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?
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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.
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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…
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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!
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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
What a wonderful life – riches without money! XXXOOO
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