July 30, 2011
Dear Friends,
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Haven’t felt like it . . . and then it became, where do I start? So from the front back, maybe?
Lucho came back. He’s sleeping on my lap, a little fatter than when he first returned, whining and meowing loud enough to wake the dead, or at least Maco who was having a dead-asleep nap, after a long day. Lucho wandered this time for three whole weeks, and was a furry skeleton at his return. So, as usual, who knows where cats go, when they do. Although I was thoroughly miserable, I was also kind of calm, a quiet misery, knowing that cats wander, and come home — And it is Lucho’s anniversary! He arrived exactly-ish a year ago, during the rainiest wet-season in 60 years, he was found in a sack, in the garbage at the bus station, and I was called, and went running, in my sandals and my green raincoat through the dark flooding streets. My mom was still alive then, to tell her the tale.
Chester is peludo, extra-hairy, and going to doggie-spa tomorrow, so that he’ll be in top shape when our friends from Canada arrive on Monday. He’s been a good friend, delivered the week after my Mom died, by Maco and the girls. I’ve never had a dog before, and I wasn’t sure quite what to do with him . . . he follows me around everywhere, saying, I love you, I love you, I love you. With Chester here, I’ve been forced to smile, and even laugh, and he has these deep, black eyes.
Of course my heart has been in ruins since the 15th of April, viernes de dolores, Friday of pain. Things stumble along, I forget and then I remember that my mother isn’t just 40, 000 miles away, she’s NOT HERE. Not there, not loving me from her sofa, reading Roberto Bolano, and cutting out New Yorker articles to save for me. Oh devastation, the crashing unbelievable end, the no, not me, place. The one who carried me, birthed me, on a stormy night in Cordoba, with bomb blasts going off, just finished it all, and is gone from this earth . . .
So the world exists, amazingly, without my mother, and I can’t go to Canada anyway, because descending upon the House are a pelaton of youth, gathered from the four directions, from four communities, four ways of being in the world, four practices of love, and honour, and gratitude and humility, and four teachers, and then five, to guide us all, and on the walls, newly-plastered and fixed up, goes the Mural.
Ah, in this place where so much hatred has soaked into the earth, so many fires have been lit to destroy, and not to kindle love, or feed anyone, just to hurt. Now, three decades have passed, but still, the ripple, and the ripple, and the ripple again of genocide, is not ever erased, and certainly not by forgetting, but the walls and divisions are not always clear, and how can there be forgiveness, if the truth is still not stirred into the core-story that people tell? So here in this house, where a (compassionate?) general once shot a boy’s dying dog, here where despicable things took place, or were planned, here the pila was used to wash the clothes soaked in mud and the blood of thousands, here on these walls, into that hatred, they came, that pelaton of youth, and they painted. Not painted over, but painted out loud. Here we are, five hundred years later, thirty years later, and we are good and beautiful – and damn you Canadian mines! You too, Spaniards in disguise.
So we painted and it was chaos, and holy, and now the inner-courtyard of Peace House glows, and is more beautiful than ever . . .
And then I left, and went north for a month, and loved my boys to death, the treasure and the joy that they are, from end to end, what I love best on the earth, my absolute heart’s core. And I walked out and around, and met with almost everyone I love, all these who are so treasured, and who sustain me, and all that I do, in this Web of Love. And I tell the story, about the Mural, about the shoe-shine boys who come to see me everyday, and about their wrong red hair, leached of colour, chronic protein deficiency. And about Selvin, and his brave mother and sister, and Isabel, and Lorenzo, and teaching Manuela enough English to pass her teacher’s test, and all the rest.
So then I come back, crying for those I love, and are in Vancouver, and anxious for all that happens in my absence, in this land of mine.
The political campaign is in full gear, and I hate it all, and feel like the victim of assault by political crap and lies, propaganda, manipulation, ambition, greed, horror and violence. The extreme-right wing party, the general who was up in the Ixil triangle during the genocide, then the head of the secret army intelligence division, and then head of the horrifically secretive, violent power, the Estado Mayor of the President . . . they are washing the country, and will win, and I think of those who loved peace, when Hitler was duly elected to office. I want to die. Or fight. Or something
So, our Home, a shelter, our Capilla of the Holy Innocents, a place to remember, to hold true peace, the truth, to be with God, that One, who loves all Good, my God, my ferocious and ever compassionate Father. In the chapel, I pray, we sing and we pray, and our hearts are strengthened beyond measure.
Today, Maco and I roar to Huehuetenango to see a girl, who was very sick, with a hideous tumour of some sort. I sit with her, and we pray to the Guadalupe, this girl’s beloved protector, and mine. To pull things out of this morass of suffering, her brother and her sister have been really sick too, her mother without hope, her father without hope too, and without a job. Home again, I go to visit another family, hiding from a violent father, then the shoe-shine boys come by, Meme first, and later, Jose. Juan Carlos is sick and didn’t come into town. Jose was robbed again today. He just can’t stand it anymore, and he cries at my table. For the third time today, I sit quietly with a crying man. I bunch up some tissues, and hand them over, I lay my hand on these my beloveds’ shoulder. It’s so damn hard.
Up on the roof, the chicken coop is complete, and awaiting its chickens. Rodolfo and our pals from the CCDA are up next week, and we will repair the veggie boxes. Sharon and group are coming, and I don’t know if they know how much we need them, their love, their standing with us, their sharing of our story.
Today, when we were driving back, I saw little blue flowers on a slender stalk. They looked like chicory, but they weren’t. A guardabaranco flew over our path. Every single time, without fail, when we drive some where, its blue flashes around us in a blessing. My mother loved chicory, and I remember it growing in the dusty summer streets of Nelson. I realized all of a sudden, that I’m not sad when I think about these blue flowers, and about my mother. I smile, and feel her love present, closer than ever, not gone at all, just different. quiet and mysterious. I am with my mother all the time now! I have been blessed, more than I can say, being the daughter of Cathleen Benson, and ever now in the circles of my friends.
em
