Team Guate 2011 in La Antigua, Guatemala

Nov. 25, 2010

We’re on the road again and it makes me want to write. It’s the expanse of fruitless trees with their dried branches adding cracks to the blue sky, the wind hissing through the windows, the tall bales of hay and then the entrance into the walls of pine at the base of Mt. Shasta. Time becomes so much more complete, filling every pore of itself in nature.

Five hours to Weed, California seems like a blink of the eye for us, a small price to pay to be away from the madding crowd and to see snow again. I tell mi abuelita y mi mama: “We’re going to a cabin somewhere in the woods.”

“By yourself? UY! Be careful, people get killed in el monte.” Eh maybe during periods of genocide when the military goes into the rural villages in Guatemala. Maybe then, abuelita. “But you’re driving alone? You’re not going en caravana o con amigos?” Why, I ask her, so we move at someone else’s pace? I don’t think so. “¡Ques’eso!” She laughs, half in disapproval at my American ways and the rest dismissing the ludicrous nature of our behavior. “Make sure you take something to cover your nose from the cold.”

It’s a good time to reflect since we’ve been back for more than a month now and time has passed, water through our fingers, ungraspable. In the distance the snow-capped Cortina Ridge and the sky lighting up the fire of an imminent sunset. “Feliz Día de Gracias.” I tell abuela. I no longer say, “Happy Thanksgiving.” I’m more Guatemalan now and while Thanksgiving Day doesn’t directly tie back to our history, it does hold a symbolic element of being grateful for leaving deprivation and entering a place of plenty. I say entering because many times it’s a mental shift – re-framing a concept of deprivation from not having access or owning materials things to having support, love and freedom. Support from those we love and who love us and to feel free to do things that matter both for us and the world.

I am grateful for this and also for ten years ago when Brad and I wandered into the snow-laden forests of Shasta County and Lassen Volcanic Park in search of hot springs and adventure. We found each other.

We’re getting closer to darkness. El Día de Los Muertos reminds us how close we are to that needlehead thinness between living and passing; the passed and the still yet suffering. Two years ago my friend Ellen died in her sleep, bled into herself after many struggles with cancer. I can’t imagine her struggling because she smiled through anything. Even pain was a gift to be appreciated because it could be felt while living and she taught me that there is always something to be made of pain, if only sometimes to remind us of the present that needs to be lived. It’s taken me this long to realize that she’s perished, gone so far away. Yet tonight we summon each other.

I enter the portal, lift up the thin black-laced veil, surrounded by dancing stilt-walking skeletons, and candles to guide me down this crowded San Francisco street where the vessels have been prepared and carried. I move slowly with the crowd and find my way to the park where the aperture has been tended. There by that tree in Garfield Park, I find her and she finds me. As if time had not passed at all. Out of my red bag, I take out the large candle, the pomegranate, the apple, the two keys, the many small candles for all the people she touched with her compassion and love. I pause and light each one with my friend Tal. For once we have no words. I pause and then pull out our her steel-framed picture waving back at me from the beach with her one arm and other shrunken arm tucked close to her body, like all the people she loved and who took shelter there.  She waved and you couldn’t tell if it was a wave of farewell or hello or simply “Here I am”.  The ocean roared behind her and cool wet sand touched her bare feet.  I thought of her pain until the end. I thought of her happiness. And this time, I waved back.

My friend Ingrid is having a baby and I feel so helpless. I sit outside in the livingroom among the women, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, the mid-wife who peacefully goes in and out of the bedroom where she is giving birth. It is quiet except for the sound of the bubbling water in the fish tank, the cat meowing, the tea kettle which boils over with water, whispering and the utter agony of her cries of pain. Gity, her Iranian mother-in-law is praying in Arabic from a small book which she reads with her dark glasses, bending her entire body into her prayer at one corner of the dark sofa, she emanates tranquility.

“This only happens once in our lifetimes,” Gity reminds me and her daughter. “It is truly a gift that Ingrid gave us.”

I thought I would come here like a photographer, a professional gig for a friend, but it’s more right now and while my instinct is to document, my heart tells me to be empathetic and to respect her privacy.

The mid-wife comes out and we hang on every word. ”She’s at 8 or 9 cm, but something is holding her back.” She needs her comfort zone back.

We empty the livingroom, it is her home again, quiet and safe without the pressure of anyone expecting her to perform on their terms. I flee to the dark corners of the baby room and write. From time to time I hear the creaking of the bed and the door. The midwife pokes her head in from time to time with the nicest, warmest smile.

When I asked Gity, who has had four children, two of them twins, and the midwife about the amount of pain she’s in and what the experience of labor is they tell me  this:

It’s like things are happening in your body, like your body is stretching and things are happening inside you that you can’t control, you feel what the baby feels, like you’re going to die, like your bones are going to break, you can’t say anything, you become like a child, language is gone. The first one you’re lost because you don’t know if it’s the beginning or the end. Every moment you think it’s the most intense. It feels like your baby is going to come out of your ass, like it’s the size of cantaloupe and there’s no way out.

I cringe, I cannot fathom my body stretching into another dimension. Gity looks at me intensely and then she says “It’s like a difficult exam you cannot fail. You just have to get through it.”