A whole new world

While it may to some of you appear to be a reference to Aladdin and Jasmine's duet in a Disney movie (it really stuck in my head at 11), it actually refers to the elaborate, exaggerated, but actually quite (possibly) realistic dream that Arturo and I shared when we met and as we quickly came to love each other and agreed to commit our lives to a child and to making a new world for him or her on the land passed to his family through his paternal grandmother.

From the roof of the current guest house facing north (see the outline of the Sierras San Martin and Santa Marta? They are dormant volcanoes that rest at the southernmost point in the Gulf of Mexico). This is approximately half of the land.  The other half stretches westward.  Trees in the foreground are those described below.

The whole new world includes a forest made of the trees where local birds most like to feed.  This was perhaps the first step and happened naturally as the neighbor, who was mono cropping papaya in the zone where Arturo started carving his pyramid into the red earth with a shovel when we decided to make our home here, stopped his cycle of clearing, forceful plowing, and subsequent stripping of the land, and Arturo began to come in his free time to make something here with his machete.  He left this part of the land alone for three years.  Birds came and pooped the seeds of the trees that they most love, and a new native forest was born.  When I first arrived a year or so later they (the new trees) covered our heads but barely made shade.  We've now been here long enough to realize what their awesome growth feels like, and what it looks like, too: 

The Tucan criollo, they come in groups of ten or more at a time

Says "moot-moot", called both the Barranquenio and the Pajaro Cu, swings his tail feathers (see how they barely look attached?) like a pendulum, has a turquoise crown!

from the side.  isn't it beautiful?  They like dripping, cloudy mornings.  They sit in the Palo de Agua and say moot-moot, moot-moot.

A new face.  Anybody know its name?

Paloma torkasa--our endogenous dove

Pajarito rojo: Oh little red bird come to my windowsill...been so lonesome shaking that mornin' chill... (but not here in Jaltipan, where ever Gillian Welch was singing about) 

 Chejere, a smallish woodpecker, doing maintenance on the Palapa del Fandango