After a week south of the US border, I feel that I have truly arrived in Mexico only now that I have entered the lovely pilgrimage town of Talpa de Allende. This place is old Mexico at its finest. On the way to Talpa I spent two days in Mazatlan followed by two more in Puerto Vallarta. In both these tourist towns it seemed that I had not actually left the USA. America has been pasted everywhere. There are McDonalds and Pizza Houses and K-Marts. Around sixteen years ago I visited both these beach resorts on business trips for some travel companies I owned. Even then I was amazed at how un-Mexican were the tourist havens of Acapulco, Ixtapa, Cancun, Manzanillo, and Puerto Vallarta. The situation has only increased over the years. Yes, the beaches are still stunning, and there are many fine restaurants that I certainly enjoy. But these fantasy lands for American and Canadian tourists do not make me feel as if I am in Mexico.
This morning I awoke early after having hardly slept at all. I had spent the night in my VW van, in a back parking lot of one of the Puerto Vallarta mega-hotels. The security guards of the hotel had noticed that I was sleeping in the van and, while making their rounds through the night, kept letting me know they were aware of my presence by knocking on the windows of the van. That hourly knocking and an occasional mosquito made for some difficult sleeping. Things like this are something that you definitely come to accept when traveling rough the way I do. Bugs, rats, missed meals, lousy food, over-crowded buses, pick-pockets, lots of hassles. All these things can make travel much more interesting. They set one free (shake one loose!) from the monotony of daily life. What a great gift. While traveling, if you deal with these various and inevitable hassles with an easy attitude, they actually become fun and instructive. The unexpected stops being scary and reveals itself as exciting.
After waking, I did some stretching exercises followed by a mile and a half swim in the calm ocean. Steve, the friend who is traveling with me for awhile (I will introduce him soon) sat upon the beach as I swam; two of us meditating: one moving, one sitting. We ate breakfast at a place called 100% Natural, a small chain of Natural Foods restaurants in the some of the beach resort towns of Mexico. Their menus present an incredible selection of mixed fruit drinks and smoothies, possibly the best I have seen anywhere in the world. While eating, I mentioned to Steve that our day would be a study in contrasts. We would be venturing inland, toward the real Mexico. From the flat ocean horizons, the white beaches, the masses of tourists to the thickly wooded mountains, the luscious green jungles, and the slow-moving Mexican rural peasants.
The journey from Puerto Vallarta to Talpa was beautiful and exhausting. The road marked on the map was a short, gently curving line. The distance indicated was around 70 kilometers. Based on a great deal of previous experience driving over tropical mountain ranges, I knew that the route would probably take an entire day rather than the single hour for a paved highway over the same distance. Crossing two ranges of steep hills, on rocky, winding, dirt roads, in first gear nearly all of the time, it took seven hours to travel less than sixty miles. A drive like this in a meditation in itself. Constant concentration on the road is required in order to thread your way around pot-holes and over bumps. The way was long and tiring but it seemed a good beginning to my pilgrimage. Talpa was to be the first of the sacred sites I visited on this Latin American journey and it felt right that my path began with a challenge.
There is a single road leading the final miles to Talpa. It crosses a steep range of mountains, winding its way to the lovely valley where the small town stands. Cresting that range, looking down on the distant town, I was overcome with elation and gratitude. In years past I have often crossed similar hills and ranges, usually by bicycle, and searched the horizon for a far away shrine. These places have for me the feeling of a fairy tale. Their settings are like the mystic vistas and magical kingdoms shown on the covers of science fiction paperback books by LeGuin, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. One can hardly believe that such places exist; they seem the stuff of fantastic imaginations.
It is wonderful to approach these sacred sites, slowing descending mountain roads into hidden valleys. Gradually the shrine is seen more clearly. Spires and soaring towers loom over buildings of the surrounding town. Soon the road reaches the valley floor and, entering the town, the shrine is suddenly lost from view. Cobblestones, winding streets, wrong turns; finally the holy place is attained. Approaching Talpa in this way, time seemed to slow down. I fell into a dreamy, peaceful state. Parking the van, walking slowly across the large plaza infront of the church, watching and becoming the milling pilgrims and playing children and sleeping dogs. Hesitating for a few moments....delaying my entry into the shrine....I let the feeling of anticipation and joy completely fill me.
Inside a few dozen pilgrims sit here and there on the pews. A group of fifteen are clustered together singing softly but with great passion, and a constant stream approaches the altar and image of the Virgin of Talpa. Many pilgrims make the final one hundred meter approach to the altar on their knees. Some are crying, their faces showing the most profound adoration. These pilgrims come from different socio-economic classes and parts of Mexico. There are poor rural peasants and stylish city-folk, army officers and Catholic nuns, children and elders. Everyone is peaceful, friendly, gentle, and joyful to be here. They delight, too, in seeing me, a non-Mexican, at their treasured holy place (over the next two days only two other gringos come to town, and these only for a few passing moments). Talpa is not mentioned in any of the tourist guide books.
The Christian shrine at Talpa, dedicated to a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, is of a type of shrine called "miracle-causing". Millions of Christian pilgrims have come here to pray for healing, a loving mate, a healthy child, or something as simple as good grades on an academic examination. And many of these prayers have been answered. So many in fact, that the image of the Virgin has attained the legendary status of being a miracle-causing statue. Yet it is important to note that long before Talpa became a pilgrimage site for Christians, the same area was sacred to an Earth Goddess named Cohuacoatl. There has been an ancient and continuing tradition of sacredness at this place. Over my years of travel, I have visited many other sacred sites with similar histories; pagan holy places that later become Christian pilgrimage shrines.
This multi-cultural veneration and sacred use of certain places can be studied and discussed from several perspectives. One perspective that I find most interesting regards the distinct difference between perception and interpretation of perception. In ancient, pre-Christian, times, people had a perceptual experience of the living Earth that they interpreted (and then labeled) as an Earth Goddess with the name of Cohuacoatl. Other people, many hundreds of years later, with a different world view and a different set of religious notions, had their own perceptual experience of the Earth at the same site but interpreted and labeled those experiences according to their vastly different religious notions. There is no question that many people have had significant perceptual experiences of some mysterious energy or presence at Talpa and other similar places. What I am suggesting here is that these experiences were, by and large, quite similar. People experienced a presence, or power, or field of energy at Talpa that has a feminine quality or feeling to it. What is different is how people from different time periods and cultures have interpreted and spoken about those experiences. Pre-Christian peoples, having no exposure to Christian legends of the Virgin Mary spoke in their own religious terms of an Earth Goddess. Centuries later, as local peasants were influenced by the colonial Spanish Christian world view, they began to interpret and label their experiences in predictably Christian way - their experiences of the presence of Talpa were attributed to the Virgin Mary. Ultimately, it does not really matter what images, legends, or religious notions are used to try to explain the extraordinary power of a sacred site. These human artifacts - whatever their culture or epoch of origin - are ultimately pointing to something beyond themselves. Something available not by explanation but only by experience. For me, and countless thousands of other pilgrims, it is enough to simply visit the sacred sites and steep one’s heart and soul in the presence of the mysterious holiness.
