What Matters?

Oaxaca 10/27/2024

"Exist"

Flowers don't wait to be noticed.
Sunrise doesn't care about last
night, or whether you wake up in
time to who are you anyway?
~jl

Yesterday was the first day of the tour. We took the participants on a walking tour of Oaxaca, highlighting just a few of the many art galleries here in the city. Today was the first day of the workshop with Michael deMeng. The participants are creating assemblage pieces based on Loteria cards from the traditional Mexican board game of chance.

My job is to tell the story of their experience here in Oaxaca with my camera. We’re only halfway through the second day and I’ve already taken over 700 photos.

When I agreed to take on this task, I had no idea what being in Oaxaca was going to do to me. There’s honestly no way to imagine how the energy of Oaxaca permeates your body and fills you with… Magic. Combined with the urgency I’ve been feeling for the last 6 months, this intense drive to reboot my life and create a new way of being in the world, the Magic feels like I’ve plunged myself into a mountain lake on a hot summer day after a long and grueling climb.

One of the things I moved, again, when I left my broken home in September was a giant plastic tub full of memorabilia: high school and college diplomas, prom pictures, letters from former lovers… and journals, so many journals, dating back to college.

If I picked out any of those journals and opened it at random, I would find, again and again, the words, “What Matters?” next to the date of the entry. Whenever I don’t know what to write about, apparently, I come back to this question.

If I were to read back through the journals, which would be a painful process on many levels, something I never plan to do, I could follow the path of my search for identity and purpose. I have never been satisfied with the options that society has laid out before me. Whenever I’ve participated in the system, i.e., had a “real job,” I’ve managed to find a way to subvert it, and make my own way, for a while.

Kind of like “The Authority Song” by John Cougar Mellencamp…

So, here I am, again. I’ve had a year to work it out. At least I thought I was working it out. Mostly I was recovering. Now I’m back to that same beginning, the same question: “What Matters?”

I was a teacher for almost 20 years. I thought it mattered. It kind of did. We fought the system. All that work… the system keeps winning.

I was and am an active father. That matters, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

Maybe the most exciting thing about this short photography gig I have in Oaxaca is that my job is to pay attention. That’s it. Pay attention and take note.

Yesterday, I took over 500 photos as we explored the city. I took photos of the participants in all the places we visited, of course, as they listened to Mija and Michael tell stories and explain histories.

Mostly, though, I took photos of what they weren’t seeing while their attention was focused on the sights and the tour leaders: children with their parents, artisans with their crafts, streets and buildings, art and graffiti, trees and clouds.

I took so many photos of the sky, using colonial architecture to frame them.

In the workshop this morning, I took photos of beginnings. Photos of the materials the participants had hauled all the way to Mexico for the workshop: the tools, and wires, and scraps, and tiny eyeballs and monkeys, skulls and figurines… more than you could imagine, and not enough at the same time.

I took photos of each participant working their way into what their imagination was wrestling with: gluing, painting, cutting, shaping, molding, arranging…

I love this about Art. We all have the whole world and everything in it available to our imagination, and each of us goes about creating in our own unique way.

I couldn’t help but think that all our life should be this way. That we should all feel liberated to engage the whole world and everything in it with our imagination to create the life we want to live in our short time inhabiting these bodies.

Once I felt like I had enough material to document the beginning, I stepped out on the pool deck of the hotel to scribble in my journal for a bit. I honestly had no clue what I was going to write about today, out of all of the possible topics. As soon as I put pen to paper, the magic took over, and I’d scratched out the makings of a poem that’s still in process.

I’ve mentioned before that the cultural connection between Oaxaqueños and the natural and supernatural world is palpable and powerful. Magical.

It got me thinking about Energy and our efforts to harness it. We burn coal and fossil fuels, we harness the wind, we capture the sun, we resist rivers. All to fuel our vehicles, power our manufacturing plants, illuminate our homes, process our food…

The by-products of all of these endeavors to “improve” our lives poison us, diminish us, and distance us from each other.

We are energetic beings. Our deep connection to our natural environment is undeniable. We are made mostly of water and need to constantly replenish our reserves in order to exist.

Yet we have poisoned the water. We have filled our air with toxic chemicals with our vehicles and manufacturing plants. We strip the earth of its resources in order to manufacture things we don’t need. We have so depleted the ozone layer that protects us from the intensity of the sun that our entire climate is in chaos, and the future of all living beings is forced to adapt at a rate that outpaces evolution.

These are merely the practical concerns.

The supernatural powers of these basic elements is readily available to everyone who has ever been enraptured by the sunset or entranced by the ocean waves, anyone who has tended a garden or waved a fan for relief on a hot day.

We immerse ourselves in water to be cleansed. We warm ourselves in front of the fire against winter cold. We place our hands upon boulders, or carry stones in our pockets to feel their vibrations. We stand quiet in the forest and listen to the stories trees sing on the breeze.

Oaxaca certainly isn’t the only place on earth where this Magic exists. It’s not even the only place whose people remember Magic. It is most certainly the only place I have ever been, though, where I am reminded, at almost every turn, that Magic is not something separate from who we are, what we are.

Magic is what matters.

Hasta luego.