Pilgrimage To The North

By Jose Fernando Davalos

 

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This was the last evening we would spend in the house that Paloma and I had built six years ago because we would shortly have to leave to the north of the American continent. Entering inside the tree I covered myself under its branches and fused in a brotherly hug with my dear Sacred Lake. When I was about to retire, I felt an enormous and loving effluvium of energy originating from the female spirit of the Lake, Rapavilleme, and intuited that my dear sister understood my reasons and the new entrusted task I was given and that although she was sad by our separation, she would pray for our return when our good Father thus arranged it. When I climbed back the stone stairs of the outer terrace of our house, Paloma was waiting to embrace me in loving silence.

At five a.m. in the morning, tired and with little sleep due to the final preparations, we were almost ready to board the taxi that would take us to the airport when, something that never happened before took place: Don Pablo knocked at our door. He wished us success and hurried to help us with our suitcases and other articles that we would take with us.

Don Pablo has been a resident for many years of the town of Chapala. He was an authentic elder that was surely in contact with the guardians of tradition of the region and which amazed us and entertained us with his interesting stories. A strong man in spite of having more than seventy years of age, he transported himself in a feisty donkey that never stopped giving him headaches and throwing him off from time to time, and always traveled accompanied by two brave and very well trained dogs. It was a nice spectacle to see him arrive to our neighborhood mounted very straight in his young donkey with a bearing and a dignity that only those that have advanced well enough in the spiritual path have.

The sun was silently rising up behind the beautiful Island of Mezcala at the east side of Lake Chapala illuminating tenuously the crest of the imposing mountains that had guarded our dreams during the last six years, and our hearts already felt the sorrow of the uncertainty and of the enormous challenges that we would have to face in an inhospitable weather and as immigrants within a culture with different values and spiritual views. Nevertheless, this is always the way of a spiritual warrior because it must fight its battles where the spirit sends him and by the time that it is required of him.

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