1986 - Uniform heartburn; A woman's comet and Jungle pyramids; Tuba in the desert; Snagging the North Star
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Deborah and Whit, two new but strong residency friends in Asheville, proposed a trip away from the winter weather, but also away from the usual tourist traps and congestion. North of Cancun and that over-hyped marketed madness, a small island lay off the coast. A protected enclave 1500 years before dedicated to the Mayan goddess of the moon, fertility, and medicine: their group manifested all of those! They went.
Two locations they visited dominated.
Farther south into the jungles, they searched out Coba, one of the greatest Mayan cities, but in those days with only a fraction of the total site hacked out of the vines and trees. On top of another fertility temple, a pyramid, Linda peered above the canopy at other still-covered hummocks/pyramids. She told Paul how the profuse abundance and barely suppressible vitality of the jungle pulsed to her, nature and abundant life. In her element, she said maybe a “prior life,” she described a retouched grounding: a conscious sense of her life-journey, of their love.
In the dirt of the tourist parking lot, beaming Linda wound her way through the tables and tents. Passing quickly by most of the common wares, she came upon a 30 inch high crudely carved figurine; a standing woman with Mayan features birthing an upside-down newborn. White palm wood, roughened surface, the carven mother’s breasts were half as big as the torso, standing out with sharp points making it difficult to carry. Linda dubbed her find “KT” for the “Killer Tits,” and she kept that carving with her the rest of her life.
It encapsulated and symbolized so much of who Linda felt she was.
And WHO she was.
Tuba City: they could never figure out on prior trips this name for the outpost and IHS hospital on the edge of the Painted Desert. They found out later Tuba was named after a Hopi guide in the 1800s, Tuuvi, which (as was typical of the white invaders) became bastardized to “Tuba”. Go figure.
The settlement was not particularly unusual, but the surrounding territory of small canyons, dunes, domes, and cliffs was extraordinary. With the repeated imprinting from multiple trips to this country over their lifetime, knowing they were heading to the arctic north, whatever guiding spirit or orientation they’d found or projected coalesced in their hearts and memory. It was to be the last time they saw their beloved desert for four years.