Puente Arce, El Salvador: typical and untypical town

February 25,2015 Blog: Puente Arce, El Salvador: typical and untypical town Puente Arce is a border town between El Salvador and Guatemala: in this it is untypical. The main street is always crowded with big trucks coming and going. There are local buses that go to Cara Sucia and onward both south to San Salvador and east to Sonsonate and Santa Ana. There is some traveling auto traffic and there are plenty of local peoples’ Japanese cars and pick-up trucks adding to the congestion, along with pedestrians and a host of uniformed border guards with their camo mufti, belts, and guns in their hands that stand more of less behind the barriers surrounding the border. The town is laid out on either side of the main highway. With approximately 9000 people here, each section is easily more than a square mile in extent. This family live on the east side and our dirt street is off the main street which is perpendicular to the highway and right at the barriers of the border crossi…
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Ready, Set, Almost a Go

FEBRUARY 24, 2015 BLOG: Ready, Set, Almost a Go I do not think I will envy the tourists who take themselves on exotic cruises on those enormous ships. It might be great for some to have a printed menu in their hands before they leave the safety of their own back yard. It may be okay to know exactly which day is to be Papua, New Guinea and at which hour there will be dinner on the terrace of the local palace. For some, this is the ideal and for all of this, they pay handsomely for the privilege. Although parts of this great journey have been a little harrowing, other parts have been exotic, charming and truly beautiful. The meals I have enjoyed on the terraces have been offered by willing hands from cooks with the skill that is accrued by feeding their own kind of local cuisine to many numbers of people over the years before I even sat at their tables. I have been in El Salvador now for about a month. It has turned into a patchwork of the times: getting grounded o…
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Fisher Folk, the beach in El Salvador

February 21, 2015 BLOG: Fisher Folk, the beach in El Salvador I have some fantasies that come along with becoming a ‘divine older woman’, one of them is that, even though I am always willing to drive wherever I wish to go, having someone else drive is wonderful. I get to go where I would not usually go especially in a foreign country where I am not so familiar with the roads and the destinations. My friend George who found me at the border here of El Salvador has taken over the driving. This includes navigating the alley where the van is parked and the destinations that are near here. On one of our trips to Cara Soucia, our planned stop at Western Union was stopped by a cranky computer, so I said after we had found some fruits and veggies at the local mercado, let’s go to the beach! The highway was paved until the final turn off at the playa where we turned to a sand and dirt packed road that wound around the evergreen mengle forest, around the houses and yards, aro…
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A Short Prayer

Dear Friends, This short prayer came upon me a few days ago when I was cruising the internet and it felt to me quite like the same message that many of us deeply feel. I have included it here because it just fits. Much Love and Blessings, to you, one and All One.
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Love is our only Reality: the Practice of Human Life

February 14, 2015 BLOG: Love is our only Reality: the Practice of Human Life Dear friends, as you might have discerned by now, I have been at a stall at the border in El Salvador for over two weeks. I have been most fortunate to find a home here while I wait for money stuff to sort itself out. And I have been doubly fortunate to find another part of my family here among very ordinary extraordinary people. I hope you will enjoy a little more about this part of the story: Journey of the Lotus. There is a part of me that at 76 is experienced and skilled, I have educated myself and taken all the lessons of my life as wisdom of the heart. Then, there is another part that is naïve and guileless. When I came to this border of Guatemala and El Salvador, the second part of me was the larger. I simply did not know what I did not know. Even when the very attractive young woman had denied my entry, I did not know from her rapid Spanish that that is what she had said. I am told …
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Living fences

February 20, 2015 BLOG: Living fences There was quite a lot of pure bliss on the drive through Mexico before I came upon the human realities of border crossings. The more tropical the weather and the land, the more I noticed and recognized the crops that grow in these humid and warm climates. The first big one was sugar cane. I had not known that when it is maturing ready for cutting, it sets up a feathery plume similar to corn but much airier, similar to pampas grass clumps I have seen in more temperate regions. There were groves of coco palms not so very different from the date palms in the desert regions of the Coachella valley. Papaya was also a surprise: it is an annual plant, sending up a crown of umbrella leaves over the fruit which ripens near the top and then, when they are cut, leaves the clump to be chopped down and composted on the spot for the next crop. The most fascinating and what became the most ubiquitous were the living fences. Seems that in tr…
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Mountain Bones

February 20, 2015 BLOG: Mountain Bones Dear friends, part of my plan with this blog of my ‘Journey of the Lotus’ is to tune you into some parts of the travel adventure that might not commonly be noted. Forget the cities built of piles of stones and cement, girders and flag poles, the icons and the cobbled squares in front of 400 year old massive churches proclaiming a legacy of a corrupt church, forget the madness of traffic in congested cities, the hideous piles of plastic basura that seem to be an inevitable feature of light fingered humans everywhere, forget the beaches and the resorts, just forget all that. I’m much more related to – mountains. I was born in northern British Columbia in the gold veined mountains near the eastern borders. Not so far north of that is the Yukon Territory and westward, Alaska, where the mountains of this vast cordillera stretching all the way south through North and South America might be said to begin. My youth was spent on V…
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El Salvador Mercado

February 22, 2015 El Salvador Mercado My stay here in El Salvador is accomplishing one of my purposes for this Journey of the Lotus: cultural immersion. Here in this family there is an ice chest that is supplied with ice only once in a while. This means, of course, that the getting of fresh food is an almost daily expedition. It also seems to be that a fair number of people depend on the street vendors for cooking. I am certain that people come to know who they like to cook for them and they habituate their businesses offering a few quarters to have everything just done right. Interesting. My personal style is to make my own food. I am joined here by the senior Mum, Orbelina, who makes meals for Papa Nefta every day. George often supplies himself by visiting his favorite vendor and because he is over at the border daily, he brings me what I ask for when he comes home for the evening: avocados, tomatoes, cucumber, papaya, melons, onions and other strange tropical fru…
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Arboles Magic: Tree Magic

February 12, 2015 BLOG: Arboles Magic: Tree Magic There was some time ago that I began to understand our human relationship with the plant kingdom. In my 30’s near the beginning of my training, a sweet older woman sat with me to talk about the kingdoms of nature. At the time, it was all a new concept but as she softly spoke to me, I watched the wonder of it all slip over her whole body like a beautiful lace shawl. From there it was not difficult to relate to what she was telling to me. Remembering that this may be termed, spiritual science, the concepts are broad and also mystical in their progression and dovetail into what our ‘hard’ science has discerned about the history of the planet, the solar system and our galaxy. The planet begins her journey in her mineral form and attracts to herself ‘atmosphere’, the element of air, and from that the rains (water element) fall incessantly for quite some revolutions of the sun forming rivers, lakes and ocean on the surface…
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Journey of the lotus: All the Fine Princes

February 9, 2015 Journey of the lotus: All the Fine Princes In any kind of journey, people are all important. Even if I am rowing myself solo across the Atlantic, there is some one other person or persons to whom I am related, to whom I wish to return and who I would wish to thank for supporting me. Two of these three criteria fit me and so this small piece honors the Princes who have showed up for me as I have taken this kind of solo roll across a continent to another. Even if they do not remember, this is my remembrance of gratitude for what they did in service. It seems that at every turn, in every place there was a smiling face and a helpful gesture. I asked Pemex station men if I could park in behind in the truck parking only to be waved through with their kind of welcoming, knowing I would be just fine thank you to sleep through the night in their lot. There was a gardener with small, full, green lush piece of ground, a middle aged grey haired wiry guy who…
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West Coast Mexico, Redux: the Final Miles

February 10, 2015 West Coast Mexico: Redux.: the Final Miles It was an eye opener when I first checked out the map of Mexico, taking note that the distance from Tijuana to Acapulco was 2000 miles! After the wild trip through the teeming centro of this truly quite fabulous metropolis, and the liberation I experienced as I drove up to the empty highlands once more on the way next morning to Pinotepa Nacional, the rest of the coast of Mexico figured in my mind as a kind of afterthought over the almost 1000 miles remaining. I was by this time quite thoroughly steeped in the magic of the land as it had become even more tropical. Everywhere I was in view of the beaches and the rolling surf, I once again imagined swimming in the Pacific waters. As I rolled through the thickness of the coco palm groves hung with bunches of green cocoanuts, as I gazed upon the many fields of papaya hewn down waiting for the wet ground and the damp air to settle and compost the old leaves and ste…
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No Tire Basura: There Is No ‘Away.’

February 9, 2015 No Tire Basura: There is No ‘Away.’ It is a tribute to Julia Butterfly Hill to remind ourselves that the trash simply does not go away. As I am driving the libre roads of Mexico on my journey so far I see plastic garbage littered nearly everywhere. Most people simply ignore it while they drop another small water bottle, another plastic bag, another empty aluminum coke can. The Spanish word is ‘basura.’ It sounds like a cute Disney bear character in a blue jacket coat and green pants doesn’t it? Well, friends, it is the same old same old trash, and it is almost exclusively plastic trash, mixed with aluminum cans. It is drifted in piles next to buildings everywhere from the very small roadside towns to the center of the cities, in the streets and alleys of the midsized places and along the highways everywhere. I stopped at an elaborate shrine constructed into a large boulder at the perimeter of the wide open area along the highway. It had been lovingly mad…
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West Coast Mexico: Redux: Manzanillo

February 5, 2015 West Coast Mexico: Redux: Manzanillo In this zone of the west coast of Mexico, the cities look a little like American centers especially that there are Walmarts. There is a difference here, however, in the tropics: the parking lots are covered with tent-like roofs and there are bevies of older guys, in their white shirts, hang-tags, caps and blue pants that help you park, that unload the packages and then guide you as you back out once more. It is expected that you donate a peso or two and a kind,“muy gracias” will also suffice. Also, roaming around the lots are young men who barrow along trolleys with buckets, spray bottles and rags who will clean your windshield or wash your car as you shop, also for pesos. Walmart, for all its corporate crap, is a pretty good grocery store here in Mexico in that there is a much wider variety of local produce along with quite a lot of what may also be found in the US, especially Washington apples cold stored often m…
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West Coast Mexico; Redux: Playa Azul

February 5, 2015 West Coast Mexico; Redux: Playa Azul If you believe that you need some tuning up in the realm of patience, I can recommend a road trip down the west coast of Mexico to assure an outcome that you will become either a mountain of patience or utterly frazzled and burnt out, a basket case! The road is fascinating; the landscape verdantly green and tropically beautiful with gardens of coco palms, of papaya, and a sea of natural vegetation: grasses, bushes, flowering trees. The road itself, sometimes even smoothly paved with a yellow line down the center, is two trucks wide at the best without a shoulder: the overgrowth of the land comes directly to the asphalt. Sometimes there is a white line on the right but not always. Without a right side white line, trucks especially, and all the traffic hovers over the yellow line making it a necessity to slow to their speed especially over the slow grades up to higher ground. It’s not possible to see around the huge tru…
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