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January 2, 1997
In November I spent two weeks in Mexico, first at the Bioregional Congress
which was held in Tepoztlan, about an hour away from Mexico City. A year
ago, the people of Tepoztlan began protesting the government's support of a
plan for a corporation to build a golf course on land that was supposed to
be protected. Essentially, they staged an ecological uprising, somehow
succeeded in throwing the government out, barricading their streets and
declaring themselves a nongovernmental zone. We were privileged to meet
some of the local activists as well as many local herbalists and healers.
The latter was important for me as I had the Nasty Flu through the whole
Congress and had such bad laryngitis that I was forced to learn many
annoying spiritual lessons about the virtues of silence.
For me, the highlight of the week was being asked to lead a spiral dance on
the last night of the Congress, when I had fortunately recovered some of my
voice. The moon was full, and we began with a pipe ceremony led by
indigenous people of tribes from Venezuela to northern Canada. Then we
spiraled with about four hundred people, chanting, "She changes everything
she touches, and everything she touches, changes" -- in Spanish: "Ella
cambia todo lo que toca, y todo lo que toca cambia." We also chanted the
slogan of the Tepoztlan uprising: "Si, se puede," which means both "yes, we
can", and "yes, it's possible." In the spiral, you pass every person in the
ritual and can look into each other's eyes. To see such a diversity of
faces pass by, of all the shapes and colors and ages that make up this
continent, to feel linked in a common purpose and emotion across the vast
diversity of our backgrounds and experience, was one of the most profoundly
moving moments of my life.
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