Touch Nothing
A Poem of Esperanza
To my chagrin, no website yet exists for Esperanza, the Archan Permaculture project currently under nurturing cultivation by the villagers of the InlaKesh Archiarchy Invention Center. It may be a project on my bench to build some such website…
Esperanza is the 65-hectare wonderland purchased by InlaKesh a few years ago. Situated near the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, Mexico, Esperanza is a home of syntropic experimentation, land regeneration, Archiarchal exploration and innovation, and, in days, years, and decades to come, will be one of the few places on the planet where visitors can come for trainings in permaculturing, Technopenuriaphobia, and villaging within an Archiarchal context.
Below is a poem I wrote during my first visit to the stirring Esperanza. It is called, “Touch Nothing,” and is mostly true.
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Love,
Devin
Touch Nothing
The sound of life is quiet here
Where the pueblos end
And the roads are sand
And even there, the plants
Would take the tire tracks in a week
If tires did not pass them over
Twice a day.
The cacophony is different here,
Loud, varied, urgent with mating,
Or water moving, or wind that shuttlecocks
Through trees, up hills, along the muddy river,
Easing the flight of birds, thwarting that of flies,
Paternal wind, so deft with seed, wind at your back, wind in your face, delicate wind across bare sweating skin in the hot day.
I am at home here. I am not at home.
I am at ease here. I am not at ease.
I am nurtured here. I am starving.
I am enlivened, and yet I see death, stalking in the forest, gelatin white fungus, black wall spider, the dog’s infected ear, fur and print from big cat, the deadliest killers too small to see.
A hole as big as a hand, black as space, widens in the old paddock.
Toss a stone in, the stone disappears.
Pour water, and no sound of it touching ground.
I hear a tale of some who seek to know the blackness of such holes,
For there is a world down there,
A life, a wish for consciousness.
And so at night, they drink liquid from a blue bark that makes their bodies baby-small.
They walk the pasture to the hole,
And into that place where no light casts,
Place one foot, then another,
And hoist and drop themselves,
Reaching out two hands
To touch nothing.
