PAZ Stories

What children make of the world partly depends on the day-to-day stories they hear. It’s in these stories that attitudes and values are planted. Here’s one our sons heard on the day it happened, once upon a time…

For 32 years I have built fountains, ponds and water gardens as a trade alongside Talking Hands Talking Feet.

Once upon a summer, I was building a ‘water-wall’ for these clients who would fly in and out of Santa Fe in their own jet. The house I was working on was one of three estates around the country. As always, I was thankful for the job, and I don’t look too critically at the source of the money. The reason I do the work is to support our family endeavors.

So much of life, it seems, is about being able to let go with grace.

In the little village of San Vicente de Azpitia in the coastal desert of Peru, in the year 1981, a young American man walked the village one evening, just around dusk, guitar strapped over his shoulder, serenading the empty streets.

He had just come to a song with the help of a visiting student from Lima. It’s bilingual verses lamented the inevitable separation of mother and child, reconciled only by the knowing that we are joined by a greater pilgrimage:
“Aunque la vida nos separa, peregrinamos en amor.”
“Although life separates us, we pilgrimage in love.”
These were the verses of an idealistic and romantic young sojourner in his early twenties, living, working and loving a tiny Peruvian village…to change the world.

Meandering the streets of Azpitia that night brought him to little mud house where he could see candles lit and many people inside. So he went up to the door and knocked.

There are rare times when the entire world becomes magnetized to an event; especially an event which causes us to reflect on our shared humanity. It is so with the passing of Nelson Mandela.

Here is a story about a song…

In the Barlovento region of Venezuela there is tiny village named Caño Negro. It was one of many villages founded by the West African people who had escaped from slavery into the jungle interior of the Venezuelan Amazon. Today Barlovento is a vibrant and thriving region. The rhythms, stories, symbol and song of these proud people is African in origin, flavored by the nature of the Caribbean, the Amazon and the Spanish language…a robust fusion of potencies.

Indigenous communities offer such simple and profound wisdoms to the world. We would be wise to listen, to find the ears to listen.

Many, many moons ago, in the ‘world travel missionary’ chapter of me own story, I lived for months at a time in little isolated communities from Alaska to Mexico and Guatemala to Peru and Venezuela. ‘Third World’ villages with close to 200 people (and their compliment of four-legged critters) nestled in the most extraordinary places.

I went to these places with the idea of ‘helping’ them. Ha! Who was helping who?

One of the things you couldn’t help but notice in all the villages was a system of ‘child care’ that comes from a deep well of indigenous wisdom.