fruit and veg… (interesting that the reserve doesn’t have it’s own supplies of fruit and veg considering auto-sufficiency is a major component of the project…) oh, there will be lot’s for me to do there it seems!!! RayoVerde!

But, the most interesting aspects of the day were, as usual, the cab rides.

Leaving town that afternoon with my bags full of odd bits and ends, the cabbie described a little of his lamented situation. ‘There’s just no work,’ he began, ‘Things are really hard. I am a licensed mechanic, but I can’t get steady work so I do this…’ I asked him about the details of cabbing here in La Ceiba. There are literally hundreds of cabs driving around and they constantly honk at you whenever you’re walking around. The guys rent the cars for 400 lempiras a day, and have to put 300 towards fuel. That’s a total of 700 limps. The flat-rate charge for a ride anywhere within town during the day is 20 limps. So, just to cover costs, these guys have to run 35 trips per day. He then went into the details of the economics. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘It’s truly a miracle what my wife can do with nothing. If I’m lucky I’ll bring home 100 limps, and with that she can feed the 5 of us. Maybe some rice and beans for dinner, tortillas for lunch, and a sip of coffee of coke for breakfast.’ ‘What about clothes and other things?’ I asked, to which he chuckled and shook his head, ‘Yeah, that’s extra…’ It all falls into context when we consider the exchange rate here: $1US = ~$20 lempiras! The cabbie drives all day for about $5 bucks, and with that maintains a family here, if barely.

On the way back into town to fill our fruit and vegetable order I got picked up by a different man altogether who told me of an awakened Ceiba. He outlined the US government’s neverending campaign of misery here, and about how the recent upheaval (there was an armed coup d’etat in 2009 and although a resurrection of ‘democracy’ ensued, the current leader was not reliably chosen by the people in a trustworthy manner at all). Now apparently this new government is pushing ignorantly for mega hydroelectric projects for many Honduran rivers, including El Cangrejal, that drains the crystalline water spilling off of the Pico Bonito range… a lush green mountain park and biosphere reserve that forms the majestic backdrop for this polluted chaotic port city…

This is where cabbie #2 got animated. He exclaimed with both education and passion that ‘NO, WE THE PEOPLE WILL NOT HAVE IT… WE WILL DIE TO PROTECT NATURE!!. And he was not against progress and energy at all, he openly supported sustainable energy systems, but NOT DAMS… not the same dams, he exclaimed, have been tried everywhere else and have been proven to fuck things up every time.

Yes, things are different down here when cab drivers are willing to stand in the way of bullets, and fire them too, to protect rivers and trees… ójala that we’d all be so moved.

By the time I got out of the cab my entire left side was tingling with shivers and pins and needles. The man was so eloquent in his speech, so passionate in his delivery, and so ready for armed protest until bloodshed, if need be, to stand up for the rights of the region’s people and wild elements… I was impressed to shaken and inspired!

Finally, leaving the fruit and vegetable market area… the new cab driver explained to me what was the reason for all the congestion I’d noticed when I’d arrived about half an hour earlier: someone had been shot just around the corner from where I’d been bargaining for melons… had I been there 10 mins earlier, I’d have heard the pop-pop-thump-and-scream.

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Love to all!!!!

Ryan May

La Ceiba, Honduras

September 28, 2010