Wilder Tribe

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yup, that's me!

beth's page

hi, this is beth. i just got back from an evening of dancing here in san cristobal, chiapas. it was a stretch for my morning person self to be leaving the posada at 10pm; course when i found a club it was totally early and nobody was really dancing yet. did i care? a little. did that stop me? no way. i hadn't danced all week and i missed it.

so who am i and why is this page here anyways? you could say i'm the one who learned to move freely in her body while living with the wilders.... it all started in 2002 when i moved in, and soon developed a habit of putting rights of passage into the cd player, skipping forward to track 8, and dancing the rest of the disk. sometimes someone joined me, sometimes someone smiled and appreciated me for who i was without needing to join in. sometimes it was just me. a friend sent a pc formatted cd with the soundtrack to amelie. the music combined with the computer's screensaver reminded kite of fairies. together we learned to look with our ears and discover what the fairies were doing and then join them with our bodies. the dancing got bigger, movements unshy and free, the kind that take up the whole living room and leave you exhausted after the album ands. i started working in the berkeley high school esl department and copied a mexican pop cd from one of my students. through shakira the concept of "constant" music was born for us and we danced funkily or pop-ily or however-ily in circles and circles around the kitchen.

eventually we all moved to lost valley. i remember dancing blessings there with malachite and rainyrain and our neighbor kai, each taking turns leading the others with the spontaenous movements of our bodies. on workshop weekends there was afternoon dancing in the classroom, a chance to see how all different kinds of music inspires you to move.

so now i'm sitting with my journal at a table in chiapas in the middle of the night, intending to write about what being family with the wilders means to me. i guess it means freedom to be more and more like me. i keep going away -- you can read some of my past letters home if you want to click the links -- but i keep coming back, cuz this is where i want to be.