Sunday, May 4, 2014

Gracias a la Virgen

<<This post is inspired by a piece of art I saw at a cooperative in Oaxaca de Juarez --- hundreds of notecard-sized paintings on tin by a single artist, each depicting a scene from someone else's life with a sentence beginning "Gracias a la virgen..." While the celebrity of the virgin is still pretty foreign to me, gratitude becomes more familiar every day I spend in Mexico.  Here's a recap of the past two weeks, traveling from the state of Morelos to Chiapas, with Guerrero, Oaxaca and Tabasco in between.>>

Gracias a la virgen that when I lost my glasses in the ocean I did not drown as well.

Gracias a la virgen that the banditito who stopped us in the road between Acapulco and Puerto Escondido was not able to open the driver's side door, that we did not run over the other children who threw themselves in front of the car while slow-moving grown men with shovels approached, and that we got away from the whole scene with less agitation and property damage than is generally caused by unmarked speed bumps on MEX-200.

Gracias a la virgen that when the signs warning of upcoming speed bumps are obscured by homemade signs for COCOS FRIOS, at least some of those coconuts really are cold.

Gracias a la virgen that the high road to Oaxaca City from the lowland coast is not even the tiniest bit narrower.

Gracias a la virgen for the gold, the jade baubles, the human skulls inlaid with turquoise, the carved bones, the necklaces made of teeth, the obsidian spears, the animalistic figures and the ceremonial vessels; for the crucifixes, the crowns set with emeralds and rubies; for the saddles, the copper stills, the iron blades and all the books; for the rifles, telegraphs and radios; the cameras, cigars and bilingual audio tours for M$50;  for all the things in Oaxaca's cultural museum in the former convent of Santo Domingo, a vast stone complex containing the makings and unmakings of empires past, present and future, items carefully catalogued and overwhelming enough to drive me several times from the hallowed inner rooms to the courtyard, where with eyes closed, mind blank I listened to the fountain spill into a stone bowl.

Gracias a la virgen for AGUA PARA USO HUMANO, but most of all for AGUA POTABLE.

Gracias a la virgen for mescal, too.
Gracias a la virgen for the mescal makers, particularly for Sr. Pedro Aurelio, who doesn't object to looky-loos as he toils by the road among maguey thorns and smoke, waiting a decade or more to cut out the hearts of his crop and clucking kindly at his little black horse as it strains to pull a stone wheel over this season's long-awaited harvest -- a mesquite-roasted, fibrous mess that must be shoveled into a barrel and distilled three times before about 1 liter of mescal for every 20 pounds of cactus trickles out beneath an alter a la virgen.


Gracias a la virgen that right when we were so tired of driving and closely pursued by darkness, a little unnamed road on the GPS led to a dusk-kissed lake with free camping.

Gracias a la virgen for allowing me to climb right up a certain sandstone waterfall in Chiapas, where a million cold clean fists pounded my chattering skull until the roar of it all became like quiet.

Gracias a la virgen that what felt like creatures nibbling at my ankles in the river bed was actually just the current kicking up sand.


Gracias a la virgen that Bruno the dog kept pumas away while we slept soundly in our hammocks.

Gracias a la virgen that so many helpful people care where we are going and how we are going to get there.
Gracias a la virgen that the cave was not as terrifying as I thought it would be and that none of the bats pooped on me as I swam on my back, open-mouthed, beneath their roosts.

Gracias a la virgen that I can visit a rich man's tomb without staying very long.

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