A continuation of the last post (Ocampo and Angangueo, Mexico)

It is appropriate that I'm starting this post with Marifer's explanation of time -- a human invention -- because on Sunday most of Mexico "gained" an hour during the switch to the winter schedule. This means that, while last week it got dark shortly before eight, now it gets dark shortly before seven, and my poor body is so confused that I conked out at 8:30 last night. That doesn't make too much sense, because my usual bedtime is not 9:30 (I do suffer from Old Grannie Syndrome, but my case isn't that severe) -- but I can at least say that I find it amazing that everyone in this country, and most people in other countries, have such trust in clocks that they will alter their biological rhythms to fit them (dinner in the dark?). Also, I fully understand the riots that the switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar caused in Britain and its colonies in the mid-18th century -- 11 days "lost"! If I were told that tomorrow was going to be the 28th of November instead of the 28th of October, I probably wouldn't feel a month older, but I would feel that the year was a month shorter. How strange that we listen more to calendars and clocks than to the universe! We try to make uniform and constant something that varies in nature depending on location and season (I'm not saying that time itself varies -- maybe it does! -- but that natural cycles do).

Now back to my interview victims at El Bosque Village: I left off with Marifer, who said that time doesn't exist, but rather was invented by humans. What do exist are events and processes, like the different stages of life, which are different for every person. All cycles of life are relative to each other -- there is no single basis for comparison. So, we measure not time, but changes and differences, without which time makes no sense. She said that we can experience "timeless" states, such as dreams, in which you can be thrown out of your life cycle, which reinforces the idea that time is mere perception and not a tangible reality.

Marifer also told me about something that I found fascinating, prefacing it with the disclaimer that I would think she was crazy. (I don't think she's crazy at all.) When she was young, she discovered that, whenever she imagined something, it didn't happen. If, for example, she imagined going on a walk with her father after swimming at the beach, she'd come home from the beach to find that her father had left the house and wouldn't be back until after dark. She said that she can "manipulate the future by creating it in her imagination," but in a negative way, and for this reason she tries not to imagine good things in the future and live only in the moment. Oof! Not only is that the most interesting reason I've heard for living in the moment, but what a way to live, no? To be scared of imagining good things because you know that, as soon as they pop into your head, they won't happen? I think that I'd go crazy. Marifer is a toughie!

Margret, with whom I went to the bread class, told us that she thought that time was an experience, and one very much linked to our bodies. When her body is moving quickly, time seems to pass quickly, and when her body is moving slowly, time seems to pass slowly (so, if she is sitting and thinking, time drags). For this reason, people are able to manipulate time by controlling their bodies. We can choose to live slowly or quickly, for time to linger or rush. Like Brian, Margret said that age affects our perception of time; she babysat back home, and she found it amusing that the children were always rushing, trying not to lose time by filling every moment with activity. Margret, older than the children, was capable of sitting and doing nothing -- she knew better than they how much time they "had". Margret also drew a distinction between different scales of time. Humans can understand time as a lifespan -- we have a sense of what that means -- and also as a day-to-day experience. Some people around the table thought that animals were capable of the latter but not the former, and we wondered what it would be like to live for several centuries rather than just one. Desirable or tragic? (Basically: Would we want to be bitten by a vampire?)

Finally (actually, this was the first thing that she mentioned), Margret brought up the coil or spiral theory of time. This is the idea that our lives are spiral-ish in nature, that we go through cycles but each time at a higher level of understanding -- a combination of repetition and progression. Those are the two things that I have the most trouble reconciling in my head, and I liked hearing about them in the context of our lives (much easier than in the context of, e.g., the universe). Before moving onto Forest, Margret's boyfriend, here is a snippet of the conversation with Margret that I appreciated enough to write down verbatim:

Margret: "Words are so . . ."
Irene: "Limiting."
Margret: "Well, you just have to pick the right ones sometimes."

Yes! Exactly the issue!

Forest was quieter than the other three, but, to my pleasure, based many of his ideas on observations of outer space. He said that he did believe in a universal time, because we could witness the birth and death of stars (whose lifespans are more or less predictable), but that our time, on our planet, was cyclical. The Earth spins around its axis and orbits around the Sun, giving us the days and the seasons. When I asked if there was a universal point of reference for time -- something against which to measure our cycles -- he said no, but then mentioned lightyears. (It's funny: the phrase "speed of light" sounds so spacey and sciencey to me that I fail to connect it to the light that my computer screen is emitting, or the light coming in from the open kitchen door. But it's the same deal!)

The observation that I found most interesting didn't actually have to do with outer space. When I asked Forest how his perception of time had changed since coming to El Bosque Village, he said that time was the same, but how he used it was different. He's slowed down, in large part because he is confined to a smaller space. When he lived in the city, he had to get places, and those places were far away; he spent two hours a day biking to and from work. In El Bosque Village, everything is within walking distance. It sounds obvious, but I hadn't made this connection with my own experience here. I spend most of my time in or between Ocampo and Angangueo, which are only fifteen minutes apart by bus; my functional world is much smaller here than it is in Washington, D.C. And the people who live in Ocampo spend most of their time there. They never have to rush to work, and (ha ha) nobody worries about arriving late, because they know that the person they have to meet is somewhere in town (maybe even looking for them already). The pace of life here is anything but frenetic -- because life is confined to a small volume! (Well, now it sounds even more obvious. I often wonder if I am really stupid. Oh, I am, I am! What a bummer.)

Also, I finally spoke with somebody about butterflies (after all, the point of my stay here)! On a walk to the outskirts of Angangueo, high up in the mountains, I met a man named Salomon and his father, Vicente. They have lived in Angangueo all of their lives, and, after Salomon showed me a book about the monarch butterflies, Vicente shared some of his memories of the butterflies when he was little. They were nothing special then -- the migration pattern hadn't been discovered, and no tourists came -- so he and his friends thought nothing of killing them for sport. Over the course of the winter, many would die on their own and cover the forest floor with a carpet of orange and black; farmers would bring their cows to the forests to eat them. Since those days, and even after the two sanctuaries were created and tourists started coming, the forest has been diminishing in size (due to legal, and a lot of illegal, logging), and the resting place of the butterflies has been shifting. Before, they could be seen in many parts, but now they go almost only to the sanctuaries, and there are fewer of them. Salomon expressed anger at the government for not doing anything about this -- it's bad for the people, too, because the tourist industry suffers -- and predicted that things would only get worse this year, with H1N1 influenza hysteria and the economic crisis. I am curious to see how many tourists do end up coming -- and from what countries. I bet a chocolate bar that there won't be many Americans.

I'll wrap up this post now. I think that I've more than made up for not writing in my blog for three weeks, no? Now I wish that I could show you the pictures that people have drawn in my little blue book! Someday I will scan them all and put them in my photo blog, which has sunk into an even deeper coma than this one. Someday, someday . . .