CHAPTER 6: CANCUN — First Steps Into Mexico

**2025 FRAMING — NYC, 2002**

"Where did you go after you left New York?" Akiko asks.

"Cancun," I say. "September 2001. Four days after the attacks."

"Four days? Why Cancun?"

"I'll just tell you what happened."

**CANCUN — SEPTEMBER 15, 2001**

**2004 MANUSCRIPT**

It had been raining since I had arrived over 42 hours ago. The sky was still dark grey and the palm trees whipped violently as the gusts of wind carried sheets of rain in waves on my hostel's rattling windows. I had gotten myself a private room with its own bathroom, TV, AC, it was my first night, so after consulting the upper tier suggestions of my Lonely Planet Guide, the Cancun section, I had settled on a very centrally located, clean, upscale-ish, Hostel called Margarita. I had barely left my room since I had checked in, it was too wet outside, and I had very little understanding of the city, wondering aimlessly around in the rain seemed pointless. I just wanted to get to Tulum, but I had heard that there were only very basic sand-floored shacks under the ruins on the beach, and being in a room with a solid roof over my head seemed like a better choice this early on in the adventure.

The storm was supposed to have passed already, but it had slowed down over the Yucatan peninsula, and did not seem like it was going to let off any time soon. The wind whirled outside evoking a hollow sense of loneliness that was hard to shake off.

CNN played in the background. I read LP guide obsessively and went over notes I had collected for each section of my trip in my notebook. I would try to tune-in every 30 minutes for the weather report and try to get a sense of when I should head off to Tulum. CNN was covering the attacks in NY and Washington that had happened only 4 days ago on September 11th. Tragic shots of the smoldering towers flickered on the screen. Mind numbing, repetitive footage of the planes crashing into the buildings were juxtaposed with angry politicians shaking fists, and beating the war drums. The world was going insane! Pandemonium on TV, no one knew who had done it yet; the world was in upheaval, it felt like something truly historic had just happened. Some sort of mythical David and Goliath story re-enacted in the 21st century and beamed across the globe in real-time.

I was in Greece on September 11th, and had seen the second tower being hit live on Greek TV as I was packing my bags at home in the basement in Kifisia, a northern suburb in the outskirts of Athens. My heart had dropped the moment of the collision, I heard a ringing in my ears, then it was silent, the moment stretched to the longest a moment can. Then shock, panic, sadness, horror! All together these emotions overcame me. I stood there staring at the screen in disbelief, it looked so much like a Hollywood terrorist action film, and you were expecting some superhero to come save the day. But no, the towers burned for 20 minutes or so before they collapsed, inducing once again a vacuum in my chest, and a chill through my body. All those lives… gone!

I wondered how many people were watching around the world right now, feeling what I just felt as they tuned in to their TVs just as I had. The nature of the attack was such that, once the first tower had been hit, all cameras in NY traced and focused in on the smoke coming form the tallest building on fire, and then LIVE only a few minutes later, the second plane hit the second tower.

I had never felt anything like this before, I felt like I had participated in the collective trauma that had just unfolded LIVE on TV. We all had just witnessed the death of thousands of people, in real time, collectively. The act undisputedly horrific and despicable echoed in the hearts of every person with a conscience who was watching.

That same evening, at dinner a few hours later, my parents had insisted I cancel my trip, or at least postpone it. I was not having it. I had been planning this trip for a year, and even this burning building in Babylon was not going to stop me. If I did not get on that plane on the 13th I would sooner or later end up in the Greek military, a mandatory requirement for all men who intend to live in Greece and who are done with their studies. I knew my parents thought that it was a good time to get my military service out of the way. I was 23, had just finished my undergrad, did not have a job yet, and had recently broken up with my girlfriend after 3 and half years of being madly in love with. For all of the above reasons they felt the timing was ripe. I think they also secretly got a kick out of it, they felt I needed some perspective, discipline, clarity, toughness. They had stereotyped me as some hippie, with shallow self-righteous rebellious half-baked leftist theories from the States, who needed a crude Greek awakening. They felt that scrubbing some toilets on the Greek - Turkish or Albanian border would clear out the stale marijuana smoke that had been clouding up their first-borns' brain.

I gracefully avoided confrontation and mentioned that Cancun and the Mayan Riviera in the Yucatan jungle would be the last place for any sort of conflict like the one we had just witnessed on TV that afternoon. I excused my self and a few hours later I was on a plane via London to Cancun.

I landed, and as I mentioned, it was raining… heavily.

The Tecate beer cans were empty on the bedside table and the room needed to be aired-out from the stale cigarette smoke. I was getting restless so I decided to go find an Internet café and send out a few emails to people I had promised to let them know that I had arrived safely. If I were planning to spend a year in the tropics, a little rain would have to be something I got used to. I grabbed my poncho and stormed out into the street.

Holding the LP guide open to the map page in the wind was challenging, but I ungracefully managed to figure out where the closest Internet café was, but arrived drenched. Luckily I had worn my swimsuit and flip-flops anticipating getting wet, so technically it was just my T-shirt that had somehow managed to get drenched under my poncho. In the Internet Café the air-conditioning blared. Goose bumps emerged where the wetness evaporated off my skin. Slightly shivering, I logged into my Hotmail account, wiping my forearms and hands with paper towel provided by the friendly young owner of the i-café.

I began to type:

Dear Sophia,

thanks for checking in. Yes I arrived and I am fine, bags, limbs and fears… all here… ha-ha! Its raining hard, and its kind of dreary, I am not going to lie, but I am looking into leaving as soon as the storm passes, hopefully shortly. I know when I left and it was kind of hectic, I did not want to have to explain myself to mom and dad, they would not get-it anyway. With all that happened on the 11th, I don't blame them for worrying, its understandable, but you know at some point you have to jump out of the nest. You know our lives have been so tidy and neat, and we have had every hour scheduled either by mom or dad, teachers, professors. Its like in the western world we have sanitized life, like it's a commercial or pictures in a glossy magazine, a sitcom on TV. What happened to the rites of passage that ceremonialised the passing from one stage of life to the other? What happened to the adventure, the journey of self-discovery that made men out of boys and women out of girls? The concrete cubes we live in since we left the countryside a couple of centuries ago, have bred an alienation from each other, from nature, from spirit which making us unhappy and destroying the planet. We are becoming robots, and the patterns of our lives are becoming mundane and repetitive. The Internet can change all of that, it's making the world smaller than it has ever been, and we can learn and share, with and from each other like never before. It's making us into a global village, and tribal rites of passage, like traveling, are now accessible to anyone who wants to take that leap of faith.

I wont lie, I am a little scared, maybe even terrified, I ask myself what am I doing, I could get hurt, I could get kidnapped, who knows! But another part of me is so excited, eager to learn and see the world. Deep down inside I believe that the Universe wants me to see and figure out who I want and need to be. It wants all of us to do that. It gives us hints and clues we are on the right track, encouraging and protecting anyone who takes the leap to go on their quest.

I know this must sound crazy to you… let me try to explain.

Its kind of like our destinies are shallow and fake and plastic, cause we don't let our selves go out into the world and make them, legendary epic tales of self-discovery. We end up settling for standardized templates we call our lives, from kindergarten, to elementary, to high-school, to university, to the army, to some desk job, looking at spreadsheets all day. Boxes, squares, cubes, buttons… Where did all the mystery and wonder go?

Just as in Ancient Greece back in the day they had oracles to consult before and during their journey, we now have the Internet! It's a collective consciousness expanding everyday with more data and interconnected minds. A hive-mind with our collective experience, a digital imprint of our history and experience that we can access from almost anywhere, at any time. You can ask this collective mind, just as you could the oracle. Think of it as a modern form of divination, you know what that is right? In its crudest form It's when you don't know what to chose and you flip a coin and say if tales then I will do this, if heads I will do that. Its been done for 1000s of years and the basics of the principle are the same even though there are much more complicated matrixes to divine from. Soothsayers would read the entrails of animals, others read tea leaves or coffee rinds, but the i-ching was developed based on a hexagram with 64 permutations, the premise is the same, but its more sophisticated.

Its and ancient Chinese tool for making difficult decisions and seeking and answer through some sophisticated system of 64 proverbs that helped them make difficult decisions. Their philosophy was based the belief that human thought and free-will as a novel properties in the universe, and that at this place in time and space, nature or reality, call it what you want, has certain repeatable patterns. These for example are the cycle of the seasons, or day and night, or that stronger winds make bigger waves. These repetitive patterns could imply an Intelligent Designer. Since our free will and intelligence makes us able to appreciate and map-out the repeatable patterns, then the assumption is: when needing insight to a dilemma, the one seeking advice, sets an intention by asking a question while performing an act like flipping a coin. By ritualizing the query the hope is that it will result with a deeper and more meaningful answer.

The I-Ching is really interesting because it takes it a step further. It's a language of sorts, a mystical group of poems you could say, and depending on how you create the hexagram, you read the equivalent poem. The hexagram is composed of six lines; the lines can be either unbroken or broken, allowing for 64 possible combinations. Each of the hexagrams represents a different concept, which loosely resembles the symbol represented in the hexagram. The hexagrams could be a representation of lightning, or a mountain, and then there is a poem/ proverb associated with each of the 64 concepts.

When you use a search engine like Google, or Yahoo! or AltaVista, the information on the web, at that particular moment is unique. All the websites and the "pipes" that connect them to each other are configured in a specific way; it's like the randomness of a coin being flipped, or the I-Ching. Each time you ask a question to the collective consciousness the answer you get back will be different. What if you treated it like an act of divination? What if each time you wanted to ask the universe for guidance to better fulfill your destiny, you ritualized your internet search as if it was a prayer or and act of divination? Could this collective mind, this oracle of the 21st century, want to help you on your journey? Could it somewhere in that complex web of electrons, push or pull one of them and give an answer that will induce a deeper and more meaningful interpretation?

I feel like this is what we all should be doing right now; this is what the information revolution is about! Its about capturing your destiny and having faith that by posting stories on your blog, and emailing your friends and family around the world with pictures and eventually videos of your trips, you would get feedback from them in real time that could affect your journey. This was probably the first time in the history of humanity where anyone can share their journey with an audience and get input in real time.

I spent the past year researching online of things I wanted to see and learn about in this gap year. There are eco-communities sprinkled throughout Central America that are trying to live a utopian lifestyle. Some are falling apart but a couple sound like they are thriving. I want to go see with my own eyes if it's possible to create an alternative to the plastic life I was telling you before. Perhaps the Internet will allow us to live in smaller communities closer to nature because we wont feel so isolated.

Then there is the Mayans and their prophecy about 2012 I want to learn more. Some say that it's when the apocalypse will be, others say the end of time. I don't know, ever since I watched Indiana Jones and heard about lost jungle kingdoms we knew little about, I was fascinated. Not to mention the Zapatista separatists in Chiapas, a group fighting for the rights of indigenous farmers who supposedly had taken over San Christobal De Las Casas and who echoed the frustration and anger of all oppressed indigenous Americans.

I paused for a second; the blinking cursor on the screen visually punctuated the silence. What was I doing? I had never written anything like this to my sister, nor had I attempted to explain myself to her ever before. It was poring out of me though; it felt cathartic, almost like a confession. It was the first time had put it all out in one cohesive thought, and it was great to see it all together. I felt good, more confident; a sense of purpose had begun to immerge in this otherwise seemingly self-indulgent journey. I continued to type faster.

Last and not least I want to go down the Amazon, and meet the shamans of the rainforest. This was where magic still exists. I want to understand it, feel it, film it before progress swallows all of this up. Reading the Motorcycle Diaries about Che Guevara's journey through all of Latin America made me want to go on this wild Odyssey, and have an adventure, weigh myself on a global scale, using only my personality and my humanity to get me where I need to go. No one will know who I am or where I came from, I will be able to evaluate who I am what I am made of.

Its risky I know, dangerous, foolish, but I really do believe that if we surrender our free will and listen carefully and ask humbly, the universe conspires to help you find your path. It wants all of us to fulfill our destiny, and will guide us there if we are humble enough to ask. Isn't that what prayer is? Or the I-Ching?

Maybe all of this is wishful thinking and a prayer at the beginning of my trip, cause I am pretty worried I wont lie. There is this feeling though deep inside of me which makes me believe I am right to want to go on this adventure, and clues constantly appear, often when I am about to give up or lose faith, and these serendipitous breadcrumbs are sprinkled across the adventure reminding me that I am on the right path.

Anyway the storm seems to be breaking up, I think I see the sun for the first time in 2 days; I guess it's a sign! I will write back to you tomorrow before I leave for Tulum, I got to run now and take advantage of the opening with the rain.

I gave the young man at the counter 20 pesos for using the Internet, its seemed like a lot, I had been there for 3 hours though.

Handing him the money I shyly said "Gracias", sheepishly one of the 4 words in Spanish I knew rolled out of my mouth.

I continued" do you know where the closest lugar I can buy a bus ticket para Tulum? Porfavor." A sense of pride came over me after managing to use all 4 of the words in one cohesive sentence.

"Down the street on the right is a place called Aventuras Mayas, you can get them there". My inflated ego, was turned down a few notches when he responded in English, knowing that he would have repeat him self in English if he started off in Spanish.

"Gracias", I said again and stepped into the street.

Dark grey clouds silhouetted the mid afternoon baby blue sky. The sun was surprisingly still strong and everything was wet and I could feel the humidity in the air getting thicker as all the water began to evaporate under the beams of the tropical sun. It was beginning to get sticky and had not fully managed to dry off in the icebox of an Internet café. That worried me cause I wanted to leave early tomorrow and did not want to have soggy clothes in my backpack. That seemed like it would attract all kinds of smelly tropical fungi. I walked down the streets trying to hide the LP in my poncho that was wrapped up wedged in my armpit. It was not so much about not looking like a tourist and sticking out like a sore thumb, as much as I wanted to feel local, blend in like a chameleon, absorb the energy of the place, observe peoples swagger and dance, and get that sense of the location that can only be described with words of poetry. The LP book, while a travelers bible, was definitely a sign that you were not local, and it was that one accessory that you were both very happy and slightly embarrassed to take out on a bus or a bar or café.

The wind had virtually disappeared and my smoke rings glided in front of me as I walked down the street. The sign on door was hand painted with big blue and green letters that made them pop out of the panel as if they were three-dimensional. The sign was stylish and its handcrafted nature made it stand out from the other typical run of the mill travel agencies with their glossy tacky lit and blinking signs. These were the typical tourist traps selling packaged deals to Playa del Carmen with all-your-can-eat shrimp cocktail buffets.

The travel agency was a small stand-alone turquoise traditional Mexican house that reminded me of the architecture in some of Miami's Latin neighborhoods. There was a glistening, dripping banana tree outside next to the sign and I just got a good feeling. Peering through the window, using my palm to cup my brow and block the sun's reflection, I could not see anyone inside. It was getting late and just as I began to fret, a young man in his late twenties rushed around the corner and put the keys in the door. He had not noticed me behind the tree and was startled when our eyes met, as I appeared seemingly out of nowhere next to him as the latch clicked open.

"Hi sorry to startle you, I am looking to get a bus ticket to Tulum, are you open?" His expression on his face immediately changed to a warm welcoming smile.

"Hi there, I am open but, I have to run home and drop of some diapers for my wife, I forgot my car keys at the office, and was just coming to get them. I will be back in 20 minutes, can you wait for me?"

I followed him inside while he searched for his keys on a large cluttered desk.

"Are you sure you can't just sell me the ticket now, quickly?" I said with some hope in my voice.

"I would my friend, but I need to boot up the computer, that takes a few minutes, and I have a 2 week year old son at home with no diapers and my wife needs them immediately. Why don't you have a beer around the corner while you wait? I wont be a long 25-30 minutes tops". I noticed the time interval had somehow expanded and I was not sure I wanted to wait; the clouds were getting thicker again. He found the keys and politely shepherded me to the door.

"Do you want to come with me?" He asked as he was locking up. "All I have to do is go by a pharmacy and pick up some diapers and some medicine".

The plot thickens I thought to myself. I hesitated for a few moments; I could not make up my mind… I did have to buy a toothbrush and toothpaste. He seemed like a nice guy, and the office seemed legit and tidy and in order other than the desk, which I could relate to. Fuck it, lets do this.

"I need tooth paste and a toothbrush so I guess I could get those from the pharmacy". I blurted out halfheartedly.

"Perfect! Come with me, we can get you what you need, then you can come over to my place, I drop off the diapers and medicine, I bring you back here, you get the ticket, I close the shop and then I can take you out to see the real Cancun"

Big drops started to fall as we walked to the car, and I realized that I had left the poncho and the LP guide in the office but we were already at the car. That was my cornerstone; I could not afford to lose it. I had heard that the guides were hard to find on the road, and I had notes in it, most importantly, the address of Hostel Margarita which, by now, had completely forgotten how to get back to. Without the map and being driven around the city to unfamiliar neighborhoods was going to make my return quite challenging.

I was about to get in the car when this shiver of doubt flushed through my brain. Who was this guy? Where was I going? How would I get back? Maybe he is a kidnapper? Maybe it's a scam? I realized I did not even know his name.

"Wait a second, I forgot my LP guide at the office" I stalled, "I am really sorry but I need to get that before we leave".

I slightly cringed and expected a souring of our newly founded relationship, but on the contrary he smiled again and said:

"Relax my friend… what's your name? I realize that we have not been properly introduced with all this rushing"

BLAAAAAM!!! A lightning bolt struck what seemed to be only a few blocks away. "Get in the car, it's going to rain again." He reached over and opened the passenger side door.

I crouched and sat in his white Honda Accord, which was messy and cluttered with toys, papers, trash, and a pair of smelly soccer cleats with a pristine brand new soccer ball.

"My name is Oliver, I am from here, born and raised, a true Mayan of the Yucatan. I was born just outside Cancun, what about you?" He started the engine.

"My name is Nikos and I was born and grew up in Athens Greece. I just started a-year-or-more traveling adventure, I actually just started 3 days ago and this is my first stop, beautiful but… rainy Cancun".

I smirked and looked out the window. The rumbling thunder blended in with the vibrations of the car engine and massaged my abdomen and lower ribcage.

"I could tell you are a traveler and not a tourist" he smirked back and winked at me.

"What do you mean, what's the difference?" I asked perplexed. He pulled out from the parking space into the road and began to drive.

"A tourist takes their home with them on vacation. The traveler makes their home everywhere, and what a tourists call a vacation, a traveler calls their life."

I had never thought about the distinction, but it reminded me of what I had just been writing to my sister about. The need to travel, to experience an adventure, enough of these pre-fabricated experiences and cookie-cut lives, it felt like a breadcrumb, a clue, I got that feeling inside me again.

Oliver continued, "Listen, if you want me to stop at the office I will be it's in the opposite direction and I will have to make a big detour to get there. I promise I will bring you right back and I will take you out for dinner, deal?"

"Sure" I was sold, I needed to begin to trust these feelings, wasn't that the whole point of the trip? To trust my intuition and following the rabbit down the rabbit-hole?

We sort of confusedly high-fived and shook each others hands.

Oliver was charming, light skinned, spoke English better than anyone I had spoken with in Mexico yet, and while seemingly absent-minded and slightly scattered, there was something calming and reassuring about his tone. I could not put my finger on it yet, but he was very inviting and friendly.

"How did you end up speaking such good English?" I asked.

"My father was a school teacher and we also had American TV playing Hollywood movies that were not dubbed. My father would teach me from when I was a very young boy, and then I remember watching cartoons like G.I. Joe. Do you know what G.I. Joe is? The cartoon and the action figures, fighting Cobra?»

"Yes I do." I replied. "We had the same cartoon on TV in Greece when I was growing up too, a new form of American imperialism if you ask me. A way to get kids, mainly boys, excited about war, weapons, and a mindset of having to defeat a evil villain.»

He looked at me as he veered into a side street. The sun was setting and the combination of dark grey, pink, and white clouds popped out of the baby blue and pink sky. The street was narrow and the white walls were punctuated with bright purple bugambilias in full bloom, we had bugambilias in Greece, but not like these, these were like Greek ones on steroids, bigger, brighter, stronger, and more like a tree than the ones in Greece that look like little undernourished bushes.

The light was golden and had transformed the white walls into a peachy pink pastel color. On my side of the car, the silhouette of the car's shadow, glided across the wall. Its shape morphing as the walls uneven surface danced that eternal dance of reoccurrence between light and darkness.

"I guess you're right" he said, "I had not really thought of it that way. The stories we tell our children, shape them into the people they eventually end up being. You said you were from Greece right?"

"Yes, my father's family is three generations of Athenians and my mother's side is from Sparta"

He belched out a loud laugh. "Nikos from Athens and Sparta?! Can you get any more Greek than that! That's great, well your ancestors told great stories. My father had studied archeology and had worked at the ruins in Tulum in the fifties before he became a teacher. He was fascinated with the Mayan culture, with its myths and legends. That's what got him interested in Greek mythology, he used to tell me all the stories about the Greek gods, their battles, and squabbles, their human vulnerabilities. Mayan gods looked like combinations of animals like the Quetzequatl, the feathered serpent, but the Greek gods looked and behaved like humans. That always fascinated me, how different the idea of god or gods can be from one culture to the next."

"I think it has to do with the environment, they always told us in school that the reason Greece became the cradle of western civilization, was because of the human scale. I did not really understand what they were talking about till very recently I think. We have 4 relatively mild seasons, our sea gets rough, but not too crazy like the hurricanes you have here. Humans stand out and contrast on the Greek landscape. We have bugamvilias in Greece but here they are so lush and large, in Greece they look malnourished when compared to yours. It is no wonder that nature with its animals is much more vivid in the gods, stories and myths you tell. I think we take our cues from the environment around us when making up the stories that inform meaning into our lives. Its like the landscape is a stage for us to get inspired from and stimulate our imaginations for the legends we make up for our selves. Here the human body is lost in the richness of nature, in Greece the human body stands out in the landscape which has less nature to compete with."

"I agree" he said. We walked up to the front door and were greeted by an excited little 5 year old girl which darted out of the house and wrapped herself around Oliver's legs as his wife, Clara, stood in the shadows of the interior holding a new born in her arms.

"This is Leeloo" he said as he whisked her into his arm holding the diapers and medicine in with his other. He pecked Clara on the mouth and eagerly invited me in. "This is Clara, my dear wife and Jose my beautiful baby boy. This is Nikos, he is from Greece and is just beginning a South American adventure. He was hanging out around the office and I promised to help him as soon as I got home and brought you the groceries for the baby."

"Mucho gusto, Encanda" she said, and politely ushered me deeper into their hospitable cozy home. It was a small 2-bedroom house with white tiles on the floor and a large living room/ kitchen which was modestly furnished with the basic needs of any house. Children's toys were neatly arranged along the wall and a couple of drawing materials were scattered in the middle of the room on the white fluffy carpet. There was a comforting smell of home cooked food in the air mixed with that baby smell, the smell that coats any household that has just brought a new-born into the world. I felt safe, comfortable, relaxed and welcome, it must have been the aura of optimism that echoes the baby smell That relentless sense of life affirming conviction that permeates a loving young family.

Leeloo, gazed at me with a smile shyly peeking through her dads embrace, and Clara immediately insisted that I stay to eat. I sheepishly looked at Oliver, realizing that this might not end up being the short pop-in, pop-out operation I had been promised, but I was getting hungry, and a home-cooked meal sounded good after all the airplane and airport food.

Oliver looked at me with a hesitant grin, "Come, stay for dinner and we will get you your ticket when I take you back to your hotel."

It was hard to refuse the offer, so I politely accepted their invitation. As I washed my hands in the sink Leeloo eagerly gave me a towel to dry myself, and giggled back to me when I thanked her.

"Is she the fifth element?" I asked smiling.

"You have seen the movie?" Oliver asked.

"Yeah its one of my favorites."

"Mine… ours too" he said with a confirming glance into Clara's eyes. "Our Leeloo was born only a few weeks after we saw the movie in the theater, we wanted our daughter to be just like the main character in the film. Strong, bold, but also vulnerable, funny, nurturing, and intelligent. We loved the name too so we named her after her. It feels like we need more warrior women in this male dominated world."

"I agree with you, there is too much testosterone in the world it feels like. Too much need to dominate, to destroy, and to tame. I wish there would be more estrogen out there, we need more nurturing, caring and healing female heroes, role models, and Leeloo's character in the Fifth Element is one of my favorite".

I helped set the table and we gathered around it and sat, as Clara served us rice and beans, and an assortment of vegetable and meat fillings for us to make tacos with. The baby was slung around Clara's chest and was breast-feeding quietly in that heavenly baby slumber. I could barely notice her feeding him, it was so natural and seamless, her movements were not obstructed in any way from her newborn being attached to her, literally at the hip. It was almost like she took pride in how she was able to take care of the household while also nurturing her baby. She was glowing! and embraced the role of motherhood with such pride and ease. It was such a stark contrast from how middle upper class mothers in the West got so flustered and overwhelmed with bringing a child into the world. Life seemed to be disrupted with the introduction of a new family member with the act of birth. From that moment onwards, cascading waves of stress and angst seemed to consume the young parents' child rearing process. Starting with sleep deprivation, all the way to stressing over what kindergarten to enroll them in, or how much sugar and TV time to allow, or whether or not to feed them organic products, raising children in the West just did not look or feel like how Carla was handling this dinner, feeding and nurturing both her husband, 5 year old daughter, guest, and new-born.

They say how you do something is how you do everything.

Leeloo looked at me as she chewed a big bite of her taco. In Spanish Oliver told her that I was beginning a long adventure, and that I came from Greece, the same place Odysseus (Ulysses) was from. He explained that I was interested in the Mayan Calendar, myths, and magic of the forests. Her eyes got bigger as she chomped away listening intently.

"We are half way through the Odyssey" He told me, "I read her a children's version at bedtime every night, she loves it, don't you love?" she bashfully nodded as she gulped down some tamarindo agua fresca.

"Its one of my favorite stories too! Its wild to think that it was memorized and recited for a hundreds maybe thousands of years."

Oliver nodded and urged me to go on by nudging his fork in my direction as he was cutting a piece of steak.

I realized I was rambling so I stopped to feel the room.

Oliver raised his eyebrows, "Why did you stop? This is very interesting, I believe that all myths are born this way. Tell me more about this idea of the collective consciousness. Some believe that 2012 and the ending of the Mayan calendar is related to the collective consciousness, but go on."

"I am sure you sing nursery rhymes with Leeloo, right?" He nodded. "I am sure we have different ones in Europe, but take Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for example, you know that song right?"

"Yes, we actually have a Spanish version we sing which is identical"

"That proves the point I am trying to make even better. We don't know who wrote the lyrics or the music, yet it is sang to us as babies and children and it seems to exist inside us or maybe outside us and we tap into it. It is a useful song to help children relax and get ready to go to sleep, so we use it and each generation passes it on to the next. It becomes part of our unwritten collective culture. What's incredible about the Odyssey is that its 12.000 lines long and there is almost no repetition, which is very different from Twinkle Twinkle. So it makes one wonder what made the Odyssey such an important and useful story, that generation after generation, it was considered such an important story to tell, enough so that large groups of people learned to deliver it in some sort of sacred performance."

"Its about the importance of self discovery through adventure and traveling, pushing your self beyond your comfort zone and surrendering to your destiny" Oliver blurted out eagerly.

"Wow! That's exactly it in a nutshell!" I said.

I was surprised that we were still on the same page and that Oliver was still interested. These conversations were usually reserved for my nerdy college buddies and some of my most philosophical friends from back home. Everyone in my family, except my great aunt Dolly, found these musings, if not boring, a waste of time due to their lack of practical, immediate and obvious utility. Here I was with someone I had just met, in a foreign country, eating at their home with their entire family, and was having one of the most interesting conversations.

I continued.

"Remember we were discussing about how the landscape affects our nature of our stories and myths? Well the Odyssey is a perfect example of how the landscape and the environment shape our stories. The human scale I was referring to has to do with the stage on which the human narrative was going to take place. The moderate climate and calm sea, the lack of serious natural predators, the proximity of the Aegean islands to each other and the mainland, made the stage on which the human story to unfold on, an easy one. If it were a video game it would be one of the beginner levels, where the highest mountain of the land Mt Olympus was just less than 3000 meters. A mountain that most fit people can summit relatively easily, yet be challenged just enough at the last 5% so that they are pushed to their limits. The Aegean Sea, temperamental with its summer Meltemi and the wild storms in the winter, was rough, but definitely a sea, much milder than the grand oceans, like the Atlantic, Indian or Pacific. If 100 men sailed West, off of the coast of Portugal into the deep blue ocean, maybe 1 would return having found the New World. If 100 men sailed off the coast of Attica, tempted by the lure to discover one of the many new uninhabited islands on the visible horizon from the mainland, 99 of them would return with a story of their adventure, and the experience and wisdom of that journey.

The Aegean, a protected body of water within a larger protected body of water, the Mediterranean, is a womb within a womb. Scattered across this gentle pool of water, within visible distance of each other; islands, like stepping stones for civilization to seed the sea. The reward for those with adventurous spirits was the island, a land they could call their own.

Protected by the natural boundary of the sea, each island was able to develop independently, but due to their close proximity to each other they could also easily trade, exchange ideas, essentially being co-dependent to each other. If each person, in each generation of this society could have a meaningful adventurous life, on a landscape/stage that would push them to their limits without breaking them, then in a very short time a rich culture would emerge as a result of all that cumulative wisdom and experience. That is why I believe the Odyssey was born from the Greek landscape and could not have been born elsewhere. The stories are intimately related to the stage they took place on, just as much as the Quetzequatl could only be born here!

The reason the Odyssey was so important was so it could perpetuate and fuel that kind of adventurous life in the generations of Greeks who heard it. It was like a very long theme song for the landscape, cheering the actors on, and inspiring the early Greeks at the dawn of Western civilization to push themselves to their limit and to use their Ulyssean resourcefulness to get out of the challenges that might have to be confronted along the way."

"I understand what you mean now about the human scale and Greece, its like nature was designed at the human scale. At the top of Mt. Olympus you are not deprived of oxygen, but I am sure you can feel the air thinning, at the top of Mt. Everest its virtually impossible to breathe, it takes a very technical climber to survive at 8900 meters. If someone tried to summit Mt. Everest, they would most likely fail, but the vast majority of Greeks attempting to climb Mt. Olympus, were able to achieve it and take home the story and the wisdom of the journey. It's the accumulated wisdom of those adventures acquired from a landscape that does not defeat the adventurers but challenges them, that gives birth to a rich and diverse civilization. I see how a story that glorified this way of life was important. The Odyssey celebrated the overcoming of challenges and the unknown, while highlighting guidelines to serve as moral compasses through the journey. The more people told and heard the epic poem, the more inspired they became to live a deeper and more adventurous life."

I nodded with approval, noticing Leeloo squirming in her chair, visibly bored due to her inability to follow our conversation in English.

Clara began clearing the table. She picked the plates up and asked me in English:

"What about the heroes? Who are the protagonists in the story? What are their main virtues and flaws? It seems like a very masculine heroic journey, celebrating the achievements and adventures of men. How are women portrayed? What are their roles in the story?"

Her question seemed more rhetorical, I was not sure she was looking for an answer. Nonetheless I was taken aback, I had never considered her question. Perhaps because I was a man, perhaps because most stories have male protagonists I had not thought about her point. She was not being assertive, nor was there any irony or confrontational energy in her question, it was simply a statement phrased as a question.

She walked over to the sink without waiting for a response. In a semi awkward silence, I thought for a moment about the female characters in the Odyssey. There was Penelope, Ulysses wife waiting for him patiently in Ithaca pursued by the suitors. Then there was Circe the sorceress, who turns Ulysses' crew into pigs while seducing him, inevitably delaying his return. The sirens, the nymph Cleo, and the beautiful Helen of Troy, all of which were characters who either instigated or complicated his journey, and in an adversarial way, butted heads with the protagonist.

There were some female characters who help him as well. His aged loyal servant Eurycleia, the blue blooded princess Nausika, and there was also Athena goddess of wisdom, Ulysses' protector, appearing ex machina to get him out of all perilous precarious situations. I could not say that all female characters in the Odyssey were antagonists or somehow adversarial to Ulysses AKA Odysseus. But I could also not deny that female characters in the epic poem were definitely getting the less flattering roles as a whole.

The lack of female protagonists seemed appropriate. As we were discussing before, the myths and stories we tell our selves mimic and reflect the values and truths that our community believes in and is accustomed to. Ancient Greece was definitely a man's world. Most women with few exceptions such as the Hetaires, were confined to the duties of raising the children and taking care of the household. They were not allowed to participate in many of the freedoms of ancient life which defined the ancient Greek experience, thus being excluded from voting, listening to the orators and philosophers, watching the Olympics, being educated, or being taught to read or write.

Clara walked back over to the table to continue to clear it. I looked into her dark brown intense yet calming eyes.

"There are a few female characters" I replied and continued in a slightly defensive tone, "None have significant presence in the sense of length, but they are significant in effecting the plot. In that sense, they are not irrelevant to the story or functioning as part of the background. Even though the epic poem came from a time where patriarchy was at its golden age and yet the Odyssey is not a chest-beating celebration of the masculine archetype."

Clara paused as she was clearing the table, baby still slung around her hip and chest, sleeping as far as I could tell.

"When I was in University, I was very politically active. My mother's family comes from Chiapas, and I have Mayan, indigenous blood going through my veins, as does he."

She pointed with her eyes to her newborn attached to her, and continued.

"I was confused and afraid growing up, my Mexican identity was unclear to me. Frida Kahlo, and what she stood for, her character and role she chose to play in the theater of history, inspired me, motivated me, and gave me faith to understand who I am. It's the person she wanted to be remembered as and her behavior that built her story that made me proud of my Mayan heritage. I became political, and stood up for the rights of indigenous farmers joining the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and through their struggle I discovered my own truth. If it was not for Frida and what she represented for me, I don't know if I would be who I am today".

The intensity of what she was saying was strangely in contrast with the tone of her delivery, which was gentle, almost hypnotic. It was evident that she was speaking from a place of personal experience and it informed her truth with a conviction that had lead her on her own journey of self discovery.

"I completely understand the need for myths, legends which feature female protagonists." I responded.

"You should go to San Christobal de Las Casas, in Chiapas and see for yourself how the indigenous farmers are struggling to retain farming rights over their inherited lands. The Zapatistas, largely inspired by Ché, became their voice and mobilized a political movement to confront the new form of colonialism and imperialism, globalization. Everyone is being rushed into this new world, and those who don't want to or cant keep up with this acceleration are destined to be disadvantaged. It really breaks my heart to see simple people being used again and again as pawns on someone else's chess-board. I really am not sure about all this progress, it just seems like the same story just packaged in a different wrapping".

"Baby… my love? Why are you getting so political?" Oscar said in slight discomfort, "We were just musing about the role of myths and how they come into being, and now we are diving into an issue which has very deep roots. Besides as far as I know the Greeks did not colonize anyone – at least not recently".

He glanced at me as he picked up the stack of plates Clara had placed on the table.

"No, we were actually slaves our selves during most of the colonization period from the mid 1400s till 1821, which is when we gained our independence from the Ottomans, and also the beginning of the modern nation state of Greece."

"The stories are important! The stories we tell weave together a collective web of narratives and they are what inspire us to act. The better stories we tell, a better world will result as a consequence."

**2025 FRAMING — NYC, 2002**

"That's it?" Akiko says. "The chapter just ends there?"

"The manuscript cuts off," I say. "I never finished writing the rest of that dinner. There were notes at the bottom—stuff I wanted to include about chaos, finding the path, the trance story. But I never wrote it."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Maybe because I was still living it. Maybe because the conversation with Oliver and Clara was so perfect it didn't need an ending. Sometimes the best stories don't have conclusions—they just stop at the moment of maximum meaning."

She types that down.