Somos un circulo
Dentro de un circulo
Sin principio y sin final…
We are a circle
Within a circle
Without beginning or end.
By Tracy L. Barnett
The Esperanza Project
TEMICTLA, Mexico State, Mexico – It began with a rainbow and ended with a spiral that represented life itself. The eleventh Vision Council, Call of the Deer, was spun from poetry and passion, woven with sweat and fire, and colored with laughter and tears.
Dreamers and doers from every generation and every walk of life gathered under the shelter of a gigantic blue-and-white circus tent in the sacred valley of Temictla Oct. 7-13 for the sporadically recurring event, which is simultaneously an experiment in human cohabitation, a marathon dedicated to social and personal transformation, and a celebration of life.
As is often the case in the Southern latitudes, I arrived a little late but at the perfect time. I registered at the front table and entered the gathering grounds apprehensively, not knowing exactly what to expect. An ecotopian community was once again arising with before me, sheltered under the towering white cliffs on all sides that would serve as our sentinels for the week ahead. I found my tent and got situated, clambering out to close the flap in a short cloudburst, just in time to see a rainbow arching over the camp and the stark white cliffs; a cheer arose throughout the valley, and I smiled. It was a good omen – and I was home at last.
Last year I had the good fortune to attend the life-changing Vision Council gathering The Call of the Eagle, and I felt myself inspired and embraced among a long-lost family seeking to manifest a new and more sustainable, egalitarian world. The theme this year, Call of the Deer, referred to the threatened Wirikuta, one of Mexico’s most sacred sites, home of the Deer Spirit that has guided the native Wixarika people, among others, for thousands of years.
On this auspicious week of 11/11/11, there would be a “New Fire” ceremony to usher in a New Age. And in addition to its usual lineup of educational workshops and activities organized by eight different councils ranging from ecology and health to spirituality and beyond, the group sponsored two main outreach initiatives: support of the Wirikuta Defense Front, with all proceeds to support its work in protecting the site from transnational mining and agroindustrial businesses; and also for the neighboring community of Chalmita with three days of educational workshops and activities in the primary and secondary schools and in the town square.
“We’re going beyond words, to specific proposals and actions – how are we going to live this new society that is being generated?” said Veronica Sacta Campos, coordinator of the Council on Spirituality. “It’s easy to say that things don’t work or that everything is bad – but to what point are we doing something to generate change – from our own habits to the organization of society itself?”
My first night I passed with Abuela Alas de Aguila, Grandmother Eagle Wings, at 60-something still one of the most beautiful women in the Consejo.
She was the guardian of the fire in the Women’s Teepee, a space dedicated to nurturing the Divine Feminine in each of us, and her brilliant smile endured the weeklong marathon with great stamina and grace.
In the days ahead I joined the circle of traditional elders at the ceremonial fire to learn about the Aztec history of this region, where Cuauhtémoc and his warriors fought the Spanish invaders with enormous courage and passion.
I peeked into the women’s teepee to find it filled with peacefully reclining bodies, Veronica at the center, talking each of them through their own personal rebirthing journey.
I followed the path to the eco-house of Lourdes and Guy, under construction just down the road, where a demonstration of ecological building techniques was underway.
I joined a delegation of Consejo leaders in a trip to Chalmita to visit with community leaders and watched as young Krishna and Valentina rallied the shy and resistant village children and youth into a rousing and heartwarming encounter circle in a creative physical expression workshop.
“The important thing is to open the eyes and the mind to other opportunities of how to live and how to create wellbeing,” said Helen Samuels, Consejo cofounder.
Laura Kuri, founder of Mexico’s flowering bioregional movement, has worked with Beatrice Padilla, Beatrice Briggs and others to build a strategy to protect the regional ecosystem, a “Bosque de Agua” or “water forest” whose three fragile watersheds provide the water for more than 30 million people.
“In very few meters we have a great diversity of ecosystems that talk about a great richness of species of plants and animals and cultures,” she said. “In fact we’re in one of the richest regions of the planet.”
The Wirikuta Defense Front made a passionate call to the Consejo to support the efforts to save this endangered desert habitat, a space of mystical encounter with the precolonial Divine, and activities throughout the Consejo were dedicated to the preservation of Wirikuta, with a variety of activities to follow, including establishment of an ongoing permaculture project in the region.
We learned more about Natural Time, a movement led by the late Jose Arguelles, a dear friend of many Consejo members, in the context of the dawning of a New Age. His followers and many others believe this transition has already begun with the coming of 2012 and the ending of a cycle in the Mayan calendar.
“These days there’s been a lot of talk about the transition to a New Age, the coming of 2012, understanding that the Earth has its cycles and we are passing through and manifesting the prophesies of various peoples around the world,” said Veronica. “We are at the point now where we are passing through the night, and are at the point of leaving the darkness and passing into the new dawn of humanity. It’s a moment to take advantage of to return to our connection to the Earth.”
Themes of respect for indigenous cultures, the Earth and a culture of peace resonated through the valley in a megaconcert with big-name Mexican and Latin artists like Ruben Albarran from Café Tacuba together with the Andean group Hoppo; the smooth reggae tones of Lengua Alerta; the system-challenging hiphop of Pachamama Crew and the Wixarika group Venado Azul, to name just a few among the abundant lineup.
Topping off a day and night of culture was the long-awaited movie premiere of Hecho en Mexico (Made in Mexico), a brilliant and heart-filled documentary by British filmmaker Duncan Bridgeman that included interviews and cameos by Consejo members as well as scenes shot in the Consejo itself.
On the coming of the dawn of 11/11/11, I joined a quietly gathering group around the fire in a New Fire ceremony. The cliffs echoed with the haunting tones of crystal bowls, arising along with the smoke of the old fire and the pungent scent of copal from the censers. Armando invited me to play one of the bowls and my spirit rose with the harmonic hum as I joined the players at the center. A young couple joined at the center to light the new fire, symbolizing the coming of the New Age.
“This action in this place is not isolated,” said Alberto Ruz, one of the founders of the Consejo of the 11/11/11 ceremony. “It forms part of an archipelago of hundreds of points of light that on this same day at this same hour are taking place in some part of the world.”
The Consejo was filled with personal highs and lows for each of us – such as the night when Blue Thunder, a Shoshone shaman from the north, called the rain in a powerful ceremony at the nearby sacred spring, and 250 campers were inundated in a wild thunderstorm.
But everything came together at the closing ceremony that began with a human spiral flowing through the valley, then a circle with our musicians performing at the center, then a dance of universal peace.
“Really it’s a social experiment that we do here,” said Laura Kuri, “to be able to come here and learn the ecotecnicas, the organic food, the composting toilets, the rituals, the heating of water with compost – it’s like an experiment that changes you. The people who come to the Consejo return to their homes and something happens and there’s a change. It’s very hopeful.”
Images from a moment in time that will live on for years to come….
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
The unseasonable warmth had us removing layers as we scrambled up to catch a glimpse of the world from on high. Another climatic oddity in a year that was full of them. Change is in the air, for those with eyes to see: We are closing the book on a year that saw vast swaths of the American Southwest go up in smoke, millions of dollars of hurricane damage in Vermont, a monster tornado that erased big chunks of Joplin, massive flooding in Australia, the Phillippines and Southeast Asia and record-breaking heat waves in Europe and much of the United States. 
