Filomena

The wall is still going up. I know the wall builders lost in the big election across the border, but it’s still going up. I wasn’t a college engineering student very long, but I know the principle of momentum. Momentum drove my own life many times after I put the brakes on too late, and could only look with fear or sadness at what came next. The tabloids in Mexico say Miss Laura Bush is getting a divorce, and he is building her a big house in Texas. Maybe she’s trying to put brakes on. Who knows? Quien sabe? The tabloids are the tabloids.

The wall is the new US Border Patrol wall. What’s it like, being on this side? I don’t feel different, I mean, compared to before they started building it. But I know it is different. It has to be. It’s the difference between keeping someone out, and being kept in. In your mind you paint a picture of what your place in the world looks like, what it feels like, and it’s always better to be in that place because you choose to be, rather than because a wall is keeping you from going somewhere else. There was a time when we could go to San Diego and shop as easily as we could go to Guadalajara. Not my family, of course, but at least it was possible. Now it’s not possible, or at least it’s harder, only I know that without the wall I wouldn’t even be thinking about going there.

I think gringo culture is a lot different from us. They like money but don’t like saving it. They like fresh vegetables but don’t like to work outside. They like having family, at least in movies and TV shows. They like their daughters to be virgins, but every other girl older than 12 they like to be a sex object. They spend millions on medicines and surgeries to live a long time, and lock their old people away when they begin to slow down.

Us? We just like stereotyping, and with the wall it ought to be easier.

Is it really October? Has it been a whole month since the last blog? The wheel of time is speeding up, faster and faster, and now October’s turned under like dirt beneath a plow. Mayan New Year, gone behind us – another equinox, all of September, gone behind us. Have you read the chapters published on my site? Yes? So I suppose you think you know my secrets. You may know something, but I wasn’t keeping it secret. The real secrets, well, you have no idea.

And now it’s October already, October second, the day when my mother holy catholic church remembers the guardian angels. I was raised catholic. We were all catholic then, and our confessor priest Armando Vesquez was the law, the final word, and animal spirits were demons, and Uncle Raul, who believed in the animal spirits, and whom I loved, was a black spot on the family. Uncle Raul always was smiling; he called me his princess when I was young enough to believe in princesses, and he never came visiting empty handed, and would make corn husk dolls, dolls of the corn people, on the way to our house. Mom let me keep them because they were human.

An animal spirit, a kanul, is a companion spirit who comes into the world when you are born and helps you. What the church taught us about the guardian angels was basically the same as what Uncle Raul told me about companion spirits when mom wasn’t listening. It wasn’t the spirit part that Padre Vasquez was disagreeing with, but the animal part. That’s why I was surprised in the church to hear the story about the donkey that saved Balaam from the angel with the sword. Balaam beat the donkey when he tried to escape the angel, and the animal asked him “why are you hitting me; what did I do to you?” The Bible teaches us not only that animals can talk, but that they can see into a spirit world that is invisible to us.

And then there are the stories they taught us about Saint Francis of Assisi. He could talk to animals, you know. It would be pretty lame to argue after all this time that St. Francis could just talk at the animals, but the animals couldn’t understand him or talk back. 

So today, on the church calendar’s day for remembering guardian angels, I’m going to go out and feed the birds. I think Padre Armando Vasquez had a closed mind, and maybe wasn’t filled enough with that most famous animal spirit of all, the Holy Ghost.

When I heard the story I cried. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Then I was angry. If only she had turned her head at the last minute, or chosen to turn down another street.

Ruslana Korshunova was a teen-age girl growing up in a small town in Kazakhstan when her fate was sealed several thousand miles away. She had no way of knowing the danger she was in, and the forces that were building against her.

A modeling agent on an airplane somewhere over the earth was looking at the in-flight magazine, and a throw-away article on a little town in Kazakhstan. In the picture was a girl, green-eyes and flowing hair. “We had to find her,” said the agent. “We searched high and low.”

The child was no match for what she was up against. Of course they found her. Of course they took her away. They put her face on magazines, and of course they made money off of her. And on June 28^th of this year the girl, now twenty, jumped out of the window of a Manhattan apartment. After her death, the 32 year-old boyfriend said “she was happy.” The man she had spent the night with before she jumped was more philosophical. “Everybody here can barely breathe,” he said, describing her new world.

Ruslana wasn’t killed by one modeling agent or one obsession. She wasn’t killed by the magazines and designers she made money for, or men that might have preyed on her. She was killed by a culture that used her, and left her seeing that window as maybe the only better option. Even in her coffin, the press wrote about the human trafficking of her as if it was a gift, a fairy tale story.

I guess people can prophesize whatever they want. Like old Ezekiel in Babylon, the prophet of God who goofed and said so, but I guess he turned out to be right after all, but most of those old cities are just a bunch of rocks today anyway, so the odds were on his side. It was just a matter of waiting long enough. What about those people who thought 2012 wouldn’t happen if Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected to lead the US of A? The new age prophecy hinged on a female world leader having her manicured hands on the levers of world power by the end date year. So what now? Is it all off? Do we need Oprah to save us like our writer Brucie suggested, or Angelina Jolie, Laura Croft with her guns hanging from her hips? Will 2012 pass us by, Americans shooting it out in Iraq and narco-traffickers shooting it out on the streets of Juarez, and the new age Clinton-left smugly telling the rest of us ‘I told you so?’ I don’t think so.

So what will happen now that our northern neighbor’s election will be between two men? Can this thing happening in the United States really change a fate that the ancestors prophesized centuries ago? People don’t realize that 2012 was the starting date of their ancient calendar, not the end date. Instead of counting time forward like the western world, they counted backward. In 2012 their calendar begins. Can a fight between Fox news and Move-on dot org really alter that reality? Who are we kidding? It’s not about men and women, it never was. It’s about the feminine and the masculine, the two faces of one God, and if we’re going to get past the dualism that 2012 authors write about, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘you’ and ‘me,’ the male and female and the left and right, then our leaders, and the rest of us, will have to move toward the feminine, wisdom and the divine feminine, which is different than saying they will need to wear bras and skirts.Such is the view from under the mountain.

The summer solstice came and went almost without my noticing. At noon in this country there is really no shadow at all on the summer solstice, but there’s never a shadow under the mountain anyway. I’m sure it was a big deal at Chichen Itza, like always, and even more so now with all the new hotels and air conditioned buses. I’m thinking of all those girls on vacation in Cancun, happy to come and welcome a new age so long as they don’t have to do it with a perspiration stain in their arm pits.

Kasper brought the news that Mexico’s recovered more than 900 ancient artifacts from smugglers north of the border, and if you add these to all the stolen loot found in the past five years, Mexico’s gotten back more than 19,000 ancient things. 19,000! That’s a lot of stuff! I asked Kasper if he thought my old hula hoop was one of the 900 old things, and he just flew off in a huff. But really, that hoop was really, really old even when I inherited it from my cousin Vilma. Mina was so jealous, and she was mean when mother took it to string our wet clothes on and hang in the sun. Padre Pena seems worried that some of the 900 objects or 19,000 objects are idols, religious things that might carry an evil demon or two that some unsuspecting folks might try to assemble, or reassemble, at Chichen or the sun pyramid at Teotihuacán, or even here at the Witz Mountain, and try to make something happen, their own thing, at the 2012 end date. Pena says he keeps God’s council on the subject of 2012, but everyone who knows him knows what that means, that he doesn’t have a clue. In that way, he’s just like the rest of us.

I have a shell comb that was my mother’s. It’s the only thing I have here to fix my hair, just the shell comb and water. There is volcanic clay mud to make your face smooth. At a resort it probably would cost like a hundred gringo dollars for a jar, but here we’re in it sometimes up to our ankles. I never thought it worked, but maybe because Witz is the creation volcano it really does make you look younger for a day or two.

I saw the National Geographic June 2008. The ruins on the cover reminded me of ruins we have back up in the mountains. The magazine ruins were Stonehenge in England, and the article said builders of Stonehenge began work about three-thousand years before Christ. This struck me the same way the picture of the stones did, since this was the same time the Mayan people were created, at the beginning of the Great Cycle.

I asked Padre Pena about it. He’s a grumpy old fart but he knows things. He went to seminary. He surprised me, I mean for a priest. He said Buddhism and Taoism and Judaism, Islam and even Christianity were modern religions, compared to 3000 BC. He said the Hindu calendar starts in 3102 BC, and at the beginning our Great Cycle their Krishna was alive. He said the first shaman Pharaoh unified Egypt in 3150 BC and the first people to write were in Sumer, wherever that is, in 3000 BC, a gift from the divine and an idea that really caught on. A lot was happening in 3000 BC.

The padre said he didn’t know who the ancient avatars were or how they fit with the gospel and God’s plan, but it was one of the questions he wanted to ask when he sees God face-to-face like Moses did.

If I ever saw God face-to-face I don’t know what I’d ask. I would like to tell him a few things though.

I haven’t been able to rest since Kasper was by last night. He overheard two people arguing about 2012, and the buzz about the end of the universe, our age of the Jaguar. One person was saying when the sun lines up perfectly between the earth and the dark place at the center of the galaxy, midnight December 21, it will let demons stream to the earth and they’ll devour the human race. The other person was saying that was a crazy idea a gringo came up with, and even if gringolandia is destroyed, the Maya will reach a new consciousness and knock the dirt of this world off their feet.

So there it is in a nutshell, destruction or salvation, the apocalypse or a new world? Some say for sure the age has to end in an earthquake and it will bury us, that sunspots and global warming and volcanoes will shake the earth until it sheds us like a shaking dog shedding fleas. Others say the shaking will be in the mind, and we’ll grow past ourselves, our individual little boxes of myspace and mytime, to see thought as its own dimension, and see the place just outside of this consciousness where it’s woven together.

So do we dread the end of the age or hope for it? In the flying saucer movie Independence Day there was a scene where people were on top of a skyscraper dancing and chanting and welcoming the new age, and in the blink of an eye the flying saucer blasts the whole building to smithereens. It’s like if the ants came out to welcome us to the forest and we stepped on them. This is what really worries us, losing our dominance, even losing it in the face of God.

Have you heard about what’s going on in the Distrito Federal, at the Mexican School of Down Art? Star students have expressionist-style paintings and lithographs touring the major galleries of Europe, and getting great reviews. And all the artists have Down Syndrome. Most were considered hopelessly retarded until they picked up a brush.

Have you heard about autistic men and women, so severely autistic that they can’t speak, having grown up rocking or hitting their heads against the wall, and now writing poetry, and autobiographies?

What’s going on? Artist Daniel Perez says of his Down Syndrome students: “their limitations enable them to see the world in a way you and I don’t.” I think he’s right, except it’s not that you and I don’t see it. It’s that we can’t see it. As 2012 approaches, the definitions of who has limitations and who doesn’t are beginning to blur. Schizophrenics take drugs to make the voices silent, while students of shamanism take drugs to make the voices heard.

I wish I knew where we are headed. Minds thought to be empty of thoughts or emotion are opening like flowers, and a lot of the time surpassing us. Do you ever think that the most normal people might be the most boring, that we are so smart at trying to act like everybody else that we just share the same freakin’ delusion, and sit around on chairs telling each other exactly what we all expect to hear?

Do you ever want to break out of the delusion, the movie we’ve scripted in our heads to show ourselves exactly what we want our world to be?

We all have a blind spot, a big hole in the retina where nerves and arteries crowd out the vision cells, but we never see the hole. We never see it because the world we see comes less from the eyes than from the imagination.

But the upward slanted eyes of the Down Syndrome artist seems to see a world we can’t even imagine.

Did you read brucie in the comments? Oprah! One thing your Oprah does is use technology to show what genuine communication looks like. We can imagine sitting with her like that and talking. During my two years in college I knew a Professor Ruiz who would call it synthesis, like when he used a poem to tell us how transistors work. When your sister says no she means no; she guards her gate and I may not pass. I may not even know there’s a side to pass on to, but when she says yes! Lord, not only may I pass; I am compelled to pass! I can do nothing but pass! I wait for your sister, your tran-sister, to show me her smile. Unfortunately, electricity and poetry wasn’t the only synthesis Professor Ruiz was interested in. There was, for example, work and play, like the day he came up behind me in the computer lab.

I’ve been thinking about the flashes of thought we call the web and how it’s kind of a metaphor for connections that have always been there. We slipped into this revolution almost without trying, and that testifies to the reality of it: it’s always been with us. Our loss is that this new collective way of communicating, this net, is more mundane, more flat, than what it replaced. Now you are reading my mind, literally reading my mind, through words on a carrier wave of digital code traveling light speed, but before the wave there was feeling and emotion, a carrier wave of the heart. In the past the connection was less frequent, but more gift. It’s the difference between experiencing God through word, and experiencing her through unity, through contemplation. Both are necessary, but as the word dominates our minds, unity becomes myth, a legend we explain away with more words.

Kasper was by last night. He overheard prophesy that a great woman leader was needed in the world if the fourth age is going to turn over in 2012, and if the end (or beginning) that God, or Quetzalcoatl, intends for us is going happen at all. There are groups in the United States of America voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton only because they believe a new humanity and consciousness after 2012 won’t be possible unless she’s elected. They believe the prophesy points to this woman and her election as a step the world can’t evolve without.

I know that in the morning, in Ahpú’s village in Pennsylvania, the people vote on if that want Señora Hillary Rodham Clinton to be their president. Ahpú’s mother and father don’t belong to her party, but nobody knows how many of the others will vote for her because of the prophesy, and because of the hope for a 2012 that brings more than an end for the universe. I’ve lived long enough to believe in prophesy, but it’s hard to think that God and the Great Cycle are waiting for the North American politics, and to see how Ahpú’s neighbors, his mailman and sheriff, make their votes.

I don’t know what woman leader would be great enough to bring this age to a close, but my heart tells me it won’t be a leader in politics. The mind of humanity won’t balance on the fear or hope of a little village in Pennsylvania, or even of the whole North American country, and from what I see from here the voting is more fear than hope. Politicians are like that, like the Councilman Erubiel Duarte, but that is what people of this age seem to want.

So if the prophesy is true, and I have no reason to doubt at least that Kasper heard it correctly, another kind of woman is somewhere, but not in the papers or on the TV. Maybe another Mother Theresa, since those are the leaders that make the real differences, the changes of heart.