Happy

How in the world am I going to get back to simple? Won't I be glad when I'm there! Or, will I? In less than three weeks, I'll be in Teote; I may be Internet-disconnected, save for a weekly trip to Jalapa on the chicken bus; I will certainly be rising with the sun and going to bed early and eating mostly rice, beans and tortillas, with plenty of chicken soup on the side. And lots of ketchup--they call it salsa, down there, but it's Heinz 57.

My gosh, my life's a complicated dynamo, these days: the global and local projects I've undertaken, the energetic way I'm getting my voice out, the writing projects, they've got whirlwinds beat by at least 60 miles an hour! Yikes! And I've built gravel paths through wilderness and marble paths through meadows and lasting paths of peace, on the ground in Colorado and in the mid-air, on the ObamaBlog. What a trip! Zip! It feels only weeks ago, I left for my life up here, instead of 8 full months. Time rips the sonic fabric when I'm happy.

Hello, CenterDoug

Goodness Gracious! Hello again to my beloved CD Blog. I'm about to get much more focused on Hello, my beloved Blogger Blog.

I'm back from my Obama-Work-Vacation, and will be more focused on this blog as I'm headed to Nicaragua on January 15th, as long as the planes are still flying. God knows any more what we can count on, except life, death, and taxes, and, for me, Barack Obama. My focus these days is very much in support of the Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, including my family in Nicaragua. I'm co-coordinating a new Obama Community Group on MyBO tofurther communication in the States with all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Very wide ranging, with some superduperstar Obamabloggers signed on. It's hot, I'm excited, and this blog should be linking to all my other blogs about now through Intense Debate. I may end up an unofficial Ambassador to Nicaragua yet, just through my blogposts, anyway. I think I posted that early here: I applied to be appointed Nicaraguan Ambassador in Obama's Administration, and, while it is a cosmic longshot that this Cosmic Caballero would ever be considered, hey, WHY NOT? (said Robert Kennedy in 1968) and I've pretty much operated that way ever since. I could do some good there, but it would be a very different Embassy than what has ever been, for sure.
Gracias, CenterDoug

Ay Chihuahua!

So, strange. Only 32 days to Nicaragua, most out of Glenwood. Here's my happiest seasons greetings to all of you. CD

Navidad in Nicaragua

©Doug Evans 2008 (767 words)

For The Glenwood Post Independent (December)

Christmas Day starts early in Teotecacinte, Nicaragua, at least in my sister Marta’s casa de palomas, on the southern skirts of this peasant village where I spend my warmer winters. No sleeping-in is allowed, in Marta Betanco’s house, not even on Navidad. Except for me, of course, off in my cloistered wing: since I’m considered a North American angel of God down here, she grants me special license, at least on high holy days; she said, with a chuckle, last night, “Angels need their sleep, Dugla, particularly at Christmas, when they’re so very busy.”

My life is very sweet in Nicaragua.

Marta’s up at 3 am, probably, for an hour of prayer on her knees, after lighting the kitchen fire. The rest of the family gets rustled up by the mamacita at 4 am, to help her clean house (including washing the adobe walls of the sala and the kitchen stove with fresh, clean mud). Every inch of the dirt floors is swept by Estania, Marta’s daughter, with her handmade broom. In the kitchen, Marta’s steaming nacatamales in their banana leaf wrappers, poised in an iron kettle above a simmer for 5 hours. The water mustn’t boil off, or all-day-yesterday’s prep work will scorch, ruining the coming feast.

Cesar, the papa of the house, is scrounging firewood to keep the boil going. Even Arnoldo, the teenage son, has a duty: he’s gone fishing for tilapia in the rio Limon, hoping to catch a big one to give his grandmother on Christmas Day. I know all this is happening, of course, even from my sequestered spot, because Marta’s voice carries quite well in still-humid December. It’s now 9 am on Christmas Day in Teote. The only sound louder than her commands was the rooster “Hallelujah Chorus” at daybreak, 4:47, today, when I awoke. Even sleeping angels need to wake up sometime, I guess; it might as well be to crowing, for joy at the coming of light.

While all that’s going on in prep for the family feast at noon, I’m playing “Christmas Carols, ‘Round the World” on my laptop, stretching in the growing light, and being grateful for another day, especially this one, in my 64^th year. Time is very precious to me, and I make the most of it. The sound of Perry Como singing “Ave Maria” brings Marta to my door with café and “Feliz Navidad!” She’s picked a favorite coral rose as a special gift, this morning of mornings. We hug, then she scurries back, sure the nacatamales are burning. I look at the rose and know, once again, that my life is full of angels, right in front of me: it took Nicaragua to let me see that. It’s a gift I’ll carry with me, I hope, and live up to, as well.

With the swish of Estania’s broom and the tinkle of holiday laughter in the air for company, I head for my laptop and three hours of daily writing. Even on Christmas. Heck, because of Christmas! In a few hours, the whole extended family of Betancos will descend on la casa de palomas, 89 strong this year, counting all the new babies, and I’ll need to kiss my Christmas solitude “Good-Bye.” We’ll be decorating the chimbomba, the Christmas tree, this year a potted Norfolk Pine, my treat, brought all the way from Esteli by taxi, which we’ll plant in my garden at Tierra Mia after the 12 Days of Christmas are over. In the late afternoon, we’ll all troop to church for Christmas mass. We’ll vow to make each day a new beginning.

In Nicaragua, Christmas dances on for almost half a jolly month past the Christmas service, culminating in gift-giving, a multiplicity of hugs, another feast on the 12^th day, when the Wisemen arrived at the stable with their offerings. As Nicaraguans rarely have cash for gifts to emulate the Magi, love and handmade tokens take their place. It’s a time to honor babies, birth and parenthood, and every human life on the planet, a time for cherishing familia, not for shopping.

This year, I helped a friend fold 89 origami storks to pass out, then, hang from fishing line above my family’s beds and hammocks. I’ve been folding the first folds on and off since August, but I know they’ll be a triumph. I mean, they’re crimped by an angel from the States, after all; I even added sparkles with glitter, so they’ll twinkle in the Nicaraguan night.

Feliz Navidád, mi amigos en Glenwood Springs and all the international bloggers now my friends. CenterDoug

From Now On, Cultural Creatives: Us!

From this post on,
I will be refocusing this blog much more often on my daily life as a multicultural global citizen, triumphant in the USA and in Nicaragua, in the Now. I will be focusing my Obama Blog [http:www.my.barackobama.com (Obama Doug's Obama Blog)] on networking those who are interested in learning about the exploited and magnificent peoples of the "Land Bridge" between North and South America, the heartland of the Western Hemisphere, Central America, from South Mexico to Nicaragua.

This Blog, CenterDoug, will focus on furthering understanding, mostly for myself, on the current paradigm shift we undergo presently.

Gracias, CenterDoug

A Shift Towards Compassion

A shift towards compassion:

I’ve been playing with the concept, for a while, of the “Paradigm Shift,” primarily a rise to higher collective consciousness, accompanying our movement from a 20^th century “Old America” to a 21^st century entity I’m calling “New America,” a very transformative, millennial vision that’s still mostly perfumed air and dreams, right now, that I’m seeing only in tantalizing, ghostly shimmers. Admittedly, I live and think and act from the very-most fringe of contemporary being. But, right now, most everything out there seems to have turned inside-out, to me: so maybe, just maybe, the fringe has become, at least for a moment, the epicenter of synergy. Certainly, questioning looks better all the time, at every level.

We’re in a very transitional Transition, at the very least from a current President to a bright-shiny new one. Everything is transitioning, let us hope, with grace. We may, as well, be in the midst of a tsunami of a Consciousness Shift—Blip!--leaving everything (including, by the way, each of us!) looking somehow different, as from a never-seen-before perspective, while staying almost exactly the same.

Imagine it: Something uniquely new, that isn’t just another expensive toy!

And, I’ll tell you what. I feel it’s already happened.

Does it not feel to you as if everything’s somehow gone inside-out? Gone topsy-turvy? Turned upside-down? And, all the while, everything has, yet again, stayed the same? That’s the way I felt when I faced third world poverty and starvation in Nicaragua, in 1993, as an “entitled American” with spiritual issues. Things happen when we’re ready for them, even if we don’t know it. Back then, I suddenly became very grateful for what I’d taken for granted before and found a pair of global shoes to fill. Now, that somersaulting sense, intuitively, signs the Collective Shift that most Cultural Creatives (Paul Ray, The Cultural Creatives) have been awaiting and working on in their millions of private American lives, since the 1980’s: that moment when “enough” people are living their lives as conscious, grateful, global people, being the change they want to see, from every level of the warp and woof of both our American tapestry and the rest of the globe’s people.

Life’s a test we’re always ready for, if we’d only listen, from the inside-out.

It might be true (but, who knows what’s true, when everything is somehow different?) that those who’ve relied on institutions to save them, even from themselves, might be a bit panicked right now, since not much is working “rightly” out there, except, perhaps, the promise of Obama and continued American ingenuity; some might be afraid to do their own thinking for a change. In my estimation, self-responsibility is still rather new a concept in America, since we tend to forget to include responsibility for others in the equation. We might all be wise to take our lives reasonably lightly, right now, held in hands of love and gratitude, honoring the current craziness with the salsa of humor and a juggernaut of compassion for our brothers and sisters, some of whom might be cracking up, under the strain, right now, of tribulation.

We’re going through an evolutionary shift in thinking, together, even if we do not know it. Those who do know it might choose to serve others, right now, at least with a compassionate ear. It’s all up to each of us, right now, after all, as it’s almost always been, but, maybe, more of us know it.

We voted for change, and it looks like we’re going to get it. We might as well welcome it, then, grow and prosper.

Gracias, CenterDoug