My Mexican Odyssey

- A time out or a time in

Story by Hanne Moeller

Photos and paintings by Ross LewAllen

Sayulita sunset

Sayulita, Mexico, January 2006

“Here are two forms you have to fill out”, said the flight attendant somewhere up there in the sky between Phoenix, Arizona and Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico. Oh oh! I thought. How naive can you be? You never fly out of your every day life without forms to fill out. Ross and I had been traveling since early in the morning from San Diego, California and we were hungry for Mexican colors, sounds, food and the time set on manana. But we had paper work to do first.

“For the customs you only have to fill out one form”, the flight attendant said. “So who is head of the household?” – “Are we a house hold?” I asked Ross quietly. Living in a transatlantic relationship with three home bases makes that kind of questions somewhat difficult. I would say that Ross is head of the household in his Hogan in Santa Fe, New Mexico and on his sailboat “Friendship” in San Diego. But I am head of the household in my fifth floor apartment in Copenhagen, Denmark. However the customs form did not leave that option open. “Well, we are still working on that one”, Ross said and took the form.

The second form for the Mexican immigration raised more challenges of defining our identity. When you have bonded through a sacred ceremony at Tsankawi, the old Native ruins north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, do you then apply for the signature “married”? – Ross and I decided we were married in front of the spirits, though not in front of any church or law, so we went for the option “married”, and not “single”.

We managed to get through the Mexican immigrations and customs without further difficulties. Even our luggage was there on time – which was not the case when I flew in from Copenhagen through London and Houston to Albuquerque, NM. I had to wait to the next afternoon until my suitcase came rolling into Santa Fe with special delivery service.

Watercolor: Ready for Mexico

After some talks on the iChat across the Atlantic Ross had come to the conclusion that I wanted to bring half of my Copenhagen apartment with me to Mexico…so this is how he imagines me at the airport. I did manage with one suitcase and one hand luggage, though….

Watercolor: The gecko

Our house gecko, caught in this watercolor by Ross. In Hawaii a gecko in the house means good luck, but here the Mexicans say it doesn’t mean anything, it is just there. I go for the Hawaiian interpretation anytime. The gecko comes to our casa in the evening and says hello. It slides under the door in the shadows, so you have to watch carefully to see it.

Many years ago, probably in the beginning of the 1980’s, I had a dream about a big iguana. It was a long dream, and towards the end of it I was standing at a grass field in a late winter or early spring Danish childhood landscape. The ground was very moist, and I was looking down for some kind of animal, worms, frogs or something. Suddenly a huge iguana jumped up right in front of me, and at the same time it was shedding its skin.

I had never seen an iguana except in the zoo, so I was somewhat puzzled that it suddenly showed up in my dream. A couple of days later I went to the Copenhagen Zoo and found out that iguanas actually do shed their skin – I had thought the dream invented that part of it.

Ever since that dream I have felt connected to the iguana. So it feels good to have a small iguana cousin around the house. I also figure that the dream inaugurated a skin shedding time of my life. And I have the feeling that my skin shedding time is now. Transformation time.

Watercolor: Odyssey Tools

Ross’s sketch book, his watercolors, his digital camera – my notebook that I bring with me where ever I go to take notes by hand every day, my Mac iBook G4, plus my tape recorder and microphone….. These are the tools for capturing this odyssey.

Normally I work mostly with sound and words. Working with Ross brings more pictures into the journey. He is a painter, photographer, jeweler and shamanic healer – check out our Odyssey blogs and comment if you like. Later I will tell you the story about how we met…. the question we most frequently get asked. It is a long and amazing story full of magic.

Our Casa Serenita, the balcony with a view

As I sit here overlooking the Pacific from the balcony of our little casa Serenita in Sayulita, the Danish winter seems to be a state of life on a different planet. Here the palm trees are waving in the wind and I hear the ever-present surf of the ocean. Butterflies and flowers bring a playful mix of orange, red and violet into the green and earth colored surroundings. Children are playing; old dusty cars are trying to get up the hill. La Colina de la Iguana, the hill of the iguanas. Wintertime here, but temperatures equals a Danish summer day.

At the balcony of my fifth floor apartment in Copenhagen

Denmark in January is mostly gray, cloudy, wet, sometimes snow, and cold. There are still a couple of months to go until spring. Normally I would be going to work at the DR, the Danish public service radio, TV and Internet station. I am a radio journalist with literature and culture as my main field.

From the world of frequent deadlines I have arranged a three months time out to set my own timing. I have taken a leave to go on this Mexican Odyssey with Ross. Maybe some iguana wants to come out of the closet and shed its skin.

Two Mexican dogs

The Mexican dogs can sure teach you how to relax. Coming from the world of radio time which is very precise – you don’t go on air approximately at 1 PM, you go on air at 1:00 PM – the concept of time takes on a new meaning here. When someone says she will meet you at 3 PM, it can easily get around 5, before she arrives. And then she is by no means excusing she is late, she just shows up matter-of-fact. Even though this place is full of Americans and Canadians, it doesn’t seem to have changed the local life style that much. It is still laid back, easy living with time to say hola! and talk to everyone. It is still a village with a church, but no bank, with small grocery stores like Mi Tiendita, but no mall, with fish taco places right on the street, but no McDonalds, and with a lot of real estate offices selling houses to Americans longing for the good life with no stress. This is a place for people who leave their alarm clock behind and keep track of time by looking at the sun and listening to the cock next door. He is doing a great job every morning.

Watercolor: The cock next door

But it is also a place where everyone is using a lot of imagination to earn the pesos of the day. At the beach children and grown ups are selling jewelry, pottery, clothes, sombreros and blankets. I even saw a man struggling in the sand with his homemade wheel barrel full of candy, looking for customers. When the village comes to life again after the siesta, you can see a woman with her wheel barrel full of milk bottles for sale and two candles glowing as her signature in the dark.

One day we saw a moving store with everything. Ross immediately fell in love with this colorful truck driving through town on its shining wheels, carrying all kinds of broom sticks, baskets, hangers, kitchen tools, mugs, mats and some stuff I wouldn’t even know how to use. All you need – and a little more.

Watercolor: Broom truck

Putting my life in a suitcase and seeing what will happen, when I place myself at a whole different continent than my everyday Danish life – that is part of this Mexican odyssey. I am basically fond of my work at the radio station because I love to work with my programs, and I still find challenges in working with radio as a media in the dimensions of sound and time. I also like doing public service radio – even though there is a lot of confusion about this concept these days.

But I need to redefine the inner motor of my work. I am not just a vehicle for whatever new strategy the station comes up with to capture more listeners. I am my own person with expressions I want to capture, shape and share.

Having been a widow for 7 years after my husband Jens Christian died has developed my inner life towards the hermit who wanders in the dark with a little light to find the path. Meeting Ross is inspiring me to new perspectives. He sees the world as his office without a desk. He talks to everyone and is a great networked. He came into my life as a sign that it is time for the hermit to go out in the world with material from within. It is time for these two worlds – the inner and the outer – to meet and blend in new ways.

My office at the palapa

The top roof under the palm tree leaves is a great place to work. I sit here and write on this white wooden bench where the paint is peeling off a little. Even a slight decay is graceful in the Mexican way of life. I hear the surf catching land where the blue Pacific meets the Sayulita bay.

Angeles is cleaning our casa Serenita every day, except on Sundays. She is 28 years old and a master of cleaning as well as communication. Even though my Spanish is quite rudimentary we manage to talk about many subjects, including how to work the very complicated coffee machine of the house that I need to make my cafe latte every morning. When I show her some photos on my Mac, she looks like a piece of magic is happening right before her eyes. She says the names of everything in the picture out loud and thus my Spanish vocabulary is growing little by little. And she says her English is improving by talking to me.

Yesterday on our way down to town Ross and I said hello to a Mexican girl, maybe 10 years old. Her name was Johanna she said, and we laughed because it is almost the same as my name Hanne. And actually I got my name from my grandmother Johanne who was also my godmother. So suddenly I envisioned my beloved grandmother, the Danish farming woman, reincarnated in a girl with dark skin, brown eyes and a little white skirt on the road to Sayulita. Then Johanna started talking to us real fast in Spanish. She asked us if she could clean our casita, we gradually understood. In this community even a 10-year-old girl can be an entrepreneur. We had to say thank you, but no, it is Angeles who has the job.

Angeles at the casita

Today Angeles admired my new iguana earrings. She could see they were a local buy. I showed her a photo of the jeweler who made them. Or maybe it was her son, he was also working with beads and silver in her little Sayulita store – I think he was about the same age as Johanna. The jeweler belongs to the Huichol people. Very little is known about the exact origin of the Huichol, but we do know that they call themselves “Wirrarika” which can be translated to mean prophets or healers. They are also known to be descendants of the Aztecs. “She is very beautiful”, Angeles said. She is right.

Huichol jeweler woman

I have decided to follow the iguana track, and it seems to be a lucky one. A couple of days ago Ross and I went to La Iguana Azul, the blue iguana, where we had a delicious lunch. Homemade falafel and flan. Jeffrey’s son now owns la Iguana Azul, and Jeffrey works there to help him out. He is one of the many Americans, who have settled down and started small businesses here. Some of them are actually creating a new life in self-made exile from Gods own country as it develops under the Bush-regime. Jeffrey came here in 1992 because he had always wanted to live in a tropical climate. Then the political situation in the United States changed – and he had one more reason not to go back.

Jeffrey at La Iguana Azul

Big news here – we now have got a wireless Internet connection installed at the property where our casita is situated. So now I am hooked up to the whole world at the top roof, while the palm trees are waving in the wind and the Pacific surf is rolling in to meet the beach down below me. My office in Paradise.

“These people live in abundance” Ross said the other day. He is right. In Denmark ‘the wise men’ is the title of the economic experts of the country. Wealth is defined as economic growth, and the people who know how to get there are called ‘wise’. A constant rationalizing and intensifying of the labor market has been their advice so far. A growing part of the population is not able to keep up in tempo, efficiency and skills, so they get squeezed out of the work force. The big problem is, of course, that fewer and fewer people will have to make the machinery of society go around. And more and more people will say: “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

Here I see a different kind of wealth. The qualities of everyday life are way above the Danish welfare society.

Food for one thing. The seafood and the fruit juices here are rich and tasty, and I can walk down the street to mama at the rotisserie and get the best chicken I have tasted for a long time. With salsa, rice, tortillas and some potatoes in a small bag to go with it.

The rotisserie down the street

But it is not just the food. It is the taste of everyday life. More time, more fun, more playfulness, more colors, a variety of sounds and a connection between people that many western societies have lost in the movement from the farming country to the big cities. Of course Mother Nature has been extremely generous at this beautiful Costa Vallarta, and so has the climate. But a sunny beach is no guarantee for a soulful place. It takes an interaction between the population and the place to create that feeling.

Full moon over Sayulita

No reason to romanticize things, you might say, which is true. Life here is also very traditional. I see the woman next door hanging out the laundry of her big family every day. I see women cooking and cleaning, buying the groceries and taking care of the children. The day they want more in life than that, this society will change.

But still there are also many women here who have their own businesses. Jewelry, clothes, pottery, food, massage therapy, a pharmacy, interior decoration, real estate, a bookstore. When I talk to these women who have their own businesses, I find out that the vast majority of them are single. They do not have a family or a partner. Which leads me to the conclusion that there is not a lot of tradition – or possibility – here for combining life as a woman entrepreneur with a love relationship or a family.

Woman entrepreneur

Yesterday Ross and I went for a Sunday trip to San Francisco just a few miles North of Sayulita. We met a woman there who was building a small library and doing an art workshop with the children of the village. I asked her if she could use my Danish copy of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” which I am currently reading. She said she might. Actually she had several Danish uncles and aunts, it turned out. She even knew a Danish Christmas song. So we were singing “Nu er det jul igen” at the main street of San Francisco, Mexico. Far out and fun.

After that we went to see the iguanas. An American man we met told us where to find them. They were living in trees and among some small rocks close to the beach. But you had to look real carefully to see them. Their colors are so adapted to the surroundings, and they can sit still for hours. They look like they have been on this Earth forever. And I do believe they have some things to tell us. Something about ancient times that we need to know.

Iguana in San Francisco

A couple of days before going to the United States and Mexico for three months I went to see Jonathan Horwitz. He is an American living in Denmark, but traveling all over the world. He is a shaman healer and does a lot of teaching and workshops. I went to see him for a Soul Retrieval – this ancient shamanic ritual for contacting your lost soul parts and bringing them back home.

It was an amazing experience. I had thought a lot of grief and mourning would come up – and it did, but in a totally different way than I had expected. I felt very peaceful inside and connected to the whole universe. Even though a lot of childhood images came up – about abandonment, about the death of my father when I was 9 and about the child Hanne as a kind of life’s stepchild – these images were at the same time filled with warmth and light and the feeling of being a part of life’s big pattern. I was back in ancient Egypt in a place full of radiant light – fires and radiance from the universe in combination – there was a sarcophagus going into some kind of fire. My own death and rebirth like the bird Phoenix rising from the ashes. Selket was there, the small Scorpio goddess, a helper of Isis. She often holds the corners of a sarcophagus.

Jonathan moved around with his rattles, singing tunes, sometimes sounding like an old bear, sometimes like singing a lullaby to me. It was wonderful.

He saw things that he told me about afterwards. A deer is walking by my left side all the time.

But very early in the ceremony he also saw a little girl. She was 4 or 5. She stood in the corner of the room – where he actually has a deer mask placed on the wall – and she was very determined, he said. She wanted to join me. When I was around 5, the spirits had sent me a message with an offer. I had refused that offer, not being able to let go of my present life at that point. But that little girl had accepted the offer. And now she was back and wanted to join me. At the end of the ceremony Jonathan created a hole in my heart and put her back inside of me. Then he closed my heart again. So now she is with me again.

When I came back home I lit my five-armed candleholder, and I did a smudging with some very special sage that was given to me by Ove Svensson a shamanic healer from Northern Sweden, to welcome her at my fifth floor Copenhagen apartment.

Jonathan also gave me a ritual: every day from the day of the soul retrieval he told me to pick up a small stone, one for every one of my 55 years. I shall pick up the stone wherever I am. For each year I shall try to bring forth at least one image. When I have collected all 55 small stones, I shall put them together in a full circle, representing my life until now with the soul images. He gave me the first stone, a beautiful little white quartz stone with a black spot.

The timing for this stone ritual has turned out to be perfect. It would have been difficult to go through with it and give it enough attention in my busy radio life. Due to my travels the stones are being picked up at many different places of the Earth and in many different time zones. For each stone I write down an image of memory that surfaces from that particular year of my life. A couple of days ago I had to write down my image with a flashlight in my left hand because the lights went out. Electricity is a fugitive thing here.

When I have gathered all 55 stones and images, I have asked Ross to do a ritual with me for creating the full circle. That will happen when we are in Tulum at the Yucatan peninsula.

Stone of the day

Jonathan also told me something else. He saw changes coming up. Within a year or so I will be confronting a major choice in my life which has got something to do with that little girl from the spirit world. I will have to make a big decision at that point of my life. And it will be one of those decisions where you can’t go back and redo it.

Huachinango at El Oasis

Yesterday Ross and I went to the restaurant El Oasis on the highway between Sayulita and Punta de Mita for lunch. Dale, an American who is building houses and a life in Mexico where he can surf, play the guitar and be out of Bush-America, had recommended the place to us.

The food at the Oasis was excellent. Shrimp ceviche, guacamole, salsa, tortillas with brown beans and the most delicious huachinango, the popular local fish reminding of a red snapper, fried in olive oil with garlic and tasting heavenly. Mexican kitchen at its best.

When we left the restaurant I saw some nice stones just outside on the highway, probably due to all the construction work going on in the area, including building the new highway, which produces a lot of good stones – as a kind of byproduct. So I bent down and searched for my stone of the day. In my stone ritual I was turning 30. While I was bending down by the roadside, the owner of the restaurant came running. “Que pasa?” he asked me. He thought I had dropped something or had some sort of trouble, and he wanted to know what was going on. Very nice of him, but unfortunately my Spanish did not extend to explaining why I was looking for a stone. So he probably concluded that this Danish woman looking for stones on the highway in front of his restaurant was ‘poco loco’. A little crazy. It is easier at the beach, where everybody just think you are looking for shells.

The iguana at the highway from the Oasis

Ross and I were standing at the roadside, ready to try to hitchhike back to Sayulita. Suddenly the owner of the Oasis came out again and asked us, if we needed a ride. One of his customers was just leaving in his Ford Focus sedan and offered to give us a lift to Sayulita. Very nice of him – and very convenient for us. Most Mexicans are extremely observant and considerate people, so ready and able to communicate, even if you don’t really have a mutual language.

The driver turned out to be an architect who was involved in all the new construction work at the beautiful bay area outside Sayulita. He spoke some English, and we were talking, but suddenly he stopped the car in the middle of the road. Directly in front of us a huge iguana was crossing the highway. Slowly, with great dignity it came crawling like an alligator right in front of my eyes. It had golden colors and a striped tail. At its back a lot of spikes stood up. The tail was as long as the body, and the iguana from head to tail must have been at least the size of a full-grown man. A beauty. It had the presence and the aura of an omen.

In this area there are green iguanas and black iguanas, the architect told us, as we drove on. The black iguanas are the smallest ones. The green iguanas can in fact have many different colors, like the golden iguana we just saw.

Watercolor: Iguana

Some notes on iguanas:

Physical Appearance: Full-grown green iguanas are usually between four and six feet, although they have been known to grow up to seven feet long. This includes the tail, however, which can make up about half the body length and, in addition to its green color, has black stripes. Green iguanas, not surprisingly, are green in color, but can be found in many different shades ranging from bright green, to a dull, grayish-green. Their skin is rough, with a set of pointy scales along the iguana’s back. Green iguanas have long fingers and claws to help them climb and grasp.

Geographic Range: The green iguana is found over a large geographic area, from Mexico to southern Brazil and Paraguay, as well as on the Caribbean Islands.

Adaptations: Besides the long fingers and claws, green iguanas have many excellent interesting adaptations. Green iguanas have good senses of hearing and smell, and superb vision. Their long tail is also quite sharp, and is snapped in the air as a defense mechanism. The tail can also break off if caught by a predator, but grows back without permanent damage. Green iguana skin is very water resistant, and tough to avoid cuts and scratches. The coloring of the skin helps camouflage the green iguana, which means that they blend in easily to their surroundings to remain undetected by predators. If they are detected however, and need to escape quickly, these iguanas can dive from trees into water, and swim well. Green iguanas are quite sturdy – they can fall 40-50 feet to the ground without getting hurt! Male green iguanas have a special flap of skin called the dewlap. Male iguanas can raise their dewlap to appear bigger than they really are, either to intimidate predators, or to impress females. Both male and female green iguanas can store fat under their jaws and in their necks for times when there is not much food available.

Habitat: Iguanas live in tropical rain forest areas, generally in lower altitudes in areas near water sources, such as rivers or streams. They spend most of their time high in the forest canopy, about 40-50 feet above the ground.

Behavior: Iguanas are diurnal, meaning that they are awake during the day. They are also cold-blooded, which means they do not produce their own body heat. In other words, if it is cold, the iguana is cold too. So to stay warm, green iguanas bask in the sun, lying on warm rocks as they soak up the sun’s heat.

Reproductive Cycle and Family Habits: Green iguanas tend to live alone, but may be seen in groups occasionally in good sunny basking spots. Iguanas lay many eggs at a time (about 50), in holes in the ground called burrows. They also dig pretend burrows to confuse any animals that may be looking for eggs to eat. After female iguanas lay the eggs, they leave them and do not return. When iguana babies hatch, they grow up without care from their parents. Green iguanas lay many eggs, but only 3-10 babies actually survive to be adults. It takes green iguana eggs about 8-10 weeks to hatch, then takes baby iguanas about 2 years to become mature adults.

Diet: Green iguanas are omnivorous, so they eat both plants and meat. They tend to eat mostly plants, though, especially leaves and fruits. Sometimes green iguanas (especially young ones) will eat eggs, insects, and small vertebrates.

Watercolor: Iguanas above Sayulita

“Garrobo”, Angeles said when I told her about the huge golden iguana walking across the highway. The Mexicans call the big ones garrobos, and the smaller ones iguanas. She also liked them a lot, she said. They seem to be a kind of Mexican mascot, having travel companies, cafes and hotels carrying their name.

One day I was talking to Xavier, the gardener at the property where we live, and he told me that there is a big tree behind Rollie’s where the iguanas live. Rollie’s is a nice place in Sayulita owned by an American couple – their smoothies and their pancakes are great, and they also have a book exchange. The road behind their place is going up to the Punta de Mita highway and the tree was on the right side of that road, Xavier told me.

The tree was easy to find, it has a big sculptural stem, a huge umbrella crown and looks like it has been here forever. I have been standing in front of it several times at different times of the day – but no iguanas. I am trying to figure out their pattern. Maybe they are just like dreams and love – appearing when you least expect it.

Anyway, I gave my Danish copy of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” to Rollie’s book exchange – as a kind of thank you for standing at the tree in his back yard looking for iguanas. He did have Danish customers once in a while, he told me. Maybe one of them will find my copy some day.

Rasta drummers at the Sayulita beach

Sayulita is a town full of music. You don’t see a lot of TV’s here; most cafes and restaurants don’t even have one. People are out in the streets instead, selling, buying, meeting, talking, having a meal under a palm tree roof or just hanging around and looking at life. Everywhere you hear music. From the big dusty vans driving through town with their fresh fish, ice cream or whatever to sell. While they carefully slow down to get past the serious speed bumps that are everywhere on the streets, they have a tape going and some speakers on. You hear their ads and then some colorful Mexican music. From people’s houses you hear an accordion or a piece of a tune, as you walk by. On the street corners, at the plaza and at the beach there is an abundance of live music, and every night seems to call for a guitar player or a small band to send their songs out to mingle with the lively street and beach life after dark. If you listen closely to the sing along climbing up the Iguana Hill, you might hear a little echo of the hippie era that could have sailed down the coast from the California summer of love.

The beach at Punta de Mita

“Is it a good time for me to do this journey, and is it safe?” I asked Adrian on the phone. It was in the early summer of 2004. For some time I had been heading out of my hermit cave. My husband had died 7 years earlier, and I had been working my way through the valley of death ever since. Now I felt there was something beckoning at the end of the tunnel. A different light, a new sound, more colors, a richer taste, new landscapes. I had a three-month sabbatical from my work at the DR and I had plans. Traveling plans. But I was also a little afraid.

That is why I called Adrian Ross Duncan, a wise astrologer from Wales who lives mostly in Denmark. I have been consulting him over the years and every time he has given me a deeper insight in the greater patterns of life and the time to come. Now he was getting ready to travel himself so he didn’t have time to see me. But he could hear that I needed his advice so he said he would see what he could do for me over the phone. So what was my question?

I told him that I was planning to go to New Mexico in the United States for a month. I wanted to see the landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe around Santa Fe, Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, and I wanted to do research and recordings for a feature program on the DR. About O’Keeffe, her paintings, and why she had chosen to live in the New Mexican high desert the second half of her life. What was she looking for there? I had been interested in her life and work for many years. Especially her landscape paintings – these unique visions where I was never quite sure whether they belonged to the inside or the outside world. But probably both. Neither abstract nor real but some third point of view.

“Are you going to drive around America ALONE?” a lot of Danish family and friends asked me with horror in their voice. They envisioned a hold up on every corner in this country of road rage, free guns and a cowboy government obsessed with war. So I had got some second thoughts about driving alone through the desert.

“Is it a good time to do this journey?” I asked Adrian, probably with some anxiety in my voice – “and is it safe?” Adrian is a very laid back type of guy. He was quiet for some time. “Well”, he answered after looking around at the signs from the universe, “you are not going to die”. Good news! Then I told him that I needed to gather all my courage to go over there on my own. He said that everything looked fantastic for my journey. This was exactly the right time to go. Alone I would be free. And it was in a way a lonely project I had and needed to go through with. It would be a mind opening experience raising me to a new level of conscience, and that kind of journey would always be lonely in a way. “But you are going to meet someone”, Adrian then said to me, even though I hadn’t asked him that question. “You will be wandering in the desert” – which is a Danish expression for a tough road to travel in more than one sense – “But you are going to meet someone. And you are not going to die.” Adrian wished me a good journey and we hung up.

And there I was – in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. In a huge hotel suite at the hotel Ramada way out at Cerillos Road. But with a silver gray Chevrolet Impala at the parking lot just outside the door it was no problem to get downtown.

On my first day I was walking around the old square La Plaza, which is the heart of Santa Fe. And I immediately fell in love with ‘the city different’, which I later learned is its nickname. The special mixture of three cultures – Native American, Hispanic and Anglo – creates a lot of interesting art, good food, spirituality and mystic with healing energies. I looked at the half hidden gardens behind the arcades, the big Saint Francis cathedral, the old La Fonda hotel, the small stores, restaurants and galleries. The Old Santa Fe Trail took me right back to the Wild West with all its mythology. And amazingly there were flowers and plants everywhere… I thought I had come to a desert town and it looked like a green house.

At the corner of East Palace Avenue and Washington I saw two people sitting and talking at a small round cafe table under an arcade. Half sun, half shadow. What a wonderful place to meet, I thought. If I knew anyone in Santa Fe I would love to sit under that arcade and talk.

But I only had contact to the people I was going to do interviews with for my O’Keeffe project, and that was going to take place at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and later at Ghost Ranch – not under an arcade. So I walked by, but the image was stored in my mind.

Sunrise over the Rocky Mountains

Tulum, Yucatan, Mexico, February 2006

After a long day of traveling on busses and planes we have arrived at Tulum on the Yucatan peninsula. This place has a whole different energy. Tropical, Caribbean, Mayan – and mosquitos! Less American tourists, but for some reason a lot of Italians. No real estate office on every corner, but an amazing amount of pharmacies.

Different from the dust roads of Sayulita the roads here are paved. Ross and I have even talked about renting bikes, but we haven’t found any bike renting stores yet. The village and the beach are separated, so on a bike you could get to the beaches easily. The taxis here are very reasonable though and there is no hustling about prices, so we have gone by taxi so far.

Have you ever tried walking on velvet? Try the beach at Tulum. Smooth sand, turquoise water and a soft surf that has already been broken once by the coral reef further out in the ocean. You will get rocked on the water and sleep like a baby.

Tulum beach

A visit to the Mayan ruins at Tulum is a ticket right back to the great Mayan civilization with a highly developed alphabet, arithmetic, astronomy and astrology, construction work, trade, art and ceremonial world. It also was an extremely class divided society with the ordinary workers living outside the protective city walls. Today everybody can get in through the narrow tunnels in the thick walls for a fee of 45 pesos.

The huge iguanas at the Mayan ruins look like they have been around since the beginning of times. Look out for them on the rooftops and the rocks, but you have to look carefully to see them because they have adapted the gray colors of the rocks.

Iguana at the Mayan ruins of Tulum

I had been traveling through O’Keeffe country in New Mexico – the painted desert around Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch and over to Taos a little further North East – and now I was back in Santa Fe. It was my last day before flying back to Denmark, and I was making my final round saying good-bye to some of my favorite places in town. I had been in the Cathedral to light candles for my loved ones – dead and alive – as well as for my own journey.

My parking meter was running out and I thought I was heading straight for my Chevy to go back to the Ramada Hotel out on Cerillos Road. I also thought I was through with galleries and stores. But then I came by a small gallery at the corner of the Plaza where I saw some special and very personal jewelry in the window, different from the other jewelry I had seen. I liked it, and suddenly I remembered my unfinished business with the snake. I had been looking for snake jewelry, especially earrings, at several places, among others in the Taos Pueblo, but they were all very big. When you produce radio with head phones all day, you don’t want a big snake rattling in your ear all the time.

So I went into that small gallery at the Plaza looking for the right snake. An American man came up to me, he was a little older than me, and with great power he started asking me where I came from and what I was doing in Santa Fe. I told him about my O’Keeffe project, and we got talking, so actually I didn’t get to look much at his jewelry at all.

“Let’s go and have an ice tea”’ he said as a matter of fact. Not a question really. I decided to do it, in spite of my meter running out and my plan of heading back to the Ramada.

He went to the Burrito next door and got the ice tea, and then he said that we could sit at that small round table with the two chairs under the arcade. The very same corner I had spotted on my first day in Santa Fe. Life is full of magic and wonders and sometimes wishes come true.

Watercolor: Jaguar shaman with snake

Yesterday was a magic day here in Tulum. Ross and I went to a part of the beach where there was said to be a cenote – an underground river – mostly visited by the locals. After having lunch at one of the beach restaurants with the turquoise waves rolling to the white sand in front of our eyes, we went looking for the cenote.

When you come from a small, completely cultivated country like Denmark, Mexico is just the opposite. You can drive or walk on a road that has just recently been paved, and the jungle takes over to the sides of the road immediately where the pavement ends. Except that here we also had to force our way through a fence of barbed wire to get to the cenote.

After a short walk on a jungle path we came to a cenote with waters so crystal clear that you could see every single fish in it. A couple of children were having fun swimming and diving, and a young woman was sitting on the bench keeping an eye on them.

Her name was Mariana, and she was from Argentina. Together with her husband Sergio and 5-year-old son Galileo she had been traveling around Mexico and South America for three years. Sergio was making wooden instruments, especially flutes, in the native traditions, and she was making whistles of clay, lamps of bee wax and plants, jewelry and other handcraft.

We went with her to a small casita by the beach where they stayed. In contrast to Mariana’s blue eyes Sergio was looking very Latin with his long, dark, curly hair and brown eyes.

Little Galileo already knew how to play both the drum and the didgeridoo, while his father demonstrated the different tones of his many flutes. Beautiful sounds filled the afternoon beach. Ross immediately felt in tune and decided to buy a flute with a saxophone personality for his grandson Takis for a 9-year birthday present, and I bought one of Marianne’s small clay whistles with a lot of sound as a present.

Ross and I were getting ready to leave, but Galileo and his friend, 10-year-old Naomi, had something to show us first.

With a long piece of scarlet cloth hung high up in a tree, Naomi did an acrobat show for us. She was twisting her body, turning upside down, rolling forwards and backwards skillfully like a regular circus aerialist. With his long brown hair and big brown eyes Galileo was following her, standing on the ground and keeping the beat on his little drum. An exquisite show where you would least expect it. Coming from people who knew about not only the soul of music, but also of life. “To live outside the law you must be honest”, like Bob Dylan once said.

Watercolor: Turtle Shaman

My first meeting with Ross that day under the arcade on the corner of the Santa Fe Plaza was so full of coincidences that the concept of synchronicity comes to mind.

“Well, you are probably already married, but that doesn’t matter”, he said to me. Sometimes I would actually answer yes to that kind of question, just to be left in peace, but this time I didn’t. I answered that my husband had died 7 years ago and I was a widow. Ross reacted with true compassion and we talked about death as our first subject. “It is not the number of years you are together that matters, but the importance of your meeting and time with each other”, I remember saying. And he responded that was exactly the way he looked at it too.

His former wife had also passed away a couple of years earlier, and though they divorced a long time ago they had still been good friends. So we shared a big loss in our lives.

Then he told me that besides creating jewelry for the LewAllen&LewAllen gallery he owned with his daughter he also had a shamanic healing practice plus he was doing painting and photography. Presently he was working on a book with animal paintings and the title was going to be “Alphabestiary”.

I told him that I was a radio journalist working as a presenter on a literature magazine called “Alfabet”!

It turned out that his mother’s family came from Germany and that his father’s family was from Wales.

I immediately sent a thought to Adrian, the astrologer, who comes from Wales, whose middle name is Ross – Adrian Ross Duncan – and who several times told me: “You are going to meet someone”, even though I didn’t ask him that question on the phone.

It later turned out that Ross also has an Adrian in his life. Her name is Atma Devi; she too is a master astrologer. Already in January 2004 she had predicted that Ross would meet a woman in August/September 04, and that women would be totally different from the other women in his life.

Besides a Hogan South East of Santa Fe Ross had a sailboat in San Diego where he spent time several months a year. When I told him that I had set out to be a classical violin player in my early years, but later changed my course, he said that we should go sailing together on his 30-foot Catalina sailboat. He envisioned me playing my violin in the bow where the acoustics should be very special.

Of course we also talked about Georgia O’Keeffe, who had brought me to Santa Fe and New Mexico in the first place. He liked her work a lot too and had seen the current exhibition “A Sense of Place” at the O’K Museum. Ross told me that she has become a sort of icon and role model for some women in the US today. Which is interesting because her life was not at all the traditional family style living. But she was a self-made woman, which is another American dream. American dreams are not consistent, but often contradictory to each other.

Ross said that he very much would have liked to invite me to dinner that same evening, but his grandson Takis was coming over so it was not a good time. And I had to do the final notes on my journey and pack up since my flight was the next morning.

“Give me a hug”, Ross said when we parted – which I did, and I got the best hug ever in return. Like coming home. He immediately found a spot near my waist that made me laugh, because I am rather ticklish. Like he had an instinctive knowledge of my body, possibly from a meeting in an earlier life.

He then asked me about my name Hanne, and I told him I was named after my grandmother Johanne who was also my godmother.

When I left, I sent him an aerial kiss and said: “Maybe we will meet again”. That came to me out of the blue. Sometimes 45 minutes just pass by. A few times in your life they can be loaded with meaning and future.

Watercolor: Day and Night

In the Mayan world time was depicted as a weight, which divine porters carried forever. The bearers were the numbers that distinguished the different periods. At the end of a day a god would relinquish his load and give it to the bearer of the next day.

From their constant observation of the heavens, Mayan astronomers were able to plot virtually perfect time cycles. They knew all about the rotation of Venus and about lunations, the basic elements for creating a calendar.

The Mayans considered time cyclic. What happened today, had already happened in the past, and because everything repeated itself, they tried to understand those changes, organizing them and registering them.

Their highly developed and complicated calendar was more precise than the one we use today.

The time-bearing gods were part of the upper world. The movement of stars and planets was associated with the beginning of time, and the constellations tell the story of creation over and over again. Time was perceived in a sacred and spiritual sphere by this civilization of artists and scientists.

The future was understood as the movement of space. To the Maya the universe was not a static and immovable reality, but a permanent movement, which gave beings the capacity to evolve. The Mayans were indeed “the Lords of Time”.

Watercolor: Two Mayans on a boat

Being instantly on the same wavelength with another person was a powerful experience to me. Also the fact that I had the courage to meet Ross and be totally present as the person I am told me that something new was happening. I am often reserved and reluctant with new people, probably very Danish. Americans are mostly faster in making contacts and much more outgoing.

At the end of our 45 minutes meeting at the corner of the Santa Fe Plaza he gave me a lovely compliment: “You are the most beautiful person – from the inside and out”.

His voice was still in my ears, when I called him from Denver the next day on my way back to Denmark. It turned out that he had sent me e-mail in the night. On the phone we talked about all the synchronicities in our meeting, both knowing that when synchronicities keep evolving around you, you are getting closer to your destiny path. Towards the end of our conversation he expressed the wish that we would be able to spend some time together.

E-mails are a good invention when you live on two different continents with the Atlantic Ocean between you. We started an e-mail correspondence, learning more about each other. Our daily letters were full of everyday life, glimpses of the past, thoughts and wounds, big fooling, fun, and from Ross always photos and paintings. He is an image man. I am into words and sound. Our letters were also full of love. In fact, the e-mails were a test ground for a love relationship.

I still had some time left on my sabbatical, and it would be possible for me to move around my plans and dates and get some time in September. I was thinking about going out to San Diego and be with Ross on his boat. But…. I had only met him for 45 minutes…what would 10 days be like on a 30-foot sailboat?

Like always when I need an answer coming from the deeper, hidden knowledge, I decided to ask my dreams. And as always, they gave me their answer in an unpredictable and coded message.

Watercolor: Night Jaguar

“Jes Stein Pedersen”. That was the answer the dream came up with. At first I didn’t get it at all. This man is in “real” life a Danish journalist whom I have met professionally – but what in the world did he have to do with my thinking about going to San Diego to be with Ross on his sailboat?

Like Sophie, the cryptographer in Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”, I had to work with this dream like a code to be deciphered.

“Jes” is a Danish first name for a boy, but when you say that name out loud, it sounds exactly like the English word “Yes”. The dream said go for it!

This journalist’s middle name “Stein” is actually the German word for “stone”. My associations with that word went to Ross’s mother whose family came from Germany. Also Ross was working with stone as a jeweler.

A few days earlier my brother – whose name is actually Jesper – had commented on my plans of going to San Diego by replying that it sounded like a good idea “If it was a solid guy”. The dream responded by saying that the guy was “solid as a rock”.

The last name Pedersen was the name of my grandmother (my father’s mother) before she got married. She used to say to me: “You are the first person in the Pedersen family who went to college.”
Now her name appeared in my dream, and I took it as a sign of approval by the ancestors.

In “real” life Jes Stein Pedersen is a TV and newspaper journalist in the field of culture, but I know one more thing about him. He is related to the family who created a Danish dairy called “Mejeriet Enigheden”. I believe it started as a cooperative, and the name in fact means “The Dairy Agreement”. My associations went to milk, which is the basic nourishment in our lives. But also the name Enigheden, Agreement, is telling something about finding a mate. Equal children are the best playmates, like a Danish proverb says.

Dreams truly are amazing. So condensed and full of images from the deep. “Jes Stein Pedersen” was the answer from my dream, and that name, only three words put together, turned out to be a rich message. After my cryptographic dream work I bought a return ticket to San Diego.

Ross on board Friendship, San Diego

Great powers were in the air on the day I flew to San Diego. Getting out of Copenhagen was a lot easier than taking off from Washington’s Dulles airport. There were 15 or 20 planes in line before ours, but the captain was optimistic and announced: “We will cut some corners of the sky to catch up with lost time.” He had 25 years anniversary as a pilot, and I felt in good and experienced hands. He was going to need that experience, as it turned out.

After cutting some corners of the sky we got into the Arizona air space. I couldn’t wait to meet Ross again at the San Diego airport, ETA 8 pm. Suddenly the calm voice of the captain was on the speakers again. All computers in the Los Angeles control system were down, including their back up systems. Since LA is controlling the air traffic in all of Southern California, it also involved San Diego. The airport was simply not working.

We were making a lot of new corners in the sky while circling around up there, emptying the fuel tanks. We landed in Tucson to fill them up again, and then some more circling. Finally the LA airport was working again, and after 3 hours delay I landed in San Diego at 11 pm.

I had been a little concerned if I was able to recognize Ross in the airport. After all we had only met for 45 minutes over an ice tea a little more than a month earlier. But that man standing there so calm, grounded and patient in his white T-shirt and soft black sailor pants could only be him. He simply laid his arms around me, I put my arms around his neck, and without talking very much we stood like that for such a long time, that all the other passengers had got their luggage and left.

The language of synchronicity – ‘the third language’ Ross called it – just kept evolving around our meeting. The language of manifesting as opposed to calculating, the language of the dream time as opposed to the time of the clock, following the path of the soul more than walking in the middle of the road already there.

It turned out that I had arrived exactly on Ross’s birthday. He turned 67 on the day of my arrival. So my present from Denmark became a birthday present – a leather cord with the ancient Danish Rune “Vinja” meaning “Joy and Delight” that he immediately started wearing around his neck. And I finally got my snake – a silver chain with a snake bead to wear around my waist, like some African women do as a protection against evil.

Blissful days on board his sailboat “Friendship”, in the V berth, in the swimming pool and hot tub of the marina, in the small San Diego beach communities with delicious sea food, sailing, all the time exploring each other and the sensations of being together. I remember our first trip to Ocean Beach. We walked in the sand and dipped our feet in the Pacific, while Ross was taking pictures. Then he asked a woman to take a photo of both of us together. “We are in love”, he announced frankly and a little to my surprise. Danish people are not so public about their feelings. But she simply answered: “Oh that is easy to see”. Apparently it just radiated out of us, whether we announced it publicly or not.

Ross and Hanne at Ocean Beach, California

Since our first days together in San Diego, September 2004, Ross and I have been transatlantic lovers with three home bases: the sailboat in San Diego, California, the Hogan in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the fifth floor apartment in Copenhagen, Denmark. There is no receipt for this kind of living. We cherish the old Chinese saying: The road will come into existence, as you walk.

One of the first things we did together was seeing a therapist. From a friend, who was also a therapist, Ross had learned that it is important to talk to a therapist in the beginning of a relationship to get some tools to work with. As opposed to going towards the end of a relationship where you are just trying to pick up the pieces.

That was a new concept to me, but I found it interesting and constructive. And I can absolutely recommend it. We got a lot of good observations and advice by consulting Janice Barsky, holistic therapist and astrologer.

Janice said the timing of our meeting as well as our visit to her was magical. And that we have constellations she has often seen with couples coming from two different countries. She also pointed out some of the traps and challenges we might be facing on our way, having a love relationship with the word TRAVELING written in capitals above it. She underlined the value of speaking up. We have many cultural differences between us, and it is important never to assume anything, but to put thoughts, needs, wishes and feelings into words. If the agenda and the decisions are not made by both of us, it is not going to work out.

Towards the end of our meeting with Janice, she talked about that Ross and I are also touching each other’s wounds. Which is a great potential for healing. But at the same time a power, you have got to handle with care.

Atma Devi, Ross’s friend and a master astrologer, went in the same direction as Janice, when we met her over a lunch. She said she had never seen two charts so perfectly fit for each other. But it is not only a private love relationship – we have work to do together, according to Atma. It is time for me to expand my world and bring parts of my inner hermit out to other people. That is one of the reasons why I meet a ‘people’s person’ like Ross. For Ross it is time to do creative work together with a partner. And it is a time for healing old wounds. Our task is to bring our two separate voices together and create work that touches other people. It will only work out, if our two personalities are in balance and completely equal.

Atma also said that our meeting had been meant to happen for a long time. She was convinced that we had met in earlier lives. That is one of the reasons why we both had this feeling of recognition and coming home when we met.

Hanne and Ross, photo by Takis

Not only had I met a shaman, I also felt a calling from the shamanic world. In the Western societies you go with your sick body to the hospital, with a troubled mind you see a therapist, and the spirit is sent off to the church, while the soul gets lost some where out there. In the shamanic tradition based on the old tribal ways healing takes place under one roof involving the whole person.

Shamanic journeys, rituals and ceremonies have entered my life together with Ross. My lost soul parts are coming back home.

In Northern Jutland we did a sweat lodge together, guided by Jane Folsted, Danish artist and shaman. We were with a group of 19 women. Ross certainly got a different experience from the men’s circles he usually works with, this time being with a whole circle of women.

To me it was a new way, and at the same time a very old way of celebrating solstice. Jane invited the spirits of the four directions to join us as we sat in the circle to clean the body and the mind of toxins. The stones in her sweat lodge were selected and heated up during many hours by her husband Per. We did a ceremonial letting go of old pains and patterns that had become useless like clothes you have outgrown. After four rounds in the hot sweat lodge, we went into cooling water and then directly to a feast of delicious food outside Jane and Per’s beautiful “Growth House”.

The night before the sweat lodge Ross had facilitated a workshop about the talking stick in Jane’s tepee. It was an intense evening of speaking from the heart with the talking stick in your hand. And listening compassionately to people that had been strangers an hour before.

Building bridges of love across the Atlantic has also involved Danish sacred sites and our long tradition of sailing, being a small country with an extremely long coastline. So far Ross has been more able to relate to these parts of the Danish history than to the modern Danish society. He comes from the new world and the land of opportunities. I come from the old European world of traditions and history.

Together we have visited one of Denmark’s oldest sacred sites, a 5 thousand years old Jaettestue – a kind of chamber made out of giant stones. We crawled in through the entrance and sat there for a long time, meditating and feeling the old spirits present.

Hanne at the entrance of Øm Jættestue

The Viking part of the Danish history has appealed much to Ross and inspired paintings, photos and jewelry from his hand. We have sailed on Roskilde Fjord – the waters by one of the big Viking sites – in a replica of an old Viking ship and had great fun fumbling with the huge oars. I got a real big splinter there. Being an experienced sailor Ross was trusted with the tiller when we went out on the blue fjord a sunny day in the early summer.

Also we are both interested in the Runes, the old Danish alphabet. One of our projects together is working on a DVD about the Runes in shamanic interpretation, complete with sound, text and visuals.

The rune LAGU (La Goo)
the rune for water connection
dreams
adaptability
being in motion
lakes
rivers
flowing
life

Of course my meeting with Ross has also had an impact on our families and friends in Denmark and the US.

At 81 my mother, Elisabeth, bought her first computer and took a couple of classes. With the great help of my brother Jesper she has now become skilled on the computer, so we are able to communicate through e-mails where ever I go in the world. A wonderful gift to our mother-daughter relationship. She sends me letters with news about Denmark, and she even sends me links from her frequent Internet searches. I can tell she is having fun with this new tool. My mother is very fond of my American man, and since she is also very interested in pictures and does some painting herself, she enjoys e-mailing with Ross and seeing his latest photos and paintings right there on her computer.

Children have always come into my life by strange ways, and now I have a wonderful adopted grandchild, 10-year-old Takis, whom I have bonded with. He is the son of Ross’s daughter Laura.

The iChat is a fantastic invention. In fact, Ross and I never get tired of praising that Apple program. When we are not together, we of course write e-mails. But being able to talk together with iChat on the computer without worrying about the phone bill is really great. In the weekends we usually have some long talks when it is morning in New Mexico and afternoon in Denmark – the time difference being 8 hours. If you don’t have a Mac but a pc, you can download the program Skype, and you will be able to talk on the computer.

Ceremony at Tsankawi, photo by Gary

In the spring of 2005 Ross asked me if I wanted to do a commitment ceremony with him. Very American – we don’t do a lot of commitment ceremonies in Denmark, I don’t even know how to translate that word precisely into Danish. I felt it was the right thing to do. I had already been married once to my late husband and had to deal with his three children settling the estate. After that I decided not to put myself in a situation where I might have to go through that again. A ceremony of sacred bonding with Ross without involving any church or law was just right to me.

We decided to call it a blessing ceremony and set the date of September 10th 2005, a Saturday under the crescent moon. And we decided that it should take place at Tsankawi, the ruins of a Native American village north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tsankawi is a sacred place situated on a mesa surrounded by the beautiful Sangre de Christo Mountains. “Mesa” means “table” in Spanish, and there is a flat area called “The Dance Floor” where we chose the gathering should be taking place. To get to the Dance Floor everyone had to climb a handmade wooden kiva ladder.

Every Wednesday night for 15 years Ross meets with his men’s circle in Santa Fe, and they offered to create the ceremony. One of the men, Nicholas with a lot of experience, emerged as the ceremonial leader. They prepared the whole ceremony in NOR, non-ordinary reality. Every detail of the ceremony was created through the images that came from shamanic journeys and meditation. A wonderful arch of green branches and leaves, the Mexican blanket Ross and I were standing on and got wrapped around us, the big altar where I put pictures of my ancestors, a silver hair pin that had belonged to my great grandmother, some jewelry, medicine stones and corn, together with candles, flowers and fruit of the Earth. Takis passed out medicine blessing corn to everyone to take home from the ceremony.

The guests and Ross gathered in a circle on the Dance Floor in the morning sun under the clear blue sky. The Native American flute played by Judith sent the signal for me to enter the circle with Nicholas. We first did a silent moment for all the people suffering from the hurricane Katrina. Then the ceremony unfolded with words of commitment, blessings, wishes, give aways and a round with the talking stick for everyone to speak from their hearts. You can see pictures from the ceremony, if you go to my web site www.transatlanticjournalism.com

I was wearing an orange silk blouse with golden threads that I had bought in Prague when I was there to do recordings about the Czech city and writer Franz Kafka. I wanted to wear something from old Europe. (Later I saw, of course, that it said “Made in China” on that blouse, but that is OK). I also wanted to wear something from old America, so I bought a beautiful Navajo skirt in golden and lapis lazuli blue at the Indian Market in Santa Fe.

The “third language” of synchronicity kept talking. I had an exquisite group of wonderful women around me preparing for the ceremony. Atma, the astrologer, was in that group, and she had done a shamanic journey where she saw me wearing macaw feathers during the ceremony. The macaw is a large long-tailed parrot with plumage in red, orange, blue and yellow. It lives in Central and South America. The Native Americans use macaw feathers for ceremonies, dances and handcrafts.

I got my macaw feathers by magic. At the Santa Fe Indian Market in late August I sat at the small round table under the arcade on the corner where Ross and I first met and had an ice tea a year before. Then Ross showed up with a man and a woman. They had macaw feathers in a bag. Every year at the Indian Market they wanted to give some of those feathers away as a gift. They had heard I was looking for macaw feathers and gave me the whole bag. The woman said: “You were meant to have them”. I said: “Thank you, now you are a part of our ceremony”. I could see that it touched her. This couple raised the birds and wanted to share their beautiful feathers once a year.

I felt the universe saying YES.

Stone ceremony, Akumal, the Yucatan, Mexico