softly spoken magic spells

Time seems to go so slow that it goes fast.

In November of 2006 Johnny and I planted a banana tree. It is supposed to take 9 months to bear fruit, but we didn't really know how to cultivate bananas so it took us longer. Everything takes us longer here. Perhaps we are slow.

In 2005, an older local man told me that the important thing is to start, and with the grace of God, there may or may not be completion. But the important thing was to start.







This past week, Johnny and I cut a bunch of bananas, and chopped down the stem that we cut them from. That is the way of it with bananas, the shoot comes from a rhizome and bears fruit only once, then it dies, and the next shoot matures. We have learned how to cultivate bananas. We are slow, but we can learn.




For several months that bunch of bananas had been growing. Its appearance brought to bear on my mind the passage of time, because I remembered planting the tree. Moments can tick by here so easily that their passage is not noticed. Time can get piled up behind us while we wait for something to do.

In February, a different local man, an elderly attorney, asked me what I thought the most valuable thing was. I said that I thought that the most valuable thing was time. He was surprised and pleased by my response, but explained that while time is the one thing that can not ever be paid back, the most valuable thing is an idea.

It took a long time to get the banana I ate a few hours ago. But I can not curse the loss, it is simply how long it took for us to get bananas. The most valuable thing was the idea to plant the tree in the first place. But the most necessary thing to do, was to start, to actually dig the hole and put in the tree.

Below is a map.


The blue thumbtack represents where a village used to be long ago. It was never very big. Everyone moved to Xaibe, other larger villages, or to town, generations ago. Like the banana plant, the shoot bore its fruit and died. But the villageness is still there. Human settlements don't just happen anywhere, there is some underlying rhizome, just like with banana plants. The name of the village was Chakha'asi, the Mayan words for red bananas. I've never grown the red ones. No one lives there anymore, right now.

Here is a closer picture.



Here is Christopher kicking around on that piece of ground we are calling the East meadow.



Posing for the camera, he has plunged his machete into the ground. I don't know where such behavior comes from, he didn't get that from us. He didn't get it from me, that dulls the blade, and I am the one who has to sharpen it. Maybe it comes straight from the blood, our kind have, more often than not, arrived with that particular pose and always with steel and fire.



Perhaps we can learn to moderate that. Perhaps with some kind of grace we might walk more gently on the ground.



The forest is what is called Moist Tropical Forest. It has a lot of interesting plants in it. Here is a flower from some species of Passiflora.



We have explored the forest a great deal. But it is very slow moving through such dense vegetation. We avoid chopping anything in the forest, because many of the plants are valuable or useful and a few are dangerously toxic. We don't know which is which and the sap from some of these plants can cause chemical burns if it touches the skin and blindness if it gets in the eyes.

We are learning about the trees and the understory plants, such as chechem, the dangerous black poisonwood tree, and chacah the incense bearing tree that is the cure for chechem, and cocoyol, a vicious palm that looks very much like a concertina wire vine, and picapica the furry bean of itching agony. We move gently so as not to harm the forest, or ourselves.

This is an image from the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of philosophy and perhaps divination.

The text of the I Ching says:

THE WELL. The town may be changed,
But the well cannot be changed.
It neither decreases nor increases.
They come and go and draw from the well.

It also says:

True, if a well is being lined with stone, it cannot be used while the work is going on. But the work is not in vain; the result is that the water stays clear.
In life also there are times when a man must put himself in order. During such a time he can do nothing for others, but his work is nonetheless valuable, because by enhancing his powers and abilities through inner development, he can accomplish all the more later on.

There is an old, possibly ancient, well at Chakha'asi.




The well is dry, and there is trash in the bottom of the well. The high bush had grown up almost all around it concealing it. A man called Polo was hired to clean the brush from around the well. I am under the impression that Polo is short for Apollonius.

Such astonishing little bits of coincidence no longer phase me much. It seems perfectly natural now that a man, possibly named after Apollonius of Tyana will clean the well. He and a man named Valentine will clean out the well and perhaps dig it several yards deeper.

I will contemplate the symbolism of all that when there is less work to be done. For now, the important thing is to begin.