Rio Negro was never part of the original itinerary Isabel and I had planned for so many months. The main intention of this journey was to visit agro-tourism locations and visit farms that might have an interest in some form of connection I was seeking on a global level to being part of the solutions to Mankind's climate catastrophe we are all facing...and see how they were coping.
So Rio Negro (Black River)... well it was really an idea borne out of a fellow Agro-tourism graduate friend and her desire to see if the community could actually cope with tourists...I gotta say I am not much of a tourist and neither are my boys.. ok swinging like a monkey in the canopy and dangling off a boat appeals to one of my kids ... yeah and me sometimes actually but we also had a baby and and my other son to accommodate so our journey was very mindful of family and attention spans.
This trip was a test for sure for some in the group.
Travelling with yet another more specific local guide, first through to the local town and museum of the indigenous peoples, Cartilla Pokomchi we visited the museum and listened to the making of their crafts and such...
Now I am not much for these things so I was dumbstruck by the following when, just as we visited the last of the exhibits and there on the wall backdropped by the Mayan calendar and the local cigar making...
was a wall of these obscure very old photographs that looked as if the street outside where we stood was laid in an extra ordinary carpet to the top of the hill and the church...
The symbols behind the speaker are the Mayan Calendar found again on the walls of the Xamen (healers or medicine people) I would see later in our journey and repeated in many places
And all that work was destroyed by the procession in a short time...
That in itself struck me as amazing until I looked closer and saw the labels showed they were done EACH year. I was amazed... but that was the least of it
These 'carpets are actually made each year by the whole township in total concert ...in FOUR hours
out of colored sawdust each family prepares in advance and comes out together laying in the pattern they must all work for some time to agree on as a community...
What a collective. Here I was so exposed in my own culture of individualism that the thought of an entire town getting together and every family doing something together in agreement, even being bothered to come together astounded me, but that the pattern, the colours and the work was done in such short shrift .. wow it was just so moving.
Suddenly I had hope for humanity for, as an artist to see that spirit and art could be the guiding force of agreement and creation when so much in their lives and our own opposes this really gave me hope for the climate and our survival. What's more I was to learn that this is not isolated to this remote town but is dene all over Guatemala in April around the saints day. (Which, I assume is easter.)
ok I will continue this day in tomorrows blog
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