The bus from Palenque rumbled south through the night, taking me deeper into Chiapas—the beating heart of Mexico's indigenous resistance. I'd deviated from my original plan. The coast could wait. Something was pulling me toward San Cristobal de las Casas.
¡Ariba! ¡Ariba!
The highlands were different from the jungle. Cooler. Drier. The air had altitude in it. As we descended into the valley where the city sat, I could see the colonial architecture spreading out below—terracotta roofs and whitewashed walls, church steeples rising above the sprawl. But underneath that Spanish overlay, you could feel the indigenous reality pulsing. This was Mayan country. Zapatista country.
Soldiers stood on street corners with automatic rifles. Not the lazy, corrupt federales you'd see in beach towns, but alert, nervous men whose eyes tracked everyone who passed. The Zapatista uprising had been seven years ago, but the tension hadn't fully dissolved. It was baked into the streets.
I'd picked up a traveling companion in Palenque—Yula, a German girl in her mid-twenties. Uptight doesn't quite capture it. She was the kind of traveler who kept a detailed budget in a leather-bound notebook, who complained about the lack of hot water, who looked vaguely scandalized by the chaos of the third world. I never expected someone like her to be wandering the non-West, but there she was, clinging to her Lonely Planet like a life raft.
"Why do they need so many soldiers?" she asked as we checked into a hostel near the main plaza.
"Zapatistas," I said. "Indigenous uprising. '94. They're still here. In the mountains."
She frowned, already uncomfortable.
The hostel was the kind of place where backpackers congregated—cheap, communal, full of Israelis post-army service, Europeans on gap years, a few lost American college kids. That's where I met Marco.
Marco was Italian. Mid-twenties. Charismatic in that specifically Italian way—all gestures and laughter, always performing. He'd been traveling for six months, working his way down from California, and he had this manic energy that made him the center of every conversation.
"Tonight," he announced to the common room, "we go to the market fiesta. You have not seen Mexico until you've seen an indigenous fiesta."
And so we went.
The market was a maze of stalls selling textiles—huipiles embroidered with geometric patterns that carried meanings I couldn't read, woven bags in colors that seemed to vibrate. Women in traditional dress sat behind piles of corn and beans, their faces weathered and dignified. Children ran through the narrow passages, laughing.
And everywhere—*everywhere*—Coca-Cola.
Bottles stacked in pyramids outside the church. Crates of the stuff piled against colonial walls. At first, I thought it was just capitalism's inevitable penetration, the same McDonaldization you'd see anywhere. But Yula, ever the researcher, had read about this.
"It's for the ceremonies," she said, consulting her guidebook. "The indigenous people use it. For burping."
"For what?"
"Burping. They believe burping expels evil spirits. So they drink Coca-Cola during rituals because it makes them burp."
I stared at her. Then I started laughing. It was too perfect. Too absurd. The multinational corporation finding a way to insert itself into ancient shamanic practice. Great marketing scheme, Coca-Cola. Monetize exorcism.
We wandered into one of the churches—not the main cathedral, but one of the smaller indigenous ones that dotted the city. And the moment I stepped inside, I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
The floor was covered in *grass*. Fresh pine needles, actually, laid out in a green carpet that filled the entire nave. Candles—hundreds of them—burned in clusters on the floor, their wax pooling into multi-colored stalactites. And instead of traditional Catholic saints, there were plastic mannequins dressed in indigenous clothing, their blank faces staring down from the altars.
It was syncretism taken to its most surreal extreme. Catholicism and Mayan cosmology mashed together into something that belonged to neither tradition fully, something hybrid and strange and utterly alive.
Music poured in from outside—not mariachi, but something older. Drums and flutes, rhythms that predated the Conquest. The fiesta was starting.
By the time we got back to the hostel, we were drunk on mescal and possibility. Marco was particularly animated. He'd bought a bottle of grain alcohol from a street vendor and announced his intention to perform a trick he'd learned from fire dancers in Baja.
"You put it in your mouth," he explained, demonstrating with water, "and then you spit it through a flame. Big fireball. Very impressive."
Several of us gathered in the courtyard to watch. Someone lit a candle. Marco took a swig of the alcohol, held it in his mouth, and leaned toward the flame.
What happened next happened fast.
Instead of spraying outward in a controlled arc, the alcohol ignited while still in his mouth. Flames erupted across his face. He screamed and stumbled backward, slapping at his burning skin while the rest of us stood frozen in horror.
Someone threw water. Someone else grabbed a blanket. By the time we got the fire out, Marco's face was covered in angry red welts, already beginning to blister.
Second-degree burns. All across his cheeks and chin.
We got him to a hospital—or what passed for one in San Cristobal. A clinic with fluorescent lights and tired nurses who'd seen this kind of stupid gringo accident before. They wrapped his face in gauze and gave him pain pills and told him he'd be fine in a few weeks, but he'd probably scar.
I visited him the next morning. He was sitting up in a metal-framed bed, his face looking like a mummy.
"Stupido," he said through the bandages. "So stupido."
I nodded. What else was there to say?
That was my cue. Time to leave Chiapas.
But before I left, I had one more ceremony to attend.
Through the hostel grapevine, I'd heard about a shaman who performed traditional temascal ceremonies—Mayan sweat lodges. I'd been documenting everything on my camera, building this archive of experiences, and a temascal seemed like exactly the kind of thing I needed to capture.
The shaman's house was on the outskirts of town, down a dirt road that wound through cornfields. He was an older man, maybe sixty, with a face like carved wood and eyes that missed nothing. He greeted us—me, Yula, and two French travelers—with a formality that felt ceremonial in itself.
The temascal was a low dome made of stone and adobe, barely tall enough to crawl into. A fire burned outside, heating volcanic rocks until they glowed red. One by one, we stripped down to bathing suits and crawled inside.
It was dark. Womb-dark. The shaman followed us in, pulling a blanket across the entrance to seal it shut.
Then he began to pour water over the stones.
Steam erupted—thick, scorching steam that filled every cubic inch of space. Within seconds, I couldn't breathe without feeling like my lungs were being scalded. Yula was already whimpering. The French couple had gone silent.
The shaman started to chant. Low, guttural sounds in a language I didn't recognize. Tzotzil, maybe. Or Tzeltal. The words rose and fell with the rhythm of the steam, and I felt something shift—not in the external world, but inside my own skull.
I reached for my camera. I'd been filming everything, hadn't I? This was important. This needed to be documented.
The moment I raised the viewfinder to my eye, the chanting stopped.
The shaman was staring at me.
Even in the darkness, I could feel his gaze—hot and fierce as the stones.
Then he started yelling. Rapid-fire Spanish, words tumbling over each other too fast for me to catch them all, but the meaning was clear: *Put that fucking thing away.*
"Lo siento," I stammered. "Lo siento, lo siento—"
He kept yelling. Something about gringos. Something about disrespect. Something about turning me into a frog if I didn't—
I shoved the camera back into my bag.
The chanting resumed, but the energy had changed. I'd broken something. The sacredness of the space had been punctured by my need to capture it, to turn it into content.
We stayed in the temascal for another hour—sweating, chanting, purging—but I was no longer fully present. I was thinking about the camera. About documentation. About the weird paradox I'd trapped myself in: trying to record the unfolding of my path while simultaneously disrupting its natural flow.
When we finally crawled out, blinking in the daylight like newborns, the shaman pulled me aside.
Through broken Spanish and hand gestures, he explained that he would perform a de-possession ceremony on me. With an egg.
I didn't understand, but I nodded.
He had me sit on a wooden stool while he rubbed a raw egg over my entire body—starting at my crown, moving down my spine, across my chest, down my arms and legs. He muttered prayers the whole time, words I couldn't parse.
When he was done, he cracked the egg into a glass of water.
We both stared at it.
The white settled in cloudy formations. The yolk floated, intact. And there, just at the edge of the yolk, was a tiny thread of red.
The shaman smiled for the first time all day.
"Bueno," he said. "This red—it will bring you sexual dreams. Good luck."
He winked.
I paid him, still not entirely sure what had just happened, and walked back toward town with Yula trailing behind me.
"That was insane," she said.
"Yeah."
"Are you going to film any of it?"
I looked at her. Then at my camera bag.
"No," I said. "I don't think so."
That night, I wrote in my journal instead of filming. I wrote about Marco's burned face, about the Coca-Cola churches, about the shaman's anger. I wrote about the paradox of documentation—how the act of recording can kill the very thing you're trying to preserve.
Dance like nobody's watching, the saying goes.
But what if somebody *is* watching? What if that somebody is you, holding a camera, turning your own life into a performance?
I was starting to realize that maybe some things weren't meant to be documented. Maybe the fluidity of the path required a certain invisibility. Maybe the presence of a recording device created self-consciousness, and self-consciousness creates stumbling.
I thought about Michael back at the Solstice Grove, living without documentation, just *being*.
I thought about the flow state I'd been chasing—that zone where you disappear into the doing.
You can't flow if you're watching yourself flow.
The next morning, I boarded a bus heading south. Yula went her own way, relieved to be rid of me. My face was sunburned from the sweat lodge. My camera stayed in my bag.
And somewhere in my journal, I'd written a note to myself:
*Let go of capturing. Just be captured.*