El Dia Fuera Del Tiempo

For those following the Mayan calendar, this past Saturday was the day outside of time, a day situated between the last day of the year and the first of the new year, counted but without a name. No one, of course, really follows the calendar anymore, but the day was cause for a host of celebrations across the world, primarily of the hippie and indigenous sorts. We decided we wanted to spend the day somewhere stunning and also somewhere with a group of people, as you are supposed to spend the whole day relaxing, partying, and sharing things with others. So we drove south to Teotihuacan, the great pyramids northeast of Mexico City. Seeing the pyramid of the sun appear, miles and miles away, as we approached the flatness nearing DF, was one of the first things that actually produced some kind of internal thrill for me. It’s enormous. It’s beautiful. It’s 2000 years old. (Outside the pyramids you can buy “the food that made the Aztecs great”, which appears, by the look of the posters, to have been Corona.)

We camped out and went into the grounds at dawn. We were the first people into the park, the first people up the side of the pyramid of the sun, and we sat alone at the very top to watch the sunrise. It was amazing, really. There was no one in the whole park, and we could gaze down the avenue of the dead to the temple of the moon, or across the flatness to where the lights of Mexico begin to make a halo in the sky.

After five hours of climbing over and into and onto every rock in the place, we headed back to our campground to participate in a Mayan ceremony that was to span the next 30 hours or so. There was an ancient and fragile Mayan woman, a variety of old medicine ladies, and an assortment of 50 or so hippies and eccentrics of all ages from all over the country present. We made an alter with offerings of seeds and fruit and flowers and danced around it chanting. We waited around a lot. We sat in a small half cave and watched drummers sing and play over a slideshow of photos that looked like national geographic best of animals loving the earth and one another, a series of lectures on Mayan astrology, a set of dances by 17 year old girls belly dancing to Mexican music (oh, Latin America), and then climbed down through a huge and ancient cave complex to another alter, where we sat all night dancing in the dust and chanting and lighting fires and learning new words. The next morning we made a ritual fire and a Temezcal, which is a kind of spiritual sauna. I think it definitely tops my list of weirdest things I have ever done. We concluded the weirdness of this day by driving straight into Mexico City and getting spectacularly lost. We made it to Carlos’s brother’s house, however, and set out to explore starting tomorrow.

On a less weird note, I wanted to add, largely to make my mother and all the other family friends I have alarmed feel better, that we have been doing more normal travel things lately. We drive around and look at very old pretty churches. We hike in actual national parks with trails. We camp in camp grounds, we swim in rivers, we eat lunch. We pick up people here and there, we meet travelers at every stop, we acquire friends. It’s been pleasant. I’m getting used to it.

Un beso

m