Surreal exuberance in the jungle
By Arturo Morales Tirado
October 3, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Lecture
The Huastecos & Xilitla
Tue, Oct 7, 1:30pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
50 pesos

Among the shadows of enormous tropical trees in the middle of the jungle of the eastern Mexican Sierra Madre Oriental, the Huastecos developed over a period of 3,500 years. As a people, they claim descent from the hero-god Cuextécatl. The natural exuberance of its rivers, flora and fauna, and the fertility of its soil, earned the name Tonacapan, or food place, from the Mexicas (the Spanish called them Aztecs).

Visitors thus have two powerful reasons to explore the region: a beautiful natural heritage in its jungle and its cultural monuments, thousands of them, spanning eras from the dawn of Mesoamerican civilization to the present.

The Huasteca region is in northeastern Mexico, mainly the states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz and San Luis Potosí, but its area of influence extends to the states of Hidalgo, Guanajuato and Querétaro. Regional music is the son huasteco (Cuban, flamenco and indigenous fusion, notable for virtuoso violinists) and the troubadour tradition of the Topada in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro and Guanajuato. The region is noteworthy for erotic pre-Hispanic sculptures, cecina (dried beef) with chiles toreados, citrus orchards, trapiches (sugar cane mills) converted into sumptuous hotels, 400-year-old vice-regal chapels and the archaeological sites of Tamtoc and Tamohí. Natural attractions are the Tampaón and Santa Maria rivers, Micos and Tamasopo waterfalls, the Bridge of God, the spring of Laguna de la Media Luna (Lake Crescent), geological holes, bird refuges, the Cave of Swallows and Basement of Clay.

The third major reason for visiting the Huasteca is to experience Sir Edward James’s surreal, unique architectural monuments and sculptures integrated into one of the best-preserved Huasteca jungles. Seven sensual and beautiful natural pools of water, surrounded by gardens of orchids and the chants of hundreds of tropical birds, make Las Pozas in Xilitla a unique and wonderful place.

I invite you to enjoy this unique experience in this week’s lecture on the Huasteca and Xilitla, surreal exuberance in the Mexican jungle.

Botanical artist on Tibetan landscape

Lecture
The Dream of the Turquoise Bee
Fri, Oct 10, 5pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

Botanical artist Dianne Aigaki focuses on the Tibetan landscape, life in the villages and nomad camps, her work as a botanical illustrator and the current political situation. She has continual contact with villagers and nomads on the Plateau, as well as Tibetan refugees living abroad.

Aigaki has had a home in Dharamsala, India, at the foot of the Himalayas, since 1996, working as a volunteer consultant for the Tibetan Exile Government. She moved there to be part of a community “where people aspired to be like the leader; where the leader is a person of impeccable moral credentials. I wanted to live in a society where parents tell their children to grow up to be like the head of the country, in this case, the Dalai Lama.” She has done house exchanges in San Miguel with several people who have gone to India to stay at her home and absorb the Indian and Tibetan culture as she gets involved in Mexico.

Aigaki created a flora documentation project of 108 scientific botanical illustrations of wildflowers growing at altitudes of 11,000–17,000 feet on the Tibetan Plateau.

Her paintings are exhibited worldwide and she speaks at botanical gardens, museums and universities on “Botanical Art as a Vehicle for Cultural Diplomacy,” “Botanical Illustration Field Work in Tibet” and “Women Explorers.” The project is part of a cultural diplomacy exchange whereby she takes letters, gifts, cassette tapes and paintings of wildflowers back and forth between families in Tibet and the Tibetan refugee community in India. The project keeps alive the discussion on Tibet as an independent country under siege. It brings new information and focus to how global warming is affecting the Tibetan Plateau and how nomads and villagers are faring 50 years after the Chinese occupation of their homeland.

Next summer, she leads three eco-tours to Tibet and three sanmiguelenses will travel with her to the Plateau. The tours are a partnership with Tibetan villagers and nomads, the concept born after an evening’s conversation about the drought that occurred in eastern Tibet in 2007. The Tibetans were facing a financial and environmental crisis. The families worked with Aigaki to form an eco-tourism project that would allow them to serve as support teams for the tours, generating income while they train to be guides and medicinal plant experts. The Geneva Botanic Gardens also has great interest in this project, and their curator, Didier Roguet, will be the plant expert on the first tour. The second tour will have Steven King, brother of local herbalist Alison Bastien, as the resident plant expert. He is a well-known explorer and authority on medicinal plants.

Despite the environmental destruction of the Chinese occupation, the Tibetan Plateau still enjoys one of the most diverse and richest expanses of flora in the world. From late May until September, wildflowers carpet the hills, meadows and mountainsides, a river of purple, white, blue, orange and magenta. Many of these plants are rare and endangered or have been used for centuries in traditional medicines to treat illnesses such as asthma, arthritis, cancer, high blood pressure and parasites.

“The Dream of the Turquoise Bee” tours started out as botanical illustration tours and have evolved into journeys for photographers, landscape artists, botanists and outdoor enthusiasts. The turquoise bee refers to the Sixth Dalai Lama who lived in the late 1600s. He was known for his love songs and poetry and his deep relationship with nature. For Aigaki, the tours connect to the hope of Tibetans everywhere that they will one day be able to return to their homeland.

Recent articles in the international press indicate that the Chinese intend to move 100,000 Tibetans off the Plateau into Chinese cities. This would be one more affront to Tibetan culture and the traditional ways of life which have been sustained for hundreds of years. The eco-tours take this threat seriously, giving guests the opportunity to be in the pure, clear air of Tibet while spending time with the people who make their homes there.

Aigaki is a member of WINGS WorldQuest (supporting women explorers worldwide). In 2007, she carried the WINGS flag into Tibet. She is also a member of the Society of Women Geographers, the premier international organization of women explorers.

Mysteries of the Maya

Film
Cracking the Maya Code 
Tue, Oct 7, 5–630pm
Teatro Santa Ana

Film / Lecture
Understanding 2012 & Mysteries of the Maya Ball Game
Fri, Oct 10, 5–6:30pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

Local resident Georgeann Johnson recently returned from a ground-breaking conference in Antigua: “Maya Prophecies and 2012.” Sponsor Jades, SA, brought together Guatemalan government people, archaeologists, Maya day keepers and spiritual guides, students and indigenous people from the Highlands.

Some 1,100 people came from Guatemala, Belize, Mexico and the US.

Johnson will present a two-part “special”on Maya mysteries. On Oct 7, she screens the recent PBS Nova show, Cracking the Maya Code, a film based on the book by Michael Coe, curator of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Coe was uniquely placed to tell the inside story of the personalities, intrigues and rivalries of epigraphers, archaeologists and different Maya code-crackers. The story unfolded over the last century, but Coe knew many of the Mayanists over the past 40 years.

On Oct 10, Johnson presents Part 2 of the duo, the slide-show talk she prepared for the Guatemala conference: “Mysteries of the Maya Ball Game and the 2012 Calendar.” The first part is a 15-minute DVD, Understanding 2012, by Jim Reed of the Institute of Maya Studies, the best visual presentation of the Long Count Calendar and its relationship to the heavens and the earth.

As the Calendar end date of December 21, 2012, becomes more widely known, some fanciful speculations and wild predictions accompany it. The film’s astronomical explications go far in trying to make a complex subject understandable.

Johnson also uses many visuals to explain how the Maya Ball game and its symbols reveal how the Popol Vuh (the Maya Creation Story) and its complex meanings are intertwined with the Long Count Calendar. Johnson’s work is based on the lifetime work of her friend and mentor, John Major Jenkins, who asserted that Izapa in southwestern Chiapas is the origin site of both the Popol Vuh and the Long Count Calendar. His contributions to understanding Maya cosmology are just beginning to be understood.

At the end of the presentation on October 10, Maya calendar birth glyphs, fashioned in black Guatemalan jade, will be available to buy. You can find out your birthdate in the Tzolkin Sacred Calendar and wear its symbol in Mayan jade.

The web of life
By Walter L. Meagher

Lecture
Wild & Wonderful
Walter Meagher
Fri, Oct 17, 5pm
Sala Quetzal
Bibliotca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

Walter Meagher takes the audience on a visit to each of the three habitats that make up the botanical garden El Charco del Ingenio: scrubland, seasonal wetland and the canyon.

The three habitats subdivide the landscape, giving it a beauty and richness of plant and animal life singular in the state. Before El Charco was founded, its landscape was no more interesting than overgrazed and abused lands common on the Central Plateau, except the canyon was always interesting.

El Charco’s views move our aesthetic sensibility: the presa seen from the path to the Conservatory, the grassland trailing over the horizon north of the canyon, the wetland in bloom during summer rains, the deep canyon, shaded and mostly hidden.  El Charco is rich in plants, birds, butterflies, reptiles and small mammals because both species and habitats are protected and because life is naturally species-rich in this part of the world.

 Each habitat—scrubland, wetland and canyon—has subdivisions, such as the pool on the way to the canyon bottom where the belted kingfisher hunts. Even if there were only scrubland, there would be surprises: 21 species of cacti and several hundred species of wildflowers.

Species are visible (the ducks on the presa, for example), but the web of life—how one species depends on another—is invisible; but it is the web, water and nutrient flows, relations of predator and prey, that can be disrupted.

The desire to protect wildlife arises more strongly as we take pleasure in that wildlife, not abstractly, not by the fireside, but in the field. These pictures are meant to move you to come out and see for yourself.

Wild & Wonderful 

Wayne and I know each of these habitats intimately, having studied and photographed them extensively for Wild & Wonderful: Nature Up Close in the Botanical Garden “El Charco del Ingenio.” I wrote the book’s text and Wayne took the photographs; world-renowned Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson graced us with a foreword. It will be on sale at the event for 300 pesos.

Note: This lecture was rescheduled from September 19 (see article in September 12 issue, p. 40).

Nutrition at the spiritual level
By Renee Devereaux

Lecture
Beauty from Within
Renee Devereaux
Tue, Oct 7, 3pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
Donation

In my long career as a nutritionist and spiritual coach, I have been able to link repeated illnesses or complaints to a particular organ or organ system and, therefore, to a chakra or energy center. I recognize that the body does, indeed, speak! Oh, that we would listen! Perhaps we would if we were taught to read the clues and interpret them. Many diseases might be prevented and nutrition would be simpler if we all took the time to read those clues and make the connection with what Nature so generously offers.

The quality of food is important and I always recommend organically grown because the pesticides used in commercially grown fruits and vegetables are carcinogenic and now we have the added threat of genetic manipulation.

Examining the energy center where the illness or complaint is rooted is crucial to beauty and healing. Sometimes we need assistance in order to get in touch with the reason for the emotion but if we want health and beauty, we will pursue the clues. I always tell my clients that it is like going on a treasure hunt. What you discover can be pure gold!

Renee Devereaux is a licensed esthetician and a certified clinical nutritionist and hypnotherapist ( www.BeBeautifulNaturally.com  (415) 119-2465). 

Third “Living from the Heart” class
By Alejandro Negrete

Lecture
Heart of Compassion
Tue, Oct 7, 6–7:30pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
Donation 50 pesos

Compassion is one of the most elevated virtues we can experience and it is inherent to our nature. How can we verify this truth? Simply by realizing that all beings, without exception, want to be happy. Deep within our hearts, we all want love, happiness and peace.

Being compassionate is being loving, joyful, conscious and nonviolent. It is the ability to see beyond one’s own faults and the faults of others in order to love ourselves and love others. Given that what we are internally is what life reflects to us, when we cultivate compassion within ourselves, our life begins to transform and to fill with love.

In this class we will explore practical ways to cultivate compassion in our daily living in order to create more harmonious and joyful lives. We will learn a meditation that has the power to awaken the marvelous energy of compassion within us.

Alejandro Negrete is a certified facilitator and teacher of the Pneuma System. Information: 120-2179, alepneuma@yahoo.com.  Pneuma System: www.inkarri.org.