matagalpa

It must be Monday today????? No sense of time. just teh parrots waking me n the morning and eating when only starving....otherwise too busy with creation...i finish tçup on the mural after seven hour blitz - not stopping to eat, drink or pee. i is so gradifying and intense....and when i finally settle after dinner with friends or a cup of rum...the ideas flood in as to how to improve or what to create in it tomorrow...my mind is skipping miles ahead to consequences and opportunities of creations...

My favorite reading is autobiographical accounts of the wanderings of adventurers...i read them not so musch s a voyer any more but more as a compatriot....for i too am an adventurer. squishing and slipping our way through wet tracks in the matagalph highlands dodging precipeses, pigs, oxen and ramdow horses....ababies and laboring babies...this is true adventure travel....if those loking for adventurif only the tourists of the world knew of this gem....perhaps the economy here would take flight...as it is - it is a wonder that people thrive because they live with nothing - zero and only thru the resourçsefulness , generosity of family and neighbors and the wealth of natural gifts from the forest, they would perish...cahews, bannanas grow wild.

i eat from the the weathered little lady living in the tiny house of sticks for dinner last night. she grew the wheat in her patch of cleared rainforest. she harvested it, cleaned it, boiled it, dried it, ground it with her crank grinder, then used her stone matate and stone pestle to grind it yet again into a fine flous and then adding water - she formed a round and patting it against her thigh - made y tortilla which she then roasted over a charcoal fire and added a chunck of cheese made frmo the mild of her ox....and i eat this astonishing succulent food with gratitude and wonder.

back at my hotel above the village, i enjoy cream for the coffee comes out so thick and foamy it is as if the huge oxen that produced it are just outside the door. so with my coffee and cream i will recount the past two days of magic:

But first - the word ¨third world¨completely fails to describe nic. cic is bathed in the light of the first world. connected to the earh, one with community, absolved of stress from anything but survival. i fell like i am chasing the real world rising before dawn, waiting for the sunrise, capturing color and shadow, seeking weathered of baby smooth faces with their fepth and warmthtrapping the crescendo of light on film and camera, the evolution of lives and contrasts. the wold so richly dimentional and marvelous...marvel...surprising and rich with hujmor and delight. observing the incredible detail of things. be it the texture of a simple door..carved from an ancient mahogany tree, the weave of a panama hat, the wear upon an ancient tile, the melody of converstyion (and it is >NEVER with anger or tears or hurry) i´ve watched the orange ball of the sun disappear behind the royal blue mountains with mushroom clouds heaving and swelling like liquid. All sense of space and distance vanish in the comfort of the senses or that sated feeling when senses are saturated at last.

what does the town center resemble in nic.? like a cavavan of a huge circus - clolorful, noisy, music, busses, trucks mounted with speakers belching propaganda and song, all moving in concert - pedestrians, busses, taxis, bikes, carts, horsemen, hortsercarts, oxen carts. i love to stop at the corner before the climb to my hotel and purchase roadted corn on the cob from the slight woman with the delicate fingers who rasted it over coals all day...eaten like crispy nuts from the cob and wrapped in the husk when she offers it to me HOT for only 20 cents an ear....

the busses are brightly ornamented and colorfully painted and decorated with ribgons, flowerts, slogans and family decals. on roof racks, furniture for market, a thousand pounds of oranges in 100 pond bags, coffee in sacks larger than most women and this is the <¨trucking industry of ic. roady like a slimy roller coaster and folks only waking from the boxes of sticks they inhait without lights, swetrer or latrines and no land for production of any food so out of necessity they prey upon the forest and its rich bounty of congus monkeys, parrots and wood.
What i want to do in my life and the life i am living are utterly intertwinded here and when traveling freely. the the kids restrained me so in africa....i look forward to meeting africa on my own terms in may....for here i really understand the libertate....letting the free spirit soar.

I underatnd that most people never get anything close tho this in their lives. They do not seek it. Why do >I? I care so much about what i am doing each day at home in auburn....However - what i am doing these past 14 days setting my own pace, drining in all that my soul can grasp. i feel that i am in a realm of boundaryness where i believe only a rare few feel secure. When i see the sundown silouettes of children, men, women carrying caskets on their heads these are the images that cause me to send down roots. there is a humanity in the ¨third world¨tht the rest of the world has lost touch with.
Drifeed into a saddle making shop...furnitre shop, i order tables for my new house from a man who can create the m and matching chairs in a shop ith no machinery - only hand toold and wisdom. the horses prance with a high step and cowboys with their traditional hads adorn them with silver saddles and ribbons of lrather. the child pauses to reat near me when i am negotiating a rattan furniture purchase and i ask to shoulder his load...i cannot even lift it. concrete? well over 100 pounds and he only 8 maybe 7-....

coming home from the mural project at the end of day...sometimes i work late and it is dark and sillloutes on the road side are peasants carrying loads of wood on their heads...they have stripped the forest to nothing ut grass within four hours of towm so they muyst use their day walking for wood and returnng at nigth....creating more distance to travel for tomorrow....

it will all be gone is ten years,,,,maybe less. then what? many babies, exhausted soil and no more wood....

the mural is pulsating with life and character. can´t believe i executed this! Brigetthe...my friends, clinic director and most beautiful woman in the world is also an artist and i have forfeited my ownership of the ribbon ovf water and let her paint it but it pains me and i wish i could do it all my self..-...but i would never have gotten it done...so little compromises but overall it is glorious...
today we may finish....sky, middle ground of an oxen, rainforest and a ditant farm....little details and i may have to say goodbye to it.

letting go of art is like sending a child off to college,....the child comes back tho...the art is gone forever. the creative process creates more ownership and it does not have it´s own life path to take...but the possessiveness is similar...strange....
with joy...i close and today we pack up the rest of the water filters for the villagers. we´ve decided to give them to the schools and we´ll see what happens to the rest. like the problem created with sending clothes to africa....who get and who doesn´t. the injectin of the clother(water filter9 CREATES AN ARTIFICIAL IMBALANCE IN THE COMMUNITY. GOOD INTENTION MESSING UP AGAIN....

BRIGETTHE AND I HAVE A SUCH WOMDERFUL COMPANY ---TOGETHER WE ARE AT EASE AND THO WE´VE BEEN SHOULER TO SHOULDER FOR A WEEK....IT IS JUST SO RIGHT....LOVE HER...