Guatemala Diaries Part- II

The climb to Mount Pacaya was steep and I was sweating like hell, though this time it was not out of working my way up but because of the hot land of this volcanic mountain. The trek was hell black with volcanic rocks, where few months back the eruption destroyed seven hundred houses nearby. It was just 20minutes on the trek and one can already feel the heat around.

This was my second visit to Guatemala after two years. Nothing was changed. For some reason I was remembering my dialogues with her two years back.


Your theory of natural abundance and connectivity makes sense, i said, but what if people donot have that abundance in them and they feel empty and seek for more or better?
She replied, well I would say, its a state of mind, a state of greed and ingratitude and not a natural reality,  We humans are the children of the same god and the same energy is flowing through all of us. The first step to live a human experience is to forgo this sense of economizing that we feel in every thing now(thanks to capitalism) and start seeing abundance in all things around. Its around us, and its within us, we just need to feel it.  And besides,wasn't it what your patron poet Rumi who said that “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” 
I felt convinced as if some non-believer silences a non-believer by quoting a holy verse. 
 (link to diaries part-1 below)

Thinking of the abundance and seeing the grass coming out of this hot black land as well, I met a humble man along the way. An American of Guatemalan origin , interested in Mayan history and volunteering in the volcanic mountains. He asked me if I have read Carlos Barrios "the bookof destiny" and if not i should. He shared some information about Mayans. The Mayans were the true believers of nature. For them the trees were the link between the underworld and the heavens, the volcanoes were the temple of higher gods, the dragons, being the guardian serpents of those temples, the monkeys symbolizing abundance and frogs symbolizing fertility.And the concept of greater god was not idolized or have a symbol in any form, as it was so great, being present in every natural thing. Just knowing the concept was good enough for them.

He told me in the month of May , thousands of butterflies come out of nowhere to this mountain. For Mayans, the butterflies were seen as ancestors returning to earth for a visit to physicality, bringing all their wisdom and taking back all the new wisdom back to the heavens to keep harmony between both the worlds. Butterflies never leave me anywhere...
(Note to self: addition to bucket list. See the active red lava with my own eyes)

Baking Marshmallows on the way...

Antigua:
Next stop  was the the colonial city of Antigua, (Note to self: Someday, to spend at least a month in this beautiful city in the middle of nowhere)

The guide was full of stories, of Mayan capture by Spaniards, of convents, of sainthood, of forced conversions of Mayans and betrayals and book burnings of the priests, of love of the Mayan princess Luisa giving birth to the first inter-racial child , of st James, and even the order of masons in this small town.  Stories were everywhere in this small town of just thirty thousand people, waiting to be spoken out loud. Every street corner was a flashback in history, a lesson on human desires and a remembering of human goodness and humility. There was a combined laundry park in the middle of the city, where for centuries women of this town use to come, less to clean clothes,and more to gossip, and while the children were playing, the grown up kids getting their first thunder strikes from their first loves. Now with the age of tamed electricity and automatic washing machines, nobody comes to wash clothes anymore but one can still see happy couples lost in themselves and some gloomy singles in waiting.
We ended up the tour at a Franciscan church where Brother Peter is buried. Ten years ago Brother Peter was recognized as a saint by the pope John Paul. It will take me ages and pages and some more visits to this town again to write about Brother Peter, so I leave it for our imaginations on how Brother Peter changed people lives and became a legend in Fransisco catholic history, and how good man are found everywhere, and in every religion and corner of the world. 


Link to Guatemala Diaries Part-1
http://salmaninafrica.blogspot.com/2013/08/guatemala-diaries-part-1.html

Some pictures down the memory lane....

Church in Antigua with Mayan and catholic symbols

local market in Antigua

Local market in Antigua

Antigua streets

16th century university

Gratitudes for Brother Peter. One from 1947

Franciscan church, where brother peter is buried. The priest not so Franciscan

Trek to hell

Its the steam, and not clouds

Hammam... Human dirt, Wars

It was a hundred year old Hammam building, in the middle of a nowhere town in eastern turkey. Dirty, rusted, tiled up with old bricks, and like all Hammams had that distinguished smell of decades of dirt coming out of thousands of souls, scrubbed, massaged and cleaned to purity every day.
As per the owner of the hammam, business used to be good in old days but now people seldom come. But today was Baiyram Night (Muslim Eid festival) and alot of people , mostly living in big cities were here to re-cherish their roots and identity. The town itself is called  'Kangal' and as the name suggests have nothing much to brag about. So I came to clean my human dirt  in this rustic place , a foreigner, naked among many friendly Turks in the same Hammam.

Laying on the hot Hammam marble and waiting for the turk cleaner to come, for some reason I was thinking of Syria and Ukraine and Gaza.  Though calm and relaxingly sweating in this ancient building in this nowhere town, I could imagine fighting was happening all around me.

Some 300km down south is the city of Allepo near Syrian turkish border. No one knew this city until a year back, and now noone wants to go there . A mess, made out of inflated egos of monarchs and super powers and tribal affiliations and now  religious topping on top like a rotten cherry on a gone-wrong cake, which nobody wants to eat or own it anymore. A while back I was served tea by a Syrian child of age 10-12 who is forced to find work here, when all he cares about is football and games and petty jokes, and all there is left is that innocent smile of a 10 year old.

Further south few hundred kilometers, is the eternal war going on. As usual both sides blaming each-other and the world powers sending measured responses , measured enough to say they care and they don't care..... Children of god dying.....

And north, just accross the black sea. a proxy cold war has started again...  the MH17 travelers who were watching movies and eating boxed lunches in the comfort of their cozy airplane seats were reduced to ashes , all their desires and ideas of living gone, in an instant. The missile, god knows coming from east or west or may be from the sky this time....

At the Hammam, the turk cleaner man finally asked me to lay down on the floor and with all Turkish hospitality smashed and rubbed and cleaned all the dirt out of me like a dirty rag (all with good and honest intentions) and all I could do was just to swear at him and laugh at my own situation and hoping of no broken bone in this adventure. 

Long after, sitting at the town's Khavenesi(Tea shop) I was thinking, if from unknown a giant cleaner man can come and scrubs and clean us all from head to toe in pure Turkish style, so we all start seeing each other purely as humans again and not as Zionists or Palestinians or liberals or conservatives or western or oriental (and the list goes on). But is this dirt only skin-deep, which can still be scrubbed and cleaned? and has not gone down in our hearts and souls? and has not made its own hate colonies all inside us, to the level that we cannot call ourselves as humans anymore. I would like to believe in the former even if it is not true.... All than is needed is a just good Turkish cleaner...



And just heard now the news of few children and woman killed in my country by angry mob (the so called Namaloom afraad, which we all know) over some Facebook religious status update.... Certainly Strange times and no good humanly news coming from anywhere.

Anyways my rumbling will go on forever. Baiyram and Eid mubarak to all of you from this nowhere town.

Konya Flashbacks....

"But is it really possible to find beauty in the most imperfect of things" asked the novice Sufi to his Sufi Master. 

The Master smiled. In that smile, were images of years and years of memories, of joyful and sad experiences, of lost and re-found love, of hopeful desires and fearful reasons. The Master remembered his own time years back when he was young and asked the grandmaster a similar question on how to find true happiness when all things are so imperfect. He remembered his own disillusions and then the moments of epiphany where he finally realized, it’s not about finding happiness in life but creating it and often with most imperfect of things around. The Master wondered how long and far this new student of his, will travel and how easy or difficult his journey would be to understand and reach this simple conclusion. 

The day was long for me. The long bus ride to Konya from eastern part of turkey was tiring, but the mere thought of walking on the streets where Rumi once walked and talked and smiled and dreamed and got awakened by shams, was worth all that visit to this small city again. There was something thing holy in that city, it always brought an unusual calm to my heart beats.

Dumping my bags in a small cheap Pansyion (turkish hotel) , and coming back to the reception I found her, going through the translated poems of Rumi by Coleman Barks. Japanese, with rough hairs and dirt all over the clothes, but there was this undeniable shine in her eyes (the ones you find in the main characters of Murakami books). Usual formalities, introductions, trust building , taking our guards off, and there we were, sitting like old friends in the Chai Baghche (tea garden) of Konya discussing Sufism and how it relates to the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi (wikipedia link)
A bit away from us, were a group of people listening to an old man. I heard the words, beauty, and imperfections and life and was intrigued to hear more....


The Master, instead of answering, asked the young boy to do the same, what his grandmaster asked him to do years ago, asking to find and bring the most beautiful shoe from the shoemaker’s shop. All these years were passing by the master’s mind in those moments like a silent black and white old movie. He thought  if knowledge and enlightenment is also circular and karmic in nature and all that stories about evolution and technology and human progress is just an illusion, and if we humans are just reliving similar lives again and again, just with different colors. The old man continued with the story (We keep the story of the shoe and the shoemaker for a later time).

My thoughts were disrupted again… I found myself listening to the Japanese girl on phone talking to her mother in a strange language. I tried for sometime unsuccessfully, to decipher the emotions beneath these alien words… the stars were all over the sky... the Ramadan moon was about to disappear and  the ghosts of Konya’s past started to appear slowly to start the ‘Sema’ (sufi whirling ceremony). Ordering another chai for us both, I, after a very long time, smiled and kept smiling, for no apparent reason…

The tavern of my mind

The Sufi was the last person to enter the tavern.

There had been a fierce argument going on the table of wisdom. Feelings showing their emotions, passions seeking their ideals,  imagination was skyrocketing here and there with a total disregard of the achieved harmony and balance in life, and rationality speaking more with fears than with hope. All of them were trying to convince the self that they know better and that the self should follow their preferred way. For the owner of the tavern, it was one of those days when he had to worry about broken chairs and wounded faces, though he also knew in the deepest corners of his heart that these days come and go and without these, the tavern as well will loose its attained charm and Raison d'être .

The fight was as usual about the new girl in town. Was she beautiful or was the mere hope of her sudden availability was making everybody excited about her. Feelings were insisting to prove to the self that beauty was there, outside, existing on its own, and reachable like a ripen plum on a tree and it is not just the rosy water effect. Rationality on the other hand was putting all the blame to mere supply and demand curves and testosterone levels. And imagination was showing all sorts of hopes and fears with no certainty on any of the two.

"They all believe they are in hunting mode, although they are hunted themselves", Sufi thought to himself and smiled. He remembered his own past. He was a born idealist and a romantic, always seeking the perfection of his ideals in the girls around until he met the one who changed his whole way of thinking. Back in old days he used to think alot about his desires, where they come from, where they want to take him and what he should do with them. The desire to make others happy which he inherited from his own roots and traditions and the desire to find his own happiness which grew within him during his travels in the far off lands , the too and and fro from both of these equal and opposite desires haunted him long . It took him ages to reach the realization of creating beauty in all things he has been associated with when his beloved challenged him to experience and seek beauty in the most imperfect of things.

The Sufi ordered wine for all, finished his cup, climbed the roof and started dancing and whirling on the tunes of the local lute player. Feelings and passions and above all rationality, they all looked at him with surprised faces for an instant and than returned to their favorite past time of fighting......

Magnolia blossoms...

The season of yellow leaves and frightened trees is gone. Life is coming back to life. Luxembourg is blossoming...

You see Neruda today sitting on a bench in a park. He seems lost in looking at two teenage girls on the grass, reading perhaps a naive love novel together and giggling for no reason. Just nearby a big magnolia tree is shouting at each passerby, “It is spring, it is spring, see what spring has done to me”.
You take the seat with Neruda. Neruda looks at you and smiles, and you know what is buzzing in his mind and he too knows, what you are thinking.....

I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

You ask yourself what would Neruda have said if he has seen Magnolia flowers blossoming first and than you remind yourself you  still need to see the cherry tree blossoming.

It is relatively early summer here. You are seeing the season within the people changing here as well. You see more laughter and smiles on the faces than when you arrived here few months back. The season inside you is still cold and icy, but you are feeling the heat from outside and hearing the sounds of happiness from inside. You ask yourself if you should allow the two seasons, the inner one and the outer one, to influence each-other. You hope that this will do good to you, but you also fear of the not so far away autumn and winter coming.

Yesterday a friend called you from your home country. He spent some of his early years living in Europe  and having his own opinions and experiences. He was saying, one thing that you will learn from living in Europe is how to be completely at ease with your loneliness.  (You find it hard to translate the word he used, to describe the feeling of being completely-at-ease. It's something like a feeling of two people living together and have gone through all the dominance and passivity curves in their combined lives and dropping all the guards now, are completely at ease in living together. Like what Rumi was saying the other day about meeting someone out-beyond the concepts of right-doing  and wrongdoing.)
But this feeling of being at ease and dropping your guards takes time and specially when the beloved you seek is no other than 'loneliness' itself. You think how beautiful and simple your home language is to describe so complex concepts, and you think a bit more about how to be at ease with loneliness


A squirrel runs past by you. You come out of your thoughts. The two teenage girls in the park are now sleeping on the grass, perhaps dreaming some naive and innocent love affair with all the drama, sounds and fury.  A magnolia flower is falling slowly on the ground in slow motion, the ducks moving seamlessly in the nearby lake. Time stopping itself for good.....

You hear Neruda saying ...

Someday, somewhere — anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life

First meetup . Bookclub - Luxembourg

For some old and rather odd reasoning, I always thought of Europe as a place of lonely individuals with shallow relationships and similar views about the depth-ness of communal life, a place where all values and ethics revolves around the individual self and one has to feel that loneliness to become a European. Was this because of my time spent in middleast and Africa ? where people are expected of thinking of others as a part of their own extended selves? and life is not just a collection of dots but a one big existence; in Shakespearean term full of sounds and fury? My time in Europe this time is proving me wrong. Europe is opening herself to me little by little.

So it was with these thoughts and with a soul tired of stomach-affairs, I started searching for a group of like minded people to spend time with and that's when I came across a book club meeting planned nearby and the book to be discussed was "the reluctant fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid. I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued to find a perfect setting with a favourite book by a Pakistani author to be discussed and so, reluctantly made up my mind to attend the event.

She opened the door of her house with a big welcoming smile. It was an old house with high ceilings and with dull lights seen in old dutch paintings . There were already few people from all over the world sitting around the living room amid two friendly cats, and wine bottles and nibbles laying around. Most of the people were new, so the meeting started a bit formally but soon after started flowing naturally. We discussed identity, writing styles, culture, globalization, relationships, food and much more in that warm cozy living room of hers and for some brief moments forgot that we are sitting in someone's else house. It was one of those moments when we humans go through a collective de-individualization process and find peace and eternal bliss in forgetting our individual selves and biases and our thoughts starts to dream and dance with the group totally in natural sync and not until when our wrist watches and wallclocks reminds us of time to leave that we reluctantly and with an effort collect ourselves again.This was one of those evenings.... and after a while the two friendly cats were also moving their heads in affirmation as if they were listening and understood all that was said and experienced there.

So Europe is happening to me. Wishing to find and make more new friends and memories in this phase of my life which i can think of  long after when i am gone from here.