Safely home from our voyage into the Cannibal Seas,arriving into perfect fall coolness and feeling renewed, educated, and braver. In our absence the Sanctuary has gone from withering late summer into clear, fragrant, luminous coolness. It's the best time of year, so bright, the leaves all around graduating into yellow, the sky exquisitely blue, the breeze delicious, the shadows dappled.
Traveling as we did in the most sanitized and shepherded way, stuffed with familiar foods and drunk on fruit-flavored slushies primed with cheap rum, hands held (literally) over any unsteady terrain, we were at no point in any danger. No risk of dehydration, disease, hunger, even of any particular strangeness or disorientation. It proved nearly impossible to even locate authentic local food, except once in Belize when we were fed a modest lunch of rice and beans with a sweet strip of plantain. That day we also found a man with a machete and a pile of green coconuts, who provided that truest and freshest drink, the water of a young coconut, which proved to be the most delicious, strengthening nutrition of the the whole week.
We made three trips ashore, all of them marvelous. In Cozumel, we visited a Maya site known as San Gervase. While you will find no towering pyramids there, it is nevertheless one of the most sacred of ruins. Women and girls made pilgrimage there, to celebrate their holy first menses, for cleansing and healing, to learn women's mysteries before wedding, to ask the Goddess X'chel for children, to give birth in the hospital there. There are the remains of a road, paved with white stones so that pilgrims traveling in the coolness of night, under the moon, could see their path; there are a trading post, a priest's house, a bath house where twenty eight maidens would celebrate their menarche, a tiny hospital for birthing. And there was another building, from which sprang a great, beautiful alamo tree. When I saw it all curiosity about the rest of the place vanished and I turned toward that small room, where the tree's great roots anchored, like a flower to the sun, my heart swelling inside me. When I looked over at Jordan he too was weeping, and smiling. We'd been unable to bring any fruit with us; we didn't even have any coin or flowers, tobacco or maize. We offered a bit of water at the tree's roots, and when my tears kept flowing I collected them on my fingers and gave that water to the stones. The Lady was there, and She saw us, and She regarded us with such great compassion, the pressure of Her attention almost too much to stand under. I could have stayed there, though if we'd tarried longer I might have lost the will stay off the ruins, and climbed into that room to snuggle down amongst the cool stones and gracious earth, with that tree standing over me like the Mother herself.
I lost my words, under that attention, and just wept. For my lost babies, the ones that didn't stay and the ones that never came. For all of us who have lost a baby, or never birth one. And the sunshine felt like her warm hand on me, on my brow and the bent nape of my neck. She knows, oh,
She Knows.
After that, in the next few days, I began to feel odd cramps and twinges in my belly. And my juices began to flow again, which is a private thing, but a wonder. Not a period, no; but some moisture where none has been, some lusciousness and lust. That heavy grief lifted, and sweetness returning.
The next day we arrived at Isla Roatan, a beautiful island off the coast of Honduras. We took a bus out of the tourist village and across the island to a place called Anthony's Key, where we then boarded a boat for a short jaunt across an arm of the Caribbean to another group of small islands for our dolphin encounter. The sun was bright, warm but not hot, and the water the exquisite color of peridot, and our dolphin was friendly and good humored about meeting us. The 24 or so dolphins of the center there are barely contained in a kind of lagoon; in fact for some encounters they are released into the open ocean. They live in a natural family pod and produce one or two calves a year, and it's plain to see there is affection between them and their trainers. We had a gorgeous time getting to know one of these beautiful creatures, in such a lovely setting.
The last excursion was in Belize, a combined tour of the River Wallace and the Ruins of Altun Ha.
We liked everyone we met (except the diamond hawkers in the tourist village in Cozumel), but the people in Belize were most hospitable. We saw the most wildlife here: howler monkeys, several kinds of raptor, two species of iguana, a fox, a crocodile, some tiny bats, plenty of herons, storks, and other waterfowl and vultures as well as the plentiful local livestock--horses, sheep, goats, cows, ducks, and chickens. Of everyplace we went, we thought we'd most like to return to Belize.
It's good to be home.
