Chasing the bright bauble of passion and purpose

Búho Nahual Speaks

Almost five months ago I signed up to be a volunteer at a local arts and crafts fair. I had few expectations. 

 

While I didn’t know much about Feria Maestros del Arte, it seemed like a good place to meet interesting people, find stories, and take pictures of beautiful things.

For four and a half months, that seed lay dormant, then suddenly it burst forth into a colossal blossom that encircled me with shimmering petals, filling the air with a new scent, daring me to catch one of the sweet, swirling, snowflakes of possibility. 

 

I definitely did not expect Búho Nahual, a wood carving that came home with me from that amazing folk art fair to send my mind spinning into a turquoise mist, contemplating passion and new projects. 

Passion, Purpose and Meaning

Sometimes passion sweeps you off your feet.

Sometimes it quietly curls up beside you like a purring kitten.

Sometimes you have to book a cruise and sail off into the unknown ... somehow sure it’s out there, or at least hoping it is while you take the risk to explore a new corner.

While searching for passion, I've been known to make a long list of what I want, thinking it will help the Universe point me in the right direction. Other folks just say, “Bring it on!”

Does it make a difference either way? Or, does the Universe already have a path neatly painted in day-glow yellow lines to guide our way? However, what if you can’t see the lines? What if the abundance of choices paralyzes you as it often does me?

Or, what if there are a million yellow lines stretching before us, morphing into our paths with each step we take. Step slightly left and you wind up married with 2.3 children in Indianapolis. Lean right and you’re in Mexico, sipping mescal with a curandero.

Could it be that each step is its own marker? Maybe the bright yellow paint is actually on the soles of our shoes, 7 billion shades of yellow tracking the planet as we proceed this way or that, creating paths that can only be seen by looking backwards.

So, does it matter? … that illusive, bright bauble in the distance? that siren song of purpose and meaning and passion? Does it have to have a name, a label? Can you follow the wrong star or miss your calling?

Should I take my long list of druthers, spooling behind me like a Christmas list written on adding machine tape, and stamp my footprints onto the cobblestones disappearing into the fog of the future? Or, would it be better to patiently wait for the kitten to awaken and meow its secrets? I could also spin the cruise dial and see where the tick of luck sends me, knowing that wherever I go, that’s where I’ll be and something will be waiting for me. 

 

Or, perhaps, I should just check out the soles of my shoes, make sure the paint is bright and look backwards more often to see if the footsteps from where I was to where I am mark a path that makes me smile? If so, maybe the only thing I need to do is give the Universe a fist bump and keep stepping out and checking the trail I’m leaving behind me. 

I do smile as I look back. I respect where I’ve been. I like where I am. The one thing I notice is that the trail behind me is a little thin. I’d like to make a fatter, more generous trail, scattering those sparkling petals far and wide. The Universe has gifted me with an abundance of energy, skill with words and images, and a heart that wants to help. Maybe all it asks of me is to share what I've been given.

As I head toward the end of my time here in this earthly form, I think what I most want is to be used up when I reach the end. A friend of mine always joked that he wanted to die “five dollars over drawn.” Like him, I don’t want to leave my resources unused. Unlike him, I don’t think it’s about money. 

 

As Búho parts the mist, I am left with wanting to have my own form of potlatch, giving away everything I’ve been given to people who need my particular gifts.

Morning after addendum from The Potential Within:

 

 

Ancient traditions: purple magic in a dyeing world

Caracol Púrpura, milked for purple dye

Yesterday, I held a bit of magic in my hand. Magic that connected me back through thousands of years of history and a sacred and fragile bit of today’s world. All of this was handed to me at the premier Mexican folk art festival: Feria Maestros del Arte, held every mid-November on beautiful Lake Chapala, Mexico.

Purple has long been coveted as a color of beauty and a sign of royalty and wealth. The wearing of purple was often forbidden by sumptuary laws intended to regulate and reinforce social hierarchies. Interestingly, for as highly as it has been valued throughout history, the discovery of purple dye seems to have come from the whims of accident.

The primary source of purple dye has been snails which make a defensive ink, somewhat like an octopus. In Phoenician mythology, its discovery was credited to the pet dog of Tyros, the mistress of Tyre’s patron god Melqart. One day, while walking along the beach the couple noticed that after biting on a washed up mollusc the dog’s mouth was stained purple.(1)

Early dye makers crushed the snails to extract the dye and it is reported that it took 10,000 shellfish to dye the hem of a garment. Today’s natural dye makers, tintoreros in Mexico, have a much more difficult and dangerous job of humanely gathering purple dye from the caracol púrpura, a snail that lives amidst crags of the rocky coast from Baja, Mexico to Peru.

Back strap loom showing the sacred purple

Among the Mixtecs, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, there is a thousand-year-old tradition of obtaining the precious purple tint of a marine snail called purple pansa. That snail was the magic that I held in my hand yesterday as I listened to Don Habacuc Avendaño, one of the 15 remaining tintoreros in the world who knows how to gather the precious dye. 

He described how he “milks” the snails, 300 of them, in order to dye one skein of yarn. From his village, Pinotepa de Don Luis, he travels to the rocky shores, gently removing one snail at a time with a special wooden stick designed to not injure the snail. 

With a white cotton skein in one hand, he blows on the snail to make in first release its urine and then the milky ink which will turn purple as it dries in the sun. Then he returns the snail to its rock and loosens the next one. One after another, he milks 300 snails to dye one skein. As Patrice Perillie, Director of Mexican Dreamweavers, continued the story of the many hours it takes to hand weave (on a back strap loom) a huipil (traditional tunic-like blouse) or rebozo using this sacred dye, I felt a little overwhelmed wearing the precious garment I had purchased the day before. 

Note: also at the Feria, there was a woman spinning rare brown cotton as well as a few garments made from it.

Rare brown cotton being spun into thread.

Margarita Avendaño spinning

Patrice Perillie wearing brown cotton huipil

It is humbling to even try to compare the hours it took me to earn the money to pay for the huipil to the hours, days and months it took to spin and dye the yarn and then weave and embroider the cloth, to say nothing of the knowledge and skill of generations of craftsmanship involved.

Huipil

Unfortunately, all of this is now endangered. 

 

Years of poaching and extreme demand for the dye has driven the magical snail to the brink of extinction. The indigenous art of weaving fabric on back strap looms is also endangered by modern commerce and the availability of cheap fabrics.

Video:
Facebook: Mexican Dreamweavers

A fascinating video featuring Don Habacuc Avendaño and his sister, weaver Margarita Avendaño is offered on Facebook: Mexican Dreamweavers, videos. Subtitled in English, the video shows how the dye is gathered and woven into cloth. 

Don Avendaño explains the hazards of gathering the dye and the challenges of making a living in the tradition that has been handed down for generations. 

If you would like to know more about how to support this project, please contact Patrice Perillie at mexicandreamweavers@hotmail.com.

Also of interest, Tia Stephanie Tours offers a “Textile Traditions Oaxaca: Coast & Isthmus & Chiapas Highlands” for 2018.

Interesting:

• The dye gathering follows a lunar, tide cycle and snails can only be milked every 28 days and during the months of November through May. (After that, the rainy season makes gathering too hazardous.)
• The snail’s dye does not require a chemical fixative.
• When Don Avendaño first began working as a tintorero, they could gather food where they worked on the beaches: fish, iguanas, turtle eggs, clams. Now, he says, the wildlife is gone.
• In the mid-1950s, when he started gathering dye, there were four times more snails than today. Now there is a national park protecting the snails and tintoreros have to be authorized.

  

  Authorization for Habacuc Avendaño

For what it’s worth:

Wikipedia gives us a glimpse into early society and the history of purple, telling us:

          The first written Greek law code (Locrian code), by Zaleucus in the 7th century BC, stipulated that:

A free-born woman may not be accompanied by more than one female slave, unless she is drunk; she may not leave the city during the night, unless she is planning to commit adultery; she may not wear gold jewelry or a garment with a purple border, unless she is a courtesan; and a husband may not wear a gold-studded ring or a cloak of Milesian fashion unless he is bent upon prostitution or adultery.

<sup>Resource: (1) Ancient History Encyclopedia: Tyrian Purple

More about the purple dye and the weavers from poet Susa Silvermarie:
http://susasilvermarie.com/tixinda-at-the-feria/</sup>
 

Generosity in Action - Prison Dolls spread love and creativity across borders

Esmeralda Hernandez and Original Friends Dolls

In an overcrowded women’s prison outside Guadalajara, Mexico, a child named Lupita was born. No one knew how much that young child and a small act of generosity would change the lives of the women around her.

Lupita was 15-months old and had no toys so Rebecca Roth decided to make her a cloth doll. Rebecca is an American who had moved to Puerto Vallarta in 1998. Eight years later she was arrested for money laundering in connection with a ponzi scheme. Although she was innocent, the Mexican justice system moves slowly and she was jailed for four years before being vindicated and released.

Rebecca Roth and Esmeralda Hernandez with Mariana and Magda

That might have been the end of the story except that Rebecca started teaching English to a young, Mexican cellmate, who also claimed to be innocent. It would take eleven years for Esmeralda Hernandez to prove her innocence and be released. During that time, the two became friends and started looking for a way to make money. (Prisoners in Mexico need to pay for their basic supplies.)

They decided to make ten dolls for the upcoming prison art show. When the prison director bought one of the first dolls and guards and visitors began to buy them also, they knew they had a project. They continued making dolls and called them Original Friends Dolls. By the time Rebecca was released in 2010, they had sold over 100 of the one-of-a-kind dolls.

Today Rebecca and Esmeralda continue the prison project providing women the opportunity to make fair pay and use their creativity making the trademarked dolls. Over 1200 hand-painted mermaids, fairies, dancers, witches, crones and more have been sold, each with a unique outfit, name, number and signed by the artist who made it. 

I fell in love with the dolls and the project at Feria Maestros del Arte, a premier folk art festival held each November in Chapala, Mexico. Of course, two mermaids demanded to come home with me. Meet Magda and Mariana.

Magda, artist: Esme

Most of the doll materials are donated scraps, and other found items including, ribbons, lace, buttons, paint, broken jewelry, seed pearls, shells, mirrors, yarn and other bright bits. More information available on Facebook.

 

All in all the seed of generosity that started this project, has grown like kudzu across borders and communities, spreading creativity and love as it grows.

Mariana, artist Ericka

P.S. And Lupita, the child who sparked this project? She and her mom now live in a small town outside Puerto Vallarta. 

Generosity: Gratitude in Action … Feria Maestros del Arte

Artist from Chiapas

 After practicing gratitude for a year and a half, I began to be pulled to something else. At first, I thought it was my old nemesis, inconsistency, raising its ugly head again. After awhile though, it felt like something else was emerging, and it seemed to be coming from my new home here in Mexico.

One of the first things I noticed here was the overwhelming generosity of the immigrants to this beautiful but poverty challenged country. I’ve met people from the US and Canada who have started orphanages, medical programs, tuition support programs, food programs, art mentoring programs, language programs and dozens of other helping projects. Most of the people I talk with are so grateful to be living in this amazing country that they want to give back and they are finding thousands of ways to do that.

Artist from Puebla

One example is Marianne Carlson, founder of the Feria Maestros del Arte, an annual event which, over the past 16 years, has become known as the premier folk art festival in Mexico. Most of us are familiar with arts and crafts fairs, but this one sprang from a different source. 

Marianne was traveling around Mexico, finding amazing crafts that she had never seen in stores or galleries. She began to fall in love with the crafts and the artisans and to understand the difficulties they faced in selling their art in order to support their families and continue making their crafts which had been handed down for generations. 

Woodcarving from Oaxaca

Chiapas textile artist

 Marianne founded the Feria to support the artists and to introduce their crafts to a wider audience. The financial arrangement for the Feria is designed to support the artists. Artists pay no booth fee or commission. The Feria raises money to help pay for transportation costs, often renting buses to bring artists from remote villages as far away as the state of Chiapas in the south of Mexico. Artists are housed by local residents, another piece of the generous nature of this event and a cultural interaction that might never happen otherwise. A modest fee is charged visitors and artists donate one piece of their art to help support the event. 

So many colors!

Ribbon hat

Huichol Pompoms

They may look like bright bits of fluff but the making of pompoms are an important Huichol craft for celebrations. Pompoms,  resembling roses in full bloom, signify “the way.” 

Bujo Nahual

While I was taking photos of some wood carvings, the artist handed me the one above. I was struck by it for many reasons but the price was way out of my range so I walked away ... only to come back again, and again. Finally, rationalizing to the nth degree, he'll come home with me tomorrow.

The Feria was born in the cauldron of generosity and I was thrilled to sample just a bit of it today.

This the first in an ongoing series around generosity.