CenterDoug

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2010-06-28T13:59:00.000-06:00

Great Rally, Great President!

2010-03-02T13:12:00.002-07:00

I am very proud of both my US Senator Michael Bennet and my 21st Century Rock Star Presidente Primero! The Denver rally I mentioned earlier was uplifting and so packed, I got a bit claustrophobic and retreated to the back of the room (where the view and air were better) but farther from the rope line. I would have loved to shake their hands and tell both how great they are doing as 21st Century leaders in ultimately trying times. President Obama, as usual, demonstrated transformative consistency, clarity, rationality, focus, and eloquent, shining charisma.

One thing from him I particularly remember came as an answer to a very loud "Give Them Hell, President Obama!" from someone in the crowd (referring to the mindlessly partisan obstructors of needed progress on Health Reform). Primo Pres immediately answered back: "I won't give them Hell: I'll tell them the truth and they might think it's Hell." Profund, better than Harry Truman, and right on the money, exactly what America needs from its transformative President.

I've been wearing my Obama Inauguration T-Shirts, ever since.

It's funny: I had some comments to my last post which indicated to me that some people read my "21st Century Rock Star Presidente Primero" title for Obama as some kind of slur. Believe me, I am his number 1 FAN, and consider my sobriquet to be the highest of compliments to this great man. We need 21st century leaders who can handle a Rock Star's celebrity with aplomb and grace, as our Primo Prez consistently does!

Gracias, ObamaDoug

OOOO--OOOO--OOOO!

2010-02-04T10:27:00.002-07:00

I've bought tickets to a political rally for Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) at which President Barack Obama will speak, in Denver. It's at the Fillmore Auditorium on 2/18 and I'm sure it will be SRO. I used to attend outrageous rock concerts at the Fillmore in the '60's, with everyone including me looking like the cast of "HAIR"! Now, I get to stand (and leap for joy) and clap and holler for our Primo Prez, our 21st century Rock Star Presidente Primero! Hooray!

Gracias, CenterDoug

Hello, Again!

2010-02-03T19:53:00.002-07:00

I'm still not calling myself "ElizabethDoug," but I do love living under Ponderosa Pines, redecorating my apartment, and developing my love for symphonic music and, especially, grand opera. This coming Saturday, I'm being taken by my lover to my first live opera, Rossini's The Barber of Seville, at OperaColorado in Denver. I'm dressing up because it's Opening Night, and, even in casual Colorado, that must mean something. However, I believe it is the first time I've worn a tie in 25 years! Spiffy me!

Things are developing in friendly fashion with my brother Bill upstairs, a surprise to everyone we know, since we used to compete and bicker, being male twins. Seems to work quite well these days. I'm also spending more time with my kids, though most of January, after the seasonal parties, etc., I mostly hibernated in my cave under Bill's house, enjoying the seclusion and solitude. I usually am a recluse in the winter, but not an unhappy or bitter one. I need time to grow myself and to focus on and love me, so that I can love others more effectively. A good deal of journal writing, dream catching, and some sensational imaginative living went on in January and will probably continue in February as well.

While I still communicate with the family Betanco in Nicaragua, it's not the same since I made the decision, for health and personal economics and safety, not to revisit Nicaragua. It feels a bit like Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa: when she left Kenya broken-hearted and busted, she never went back. I also intend to move on forward, though I'll stay in touch.

Sayonara 'til next time.
Gracias, CenterDoug

Everything Has Changed in Nicaragua 2009

2009-08-09T10:51:00.002-06:00

I came back from Nicaragua this May a sadder but wiser "wise fool" than when I headed down in January 2009. Strangely enough, I spiralled into a clinical depression down there this year, as I realized how dire things are with the peasantry of Northern Nicaragua and how hopeless I felt and still feel about exerting any change there: in 15 years of building bridges in Teote, nothing at all has changed for the better--though there have been better moments--things are getting worse, and I'm getting too old and unhealthy and poor to carry all that burden.

It's clear that my convenience as a channel of funds from North America (mostly personal dolares) has built me a house of Nica addiction to my money--Damn, Damn, Damn! Something I tried so hard not to do!--and my funds have mostly blown away with the Winds of Wall Street now: going down there fairly empty-handed was unhappy for me and too much bad news for the Betancos. Nothing worked right. To top it off, I felt unsafe there for 5 months because there's such crime and street violence, such starvation and homelessness and need, and everyone I know there came begging because they still think I'm a rico, which I have never been, because, to them, "all Norteamericanos are ricos." When people are living at the survival level, anyone with a steady income is a rico, no matter how small the income.

While I read a ton of books and worked on my garden in Teote, had a few happy times and new experiences, I came back up here depleted, shocked, even a bit traumatized by the trip, and I've been working to get back to emotional health ever since, with resilient success, thank Goodness. But I won't be headed back to Nica next winter.

Conditions will need to change there before I'll go back, though I'll still communicate with the Betancos.

Instead, I'm moving in with my brother in Elizabeth CO by October 1, ending my long residence in Glenwood Springs and Center, exchanged for a more cosmopolitan life lived under rural Ponderosa Pines in Kiowa County, much nearer to my kids and grandkids, concerts, ballet, and other fruits not available on the Western Slope.

New Page for CenterDoug to write on; I doubt if I will start calling myself "ElizabethDoug," however.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Sorry to Say . . . . !

2009-08-09T10:15:00.003-06:00

Sorry to say, all you bloggers, that I haven't been very active on CenterDoug since May because I've been focusing on my MyBO Blog, "CenterDoug's Obama Blog" almost entirely. I and a MyBO friend have created a further Community Blog on MyBO titled "Obamans for Change in the Americas (CITA)" which focuses on President Obama's Administration in relation to bettering relationships in the Western Hemisphere and improving the lot of our Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. An interesting blog with verrrrrry interesting bloggers in the group:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/ObamansforChangeinCentralAmerica

You'll notice we widened our focus to all the Americas after entitling the Blog and can't change it on the URL. I consider both CITA and the "CenterDoug's Obama Blog" posts as part of my GLOBAL LEGACY to my children: it's that important to me. Check them out.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Peruvian Amazonians

2009-06-18T20:58:00.002-06:00

Well, having gotten back somewhat intact from Nicaragua during swine flu emergencies and plenty of fusbal games, it's strange to be back to Blogger, but, here I am, and now I am totally immersed in the mostly unreported crisis in Peru (June 5-7) where the National Guard nixed 60 indigenous people seeking to protest the development of the Amazon Headwaters in Peru, their heritage, a direct result of Free Trade Agreements with the US. Sad to say. The extant FTA policy promotes the decimation of the Amazon Headwater Rainforests--and the destruction of tribal lands where there had been NO TOUCH before, and--yikes, these people need not to be touched, by our rather poisonously-progressive culture.

So, I'm pushing for Obama mediation in this crisis, to begin his quest for Latin American partnership and to protect my breathing past tomorrow, since the Peruvian Amazon Headwaters, which should be a World Wildlife Park, undisturbed, is a major lobe in the "lungs of the world." For more on this issue, check out my CenterDoug's Obama Blog.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Back From Nicaragua, Again

2009-06-02T18:59:00.003-06:00

Goodness knows, it's been a long time since I visited this spot, but, for some reason, I was blocked from the site when I tried to get to it, down in Northern Nicaragua. God only knows why? Anyway, I'm back in the States now, it's June, with a bunch of new insights, but, mostly, a sadness because one of my friends among friends, Dave Harmon, passed on in May, while I was still in Teote. Harmon introduced me to Teote back in 1993, selling a Third World/First World compassion trip to Nicaragua which changed my life. This blog is therefore dedicated to the memory of don David Harmon and others who gave their hearts and (some, their lives) to foster liberty and social justice in Northern Nicaragua. When I finally settle into Glenwood Springs once more, I'll be working to build a place of reflection in honor of don David up on Spring Valley Campus, CMC, where he helped students to empower themselves as global citizens for 25 years.

Gracias, don David! CenterDoug

Happy

2008-12-27T21:44:00.004-07:00

How in the world am I going to get back to simple? Won't I be glad when I'm there! Or, will I? In less than three weeks, I'll be in Teote; I may be Internet-disconnected, save for a weekly trip to Jalapa on the chicken bus; I will certainly be rising with the sun and going to bed early and eating mostly rice, beans and tortillas, with plenty of chicken soup on the side. And lots of ketchup--they call it salsa, down there, but it's Heinz 57.

My gosh, my life's a complicated dynamo, these days: the global and local projects I've undertaken, the energetic way I'm getting my voice out, the writing projects, they've got whirlwinds beat by at least 60 miles an hour! Yikes! And I've built gravel paths through wilderness and marble paths through meadows and lasting paths of peace, on the ground in Colorado and in the mid-air, on the ObamaBlog. What a trip! Zip! It feels only weeks ago, I left for my life up here, instead of 8 full months. Time rips the sonic fabric when I'm happy.

Hello, CenterDoug

2008-12-12T13:27:00.002-07:00

Goodness Gracious! Hello again to my beloved CD Blog. I'm about to get much more focused on Hello, my beloved Blogger Blog.

I'm back from my Obama-Work-Vacation, and will be more focused on this blog as I'm headed to Nicaragua on January 15th, as long as the planes are still flying. God knows any more what we can count on, except life, death, and taxes, and, for me, Barack Obama. My focus these days is very much in support of the Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, including my family in Nicaragua. I'm co-coordinating a new Obama Community Group on MyBO tofurther communication in the States with all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Very wide ranging, with some superduperstar Obamabloggers signed on. It's hot, I'm excited, and this blog should be linking to all my other blogs about now through Intense Debate. I may end up an unofficial Ambassador to Nicaragua yet, just through my blogposts, anyway. I think I posted that early here: I applied to be appointed Nicaraguan Ambassador in Obama's Administration, and, while it is a cosmic longshot that this Cosmic Caballero would ever be considered, hey, WHY NOT? (said Robert Kennedy in 1968) and I've pretty much operated that way ever since. I could do some good there, but it would be a very different Embassy than what has ever been, for sure.
Gracias, CenterDoug

Ay Chihuahua!

2008-12-09T20:11:00.005-07:00

So, strange. Only 32 days to Nicaragua, most out of Glenwood. Here's my happiest seasons greetings to all of you. CD

Navidad in Nicaragua

©Doug Evans 2008 (767 words)

For The Glenwood Post Independent (December)

Christmas Day starts early in Teotecacinte, Nicaragua, at least in my sister Marta’s casa de palomas, on the southern skirts of this peasant village where I spend my warmer winters. No sleeping-in is allowed, in Marta Betanco’s house, not even on Navidad. Except for me, of course, off in my cloistered wing: since I’m considered a North American angel of God down here, she grants me special license, at least on high holy days; she said, with a chuckle, last night, “Angels need their sleep, Dugla, particularly at Christmas, when they’re so very busy.”

My life is very sweet in Nicaragua.

Marta’s up at 3 am, probably, for an hour of prayer on her knees, after lighting the kitchen fire. The rest of the family gets rustled up by the mamacita at 4 am, to help her clean house (including washing the adobe walls of the sala and the kitchen stove with fresh, clean mud). Every inch of the dirt floors is swept by Estania, Marta’s daughter, with her handmade broom. In the kitchen, Marta’s steaming nacatamales in their banana leaf wrappers, poised in an iron kettle above a simmer for 5 hours. The water mustn’t boil off, or all-day-yesterday’s prep work will scorch, ruining the coming feast.

Cesar, the papa of the house, is scrounging firewood to keep the boil going. Even Arnoldo, the teenage son, has a duty: he’s gone fishing for tilapia in the rio Limon, hoping to catch a big one to give his grandmother on Christmas Day. I know all this is happening, of course, even from my sequestered spot, because Marta’s voice carries quite well in still-humid December. It’s now 9 am on Christmas Day in Teote. The only sound louder than her commands was the rooster “Hallelujah Chorus” at daybreak, 4:47, today, when I awoke. Even sleeping angels need to wake up sometime, I guess; it might as well be to crowing, for joy at the coming of light.

While all that’s going on in prep for the family feast at noon, I’m playing “Christmas Carols, ‘Round the World” on my laptop, stretching in the growing light, and being grateful for another day, especially this one, in my 64^th year. Time is very precious to me, and I make the most of it. The sound of Perry Como singing “Ave Maria” brings Marta to my door with café and “Feliz Navidad!” She’s picked a favorite coral rose as a special gift, this morning of mornings. We hug, then she scurries back, sure the nacatamales are burning. I look at the rose and know, once again, that my life is full of angels, right in front of me: it took Nicaragua to let me see that. It’s a gift I’ll carry with me, I hope, and live up to, as well.

With the swish of Estania’s broom and the tinkle of holiday laughter in the air for company, I head for my laptop and three hours of daily writing. Even on Christmas. Heck, because of Christmas! In a few hours, the whole extended family of Betancos will descend on la casa de palomas, 89 strong this year, counting all the new babies, and I’ll need to kiss my Christmas solitude “Good-Bye.” We’ll be decorating the chimbomba, the Christmas tree, this year a potted Norfolk Pine, my treat, brought all the way from Esteli by taxi, which we’ll plant in my garden at Tierra Mia after the 12 Days of Christmas are over. In the late afternoon, we’ll all troop to church for Christmas mass. We’ll vow to make each day a new beginning.

In Nicaragua, Christmas dances on for almost half a jolly month past the Christmas service, culminating in gift-giving, a multiplicity of hugs, another feast on the 12^th day, when the Wisemen arrived at the stable with their offerings. As Nicaraguans rarely have cash for gifts to emulate the Magi, love and handmade tokens take their place. It’s a time to honor babies, birth and parenthood, and every human life on the planet, a time for cherishing familia, not for shopping.

This year, I helped a friend fold 89 origami storks to pass out, then, hang from fishing line above my family’s beds and hammocks. I’ve been folding the first folds on and off since August, but I know they’ll be a triumph. I mean, they’re crimped by an angel from the States, after all; I even added sparkles with glitter, so they’ll twinkle in the Nicaraguan night.

Feliz Navidád, mi amigos en Glenwood Springs and all the international bloggers now my friends. CenterDoug

From Now On, Cultural Creatives: Us!

2008-12-01T20:18:00.002-07:00

From this post on,
I will be refocusing this blog much more often on my daily life as a multicultural global citizen, triumphant in the USA and in Nicaragua, in the Now. I will be focusing my Obama Blog [http:www.my.barackobama.com (Obama Doug's Obama Blog)] on networking those who are interested in learning about the exploited and magnificent peoples of the "Land Bridge" between North and South America, the heartland of the Western Hemisphere, Central America, from South Mexico to Nicaragua.

This Blog, CenterDoug, will focus on furthering understanding, mostly for myself, on the current paradigm shift we undergo presently.

Gracias, CenterDoug

A Shift Towards Compassion

2008-12-01T08:35:00.001-07:00

A shift towards compassion:

I’ve been playing with the concept, for a while, of the “Paradigm Shift,” primarily a rise to higher collective consciousness, accompanying our movement from a 20^th century “Old America” to a 21^st century entity I’m calling “New America,” a very transformative, millennial vision that’s still mostly perfumed air and dreams, right now, that I’m seeing only in tantalizing, ghostly shimmers. Admittedly, I live and think and act from the very-most fringe of contemporary being. But, right now, most everything out there seems to have turned inside-out, to me: so maybe, just maybe, the fringe has become, at least for a moment, the epicenter of synergy. Certainly, questioning looks better all the time, at every level.

We’re in a very transitional Transition, at the very least from a current President to a bright-shiny new one. Everything is transitioning, let us hope, with grace. We may, as well, be in the midst of a tsunami of a Consciousness Shift—Blip!--leaving everything (including, by the way, each of us!) looking somehow different, as from a never-seen-before perspective, while staying almost exactly the same.

Imagine it: Something uniquely new, that isn’t just another expensive toy!

And, I’ll tell you what. I feel it’s already happened.

Does it not feel to you as if everything’s somehow gone inside-out? Gone topsy-turvy? Turned upside-down? And, all the while, everything has, yet again, stayed the same? That’s the way I felt when I faced third world poverty and starvation in Nicaragua, in 1993, as an “entitled American” with spiritual issues. Things happen when we’re ready for them, even if we don’t know it. Back then, I suddenly became very grateful for what I’d taken for granted before and found a pair of global shoes to fill. Now, that somersaulting sense, intuitively, signs the Collective Shift that most Cultural Creatives (Paul Ray, The Cultural Creatives) have been awaiting and working on in their millions of private American lives, since the 1980’s: that moment when “enough” people are living their lives as conscious, grateful, global people, being the change they want to see, from every level of the warp and woof of both our American tapestry and the rest of the globe’s people.

Life’s a test we’re always ready for, if we’d only listen, from the inside-out.

It might be true (but, who knows what’s true, when everything is somehow different?) that those who’ve relied on institutions to save them, even from themselves, might be a bit panicked right now, since not much is working “rightly” out there, except, perhaps, the promise of Obama and continued American ingenuity; some might be afraid to do their own thinking for a change. In my estimation, self-responsibility is still rather new a concept in America, since we tend to forget to include responsibility for others in the equation. We might all be wise to take our lives reasonably lightly, right now, held in hands of love and gratitude, honoring the current craziness with the salsa of humor and a juggernaut of compassion for our brothers and sisters, some of whom might be cracking up, under the strain, right now, of tribulation.

We’re going through an evolutionary shift in thinking, together, even if we do not know it. Those who do know it might choose to serve others, right now, at least with a compassionate ear. It’s all up to each of us, right now, after all, as it’s almost always been, but, maybe, more of us know it.

We voted for change, and it looks like we’re going to get it. We might as well welcome it, then, grow and prosper.

Gracias, CenterDoug

I Can't Believe It's Almost December!

2008-11-29T11:16:00.003-07:00

I'm here in Aurora,
with my daughter Melissa and her family, so life is sweet and millennial in my life. In retrospect, I certainly have been travelling, in and out, on the other side of the paradigm shift, and I certainly have had fun imagining in virtual reality quite a few interesting possibilities. Still, it's about time to pack for my return to Nicaragua in the middle of January, so I better get crackin'. I still have a 64th birthday to celebrate with my Current Lover, Christmas in 12 different places in Colorado, New Year's resolutions, 2 Grandson Birthdays: Ay, Ay, Ay! When will I have time to pack with all this birthing to party over? It always feels to me that this turn to January is a good time for forgiving the old ways and embracing new beginnings, but this year I've nothing I need to forgive: I've been celebrating newness in my life for a year! Season's Greetings to all, from this old codger, the artful dodger!
Gracias, CenterDoug

Down is Up in Obama-Land

2008-11-26T07:47:00.001-07:00

"Down is Up in Obama-Land"

BALANCING THE TENSION OF THE OPPOSITES WORKS: Here’s how the Universe probably works: all things exist in tension with their opposites in an exquisite balance that can be intuited but not measured. The Universe is both expanding and contracting, all at once, a crazy paradox, of course, because the essence of the Universe is paradoxical mystery. Light is both a wave and a particle, physicists say, exerting characteristics of both in a seemingly impossible way: its essence is the tension between these opposing states of being. Get it? Another example: We are both living and dying in every minute: the quality of our living and dying depends on the way we hold the tension of these opposite states within our personalities. If we see ourselves as dying every minute (which we are) we live a different life than one who sees himself as living every minute (which we are). The most transcendent approach: to recognize that both states are true in every minute, then to be grateful for the energy this paradoxical tension develops in our understanding of who we are.

“So what?” say my Earth-bound friends; “Of course!” say my cosmic-flyer-cohorts. Somewhere in between the two is a space where I’m both grounded and flying at once: to me, this is the miraculous moment, the NOW, where all things and their opposites are One.

THE MARKET MELTDOWN: So, now we have the Market’s falling spiral, and we know from the above, when something’s falling, there must be something intrinsically connected to it that’s rising as well: Let’s look at that intuitively for a minute. What immediately comes to mind is TRUST/DISTRUST in this economic issue. The Market’s fall marks the lowering levels of investor trust, individually, then collectively, in our economic system: It continues to deepen and re-create itself in negatively-synergistic ways. We no longer trust that “business as usual” works.

But, then, if trust is falling into distrust there, where is distrust spiraling upwards into trust, in my life and in the life of the collective American spirit? A very important question. When I listen for an answer to that question, what bubbles up with truth-shining is “my own inner trust.” How rare and right that is, for me, at least. In the last three months of activism for President-Elect Obama, I’ve come to a flowering of my own formerly-wounded spirit. I’d chosen to be too disaffected in my native land. Now, I feel I’m busting out with purple (red + white + blue) roses! I can almost smell their musky scent, wafting up within me.

I’ve come to trust myself, my balanced mind and heart, my instincts, my microcosm dancing within the macrocosm of America: the key here, though, is not me, though I do believe in growing, but that this flowering evolved from my active participation and dance with the collective, rather than just within myself: in this blog; upfront in people’s faces; on doorsteps and sidewalks and out to the streets of Glenwood, a tango-fest in the face of oncoming rush hour traffic, the day before Election Day’s Victory, a jitter-bugging fool with my Obama/Biden yard sign. Hoo-Hah!

THRILLING STORIES: I’ll bet every active Obama supporter can write a similar story. I’ve read many of them on MyBO and www.change.gov. They thrill me, these stories of personal growth from active service in a mutually beneficial world. Our individually-rising trust in ourselves as worthy and functional, walking our talk, changing our world, being the change we want to see, has raised not only the collective self-esteem of Americans, even of both Parties, but the esteem of the enthralled billions globally as well, who rejoice with us in Obama’s—and Our--victory. We’ve become a stronger people as a result of this election and our participation in it. I’m grateful. I can hardly tell you how proud I am to be an American, on the cresting wave of the future.

The world’s a stronger world, as well, from the gift of hope in affirmative change that we all inspired, this mindful mandate, signaling American maturity to the planet. None of us need to be reminded of why the world has rarely if ever thought of our electorate or our politicians or our culture as being mindful, but it surely does now. I’m mindful; most of you are mindful; we all are more mindful because we’ve been trusting in and observing a very mindful leader, such an honorable man, with remarkable self-esteem. We're reflecting him like shiny candles in multiplying mirrors of wonder! This bodes well for the state of America and all humanity.

We have much reason to be humbly proud.

MARKET IS DOWN, SERVICE IS UP: Thus, as trust in the economic systems falls, we find ourselves, even in the face of all that paper collapsing, trusting in ourselves to survive, to create, to share with our brothers, to love, to link ourselves together for affirmative change. We want to keep our passionate hearts open. “Coloradans for Obama” has moved on from the election to filling food banks across the state with a mouse-click, to feed our hungering people, as well as continued networking for Obama. 100,000 meals have been raised in the first two weeks! That’s inspiring, and only one miracle among millions occurring among us now, at the grassroots level, in the very fertile soil of our linkage. We’ve learned we can work transforming miracles of--Let's name it!--grace, through mutually-beneficial service. I truly believe that America’s gearing up for blooming, regardless of the rotten garbage out there. Blooming out of “business as usual,” service linkage is emerging, and a breathtaking garden begins to evolve, even if it still has some prickers. Who wants a rose garden, without the thorns? How boring!

OUR FUTURE IS RAINBOW: What our “new” way of doing business will look like is anybody’s guess--it could come down and up to barter, as in Nicaragua, or to federally-linked service, here and abroad that serves the world mutually, also with a mouse-click--or a more meaningful life. Of course, I have a guess, too. We’re each responsible for its evolution in our individual, transformed ways, but our linkage synergizes our personal ways together: mutual service to our fellow human beings will most likely be its foundation; electronic linkage its probable engine; and rising self-esteem (and gratitude for it), its synchronizing energy.

Dynamo!

Service linkage builds new work and meaningful jobs that both matter and pay. Let's "follow our bliss" (Campbell) into the rainbow garden of American life.

While President-Elect Obama is our most visible miracle worker, it is all of us who'll make his miracles happen, as we did in retaking our nation. We may send our prayers and hopes to lift up Obama, but let's take our highest expectations for change upon ourselves.

Come on, now, Obama-bloggers, smell the sweet and sexy scent! It’s not all bad out there; we’re blooming like rainbow-roses, all over Obama-Land.

We did it once; we can flower again and again: Yes, We Can! Yes, We Will!

President Obama, for 8 Great Years!

Gracias, CenterDoug

Could Fantasy Become Reality?

2008-11-21T15:45:00.004-07:00

I donated five bucks

this morning to the Obama Transition Team, greasing the Presidential Choo-Choo enormously, I'm sure, but since my net worth has been halved on paper this Fall, I've had to economize. As a result of the donation, though, I was asked once more to "Share My Vision for America" with the Team, and, of course, being the big-mouth I am, I did, and, in that process, came up with a rather strangely perfect job for myself in the Obama Administration, for 8 Great Years: Picture this! Doug Evans Betanco, Ambassador of the United States to Nicaragua.

Yikes, I love it! I'd look great, now I'm thinner, in a cut-away or tux and I sort-of speak the language, and the Embassy party scene in Managua is hotter than can be believed! I could truly do some good there, especially for the peasants, even if I were surrounded by a viper's nest of CIA gentleman-representatives still living as if Reagan were President. My first task would be to bring my staff into 21st Century Transformative Diplomacy. Cool, Old Man. Very cool.

Now, now, I can hear you saying, "Good God! Doug's gone off to cloud-cuckoo-land, for sure!" And, believe me, I'm really not counting on Federal work to keep me out of the breadlines, because I know I simply do not fit the mold of Beltway Bubble Believers very well, at all. I've considered my government here at least as wacked as I am for thirty years: I live on the other side of the paradigm shift that's happening. Anyway, I've probably flunked out already (See post below on applying for a position in the Obama Administration) because of my FBI dossier, which I'm sure is extensive because I created a crazy stir back in the 70's that involved a former President, sort of a secret that everyone knows. Oh, well, I've grown since then.

Gosh, I could forge such links in Latin America from that perch, and really, we'd better start forging good ones because South of the Border, my friends, is a newly-emerging dynamo of capital and development in this Hemisphere which currently is very wary of involvement with the manipulations of the Old Imperial America.

OOOOOOOOOH! I've got to start thinking about forging links in Latin America, to the mutual benefit of all the peoples involved.

So, anyway, This is the essay I send to the Obama Transition Team, today:

"My Vision for America"

My New America keeps its word, internally and externally, and walks its talk with maturity and courage as One with the rest of the world, an honorable nation among nations. Acting maturely means being peaceably responsive to the needs of all the world's peoples, not just the rich elites; honoring international law and World Court decisions, even when they go against us; and, especially, owning to our past mistakes, rectifying them when possible, and choosing in the future to forge a higher path.

My New America, for instance, would honor the World Court's decision in the case of Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua vs the USA in the 80's: the Court found for Ortega, found the US guilty of "conducting a terrorist operation" against the State of Nicaragua from 1979-88, and levied reparations in the billions against the USA. This has been ignored by the State Department for 20 years, and the whole world knows it. If we expect our fellow nations to honor that Court’s decisions, we need to honor them ourselves. When we don’t, we build support for world-wide terrorism’s ad campaign on the ground against us. Honoring this debt is in both the national interest and for the world’s security.

My New America would honor that debt by paying those reparations with interest and monitoring the funds so at least half gets into the pockets of some of the world's poorest people, the campesinos who comprise 90% of Nicaragua's citizens and who have borne the brunt of the ruinous hardships this US action catalyzed. Nicaragua’s economy is ruined, perhaps irretrievably. While the funds might technically go to the current Ortega government, they must be administered by a third party, perhaps The Carter Center, to assure that our tax money does not end up lining only the pockets of the Nica elites. The people at the bottom of the world's economic beanstalk need nourishing, if the beanstalk is not to topple out of starvation at its roots. As well, the USA needs to honor its own laws, in order to stand taller in the world.

My New American President Obama would need to re-educate the American public to understand the truth about Nicaragua: the Sandinista Insurrection of 1979 was both reasonably peaceable and justified, very much like the American Revolution in intention and inspiration, and in no way a "Communist takeover" by wild-eyed guerrillas; the only terrorists in Nicaragua were the Dictator Somoza's National Guard, trained by the US to subjugate the population; after the Triunfo of the Sandinistas, we paid the Guardsmen who had fled the country to terrorize the new and legitimate government of Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica.

The New American people need to understand that the spin-dance of Old-American foreign policy vis-à-vis Latin America in the past no longer exists in the New Millennium, that we will not be lied to anymore, because our New America will no longer lie to its citizens or to the world.

My New American President Obama would travel to Nicaragua to offer both apologies for our dreadful past together and gratitude for the opportunity to make amends, so that we can move forward to stronger democratic and economic bonds. I want to accompany him on that trip because, In my New America, I would like to help build those bonds, if only by this suggestion, or, even better, in a more visible and responsible role. It would bring great honor to my "family" there and to me, here and in Nica. As I've bonded with the people of Nicaragua and lived part time there for fifteen years and spent my time both here and there forging stronger links between these two American countries, I'd just leap for joy to see brotherhood and honor reign in both. The rest of the world would fall to its knees and pray, in a thousand languages, "Thank God, the US we know and want to love is back with us today!"

Gracias, Charles Douglas Evans (aka, in Nica, Doug Evans Betanco)

It's funny, yet true, that when I returned to the States last June from a winter in Teote, I was calling myself in this blog Ambassador Evans Betanco because Teote had asked me to be its voice in Glenwood Springs. Unfortunately, the work with Nicaragua has no more buy-in here in Colorado, so that FCE focus is gone from my life. Why kick a dead horse alive? But, I really would love to be a really real "Hon." And, while I was doing all that ambassadorial stuff, I could be plowing money of my own into building my English Language Academy in Teote. Hoo-Hah!

Gracias, CenterDoug

Applying for Obama's Administration

2008-11-12T21:23:00.006-07:00

Good Lord!
I just finished an application for a position in the Obama Administration. Cool, old man! I applied to be court jester, or even better, because being jester might be very hard this first four years, for position of Editor to the Obama Bloggers' Digest, a daily compendium of links and summaries and some full articles, videos, etc. from the National Obama Blog to the President's Ear (my idea). That one I could do from home, both here and in Nica, on the Net, and I'd love it.

You can access the Obama Job Search at www.change.gov. Click on "Jobs," but, be aware, it's an extensive application when it comes after the preliminary app, so have a resume to upload before you start.

Oh, well, it would certainly be more fun than working at Wal-Mart, where I'll probably be headed when I return to the US in June, unless the stocks start rising. I'd make a great Greeter! And probably love that job as well. Attitude is All.

Gracias, CenterDoug

99.44% Pure Democracy

2008-11-07T19:44:00.002-07:00

99.44% Pure Democracy

©Doug Evans 2008 (729 words)

For the Glenwood Post Independent

On November 3, 2008, the day before Vote Day in America, my intuition led me to rush down to Obama HQ in Glenwood Springs, to volunteer for standing in the middle of the busiest intersection in the City, Grand and Sixth, at the Bridge. I felt I had to do something different from phone-banking, canvassing, and walking downtown in Obama regalia, and “dancing in the streets” with my Obama/Biden Yard Sign fit the bill! Full of joy and fervor, having chosen to believe the President-Elect would win in a blue-state landslide a month earlier, centered in Colorado, this sign-dance would not only be good exercise, practicing The Stroll and the Cha-Cha and The Frug in traffic, but, also, maybe one of my former students from CMC might decide for the Dems because of my example. I’d also carried a “Vote, Please” sign in downtown Glenwood on Election Day, 1976, for Jimmy Carter: it felt like a way to get out the vote and integrate parts of my life, as well.

When I got to the Bridge at the 4:30 rush hour, two other Obama supporters stood with their signs, so my dance floor shrank a little, but the company was great. We really got it together as a chant team out there, yelling “President Obama, For 8 Great Years,” while I twirled and whirled and boogied—There were even some ballet leaps, at the start!—shaking my power-stick-sign at passing motorists like a Ute Shaman on the warpath for “Liberty and Justice for All.” It was, as they say in London, “quite brilliant!” Horns were honked, more often than not; thumbs went up as much as down; I only saw a few middle fingers, which made me laugh. I honestly have not had such fun since I played Sancho Panza in “Man of La Mancha," singing about impossible dreams!

Then, the rest of the world intruded on my patriotic-trance-dance.

From out of the “Road to Nowhere,” as if by magic, 20 men, women and children appeared along the edges of the intersection, carrying McCain/Palin cardboard signs, soon flooding the island in the middle and all the other corners with ardent Republicanism.

“Uh-Oh,” I thought, “this could get ugly.” So, this crazy-minded-wise-old-dancin'-fool began to laugh at the top of my diminished lungs, just giggling hysterically at the comedy life was showing rather than dwell on potential tragedy. It was—and it became even more so—a laugh riot, for some time, out there in front of the Hotel Colorado, with everyone having chuckle fits of excitement. I’ve been told many times that my laugh is infectious, especially by directors of comic plays who want me in their audiences, so maybe my giggle made a difference. At any rate, we were all most civil and joyful, for two hours of red-white-and-blue; some of the kids broke away from their Moms and picked up Obama signs, balancing the ratio; four passing Glenwood High students also got into the spirit with more OBAMA placards, doing their patriotic duty with gothic flair; and every car honked for one or the other candidate, so I’m sure the Valley echoed all the way to Carbondale. It must’ve sounded in Glenwood Park like the world’s longest wedding caravan!

Reporters and photographers then showed up to make us part of the City’s visual history, and-- Goodness Gracious!—I ended up looking stern and somewhat patriarchal, probably because my back hurt, on the front page of the Post on Election Day! Now, I guess I really am a star, though I wish the photo showed me giggling: that’s what I’ll remember. And this: All of us had the thrill of participatory democracy in action. All of us felt “special.” All of us knew we were witnessing a unity of purpose above partisan division: we were all there To Get Out The Vote for America.

What a great lesson for all those young kids holding signs with us older patriots! People who are divided over issues or candidates or campaigns can still be united by our common values of fair play, free speech, and respect for law and order. We could’ve been clubbing each other with our signs! In other places in the world, that would've happened. Instead, we participated in a Happy Birthday Party for a New America, Proudly Walking Its Talk. Perhaps, I should rent myself out as the happiest dancing clown.

Pure Democracy in Action

2008-11-06T08:01:00.002-07:00

[CenterDoug Notes: after two months of intense political activity--not since 1976 have I carried a candidate sign, though I've always voted and marched against the Rocky War in 2003--after all those phone banks and door knocks and sign-shakes and letters and blogposts for Obama, I've "Sayonara'd" my CenterDoug's Obama Blog now that he's going to be President, I'm sure for 8 Great Years. It'll remain up there at as a testament to my service to this Transformative President and his Transformative Presidency. Maybe I'll publish it, as it is timely. I even sent the Obama National Blog a lengthy tome of political philosophy that flew out of me, full-blown and amazing, down in Center three weeks ago [ ]. All in all, I posted almost 30,000 words of encouragement, high-road tactics, analysis, insight, along with some ludicrous folly. I think it's worth a read in the cold of winter coming, if for no other reason than to connect to the empowerment of the moment we are feeling now. It's also a chronicle of my own rather eccentric evolution as a contemplative activist for the American Democracy. CD]

Pure, Principled Democracy in Action

This 2008 Presidential Election, besides, I think, restoring the potential of America to Americans on the ground, also electrified the "Cultural Creatives" here, who've been living and evolving, mostly out of politics and under the media radar, for many silent years. Who? Oh, you know, "Them," the long-haired crazy rainbow hippies of the Sixties and their children, raised to believe that Principles acted out in front of and in us are more important than the American economy to the health of our global humanity. 50 million adult Americans, most of whom have not heard of this nebulous almost "virtual" group, have been quietly transforming the world every day by transforming themselves into empowered, present-moment, authentic people, whatever their walk of life. Most of those principles are in the masthead note on the Title Page of this CenterDoug Blog.

I'll be spending some time here, in the next few weeks, exploring the paradigm shift that most Cultural Creatives have been working towards: to move the world from the bottom up to elevate the principles of balance, mutuality, connection and gratitude, out of the greed, egotism, and parochialism, past the massive abuse of the human condition as well as of our Planet Earth to which we are witnesses in treacherous times. I do believe that shift in consciousness has already happened--or at least a tipping point was reached in the results of Election Day 2008. I'm quite convinced that the swing voters and workers and new registrants in this election are mostly Cultural Creatives who jumped on the Obama bandwagon because Obama speaks with the voice of the Now, and we all heard it and moved mountains of past karma aside by upholding the principles of Equality and Tolerance in America.

More, later. I have to get all those yard signs off my line and write an article for the Post.

A Prediction

2008-10-28T14:03:00.002-06:00

I'm not much for looking to the future (too unpredictable) but in the present moment, I've awakened this morning knowing (from where?) that the great American Republican middle of Republican moderates is breaking up, and this middle is aiming to vote, one to one, for President Barack Obama, because these people, decent, loving, investing and stalwart, know a trend when they see it and put their money there. There's a surge developing from the moderate Republicans that most will not tell anyone, because it feels almost treasonous to own it, from their point of view, but, still, I feel it happening. Moderate Republicans are going to vote for Obama because, strange to say, the alternative is exactly what THEY don't want now: more of the same repudiation. Conservatives are discovering that the true centrist voice in this election is Obama! Hoo-Hah!

I'll go further: the downward spiral of the stock market will continue until Obama wins: then, such a dramatic surge upward, as the smart money comes back to the market, knowing that the transformative President will make things, if not easy street, at least BETTER. These people understand and watch world trends as well as internal economics: the world is awaiting a triumph for the world, and that will push the market. You watch. After President Obama wins, there will be the most amazing upsurge of the market that anyone has ever seen.

I may be crazy, but I ain't stupid!

[CenterDoug Notes: 11/19/08. Didn't happen. I must remember not to make economic predictions, which make me both crazy and stupid. Sorry. CD]

Gracias, Doug Evans Betanco

2008-10-27T20:22:00.002-06:00

Ay, Chihuahua, I'll maintain my centrist position and spend a good deal of time praying.
Gracias, Doug Evans Betanco

Towards a Transformative Presidency

2008-10-24T19:16:00.004-06:00

Hi, all. I've been whiling away my time being Madisonian, thinking of transformative government when President Obama moves in to the White House. Just some thoughts.

First, The Brief; then, the tome, full of examples and provisos.

Towards a Transformative Presidency (Brief)

By Doug Evans Betanco - Oct 25th, 2008 at 5:58 pm EDT

[Examples and Provisos form the bulk of TTP(9) below in Greater Blog]

Preamble: These Principles are based on a firm conviction that we live in a Universe pervaded with balance, even if we cannot measure it; with tension, even if we cannot touch it; with paradox, even if we cannot know it. At its center is mystery, way beyond our understanding, but, in and out, that mystery is somehow grateful love: All things come from and are driven by this energy, defined by a unity above division.

As well, these Principles contain two fallacies as old as man’s time on this Earth: 1) the use of words, a fallible necessity, when dealing with almost-absolutes; and 2) the expression of the macrocosm through the microcosmic eyes of man, indeed, only one man, with all he knows and intuits, just whispers in the storms and calms of time.

MISSION: Over-riding everything else, the mission of a Transformative Presidency is to empower the American electorate, by the Oval Office's example, to empower itself as a truly democratic citizenry, working in harmony and tension for the mutual benefit of all.

UBER-PRINCIPLE: WE WORK TOWARDS ANY MOVEMENT OR DIRECTIONAL SHIFT THAT, THROUGH ATTITUDINAL HEALING, LEADS THE INDIVIDUAL OR COLLECTIVE TO AFFIRMATION AND GRATITUDE FOR OUR ONENESS AND MUTUALITY, AT EVERY LEVEL OF OUR EXISTENCE, EXCEPT, OF COURSE, WHEN WE CAN'T.

Principle 1: There is order in all things, except when there is not. Seek it in the midst of chaos. Chaos tenses order: they are immutably connected in the human condition. What we can do is observe this tension: from its nexus, new order evolves; we are capable of seeing it come, even in the Oval Office, then channeling it towards the mutual benefit of all, except, of course, when we can't.

Principle 2: There is balance in all things, except when there is not. Seek it in the midst of Imbalance. Imbalance tenses balance. Both are necessary in the human condition. What we can do is grow with the tension to our own greater personal and national maturity, Mr. President, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principle 3: Order attracts and repels chaos; balance attracts and repels imbalance: the tension between these balanced opposites energizes all things as a dynamo. Seek the tension, hold it in both hands, feel the synergy and listen to its hum. Be grateful: It will speak of affirmation, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principle 4: Gratitude is the energy which binds the Universe together and empowers it appropriately, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principle 5: The multiplicity of the Universe is in the smallest things, right in front of us, as well as in the largest, biggest ideas. Pay Attention to the small things, even in the Oval Office, sir, and the Big Things will clarify, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principle 6: There is a space between things and between each other. It’s very full, even though we think there’s nothing there. Such a strange thing to put in words, but, really, half the Universe is there! Everything is about context, about what sits next to it. In this space we’re connected and One with all, as in our hearts: being with the spaces in between, sitting there, works towards the mutual benefit of all.

Principle 7: Time’s an illusion, except when it is not. A state of All Time, very real, though considered illusory, exists within us in the Now, the present moment, where there‘s no timeline: everything happens at once, a major paradox. Touch the Now as often as possible, especially in the Oval Office, in order to be timely, fitting and appropriate, for the mutual benefit of all.

What to Do?

Uber-Principle in Action: Transformation is a process that moves towards "turning things around" to a more fitting and appropriate way or direction (down to up; hate to love; fear to fortitude, etc.) that leads to attitudinal healing and gratitude, for the mutual benefit of all. Work in measured steps to turn things toward affirming and empowering the world's people in their Oneness.

Principles in Action 1: Unity pervades the Universe beyond division: work towards and empower others to work towards unity of spirit and connection for a mutually beneficial world.

Principles in Action 2: A problem is its solution: sometimes, the best fix is no fix at all; build linkage, instead, with other perceived problems, and help them to synergize with appropriate administration and service. When things fall apart, other things grow together from it. Look to see what’s growing from the center of dissolution and nurture it to new solutions, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principles in Action 3: As much as possible, rise to thinking from a both/and perspective, rather than strictly from either/or, as both/and thinking fits the Now. Almost everything is both a blessing and a curse; as well, usually, both sides are true: sometimes it’s necessary to rise up the middle, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principles in Action 4: Strengthening balanced linkage between the top and the bottom of just about anything right now strengthens the ends and, thereby, electrifies the middle. Forge the links, sir, and we'll all have much to be grateful for.

Principles in Action 5: The Principle of Balance/Imbalance often looks like Justice in action, as the Universe acts as a mirror to us, individually and collectively: What we throw out to it comes back to us.

Principles in Action 6: All of the above are lies at some level; be transparent, practice discernment, live in balance with this globe of nations, and trust your Presidential intuition, for the mutual benefit of all.

Principles in Action 7: Above even the above is a further state of intention, beyond lie: all things seek to rise to the next level, to transcend the known, even when they're headed down by circumstance or lack of curiosity.

NOW, the Tome:

Towards a Transformative Presidency 9

By Doug Evans Betanco - Oct 25th, 2008 at 5:45 pm EDT

Preamble: These Principles are based on a firm conviction that we live in a Universe pervaded with balance, even if we cannot measure it; with tension, even if we cannot touch it; with paradox, even if we cannot know it. At its center is mystery, way beyond our understanding, but, in and out, that mystery is somehow unitive and grateful love: All things come from and are driven by this energy, which, while we may see it as dual, is more appropriately a unity beyond division.

Uber-Principle: WE WORK TOWARDS ANY MOVEMENT OR DIRECTIONAL SHIFT THAT, THROUGH ATTITUDINAL HEALING, LEADS THE INDIVIDUAL OR COLLECTIVE TO AFFIRMATION AND GRATITUDE FOR OUR ONENESS AND MUTUALITY, AT EVERY LEVEL OF OUR EXISTENCE, EXCEPT, OF COURSE, WHEN WE CAN'T.

Example: We have gone through a decade of dreadful cataclysm; there might be more to come. There has always been cataclysm, but last decade’s seemed “more global” in immediacy, instant to all. There’s been a lot of near-chaotic shaking. If seen fearfully, these constant episodes of panic could lead one to suppose the end of what we know. From a longer point of view, they’re the airing-shakes of the coverlet on our guest bed, to welcome someone new to the house: the intense impulse of hope this campaign sends to the world, electrifying Earth in anticipation, appears to be blooming a new transformative order amidst the trembling chaos; when hope blooms worldwide, especially in the immediacy of the Internet, fitting and appropriate things tend to happen, to evolve, while happening more quickly. Therefore, fan the hope for order, act accordingly, and Decade Two of the New Millenium might be a more graceful decade of growing American maturity in the world.

Proviso: What we see as order is often disorder to others. The wisest man today does not impose his sense of order upon others, unless they ask for it. But, in that, clearly, I’m not very wise. I am, instead, for this election process, American, totally a gringo, until the victory. I hope I'm not imposing; my only authority is my authenticity.

Example: The American economic system is grossly imbalanced, since everything flows to the top, while little attempt is made, except through government, to nurture the bottom. Practically everyone but me is a debt-slave! The top runs everything, creating imbalance in the system, not only in the flow of wealth but also in the numbers. Clearly, the balance can be driven down toward midpoint by opening federally-subsidized microenterprise banks in every hamlet and town, to put cash for growth into the hands of the impoverished and hold them accountable for repayment with Grameen Bank practices. You could do more, here. Loving the bottom is key to balance.

Their expenditures would massage the middle. The important thing is the balancing of the few at top with the many at the bottom in opportunities (not just accessible cash). Then, synergy occurs, and new, mutually beneficial order.

Proviso: Good Lord! Who really knows what balance is? We try, but fail, then try again, always towards a greater balance. My balance, today, comes from writing letters to the top from the bottom. Quite arcanely weird, but, balance, nonetheless.

Example: The Obama/McCain race is a perfect example of a polarized tension of the opposites. It is currently an extraordinary dynamo of energy, worldwide, synergistically, but, how to use it for global mutuality? Colin Powell said it all: be “a leader of those who want to be free,” especially from fear, narrow thinking and demagoguery. Most in the world, except, perhaps, some neo-con Americans, know, firsthand, what that looks like. Continue to show us how the opposite of that, tolerance and authenticity, acts. Be tolerant of John McCain and his Party, unfortunately-deluded-and-dangerous as they’ve become. Ignore them.

Warn us, perhaps, that Arch-Conservatives behind this blatant racism must not achieve a victory for intolerance in November, not in a country of grassroots patriots whose ancestors came here to escape demagoguery, control, and ethnic oppression. What kind of idiot do those neo-cons think the electorate is? They’ve hung themselves.

If we as Americans can triumph over our own demagogues, if we can say, to the robo-phones, “Ha! Not in My America!” by electing President Barack Obama here, we will show the world Americans have come of age as thinking people and are walking our talk. The world needs a triumph for tolerance and multiculturalism. You’ve become, like it or not, a walking-demonstration-of-the-fruits-of-toleration-joined-with-personal-excellence. That could change things globally, in a very grateful way. Much could be built in the heady days after a world victory for loving kindness and respect for all. Much. Mucho.

Proviso: The universe is full of both risk and certainty. Making absolute statements is ludicrously risky. One must also exercise Principle 7, as everything changeable can change, overnight. Timeliness is all. In the moment, though, now, go for risking to be completely authentic in the modern world: that act speaks to championing the balance, the order, the Now you represent. There’s always time to dance, even elegantly, later, at the Inauguration. You know, sir, you’ll need to dance with change, like Fred Astaire, exceedingly well, defying gravity while keeping your feet on the ground of our common humanity, after your election. We can do this.

Principle 4: Gratitude is the energy which binds the Universe together and empowers it appropriately, for the mutual benefit of all.

Example: I’m sure you realize how grateful I am to finally have a Presidential candidate I do believe in! There’s been a dearth. Now, I’m enlivened in my American patriotism as almost never before, not since the Bicentennial. I am so empowered by my efforts to register college students—first time voters all—that I sometimes weep with joy. I certainly would not now be sending you all these strangely imperative posts—or my discretionary income, never political before—I would not even be paying attention to this election, had you not spoken with the voice of the Now when I needed to hear it. Thank you, Barack Obama. I’ve been waiting for your voice for thirty years. So have 50 million American adults who simply gave up on changing the outside world, thirty years ago, and decided to change themselves, instead, to make the world a better place, day to day, one intrinsic step at a time. Let me tell you, it works. Your constituency is very powerful, sir, as a result.

Results of this gratitude? A bunch of presumptuous ramblings? And 87 new voters! Who knows? I know I’m centered, connected, in love with the possibilities of my country for the first time in 30 years! It’s a totally blessed homecoming. It will work, my gratitude, all on its own, for the mutual benefit of all.

Proviso: You may be listening to the most-crazy person in the modern American states, from the Arctic to Antarctica, in the whole Western Hemisphere! Good God! I’m being written far more than I’m writing, in this current blog, and I’m sharing it, and, one time past, I promised I’d not do it again. I’ve done this political writing before. Yet, I’m electric! I know it’s crazy, but, oh, well--What can I say?-- I LOVE it! I promise to settle down, after the victory. Anyway, I know, though these things are going on to you and the Obama Groups on the Blog, that they’re really for me to grow with. Whether you read them or not, I’m growing spectacularly well as a result of them. They clarify me. Growth, anywhere in the human system, grows us all, especially from the bottom.

Example: I wore my OBAMA O8 T-shirt while eating at the local best restaurant in Center, resulting in the confirmation of at least 12 votes for you, today. The waitress mentioned the shirt, I started talking, and it ended up a triumph for diversity, in a place where I was the only guy not permanently tanned. The truth is in the details and, of course, in the intention.

Example 2: I watched an owl, usually reclusive, fly across the Rio Grande this morning. Huge! I thought, “a good symbol for Obama, that owl, who knows when to fly across the river, going home!” I learned later that you had flown to Honolulu to your Grandma, a very wise and appropriate use of time. Hope she's OK.

Proviso: The knowledge gained from small things must fit your vision, current, of the future. When it does, it’s a sign. It might, though, change. Pay Attention. Be flexible, and teach the difference between dancing with change from center—the ideals maintain--and campaign promises some blowhard spoke to the wind.

And, really, think!: Am I Polonius to you? I hope not, but maybe it’s good. I am one with you at the deepest patriotic level, but. for God’s sake, don’t be Hamlet! You’ve already chosen to be.

Principle 6: There is a space between things and between each other. It’s very full, even though we think there’s nothing there. Such a strange thing to put in words, but, really, half the Universe is there! Everything is about context, about what's sitting next to it. In this space we’re connected and One with all, as in our hearts: being with the spaces in between, sitting there, works towards the mutual benefit of all.

Example: The space in between the top and the bottom is currently vast, at every level, full of bitterness and unheard agony, class struggle, economic manipulation, racial hatred, and cultural bias. If, instead, it were illuminated with mutuality, pragmatic service to humanity at both ends of the beanstalk, philanthropy which empowers rather than enables, and open human love for one another, it would benefit all and grease the new order global economy, addressing the world’s needs as well as our own.

Proviso: Gaining a sense of the character of such “spaces” is an intuitive skill that smacks of magic knowledge or wizardry: Trust issues can result from the abuse of intuition for personal, religious or unilateral, national self-interest. One person’s glowing intuition, as well, could be another’s worst nightmare. The wisest intuitive chooses to be both leader and follower of himself, first, even in the Oval Office, rather than an avatar or guru to others. We need no more martyrs or Hitlers.

Example: The Now is speaking a timely “LIBERTY,” both to me and my empathic friends, even “Loss of Liberty”; given that this country could, with another stolen election, move toward anarchy and rebellion-- God Forbid!--it might be best to hear this call of the Now as clearly as possible, scrutinize the election process as preventative maintenance, and push for action towards an evolution in the definition of freedom, stemming not from the unrestrained license we’ve seen on Wall Street or our former unilateral license against the world, but, instead, from self-restrained responsibility for our freedoms as connected beings, as One not only within our borders but with the rest of humanity as well.

Each of us is already connected to the collective: our every thought, word or deed affects the freedom of us all. Every timely step towards recognizing this Oneness is a step towards global liberty, in the present moment. Each of us is everyone else, as well, at the deepest transpersonal level of our being: we might as well treat “ourselves” well. Being responsible for everyone else is a very light burden, if walked in love and gratitude. Be a model of global responsibility for our connectedness and show us real freedom in action for all.

Proviso: Again, “hearing the voice of the Now” in “All Time” from our “Connectedness” is a mystical notion, with no scientific measurements for accuracy or reliability or proof. Be wary of those who claim to know the Now better than anyone else, as everyone hears this voice, though few are conscious of it or its significance. Out here in cosmic-cowboy-land, of course, everyone listens to and talks about the Now, every day. Ask Oprah.

What to Do?

UBER-Principles in Action Transformation means "turning things around," through a process which aids a change in direction or spin, resulting from an attitudinal healing that moves towards gratitude and affirmation from where it was before. Work towards this in all things.

Example: In my own life, I find, particularly now as an activist, but in my professorship as well, that simply listening and reflecting back to someone full of anger or hate or fear can often lead to attitudinal healing towards the affirmative, thus "turning" that spin "around." The effects of that "turn" affect us all, at every level, towards connection.

Proviso: This is not a magic trick or the work of a wizard, but, certainly, one could play that game. This is about being up-front and empowered as a "peaceful warrior" for Connection. It also works well for empowering change and empowering self. It's important to be very cautionary about claiming any special power from Transformation, except the power of communication. We all work towards it every day, even if we're working against it.

Principles in Action 1: A problem is its solution: sometimes, the best fix is no fix at all; build linkage, instead, with other perceived problems, and help them to synergize with appropriate administration and service. When things fall apart, other things grow together from it. Look to see what’s growing from the center of dissolution and nurture it to new solutions, for the mutual benefit of all.

Example: There are increasing numbers of unemployed middle class professionals in this country, trying to keep their homes and families together, with no new work in sight. These are responsible, careful people, for the most part, who’ve worked for years to prime the system for the people at the top, and all their work seems to be for naught. A problem, certainly. AND, at least a fifth of the world’s population is starving for lack of opportunity, a huge problem that must be addressed in a “new order” global economy. The unfed bottom of the bottom can no longer be neglected. AND, at the same time, the Internet is changing the way we work, connecting us all from our laptops.

Perhaps the Obama administration could network these unemployed American professionals in a new electronic WPA (Working Professionals Association), linking these professionals to paid international service work from their homes; linking them to community service within the country; and, most importantly, linking them to each other in ways that foster synergy and innovation, creating their own new businesses out of the current bitterness, serving the newly unemployed all over the world and focused on building opportunities for serving the perennially unemployed peasantry at the bottom, as well. Getting and administering the flow of cash for economic development into the hands of the peasants, rather than to the bureaucratic middlemen who pocket it before it gets to the people, as well as opening up the flow of education, financial management, language acquisition, meaningful work, and updated proficiency in technology to the world’s poor: this linkage of top to bottom would provide its own energy in short order, just as your linkage with the Grassroots has done here. Ay, Chihuahua! What a noble, transformative work! Alchemical! The transpersonal nature of the work, walking in others' shoes, would finetune the human systems, as well.

AND, since The Gates Foundation has already started this linkage, perhaps it could be enlisted to monitor or model appropriate behaviors and avoid mistakes in the transformative process.

Proviso: Linking problems to build solutions, top to bottom, can build a negative, downward synergy, creating a bigger problem, unless the linkage is administered with benevolence, flexibility, transparency, gratitude and mutual service rather than greed, narrowness, secrecy, charity, and co-dependent ethnocentricity. Listening is as important as linkage in the Now. So is trust.

Principles in Action 2: As much as possible, rise to thinking from a both/and perspective, rather than strictly from either/or, as both/and thinking fits the Now. Almost everything is both a blessing and a curse; as well, usually, both sides are true: sometimes it’s necessary to rise up the middle, for the mutual benefit of all.

Example: Both the top and the bottom of the beanstalk are starving, but from different food. In Nicaragua, rice, beans, corn and meaningful work are lacking. Here, we’re starving for a true word in the glut of information, for certainty in an uncertain age, for spirit, and for meaningful work as well. Both food and truth-- and meaningful work, always--are vital to well-being. Why not link them in the love of humanity, for the benefit of top and bottom?

Proviso: The linkage must be mutually chosen, not imposed.

Principles in Action 3: Strengthening balanced linkage between the top and the bottom of just about anything right now strengthens the ends and, thereby, electrifies the middle. Forge the links, sir, and we'll all have much to be grateful for.

Example: I have, over the last fifteen years built a bridge of understanding and heart with an extended family of dirt-poor peasants in Northern Nicaragua. The Betancos gain strength from my continuing return, sometimes with cash for small development loans or education or other aid, no strings attached, and I gain balance and love and a sense of transforming things, just knowing them and their heightened spirituality as part of "my" family. My life has been energized and moved by the experience and so has theirs: As well, the airlines have gained a frequent PanAmerican flier and the reading public has already gained from my writings, which speak of this synergy.

Example 2: God knows, I live now at the Bottom of our collective economic ladder, on a limited teacher's pension. You're successfully living near the top, more power to you. This blog linkage has the potential for creating growth in both places, and, perhaps energizing the middle, since I see this Obama Blog as a book that could be sold and read and pondered. I think it speaks of harmony, in many ways, despite the encroaching chaos of our times.

Proviso: The intention must be mutuality, to loose the synergy of top and bottom. No controlling behaviors, etc., when turning things around. The ego obstructs the flow.

Principles in Action 4: Clearly, all these principles work from unity, one we can't understand but which connects us always, even when we're blind to it. Therefore, work in every measured way to walk towards unity, in the Oval Office, within your staff and administration, towards common goals; inspire your fractured nation to come together hopefully to rebuild from our calamitous past into a more graceful future; enlighten your brothers/sisters in the world by your solidarity with all peoples, top to bottom, working for a more appropriate future of brother/sisterhood, of humanhood, on this speck of dust we get so riled about, floating in a tub of grateful love.

Example: Melding your election team with the unvoiced Grassroots progressives (cultural creatives) has empowered everything from voter activism to elegant and successful fundraising, much of it over the Net, top-to-bottom verticality laid horizontal in equality of common purpose. Keep it active after the Triumph to build consistent feedback loops and singularity of intention.

Practice seeing this horizontality when observing the mess-pot of problems in your keeping, most of which are due to top-heavy behaviors. In the pot, we're all just meat for the Giants, I suppose: we might as well be excellent morsels. The tension between the horizontal and vertical structures of American capitalistic democracy can be worked into a crux of synergy by lowering the bar to include the bottom, then raising it to a progressed level.

Proviso: As with most things, unity in action can be abused a) if people are unified by a leader on their common hatreds, as in Nazi Germany and, apparently, in the RNC, today; b) if the leader draws this Oneness to himself, as his property, rather than reflecting it back to the populace, to energize them; c) if this united force is focused solely at the national level, ignoring the global humanhood, it can be used to promote divisive ethnocentricity rather than global multiplicity (as in the War with Iraq).

Example: If we, as a nation, throw out manipulation and control to the world, that comes back to us in ways such as 9-11. Our nation is carrying such a black cloud of our past world stance, it's hard for anything looking like freedom to get through it; instead, we're enchained in it and punished for it. Turn this around by being a mature American President working for mutual benefit.

Proviso: What comes back will be a reflection of what's thrown: it might not look like it, though. If a man kills someone else, he may not die, but, internally, psychically, something in him dies.

Example: You. I.

Proviso: Who knows what lies we live by, thinking they are true. There’s almost always a question and an answer between us, since we are human, in tune though we may be.

Principles in Action 7: Above even #6 is a further state of intention, beyond lie: all things seek to rise to the next level, to transcend the known, even when they're headed down by circumstance or lack of curiosity.

Example: Whether it's called evolution or intelligent design, northward immigration or forced economic displacement of peasants, progress is always implicit in the process of living beings, even in their progress from dust to more experienced dust.

Proviso: Sometimes, it's important to remember, in a drive for transformative progress, that, in the Now, there are no directions, or, rather, all directions exist as One, eastwestsouthnorthupdowninout, all One, so, there, "progress" is not only very relative to each person but also, probably, not necessary. In general, though, "up" is an affirmative direction if the Mutuality is served.

Gracias, CenterDoug

I'm in Center!

2008-10-22T20:09:00.002-06:00

Good Lord! I've been in Center, in the center of the San Luis Valley, for three days now, and, believe me, all is right with the world. I've not only solved half the human problems, but also got 12 new confirmed voters for Obama. So, I'd guess you know where I am. I'm mainly writing to tell you that, as a Center person, everything is flowing in the most appropriate and fitting direction, so party! Go knock on some doors quite happily for Obama, or, really, whoever, 'cause my man is gonna win! Check my Center trip photos at the right..

Where I Am These Days

2008-10-18T12:40:00.005-06:00

I've been blogging

like a madman for Barack Obama, and will continue to do so on my CenterDoug's Obama Blog at the following link http://my.barackobama.com/page/
community/blog/CenterDoug

But, excuse me, I have a date with door-knocking. Please VOTE!

Gracias, CenterDoug

Somersaulting Images

2008-10-11T11:50:00.006-06:00

It's struck me how partisan and biased I've become
in the last few months, rooting for President Obama (How I love to write that!). I was chatting with a very balanced friend, detached from most illusions, the other day; I gave a list of the mistakes I saw constantly in The Other Candidate's (TOC's) campaign, from the choice of TOC's Running-mate (TOC'R) on down to the mudslinging innuendos of TOC's illogic, a list which raised the question, "Is he trying to lose the election? He looked so old and bloodless in the second debate!" My friend reminded me that many of the items on my list, if seen by TOC's supporters, would be considered the blessings of his campaign. In truth, the attitude with which we approach an issue or a race determines our opinion of what we allow ourselves to perceive: we need to remember that we're probably seeing only half the picture, while the other half reads, point-by-point, upside-down.

In such a polarized, partisan contest, I've found it clarifying to see the Parties as stick figures, one standing tall, head above its shoulders, and the other upside-down, standing on its head. God knows which one is right-side up, but I'm sure you all know which figure I think has its feet on the ground of reality and its head high up in the mountain-air of its vision.

When I came back from my first trip to Nicaragua, I'd gone inside-out and upside-down, and stayed there long enough to know I'd better be grateful for the privileged life I lead, with so much luck to be born in North America. I found myself universally angry at the manipulation and terror the US exerted there, under the table, in order to protect "its National Security," in the 1980's. I decided I would speak out against the food slavery and control our State Department actively supports in Nicaragua and most of Central America.

It is inspiring to say, "I'm a freedom-fighter, working for Democracy" and getting other sovereign states to toe the line in our national interest, but, in truth, when our sense of supporting "freedom" leads us to enslaving others for our economy, I have to wonder what blowback we thought we'd get? Our "blowback" from ruining Nicaragua for ever, possibly, is that everyone from 18-35 has moved up here, illegally. Since we invaded their sovereign space so significantly in the 1980's, there's absolutely NO compunction to keep the young in Nicaragua from crossing into "our" space and into our opportunities. And, who can blame them?

At any rate, this image of the two stick-figures has helped me to find my way as a man who seeks to act with unity beyond division when I can. I've decided to build unity and healing and binding of our partisan wounds in this country as my first priority. Partisanship will move towards unity, hopefully, whoever wins, but since President Obama is already speaking vocally in that direction, too, I've great hope for the outcome of the somersaulting race, that it will lead us all to work for a more mature and lasting American stance in the world, which makes us adult learners in the statecraft of a world of equal nations.

I'd hate to think that TOC, who's saying "Yes" in his campaign to racial and ethnic and elitist division, would not work to unite this polarized population, if so elected. He's a mostly good man--most Republicans are very good people, including my beloved sister--who has fought the hard fight in Government while most of us have been in denial about most of it for thirty years of work and "Let them do it!"

That can't happen anymore: the majority, I believe, of the American voting public wants to take back the country from supporting only those 400 very rich families that own more than the next 100 million people down the ladder. I'm for a candidate who would bring the ultra-rich into the democratic fold.

Think six-times before you vote in this election.
Repeat after me: "President Obama! President Obama!"

Gobama 2008!
Gracias, CenterDoug

College Students and Senior Citizens for Obama in Significant Ways

2008-10-10T20:51:00.004-06:00

Here's the Obama-maniac 2008 again,
all fired up with enthusiasm--If you don't know, "enthusiasm" is from the Greek, and means "inspired by the God in me," and that's certainly where I am in the Now, and loving it, and thanking Barack Obama and his excellent team and me, for it.

I learned today that Garfield County, CO, the epicenter of the new natural gas and energy industry in the nation, is also the epicenter for the outcome of the Presidential election, according to US Senator Ken Salazar (CO DEM), visiting the epicenter of America's beauty, Glenwood Springs, with former Governor Romer and State Dem Ray Rivera, .

I believe it--I'm CenterDoug, after all, sometimes from the Center of the Universe, and Barack shares this space reflectively with me, I'm sure--and I know from the tumult of people who showed up today that the powers-that-thoughtfully-be are moving en masse to our side, regardless of their declared party affiliation. In Glenwood today, downtown, a pickup truck with a huge sandwich-board sign in its bed reading REPUBLICANS FOR OBAMA 2008 cruised Grand Avenue all day! CRITICAL THINKERS, UNITE!

If there were ever an election that needed to be approached with critical thinking and logic, rather than blind Party devotion, it's this one!

If you'd like to help make this evolution of American Democracy happen--from the ground up melding with the intentions of the top--just call up or walk down to your local Obama Headquarters and say, "I'll give an hour or a day for the next three weeks or promise to mention the SMART CHOICE 2008 at least 15 times in my every day conversation." Become a part of the miracle as the American people retake and reshape their Democracy, vote by thoughtful vote. Gobama 2008!

People who have come on board for Obama report to me that their level of self-esteem and empowerment as American citizens has tripled, quadrupled, gone universal, even, with the knowledge that, finally, we're backing, as Senior Citizens, as College Students, as Americans, someone we can truly believe in to live up to his campaign promises.

The room in Glenwood Springs today had about 100 people, far more than have ever congregated, except for election night Donkey parties when everyone had to drink in the new--dratted--Republican era of the moment, unhappily, in this itty-bitty, but ultra-significant village in the Rockies.

Not this time, friends.

At least a tenth were Seniors and College Students, both demographics that have not seen a political meeting much or ever. EVERYONE WAS ON FIRE FOR DEMOCRACY, FOR A CHANGE. THIS is very significant, here in the State of Colorado, which, more than likely, will decide Obama's victory in November.

I'm going to make it happen. It'll help my universal balance account. How about you?

Gobama 2008!

Gracias, CenterDoug

Hello, Again

2008-10-08T09:13:00.002-06:00

Goodness,
it's been a while since I posted to this CenterDoug Blog; I've been doing all my posting in CenterDoug's Obama Blog on www.my.barackobama.com, instead, because I've become a true Obamaniac! I've pulled myself out of retirement by declaring myself on an "Obama Vacation For the Nation" until after Vote Day 2008, and I've been hard at it for at least 8 hours a day, filled with working at Obama HQ, Glenwood Springs; Voter Registrations drives up at CMC and in a local grocery store; manning phonebanks for Obama; and spending at least 4 hours a day researching the current political news and blogging away like a campesino, making a difference. I've pretty much imagined myself a strategist and friend of the candidate, his campaign, and his character, all of which are impeccably honorable. So, the work has been, for me, anyway, and I trust that it'll empower both me and the rest of the world in the future.

I haven't been this fired up for a candidate since 1976 and Jimmy Carter. I gained an insight on my own motivations, as well: in past elections, I used my vote primarily to keep greater scoundrels from winning than the ones I voted for; this time, I'll be voting for a man I believe in, for changes that certainly need to happen. It's made all the difference in my attitude towards America, and I thank Barack Obama for his gift to me of Hope.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Pardon Me, But ....!

2008-10-04T20:51:00.007-06:00

I know, I know, I know!

It used to be the case that, at least in Colorado, mention of politics and religion in polite society was considered almost a "social-class offense," but not any more. Everywhere I go, people are talking the election and the race, and, surprisingly, most of the party talk is for Obama. I feel the 60 million strong group of Americans known as the "Cultural Creatives" have found a partisan home for the first time since the Sixties. I am a "Cultural Creative" ( Paul Ray, The Cultural Creatives) Certainly my life as an Independent for thirty years has come to an end this summer when I changed my registration to Democrat, after 30 years of being "Unaffiliated," because, basically, back, then, I tuned out politics to focus on my students in an apolitical way.

I feel as if I've come home, somehow. In the 70's, I carried a sign down and up Grand Avenue in Glenwood Springs, on Vote Day, 1976, urging people to remember to vote: this looked at the time in this very Western town (then) as a somewhat anarchist personal statement that no one could deny, but it was practically terroristic to be carrying a sign.

Now, I'm looking at Michael Moore's emails and wondering how 400 families at the top of the rich spectrum own more than the next 100 million citizens down the ladder--even though most all of them own property in this Valley--and I have to wonder. That figure sounds suspiciously like the percentage of "billionaire" aristocrats in the British national makeup in the eighteenth century, and I thought we had revolted against the concentration of wealth in a few back in 1776. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see many parallels between the plight of the disappearing Middle Class in America and the Colonists who founded our Republic.

But I am writing about the Cultural Creatives: if Sarah Palin can just ignore the questions of the moderator in a national televised debate, I guess I can return to focus in my blog, to strike some sort of universal balance.

Cultural Creatives are, 60 million American adults strong, almost all for Global Citizenship, second only on their ladder of values to Oneness with the Universe. When one places that "global-ness" so highly, everything else has to change, down below: partisanship is so many words; "national" means the place I live for, not die for; the national economy looks most like the tool that drives a third of the world's population to live in abject poverty and seasonal starvation.

Cultural Creatives work to live in the Now, and anyone looking for "our" vote better give up running on the "What I voted for" line: too many great Senators have voted against a great bill because some yahoo Senator has amended a pork barrel add-on to it, to use those numbers. Cultural Creatives look into the eyes of the candidate, and then know for sure.

They come from every angle of the American spectrum, from Colorado MamasforObama to a Listserv for Colorado accountants, but the defining character point is love of the planet and our place in it. How many readers out there realize that a third of the American adults in America place the sanctity of the world higher than the health of the American economy? Yikes!

No one even remembers Nicaragua, a chic topic in 1980, but completely forgotten now. It is as if the mouths of starving peasants, crushed by American might, mean nothing. I beg to differ: the result of our foreign policy has impoverished that sovereign state, and, even though the country is bending over backwards, it's still considered a "terrorist" state by the State Department, which, God Bless them, lives in the 1950's. One of the primary reasons why so many Independents have shifted to the Obama and Democratic columns, cultural creatives, mostly, is due to the fact that the Federal line simply doesn't wash with the cultural creatives' experiential take on real conditions in the countries who serve our needs for sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee and bananas. So many Americans have actually been there that the "line don't wash," anymore.

Is anyone listening to global citizens? I'd suggest that the background of Barack Obama as a multicultural citizen of the world is arms above any of his opponents. Peasants are citizens of the world, too. Vote Obama, 2008.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Letter to Obama #10: Democracy's Been Served, Gracias!

2008-10-04T06:56:00.004-06:00

Dear Barack Obama and Gentleman Joe Biden:

I’m writing to suggest that yesterday, October 2, 2008, the day of the Biden/Palin Debate, was a great day for the American Democracy: it’s been a while since I felt this way, not since three weeks ago, looking in Obama’s eyes in Grand Junction, Colorado. Since then, I’ve added to the lustre of my meaningful life by becoming a volunteer—a specialist in New Voter Registrations at the local college-- for Camp Obama here in Glenwood Springs, God’s Country in Colorado, a state that is more ready to vote for change than I’ve ever seen it, in 32 years, since I emigrated from New Jersey, a rebel Democrat, in the 70’s.

This state can be won in November. The groundswell is only starting. The levels of grassroots activism here in the Roaring Fork Valley, hub of traffic from Vail to Aspen, a multicultural conglomeration of very successful people with international and local pretensions, have risen dramatically, on both sides. People are stopping each other on the street to make sure a friend or acquaintance is registered to vote! Do you appreciate how different that climate is, from past elections here? In 1976, a rabid Jimmy Carter supporter, newly enlivened as a Democrat from the celebration of the Bicentennial, I walked the streets of Glenwood with a “Vote, Please!” sign on Vote Day. This was almost surely terroristic behavior in Glenwood at the time, not much visited by people carrying signs. But, heck! Who could deny the mutuality of my message? Still, it was aberrant behavior in this very (pre-1990) Western town.

Oh, yes, things have changed. Things are changing. To succeed in change times is a) to recognize that change is occurring; some things, like the historic migration of humanity northward around the world or the sanctity of partnership, regardless of sexual choice, are inevitable in that change—One needs a good nose for the Now--and b) to remain constant in our actions to the set of ethical principles we preach. Walk the Talk. Evolution of the change will occur as it will, and we will be stalwart to claim or at least mark it Obama by our belief in egalitarianism. I feel more people than ever are willing to claim that “all people are created equal.” Democracy is more afloat in the US than I’ve seen it since the ‘60’s, given, of course, that I live on the fringe, in cosmic-hoo-hoo-rainbow-land!

Barack Obama! Joe Biden! Thank you. People are coming up to me to thank me for helping them register to vote! I feel like Mr. Democracy for sitting myself down at 63 and asking everyone who goes by, “Are you ready for the election? Will you get a Mail-in Ballot for November?" For a simple-minded senior like me, this is amazing, simple work, but the gains!

I’ve been out of activism, though always a voter, since 1980, when I moved from the Dems to the Unaffiliated Column. A couple weeks ago, I moved back to the Democratic Party, because I must participate in the caucuses again. Your stance on grassroots activism has given every “cultural creative” (Paul Ray, The Cultural Creatives) a point to focus on, a voice to espouse, a way to balance all the opposites, a leader for the dance with change afoot, in a foot-to-the-ground, natural way. The bottom is rising. Hooray for you! I’ve had a hand in registering 81 New Voters to the system in three weeks! Despite 42 meaningful years in the American public educational system, this feat, right now, most brings me to tears of pride. As a baby-boomer on the leading edge (birth-1944) for thirty years, I’m grateful for the reconnection to the American principles of grassroots activism that started this country, before there was partisanship, before there was spin, when there were only revolutionary sharpshooters picking off Redcoats from behind the trees of Virginia--terroristas--seeking self-resolution.

My DAR great-great-aunts, descended from religious victims out of England in 1687, and my Celtic coal miner paternal forebears, looking for food in 1910, and the Sandinistas I've bonded with in Nicaragua, would all be happy to see my progress as a citizen. Maybe it’s time to let rhetoric be rhetoric, and let actions speak for truth.

I registered 27 New Voters for America yesterday. Democracy was served. And, Barack, I thank you for it.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Building a Lasting Path

2008-09-30T08:26:00.010-06:00

Good Grief!

This latest dire crisis on Wall Street, coupled with news from Nicaragua of serious hunger when I have no money to send, has had me spinning since last Thursday: my diet has crashed for the moment on a tidal wave of comfort food and wine. This is not good, for me or for America or Nicaragua, so yesterday, while Congress made it clear that our current President should head for his pasture full of gooey cow pies, I decided to take myself in hand and "Do Something" that would last. My favorite cut on the new Eagles album, Long Road Out of Eden (2007), "Do Something" hits me deeply in my contemplative-activist's heart: the Obama campaign, so intent on pushing grassroots activism for change, might consider adopting it as its theme song; it surely gets me out of my rocking chair.

Of course, then I had to decide what to do. That "lasting" bit made the choosing complicated, since, philosophically, I know that nothing lasts but change. Even philosophers, though, need roots in the soil of "doing," so I amended my quest to "building something that would last a reasonably long time"; that expanded my possibilities and established some limits, as well.

It eliminated the first task that popped up--That I should butter-fry up a mess of Velveeta Cheese and Mayonnaise sandwiches (a comfort food holdover from the 50's, absolutely taboo-poison in my current life style, except maybe when the Market's crashing). I instantly eliminated that because those grilled cheeses wouldn't've lasted ten minutes before being stuffed down my gullet, slathered with catsup, never mind the guilt. Nix on that.

What else in my current life had potential for reasonably long-lasting creation? I could work on my novel, Safehavens, or post on one of my blogs or write a poem or paint a picture, all things of notable longevity, but, after even thinking of all that toasty Velveeta, I figured I should move my body in this enterprise as well. Move it, move it, move it . . . BINGO!

The gravel path through the Wild Garden! I'd put it off for a month: Now, I'd do it. I'd plot it, edge it with small rock to hold the grass cloth down, then pour pails of gravel, one by one, over the cloth: a lasting path through the wilderness, designed to add a tension with its man-made-order, midst the wild grasses, willows, weeds, and the whispering of Cattle Creek. BINGO! While my world looked majorly awry on Monday morning, I'd mindfully focus on building a path.

Brilliant.

Of course it might've been better if my work had sent food or money to Northern Nicaragua, but there's only so much I can do. I work in a artist's garden in exchange for pieces of her art. I did decide, though, that I'd make this path-building a walking meditation, a prayer for the poor of Teote.

And that's how it turned out, as each pail of gravel travelled down a slope to the garden, step-by-step, to cover another square foot of path. The work moved very sweetly: Cattle Creek gurgled and bubbled and sighed as the path slowly lengthened; I felt a minute-by-minute release of angst and terror and guilt, and a calm delight replaced my worry for my south-of-the-border family. The woes of the Stock Market disappeared. When a rock proved unmoveable, I wound the path around it, creating an island in the thin river of stone.

By quitting time, the gravel path was done and I felt whole and holy. My friend was in bliss. That charmed path had made the garden! Perhaps, as many claim, my working prayer had blessed the larger world as well. I felt like a monk in a Kyoto Temple garden, making order out of chaos with a rake, and, in truth, the ego has no place in successful design. Would that the economic planners in Congress had had that kind of focus, yesterday! Maybe they should all start building solid gravel pathways across the utter wildness of the White House lawn?

Letters to Ba'rama #4: Notes on the Frst Debate

2008-09-27T07:59:00.001-06:00

Fresh from my Neighborhood Debate Party, Senator Obama, and full of fresher admiration for your presence on the national scene, I’m once again struck by the focus and clarity you bring to your hopeful message of change. Looking comparatively at the evening’s presentations is meaningful.

First, while you defended and clarified your record as needed, you spent much more time being “present moment” than your opponent, who relies on his past and never quite “gets” the Now. In fact, he avoids it, falling backwards to attitudes of American-Empire-Thinking that better belong in memory than in the mind of a possible President in 2008. Since most of our domestic and foreign problems stem from this elitist and ethnocentric mindset, it’s refreshing to hear you calling for open and honest dialogue without pre-conditions and “American” agendas. “My way or the Highway” thinking cannot work in the Now, when all ways are united in human mutuality.

Second, Ba’rama, you clearly are the better listener, both to Jim Lehrer and to McCain; your responses speak of experience with dialogue, compromise as needed, and building agreement, whereas your opponent often seemed more focused on presenting a canned message that skirted the issue at hand. The fact that you agreed with McC and complimented him when possible shows your maturity in argumentation and interpersonal relations. You also looked at him when you spoke to him, whereas his eyes never left the camera.

Third, sir, you spoke more often from fact and specific evidence than from “pleasing” generalities and “Beltway Bubble Babble.” It marks you as a critical thinker who respects clarity, particularly in your repeated interjection, “Let’s be clear.” Since we as a nation have been in a fog of purposeful untruth for many years, your forceful call for clarity marks you as a voice of truth in a murky wasteland of distortion and spin. It’s refreshing. Perhaps the other side still thinks the American Public cannot think, but I beg to differ. We can, we are, and it’s changed everything. More and more often, the emerging “American Public” is not looking for someone to “lead” it but, rather, for someone to collaborate with it for mutual benefit and respectful progress.

Fourth, my friend, while both of you hedged a bit from answering Lehrer’s excellent question about how your Presidencies would be changed by the current economic crisis—not surprising, since it’s too unclear to make predictions—I was happy to hear you state for the record your tax plans, since the other side’s ads have been full of shameful lies and spin that needed refuting. I was particularly happy when you called out his distancing from the GOP economic line, something he’s been supporting since Reagan.

Finally, then, I feel you won the debate because you spoke, with honesty, clarity, courage and reasonable passion, directly to us, from the Now, as a statesman and a world leader, whereas your opponent spoke as a seasoned politician whose bubble is likely to burst.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Too political? What's that?

2008-09-26T17:47:00.004-06:00

To readers of this blog, I'd like to suggest, if you're interested in my political opinions, that you check out my blog for supporters of Barack Obama at . While I'll still be posting my "Letters to Ba'rama" series here, the blog post to the other blog will be more partisan than these. I do seek balance in all of my words.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Walking the Talk: Letters to Ba'rama #3

2008-09-26T12:03:00.009-06:00

Right on, Ba'Rama!

Standing on your democratic principles to insist on this debate tonight has empowered your campaign and made your opponent sound, again, like a manipulative Bush clone, for all of us to see. This consistent pattern of terrorizing the American public in order to further rob the American Dream by denying debate or inclusion on issues which affect each of us, in the name of expedient, patriotic need (Ha!) has gotten so heavy-handed, it's backfiring, even if we are in a crisis. The Old Guard has called "Wolf" too many times, in order to get its way. Standing firm, as you are, in the face of this latest "direness," on the inclusion of the American Public to the conversation is the way I dream my next President to act.

Please stand firm on insisting for accountability in this bailout debacle. I don't mind so much the Govt. coming to the rescue if it's really necessary to stabilize things, but I think the taxpayers should get paid back with interest, perhaps by these firms accepting increased taxation to lower the national debt. Maybe that's too simplistic? However, that's been the system's stance with me: why should these firms be treated any differently, when it's, after all, "my money"?

I'm off to a Neighborhood Debate Party tonight, and will wear my Obama/Biden T-shirt even more proudly after your stance these last few days. I'm bringing the salad, though I really can't afford it this week. Right now it feels like a stance of hope to have food to share. I pray for your success tonight and our financial futures.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Letters to Ba'rama #2 "At the Bottom, There's Hope"

2008-09-21T07:32:00.013-06:00

OK, Ba’rama. In the last post I appreciated your empathy, your ability, face-to-face, to share with the one in front of you—Amazing! I will likely never stop being impressed by that, that moment in time when we faced each other, when I felt empowered by the soul of Senator Barack Obama at the Cross Orchards in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Thus, today, I’ll appreciate your ability to inspire the grass-roots to empower themselves, a trait I took on years ago in my own writing classrooms as a community college professor. I had the choice to a) empower myself from the knowledge that my students had to pass my required class or b) to go one step further in the recognition that my knowledge of persuasion tactics would make them more powerful citizens. I chose b). The very concept of empowering others to empower themselves makes everything different: that ‘s what you’re doing, and I pray you will be successful on a national scale in the way I’ve been successful (so they say) in my classroom. What could be more meaningful?

Empowerment of others is an art. A gift. An ultimate blessing.

How fortunate that you're where you have the opportunity!

Your understanding of the Constitution and The Bill of Rights as living documents that grow as we grow thrills me, as I’ve not seen much adherence to constitutional law in the last eight years. The Constitution's been used and abused, and that offends me. I’m told I’m “totally out of the box” since my experiences in the Third World have matured me; though not an outlaw, I am a celebrator of our freedoms to license, within our need for restraint as community members. I believe the government has overstepped its function when it interferes in the lives of consenting adults, making personal choices. Responsibly-retired, debt-free, and politically active, I’m deeply empowered by most pages of your book, The Audacity of Hope, even though almost every one requires me to stop and think about your statements: what could be a more telling statement about the quality of a book?

Hooray for you!

So, now, all of a sudden, the other side is spinning its own grassroots appeal, its “soccer-mom-dom,” but, please: Let’s get real. No one on the other side has walked in anybody else’s shoes in years, unless they were stolen from some nameless taxpayer's closet. That side is about money and politics and spin, from the top down. Our stance is equality, about building bridges between the bottom of the beanstalk and the top, fostering mutuality [see my post "Whirling in Teote"]. The non-working “trickle-down” effect has crippled our economy and our international relations. Please, Ba'rama, stay honest, balanced, empathic and empowering!

I’ve been coming from the bottom of the ladder for a long time, as an advocate for the peasants of Nicaragua, deeply abused by American-Empire-Thinking for almost 30 years, and still not addressed realistically by the State Department; your stance for the empowerment of the American citizen in this election empowers both me and “them,” the people we've hurt intrinsically. I call upon you to remember that the “bottom” of our American society is still higher on the opportunity ladder of the world’s people, that the real bottom is the third of the world’s population, sweating for almost ‘nothing,’ living in the perpetual darkness of economic oppression endemic in the peasantry. 90% of Nicaragua is starving right this minute because of our global economic policies.That is a real ‘bottom-line.’ It's no wonder to me that Central American Peasantry has chosen to force the US to live up to its claim to be the Land of Opportunity. Our multinational corporations have been robbing them blind for a century, with government assistance.

So, while I appreciate your ability to empower each of us Americans, I also enjoin you to empower that third of the world’s population. It might help for us to own up to the World Court's verdict against the United States for conducting a "terrorist" operation against the sovereign state of Nicaragua in the Contra War of '80's and to make reparations for that horror, as the Court and most world opinion suggests we do, to show our willingness to walk a more mature and balanced line in the world, to retrieve our tarnished honor. We created that international law which supports that World Court decision: it's way past time to expect of ourselves what we demand of our "enemies." That would be really Real!

When you say that you can’t change Washington alone, but we will, individually, make the difference because we change ourselves, you speak truth and American principles we have almost forgotten: lasting change for truth comes from our personal changes, not just the rules the Senate makes or the continual ignorance of consequences displayed at the highest levels of our power and economic structures. Good Lord, I’m happy to hear a Washington Senator calling for consequences that lift up "Main Street" rather than Wall Street greedheads who've lost their balance and do not deserve a bailout without serious recompense to the North and Central Americans who depend on their supposedly responsible actions for sustenance! At the bottom, there's still hope for the top.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Letters to Ba'rama #1 "Empathy"

2008-09-17T12:36:00.005-06:00

Dear Ba'rama:

I have a penchant for nicknames, especially if the name I’m nicking is frequently in my mind and conversations: I guess I’ve a lazy-brained tongue as well as a fondness for terms of endearment. So, Senator Obama, I started calling you "Ba’rama" about three weeks ago. Then, last Monday in Grand Junction, your introducer tripped a bit (It’s OK!) and called you "Ba’rama." Click. As, at the time, I was also mulling over a series of letters to you on my blog, CenterDoug <http://www.centerdoug.blogspot.com/> “Letters to Ba’rama” clicked in as the title, so, there we are.

You handled that little trip of the tongue very graciously: it’s a trait of yours I appreciate, and one, hopefully, I’ll return. I’ve decided, in fact, to appreciate, in the next posts, our common ground, and in this #1 Letter to Ba’rama, your empathy, for I know it’s real: I saw it in your eyes in Grand Junction; it touched me with a frisson of kindred spirit as we shook hands. I complimented The Audacity of Hope. You thanked me kindly. I’d wear a Michael Jackson glove to shield the hand that shook the hand of the next President of the United States, but I’m not into outward display or the future—very tricky ground--and, anyway, the connection felt more “human-to-human” and present moment than hero worship. Empathy touches deeper than that.

You recognize that most of our lives are struggles "of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light," an awareness that leads to balance and understanding, good leadership qualities. If you can walk in others’ shoes as you did last Monday, you’ve got it made, Ba’rama, whatever happens in November, and I’m very grateful for it. Last night I registered 45 new voters and tonight I'm on the Obama phone bank, to show my appreciation and my longings for a changed America.

Gracias, CD

Sleeping Spaces

2008-09-11T15:29:00.004-06:00

[CenterDoug Notes: I felt the shorter version of this piece (last post) needed expansion for clarity, so I did that. I like it better. CD]

[For The Glenwood Post Independent]

“Well, there it is, again,” I growled to my housemate, film-producer Tex, while punching off my cell phone. “Another nasty comment against Latinos “cramming too many peons” into their houses, “all sleeping together, I suppose!” Ay, Chihuahua! Sometimes I cringe at how we cling to cross-cultural stereotypes, while forgetting to look at our own kinky culture in the mirror. Ethnocentricity. I’ve been working on that most of my life. Raised in New Jersey in the bigoted 1950’s, I’ve had to dissolve the boxes of prejudice that surrounded me in my youth. Instead, I’ve opted to see everyone in me and me in everyone else, a better balance, and one that leads to gratitude. How I wish I’d known that unity when I still had pimples!

“Sleeping space” in the US and Nicaragua is an ethnocentric case in point. The stereotype above is very often not true among North American Latinos: most of the Hispanic families I know in the Valley are small and occupy single family dwellings, most with several bedrooms. The family swells in size and communal sleeping space only on special family occasions and holy days. There are teeming exceptions, as well. In the peasant economy of Northern Nicaragua, though, four generations of a family may share the sleeping areas of their house together, wearing the clothes of the previous day through the night as their only privacy, changed in the morning. In the States, in contrast, most people crave separate sleeping space, unless, of course, they’re “sleeping” with significant others. It’s a cultural difference from which I’ve grown.

In that chat on the porch in Glenwood Springs—I share a 3-story rental house full of private and communal spaces with three other single adults—Tex said, “I need a place to close out the world, for solitude. A while back, in Utah, I lived in an unheated space in the basement all winter rather than share a warm master bedroom suite upstairs, even with my best friend: I need privacy, not a dorm. But I like this housemate thing, as long as you’re all respecting the privacy of my bedroom.”

“Me, too. I’m an introvert and need perhaps too much quiet time, but I can choose it here or not. Even in my marriages,” I remarked, “I’d want a door I could close, usually my home office. Privacy’s an entitlement here, but not in nightly Nicaragua, where most people don’t want it.”

“Huh?”

“Listen, Tex. When I first visited Teote in 1993, in the house of my now-adopted peasant family, the Betancos, they gave me their only single room. The eight family members slept in the other cuarto, in hammocks, because I also had the only bed. ‘Norteamericanos,’ they believed, ‘need space,’ whereas Nicaragüense ‘prefer company,’ especially when asleep. I felt guilty, being such a space hog. They assured me they wouldn’t want it otherwise. ‘Too many desperados out there to sleep alone,’ they said. ‘How can you do it?’”

“They’re stereotyping us?” Tex asked. “Hmm. Some of that might be Hispanic hospitality. But we also shift beds to accommodate guests here. That’s the same.”

“Sure. However, we move back to private spaces when they’re gone. Cultural diversity’s at work, Tex, and it starts very early. Most everyone here was raised from birth separated from their parents; in Nicaragua, hardly any mother would sleep apart from her babies, and, as the children grow, they just shift from their parents’ bed to that of the kids, in the same room. No one’s ever heard of a playpen or a crib or a nursery, much less infant daycare. 24/7, family’s holding the baby, until she’s walking and talking, and, then, there’s a family hand to hold. Many Nicaraguans live their entire lives in the home they were raised in, bringing in spouses and kids as they come along.”

“That’s pretty different. Maybe we have varying definitions of ‘family’?”

“Absolutely. ‘Family’ means security in Nicaragua. Here, most try to escape, to establish separate living quarters, at least, as soon as we can, to be independent. As another friend said to me, “most people resent their families!” That’s too generalized, of course. Maybe, though, because we stress self-sufficiency, while Nicaraguans push family solidarity, the cultures divide, even in our sleeping patterns: yet, both are valuable, cultural-survival models and both are learned behaviors.

We can learn from each other to grow beyond that division, to be both independent and One. In 1993, when I first slept with the Betancos, I grabbed for their “extended-ness,” a feeling I’d lost in the years since I left New Jersey in the early seventies. I adopted a new set of parents, eight brothers and sisters, and 49 nieces and nephews, to fill that empty space. Now that I’ve built a private suite at my sister’s house, I choose to leave the adjoining door ajar at night, in case someone, seeing my light on, needs a talk or a cuddle. Since the rafters of the house are open so the bats can gobble the mosquitos, all hear any sound, anyway, so why not? Privacy’s an ‘inside’ thing down there. And, up here, I’m a more open Dad and Pop-Pop, building family, since I’ve shared my space with campesinos, deep in the heart of Nicaragua.”

Gracias, CenterDoug

Sleeping Space

2008-09-06T15:29:00.002-06:00

FROM HERE TO THERE
“Sleeping Space” ©Doug Evans Betanco 2008
For La Tribuna (463 words)

In a chat on the porch in Glenwood Springs—I share a 3-story rental house full of private and communal spaces with three other single adults—Tex, one of my housemates, said, “I’ve chosen a room of my own for years. I need a place to close out the world, for solitude. A while back, in Utah, I lived in an unheated space in the basement all winter rather than share a warm master bedroom suite upstairs, even with my best friend: I need privacy, not a dorm.”

“Me, too. Even in my marriages,” I remarked, “I’d want a door I could close. Privacy’s an entitlement here, but not in nightly Nicaragua, where most people don’t want it.”

“Huh?”

“Listen, Tex. When I first visited Teote in 1993, in the house of my now-adopted peasant family, the Betancos, they gave me their only single room. The eight family members slept in the other cuarto, in hammocks, because I also had the only bed. Hosts in our Sister City were required to provide Brigadistas with privacy. Some couldn’t: their casas held no separate sleeping room. ‘Norteamericanos,’ they understood, ‘need space,’ whereas Nicaragüense ‘prefer company,’ especially when asleep.”

“In the fifteen years I’ve travelled south, I’ve always had a separate room, without asking. When I moved to my sister’s house south of town, near the campo, they’d built a space inside their sala with black plastic walls. Everyone else slept two to a bed in the other room, as usual, and they assured me they wouldn’t want it otherwise. ‘Too many ghosts in the night to sleep alone,’ they said. ‘How can you do it?’”

“Some of that,” said Ted, “might be hospitality. We shift beds to accommodate guests here, too.”

“Cultural diversity is working, as well, and it starts very early. Most everyone I know up here was raised from birth separated from their parents, even from other siblings; in Nicaragua, hardly any mother would sleep apart from her babies, and, as the children grow, they just shift from Mom’s bed to that of the kids, in the same room as their parents. No one’s ever heard of a playpen or a crib or a nursery, much less infant daycare. 24/7, family is holding the baby, until she’s walking and talking, and, then, there’s a family hand to hold.”

“That’s pretty different.”

“Maybe it’s because we stress self-sufficiency, while they push family solidarity: both are valuable, cultural-survival models. We can learn from each other to be independent and One: now, while I’ve built a private suite at my sister’s house, I leave the adjoining door ajar at night, just in case someone needs a talk or a cuddle. Up here, I’m a more open Dad and Pop-Pop, since I’ve shared my space with campesinos, deep in the heart of Nicaragua.”

That One Angry Guy Is Me

2008-08-06T18:14:00.018-06:00

It's been sixteen days since my brief experience with the young Nordic man punching the River Path Sign in Two Rivers Park (See past three posts for the story). Since then, I've invested myself wholely in that moment, for it feels very numinous and uncanny to me, good signs that further investigation would be meaningful. I've wondered if, with my pronounced ability to imagine, I might have invented the episode whole cloth, but, no, it really happened, down to his rant as I remember it and the sheen of his blondness. It's led me to much wondering, pondering, reflecting and to so many pertinent questions.

Why was I the only witness?
Where did my courage in that moment to confront him come from?
Why was the river striped red and blue that Sunday on the RiverPath?
What does the sign really say?
When do "real" and metaphoric life merge like those rivers into a greater swell?

I went back to the Sign that evening: I not only wanted to check the damage but also to see if the sign had anything on it that could inspire That One Angry Guy to his punching. It's heavily covered with thick plastic, very scratched but still transparent enough to see what's underneath. There's a nice map of the RiverPath's winding trail along the Roaring Fork up to 23rd Street (these signs need updating) and a brief history of the Path's process to creation, the matching grants and private donations, a list of the Town Council members: nothing I could see except its innocence. While I know his actions mystify me and I don't choose to share his mind, I can imagine that perhaps he saw in the sign "our" desire to please ourselves when others in the world are in agonies of starvation and peasant-decimation? But, that is me. I don't know, but he clearly took the sign to represent "You People!" and needed to punch "us" from his own agony.

Perhaps it was just for me, seeking a story and always seeking "me" and my fit with the world?

At any rate, as I do very often with my experiences in our world of the senses, I decided to take on the "real" experience as if I had dreamed it, caught it as a dream, journalled it, then worked to interpret it, in Jungian fashion. This allows me to see the interaction as a mirror of what is also happening in my psyche, because, in dream analysis, all the participants and the dreamer are parts of the dreamer's psychic makeup. In other words, That One Angry Guy and Walking Doug are parts of myself, interacting, for meaning, insight, potential change.

There is one angry young man in me, as I discovered this year in Nicaragua, and I've been working to transform that anger into greater gratitude, as a result of other dream work that has inspired me to continue building my life towards empowering a culture of gratitude, in my home, former school culture, and now, in my writing. That work is the psychic context of the dream. Other dreamwork has also invested my summer with delight, as I'm actively actualizing my strong and youthful masculine energy after years of denying "him" because it usually got me in trouble. I've been riding on a Harley and being bold in a new way. Another part of the context.

The meeting of these parts of myself occurs north of the river walk bridge, resulting in a short conversation. We talk, but I'm dismissed, as if irrelevant. The young man stays there briefly, punching the sign, then disappears, while the elder crosses over to the Glenwood (home) side of the bridge over the unifying waters of two rivers, one silty, the other clear, on his pathway. He says he feels "free."

In dream analysis lingo, when my young masculine meets my wiser mature masculine, in this dream, what seems to matter most is that the mature "me" is listening to the younger, asking the pertinent questions, looking for connection from this wild angry guy, also seeking connection, even in his anger. The "Wise Walker" is building bridges of communication, a metaphor I have empowered with great significance in my life. The fact that the real experience happened on the north side of a bridge leading to home, south of the bridge, is so numinous to me that I gape. I am a bridge-builder, and I am "bridging" in this waking dream. There's an attempt at dialogue, but the young man is wary, and chooses to return to his physical way of releasing his anger. Wise Walker Douglas departs, gratefully in one piece, rather empowered by his boldness, but not before receiving a new central metaphor from the mingling of the rivers' colors under the bridge, ultimately a yin-yang symbol of the balancing of the tension of the opposites that keeps me living in the Now, empowered.

The symbol is saying to me that the angry red energy of the young male and the clear blue compassion of the elder are one and the same energy in the bigger picture; they are bridged by the power of the heart (the bridge, a gift of Glenwood's people) seeking connection over the tumultuous river of emotions (water in dreams is the emotional nature). One side expresses It in hate; the other side expresses It in love. It is It; the heart bridge unifies them: Listening to my young masculine in compassion rather than in neglect, ego, fear or denial, can empower me affirmatively. Listening to "him" will make him less angry, work towards a more harmonious future.

Affirmation, to me, is not pollyanna positivism: it's the pull of the current of the river merging, the positive and the negative working together to empower. Honestly, who really knows what "POSITIVE" and "NEGATIVE" are? It's all culturally-laden value judgement.

What counts next is what I've learned from this surreal experience, to express myself henceforth from that affirmative space in between, calling on the young male energy to further the thrust of love and gratitude in my life, apt collaborators. I will honor that teenage masculine energy, and this will energize this old "me." What I do with that unified energy will change my life in a very affirmative way, from my choosing to further my integration by listening to the disordered (though none-less-valued) chaos of my "young masculine."

My life is simply extraordinary.

Gracias, CenterDoug, free in the current that pushes the rivers to mingle.

Analysis of "Punching Signs"

2008-08-01T23:09:00.007-06:00

I had an experience with a very mysterious and punchy stranger, one who moved and revolted me, at once. I'd intentionally set out riverward to find a subject to write from, on my walk, because my earlier excursions there had led to my gold standard, "Pushing the River." He happened along, punching the River Walk sign (see the past two posts for clarity). Perhaps I wouldn't've been so curious, had I already a story for publication? But I was ravenous for one, and intentionally set, so thank God, it happened.

Over a week, the story unfolded to me. But, I must be honest, for every day of that week, I thought the piece was done and sent it on to my editors, unprofessionally. Now, I feel so foolish for bothering them with my undone stuff, but, at the time, each time, I felt "done," finished, ready to start another. But, NO!

It took my getting to focus with that particular experience--such a long time coming--and it did not happen to me until I remembered the sight of the river beribonned in blue and red to the west for at least half a mile. Zonk! Focus. The yin and the yang, together as one in the river, and me standing over the confluence, observing, right in the flow in the middle. Bonk. How long it takes for me to get it! I flow, midstream, now, "free in the current that pushes the rivers to mingle."

It came together, then, in a way that allowed me to edit the piece from that wondrous metaphor, and to wonder at how long it had taken me to get it before. That One Angry Guy and I, flowing in the river together. I've decided he was an "angel in disguise," just for me. I'd been processing earlier the shift from being angry about the state of the poor in Nicaragua in my writing to being grateful for all my experiences, and Mr. "Angry Guy" showed up. modeling exactly what I did not want to become myself, then disappeared. How strange?! How wonderful, for me. What I've learned! It would probably have happened anyway, but dealing with it in writing has pushed the river.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Writing Lesson

2008-07-31T12:27:00.008-06:00

[CenterDoug Notes: This post and the last one, both entitled "Punching Signs," constitute for me a perfect lesson in the art of revision, as well, the fine art of achieving focus in a piece. These last two drafts--14 in all--of this piece, will be published in Spanish and English newspapers here in Glenwood Springs in August. I learned the value of cutting fairly late in the process of "Signs," but it's something I've known forever; writing for publication sometimes forces the practice, and I say "Hooray!" I'd sent the 805 word final draft to my editors, one of whom asked me to consider concising it because of space concerns in his paper (Gracias, Luis Polar, editor of La Tribuna: CenterDoug). Did you know that translation from English to Spanish usually adds 10-15% more words to the length of an essay, mainly due to more formalized constructions, such as possessives and contractions: "He's a horse's ass" becomes "He is the ass of his horse." Count the words). Espanol uses no apostrophes. Endlessly interesting.

Anyway, I took up the challenge and went at the piece thinking I'd eliminate what distracted the reader's focus from the focus of the story, really, living in the now, in the uniting flow past division. I whacked out humor; needless adjectives; detail, that did not serve the focus; and concised some expressions from five words to three. Darned if I don't love the shorter piece (669 words) the most. What I took out is not "wrong" writing, just "long and unfocused" writing: the result is a more impactful and direct fable that sings instead of playing "too many notes" to serve its intention. My friend Wewer wrote that the abridgement really worked, because she "didn't miss anything." I think it's gone from a strange little ramble to a power walk, through excision.

I gained a new rule for revision: once the piece has told me what I'm focusing on, I need to go once more to it and concise it to that focus. I'd figured out the conceptual level and movement of the piece by draft 10, including the incredible shot of the river divided in half by the red silt carried by the Colorado at the confluence with the Roaring Fork into two ribbons of blue and red water, flowing as a river. However, I was in love with the humor, the somewhat ironic moments between That One Angry Guy and me, which truly happened. In fact, hard to believe, I left out several really choice elements of his list, as truly offensive. I loved having Arnold Schwarzeneggar in the piece, and many of the "signs" of non-verbal communication I'd added as a subtext. But, they weren't adding "communication in the compassionate moment" to the essay, and that's what I finally figured out I was writing about. Ay-Yi-Yi, a complex process, writing is.

In this post I've highlighted new additions only. In the longer draft below in this blog, I've highlighted what I took out. It's a study in intentionality, tone and focus in writing, a good place for observant students of writing to gain much. CD]

Punching Signs
(669 words) (highlighted words and phrases added during the abridgement, for tighter coherence)

On my walk past the crystalline Roaring Fork, along the muddy Colorado, I chugged out of Two Rivers Park near the walk-bridge and witnessed a fit, Nordic guy, maybe 25, punching the River Trail sign. He whacked it five times, hard, head-butted it once, grunting “You people!” with every jab. Then, he looked up, stabbed his finger at me and said, “You people are too weak to fight for your country!”

I said, “What?” and stepped towards him, hand cocked over my ear, curious.

“You stupid people can’t see your country’s being stolen, much less fight for it!” His blazing eyes bored directly into mine. They seemed clear.

“I beg to differ,” I said, calmly. “Millions of Americans fight peaceably for our nation and the world, every single day, each in his or her own . . . .”

He cut me off, in English so well-enunciated I knew it was his second language: “Your government’s a pack of thieves, rich on the poor world’s blood! Your country’s a snakepit of unbelievers, coloreds of every shade, illegal aliens, Spanish-only speakers! Drug fiends, perverts, liberationist bitches, peaceniks . . . ."

“Wait a minute! Pacificists aren’t weak; women and Hispanics . . . .”

But he kept on, unhearing: “. . . rapists, wasters, corporate crooks, lawyers, bean counters, the dregs of the world! Men who think they’re women, and women who think they’re men: Abominations, stains on God’s Living People! They’re stealing you blind! We’ll pull them all down!”

“Who’s ‘We’?” I wondered. He'd taken a prophet’s stance, but what a hateful pulpit! Since he’d stopped bashing the sign, though, I dove back in: “What you say might be true, but, why are you so angry, my friend? What hurt burns within you?” His eyes grew wary. “You’ve sand-blasted all I know,” I whispered. “I don’t believe we deserve it! Why abuse us and wallop our sign? It’s your park, too.”

He didn't want to listen. “You people ruin the sacred-holy World of God, old man, and don’t even care!”

He’d got my blood up—“Old man,” indeed!--so I breathed it down. “It takes all kinds of tolerant people to make up “my” America,” I said, “and most of us care, very deeply.”

I reckon I’ve got feistier in my sixties. Earlier, I might’ve scuttled past long before this, but anger, now, cries for help. However, he broke our eye contact, shook his blond hair furiously, and returned to battering the sign.

I’d been dismissed.

Sometimes, it’s wise to read the signs: I backed away, with a “Namaste” and a “Peace” and a “God bless you,” and bridged the river, musing. “Why’d I witness that, I wonder? Such projection! Does he know he’s so fearful, to spew such hate? What a list! What a Nazi! Should I call the police?” When I looked back over my shoulder, he’d vanished.

I forged on with my calorie burn. “He’s hurt himself worse than that sign. He’s flooded with pain, yet, even in his special madness,” I marveled, “I never felt he’d physically hurt me. He sought a connection, but, then, he withdrew.” The two rivers joined, west of the bridge, a confluence of clarity and silt, blue and red ribbons in a greater river.

While a happy stream of humanity flows by me daily in this global playground, That One Angry Guy just won’t float away. Since most of us are on his list, it’s wise to know that some among us do revile us, beyond reason or cause. It’s the human condition, a part of the river. Hating them back makes the world even hotter, burning us double. Rather, I’d choose my heart-waters for protection. Peaceful ways bring healing change by leading me to pools of compassion, my greatest strength, changing me.

While sign punching still mystifies me, one thing I know, gratefully, in my core: I sure wouldn’t choose to get stuck in the ooze of “his” Nightmare America; I’d rather be flowing midstream in “mine,” free in the current that pushes the rivers to mingle.

[CenterDoug Notes: I've chosen to publish this draft in both papers.]

Punching Signs

2008-07-28T23:58:00.021-06:00

On my walk past the crystalline Roaring Fork, the muddy Colorado, dreaming about my bonded Nicaraguan family, I chugged out of Two Rivers Park near the walk-bridge and witnessed a fit, Nordic guy with a backpack, punching the map on the River Trail sign like The Terminator, with vigor. He whacked it at least five times, head-butted once, grunting “You people!” with every jab. Then he looked up, noticed I’d turned to watch after passing, stabbed his finger at me and said, “You people are too weak to fight for your own country!”

I said, “What?” and took a step towards him, hand cocked over my ear.

“You stupid people can’t see your country’s being stolen, much less fight for it!” His blazing eyes bored directly into mine. They seemed very clear.

“I beg to differ,” I said, calmly. “Millions of Americans fight peaceably for our nation and the world, every single day, each in his or her own . . . .”

He cut me off, in English so well-enunciated I knew it was his second language, gained from schooling in another country: “Your government’s a pack of lying thieves, rich on the poor world’s blood! Your country’s a snakepit of unbelievers, coloreds of every shade, illegal aliens, Spanish-only speakers! Drug fiends, perverts, peaceniks . . . . “

“Wait, just a gosh-darn minute! Pacificists are not weak, and I . . . .”

But he just kept on, unhearing: “. . . rapists, indolent wasters, vile corporate crooks, lawyers, bean counters, the dregs of the world so honored here! So many men who think they’re women, and women who think they’re men: Abominations! Dens of vipers, zombies, stains on the world of God’s Living People! We’ll pull them all down!”

“Who’s ‘We’?” I wondered. He'd taken the stance of a prophet, but what a hateful pulpit! Since he’d stopped bashing the sign, though, and hadn’t punched me instead, I figured we’d made some progress in dialogue, so I dove back in: “Some of what you say might be true, but, really, why are you so angry, friend? What hurt burns within you? You’ve sand-blasted all I know, friend, including me,” I whispered to his eyes. “I don’t believe we deserve it! On such a clear day, why abuse us and wallop our public sign? It’s your park, too, yours freely.”

He clearly hadn’t heard my questions or didn't want to listen, more likely. “You people ruin the sacred-holy World and Word of God, old man, and don’t even care!”

He’d got my blood up—“Old man,” indeed!--so I breathed it down. “It takes all kinds of tolerant people to make up “my” America,” I said, “and most of us care, very deeply.”

I reckon I’ve got feistier in my sixties, somewhat surprising. In the past I might’ve scuttled past long before this, but anger, now, cries for help. However, he broke our eye contact, shook his blond hair furiously at my apparent weakness, and returned to battering the sign like Schwarzeneggar.

I’d been dismissed.

Sometimes, it’s wise to read the signs: I backed away, with a “Namaste” and a “Peace” and a “Bless you,” turned and bridged the river, bemused. “Why’d I witness that? Such projection! Does he know he’s so fearful, to spew such generalized hate? To point me out as evil, a total stranger? And what a filthy list! From a guest, for God’s sake! What a Nazi! Should I call the police?” When I turned to look back from the end of the bridge, he’d disappeared.

I shook my muddled head, forged on with burning calories. “He’ll hurt himself far worse than that poor sign. He’s flooded with pain, in and out. Yet, even in his special madness,” I marveled, “I never felt he’d physically hurt me. He sought a connection, but, then, he withdrew.” The two rivers joined, west of the bridge, a confluence of clarity and rain-washed silt, two ribbons in a greater river.

While a stream of loving humanity flows by me every day in this global playground, That One Angry Guy and his righteous intolerance just won’t float away. Since most Americans fall somewhere on his list, it’s wise to know that some among us revile us, beyond reason or cause. It’s the human condition, part of the river. Hating them back, fighting fire with our own blowtorches, makes the world even hotter, burning us double. Rather, I’d choose my heart-waters for protection. Peaceful ways bring change by changing me, diving in pools of clear compassion, my greatest strength.

While punching a park sign still mystifies me, one thing I know in my core: I sure wouldn’t choose to get stuck in the ooze of “his” Nightmare America; I’d rather be flowing midstream in “mine,” free in the current that pushes the rivers to mingle.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Pushing the River

2008-06-24T14:27:00.015-06:00

While on my power walk down the Roaring Fork bike path in Glenwood last week, I sat on a bench, winded, watching the snowmelt flood by, and thought, once again, “I’ve chosen a great place to live!” Since 1973, after a 15 year westward migration from New Jersey, I’ve called the High Country my home, and, in 1993, I fit Glenwood’s Sister City, Teote, Nicaragua, into that space as well. “Home” is as our hearts define it: mine now extends to all the Americas and out to the rest of the world. It’s made me a bigger person.

A young Hispanic man sat down on the bench. “I recognize your face, Sr. Evans Betanco,” he said, “from your Post Independent articles, and I have some questions. My name is Noë.” He spoke in heavily-accented English. I jumped at the chance to practice my Spanish, and he, his second language, so we jabbered away bilingually, a global delight. Then, he asked me if war still raged in Nicaragua, a question I’m asked often, with a complex answer.

“No,” I said, “there’s no war, not with mortars and guns. The Contra War’s been over since 1989. But yes, even so, there’s economic war between the rich and poor worlds, a vast tension from in- and outside Nicaragua, with no real middle: as a result, Nica’s ruined in all but spirit, perhaps irreversibly.”

“It’s the same in Chihuahua for most of my family: not many dreams for campesinos, except to move north,” the young man remarked. “If there were hope for the poor within Mexico, I probably wouldn’t be in this fragrant valley,” he said, smelling the coldness of snow in the river, the sweet rocket blooming. “I love it here, too, but I’d live where that hummingbird’s been, at the house of my grandfather. I’d be helping him plant corn on the hillsides, running with his horses.”

“Ah, yes,” I nodded. “Many forces converge to keep the poor in hopeless poverty, south of Texas. The Sandinistas triumphed in 1979, but their freedoms were stolen away, again, by external economic pressure and an illegal travesty of an American-sponsored war.”

“That’s sad.” His eyes followed a stick of driftwood carried on the surface of the water.

“The global economy needs the entrenched rural poor to do its agricultural handwork for slave wages, to keep prices down in the north,” said the college professor in me. “There’s no opportunity allowed. So, rather than revolution, which no one wants now, a third of Teote’s youth have come up the rivers for hope, fighting against the world’s current. They work here to purchase freedom down there for their families, with money they can’t earn in the calculated exploitation of Nicaragua’s poor.”

“It is the same in the mountain valleys of Chihuahua.” Relentlessly, the river rushed to dwindle in California.

“It’s the same all over the Southern Hemisphere. Humanity's witnessing the greatest migration of peoples ever, from Africa and Asia, from Central and South America, moving north to countries with work and money, not just here in the States.”

“And sending much of their earnings back south,” said Noë, “to feed grandparents, to buy land for a better future. My job after high school has bought me an acre in Mexico. I’m a landowner now; in a few years, it’ll be in my name. If I’d stayed in Chihuahua, I’d own just the second-hand clothes on my back.”

“We’re freedom fighters, you and I, each in his way. If you’re any indication, mi amigo, I’d say the Hispanics are winning the war, this time.”

We smiled at each other. He straightened with pride, glowed with the prescience of youth, and whispered, “Both sides will win in the end, over time, you’ll see, my friend. It’s not a war. We want only to live, to breathe free, to contribute.” He bowed his head as a breeze whiffed across the Roaring Fork, cooling our faces.

I felt like a very young man for a moment.

The river pushed past. The rocks in its channel tumbled, grinding, clicking beneath the swish of its waters.

Gracias, CenterDoug

I Do Love My Ducks: Do You?

2008-06-21T21:17:00.014-06:00

I do love my ducks, living ones in Teote, art ones here, and metaphysical ones all over, joying-up existence. I raise them in Nicaragua for fun, for food, for feathers; I collect Duck-Art; I've even been gifting special friends up here with membership to our "Brother/Sisterhood of Ducks," a club of graceful survivors: I love how all these ducks ride waves, weather storms, firmly waddle on land and fly transcendently above it, all in line. I'm a Duck, and darn proud to be. I've earned it.

Not that ducks are always noble: when 4, I climbed then fell into a pen fluttering with big black menacing ducks that didn't like me at all. I came close to losing an eye. "A punishment for being too curious," it was said. Yikes! It was the late 40's. Still, I've understood "pecked-to-death-by-ducks," most of my conscious life. We all have Critics pecking deep inside us, as well. Without? We live in a fractious, judgmental worldliness here: it's much easier to criticize others than to be self-responsible and grow. Good Lordy, I've done my share of pecking! Now, mostly, I’ve given it up as twisty, useless ego projection, and I forgive myself.

Too, my sweet ducks poop day and night, conspicuously. It is great fertilizer, but they tell every other duck about it, every time they do it. Sometimes, in addition, they gobble garden plants to the stems, forcing duck segregation on my Nica land, "Tierra Mia." But, man, I love to see them waddle past my feet with yellow ducklings close behind, so I let a pair of large whites wander, gorging on swarms of hoppers and leaf-cutting ants. "Pato" and "Pata," the duck king and queen of Nicaragua, are Cool Insecticides, with charming and delicious offspring.

On my first trip to Teote, in 1993, there were many synchronicities between the Betancos and me beyond our mutual reverence for the Archangel Michael, a biggie. Similarly "big," mi padre don Ramon raises special ducks out on his farm at Quacamaya [Would an Englishman pronounce this Quack-a-maya? Ha. Kingdom of the Ducks!] "Quack-quack" sings to me: then, it helped the bonding process; now, we eat the best Cumin Duckling, whenever I'm there. Add that Teote's a northern gardener's idea of Paradise, where you push a flowering branch into wet soil, to grow a new tree. Do you get the picture? From the first minute to now, I've been one happy Duck in Nicaragua, even when times were hard, as in 2000, when a machete slasher stalked the town at night, or after Hurricane Mitch killed all livestock on the farm except the ducks. Go, Quackers!

I've about 100 in my Art-Duck Collection plus a few loons since I'm crazy as one, as we all know, or, at least, "way out of the box," as one local businesswoman exclaimed, praising me highly. An odd duck, es cierto. I've got carved wood antiques, usuable decoys, pewter and glass ones, cheap Duck ceramics, rubber duckies and many soapstone quakers from Nicaragua. There's also a red metal windup duck on a tricycle and a cute metal-duckie train, a drake and three ducklings that bobble. One of the best bargain-hunters in Colorado, also a Sister Duck, keeps her eye out for more of Dougie's Duckies.

A while ago, as well, I inherited a major collection of stuffed-animal ducks, covered in every kind of colorful cloth, but I distributed them to the kid Betancos this year, feeling a 63 year-old man with a house full of "Teddy Ducks" was just too eccentric. Characteristically, the kids’ mothers stuffed them pronto into clear plastic bags to protect them from the dust of Teote. “Don’t let the pato de don Douglas get dirty!” they admonished. I’m hoping, though, the kids sneak them out in their hammocks and snuggle tight, calming the terrors of dark Nicaragua, where “wild things” really are. That thought brings a whiff of rosy peace to my own nights, up here.

I've often wondered why I have this obsession, especially given my close call as a child. I could have developed a phobia. Instead, I love them. Go figure. Perhaps it's just the similarity 'twixt "Doug" and "Duck" which grabs me? But, as with all, there must be something deeper. Years ago, a Southern Ute shaman-friend of mine declared the duck my spirit guide, my totem: he gave me a quartz duckling to hold, along with a cross, for protected inspiring while diving in the well of the Creative Unconscious: I’ve found my pearl-diving magnified, as I’m willing to stay down there longer, breathing from within. I carry them as well in my pocket with my cell phone when I venture into bloody Nicaragua. Between my duckling, my Buddha-Belly-Stone and my crucifix, I’ve become a braver soul, more authentic, even here in the heights of Colorado. A mighty "Quack!" can work wonders. [Check out a part of my collection at the top of the photo queue!]

Gracias, CenterDoug

Reintegrating

2008-06-21T07:16:00.002-06:00

I've been in Colorado now for 6 weeks, after 3 months in Nicaragua. I've spent most of that time gardening with a frenzy, writing with a purpose, and playing, playing, playing, like a boy freed from school for the summer. Perhaps retirement is second childhood, but the creaks of age, when I bend over to lift a plant, remind me to stay in the Now. The price of gas here, 4 bucks a gallon, astounds the cheapskate part of me, though I know it's almost ten in Europe. I'm spending far less time in my car, walking far more often. My garret has been transformed to a monk's cell of simplicity (compare accompanying foto with the same view in January, before my trip, at the bottom of the foto column). I had to get to clarity of vision in my own living space, so my guest room has become a storage room of glitzy stuff, art, and process center for a Porch Sale at Palmer House in late July or early August. Check the fotos of my garden in Spring!

Gracias, CenterDoug

This Particular Kindness, Part 5

2008-06-04T00:27:00.000-06:00

Cuento 5: “Mañanita”

4:25am [Typing, ecstatic]: Marta and Cesar can’t sleep, hear my pacing, and whisper, “Douglas, café?” over the inside wall.

“Agua,” I answer, blow out my light, lock la puerta. My stomach churns from all the café and bile. Flashlight and cup en mi manos, I cross the darkened solar. No luna. I click my foco on.

“Cuento 1” will have to do for the Internet this morning. The rest? Too politically incorrect. I just can’t face the terror. Or bring myself to pray for OHG.

Kíler, the family perro, growls, snorts, starts wagging, his tail thump-thumping my leg. He’s stationed where I used to pee, before mi pichinga. “This dog knows who butters his tortilla,” I snort. Most do, in Nicaragua and in the States, but here, with a difference: understanding “gracias,” they’re grateful for butter, since they almost never get it.

I wait outside the kitchen door, click off the foco, my shoulders slumped with metaphysical defeat. I can’t see a foot in front of me. There’s not a streetlight for miles. Slasher territory, es cierto. On goes the foco. Cesar’s removing la barricada within, their night’s further caution: a lock’s too expensive, since it’d need attaching to a brand new puerta.

I hear Marta light a candela. Her door finally opens. I enter, sit. The barricade goes back up.
"You're sad again, mi hermano." Cesar knows me inside-out. So does Marta. "It's true, es verdad, but I'm happy to be with you, familia." We loll, wiped but smiling, in red plastic sillas, drink each other’s salud, one more time, in the Nica candle’s glow.

"And, to my haunted government, peace, por favor, gracias por todo," I whisper. We nod, wryly, grin, clink our cups.

“Douglas, have you used "Pichinguita," yet?” Cesar laughs at his new coinage.

“She's full,” I reply, on the beat, and once again, los trés are muchachos, giggling under hands, not to wake the niños. Or, sleeping in la sala, just over the wall, my Betanco parents, sighing in the Nicaraguan noche. I gulp mi agua. "Ay, Pichinguita!"

Don Moncho talks in his sleep. “Mi amor,” he murmurs, at almost 80. What a macho!

Palomas coo, flutter in the rafters.

We’re startled by a bolo, roaring out his drunkenness too near, outside on the road: this sets off Kíler, ferocious Chow from Hell en la noche, and dainty vicious Pinta, black and white whippet, who, in eternal round, spark the roosters’ crowing, early, before even a blip of a promising glimmer, yet, in the eastern sky. Marta asks if Cesar’s got his machete. He checks his bota.

She listens quietly. “So many voices, in here, out there.” She sips her café. “Can you hear them en la vienta, Douglas, in the wind? Oh, they cause us no harm, gliding east and west, south and north, a country of whispers. En noche, they sing. Douglas, can you hear?”

“Only the breeze, mi hermana.”

“Douglas,” says Cesar, “they’re the spirits of sleeping campesinos, whispering as we do here, but from their dreams. Common as pichingas, they sing so bravo from their hearts, so hushed now, from pobre to pobrecito.”

“Cesar, mi hermano, what do they say, amigo?”

“Listen, hombre. Just listen.”

A macaw screeches in the kapoks down by the rio Limon.

Palm trees rustle in the dawning swell.

I hear it, though not in the wind, as Marta’d said. Rather, in my breath, the loudest stillness:

"Estoy libre! Estoy libre! Si, si, I am free!”

It leads me to a certain rapture. For one-sweet-endless minuto, everything is right.

"Por favor, la barricada, y gracias, hermanos. I need to get back to my writing." Then, comes a distant ángelus, the bells of welcome to the sun. Ay, Chihuahua, this miracle place! Dawn breaks in Teote, lights the restless heartland of a freer Nicaragua.

This Particular Kindness, Part 4

2008-06-04T00:25:00.000-06:00

Cuento 4: “Breathlessly-Deranged Heresy!” (841 words)

12:10pm [Typing] Cesar heads for su cama, with a yawn and a “Buenas noches.” I bolt la puerta, smiling, with a crowd of thoughts and mi pichinga. There’s much to do. My fingers peck and hunt, seeking jewels from the dust of Teote.

Cicadas chant, low in the trees.

I’ve lit a candela. Though it brings insectas to my writing table, it appeals to my sense of the romantica, and I need it. I can't get Noam Chomsky's 9/11 writings out of my head. I just reread them, earlier this week. What a truthteller when America needs to hear it most!

1:22am [Typing] The plight of peasantry keeps coming back, a gusano worming into invective against this outhouse hole of peasant decimation and politico chicanery, brought home to where I live with the Sandinista peasants.

It’s hard to write fiction when my intellect is so piqued, and too didactic for a story; yet, unfortunately, I’m a part of this overflowing pichinga! I’m also an active global citizen from the ground up, since I first saw a photo of the Earth from the Moon in the 60’s and fell mystically in love; I resent what modern terrorist states have done, completely beyond my understanding, to my planet and its people. I clearly need to find a way to shake this outrage out!

Ah, mi amigos, forgive me, urina jokes have been cosmically huge here today, with all the locos trying to cheer me up. I must have a big “Triste” sign on my forehead. I’m un viejito with a heart condition and life’s a tragi-cosmic joke, I remember, to keep from charging Arriba on Triunfo, demanding the candidates stifle this breathlessly-deranged heresy of hypocrisy, this “War on Terror,” when the enemy, to the rest of the world, unfortunately, is us.

We’re not supposed to know that in America, though millions do, so keep it fairly hush-hush, por favor.

As an American of conscience, I’m finding it difficult to face my reflection in the mirror in the morning: Todo el mundo thinks we’ve lost our hearts, minds and, even worse, our moral credibility as a nation.

What a wild goose chase we’ve been led on since the atrocity gigantica of 9-ll, when the peasantry here were first to their knees, praying for the victims, in solidarity with the American pobrecitos during their days of peasant terror. Here, there were special prayer services in all the pequenos--small Catholic prayer groups--in town. The padre from Jalapa couldn’t get here for un misa, because, he said, all Jalapa was en la Iglesia, crying and praying in solidarity with the American people. The world became us, for a day, and many days thereafter.

However, it was soon business-as-usual in the Bubble, with a couple hundred thousand Afghani peasants decimated, the rest left neglectfully to starve; then Iraq, mass decimation, while we re-focused our terrified people on chasing down a hateful dingbat like Osama or a filth of a Saddam Hussein, both our former creatures, nonetheless. All that scapegoat behavior, to keep us from looking primero in our own haunted mirror. We demand this of other countries, by international law we ignore when the judgement’s not in our favor.

Loco, total.

If a student came into my office exhibiting OHG’s past behavior, I’d be counseling him to curb his sociopathic tendencies, to balance his checkbook with respect for human dignity. I’d ask him what he really fears and I’d suggest he handle his terrors very lightly. If he felt violent, I’d tell him to hightail it back to my office pronto, for further training in mutual compassion, which needs to be learned and practiced.

I’d tell him to act like a campesino, praying for all victims of terror, despite his own bitter wounds.

Ah, that’s it! Gracias a Diós! My writing’s led me to a peasant’s way out of my heart’s dilemma: on 9-11, the campesinos prayed for America. Can I do less? It will, es cierto, enlighten my vigil. Ah, sí, I'm warming to this task already. Ay, Chihuahua, though, do I have to raise up OHG?

3:30am [Typing whatever comes to mind]: I’m tired, muy consado. I’ve almost decided to throw most of my night’s writing away. Too didactic for a story. Mostly, I can’t find a way to take it farther, lift it higher. The subject’s too heavy, the tone, pubescent-choir-camp-sniggering: the “pee” stuff seems shameful, the “terrorista” plea for prayer, perhaps, even dangerously forthright, though both are completely nicaragüense and “me,” totalmente.

The fact of the matter is—Dammit!—I’m afraid, like the rest of the cringing world, of “Spin and Terror,” the rampaging two-headed dragon, so fine-pointedly expert at silencing Truth, worldwide. Dammit-all-to-hell! Dínamo del Diablo!

So, nothing’s worked for quite a while. I’m stalking an ending, to ground and send us flying, not only in the blasted work, but, also, in me. In the past, I’d have walked the block a couple times, una meditación caminando, but not now. Urina total!

Ayúdeme, Diós, por favor! Help the American people!

Ah, there we go. some release, there, gracias.

Gratefully, I hear a whisper, at 3:35am, in mi candlelit cuarto, in darkened Nicaragua.

This Particular Kindness, Part 3

2008-06-04T00:23:00.000-06:00

Cuento 3: “Poetry Reading” (805 words)

11:25pm [Typing, with one finger] Cesar’s patient, expectant rocking, his pichinga-tossing, light up when he finally sees me smile.

“Ay, mi hermano,” I say. “We hombres have done some very pissy things to each other. Perhaps, we need pichingas nuevas.” We chuckle, but he feels my pain, still written on my face, I guess.

“You’re sad. Lo siento, Douglas. I’ll recite your pichinga poem.” I try to bury a billion corpses with a laugh. It’s hard, but I’ll manage, with help from my friend who knows me.

My poem’s about the Pichinga Dream. All Nicaraguans are poetas, or, at least, love poesía, one more thing we have in common. It’s a ludicrous poema. I wrote it en ingles in ten minutes, for laughs, though I translated it pronto, so my family could share the joke. It flew across their dryness like a fresh wind full of rain. Cesar proudly memorized the English, adding to his machismo that he speaks the tricky language now. We worked for a week on la pronunciación, the delivery, so he deserves his pride.

Cesar, rising, begins:

“The Chalice of Milagros”
by Doug Evans Betanco

Come to me, little safeguard, pichinga,
Friend of darkness, heaven-sent in Cesar’s
Dream. Plastic miracle, pichinga, mi diamante:
Bright as oro at night, then changing--yellow
chameleon!--to Arcángelico blanco, oy,
At daylight’s pouring. No more fear have I,
No more terroristas; no machetes at my eyes,
No more bolos en la noche. Ay, Gracias!
Mi pichinga, brother’s gift de Diós,
Little peepot, cross mi cama en paz!
Then I will, es cierto, sleep more wholly,
Libre, seguramente, in all seven directions.

“I love this poema,” he says, sitting en triunfo, tapping his corazón.

“I, too, mi hermano. Fits the occasion, but it could be better poetry.”

“Es bonita, hermano.” We finger-tap the tops of our shoulders, feeling the frisson of angel wings. It’s a holy Betanco momento.

“I’ll give you my “Fluff,” about planting seeds as a poet. It’s in English, too. I give you the 'Quiet Voice of the New Millennium.'" I stand, face the rocker. I love to share poemas, here, especialmente.

“Fluff” (2008)

Look! That cottonwood seed in genuflect
Might know where it’s going, what breeze
Lifts it to frames around windows, to gutters,
To tapestries woven in hair. I’ve seen cotton
Rise to the clouds, or plummet to rivers, or stop,
Stuck in midair, tacked to a veil of handkerchief linen
No seed could sail through, held, almost too long for breath,
Waiting for some gust to snatch it, or some hungry wren,
To swallow, then shitcast it, where it might settle, white
In a crackle of granite. There, sunwarm, with wet dust
Down just for it, even airy fluff can set a potent root.

Poetry reciting and story-telling, mentirijillas—make-believe--embroidered with saints and angels, are family treats at palomas, part of an oral tradition that stretches to the misty mythologies of creation, on one end, and to a more just future, on the other.

11:48pm [Typing, drinking café. On a roll] Nicaragüense must be the world masters of irony, of paradox, given their history, their God-awful presento, their economia ruined, probably forever, by our thumbs-down back in the 80’s. Unfortunately, according to our haunted government (OHG), terroristas still hang from every mango on “Mi Tierra.” Good Grief! The only ones here have Yalie accents. Some gardens simply will not grow, poisoned by their pasts and malo spin, despite the world’s most heartful, high-powered praying.

Both poems appeal, tonight. Cesar feels the twists, despite the foreign language. My family finds libertád in chains, fights death while alive, makes feasts out of famina, every day. It’s still little better than survival mode here. They know the U. tricks us for our good; creating rich salvación from a pichinga is a necesidád for them, and, now, for me.

“I’m proud of you, hermano. Me gusta “Fluff,” es cierto.” My brother loves my poem even though he knows little of the English. He pronounces it "Floof."

“I love it here 'cause everybody gets my jokes.” We laugh, mi hermano y yo. He’s honored by my presence in his life, verdad! I’m honored he's got “Pichinga” by heart, and, as well, that mi amigo thinks so kindly of my needs, he even dreams soluciones plasticos for me.

Ay, Chihuahua, those roosters again! Up in my mangos, their nightly roosts. It's a good thing I'm covered in kindness and protection: I’ve been trying to coax those OHG terroristas down from my trees all trip, as I'm sure at dawn they're covered with chicken caca, pocked with red mosquito bites. Very unhealthy. They also jangle my pollos. It’s “Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy-Doo,” all night long, plus lousy egg production in the morning, in downright terrorista Nicaragua. Ah, well.

This Particular Kindness, Part 2

2008-06-04T00:21:00.000-06:00

Cuento 2: “Venting Journal” (591 words)

10:37pm [Typing, yawning]: Cesar drinks café silently, smiles from across mi cuarto. His face is Castilian in structure. He might’ve been a model for Velasquez: pale, elongated, otherworldly, de Europa. He’s heir to an antique rape.

Most Nicaraguans are genetically related to 17th century sex between Indios and Spanish soldiers. Pure-blooded Indios, coffee brown, were decimated later by the importation of European diseases—smallpox, typhoid, cholera, plague, measles—which swept through the hemisphere, an inescapable flood of death, carrying off most not born with the “gift” of Spanish antibodies in their Indio-Españo blood.

It’s been downhill ever since for the remaining peasants of Central America. Tonight, it just depresses, this historia of total exploitation, for profit, for 400 years. I’ve been mildly down for days, unusual for me.

11:02pm [Typing] Cesar is playing catch with mi pichinga. I know he wants to talk, to help me find some happiness. I guess it shows in my face, this sadness, but, here, my masks are down. I put him off ‘til later with a frown of concentration, a smile of gratitude next in my eyes, for the pichinga, bouncing in the terrorized midair.

It could have been otherwise, this particular kindness, even for my urinary needs. A few Brigadistas, en años pasados, sprayed Teote with their disrespect, marking territory not their own—only Diós knows why. I have, I know, done the same en los Estados, when I’ve felt disempowered. Oh, yes, my aim can be straight and vile, es verdad. I’ve learned from major experts in trajectory, distance and spin, by keeping abreast of both college and current affairs.

But not ever, in Teote. Here, I’m more careful---“Más cuidado!”—when I need to vent, not to splash on anybody’s botas. My respect for these honorable people assures like behavior in me: I become my “glory self” here, writing and living from my heart--mi corazón--at the peak of my powers.

Perhaps, my care developed primero in Colorado, before I even knew los Betancos. The peasants of the world-—pobrecitos—have endured a golden shower from the johns of Babylon who’ve run it, for profit only, since earliest recorded time and, surely, before. I refuse to perpetuate this denigration of the human spirit—exploiting the poor—here in Teote.

We’re equal, as we’re meant to be, brothers, sisters, solid, within and without La Familia. We give to each other, knowing it’ll be returned. We feel each other’s pain. Theirs, at the bottom of the beanstalk, results from gigantic prideful greed, the deadliest combination of vices. Everyone up the Great Chain of Payout makes a decent living off their sweat but them.

Few in Arriba--in the States--want to face our reliance on their work, but it’s true, nonetheless, right down to our very staples. Their faces should appear on the dollar, though I suppose it's ironic that old George is there, one Terroristo máximo to the Redcoats, always shooting from the trees, a Cuban guerrilla in side-buttoned breeches. Ha! He picked up his tactics from Red-coated “Indian” scouts in earlier British wars.

Colonial blowback, I guess.

When peasants get angry at this setup, now, we just decimate a few for the sake of the tobacco or the sugar, the cocaine or the oil. It urinates on us all, like a monumental, hemispheric whiz, against a steadily mounting, very righteous wind.

Our track shoes are already muddy.
Our government is haunted by its past.

“Ay, yes! It pisses me off!” I whisper into la silencio. “Si!” I’ve learned to restrain it, to even transform it, from past mistakes: when I’m angry, projecting, I write, I pray, I tell another gringo joke, just another happy fool in Teotecacinte, Nicaragua.

This Particular Kindness, Part 1

2008-06-04T00:19:00.000-06:00

“This Particular Kindness”
©Doug Evans Betanco 2008
(3672 words, in 5 Cuentos)

Cuento 1: “La Pichinga Dream” (881 words)

La Casa de Palomas
Teotecacinte

9:57pm [Typing]: My brother-in-law, Cesar Urrutia de Talavera, sits in my rocking chair, watching me, his face a sunrise of laughter, while I write. It’s past his bedtime, and Marta’s left the planet, already, I’d say, from her snores over the wall, or maybe that’s don Moncho, staying the night with doña Eva: I’m only beginning, an Internet deadline to meet en la mañana.

I’m writing columns this trip, while living with my bonded familyof campesinos at la casa de palomas, here in Northern Nicaragua. I’ve been having luck typing these stories from the presento, as they happen, in and out of me; since everything here is loco when seen from Arriba--up there in the States--I let Time, notoriously loco, be my planner, even if it brings “crazy” to my keyboard. I can always take it out, later, or make it crazier.

10:03pm [Typing]: In his lap rests my clean, 2-liter juice jug, mi pichinga, with, like all things Nicaraguan, a bittersweet historia. He reminds me with a smile so fond it must ache, una sonrisa, that, soon after my arrival in Teote, two months late because of necessary heart work, he’d caught a terrible sueño, a nightmare. In it, he sees me attacked at midnight in the front yard of palomas, jumped by a drunk with a machete.

Mysteriously, he hands me a pichinga instead of fighting my dream assailant, and smiles. The bolo, clearly befuddled, his knife no longer at my throat, turns instead and stumbles off into the dark. I hold the plastic pitcher tight to my chest, while mi hermano, Nicaraguan to the core, grabs my flashlight and, clicking his tongue, clapping his hand on my foco, leaps into a formal, solitary dance of honor, machísimo. My powerful beam, a sword of light, cuts the black skin de la noche.

“Lucky, that night of the pichinga,” he says to me now. “What a dream, gracias a Dios!”

10:09pm [Typing]: Esta sueño, he tells me, in between my typing, woke him up in fright. He remembered it. Early that morning, he told it eerily, eyes bugging, for we had just felt the shock of young Lito’s recent slashing, here in Teote, by a bolo, while escorting his girlfriend home from a teenage dance. I can now report, my nephew’s on the mend, can see, his fading scars, somehow, enhancing his looks. Lucky kid—por gracia de Diós.

But, back then, bolos had taken up permanent residencia in the whispers round my sister Marta’s kitchen mesa, along with a continuous and kindly concern for mi salud, so this dream was electric with synchronicity for us all.

Especially for me. Since Lito’s attack, my walks en las calles had been curtailed at my family’s insistence, unless Cesar-guarded, a stiletto tucked in his black leather bota. As he usually retires at 9 pm, I’d spent too many late nights this trip pacing in my locked-tight cuarto, mi noche haunted by a lurking paranoia, previously not much un parte de mi vida Nica. Probably, I’m too trusting or oblivious a soul, more concerned with the flash of ideas than of glinting machetes.

In this black fear, however, unlocking mi puerta, heading to el servicio in the backyard, even with my heavy foco, had become a perilous gauntlet. I’m not a machete-kind of guy, and feel protected, here, in any case, most of the time. Yet, I’d taken—Forgive me!—to peeing out mi puerta into the noisy dark of the dirt corte, rather than facing my fear of knives and blindness, every time I had to piddle.

En la mañana, however, shameful mud had greeted Marta’s broom, sweeping mi patio. If she minded, she didn’t say, but I felt this copious evidencia of my nocturnal panic, however justifiable, a fouling of her cave. On the night of Cesar’s dream, I’d even thought to do it in a plastic bolsa, but I feared it might burst. Clearly, a dilemma in amarillo.

Thus, when Cesar shared his dream that morning over café, I was amazed, and when he plonked a jug with campesino force on the kitchen table, astonished. When he said—of course, I translate—“Here’s your Pichinga, a jug for su cuarto, for urina en la noche,” I was once more grateful, both to him and to the U., nudging me towards seguridád in the simplest, most miraculous maneras. Filled with delighted relief, I thanked him. Then, of course, we all dissolved to sniggering, imagining mi noches en la futura, and I became, por un momento, the center of a Nicaraguan piss joke.

Urina is very big here, as well as caca, sexa and politicos pasados--most of whom end up in the outhouse having lunch with Somoza Segundo, their imaginary caca-eating parrot--for relief from the drudgery of living at survival. I love mi pichinga, my salvación from the honed blades of wildness, the loco-Jack-the-Rippers sneaking into my asylum, even here, in Nicaragua.

Ay, Chihuahua, Ha, Ha, Ha!

2008-05-30T23:33:00.000-06:00

It is dramatically strange, after re-reading this Blog, to realize--Yikes, Chihuahua!--what a great life I'm leading! There is life after work. Cool. Rainbow. Hippie. Amen.

Gracias, CenterDoug

Heart for the Americas

2008-05-30T14:06:00.000-06:00

‘Twixt Here and There

“Heart for the Americas”
©Doug Evans Betanco 2008
For La Tribuna, Glenwood Springs

I have a heart for the Americas and their people: North Americans, Central Americans, South Americans, all Pan-Americans, from Hudson's Bay down to the tip of Patagonia. Born to the same hemisphere on this twirling planet, we’re made special, instantly-united by geography and history, even when torn by government shenanigans, disparity, immigrant abuses, and almighty pressure from across the oceans. Americans live in the Americas, and I’ve come to love them all.

A Waspy young boy, I grew up in New Jersey in the ‘50s: my closest touch to Latinos was the Puerto Rican street gang in West Side Story. That condition lasted well into my 20s, until I moved to Denver, discovered “Mexican” food and met a few Hispanics, one from Peru, in 1973. From then until 1993, my take on the other sons of America was that they lived somewhere else and occasionally bloomed with genius like Gabriel Maria Marquez or Sandra Cisneros or Rudolfo Anaya. All through the ‘80s in Glenwood Springs, few spoke Spanish, except for the high school Spanish teacher.

In 1993, however, all the Pan-Americans came crowding in on me, or, rather, I barged right into their space, a total gringo, by joining a CMC-sponsored trip for three weeks to Glenwood’s Sister City, Teotecacinte, Nicaragua. My first thought when I got to this ravaged village at the end of the road was that we fund windowboxes full of red geraniums for the town square! It's been a high-learning-curve ever since. There I found what’s shaping up to lasting joy in my life and a greater authenticity as a writer. For four years before my trip and for fifteen years after, the campesinos of Northern Nicaragua and the people of Glenwood have worked to bring the infrastructure of the town back to healthy standards after the devastation of the Contra War in the ‘80s, building potable water systems, sharing expertise in education, health and agriculture, adding daycare centers and a notable high school, while bonding as brothers and sisters. I became a Betanco as well as a better Evans. Suddenly, the people of Central America and I, at least in Nicaragua, became family.

I have grown deeply as a result of this bridge-building, and have welcomed our new Hispanic population to the Valley since 1993 as a step forward in cultural diversity. I’ve loved the ESL students in my classes, even though we were frustrated by language acquisition and college level standards. The values of our new Latino neighbors are admirable, based in the Golden Rule and the nuclear family. I know we can work together to build our community stronger than either could do alone, a synergy of best practices greater than the sum of its parts. At least I hope so. It takes patience, compassion, gracias and especially listening from all sides.

I’ll be writing a column a month for La Tribuna, focused on the interface between my Pan-American sisters and brothers, here and in Nicaragua, where I live half the year. As “The Honorable and Loco Ambassador from Teote to Glenwood Springs,” appointed by Teote’s Council, I’ll be continuing the Sister City efforts. With one foot in the First World and one in the Third, it’s a continually topsy-turvy life of insight that I hope you’ll enjoy. Gracias por todo.
[For more info about the Sister City work, contact me a devans384@gmail.com].

Gracias, CenterDoug

Sunbeam's Gift

2008-05-19T21:43:00.000-06:00

I've got a fat check coming, and it's created some angst in me. I'm meant to stimulate the economy with it, which sounds a bit sexy, but, unfortunately, I've got new rules.

Believe you me, I've been very patriotic in my economic stimulation for 63 years. I've done it with finesse, buying hard-cover gardening books and GAP clothes in escalating sizes, paying for colleges and cosmetic wart-removal, while investing mostly in a Carbondale artist named Wewer Keohane, a foresightful decision, gracias por todo.

Currently, though, I'm spending hours a day divesting my Glenwood Springs apartment, an Ali Baba's Treasure Cave, of once-very-stimulating stimulations, piled up in corner, closet and antique Chinese cabinet. In Teote, I can't show my home fotos to the Betancos: this Uber-Stuff marks me as the grossest rico on the Planet Earth, even though I fit the American lower middle level by averaged income. I can hear the campesino calculators spinning: "There's 100 T-shirts in that closet, and I have three!" This makes me very uncomfortable, for very clear reasons. As well, I'm tripping over heaps of treasures, not good for an aged rainbow hippie with very delicate bones.

So, soon after returning to my Colorado Tower Suite, I commited to minimalization on a daily basis, while also standing in my power not to buy one thing 'til it's almost bare: just me, a bed, a desk and chair, a scant summer wardrobe and my enormous art collection. It will rival campesino cupboards in utility-simple: my sister Marta feeds thirteen people a day at la casa de palomas with four sandwich plates, three soup bowls, 12 plastic glasses, four coffee cups, and 13 pieces of silverware, so I've a perfect model in my head. I've spent a week packing china and glassware for consignment! "I will not purchase anything but diet food and prescription drugs 'til I'm living like a peasant," my brand-new mantra: count on a porch sale at Palmer House in June.

However, living in Glenwood Springs while "Not Accumulating!" is ridiculously difficult. In Nicaragua, there's nothing to buy but Dollar Store Specials, so it's easy to keep my life light there. Here, however, with the caravan crossroads of the globe right up the road in two directions, I'm learning to say "No!" real hard.

Maybe I'm a glitz-magnet? Even more difficult, my friends are also downsizing and want me to pick up their unwanted things. It's hard to say "No!" to a rain of intriguing gifts, especially since "Free!" tingles my poor-Welsh-peasant soul: I am getting better at it, gracias a Nicaragua. Plus, I simply have no place to put one more thing!

I'm feeling, however, almost unpatriotic: Using our three trillion dollar spendfest in Iraq as a model, I imagine we're to get to a BigBox pronto and BUY, but that disobeys my rules. As well, the "Good Citizens Shop" idea does not work for me as a criteria of valued citizenship: Grammy Edwards always taught me that "Good Citizens Save," but maybe that's become Obsolete nowadays. What to do? What to do? I certainly wouldn't want to be considered a terrorist for living on the interest of my interest.

On top of all that, this E.S. check looks like "found money," money for Teote, for land, cows, turkeys, fish-farms and the like. Even though money spent there usually ends up in a Miami bank, this doesn't seem the intention of OHG's gift, and as a diplomat from Teote, now, I walk with measured steps, especially with money from the Gods of War out there.

I wish my Nicaraguan son, Ramon Ernesto, that joyous sunbeam, were here to reflect and focus my thinking. He's a very good communicator, despite the language barrier, as he knows me pretty well after 15 years, yet thinks that everything I say is downright magical--What can I do?--even when I'm being an utter fool. Perhaps because of that, I . . . Huh? That's it! I'll give it to Ramon! An official gift from OHG to welcome a son of the Americas to our shores, one packing a US Passport. I've decided to adopt him here in the States, which fills me with the joy of a completed turn-around, both for me and Nicaragua, and certainly for Ramon Ernesto.

I'll buy his airplane ticket north--Support the Airlines!--and the rest will be his first Estados spending money, once he's here. I imagine he'll know exactly how to stimulate the economy.

And I'll find a pathway through this glitz, so I can live as simply as a campesino, even here, deep in the heart of Colorado.

Gracias, CenterDoug

When Dios Touched Adam

2008-05-16T14:01:00.000-06:00

[CenterDoug Notes: Having just read a must-read article by Evgenia Peretz, "James Frey's Morning After" in the June Vanity Fair, I need to establish at this end of the blog a small disclaimer, as I did with "In the Beginning,"earlier on: while all I write is as truthfully and honestly written about things that happen in my life, this is still an embellished memoir, a literary work, not a news story. For the literal nasties who trashed Frey as a "liar" for being a creative artist with his memoir of addictions, one big "BOOOO!" for simple-mindedness and spite. A Million Little Pieces is a great book. Frey's new novel, Bright, Shiny Morning establishes him as a major American writer, and, too, one who has stayed completely dry throughout his vilification.

The following narrative essay, "When Dios Touched Adam," is a case in point: while this event occurred on March 15, 2008 in Teote's little white church, from 8 pm to 9pm on the night before Easter Sunday, I'm writing this reverie on May 18, a product I'm editing, embellishing, and polishing through mists of recollection and wonder. I'm working to be honest but I know there are occasional lapses, where the word choice or emotional nature of the text has required movement from before to after, or, even more, to invention of detail for clarity. There were, for instance, flowers on the altar on March 15. Also, Don Moncho and Ramon Ernesto would probably remember the episode differently. The don wouldn't want dona Eva to hear about all those ladies hugging him. Ramon might downplay his crying to one tear in the eye because he's such a macho. We all edit our stories every day. Right now this experience feels like a dream I'm glad I caught and saved. As Norman Mailer stated about memoir as a genre, "That's why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self" from which to glean some truth.

The best way I know to push my buttons is to call me a liar: I must have buried trauma about using my creative imagination, some holdover from a childhood telling stories and, sometimes, getting caught in a fib. Still, I wouldn't pause a moment from adding flavor to the brew of a story, even in a memoir, if it helped to bring my truth to the insight of a reader.

Any reader who feels cheated if a memoir isn't 100% factual needs to grow: there's no such bird in the library's aviary. Even histories and "news" pass through the filter of the writer. Hmm. Maybe this excoriation of Frey comes from our sickness-to-death of being "lied" to, by those who should know better. Perhaps, the wrath of professional writers projected at Frey results from buried guilt for "spinning" stories in their pasts, in order to pay the bills.

Still, after the Frey incident, I feel I need to pull a Kurt Vonnegut, and remind other bloggers that "Nothing in this book is true." CD]

"When Dios Touched Adam"

Imagine, if you will, that ultra-famous section of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling extravaganza in which Dios, all glory, wrapped in cherubim and light, sends life's spark from His finger to a hunky, recumbent Adam. Zap! Got the picture?

I got zapped much like that, I know, last March in Teote, as did most of the catolicos in the Upper Jalapa Valley, at the Resurrection Eve Candlelight Mass during Holy Week in Teote's new iglesia. When in Teote, I worship with my family of Betancos there, and, because it's a liberation Catholic diocese, I take communion as well: there, if someone wants to eat, he's served, with joy and gracias, regardless of his past affiliations. I get hungrier for host, I guess, being hourly bombarded by mortars of poverty and manipulation, down there, so I'm very deeply grateful.

The church is a 100' x 150' x 30' hall, with wrens nesting in the rafters. It's filled with wooden benches--No way to slouch!--lit by large open windows, with a center aisle sweeping up to the very plain altar, backed by a 20 foot crucifix of carved and painted wood, with Christ upon it. To each side, just recently donated, life-size statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, in brightly painted plaster, look out to the congregation. I swear that Jesus statue winks at me, sometimes, but, then, my eyes are failing.

When the Betanco family, about 35 strong on Holy Saturday night at 8 pm, waiked into the darkened back of the iglesia, I had to let my eyes adjust, a glimmer of dusk still behind me in the western sky. The church was dark: Jesus was still in the tomb. The family split up at the door, the brothers and sisters claiming seats in the back pews with their kids, while mi padre don Moncho, my newly-adopted son Ramon Ernesto Evans Betanco and I headed quickly up the side aisle and snagged don Moncho's customary seat in the first pew, where all the heavy-praying people sit, wanting, like my Dad there, to be that much closer to Heaven. Eight wrinkled ladies squeezed tighter so the three of us could sit together. Everyone had candles but us. Who knew it was a candlelight service? Well, don Moncho knew, but he's a notorious cheapskate: he knew the deacon would pass out candles to anyone not armed with potential light. How strange to be where a 5 cent candle can make or break your dinner!

It's strange, as well, to be in a darkened church, even stranger that the statues were shrouded with winding linen, that no flowers from local gardens decorated the front. Even stranger to a norteamericano, almost everyone was weeping for the loss of Jesus, still unrisen. Most of the town had participated in the life and death drama of Jesus's passion, for a solid week, every day a different festival of spirit, triumph to disaster, then, that night, the anticipation of renewal still to come. Ramon Ernesto was crying; don Moncho was crying; I was shedding buckets, completely uncharacteristic of me. The darkness was palpable and moving.

I wear my spirit much more openly in Nicaragua.

It's the norm.

The padre finally pulled up in his Toyota truck, a troubador of spirit to ten local churches in the Upper Jalapa Valley, and the crying stilled. He led us through whatever the standard service demanded, then came down from the altar, eyes wet, and, burnishing a twig of limonaria from the church's garden, whisked holy water to the congregation, baptizing us anew. More tears, this time of gracias and hope.

Then he called forth the deacons, whisked them well, and commanded them to light the altar candles, to unshroud the statues as he proclaimed the Resurrection of Christ. "Christ Is Risen! Christ is Risen!" he shouted to the corners of the church. Everyone sobbed anew with joy as the statue faces were unveiled. We lit our candles, from one to another, down the rows, and passed the Peace with shining faces.

Good Lord, I'm crying as I write this.

I've spent many Sundays in church, here and there, but never have I been as unified with a weeping congregation as that night in March. The depth, the solidarity, the proximity of my new son, crying his heart out in thanksgiving for his brighter future, for a real-live father: Lordy, I just started to bawl, quite gringo loudly, I'm afraid. As soon as Ramon and I got wailing, don Moncho wrapped us in his campesino arms and, jubilant, joined the teary chorus. Then, the weeping, heavy praying ladies 'round us wrapped us up in hugs while the wailing, the joy, got even bigger. The priest, recognizing a real miracle, came over and whisked us all again. The congregation showered us with gracias, while we three just cried for joy.

Then--Praise God Almighty Madre!--the guitar choir strummed over, and, through the sobbing, they sang my favorite song, "Bridge Over Troubled Water," which the Latin church has adopted: for a moment--Zip-Zap!--I stopped having a body--Ay, Chihuahua!--came one with light. Anyone who's built bridges 'twixt there and here, my central metaphor, will feel the click. What can I say, I'm sobbing right now. It's a holy moment to remember. I've never felt more nobly a campesino.

I know the Teotanos in the church unloaded a font of sorrow and releasing joy, still held from the hellstorm of the Contra War that devestated Teote 25 years ago. My being there, a symbol to the town of America's loving and generous people, turned much around. Truly, a night of international honor por todo. Gracias.

It'll straighten me, make me stronger, bring tears of light, make me whole. Zap! What a powerful-deep-love, in that hall of joyous peasants! An all-out zap-feast, from a holy, outstretched finger. I felt my fifteen years in Teote validated, made perfect. Suddenly, and only for the moment, all my ironies came together. It transfixed me for hours, "a fool for Dios," my sister Marta says, with a chuckle. Don Moncho danced in the streets. Ramon repeated "Gracias," over and over. Marta fed us chicken soup. We all watched the sun rise together at 4 am on Easter morning on my porch at palomas, too wired to even think of bed 'til earliest morning.

I gained an insight on the nature of joy, but that's another story.

Amen and Hallelujah, Gracias, CenterDoug

7 Wierd Things About Me

2008-05-14T16:55:00.000-06:00

David Crofts Munro, blogster of "Drunk with Barley," has tagged me in a Blogger game to reveal 7 wierd things in order to facilitate greater intimacy with my readers. He left his Comment at the end of February, about the time I gave up fulltime blogging since I lost the Net on my Desk down in Nica and got tired of the busride to Jalapa to hit the Computer Cafe.

I'm piqued to be picked and I take on the challenge, even if belatedly.

1. I guess it's pretty wierd to think there's nothing really "wierd" about me, though "kinky," "odd," or "eccentric," "foolish," "crazed," or "demented" might be easier. Some people think I'm a walking abomination, but that's their problem. What others might think "wierd" in me is none of my business. That's their projection, only. This is coming from my core belief that everything in life is ultimately both "wierd" and mas o menos perfecto, at exactly the same time, and what's important to me is plumbing the space in between that tension with loving kindness.

2. After two marriages, four children, seven grand-children and nine "adopted" Nicaraguan kids as well, and after 15 years of discouraged celibacy, I have "come quietly out of the closet" and formed a mature and loving relationship with a man of my own age and background, also retired, "my CL (Current Lover)." Perhaps it's wierd to have waited so long (63) to feel so natural about my sexual orientation. Yes, that's wierd.

3. I spent 15 hours this last time in Nicaragua revising one 50 word sentence in my post, "Enter the don." The one about me on a runaway horse. I love that sentence, but even I think spending that much time might be really wierd.

4. Most of March in Nica, surrounded by the aftermath of our US-sponsored Contra War in Northern Nicaragua, an act of terrorism that lasted ten years, I've finally worked through my fear of our haunted government (OHG) and "Spin and Terror," the developed world's two-headed dragon of hypocrisy who zaps honest writers on sight. I feel the release of the terror in me, have replaced it with a more peculiar and courageous love for the Beltway Bubble machinations, so good at teaching the world how not to be, so forcefully teaching us the value of honesty in the world by lying so unconvincingly. Don't you just love them, for helping us to get it? A strange but more comfortable balance for me, that will have me putting up a very wierd and politically incorrect story of mine, "This Particular Kindness," on CenterDoug: I've been sitting on it for 8 years while processing this terror, this fear of being boxed as a traitor, this long trip from the year 2000; while I'm grateful now, my life since 9-11 has been terribly wierd. It's interesting that, while many Americans feared terrorists, I feared OHG, my own government, much more, all that time. But now, it's "been there, done that, done." It is important in my life to replace fear with love and live in gratitude for it. I even feel compassion for the Shrub. Gracias a Dios por todo!

5. I hate mosquitos, am a malaria magnet, yet wierdly choose to live in Nicaragua half the year, though mostly in the dry season when they're diminished: if anyone could figure how to market mosquitos by the pound, Nicaragua would be a very rich country. The Teotanos can't wait for me to come back: when I'm there, no one else gets bitten but me. Now, that feels really wierd.

6. I went to a friend's daughter's 8th grade Honors Assembly (She got a prize!) last week, which opened with the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem, both of which stir my soul. I know that's wierd, but I was raised in the 40's and 50's.

However, it's also wierd to recite the words "liberty and justice for all," when I know from my own experiences in the world that OHG intentionally oppresses the lower 90% of any "undeveloped" nation state it touches, and considers the peasants of the world to be "expendable" cannon fodder. Slow Burn. Somehow I'll find a way to be grateful for it, but it's hard. Even in the US, that lower 90% are considered too stupid to be told the truth, are treated like mindless cattle, afraid of the ranch boss's electric prod. How wierd! Freedom and justice dies when fed only fear and lies.

7. I am the scion of English peasants who made good in Pennsylvania before and during the Revolution by selling horses (probably stolen from the Brits) to the first American revolutionaries, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. I have to needle my DAR great-aunts lovingly about "our foremothers" being revolutionary terroristas in the 18th century. How ironically wierd!

I am also related to a long line of hard-drinking, coal-mining Welsh peasants, economic terrorists in the Jolly Olde England of the 1850's, who came over here to escape the hangman and whose sons and daughters fought for labor rights at the turn of the century. How those boozy tenors ever married into the DAR is a very wierd story that the great-aunts won't tell.

In the Sixties, I took to the streets of Lawrence KS a couple times, wearing tie-dye, once to hear Bobby Kennedy speak, but, really, that was more about dancing and singing and beer and high-flying than class warfare. Rainbow-thinking didn't seem "wierd" then, but it sure does now, except among other like-minds. "Like, archaic, man, you know, like?"

In 2008, I'm a stabilizing force in the lives of a hundred Nicaraguan Sandinistas who cattle-trucked--every last man, woman and child alive in 1979--to Managua to peaceably and almost bloodlessly overthrow their hated dictator Somoza, our Pan-American puppet for 30 years of low-intensity-terror. All those women nursing babies in the streets made peasant decimation by Somoza's National Guard pretty impossible, especially since the Sandinistas made sure the huge international press corps was on hand to photograph them all. Most had Spanish copies of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in their back pockets to bring good luck, in solidarity with the principles of liberty, justice and fraternity for all which those pamphlets inspired in them. What a wierd spin OHG put on that!

How wierd to be a pacifist in such a long-line of Anglo/Hispanic freedom fighters! Our revolutionary tradition in this country makes hereditary terroristas out of most red-blooded Americans, really, somewhere down the line. Given OHG, though, I have to wonder which side of 1776 the Beltway Bubble would support? I really can't see anyone in the War Room thinking it politically correct to join George Washington, that great guerrilla, behind the trees of Virginia, to fire potshots at the 18th century's foremost killing machine, the Redcoats. Can you? And, since OHG is already doing such a great job of wrecking nearly everything, I'd say it's doing itself in already, all by itself, giving me liberty to build peaceable grassroots bridges. How wierd that OHG considers such bridge-building a quasi-terrorist act, at least in Nicaragua!

Gracias, CenterDoug

Buen' Dia, Arriba

2008-05-08T13:13:00.000-06:00

“Buen’ Dia, Arriba”
For the Glenwood Independent Post (May14, 2008)
(925 words)

Good Morning, Arriba--“Up There,” what Nicaraguans call the States. I've fallen in love all over again with Glenwood Springs and Colorado, where I've lived since 1973. Full of successful people and kissed by La Madre Mundial with the natural eloquence of roaring rivers and snowy, silent mountains in May, Teote's Sister City thrills me, even while it chills me, after three months of 90 degree days. I'm very happy to be home, but I think next year I’ll hold off coming back until the middle of June, so I can throw away my long-winter-underwear.

I'm now not only a don in Nicaragua but also an "Hon." Teote's Town Council Chairman and its Mayor, who sing trio with me—I’m the Segundo, the high, haunting tenor, backed by guitar and accordion--have invested me with a new title, El Embajador Honorable y Loco de Teotecacinte á Glenwood Springs. Being a crazy but honorable international Ambassador suits me much better than Norteamericano Angel de Dios, so I accepted the mission to warm our Sister City relationship, somewhat cooled and distant since 9-11.

I will not be organizing or running Brigade trips as in the past, but I’m looking around me for some younger blood to carry on this very meaningful work, with my facilitation.

The bridge I've been building for fifteen years just keeps getting stronger supports, tied right to the heartful bedrock of people-loving-people that binds it all together. I'm in danger of becoming lovable as a result, a tad difficult for an aged-rainbow-hippie-curmudgeon like me.

I'm also upgrading my wardrobe, since sweats don't really cut the proper diplomatic swagger or dignity I must now maintain. I may even buy a linen suit and a Panama hat! Does anyone know where I can get a diplomatic sash or which way it crosses the chest? Any diamond-studded Orders from various and sundry Kings or Queens I could borrow?

Lordy, I'm going to have to remember to shine my shoes! Now that I think of it, though, I don’t own shoes you can shine.

I'm also crossing another bridge on my return, as both the Glenwood Post Independent and our Western Slope Spanish-language newspaper, La Tribuna, have invited me to write continuing short essays for their readers on living the multicultural Anglo/Hispanic life. It's the next step in what I most often dream for myself, a regular readership and publication as a professional writer of honorable authenticity.

Royalties would help, as well.

I can guarantee two things at least: I’ll always make deadline, usually coming in early, and, having my fill of spin and terror in the last 20 years of "news," I will not tell lies. Getting at the truth of anything, these days, takes courage, persistence, discernment, and humility, so I'm practicing sooth-saying in the mirror each morning along with my diplomatic bows. It strengthens my backbone as well as forcing me to hold in my shrinking stomach, usually churning from my haunted government's latest mendacities.

Always, after spending time with the hardcore Sandinista peasantry of Northern Nicaragua, and especially after returning to Arriba, I'm faced with a dilemma to my bridge-building, now exacerbated by my new, more public roles up here and down there: I know from personal experience what the rest of the world has taken as Gospel for years, that the USA I love has completely and cravenly lost its moral credibility in the terrorized world it's done more than any other nation to create.

Whatever happened to the idealistic country which, through the Marshall Plan, rebuilt the infrastructure of Germany and Italy, our former enemies, as a free and brotherly gift from the American people after World War II, instead of demanding ruinous reparations? We presented to the world, then, a pure example of right action and forgivenance, one that also proved eminently profitable. We did to them what we would’ve wanted done to us, had we lost the war.

But, then, what has happened to The Golden Rule, which I still live by because it works great? Does it not apply to nations, as well, especially those which talk such a high-minded line when condemning their brother nations? Perhaps that Rule, in today’s geopolitical realities, is Obsolete?

I hate that thought with all my power and patriotic fervor behind me, but it's made real to me every day in Nicaragua, a major victim of American "Spin and Terror" for the last 80 years. My family and all peace-loving Nicaraguans, who just want to eat, are boxed as rabid terroristas even now, a huge joke if it weren't so dangerous and stupidly hypocritical.

According to our State Department, terrorists hang from every mango tree in Northern Nicaragua, but, honestly, if such bogeymen are there, they wear Abercrombie and Fitch safari wear, plus black glasses, of course, not the Dollar Store garb of the Sandinista campesino.

I wish they'd come down from my mangos in Teote, if indeed they're up there, as sleeping in my chicken roosts with swarms of malaria and dengue carriers, plus all my cooing, over-pooping palomas, is a most unhealthy perch for any poor human soul, much less a privileged Yankee terrorista.

I suppose, as an international diplomat, I’ll learn to lie with charm, but, for now, I’ll stick with honesty, since that’s what I crave from others. Everything else, instead of unifying bridges, builds crazy division, and who on this planet really needs anymore of that?

Freezing in Arriba

2008-05-08T00:46:00.000-06:00

I'm home to Glenwood. It's May 7, still very cold by any Nica standards, and everything has changed, remained the same. How strangely comforting and familiar, to realize that what might have been tumultuous and disorienting, not so many years ago, is grinning-calm, solid and triumphant.

Gracias for my happiness.

There's so much to write, now, a 3 month journey that somehow exploded, a tin tomato-juice can of firecrackers--and, yet, no one got hurt, especially me. I got everything I asked for.

Except Internet access. Be grateful, everyone of you, for that miraculous blessing of instant Google. I planned and paid to have it, but, No! So I grew instead from inner springs. Por favor, forgive me my almost Blog-less April!

Here's all the changes:

1. I was completely warm down there, even though Colorado got 100 snow days.

2. I saved my entire pension for three months while living like a PHARAOH OF EGYPT in Nicaragua.

3. Everyone I touched down there, grew.

3. What I didn't want, happened, and I made it better.

How simple. How complex!

Gracias from don Douglas, now in Glenwood Springs.

April's Happy Fool

2008-04-11T10:19:00.000-06:00

“April’s Happy Fool”
©Doug Evans Betanco 2008 (1326 words)

While bathing in the río Limon, under sprays of yellow orchids, a gold-lit haze of bees, I notice “Old Gibraltar” below my chest in 2006 has evolved to a flab plateau, here in Teotecacinte, 2008, Glenwood’s Sister City. I have ribs. Although I chose to moderate my weight loss after an obsessive February, I’ve probably—My scale got stolen in March!--lost 10-15 pounds of mondongo, since February 1, mostly in my face, upper body and legs. I still resemble a pink candy apple on two skinny sticks in the morning mirror, even when I hold in my stomach, playing Arnold Schwarzeneggar.

Oh, well. My original goal, 40 lbs. in 3 months, would’ve stretched me into perfectionism, part of the old Doug complex, not the new don Douglas Betanco, pensionado. Five pounds a month is healthy, and there’s always mañana. I’ve bought a belt to keep my pants up, always a good sign. My cheekbones show now, and those Cary Grant creases beneath them, once mere dimples, continue to deepen. It’s been a shrink/grow vacation, replete with passion, change and painful joy.

Semana Sancta in Nicaragua deepens me. Teote is where almost everyone celebrates Holy Week openly, from Palm Sunday to Easter, in the streets; where Judas Iscariot—my friend, Chindo Sanchez, an unforgettable Saddam Hussein mask on his head--rides a donkey backwards through town, interrupting traffic on its highway for two hours on a holiday Thursday; where Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, dubbed in Spanish, replaces novellas on the Teli for a week of very human and divine DVD. It’s where tears of loss and then of gracias flow, at the soul-magnifying candlelight mass for the Resurrection. Semana Sancta’s rollercoaster of sorrow and joy knocked me free of self-absorption and mission, for a moment, changing the rhythm of my trip completamente. Even thinking of it now brings agua sagrado to my writing table. Then, in the middle of March, I stopped writing, except for my daily journal, and quietly evolved with Diós for three weeks.

As a direct result of Semana Sancta 2008, I have a newly-official son: my legal adoption of Ramón Ernesto Evans Betanco, is final in Nicaragua. I feel more honest, somehow, after calling him “my son” for fifteen of his 23 years. I’ve helped my sister Olga with his upkeep, along with eight other sons and daughters “de Douglas,” kids whose fathers had abandoned them. I’ve been a good father figure, though mostly from afar. Ramon’s run my errands; walked hundreds of miles with me as a guardia con machete around the lonely campo; taught me Spanish idiomas; and now teaches me to ride mi caballo Triunfo. We cried together in the Easter Eve candles at the iglésia, a very special bonding. He’ll be entering the States with legal documentation, though he’ll be leaving his mother and several sweet girlfriends pining. Starting at Square One in both trade and language acquisition, Ramon Ernesto wants first to be an English-speaking electrician’s helper, then, eventually, to build an electrical supply business here.

I’m also now living in my new cuarto, of adobe, pole, tin and stucco. I dug and mixed the mud (with my feet, a la "I Love Lucy," and molded the bricks, all on my own new land here. I love its spaciousness, its ceiling three feet higher than in my former room. A band of clear molded plastic roofing brings extra light to my writing room. Best of all, it’s been built insect-free, for nightly comfort. Though the open eaves of the usual construction help cool down conventional rooms faster than my standing fan, this room’s back window will soon hold an air conditioner. Already, having no mosquitoes in the kneehole of my escritorio is delightful. I’m sleeping disentangled from my mosquitera for the first time in Nicaragua. The rest of my wing will be ready for my return in January.

I also paid a visit to Lito, the oldest hijo de don Douglas, 32, serving a year in the state penitenciaría, the darkest place I’ve ever been, with the most malo energy, even on visiting day. Bad juju, all around. Sadly, he’d become an alcoholic thief after 2000 and is now paying the piper. About half of Teote’s young men, most often the ones who don’t see coyotes in their futures, drink too much guaro here, after their eight hours in the tobacco fields for $2.50. He’s promised me a changed life, and I’ve facilitated his early release for good behavior. Alcol is a hard one, as I know, and, even harder, with so little opportunity here for him to fill that hole with meaningful work. Today, we’re visiting Chindo, head of the local Sandinistas, who’s promised to sponsor his local recovery through Twelve-Step practice while I’m gone, since the Teote AA chapter is defunct. Clearly, my relationships here are deepening, as I plant seeds and cuttings in my south-of-the-border jardín.

What else is new? A million small and very necessary changes: buying glasses for mi madre dona Eva; opening the new servicio at the finca; establishing work projectos for my other children, a few scholarships for English lessons; finding new clothes for the youngest kids de don Douglas; and a new flashlight and straw hat for mi padre. I have also been given a hundred trinkets, photos, lunches, dinners and breakfasts, a couple serenatas, and also a new sense of honor. Whereas I used to do all the visiting, now everyone’s coming to me for café and a chat. It must be all the silver shining in my hair these days, though, really, I’m feeling years younger.

In addition, I’ve written 35,000 interesting words, full of angels and real estate, mostly up on my blog, which needs some closer revising when I get back to Internet daily, now an inconvenient bus ride away in Jalapa. Next trip, “Explorer” will be on mi escritorio in Teote, or bust! I’ve reread, with the extra time, all my Judith Krantz novels, in counterpoint to Nicaragua’s total lack of glitz, and a current book by Noam Chomsky, a truthteller when Americans need more of it.

All in all, I’ve had another whirlwind trip, I see now, though somehow slower, done perhaps with greater grace, as I savor things, now. Yesterday, I did nada except walk the five miles ‘round the campo with Ramon and play with my puppies, now two months old. From dainty, vicious Pinta, a whippet, and noble Kilér, the Chow from Hell en la noche, have come sensitive “Pinto,” a black and white whippet macho, and <strong>“Espiritu,” a romping-ghostly-grey bearcub, eventually a great, hairy male like his dad. Their evocative faces, their innocence, have won my heart completamente. I wash them every day with flea shampoo, a major step in domesticity for me.

Watching them play with little golden cherries from my nance trees beats evaluating papers or, worse, the haunted national news. Sorry, IP, I haven’t seen a newspaper for 75 days. My pups are ferocious enough, swatting fruits across the swept yard like seasoned soccer players. Pinto caught “Spiri” in the nose with one just now. Apparently, it hurt for a puppy-yelp second, before Spiri pounced.

I’m a tad concerned I’m becoming too mellow.

The most exciting thing that’s happened in a month is happening as I write: it’s raining in sheets on my new tin roof—Water-tight!-- for the first time in 40 days, inundating my gardens gloriosos in the middle of the Dry.

Gracias a Diós para todo! I need to go dance in la lluvia for a minute. Excúsame, por favor.
Now, that was a refreshing change!

If I want something more radical, there’s always tomorrow. Who’d have thought I’d find mañana-thinking so comfortable, after years of being such a whipmeister? My students must be laughing bitterly, but, retirement takes both mind-retraining and deeper waters for my soul-swimming. Here’s to all Glenwood, a toast with potable agua de la Brigada de Glenwood Springs, from one happy April’s fool, grinning ear to ear, a sopping-wet loco in Campesino Heaven, Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia," Part 7

2008-03-17T10:17:00.000-06:00

Cuento 7: “Aves y Gracias” (888 words)

“Tierra Mia,” my city block of casitas in Teote, Nicaragua, at the end of a very long road north from Managua, is fenced from passers-by—as well, from passing pigs, cows, and occasional caballos on rider-less mission-- with festoons of plastico burlap on poles, leftover from last year’s acres-long, acres-wide nurseries for newly planted tabaco. The seedlings need protection more from migrating birds than from insects, well-decimated by the black-market DDT used extensively in the fields. No es posible, even one bug or bird hole in the precious leaves, when each, rolled expertly in Havana, makes one holy, lustrous draw, probably worth $75 before tax, in Nueve York. I should grow tabaco, but I have human and environmental ethics.

Unfortunately, that insectacida makes goldfinch and hummingbird and parrot migration genocide. After a short visit to Honduras or Northern Nicaragua, they stop laying viable eggs, from eating dying insects. Unfortunately, this end of the Jalapa Valley used to be known for its sky-darkened swoops of passenger pigeons, chartreuse parakeets, in swarms at every loud retort from an over-gassed tractor, so the elders say. White ibis, along with avocet and heron down from Colorado, used to fly, icicles against the hot celeste of the sky. No longer. I rarely see a bird on the ground. Thus, the aviary, for birdsong, to write by.

God knows what DDT has done to this old knight’s body, though I don’t think my fertility’s much an issue anymore. And, after all, I was raised in the 40’s and 50’s, with insecticide a staple food on every plate in America. What it’s done is done already. On the other hand, now that I’m a don, I should maybe think about founding a dynasty?

Ay, Chihuahua! Look at these hibiscos, roja y blanca y rosada y salmón, even amarilla, as yellow as limones, now all a-bloom. Bonitísima, esta flor, very centered. One flower of hibiscus in a vase looks great on mi escritorio, here at la casa de palomas, for a day.

In the rainy season, cuttings root without Rootone: all I need do is amend the soil with old chicken caca and stick a cutting in. Guaranteed. For rosas, as well. This place--I’ve known since my first visit in 1993--is gardener’s Paradisio, and I’m a major gardening fool. I have such gardener’s greed, whenever I visit another jardín full of exotic plantas: “Just a few cuttings, por favor?” Some things, even in the whirling flux of the world, don’t change.

Ah, “Tierra Mia” is endlessly interesting, do you see, mi amigos? Every inch tells a story to me. Have I shown you where the little shrine to San Miguel will be? Come with me, por favor, amigos. Es aquí. I’ve spot for a fountain, a tiny pool and a brightly-painted statue of mi amigo, the arcángel, umbrella’d in the rain by a techa of tile. Even angels need a cover from la lluvia, torrential here from June until December. There’ll be a seat here, from a nance log sawn in half, bright red as cherry, so I, a multi-tasker, can wash my feet by the pool and pray a while, at once.

“Tierra Mia” holds potential as a pretty retreat and workshop center, La Casa Descansa de los Ángeles (“Angels’ Rest”). But, that’s future. Right now, I’m contento, tranquilo, just being the Chéli don, grateful for my ultra-verdant greenery in the hot, dry Seco, while it’s yet so cold outside in Glenwood. But, now it’s March, there’ll soon be early daffodils even there.

I live with whispering ghosts, es verdad, in every corner of “Tierra Mia,” but bennies have accrued, as well, from creating, so far, an empowered life of giving, not the least, a valid karmic protection I feel shining around me, un cerco de luz that people notice, out beyond my paler skin. As a Brigadista de Nicaragua, especially as a friend to Teotecacinte, practically a national shrine, I’m honored by every Nicaraguan everywhere, even in the bureaucratic offices of Managua, once they know my story. One official introduced me to an ambassador as “un don de la Guerra, from the killing fields of pobrecita Teote.” Ay-yi-yi!

Diós mío, my heart is full. That exalted honorific, friends, makes my old-don eyes sting, brings me to attention as I remember and write it, like singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My love for these people of gracias flows from very deep springs: I have much to be grateful for, as well. “A don of the War!” Ay, Diós! I hadn’t even arrived yet, back in the bloodshed, but, now, en Nicaragua, I’m an honored Veterano, though one with longer-lasting kickback than an AK-47, es verdad. Here, I couldn’t fly higher, though a jet-set peace guy, a quiet witness to global atrocity, and, probably, for some, from the Moon, or, possibly, so say los locos, one high-flying earthy ángel.

It’s all blessing and curse, really, mi amigos, don’t you think? It’s certainly been “create-destroy” in the bloody lists of my Middle-Ages-modern hacienda, especially within myself: Ay, the craziest gauntlet! There, a friendly ángel comes in handy, even for un viejito knight, retired to scarlet “Tierra Mia,” a twinkling star-don, gratefully at your service, in this Loco-Latin-Love-Boat-Field-of-Honor, building heart in wounded Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia," Part 6

2008-03-17T10:13:00.000-06:00

Cuento 6: “A la Futura!” (830 words)

Now, mi amigos, after café, I’ll show you to the servicios out back. Three ensure one empty, in case I scarf too many mangos at once. Ha! This is dangerous fruit for taste-obsessers, especially if juiced fresh —Ay, yi, yi! Dulce Maria! But, oi-vay, once, en la pasada, I . . . oh, well, queridos, that might be “TMI”: few words could adequately express the unending direness, excepting “Oi-vay,” moaned very low in the gut, with cramped yet explosive inflection.

Ay, Diós mío! No más!

Now, caballeros, look at what we’re doing on the north side of palomas! I’m so excited!

My new private rooms at palomas, built this trip by my brother Denís, for $1200, from adobe blocks handmade on “Tierra Mia,” will triple my personal living space. I’ll now have a 40’ wing of my own. My current hand-built cuarto (12x20) has served me just fine for eight years, but it multi-tasks as an office, my bedroom and closet, as well, my somewhat private sitting room. Very minimal, it feels too cramped, now, for entertaining on “Tierra Mia.” When my new wing is finished, I’ll have a private sala off the front of palomas, for receiving my don-dom’s guests in more comfortable surroundings, complete with suspended ceiling fans.

La sala nueva will connect, via a new door, to a light room (6x20) with a potable water tap, up through the floor, giant screened windows with wrought-iron theft guards at each end, topped by a clear plexiglass ceiling, for starting plants and indoor flowering greenery without insectas: I’ll be writing in an airy greenhouse full of orchids when I’m here next year.

Then, to continue the enfilade, another door opens to my new bedroom and rainy season office (18 x20), one with a needed lockbox closet (3x3) and shelves for mi chunchas—my desktop publishing empire, my Nicaragua clothes, mi libros and art supplies in Rubbermaid boxes —so I can travel more lightly in the future. My new bedroom/office will be locked, cerrado, draped in dust cloths, sagrado, when I’m gone, las chunchas triple-tight in their boxes in that padlocked closet: I’ll have the only keys to my sanctum sanctorum tucked in my travel drawer with my passport when up in the States, ready to return.

Those chunchas are just too much temptation, even for my sister Marta, very honest and devout, who once wore my clothes all winter, I’m sure, and, then, feigned surprise at their mouse-ruined condition, even though I’d left them in a belted metal case in my room. “Must have been los muchachos,” said she, though, of course, no one else but she might have worn them, with a belt or sash. Maybe it was the Arcángel , needing warmth in the night, who left them out for los ratones to shred for their nurseries? Only in Nicaragua would a Guardian Angel shape-shift to a Gap-dressed, lovely matrona and madre, una campesina eleganta, blaming it all on her innocent-ángel-looking kids! Mentira! Mentira!

It’s a fun game of life here to catch people you trust in their “little white lies.” It keeps vida more finely tuned towards both the truth and sublime comedy. I couldn’t care less about the clothes—“End-of-Season-Sale” in Silverthorne, 90% off, from 2003, they’d tent the new-skinny-me--but the “mouse-eaten-ropas” story evokes merry guffaws over the fire in Marta’s cocina every year, when I bring it up, yet again, Don-Rickles-don-that-I-am, just to tease her.

Still wearing the darned-patched-cinched Gap shirts I gave her in 2005, she blushes, demurely, smiling. Everyone points to her flush, giggles behind fists, Betancos in love with mi hermana, La Capitana Marta, Guerrera Sandinista de Nicaragua, 1980-87.

Out the western puerta of my new bedroom, will be my veranda, sequestered from family activity by a clump of bananas and café, fronting a square court of brick pavers and gardens. On the north, there’s a clump of coco palms and Semana Sancta palmeras, already planted, surrounding a cistern—pila--where I’ll plunge in hotter weather, with red and white Butterfly Amaryllis and indigo-blue Lilies of the Nile, my little patriotic cooling-off corner.

West of the court, a white garden visible from my office window will shine in the moon like polished silver with waxy Peace Lilies, white Datura and Brugmansia trumpets, and Peruvian Daffodils, like giant icy-spiders under white camellias y gardenias.

We’ll see how it all plays, for one very happy visionary-don.

Ay de mi! I have too many projectos on “Tierra Mia” already, prior claims, to fret about La Doña’s pasture: la casa de palomas is also getting a new roof in March, already paid for. And a proper dovecote for my white roller pigeons, as well as the canary and parakeet aviary in the garden room. Palomas just keeps growing like Topsie, ever larger, one room or concrete floor at a time. I hope I’m not importing too much Disney World, but I’ve rampant visual greed, in developing Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia," Part 5

2008-03-17T10:09:00.000-06:00

Cuento 5: “Solidaridád,”Paradisíaco (889 words)

Gardening’s why I’m here in Nicaragua, beyond loving my family into productive life and pushing my writing to staccato elegance, castañeteo, sometimes, when I’m here. Too, I’ve a well-sprung heart for Teote, and, given all the FCE work—the school s, health clinic, police station, town hall, women’s bakery, plus, experimental farms, scholarships, visiting vets and optometrists, ad infinitum. Just for starters, we brought potable water back to town, out for 13 years, not bad for gringo crazies with hearts in the warmer places. Gracias, Glenwood Springs, Sister City.

It’s all just greater gardening, to me. Of course, I also love being a don.
Por favor, look here, over this plastic fence, queridos!

“Tierra Mia” backs up on La Grundge-ia, a.k.a. Teote Abajo. Once a haven for war homeless, now it’s Zorro’s starving village, con putas en la noche, all down my western border. Most are polite young women with abandoned kids who enjoy this more than working tabaco. I own and rent two houses on Puta Street, my buffer, to several young -Betanco-niece-sex-workers—Believe me, amigas, I’ve tried to save their virtue, but, no dice!--plus a third, across Puta City’s main street, not really part of my plan for “Tierra Mia,” but for noise control. Its acquisition speaks to realer-than-real life on Teote’s meanest street.

I bought the gay bar and its blasting PA, es verdad, now rented to busy teachers, when doña Marvin, the owner, one of Teote’s “men in dresses,” wanted to move farther off, onto the highway to Jalapa, paved now, and fast, and needed to sell. “La Faerie Queen de Teote,” so named by another Brigadista, whispered to Marta over café that she’d “cut the price, move out rapidamente y permanente, if a certain noted Chéli would expedite the cash pronto, via Western Union, in 2 days. ”

Otherwise, she’d “probably have to stay, for years”—location is everything, even in Teote—“until a sucker comes along.” Anyway, she said, “I guess I’ll open a Disco Bar for heteros on the other side, shocking pink and blue, just stunning, like Paris or Nueva York, with mirrors,” she said, “though un poco loud, with two barros playing such musica diferenta ,” she added, with a mince of claro sympathy to Marta, and . . . . So, Martita, who hates la musica de Marvin almost as much as I, got on her cell, my gift, called me, and, voila, I marshaled all the angels needed to reap mi tranquilidád.

Por gracias de Diós, with help from Miguel, and, especially don Moncho, one shrewd Jerry McQuire, I eventually obliged, after shaving another $900 off Marvicita’s cut-rate asking price, “for malo wear and tear in all the fuchsia bedrooms,” mi padre said, with a macho smirk in his voice. The cash, ready, had fallen in my lap, gilded manna, the week before, another synchronicity. “Found Money” hyperventilates to this end of the road for the incipient don Douglas, Land Baron de Nicaragua.

The deal got me an upscale house in Teote, cheap, with multi-colored cribs, a modern kitchen, and a bordello de hombres bathhouse deluxe, with aqua Greek columns around a deep pink pila, cold-water-only, Teote-style. It’s the one house, excepting palomas, I’d live in, did it not front La Calle de las Putas.

I bought it to bury the noise, but I also engineered a laugh-riot-sensation the following Christmas Dinner in Colorado, telling my grown son and daughter, in front of the clacking relatives, they’d one day own a very pricey gay bordello in Puta City, Nicaragua! Hoo-Hah! We almost lost our giblets and gravy, giggling. Trickster-don!

Now, though, I’m selling it, for doble the dinero, to an evangelical church on a mission, with need, apparently, of a large baptismal font. No PA is part of the deal. I’ll buy a couple more buffer houses with the gains. I hope I’m not cheating my stateside kids of their heritage, but I’m not much into abuse. Marta says muchachos con vestidos died of slit throats in esta barro, and I don’t need any more ghosts than I already have.

The deal with Marvicita felt destined, smooth, mutual. Both doña Marvin and I are happy in our expansive and, for me, much quieter, places. I’ll never hear Ricky Martin’s “Vida Loca” again, her favorite song, blared out her barro’s system until 10 pm every night but domingo.

Even gay putas need their Sundays off, and most go to church in very sedate dresses, with braided beards, of course. When doña Marvin’s not in bright Gucci knockoffs, she, being a macho modern guy, goes for black Armani copies, muscle shirts and chains of gold and silver, un guapísimo, especially for church with her colorful entourage. They separate and celebrate with their families, pass the paz, and visit with the padre after misa. In drag. With beards. Surrounded, like doña Marvicita, by children from earlier sexual choices, supported by their current services.
Now, that, mi amigos, is Teote, pequeño, in small: one for all, and all, regardless of circumstance, for one, in solidarity. Gracias a Diós por todo.

Perhaps the locals who covet La Doña Estebana’s pasture just want to live across the street from don Douglas Betanco, on the quietest street in Teote, tranquilo but for “The Moody Blues,” medium volume, my constant writing compadres, in blues-y Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia," Part 4

2008-03-17T10:06:00.000-06:00

Cuento 4: “Don Visions and La Doña” (870 words)

Let us sip some café. Por favor, my guests, siéntense, here on my veranda, out of the southwest vienta. See how elegantly Marta has set our table—Gracias, Martita!--complete with peace lilies in mi abuela’s cobalt-glass vaso on the hand-crafted mesa? Rosquillas beckon on my great-aunt’s hand-painted, gold-trimmed Limoges plate, thin as eggshell, translucent. And cups extraordinaire, anywhere, crystal I rescued in a coup de garage sale in Glenwood—6 Waterford cups, signed, mint condition!--from an Oxydol box of dirty rags I bothered to finger, then bought pronto for $1.

Would you pour, La Doña?

These were carried just for café at palomas, querida, wrapped in pop’em plastic in my ancient, reinforced Samsonite suitcase, still going strong. I never carry it myself when I can help it, but it’s indispensible for toting my desktop publishing empire and one or two fine, appropriate objets to embellish “Tierra Mia” lifestyle. It’s not “Rich-and-Famous,” yet, but we’re above-the-poverty-line-elegante in very small things. Next trip down, Samson will hold some Wewer Keohanes from my Glenwood collection, in gilded frames, for my new cuartos, north of my current room, and a pewter duck.

This Old-Zorro-don sets a courtly table when it counts, a glittering Wow for everyone breathing inTeote, out here in the drying cornstalks. Fresh-toasted café for dipping chewy rosquillas counts for everything, as lifted-pinky as possession-poor campesinas can make it, serving hospitality with finesse.

Ah, sí, I grow this café myself, here on “Tierra Mia,” under those spreading banana trees down south there.

I’ve rented that pasture to the east, below those sexy montañas, to grow corn, provide work projects and food for my older hijos, keep them out of tabaco. The don in me deeply covets it. It looks great from mi ventana, full of well-fed maís. I can watch it grow a half a foot daily in the rainy season, without leaving mi oficina. The owner, here pouring, mi amiga La Doña, won’t sell--Naughty Señora!--though I’ve asked many times: it was her dear don Gumercindo’s favorite piece of land.

Somehow, though, the way mi loca vida twists and turns, I intuit I’ll own it, someday, with the help of the Arcángel. La Doña to Teote, Estebana Sanchez is 97, a good friend. She has, from me, a framed photocopy of the Arcángel in all his glory, on her sala wall. We dance sometimes, at fiestas, very, very slowly. I’m delicate, after all, un viejito. She’s a tough, wizened crone, in the best sense, es cierto. And, too, while I want her “memory-lane” mostly to keep it unobstructed along the track to the río Limon, as well for caballos and sweet corn, a few coco palms to bisect the view from palomas, I’m not really very greedy, for an aristocrat.

Prime campo land of two acres, though, that pasture with its own artesian seep, good clay for tiles--Ay, Chihuahua, amigos! Unfortunately, even if La Doña deigned to sell, it’s jumping out of reach, though only twenty feet from my property line, straight across the road. Van Gogh would have lost his other ear to this mystical view out my writing window.

The foundations of La Doña’s first casa as a married woman are located there. The house melted in the rains, after her husband took the tin roof, during the war, to use as ceiling for a bomb shelter at her city home, back in 1980. What didn’t melt was blasted to smithereens in 1981, as the Contras moved con fuerza to take Teote from the Sandinistas, who considered the battle to keep the town a fight to the death. Many got buried. The old shooting trench from La Guerra, around the town’s perimeter then, still crosses the pasture, north to south, though it’s a bit crumbled in. Cottontails make it home.

I’d love to have her in the neighborhood, again, now I’m a local don. She’d tart up el vicino even faster, and be closer, as well, for our visitas than up in Arriba, where the oldest families live, some in compounds with an ancient stucco wing like hers, stout wooden beams still arching the sala, under a roof of tile. Her husband, don Gumercindo Sanchez, and she founded a most vibrant and peso-savvy family in Teote: their hijos have carried on the Sanchez tradition of moving and shaking most pragmatically with the times.

According to La Doña, half the ricos in Jalapa have knocked at her door, ruining her siesta and her estomago, but offering mountains of dolares for her former home site in Teote, to develop as a projecto of 48 teeming casitas or to grow tabaco: “Ay, no!” she says; she doesn’t like that picture any more than I do. The price is rising even faster than the market, though, and too big a chunk for me: I haven’t got much money left this trip, on purpose. I live on a very fixed income, here and there, and need to get used to it. Ah, well, even though my writing desk faces the campo, with those hills, naked majas Tropicanas on parrot-green lounges, if I’m meant to have it, I will, even in Pension-City, Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia," Part 3

2008-03-17T10:02:00.000-06:00

Cuento 3: “A History in Flors de Sangre” (886 words)

Ay, Diós mío, señoritas y caballeros, look at that unobstructed view of Honduras across the campo, from mi casita del norte. As you can see, esta vista mágica fronts the long eastern border of “Tierra Mia.” All the casitas, covered now with scarlet bougainvillea, face these sensual yet dangerous mountains, once filled with landmines and Contras and banditos and Mayan warriors, now robbed desnuda of their towering pines and mahogany by log teams in the 50’s. They primed Anastásio Somoza el Segundo’s dictating pockets, over the sixty odd years his family was supported in power by the U.S. Marines.

They put down recurring campesino insurrections—Libertad whistles more loudly to land slaves than to free men, perhaps?--even before the 20’s, when a firebrand named Sandino, from Nueva Segovia, the north country province where I live, rose in arms against the Gringos, the Men in Managua and Somoza, el Primero, then a General, who truced, finally, with this national peon-hero, after many Marines, campesinos and Nationales were killed, all fighting for a version of democracia. Promising land distribution to Sandino’s face, El Jefe then had him shot in the streets, after the Marines had helped to elevate Primero, a peacemaker as it seemed, to Presidente. They also trained his Guardia Nacionál, notorious for torture and bloodletting mayhem, though I hope our boys will never know what vicious sadists and terroristas their students became, with fine-point savvy in mass-intimidating-travesty, after boot camp.

Anastasio, el Segundo, one heinous modelo perfecto for his Guardia, siphoned off gazillions , all here believe , in international aid flooding his Capital City after the 1967 earthquake trembled most of Managua to the ground. Que desastre! The city, when I first saw it in 1993, still looked a bombsite, 25 years after. That was way before I became a don, of course, and before I saw what bombs can do to people, up close, in Teote.

Now the rubble of the former Downtown has been turned under an extensive green parque, nice for the opening evening, after which it filled overnight with thousands of black plastic tents on clothes lines, strung between the newly-planted trees, homes for Managua’s poor and squatting street kids, sniffing glue and selling themselves for a breath of freedom. It’s not a safe place to get off the bus; in fact, I’ve heard, mi amigos, an innocuous tourist lady in a bus, with an over-jeweled hand out the window, lost her rings and fingers to a hungry machete. Managua’s not the best spot for a jewelry convention, nor is Teote, not quite as desperate anymore. I left my gold retirement watch in Colorado on purpose, practical don that I am.

Everything in Nicaragua’s connected, one way or another, to the abuse of the poor, 90% of the population, by the privileged. “Tierra Mia” has witnessed most of it, so every stone tells stories of cruelty and rape and oppressive slavery, for two thousand years, if we figure in the Mayans. They sacrificed slaves, mostly captured war trophies, for every god-appeasing function, including, I suppose, sweet fifteen parties, to flatter marriage gods into sending on rico husbands. Imagine, if you will, losing your heart, possibly right here on “Tierra Mia,” to save a winsome Mayan princess from pimples. Such a rare honor, don’t you think?

Sí, señorita, Mayans marauded the north of Nicaragua, so I’m told by La Doña Estebana, who ought to know, an ancient crone and matriarch of all Teote, a friend of la Brigada de Glenwood Springs. She’s Mom to local star and Sandinista war hero, mayor of Teote through all its Brigada activity, Chindo Sanchez, now mayor of Jalapa.

La Doña says the Mayans, to corral their slaves before the trip to Guatemala, built a stone compound, then a small stone city where the Limon and Poteca rivers come together, just down rio from Quacamaya, mi padre’s finca with the curious non-Hispanic place name. The ancient site—stones vanished into campesino foundations centuries ago--now slithers with poisonous snakes, so everybody stays away, even seed-seekers making beaded curtains. Too much ancient pain, I’d say, and haunted. I’d love to explore it, but avoiding Bushmasters and Corals—as well as pain-- is very high on my Teote have-to agenda: One good bite of the don and I’d be agonizing history, myself, or, worse, paralyzed for life. Luckily, they only live where people don’t.

Somoza Segundo, a pit viper, ran the upper Jalapa Valley, the breadbasket of Nicaragua, as a personal tabaco fiefdom, owning most of it himself, through the shadiest dealing, so say the Teote elders. If he wanted a piece of land, and the owner, usually a campesino struggling to keep his acre, wouldn’t sell, he’d end up dead, shot, skinned while dying, skewered on a sharpened pole for good measure, then dumped in the middle of the disputed piece of land. Slam-bang! It made estate acquisition pretty easy.

His “cattle,” the Sandinistas who eventually overthrew his terror in 1979, worked in his fields for food, like any other domesticated beast. All the elders joke sardonically that every fetid outhouse in Nicaragua now holds a starving, caca-eating parrot named “Segundo” to clean out the hole for free.

Thank God, he’s gone, assassinated after his ouster with silver bullets, the elders say, to keep him in his coffin: “Tierra Mia,” scarlet-stained with bougainvillea, would make a jim-dandy triunfo of a private pool for a dictator and his doxies, complete with imperial, sultry view, here in bloody Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia" Part 2

2008-03-17T09:58:00.000-06:00

Cuento 2: “Slow Walk to Land Baron Style” (802 words)

Now, though, I’m weary, from such imaginative don-derring-do. The tender bowing over fine brown hands hurts my back. It can be tiring, this landed gentry bit. My butt and legs hurt, as well, from this morning’s lesson with mijo Ramon. I’m content to hobble ‘round my bustling homestead, la casa de palomas, grinning as wide as Methusaleh’s teeth were long, savoring the campesino flavor of “Tierra Mia” in Nicaragua.

Ay, Chihuahua, “Tierra Mia!” Would you care, mi amigos, for a little stroll, with a guaranteed, pedigreed Nicaraguan don, around my mesh-curtained castle yard? It’s mi plesor, as a first-time landowner, señors y señoras.

Ah, sí! Check out this tall poinsetia clump, north of palomas. 8 feet of verde stalks, scarlet-crowned, the village elders say the plant’s witnessed too many martyrdoms, quite bloody I’m sure, and, so, it metamorphs to red in February, a memorial to saintly and Sandinista sacrifice every year.

Behold, now, mi Campesino-Heaven-on-Earth, just past that bright-red bouganvillea! Si, senor, my yard’s very long. More than 200 striding paces, street to street, a village block of tired adobe shacks—No other word fits quite as well, but we’re making progress!--my new celestial province of fruit trees, full-grown, bearing aguacates, mangos, cocos, cacao, bananas, limones and naranjas, and , of course, café.

“Tierra Mia” stretches over a half acre, más ó menos, still growing, of developed residential land, amenities already in at the sale. Surrounding la casa de palomas, still home to my sister Marta and her family, though my name’s on the dotted line at the lawyer’s, “Tierra Mia” expands my strolling space, safe after dark with my perros beside me, right where I’ve lived for 13 years when in Teote. I traded Martita a fine but tiny casita, with bananas and café, down on the rio Limon. A pump and hose fetch water for the trees and for frijoles in the Dry. We both think we got the best bargain, especially as she still lives at palomas, taking care of us all, so Miguel had a hand in, we feel, es cierto. Mutuality is the Árcangel’s constant sign, along with his Sword of Truth.

The rest came poco á poco, as contiguous lots became available in the years since I developed landlust in Teote, guided by synchronicity to buys where everyone wins. A 20 minute stroll traces its circumference, about the same as dawdling ‘round a block in Old Town Glenwood. New member of the campesino hierarchy, un caballero, I’m finally planting in my own garden, un jardÍn tropical, just like Voltaire’s Candide, no more on rented land.

Just look at these cascading candelarias, like red honeybees on golden wires, on every wood column of my veranda! Life triumphs over death, once more, in “Tierra Mia.”

See the fleck of red in this pebble? It speaks to la sangre of many martyrs. Two millennia of war, “Indian” slavery and quashed rebellions do that. Before this extension of Teote was built, to shelter refugees after La Guerra, what a killing field “Tierra Mia” must have been, so close to the fields and the front! From tilling the soil for new gardens, I know it contains bullets, and, once, a bayonet, though guerreros campesinos are very careful with their killing tools. Most still keep an AK-47 and a machete under the mattress, lumpiness an issue transcended with an extra colchone.

OK, sí, it’s pretty bloody ground, but, it puts things into campesino perspective, and, we do get an ocean of rain here when it rains! Pero, no, it’s a horror story, unwashed or cleaned, especially with the earliest Spaniards and the Somozas, who called the campesinos “our cattle,” and treated them accordingly, a continuous blood-drenched genocide of “expendable” people, just “meat.”

Even so, I love this tierra, as only a first time owner can, even if it is land purchased on the cheap--less than $5,000 in 7 years--in the hinterland of Nicaragua, not on the tourist-covered beaches of San Juan del Sur. It’s now worth $27,000! I could take the money and run, but why sell in this market, rising like an angel up to el Cielo? Just last year, I doubled my money.

In Glenwood, God knows, a city block would pave my way to Pig’s Heaven, or, at least, a small McMansion, but Teote is a garage sale after hours, when everything’s picked over and 90% off. Norteamericanos like me are snapping up chunks of Nicaragua as I write. It’s a “Blue Light Sale” at K-Mart in this northern farmer’s market, though I hear residential land in coastal cities is already much higher. But I live in No-Where-City, where everything is loco, including me, with my feet planted firm in “Tierra Mia,” in the corn god’s very sunny kitchen, Nicaragua.

"Tierra Mia" Part 1

2008-03-17T09:53:00.000-06:00

Cuento 1: “Enter: don Douglas” (894 words)

What power a dinky word like don has! I’ve been elevated in Teote to don Douglas, with nary a sword to my shoulders, I’m sorry to say, nor any swearing-in ritual, not even a bending of my now aristocratic knee, after a swirl of my Zorro cape around my soon-to-be-skinny frame. I’ve always loved costumes. A CMC Theatre star for many years, I played Sancho Panza in Man of la Mancha, so I understand eccentric dons and impossible dream fulfillment. I’ve also played Bottom, the blustering ass in Midsummer Night’s Dream, who wakes, enchanted by magic dust, with a donkey’s head on his shoulders and with Titania, Queen of the Faeries, wildly in love with him.

That part fits, too, especially en la mañanita, though I’m quieter, with tiny ears, and am acquainted, as we shall see, only through real estate deals with la Faerie Queen. I stole both shows, with raves. However, I’m a don not for my stage presence, but because I now own sufficient land in Teote to actualize dreams, my way, like that other don—Quixote de Quijana--and because the villandry here find me a wise viejito, also, a loco fool, a good balance for playing don Douglas Betanco to the cosmic hilt, on my own medieval fiefdom in bloody Nicaragua.

Yes, you may kiss my silver ring, if you insist, my child. And, por favor, my guests, bienvenidos a “Tierra Mia.” We blaze hospitalidád con gusto on our brightest white, starched and ironed Oxford-cloth shirtsleeves, here in the omnipresent dust of the Dry.

Don Douglas Betanco de Palomas y Quacamaya y Colorado! Quite a handle to live up to, though I’ve been that, really, for years, one loco knight errant for justice, a private global warrior, and, while wordy, un trovador seeking verdad y gracias, with sweep of sombrero, at your service. Don Douglas is eager, as a landed aristocrat de Nicaragua, to rescue dimpled damsels—old toothy dragons, for that matter—or peons, es cierto, at a handkerchief’s drop, a fetid snort of breath or a cry from mi hermanos. Just call me on mi cellular, and I’m rearing en caballo, my sword aloft like Old Zorro, 25 years imprisoned, raring to go por Libertad y campesinos, with Spanish-American-Colonial-Class--ah, well, just like me! May I be worthy of this noble though intensely-abusive tradition!

Let’s try again, what say you, without abuse this time?

Old Zorro, eh? Anthony Hopkins, with his crystalline eye? Not bad, don Douglas, CMC Profesor de Ingles, Emeritus, gracias a Diós, especially now I’ve dropped almost a hundred pounds of fat and a ton of student papers. Hoo-Hah! Old Zorro it will be, when I can fit into the skinny black Levis I brought down, for the Palomas Mascarada in April. Hah! I’d better start doing sit-ups, pronto!

Oh, of course, señorita, I love the movie. The Mask of Zorro’s the only DVD in English at la casa de palomas, so I watch it anytime I want an Ingles fix. I’m totally immersed in Spanish, a treat for the ear: I love the liquidambar flow of spoken Español, more harmonious by far than harsh American English. “Church” is hardly the sound to sing the soul of “Iglésia.”

Ah, si, señor. Zorro’s a personal hero. He was, after all, don Diego de la Vega, so we’ve mucho in common besides Spanish, including great charm. It comes, after all, with the don territory. I wish I had a cave under “Tierra Mia,” for my fencing lessons, but I’ll never be Antonio Banderas. We’ll have a walking maze in the jardin, though, and plenty of happy peasants, hats in hand, singing my noble praises. Please, mi señora, check out Martita’s impatiens by the entrance here. Rosada, sí, y blanca, y roja y coral! Marta plants them for happy welcome to palomas.

Now, about that rearing horse: Triunfo’s my sweet pensionado present. I bought this macho horse, a caballo pinto grande, more hands high than most here, for stud as well as genteel country living, as soon as I discovered my don-dom. Who could even think himself a gentleman without a horse? In Spanish, “horseman” and “gentleman” are the same, caballero, and, Diós sabe, I’m a “cosmic cowboy,” total. Sometimes, I even stay saddled, though it’s iffy, so I don’t really rear that often. Never, to be truthful. I’m definitely a “Keep-it-at-a-nice-slow-walk-for-now, Triunfo!” caballero.

I‘m getting lessons. Mi hijo Ramon, 23, born on un caballo, has taken me under his wing. He wants me bone-whole, as do I. A perfect Nica country squire’s macho younger son, he helps me by choice in my dotage here. He worries that Triunfo, spirited steed, will bolt, a whirlwind of lust, frothing, no doubt, while I, clung orangutan-tight, entangled in his whitewater mane, hurl deranged mea culpas to Cielo, “Vaya con Diós!” to cheering peasants and “Sit! Sientese, por favor!” to my horny horsy, all the bucking way to the volcanoes.

“Tio Mame” in Nicaragua! So much for knightly dignity. I pray I don’t lose my new sword.

This is not really that unlikely a scenario: not of the fox-hunting set, I’m hardly a horseman, yet. Ramon’s teaching me caballo control, primero. Even a don de Palomas y Quacamaya y Colorado should learn the ropes, first, with a devoted maestro de caballos, playing it seguro with his brand-new-brightly-painted-slightly-frisky toy, my celebration-season-Triunfo, here in “Tierra Mia," Nicaragua

Angelus, Part 7

2008-03-17T09:46:00.000-06:00

Part VII: “Last Lines of ‘Ángelus’” (581 words)

I finished “Ángelus” this morning, in 6 Parts, on a domingo near the end of February, but I felt it missed a 7th Part, since 7 speaks more loudly to me of finish and luck than 6. Don’t our lives run in spirals of sevens? And, then, there’s craps. It would fit better a story of angels working to keep us, by choice, from the seven deadly sins we celebrate in every magazine: avarice, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride, that’s the Nightly News. Most live in Vanity Fair, somehow, partying with supermodels and plutarchs, at least in our imaginations: at one time, I’d studied angelology as a respite from all that contagious local color up there, feeling highly sanctimonious.

I stewed about Part VII all afternoon, having nothing much to add, after weeks revisiting a less expanded draft of “Ángelus.” Then, I had a rain-tossed brainstorm, when an unseasonal downpour rang the tin roof, a carillon of cracked bells, right above my writing desk: since the last lines of the Six end in “Nicaragua,” I’d create a narrative poem for Part VII, by stringing the end lines together on a skewer of palabra-bells, entitled with the plot movements in “Ángelus,” providing narrative structure.

Voila! That’s what I’ve done. I’m very pleased to share it. It makes a very lucky end, especially since an “Angelus” is the tolling of church bells at dusk or death, calling all angels, when day turns to night, then heads again, hopefully, towards the dawn, with the help of Heaven.
A little judicious cutting, rearranging of palabras for bell-shaped poems, more espanol, apt punctuation, excellent dimension and even some damn-fine objective-correlative work, a la Yeats and Macleish: one very tight poem, I think, curious when standing alone. It’s meant for performance, as well as print. What could possibly be better? A tintinnabulation of silver bells at bedtime in dangerous Nicaragua: Let them ring!

“Last of ‘Ángelus’”

**Creation**

Mi padre peeks,
a duenna, as I bathe
desnudo in the río-crossing finca,
for ángel sign! Loco, he is, mi amigos,
even in Nicaragua.

↕Conflict↕

Persuasive I am, one fighting gallo, mano a mano,
sin scratching souls. Papá, que pasa? What’s
falta? What’s arriba, what’s down? San
Miguel! Rollercoaster jokes, yet!
Ángel-loco in Nicaragua!

«Focus»

Viejito,
sleep-interrupted.
Perros y coros of descant gallos,
dead-drunk bolos roaring at midnight, Teote
slashers, all, con machetes; ladrones y putas bailando
en los calles: after-dusk-dead-paseo. Ay,
your fearful angelogia,
Nicaragua!

¿Question?

Papa
hits
eerie
buttons?
Have I no leathers
against them, no deep furs? No lit
angel feathers to cushion bones from falls
on stone? Look! En luz de luna, alone, I stretch, one foot
to chair antiqua, to cut with hand tijeras one gilded candelaria--
Glitzy spray of honeybees!--from elbows del mango en mi jardÍn.
Why risk, once again, my hips,
para
ángeles
del oro
on my desk here in Nicaragua?

*• Obsession •*

Ay,
Miguel,
I’m crazy,
Perfeccionista loca,
want chunchas, mi vida, just so,
truly claro! I check it, mi Ángel, all the—
Ay de mí! Click! That’s it! Aleluia!
Holy Nicaragua!

*Revelation*

In
asylum
of perfectísimo,
one wrinkled ángel de Diós
de los Estados, makes biggest fear come
true: esperandos imposibles from others.
Now, más ó menos means perfecto! Viva Nicaragua!

‡Resolution‡

Con silver jangles, spurs, caballo y viejito don, sombrero in hand,
spiral to Ángeles, muy despacio, from well’s bottom.
I finally rest, con paz, mi guerra-weary heart,
healing, warmed by San Miguelito,
más ó menos, tranquilísimo,
one happy hombre,
Old Zorro at
fiesta, un
ángel de Diós
de los Estados,
with familia,
this gleam of
angels, más
ó menos, in
Nicaragua.

• Dissolution •

Bells,
trembling,
ring silver-bright,
un ángelus, sundown’s tintineo,
calling all angels! What could possibly be better?
When all things fall-apart-before-the-dawn’s-reúnion,
horas prior my “little death” of sorry sleep,
tintinabulas fight darker oscuro,
welcome mañanita light,
in Arcángel City,
Nicaragua.
Ω

Angelus Part 6

2008-02-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

Part VI: “Miguel’s Most Artful Persuasion” (841 words)
“Loco Leads the Locals, in Blindfold!” I can see the headlines now. What’s been dinging my buttons all these years about this angelology is very simple, amigos: I’ve been pitching my own example of high expectations, of perfectísimo, here, for years, obsessive in my twirl, in almost every action I’ve chosen to do, as my concept of creative living. Subtle compulsion, with all the best intentions. It’s worked milagros here for many, including me, raising up with others the lives of hundreds.
My most constant word in español en mi vida loca is “Perfecto!” I haven’t been lying. So much really is in Teote for me, past chunchas—things--which here are Dollar-Store-Puro, unless handmade by local artisans with some excellent craft. I never thought I’d been pushing my expectations of myself on them, but I have, lo siento, and they’ve almost universally lived up to this unconscious challenge, grácias a Diós, so in most ways, everyone’s a winner, a good sign of Ángel Flying. Yet, still . . . it’s been a ton to work for, for nigh on 16 years! They must breathe a sigh of relief when I leave for another year.
My God, what an unconscious, gringo controller I can be, though in my soul a Chéli! I’ve been denying my own fear of flying off target here—Believe me, I have, big time, in the past!—protecting my crazy life from Nicaragua’s blatant craziness with excruciating standards of personal perfection. Voila! I’ve created what I most fear--unattainable external demands like the ángel-chuncha--the standard outcome for this type of subtle mania. We manifest what we most fear, almost all the time. In the process, I’ve unwittedly projected expectations on a whole Olmec-Mayan clan; then, I’ve been unfairly angered for seven years, put off by their simple expectation of the same ángel perfectÍsimo from me! Now that needs rectifying by forgivenance. Then, says The Course in Miracles, another miracle can happen.
Clarity of vision, por favor! Projection’s an old, old story of mine; the pattern’s emerged frequently, especially in the 70’s, but also in my just-past teaching, my academic standards a consciousness-raiser for my increasingly successful students, but—“Diós, perdóname!”—I was such a whipmeister, albeit with a grin. I feel sorry for them, now. Pretty controlling, as my wives have said. But, now that I’m a Nicaraguan gentleman farmer, in my family compound, I need to settle down.
I’ll retire the whip until I’m playing Zorro, in bandana, cape--a black rain poncho--and a zip-zap-zingy, handmade leather faja, bought to play a wicked banker in a Glenwood melodrama, now here, hanging at the head of mi cama, where Nicaraguan dons keep them, against the terrors and ladrones de la noche. Mamacitas keep one hanging en la cocina as a visual discipline tool, as well, to chase piglets out of the casa. I’ll be The Masked Bandito, a surprise sensation, at the family fiesta this year for me, with a marimba band, maybe, dancing en la sala de la casa de palomas, soon to be concrete for dancing and no fleas, with chocolate cece y gelado in five angelic flavors: Ay, Chihuahua! I doubt, though, if Catarina Zeta Jones will appear at this April’s Palomas Ball.
This time, I’ll take a growth step here: instead of covering up my fear of failure with perfectionism, when faced with choices, I’ll rise into a “more or less” approach, straight up the spiraling way of balanced opposites. I’ll say what Nicaraguans say, “más ó menos,” when asked, “Como está?” I’ll answer “Más ó menos” in the mañanita, with my usual angelic smile, instead of “perfecto,” except when extending complimentos to my well-paid familia workers, for their “perfectísimo trabajo, gracias.” That sounds muy tranquilo for us all, especially for this viejito don. Más ó menos is perfecto. The only time I’ll claim my majestic angel status is when working one-on-one with others and when I’m polishing my writing, where I’m definitely a Giant Ángel de Diós, though of the almost secret kind.
How life twists most here when I least expect it!
Now, what’s the Michelangelo thing to do? Ah, in truth, the artist in me whispers in my ear, in answer: each of us is clearly an angel, standing sword ablaze against the sky, a smile to hosts of others, the standard gleaming of righteous angels. Nice. While I’m not sprouting chicken feathers or getting married—Diós no la permite!--and I’m staying extra-close to mi tierra and my clothes, I’ll trip a light fandango with these darling family ángeles, as we perfect, más ó menos, our Indio-Espano-Celtic melting pot of love, just one more wrinkled don de los Estados on a well-saddled pinto, with silver jangles and spurs, slowly trotting up the spiral to the Angels from the bottom of the well, sombrero in hand, en paz. Más ó menos, perfectísimo. I’m finally resting in my old, world-weary heart, safe with the protection of San Miguelito, in Teote, Nicaragua.

Angelus, Part 5

2008-02-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

Part V: “One Foot Over the Line, Verdad?”(691 words)
By 2005, on a quick trip south, though, I thought the ángel-chuncha with don Moncho had gone too far, past the line between honor and reasonable awe to a stance of fervent católico devotion, better left to Diós in the charming new Iglesia—Ee-glay-see-uh--such a melodious word for church. Mi padre couldn’t stop telling his amigos in the streets , the tiendas and his Católico pequeños that “I had no needs but peace” (true, in a way, but I approached 280 pounds on a 5’6” frame of tiny bird bones, from nervous eating in the States, an indication of major distress). He crowed that miracles surround his family with grace when I’m around (also verdad, but it takes the whole grace-filled family); he chanted my praises to the heavenly skies and began revering chicken feathers at my feet. “Entonces,” he whispered, lit with passion and glee, in the ears of half Teote, “Douglas must be sent from Cielo,” as well as the States, “to earn his wings.” I felt an overweight but somehow venerated holy relic! I kept expecting him to check my back for wing buds or to bring me an angel’s bell, a la It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my favorite Capra movies.
I’m hardly a celestial being, as my former wives can attest, nor do I want to fight those ancient battles of right or wrong, in life or international relations, a quagmire of guesswork in both. I prefer romantic logic with classical tools: both sides being valid, then, “Let’s fly up the middle with Miguel, transcending discord for mutual peace,” I say to mis hijos. But, I’ve got plenty of personal quirks, sins and raw, wounded skeletons grinning ominously in my closet, not on public view. So, the angel elevation felt, though a distinctly luxurious box, just too confining, one I could not humbly live with. What a weird responsibilidád, to be an angel! I told him, por favor, to cut it out, for the sake of my ballyhoo’d celestial tranquility.
And, so, he did, thank the stars.
Now, it’s up again, after last night’s tete-a-tete over rice pudding, when he whispered it, una más vez. I imagine now--God forbid!--I’ll have to do something really-truly—horribly non-angelical, like dancing through the streets desnuda, with all my leftover flab hanging out, covered with pasted-on feathers; or painting my fingernails bright black, like las brujas from Honduras who, according to the local curandera Esmeralda, dance sin ropas at the snake-infested hot spring up the river near the border, once a month at full moon. Whoo-ee! That would be a wicked picture to point at for proof! Or, perhaps, I’ll get disgustingly drunk on guaro in the baño, easy enough to do, but I’m no longer one for booze.
Something’s missing here, a solución less painful, pronto! H-m-m-m? Why is my imagination running towards nudie shots?
Maybe, I should troll los calles for una enamorada here, to show I still have at least some carnal needs? However, sending all the mamacita matchmakers loco with delight for the futures of their charming daughters, “Soon to live with don Douglas in the States, un rico fabuloso, I hear!”—Ay, Chihuahua! That’s dangerous territory, es cierto, for a confirmed bachelor with very little money, though none here believe it, in a very small town. I’m clearly, in potential, the most desirable, antique Sugar Daddy in all Teote, and probably for another hundred miles in all directions! Talk about cosmic jokes! I’ve been celibate, by choice, for most of twenty years. Everyone here loves—covets--the Chéli, the North American Teotano from La Brigada de Glenwood Springs, with the loco Nicaraguan heart. It all seems just too much, an incredible amount of trouble, guaranteed to spin in the wrong direction a very graceful, very simple life, lived cleanly, but only somewhat angelically, , here in my comfortable, far south of the border quietness.
Ay, Chihuahua, I’m such a crazy perfectionista, who wants his things and life just so, that’s claro. I check it, now I’m retired, all the—Oh, ay de mí! Click! That’s it. Hallelujah, Nicaragua!

Angelus Part 4

2008-02-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

Part IV: “Laughing with Los Ángeles” (717 words)
Seven years after my first angelic trip in 1993 to Teote , by Y2K, after divorcing my second wife stateside, after having a heart attack and angioplasty, though, still, like the fool I can be, smoking plantations of cheap cigaros, I built a room by hand of adobe, wood and tin, at la casa de palomas, for $400; I wrote 100,000 words about Teote in 4 months of inspired frenzy; I also danced in los calles with jubilation during Semana Sancta; bought the banana and coffee finca, with the help of San Miguel; and lost more than 40 pounds: all this, while, apparently, floating up from honored brother, in the family’s esteem, to North American angelhood—For Goodness Sake!--one of the most quiet kind, I assure you: it was disconcerting, es cierto, though not unpleasant, es verdád, when a multi-tasking whirlwind like me, freed from years of paper-grading up north, took on the wildly circuitous hinterland of Nicaragua. It gave further spin to my tornado.
Phew! What a sentence! Magisterial!
Árcangel Miguel was usually with me here, after all—Qué Guardia!--and mi vida loca in Teote, a constantly numinous south-of-the-border treat. It still is. It was an easy transference for mi padre to make, just a shift from a capital letter, really, though no less mistaken, for all his seriousness. When don Moncho Betanco, with tears in his eyes, named me in 2000 el norteamericano ángel de Diós--albeit one from the States, a curious place for angels to derive--I made it a joke. I carried ‘round a walking stick I called “my sword of truth,” to much alegría de mi familia. As I usually stepped into caca de vaca at the ranch when holding mi espada aloft, it was pretty comical, and I loved it. When I’m in Nicaragua, I’m a star. It became another joyful cuenta de Douglas about their new hermano, the loco from the States.
It helps, I suppose, that I’m a regularly generous hombre, both here and in Glenwood, with time to listen and a tithe shared among my friends, family, charitable groups and Teote, in gracias. It also helps that I’d come back six times in seven years by then, leading Brigada trips, and in 1994 brought cash to buy mi padre a nursing cow. He’d built a rusty herd of dairy cows, before Hurricane Mitch wiped it out here in ‘98. So life usually flows—Rollercoaster!--when on a farm outside a backwater campesino town in Nicaragua, where “everything mad, bad, or sad usually happens, at least once, or all at once, sometimes,” as I wrote back in 2000, “one vast cosmic joke after joke after joke,” still bitter about those colorada cows in Heaven. I need to take it with a tad more cosmic salt, so I’m Kokopéli here, a major trickster, a Palladium vaudeville comedian, for my own sanity. Laughter really is the best medicina, even if los Betancos are right, and I really am a gentle ángel.
I’m a pretty shiny guy in Peasantville; in fact, I work to be the best norteamericano—with-nary-an-ugly-bone--when in Teote, a model of equivalence to balance out the shells my haunted government bought in the Contra War, supporting the tyrannically-evil dictator Somoza instead of cheering on the Sandinistas, democratic to their ultimately capitalistic cores. What in the world does that say, amigos?
I’ll probably buy another milk cow for la finca next year, with the interest, pretty low, on some personal micro-enterprise loans coming due in April, when corn prices get higher, before the planting of next December’s harvest: there’s thirteen Betanco kids living there, two miles east of Teote, with their madres and their abuelos, thus more need for milk de vacas. That’s no joke for me, our body’s thirst for leche and calcium. I too want more liquid freshness left for me, for warm milk in the evening. I’m a viejito, after all, my sleep’s often interrupted by dogs and the town’s chorus of roosters, and my bones are Celtic-fragile: I also have no feathers, no fur, no outstretched wings for bad-fall protection, while standing on my deskchair in the night here, leche-sated, picking orchid candelarias, arcing out of trees in my jardÍn perfectísimo, in resplendent Nicaragua.

Angelus Part 3

2008-02-23T11:29:00.002-07:00

Part III: “Ángeles in Teote” (482 words)
The loco-ángel-bit surfaced first, from the don, when I was here on sabbatical from papers and faculty politics, from March to June 2000. Angels, though, always envelope our conversations here, and have, from the very first time I lived in la casa de mi padre, in 1993. “Wake, Lazarus,” a sonnet, came out of stories, full of angels of mercy, from the War Zone, right in the middle of this town:
“Wake, Lazarus!” ©Doug Evans Betanco 2008
Teote is a bone house,
A scarlet, earthen vessel
filled with pale white skulls,
soldier’s bones. Too much blood
cakes cracked adobe walls, muddies
toes of grinning street boys, starved
bellies bloated. What eyes they have!
Their teeth like ivory, angels breathing
light, in this night of bones, haunts,
keening crones, crowing roosters,
danger zones: bright, unburied
funerary,
of risen flesh, of ribs and hair;
undusted freshness, grounded in air.

Cielo profundo! I do love this concrete poem, almost the first I’m proud of, both classical and romantic, at once, but I loathe the misery of war fought here, so omnipresent when first I came. Back then, unpacking, I pulled out a laminated picture of Archangel Michael, with Sword of Truth raised against the fires of Satan. A friend gave it to me for protection against los ladrones, bandits, still plaguing the highways of Nicaragua in 1993, robbing passengers of buses and the backs of cattle trucks, especially if carrying gringos on their way to the hinterland. Not honorable work for campesinos, but the war, just over, had left many Contras unemployed in their native land. Our hosts from Teote drove with us, carrying AK-47’s.
When I showed my angelcard to don Moncho, he jumped for joy, then explained that Miguel, one Really Bright Ángel, was the family’s patron saint as well as the Árcangel-in-charge of the Sandinista Revolution here in Nicaragua. Half the boys in the family had Miguel or Miguel Ángel as their name, and a few Miquelas, as well. Major synchronicity! This called for a celebration, so we toasted with some of my precious bottled water from Managua. He’s a model for AA. I’m a big fan of this ángel, have been since 1985, when, I swear, he lived under a spruce tree with me, in my magic summer garden office on Blake Court in Glenwood. With don Moncho, I loved toasting him in clean, clear agua, a sacred bonding ritual, padre y hijo y Arcángel, in the name of Diós, the first of multi-many synchronicities.
Little did I know, then, in 1993, that this angelic connection would lead me, 15 years later, to consider a dash through the village at noon, baring all, leaping al Cielo, whirling like a loco dervish with a mop on my head, screeching “Over the Rainbow” too loudly--Oh, well!--way too deep in my asylum--Crazy Central--in Nicaragua.

Angelus, Part 2

2008-02-23T11:29:00.001-07:00

Part II: “Ángel Flying” (795 words)
It does have a nice ring to it, ángel. But—Diós mío!--they’re much too cosmically actualized, for my lifestyle or comfort or good, to be, even in a seemingly God-forsaken place like Teotecacinte, Nicaragua, awash with the tears of Diós. I’m also a tad bit shy of heights, though I’m quite the jetsetter these days, and I’ve caught outrageous flying dreams, for years, swooping here, darting there, like Mercury transcendent. In those, I’m free, with no restraints of gravitas or gravity: I leap to the sun for lunch, amigos, to the moon for tea, then, cruise the tops of trees and montañas, even enter distant wormholes, then—whoosh--off to other galaxies, in sueños muy profundos. But that’s flight dreams for you, which we all have in our sleep, perhaps when we need more conscious freedom. I used to have them frequently when beleaguered by the 75,000 papers I’ve graded over the CMC years. Otherwise, I’m firmly tied to the ground, even after losing close to 100 pounds in the last two years. I did once draw a map of Glenwood Canyon from 4000 feet up for the Highway Department, back in ‘76, but, I swear, that was just creative visualization. I’m no light-blooming arcángel, as most in Glenwood know.
I do have a history of somewhat angelic proportions, there, though. Since my 30’s, I’ve been a seeker after truth, a la Socrates, in and out of myself, a guarantee of iluminación, occasionally, and a ton of blind alleys, as well, mostly kept dark in my sanctum sanctorium closet. I’ve also caused heartache to others, long-distance especially, sharing visiones profundos, in the artificial perfectísimo of letters and words, even when written with the best intentions. I wooed my first wife, for instance, a former high school sweetheart, with missives románticos, worthy of a latter-day Shakespeare, winging seductively in 1972 from Jersey to the ski-slopes of Vail. Ay, Chihuahua! The reality of our brief marriage was hardly angélico! I now prefer eye-to-eye conversation, to avoid painful pratfalls en la futura.
Eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart, it’s the only way here in Teote. Beyond the fact that many here don’t read or write at any depth, most are gifted conversacionalistas, gauging truth or lie with pointed discernment, from centuries of foreign manipulation. Perhaps, since I’m a master gardener, after all, I trace this campesino groundedness to their devotion to agricultura, because most have honeyed hands in the soil with plants and seeds and weeds and mud, for all their humble lives. It takes a focused gardener to know one. Trust and honor, here, are earned with a scan of the eyes, a very good lesson in dialogue leading to mutuality, the gift of los ángeles, worthy of intense cultivation, with ample fertilizers of gracias and verdad.
Even though my whole familia de ángeles son locos, this craziness is a long-standing family joke, stemming from my first trip. In a night of story-telling, playing “Truth or Lie”--Verdád ó Mentira—around the fire on the floor of the sala, lit to discourage mosquitos, to bring light to our faces for discerning wheat from chaff. Don Moncho stood on one leg, atop the hot seat in the middle of the family circle, with a mop on his head, a bright red poncho for a capo, his machete aloft, pretending to be “San Miguel to the Rescue” when Contras invaded his cocina, looking for fresh recruits from among his young sons, in 1983. “Miguel,” he said, “had spirited his hijos to the iglesia in the upper town, for a night of prayer.” Even Contras understood the call of the Arcángel, so they left the house alone. Denis, Jose Ramon and Luis were really undercover, beneath mi madre’s altar table, with its trailing oilskin. Laughing like a loco at his wit, I told him that “all Betancos are crazy.” He agreed, as did the rest, and it stuck. We all agreed he’d told the Truth in the telling, even if he’d sort of told a lie to the soldiers. I’m sure the teens were praying to San Miguel y La Virgen y Jesús y Diós, while under the altar, very hard, and for the rest of the scary night, with gracias, again in their camas.
About this other ángel bit, mi padre won’t take “No” for an answer, “esta vez,” he said, directly to my eyes, with viejito firmness. He’s very macho, campesino stubborn when he thinks he’s correcto. So am I, es verdad, when I get my feathers—Oops, I mean, my rooster hackles—riled up. Then, I can really be a very persuasive fighting gallo, mano a mano, without scratching a soul. We’ll see what’s what, what’s not, what’s up, what’s down--Good Lord!--in the flighty hills of Catholic Nicaragua.

Angelus, Part 1

2008-02-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

“Angelus”
Part I: “Miguel’s Betancos” (864 words)
Oh, man! They’ve started it again, my bonded campesino family here, los Betancos, at the end of the road in Teotecacinte, Nicaragua. Good Lord! It’s 2008! They should know me better, by now. I’ve travelled here, hat in hand, for 15 perfect years! They’re dear and ancient souls, who shine, up front, from the heart, on their sculpted faces, and, most brilliantly, from deep within their Polynesian-Indios eyes. Their faces in candlelight speak of Easter Island and Samoa. It’s a walk through human history to know them, though in Teote, there’s not too much Castilian beyond an occasional horseface—No one here looks bleached-out by the sun, as in some, more aristocratic colonial cities, where women use umbrellas for shade against a healthy tan. So close to ancient Maya, almost everyone’s a delicious café-con- leche, honeyed with an inner golden glow. I spend a half hour without a hat in the early afternoon sun, just to catch up with the local color.
Don’t tell my family, por favor, I called them “Indians,” in any part, as my family counts every blanco genome in their DNA a beauty, every colorada mark of The People on their faces a curse. Only Diós knows why, given the ugly rape of Nicaragua from 1500 on, by Indo-Europeans, continued by later, more Nordic gringos feos, even as I write, still searching for El Dorado, to steal it from los Indios. They just don’t realize the oro of the campesinos not in the ground, but in the heart. Don’t get me started on that. Mi familia Betanco holds such triumphant, pre-Mayan joy inside, incandescent when I’m here with the locos, it’s hard to keep from gushing ecstatic all day long, from my crib in the corn god’s kitchen.
I’m angry at the lot of them, ángeles though they are.. I just can’t believe it! Again! Ay, Chihuahua , I’m spewing, a venal sin in writing. Tone it down, don Dugla! But, mierda! What’s really pushing my buttons? There must be something I’m denying, refusing to look at in myself. While I feel I live in the heart and mind of Diós in Teote, and I’m grateful for it, I’ve human reason and ego, as well, the gift of Eden, when in front of my laptop. But, really! How dare they?
Loco, sí, they are, every single one. It’s grounding in Teote for me, un loco norteamericano maxísimo, to remember it. Mi padre, don Moncho, took me aside, en la noche, and said it once again, after keeping shut of the subject for at least three years, at my request. It came late last night while eating warm arroz con leche, a satisfying rice, milk, cinnamon and sugar dish to whisper over in the candlelight at evening’s end, when everyone en la casa is sleeping, except for viejitos. I was at Papa’s finca for the night, something I can only do occasionally, because, without electricidád, I don’t write much anymore. I do generate poems by hand with a flashlight-pen, in my writer’s journal, late in the Nicaraguan night, with bats flying through the open rafters. I find this very romantic, conducive to musing, as long as I have a mosquito net over the cama. And then, as well, there are the fleas in the beds. Unavoidable ravenous beasties--pica, pica, pica through the tossing night--despite doña Eva’s constant washing and cleaning and sprinkling down, as they live in the dirt floors and walls, swept and washed and swept again, to no avail. Aerosols don’t stem the biting horde, and who wants to sleep with the smell of Raid! in the bed? Fleas are great survivors, content with dry dust and any passing animale, including me. It’s on my agenda to layer the adobe with painted stucco, at least in my studio, there, en la futura. I’d rather deal with angels any night.
Occasionally, it’s good for a writer to rough it, choosing “machine-denial” and less comfort. No one would choose fleas, but, part of the finca picture, even they’re a blessing. Both force my senses to seek inner springs from the deep well, within, past my often irritating voice and circumstances. Luckily, I was tranquilo, last night, with cicada songs in a dusk of my muse’s nudges and a promising poema. When my father spoke this locura, I immediately pooh-pooh’d my loco friend, of course, with a snort, a sigh, and a giggle, then some more than gentle persuasion, but he just won’t listen to reason, not even from me.
He, at a miraculous 79, was serious, as only a Nicaraguan católico can be, glowing with pride and love and awe at his last new son, now 15 years in his life, don Douglas Betanco de Teote (63), as the villagers here call me, since I now own property in my name, here in Teote. But, right now, I’m more concerned with mi padre’s doubtful sanity.
He honestly believes I’m a giant angel, resplendent in celestial light—I mean, really, gang!--a “norteamericano ángel de Diós.” He peeked like a duenna, when I bathe desnudo in the río that flows through the farm, for signs of some very white wings!

Whirling in Teote, Part 4

2008-02-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Part IV: “Good Juju and Bad” (912 words)
Our haunted government and the MNCs, unfortunately, have built a ton of bad juju in Latino America, I’m sorry to say. The Federal “client states” and their peoples, trapped by imperious thumbs, remember this painful economic pressure a tad more than our more philosophical—though no less important--gifts to the health of their psyches. Even though we’ve gifted them the tools to build self-esteem, peons need reasonable pay for their work, too.
I hear the Giants try to palm off this outrage, these allegations of collusion with the overseers, as the rhetoric of communist rebels. Hoo-Hah! Scratch a campesina and a highly-functional capitalista appears, even if she hides her coin under the mattress with garlic. She’d never trade food slavery for Lenin, just another form of tyranny. It’s not about turning “Red”; it’s about shaking the vine enough for beans to fall to the ground, opening up the cash flow downward, spreading the dollars’ manure to the roots of this ailing beanstalk. How? Eliminate, as the Free Traders do, a few tiers, between the peasants and the American market, of key-stoning middlemen. These freeloaders in the distribution channels who’ve never seen a campesino or a tobacco field could stand to sweat a little harder, while the campesinos certainly deserve to feel as valued, monetarily, for their labor as we do in the States.
I’m not suggesting that they be paid at American minimum wage: even a raise, at first, to $1 an hour from $.67 would do wonders here, promoting waves of pure American capitalism--of the dream kind--since they could and certainly would plan their futures with some cash sequestered in their wallets. A little extra discretionary income—an unheard of concept here, would also allow their children uniforms and shoes for school, spreading education, and would improve children’s health with fuller nutrition. Mark my words: if we want the world marching to the drums of globalization, we must enrich the soil, however slightly, at the bottom. Cash would also do more to spread democracy than all the military aid and surplus food we slip into the pockets of families topping each branch of the beanstalk, aid sent from our taxes that the campesinos never see. If we wish the world to flourish with democracy and fresh capital spending, we need to grease, instead, the palms of the peasants where they live, work, eat, and, someday soon, even save for their children’s future. Now, that’s a real Jimmy Carter dream, for all the Americas.
We could also exert pressure for the poor of Latino America at the grocery stores where we buy our staples. “Any Fair Trade coffee, today? And, oh, who actually grows this sugar? Anything produced stateside for at least minimum wage?” are great questions that could really make an intelligent difference. It’s our dollars spent here that fuel the whole teetering vineyard. I might as well choose a banana in health food stores supporting organic humanitarians, getting dolares to the campo or to North American farmer’s markets, hurt almost as much as the peons by the Giants.
Anyway, taking without giving in return is abysmal juju hanging like a sullen cloud over the Beltway Bubble, prime Giant territory. H-m-m-m? We’d each better play it safe and buy a ton of garlic cloves, as well, blessed by the local priest!
Now, though, mi hermanos and I, locos Betanco, total, place our hope and passion for justice in our kids, some headed one day to the States. Let’s hope the new Chief Giant at the top, with his or her ultra-chic, Nieman-Marcus goose, chooses generosity and compassion, this time, in place of massive people-squashing. This election is very important: we need cosmic justice change, up there, right quick.
In Nicaragua, now, gracias, out here beyond the Pale, it’s quiet, noisy only with perros barking en la noche, with roosters’ crow, early in the mañanita. Sandinistas turn capitalistas, building safer, cheap retirement—Surprise!--for us gringos pensionados, a third and growing source of dollars for Nicaragua’s peasants on the ground, where dolares rarely go, where it’s possible to quintuple the reach of our incomes, in comfortable quarters. The jet to Managua’s full of U.S. viejitos, us new-aged-rainbow-baby-booming-pension-stretching-hippies. We’re legion soon. Our Judy Garland gold dust twinkles lightly at our feet, flying south to warm adobes out of cold February, full of gracias, and closing the migratory circle.
At least this new migration south is mutually beneficial, equal, eye-to-eye, without exploitation, neither up nor down the beanstalk, and, since we older ones give back in gratitude at least as much as we take, the very best balanced juju, verdad?
So, really, amigos, por favor? Who’s using whom, and, really, who cares, on this crazy-swinging vine, gyring in Katrina’s tragic wind?
We’re holding on, here in the Americas, for our own-dear-precious-lives and, maybe, for others, bending with the tumult when we can, straightening when we must, and praying esta planta gigantisima won’t come crashing down. It’s been around, es verdad, at least since Campesino Jack planted his heat-seeking bean, gained by bartering his worthless, dried-up cow for food, multi-many magic legumbres ago. Gratitude, mutuality and clearest light, the best fertilizers, might make its stems twine even higher, past that McMansion we’re all seeking, and up to even friendlier skies. At least, that’s as it appears in a world of frijoles, to me, one grateful viejito master gardener, sort-of-quasi-permanently-planted, deep in the heart of Nicaragua.

Whirling in Teote, Part 3

2008-02-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

There’s other profit in this northward thrust for freedom, past jangling pockets: it’s probably stayed, momentarily, the
shrill song of revolution, whistled loudly south of Texas, all the way to Patagonia. If self-determination explodes en masse within the Latino hinterland—“Diós no la permita! No más La Guerra, por favor!” I cry to mis hijos!--forget the North American economy. Prices would most likely blow sky-high—30 bucks a pound for coffee!—and manufactory, pretty thin already, would probably fail for lack of materials , if multinationals had to pay real value for goods produced by multi-millions of food slaves for the Giants’ local suppliers. Convenient for the MNCs, who practice denial in the mirror about the slaves indirectly feeding them—“What slaves? In the internet Age? Absurd!”--while working on their golden parachutes. For minerals to factor our machines; for coffee; for sugar to make our booze; for cotton and tobacco; for fruit, flowers, beef and timber; even for our illicit drugs: for this handmade bonanza, up to 70% in some southern populations sweat for tin pennies, gone before they’ve finished being hungry.
We take this cheap flow of manna for granted, but these hungry campesinos, if denied the “out” of hope trips up to the northern castle, would simply not take nada for their work any longer. “Life’s too short,” they say, “I’ve got to follow my dream.” I can’t imagine where they might’ve picked up that slogan. Perhaps, I let it slip into the family patois, myself, an inveterate dream-tender. That potential possibility, alone, of touching the goose egg, keeps my older hijos teotanos, born fatherless to my sisters, ten years after the Contra terror, from piling barricadas in the streets of Managua, as did their fathers and mothers, 30 years ago, against the same economic tyranny. We would, too, if it came to that: that’s why our mostly-peasant ancestors got sweaty to come to America, and why our earliest patriots died. It’s a noble heritage to rise to, being scions of revolutionaries, one we share with Nicaraguan campesinos. Since the bloody 60’s, though, we’ve mostly forgotten that.
By the by, amigos, revolutions in the Internet Age probably won’t be locally-contained events, as in the past. Peasants, here, formerly land-locked in this remote mountain valley, are talking to their counterparts in Mexico and Peru, by email; they also speak as one, in halting English, with Africans and Asians, sharing photos of common inequities and luxury dreams, beyond language, building trans-cultural identity while fanning their desire for golden assets. The Internet’s just a bus ride and ten pesos away. It doesn’t judge them down based on national, racial, ethnocentric or financial myths. It’s worth a loaf of sweet bread, but it’s got more value. It could swell to a campesino chorus, a la Ernesto Cardenál, for redress. An awaking new Giant, I’m thinking.
They think it’s way past time for change, with very good logic. Like campesinos everywhere, they know, through millennia of pain, when they’re replanting in a changing campo, it’s more pragmatic to grow beans with hands down deep in the fairgrounds of their souls, con la gracia de Diós, the richest tierra, with special, sequestered seed from tender-loving gardens, than to risk the taint of frijoles or bancos or burócratas from the worldly, festering mercado.

Whirling in Teote, Part Two

2008-02-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

Part II: “Abuse, Juju and Kite Flying” (633 words)
To be exploited here for cents or in the Promised Land for dollars, that’s the question. The work’s pretty much the same. However, I know not one CMC student in 26 years, especially now with our multi-tasking millenials, who wouldn’t, in reversed situation, answer as the young Teotanos do and follow the whiff of cash, seeking more freedom. So many here have “gone mojado,” to restaurants in Aspen, to taxis in Atlanta, to knackers in the snow of North Dakota, the town’s futbol team is hurting!
Seriously, if businesses in los Estados were not so eager to hire “illegal” labor, muchachos certainly would not go. They fill the exploited niche few citizens will consider. Perhaps our federal laws aren’t facing—or, rather, for the sake of the economy, conveniently overlooking—our shady hiring practices? Unfortunately, though I love the growing Hispanic influence in the Roaring Fork Valley, I feel I’m “aiding and abetting,” somehow, whenever I buy a burger, the fault of law turned upside down for profit, not of those cute food servers. I’ve no solution, past realistic legislation, yet, clearly, if profit’s maximized by cutting outlay for labor, nationwide, at the lowest levels, then, legal or not, like it or not, nothing will stop this trip to Mecca. If it did, there’d be fewer coupons to clip, for the “pobres” at the top.
Once Teote’s sons get jobs, often way below minimum wage since “illegals” are easily exploitable, muchacho’s earnings head south, another point of contention, into wallets of wives or mothers who raised them. Padres open bank accounts, often for the first time, becoming interest-earners. After stashing more under the mattress, with garlic cloves that bring good juju, campesino families, those with northern sons, arise, like gold-and-silver kites in a wind-dance, in gyres of acquisition, buying land, Brahma bulls and caballos; then, tractors, taxis and motobicicletas, guzzling $.90 a gallon gasolina; next, a million plastic chairs. Everything’s at least an eighth the price here, and land’s even cheaper, so we’re not talking massive gold drain, maybe $50,000 yearly, huge only in Teote.
Even for all Latin America, this money sent south can’t come close to the googleplex of billions in natural resources we extract from them each year, at exploitation prices, paid to rico families in capital cities, who also control the local banks, medicine and food supplies, the markets where Teote spends its dollars. As they, in turn, reinvest their profligate nest eggs in safer American markets, usually in Miami, it almost all comes back to us, in the long run. Only a negligible pittance returns to the peasants from the Fire Sale of their work and national heritage, from a fire the Giants started. Not good juju, amigos, way out of cosmic balance, for four hundred years.
The Betancos, jealous, want those shining kites for our sons, but most have no coyote money. “No, con mi dinero,” I’ve said, many times, but dream denial’s really not my strong suit. Since I’ve nine unofficially-adopted kids, los hijos de don Douglas, born to fathers who abandoned my sisters, a couple full-grown sons, chomping at the bit, a few much younger daughters, I’d love to pave their way to opportunity beyond providing a just father’s love; unless the immigration laws change, though, they’ll need to find their path to Disneyland on their own, and they probably will. In the American Century just past, we’ve taught the poor not only to dream our way, but also, “Do it now, amigo,” then, “Do it even better, mañana!” It’s our pragmatic, progressive gift of love and honor to the world, complete with our well-known blindness to borders, returning right straight home to us, con muchas gracias de los campesinos de Teote, Nicaragua.

Whirling in Teote, Part One

2008-02-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

Whirling in Teote

Part I: “At the Bottom of the Beanstalk” (655 words)
In 2000, when last a viejito in Glenwood’s Sister City for an extended stay, I saw minimal economic change—a bit more food--since the Contra devastations in the 80’s. From 1979 to 1990, almost every family lost sons, casas, farms and livestock, livelihood, in La Guerra. After “Reconciliation” in the 90’s, Teote, just ribs, hair and hunger at the end of the road, flooded with refugees, with international aid workers as well, Brigadistas. For ten more years, campesinos fared poorly, their pay for piecework in the fields just a meal, enough to make it ‘til morning. No cash. Too often, niños died of diarrhea, from drinking river water.
In 1998, Hurricane Mitch, seeing a bad situation, made it worse. Herds died from river-borne disease, when outhouses upriver cleaned out in the floods. Homeless vagas from Honduras, living in the forests by day, stole anything not nailed down in Teote’s lampless night. Without help from Glenwood and other Friendship Cities, plus, of course, the resilient joy of these magnificent people, Teote would’ve stayed a sorry wasteland. While other Nican cities writhed under global massage, especially after 9-11, Teotecacinte, the corn god’s kitchen, still held out its begging bowl, and no one here liked it, at all. The young men talked again of new revolt.
Now, a whirlwind of cash twists through this village of dust in the viento. Dinero comes in two ways: first, in pay envelopes from Cuban or Columbian cigaro plantations, in cahoots, of course, with Big Tobacco; and, second, from Western Union money-grams sent monthly by the prime of Teote’s youth, now working up north in the Land of Opportunity. These dolares, both blessing and curse, ring with charges of abuse and criminality, from both sides of the border.
Southside, tobacco men know well how to wring dinero from campesino poverty: for $.67 an hour, a peasant works a 48-hour week, without benefits, without redress, “at will.” This hourly pays for food, at local prices, for one, after overseers charge hefty kickbacks, off the top of the envelope, for lunch they do not serve. With little business, no industry, and no profit in growing corn, many villagers must pray, “This too shall pass,” in order to eat. Still, these envelopes, so meager with inflation, twirl each casa like dust devils on the campo. Since every centavo replicates twice before it’s spent on rice and beans, more cash-in-hand means pollo on every plate, plus a flock in the solar for huevos, and some, indeed, for sale. Campesinos are nursed on stories of turning dross to gold and water to wine, through cunning, magic, and la gracia de Diós. Especially here, so long at survival, eating’s been a daily crap shoot, with “The Man” in Managua, the only clear winner. Now, cellulars chime in a town still without landlines since the Contra cut them, in 1982. Portable TV antennas tune to Dallas-like novellas de los ricos. Best of all, thank God, there’s a bright, metal outhouse with a fresh-dug hole in every campesino yard.
Except for those living on the local rotgut, no one starves here anymore. The water’s potable and constant, while healthcare’s improving. However, the perfume of money doesn’t mask for long the stench of grinding exploitation, entrenched since the conquistadores here, at the bottom of Jack’s giant beanstalk. While little opportunity exists within Teote to shinny up higher to the castle, with few magic beans of capital and connection, visions of TV-land ‘s golden eggs shimmer aplenty, right in their eager faces. Meanwhile, the precious leaves they tend metamorphosize to puro primo, very long cigars, sold as Cuban art forms, though grown in Nicaragua by food slaves, to discriminating smokers in the finest hazy clubs, for $100 a crack, mostly for tiers of middlemen. The pennies dribbling from Big Tobacco just clink more falsely on a campesino’s second-hand plate, here in Northern Nicaragua.

What I Eat Creates Me

2008-02-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Food—la comida—is a very big deal in Teote, now above the no-survival level, but still beneath the shady leaves of Jack’s giant beanstalk, where little sun shines. The corn god’s kitchen is part of global economics, es cierto, but, as well, apart, below its diligent radar, though such transparency’s hard to imagine for a viejito from Glenwood, a town so totally connected to the world’s banking stream. At the end of the road in Nicaragua, surrounded by undeveloped Honduras, Teote’s not exactly a New-Venture-City, except for growing marijuana—Not an option!—or, perhaps, building a fat farm and spa for overweight boomers, since a very hot spring, currently infested with coral snakes and stinging fire ants, gushes from the banks of the Limon, upriver. Maybe I need St. Patrick, who expelled culebras from Ireland.

Ridding self of weight here, however, doesn’t take a blesséd saint: the campesino diet empowers that, thank God, mostly local rice, red beans and corn tortillas, handmade from maís every morning, pure energy food. With chicken soup, fresh veggies and fruit, crisp plantains, plus boiled milk from mi padre’s cow, I find the food full of savor and texture, constantly surprising, and, with an hour’s saunter daily ‘round the campo, guaranteed to drop ten pounds a month from my sagging frame. Que milagro! Yet, truly, for me, this diet’s not sacrificial. Of course, I’m not a drinker, here, except for an occasional local cerveza, but, then, I’m cosmically-high already on my writing, at least eight hours a day.

Here, the chicken soup (sopa de pollo) beats anything my grandma used to make. Its base, a fresh-killed, quick-browned, unskinned hen in pieces, stews in salted agua at a slow boil, at least three hours, with onion, tomato, minced garlic to taste, and a pinch or two of cumin. Later, we add chunks of challa—a vine-borne squash that grows up trees—of yuca (peeled cassava root), and sometimes a handful of Spanish parsley (aka perejil) or manzanilla (camomile) leaves, to break a fever, or noni, extra good for the kidneys. Lip-smacking heartiness, it’s served at least thrice a week for lunch or dinner, especially in the rainy season, June to January, sometimes chilly from the damp. Though it rarely goes below 60F, everyone wears a second-hand parka if it gets that “cold.”

The speciality of the house, nacatamale, is an amazing enfolding of rich corn masa--Si, with lard!—‘round bits of pork in cumin-garlic juices, with delicate pinches of rice, onion, tomato, potato, and petit pois from Jolly Green Giant. La mama wraps it in 4x6 envelopes of green banana leaves, tied with string, and steams these for hours in an iron kettle with the lid on. We do about 30 at a time. One, served warm, stays with me for a day of fullness, but it’s best to be wary of too many in a week, if I want my stomach to shrink.

Other treats, dipped in unsweetened coffee to jumpstart the morning, golden roquillas, chewy-crunchy in turn, are rings of corn masa and egg, rolled by hand and baked in an adobe orno. It takes two hours to burn enough wood to heat it, but, then, they’re quickly in-and-out with a long-handled, wooden spatula. A variant, roquettas, are pressed cookies of slightly sweetened masa with a dab of honeyed goat cheese on top, bubbled ‘til caramelized. Yum. We use up the heat baking gingered corn bread or wheat cake tortas, glazed with sugar and egg. This seems a ton of baked goods for a diet, but, all’s in moderation, and working: at weigh-in, this morning, I broke 190, for the first time in 7 years. I almost cried. If my VVH-HMR diet coaches read this, they’ll jump for joy. That’s 8 pounds lost, in less than two weeks. I’m totally back in weight loss, ladies, straight arrow for my target. Hoo-hah!

There’s plenty of fresca, to flush out my remaining flab, with pulp and juice from fruits in season in the yard, usually limes, oranges, coconut, or uba, grapes, bought in Jalapa, from Chile. In addition, pinol and cacoa seed, picked in my family’s orchard, sundried and roasted to peel, then ground and boiled in leche, makes a before-bed tonic improving the circulation, so says the local curandera. As well, a few spoons of oatmeal (avena) with a little sugar, bought in packets and added to hot milk, thickens a breakfast shake to die for. It sticks to my ribs all morning, while I’m sipping my home-grown coffee, burnt black in my sister’s cocina. That’s when I’m fed by my writing.

H-m-m-m! Perhaps a writers’ workshop for sedentary scribes from los Estados? Guaranteed weight loss, stewed in fertile, transcendently creative juices!

In Nicaragua

2008-02-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

It´s taken me a while, but I´m here in Teote, and my datacard needs to be re-enabled, so right now, 2-6-08, I´m sitting in a computer cafe in Jalapa, Nicaragua, a busride away, typing out a new post quickly. I really wanted to have the only active internet connection and computer in Teote (silly boy, for such an ego trip) but this will do until I figure out what´s up with the Verizon machine. I do know the satellite in the southern skies is working, so it must be my card. Perhaps, like just about everything else in Nicaragua, it just will take longer or it just doesn´t work here. The most common sentence in Northern Nicaragua must be Ësta Nicaragua, no sirve!--It´s Nicaragua, so, of course, it doesn´t work!

I figure I must be meant to be more social for a while, instead of holing up in my room in Teote, writing, writing, writing all day and night, with which I am a tad obsessive but very loving and fulfilled. I am having a good time today at the computer cafe, fairly new here. It certainly was not a part of the Upper Nicaraguan scene when I first came back in 1993.

Anyway, on my arrival, everyone at don Moncho´s finca was very glad to see me, because (this is so don Moncho) I had left money when I last was here to build a new outhouse on the farm, the old one being so smelly and dilapidated that I just couldn´t abide it anymore, PLUS IT WAS READY TO FALL IN ITS OWN HOLE; he built it, but then locked it up for two years (I had an operation in ´07 and didn´t make it down last year) in order for me to be the first one to use it. Ha! So we had a ritual yesterday morning, opening up the new outhouse for everyone´s use, and all are grateful.

LIFE IS JUST THAT WAY IN NICARAGUA, WHERE I AM HAPPY AND HEALTHY AND SO GLAD TO GET BACK TO MY BLOG. ALL IS WELL HERE. I´M TAKING A MILLION PICTURES WHICH I´LL POST THE NEXT TIME I COME HERE, BUT THIS IS IT FOR NOW. I HAVE TO PAY MY BILLS, NOW THAT I AM ONLINE. CIAO, CenterDoug

Smooching in Transit from Here to There

2008-01-31T06:07:00.001-07:00

I have been smooched and smooched and smooched, yet again. My "current lover," henceforth known as My CL, since we both like that close-yet-slightly-distanced sobriquet used first in this blog, is a national treasure of successful smooch technique, por gracias de Dios and all that's holy, and I am, so to speak, lapping it up. Is there a Smoocher Hall of Fame? Should an antique kisser like me (63) be called a Smoocher Laureate? My CL could run classes.

I'm now at my daughter's in Aurora (CO), one more full day from the plane south, and I love it here, too. Every corner of this tidy tract home from the 60's brims with functionality, based in love and smooching. Melissa and John--and the boys--just live to love and support each other, and I couldn't be prouder of my best sweetie-pies. The peak time's at dinner, when all at the table share the best and worst experiences of the day: the kitchen fills once more with tenderness, a shiny radiance of pure nurturing, way beyond the spaghetti on the platter we surround. No wonder my daughter grows twice-blooming amaryllis in her living room, with all the happy-camper-growth-energy that flows through and envelops this home! How grateful can a Pop-Pop be, just to be included in it! Gracias a Dios por todos!

I'm pretty grounded in self-love and gratitude these days, which was not so, for much of my life. To me, it takes a good, nourishing love of self to even begin to love others healthily, not the other way around, as is commonly taught in our still-puritanical American culture. Loving others as self-sacrifice is not, for me, what Jesus of Nazareth embodied as a model, but, rather, loving others as self, the classsic mystic stance of Oneness, in the moment, where miracles happen in the intersections between things. In the past, with the best of intentions, I'd created addictive relationships from my utter neediness, instead of from my current fullness, so I know whereof I speak. The puritanical model breeds self-negation and abuse, parasitical behavior that diminishes rather than empowers, whereas the love embodied by the Christ is mutually beneficial, centered as it is in the mutual connection of "Godliness" in each of us.

"I am Thou" is the foundation for understanding the teachings of the Son of Man. We "turn the other cheek" to an "enemy" coming at us, because we see "Him/Her" as "Us," even if currently angry and menacing. Why attack the incoming fist, since it is mine? Might as well love it, turn the cheek in Oneness, and, more often than not, turn the antagonist into an ally.

Had we done that, in the aftermath of 9-11, rather than spewing war for profit, we might not now need the obsessive security our fear has created. Nor would we need to find enemies in order to feel powerful ourselves. The "world's most powerful nation" could learn to exert a stance of love to the rest of the world, rather than an immature cringing based in fear and the need to control. We are diminished every day, the way things are now: we empower only those who use hatred against us. while crippling ourselves, as the whole world suffers and learns to hate our government even more. I wish I could just kiss it all away.

Gracias, CenterDoug