From last weeks blog: A third pottery village… could life be so generous? I day dreamed about this place for weeks and poured over maps of Oaxaca trying to find it. But it did not reveal itself. So finally I broke away from my Spanish studies and commitments and got on the bus to take the bull by the horns. The big market of Tlacolula was in my sights, and meeting a potter from this secretive village of red clay was my goal.

The big town of Tlacolula has had a regional market every Sunday since ancient times. People come in from all the surrounding Zapotec villages to buy and sell all the things that people need. The market is enormous, filling the large square block of the official market space, spilling out into the surrounding streets, engulfing the church and filling the town with humanity and a thousand scents. 

Into this I dove with my intense curiosity and my young and foreign innocence. Somewhere here, if what Pedro told me was true, I’d find these people of the red pottery. 

I wandered and asked and wandered and asked. “Ah yes, they sell their wares over that way”, a vague wag of the hand pointing the way. Following these blurry, but very hopeful clues I came to a large and long building with a ceiling as high as a tree and birds flying among the rafters. Inside, butcher stalls were lined up displaying defeathered, yellow chickens hung by their feet that looked just like the rubber ones for sale back home. There was a wide assortment of meat cuts and pig heads that appeared to be grinning. There were women selling avocados, chilies and herbs and other women selling huge tortillas from stacks two feet high at their sides. Down the middle of the aisle were metal brasseries alive with glowing, oaky charcoal with women, heads wrapped in speckled black shawls, fanning the embers and flipping sizzling meat. I stood watching and saw that people would buy a filet of meat from one of the many butcher stands and then the butcher’s assistant would cook it up for you on the spot while you bought yourself your tortilla and toppings.  It was some kind of very old-school, do it yourself, fast food joint! 

But there were no potters. A woman at a brazier offered me another blurry hand wag towards yonder that took me out the far door of the community sized butcher barbecue scene. As I walked out into the open air again and into the swirl of life on the street, there they were. 

Along the sidewalk on the street corner, there were perhaps a dozen of them, seated side by side, each with a small array of red clay pots in front of them. To their left women as old as the mountains were selling live turkeys and to their right foot traffic streamed down the street. I simply stopped and looked, buried between a mango saleswoman and a young man selling walnuts, cashews and chile-roasted peanuts out of an orange wheelbarrow. 

There in the swirl of it all rested the pottery. They were round, earthy-red and smudged with irregular black marks left by the fire. The midday sun filled the dusty air with dry heat. The scent of ripe mangos, toasted peppers, wood smoke, composting garbage and grilled meat wafted around my nostrils.

Behind the pots sat, I assumed, the potters. They were mostly women wearing crowns of casually wrapped black shawls with gumdrop colored dresses detailed with lace fringe. There were also a few men in worn, button up shirts and shaded by short brimmed hats. They were all people of the sun, colored like cinnimon cacao shells and the contours of a lifetime in the sun gracing their faces and hands. They sat on the ground and one or the other of them would lean forward and pick up a pot, slapping it with their hand to make it softly ring and proffer it to potential customers walking down the street. Little muffled tongs of sound, the shy song of the pots. 

The air was filled with voices calling out wares for sale, bartering, laughing, disagreeing, gossiping…but as I stood there taking in what was before me, it all went quiet. A sensation of thick, slow, deep time enveloped me.   

The sun on my arms felt delicious, the sky full and alive, and those pots, in the hands of their makers, whispered to me in a silent and enveloping voice. They communicated through a stream of sensations, images and memories I’d never had. Time, thick layers of languid years, felt tangible like warm water that I could plunge into and pull myself through. Its presence was an engrossing slowness, so very very patient, where nothing seemed to be more hurried than the movement of a stone's shadow as the sun moved across the sky.  The pots whispered, a silent breath of awareness that flooded over me. Timelessly I melted. And felt. The passage in and out of days. Late afternoon breezes stirring up the dust among the mesquite and agave creating little dancing dust devils strolling lazily across the valley floor. The pulling of clay from the earth, the scent of moist, crumbling, tangy soil. Blue-gray rivulets of smoke swirling above the fire, playing in streams of sunlight. Hot coals heating the skin of the red clay pot to boil the beans and toast the corn.  Long, quiet conversation as the evening enveloped the hills, dusk birds, the tilling of the fields, rumbling thunderheads at the coming of the rains, seeds germinating in the moisture, the rustling, yanking sound of corn being pulled off of dry stalks in cooling Fall air. And the hands of the potters and the red, round vessels feeling and containing all of it through layer upon layer of seasons and centuries. 

Unhurried. Patient. Hushed. 

My entire being knew that I was peering into a space of dreamy and timeless humanity, far, far beyond the strange, imbalanced and frantic world I’d been born into. They were just red, round pots, but it was as if I’d come upon…what? 

It was like this. Many of you will remember a radio dial in your car on a road trip, and how as you travel you would turn the dial looking for a station that pleased your ears. Mostly you would find static, but here and there a radio station would squelch into clarity. The odds of that station broadcasting the kind of thing you were yearning to hear would be pretty low. But every once in a while you would tune into just the right station with just the right sound. You had found your frequency.  

Maybe the journey through life is like continuously searching for the right radio frequency. We travel and we search and with any luck we tune into that which resonates deeply with our souls. I’d felt such rich frequencies peeking out through the static before. I think of the first time I put my hands into clay to make a pot and reveled in the connection between hands, earth and creating something beautifully needed, or the inexplicable sense of joy and aliveness I felt the very first moment I’d crossed the border into Mexico years earlier. And now, here, standing on the corner in Tlacolula all the static dissipated and I could hear, as clear as the wind, something that was silent; the harmonious canticle of these pots aligned before their makers to serenade me. Something in this foreignness felt very much like home. 

Somebody jostled past me and I snapped back into the jarring reality of the moment. The ruckus of the market filled my eyes and ears again and I sidestepped to avoid a man carrying a large cane basket full of bread rolls pushing his way through the crowd. I didn’t know if an hour or ten seconds had just passed. I looked back to where the potters were.  

They were exactly as they’d been before. Ten seconds I guess. I pulled my hat down lower over my eyes to shade them from the bright April sun and stepped into the street. I stepped towards them.  Seven steps and I was across the dusty concrete street standing before the potters, tall, foreign, awake, wildly curious and reverent. But what to do now? 

I wanted to know more about these pots and the people who created them. I wanted to feel the round vessels, see them alive in the work they were made to do, understand how they were formed and learn about these people of the pots. I wanted to go to the source, to follow the voiceless whisper that spoke to me beyond words and listen and see what I might see. This seemed as important to me as anything else I could imagine. 

For some reason I was drawn toward an older man in a bent up, short-brimmed straw hat. Perhaps it was his kind eyes. I ventured a smiled. He smiled right back. Feeling encouraged I offered a shy buenos días, creating a tenuous word bridge across our distant worlds. His smile broadened, his eyes brightened and he returned the greeting with great warmth, making that bridge solid. We began to speak, talking about the obvious, these red pots between us. I could feel the curious eyes of the others seated there watching us.  

As nervous as a boy asking a girl on a date, at a certain point I began fishing for an invitation to visit the village. “Boy,” I said, “I’d sure like to see how these pots are made.” 

He understood by indirect, direct question and picked it right up. “Come visit the village,” he said with a smile, “come to the house. My name is Francisco Cruz and we live at #16 Juarez street.”

“Yeah? Ok!” I couldn't believe my luck.  “Thanks! … Umm, how about I come out next week?”

“Sure, whenever you’d like.” 

I believe I floated out of the market that day.