Bolivia 2015

From Parque Monticulo your eyes easily capture a panorama of La Paz.  Huge eucalyptus trees adorned with declarations of love frame the crenelated mountains on the horizon.  A Sacre-Coeur of rock silhouetted against the summer sky, the yellow teleferico whispering by in the middle distance.

Eyes drop down to the intensely packed houses clinging to every bit of buildable land.  Mondrian colours decorate an apartment block injecting primary colours into a sea of brick red.  The spread of La Paz stops only where building is impossible.  The valley has long since been filled, and El Alto, hundreds of metres higher on the flat Altiplano above La Paz, is the spillover.

A classical fountain, currently dry, sits in the middle of the park, shaded by complex branches of evergreen trees.  Birds flutter limb to limb singing their songs into the contemplative afternoon. Andean mountains push skywards, desire manifested in pink and beige and grey-green forests, the white snow on Illimani aristocratically towering above all that surrounds it.

I´ve spent 6 weeks in La Paz in the last two years, not very much time really, and yet I feel at home here.  There´s a peace to the place that fits its name.

Street art springs into view everywhere – it is only a matter of seeing it.  Walking down from Monticulo I glance at some graffiti on a hoarding by a construction site … “art is everything and for everyone or for nobody” … and then I notice the tag “Mujeres Creando”.  Of course.  Mujeres Creando – the fearless anarcha-feminists who contribute so much vitality to the spirit of La Paz.  And Madie, the always smiling, always friendly fixture of Virgen de los Deseos, the downstairs café of their wonderful casa in Sopocachi where I am once again staying.  My little room, with its hard mattress and shared bathroom, is a long way from those predictable hotels in the colonies of consumption where I spent my business days and nights.  It feels warm, loving, welcoming.  What is true luxury if not this?

I walk into the café and see Maria Galindo, activist extraordinaire, sitting at one of the tables, deep in conversation.  Her eyes are aflame like Che Guevara´s in Korda´s iconic photo, broadcasting clarity about a Latino future without macho patriarchy, a future of freedom, electricity buzzing in the air around her.

Freedom.  That´s the word.  It´s what I feel in La Paz.  Even though it´s a city, freedom is right there in my field of vision – the high mountains are no more than an hour away.  Wordsworth, writing in the English Lake District not far from where I grew up, found freedom in the mountains and the seas.  For me too that´s been a fairly clear thread through much of my adult life.

“Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:

In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,

They were thy chosen music, Liberty!”

William Wordsworth

But what is true for one person is not necessarily true for others.  My friend Sylvia has a different response to La Paz.  She notices pollution, overcrowding, litter, traffic – none of which is easy to dismiss.  She feels an energy and atmosphere in the city that makes her ill at ease. 

Her truth and my truth are different, but equally valid (or invalid).  Like in Baudelaire´s The Double Chamber, both beauty and horror are always present – our perception is all we can go on.  What each of us sees is true for us.  Our accumulated life experience builds those doors of perception - Roland Barthes´ insight that we each read our own novel regardless of the intent of the author is much more than merely a piece of clever literary criticism.  For thousands of years the high Andes have been a place to cleanse one´s doors of perception … and duly cleansed what we see remains relentlessly our personal version of truth.  That being the case, isn´t the idea of objective truth a conceit born of scientific reductionism, or the detritus of a world view anchored in religious hierarchy?  It hardly matters which.

So today I will sit back and enjoy the subjective truth of my perception of La Paz.  I´ll add honey to the camomile tea on the table in front of me, and give thanks for this delightful afternoon, these beautiful people, this gentle city sanctuary, this wonderful life.

“An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice, mingled with a floating humidity, swims in this atmosphere where the drowsing spirit is lulled by the sensations one feels in a hothouse.  The abundant muslin flows before the windows and the couch, and spreads out in snowy cascades.

…

And this perfume of another world, whereof I intoxicated myself with a so perfected sensitiveness; alas its place is taken by an odour of stale tobacco smoke, mingled with I know not what nauseating mustiness.  Now one breathes here the rankness of desolation."

The Double Chamber, Baudelaire

Doing nothing, slowly

I lie in my cabin watching the sky lighten, feeling the tropical air pushing across my body from the small fan overhead.  After a few minutes I get up and pad quietly along the side deck to a hammock.  It´s almost sunrise.   The air is motionless, the sea too.   Birds move between trees on the small cay we are anchored next to.  I hear motion from Kathy´s cabin, and soon she is on deck in the other hammock. 

Queen Cays

Sunrise announces itself as a burst of molten yellow.  In an hour it will be too hot to not be under shade, but for now the birth of this new day is all about peace and calm.  Nothing is said, nothing needs to be said.  The only movement will come when one of us feels the urge to make coffee.

Kathy blinks first, and the smell of druggie ground coffee coming up from the galley easily wins out against my well-intentioned instant decaf, purchased as the only decaf possibility in the coffee growing country of Guatemala.  I accept my fate and succumb to the drug.

Otra Vida is anchored at Queen Cays, Belize, three tiny white-sand-and-palm-tree islands each looking like something ordered up from central casting for a shipwreck movie or an advertising shoot.   We are 20 miles offshore and the water here is a few metres deep … a mile to the east of us, outside the barrier reef, it is 1.6km deep. 

Belize is sometimes referred to as “The Land of No Mondays”.  The calendar says it is Monday.  What does the calendar know?

There´s nothing to “do” on these islands, no one lives here, nothing to buy, nothing to trade.  Think or Swim … Write or Paint … Listen or Cook … that´s about the sum of it.  Well, at least until cocktail hour, following which the list of options is shorter.

I decide to paint (badly) for a few hours.  Kathy decides to read.  Later in the day we go ashore with the dinghy. Walking the circumference of the middle cay takes perhaps a minute, and only that long because of stepping over a couple of palm trees brought down by hurricanes past.  We snorkel over coral gardens, entranced by delicate purple fronds and brightly coloured tropical fish, try to frame the perfect photograph of the cay, take a rest from this exhausting day in the shade of a coconut palm, and then tidy up some of the floating plastic trash that has washed ashore on the island.

Full moon over Queen Cays

Back on board Otra Vida later in the afternoon simple Peruvian Sopa de Quinoa heats on the stove.  We resume our positions in the hammocks, reading, readying ourselves for sunset.  As the sun gets lower in the sky I make cocktails and we toast the end of daylight, giving silent thanks for a day of life lived in the present tense.  The air cools, the stars come out, we chat, and time stops.

Really, what does the calendar know?

          “Those moments of love, freedom, serenity, 

            play – what power has made us believe 

            these are but respites from real life?”

                   – Charles Eisenstein

Valle de Sensaciones

“Elsewhere”. The sign was on a tree in the middle of the pista -  a koan written using twigs – leaving no doubt I was now in the Valle de Sensaciones.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters memorably set the destination of their bus to “Furthur”, a one word subversion of some of language´s structures and strictures.  The straight jacket of syntax and spelling, obviously, but they did indeed go further, further, further – right up to that wall of impossibility we all crash into when trying to describe the numinous directly in words.  “Elsewhere” has the frisson of subversion too, an invitation to liberty, born of grace and beauty in this special part of the Alpujarras in southern Spain.

As I walk a little further into the Valle, the koan still buzzing around in my mind, the magic unfolds.  Straight lines are few and far between in the Valle, literally and metaphorically.  Windows and doors are framed by tree branches. Broken pottery mosaics add to natural colours, channeling Gaudi and a hint of Hundertwasser.

Where to sleep tonight?  A tree house that moves gently with the breeze? A cave burrowed into a cliff?  A geodesic dome?  A suite built from clay, straw and found wood, with a floor of river boulders?  A bed in the open air in a bamboo forest?  A tepee?  Those are just some of the choices.

Valle de Sensaciones ecovillage was founded by visionary traveller and intentional community veteran Achim Burkard 15 years ago in a steep sided canyon close to the tiny village of Yatór.  It is almost invisible – this is not somewhere stumbled upon in a one week rental car tour of the hills around Granada. Abundant sunshine grants solar power and warm afternoons of contemplation, and a stream provides for the pool and the shower.  Exploratory and experimental programs run in the Valle each year, one of which, as I later found out, is titled "Elsewhere", the genesis of the sign.

A window in one of the sleeping rooms

"We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without” Kant

At the Valle you do without grid water and grid electricity.  You do without mass produced food.  You do without TV, radio, broadcast media of any type.  You do without pretension, without façade, without status, without competition, without organized religion, without coercion to conform.  You mostly do without money. Freedom is always present, softly pervasive, largely unspoken because nothing needs to be said.  It´s a seductive inversion of mainstream consciousness demonstrating another way to live.  Connection, honesty, community, love, trust – these are the currencies of the Valle.

The mealtime gong provides percussion to the gentle flow of each day.  Cooking and housekeeping are shared communal activities, each selecting how to contribute in accordance with their mood.  It works, contrary to the fallacy of “economic man”, because it is powered by a deep desire to contribute rather than by a socially constructed competitiveness to own and “win”.

The compost toilet building

A day might include reading in one of the hammocks, creativity with wood, clay or paint, helping complete the naturally built moon temple or some mosaics, sitting on sofas in the “living room” energised by conversation and eating almonds, a celebration of the equinox in the medicine wheel, or floating on an air mattress on the pool gently drifting under an olive tree with the light breeze. (Needless to say, the pool is not sterile, blue and square – it is circular, built with rocks and love, filled by continually flowing stream water).

But for all that I am writing about place, the Valle de Sensaciones is not primarily a place - it is something beyond place. It is a philosophy of how to live an engaged fulfilling life in harmony with the planet, crystallized into a material physical form.  A manifest example of psychogeography, where every moment is part of an extended non-urban dérive (and, significantly, without the need for abundant alcohol to lubricate the flow of magic).  Conversations here run deep and wide, and no subjects are off limits, the constricted and calculated semi-communication of bourgeois society having been left on the tarmac road outside.

It´s Sunday evening. The full moon rises over the fig tree bright and clear in the starry Andalusian sky.  Later on its journey it will transform into a blood moon for few short hours.  Ribbons of Johanna´s sweet rainbow songs soften the air, Achim´s accompanying drum beat tasting of freedom and Africa.  The smoke rising from the campfire blends with lingering pirouettes of cactus, the glow of faces with cheeks aching from day-long perma-smiles immanent in the warmth.  I reach up to the vines growing overhead and we feast on grapes.  Looking around slowly as everything merges, thoughts vanishing, my heart spiralling off to a place beyond words … an eternity or a moment, what does it matter … how could this be any more perfect?