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2/7/2020 0 Comments We live in the ring of fire... ... along the Avenue of the Volcanes: 32 volcanoes on our mainland and 15 volcanoes in the Galapagos Islands. Now, like me, you may have been taught in an elementary science class the definition of Life and. in that unit, you learned that rocks and mountains are inanimate.
And while you memorized the rock cycle and learned about the different parts of a volcano, you learned these things with the knowledge and certainty that these lumps of rock and soil, with their seething gases and molten lava, spitting out mud and rocks, spewing lava and vapor, these mountains with their underground chambers and springs and lakes, waterfalls and rivers, these ancient moving geological formations are most certainly NOT alive. I was born on the flanks of the sleeping volcano Guagua Pichincha. As a child I lived in the Ecuadorian Amazon and at night I would stay up late, my eyes pressed into binoculars, watching the volcano Sangay miles across the canopy erupt in blue and green gases that hovered over the crown while glowing lava flowed down the gleaming white cone. Years later, I lived on the flank of the beautiful and seductive Isabel Tungurahua. I watched for her red rocky face at sunset and at dawn. I bathed in her thermal pools and witnessed the first thin spiral of vapor rise up from her crater in 80 years. I felt the earth rumble beneath me at her complaint and abandoned a town I loved, 7 months pregnant, 2 weeks in advance of a military evacuation of 22,000 people as Tungurahua erupted in spectacular fury. One week later, in Quito, I watched in surprise from my living room window as an unexpected plume of vapor, gas and ash burst, without warning, up out of the Guagua Pichincha rising 12 kilometers into the cerulean sky. I have swept ash from our porch and closed up windows and doors as a noxious sulfur cloud from Reventador seeped over our house. I have sent emergency volcano kits to school with my children including goggles, masks, band aids, suero fisiológico, bottled water, and snacks. I have driven through falling ash, thicker than a blizzard, as Cotopaxi erupted, the prickly sound of pumice smattering across our car. As I write, 3 of our volcanoes--Reventador, Sangay, and El Cumbre in the Galápagos--are in an active process of eruption. This month a brand new scientific study warns that Tungurahua´s western flank may soon collapse. The mountains are giving birth. From my very limited experience--from this tiny window that is my life--I can tell you, most certainly, that these mountains are anything but inANIMATE. I look it up: Anima. ... The Latin origin of the word is animus, ‘rational soul, life, or intelligence,’ from a root that means ‘to blow’ or ‘to breathe.’ From the Latin. A noun. Declension: 1st declension Gender: feminine Definitions: 1. air (element) 2. breathing 3. life 4. soul, spirit, vital principle 5. wind, breeze Did you know that volcanoes breathe?
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2/1/2020 0 Comments The snakes became talismans... Jewels of memory sacred encounters marking my path. The brilliant banded coral waiting for me as I return home on my bike, a warning spiral of color, at the foot of the cement ramp leading to our front door. The elegant palm viper draped on the school gate her flickering tongue reaching out her eyes meeting melding with mine. The fat bushmaster sunning on the white gravel path to school. The rainbow boa I catch in our backyard and hold for a few hours in a cardboard box before she slips away. In our summers in our pink house in Richfield outside of Minneapolis, I would search our tiny backyard for garter snakes elegant living treasures catch them hold them peer into their silky eyes and feel powerful silent and beautiful. As I grow older the snakes come to me in my dreams. Signs of creative spiritual power coiled and waiting to pour through my life. I become a snake handler. In the smoky rooms of my imagination the snakes coil around my legs spiral my arms crown my head slip down the length of my spine. Prophetic words pour from my mouth on the flickering forked tongues of serpents. In Atlanta, in graduate school, I walk through Candler Park. I call them and there they appear again sunning in my path, slipping along the forest floor, sliding silently into the pond. Every time I see a snake, I bow in its presence, aware of a profound sacred blessing. Our encounters are brief. Every time they slip through my grasp, I mourn them.  |
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