Full Circle

It's been such a long time since I last wrote.

I found a draft of a blog post I started to write 6 months ago and I never finished.

Obviously, life as a mom sometimes makes it hard to find the time to sit down and write, but I guess there is also a big part of me that sometimes feels self-conscious about putting myself out there in such a public space as the internet. I got a couple of emails from friends in the past few months that told me that they usually find out how I'm doing by reading my blog and I'm very thankful for those kind works because they inspire me to make an effort to write this now.

A lot has happen in this past year, but at the same time I get a feeling that I have not much new stuff to say. We're almost exactly in the same situation we were last year at this time of the year.

After we got Teal's passport we went down to Mexico and we intended to drive to the Rainbow Crystal Land in Costa Rica.
However, once we got to Chihuahua and we settled in a comfortable space we realized how much we had needed that sedentary rest. Specially as we were going through the incredibly transforming rite of passage of parenthood. We drove down to Mexico City and Morelia with my mom, in her car, but after visiting some family and friends we came back North. For a long while my mom had been trying to sell the house where my sister and I grew up, but she put the sale on hold while we were in Chihuahua and Adam, Teal and I made it our little family space for 5 months or so.

It was a very special time to reconnect with my hometown and rediscover it. I saw it as time to give back to the place where I grew up.

It was time for us to plant seeds.

During our time there we made new friends who taught us beautiful lessons and who became a little family to us. First we found Mina, a beautiful wise woman, mother of two, healer and artist. She showed me a new face of Chihuahua. She introduced us to a Temazcal right in the city, and to the Cultural Tianguis where we started selling vegan falafel and vegan banana bread on weekends. We looked forward to Saturdays hanging out in the park, hula-hooping and hanging out with artisans, jugglers and travelers. There was a nice family environment and other babies who Teal got to interact with. There we found Zinnia, the girl who started the project of the market more than a year ago and who has a daughter who is around 8 months older than Teal. After a little while we found out that we share a lot of the same political ideas (anarchy, autonomy and non-hierarchal organization) and we got together to start a Food Not Bombs group.

I also got together with two other wonderful women to organize a Conscious Women Festival in Chihuahua. It was an event to talk about women's health, nutrition, cycles, menstruation, uterine reconnection, pregnancy, humanized birth and some other subjects. It was a very exciting project that helped me reinforce what I had already suspected throughout my pregnancy and felt more certainly during my post-partum recovery: I want to become a midwife and a true medicine woman working for women's health. I see it more like a life path than a goal to be reached, and for now I'm thinking of many diverse and even creative ways go start getting myself more into the world of childbirth and women's health. I became a certified doula and a few months ago I had the honor or accompanying a beautiful and strong woman during her labor.

We left Chihuahua in August, leaving behind some baby plants from our very young herb garden, distributing them amongst the beautiful friends who we also had to sadly say goodbye for now.

It was a nice time, but Teal was already 8 months old by then and we were ready to get back on the road. Although we did want to go to Costa Rica right then and there, we had at that point ran out of money, so we decided to try and work another harvest in Northern California.

We did pretty much the same trip than last year: San Diego with Adam's mom and wonderful friends in Ocean Beach; Los Angeles with Perry and also reuniting with my old friends from college; the Bay Area, where we hung out with Adam's friends from high school, and finally Northern California. In Redway, a little town in the middle of majestic redwoods, we got to see Katee and Leyna (who were present at Teal's birth) and we played music together, cooked in a fire and had a great time together.

We then went up to Arcata, where we ran into a lot of nice Rainbow family who we had met in Guatemala or Palenque. This whole time in the States really has been such wonderful time to reconnect with old friends and I feel very blessed with those friendships. I think the thing that sometimes makes me sad about nomadic life is that it makes it difficult to devote as much time as I would like to cultivate my friendships. When I was in college my good friend Florencia used to set up "dates" with her friends where they would just get to spend all day together, eat something, walk around, watch a movie, talk about what was going on in each other's life. She did that pretty often and it was so nice to get that time with her. She is still one of the people who I stay in contact with and I really wish I could get to see her more often. I wish I could do that with all of my friends. Travel the world and visit y'all or have a nice, comfortable space to offer for friends who want to travel and visit.

I send my love to all those friends who I haven't seen in one, two or even more years, and I hope life brings us together again. My heart remains open to you.

We were in Northern California for a while, looking for work.

It's a crazy world. There seem to be even more people in the same search this year. The draught, the forest fires and the baby might have contributed to the added difficulty we had in finding work. Eventually we got lucky we met another couple with a baby in a supermarket's parking lot. They brought us up to the place where they worked, but the work didn't last much.

After that we were kind of tired of looking, but we did one last trip to Garberville in the hope to make just a little bit more money.

The day we got there we ended up going to a free dinner organized by the Rastafarian community and there I ran into a friend of Benjamin Lesage (my dear French friend who lives without money). We talked for a long while about Benjamin and the whole traveling and living without money thing. I had actually just been thinking a whole bunch about that because I felt very negatively about the desperate search for work and the sensation of not having made "enough" money. Enough for what?

Yes, having a baby does change things. I wouldn't want to hitchhike because it is so nice to have a safe haven for Teal to sleep in when he is tired and fussy. I'm SO THANKFUL for the Dream Machine (our van). But we also don't really need that much. If anything, I often find that we have too much. Teal has too many toys, we have too much stuff. Too many clothes, too many baby blankets, too much. And it seems like people are always trying to give us more.

We do need money for gas, tolls and repairs on our way to Coat Rica, but I also know inside my heart that everything we need always comes our way if we keep our hearts open to manifesting abundance. That abundance doesn't have go come in the form of money. It was great to have that realization. I'm so thankful for the lucky encounters that helped me remember what I had already learn while traveling with Ben, while hanging out with Suelo, while living life in Rainbow.

So we decided to not keep trying to find work and to just start heading down South. After visiting friends in Sebastopol, San Jose and Los Angeles we now find ourselves back in San Diego, about to go back to Mexico. So it's almost the same situation that we were in last time I wrote, almost a year ago.

We are planning to visit my mom in Chihuahua and then heading down to Oaxaca, possibly for a Rainbow Gathering that might be happening in January.

I want to go find an indigenous midwife somewhere who can take me as her apprentice and start working with pregnant women. I have tons of very ripe ideas in my mind to develop my creativity, which had been dormant for a long while. I just need to set roots somewhere for a while.

Teal is growing and thriving. He started walking at 9 months old and now he is a little explorer: trying new food, making new friends, trying to figure out how to put words together, playing with musical instruments, learning to be diaper free without peeing on us or indoors (he even uses the potty sometimes) and giving very loving hugs to whoever is lucky enough to run into him when he is in a hugging mood.

We are excited to take him into even more adventures. He is very adaptable and has handled the traveling life in the Dream Machine very well.

So, that's my life. More or less.

I have also been doing a lot of reading, learning, self-searching and deep-healing, and as part of my self-introspection journey I will try to make the time to write more often. Hopefully I will archive it this time.