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Mike Richwine
Word count -1425
Interview with a Witch
Belize Arrival
What did I get myself into? I’m standing beside a river in the middle of a Mayan jungle at eleven o’clock at night, in a hot rainstorm — the kind that dries on your face but soaks your clothes. The only light comes from my trusty headlamp, glinting off muddy water. Somewhere up the pitch-black path ahead lies the Mayan Mountain Research Farm, or so the poleman tells me
It’s been sixteen hours since I left my warm bed in frigid Chicago — two flights, a four-stop puddle jumper plane, and a ride in a mud-spattered pickup. The plane, more like a bus with wings, finally reached Punta Gorda on the Caribbean coast. I waited beside a closed, whitewashed terminal until a man in a rain-soaked dented truck pulled up. “Chris here,” he said. “You must be Mike, throw your pack in the back. We’d better hurry — you need to make Toledo before dark for your ride.”
Now, standing by the jungle stream, I meet that ride: a seven-foot dugout canoe, slick in the lantern light. My non-english speaking guide gestures for me to climb in. I lower myself onto the wet bottom, clutching my soaked backpack as he poles us upstream through the rain. Two wet, frightening, dark, hours later, we land at a muddy bank, and he points up the trail into the darkness
No roads. No lights. Two weeks of mosquito nets, composting toilets, and hot, humming jungle path ahead. I tighten my pack straps and take the first step, still wondering — what exactly have I gotten myself into
The jungle smell? There was none – picking out a smell was like trying to hear a single violin in a symphony! Only after a while could you discern new smells that were introduced, smoke, animal dung, the flower opening, the compost toilet.
Mayan Mountain Research Farm was like an upside-down version of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory — with Chris as a kind of jungle Wonka. Nothing quite worked. Everywhere you looked were half-finished projects. Whether it was lack of parts, money, humidity, or simply no roads to haul things in or out, nothing ever seemed finished. You could see the good intentions — solar panels here, an irrigation line there, broken things and parts everywhere— but his vision was either ahead of its time or just a little fractured. He lived in a treacherous looking “treehouse,” with the class/gathering area below the stilts carrying the house with a tree growing thru it. The Oompa-Loompas were the local Q’eqchi’ Maya villagers, cheerful and skilled, serving us fresh food cooked over wood fires in an outdoor kitchen from another era. Speckled chickens were everywhere running free clucking happily but hiding in their coops at night fearful of the things that come out in the jungle at night. The only non-vegetarian meals were these chickens, but not often. Our symposium group of twenty was delightful, full of curiosity, humor, and the shared spirit of adventure that had drawn us here. I may not have learned much practical permaculture, but I met characters I’ll never forget
Dr. Arzu Mountain Spirit
A Garifuna herbalist renowned for her deep knowledge of rainforest plants and traditional healing, Dr. Arzu bridged ancestral Garifuna medicine with modern wellness. A striking woman — tall, coal-black, with an almost luminous calm — there seemed to be a mist surrounding her beautiful, smiling face. She carried her wisdom with a soft, knowing grace that made even the jungle seem to lean in and listen. Some called her the Queen of the Garifuna
The Garifuna trace their roots to survivors of shipwrecked African slaves who found refuge with the Indigenous Carib people on St. Vincent in the 1600s. From that unlikely alliance grew a culture rich in rhythm and resilience — exiled by the British, they eventually settled along Belize’s southern coast. Even today, their drumming, language, and healing traditions echo that long journey
Arzu quietly talked about voodoo, attending a “gathering of kings,” and her work as a healer. She spoke with a Brooklyn accent of her education in the United States, and being called back to take her place amongst her people in Belize — a bridge between two worlds
Albert Bates
A weary, bearded soul with a restless intellect, Albert carried the look of a man who’d spent too many nights thinking about how the world ought to be. One evening he told me how, as a young, Syracuse educated attorney from Tennessee, he became involved with a Haight-Ashbury group. He then joined a caravan of dreamers led by Stephen Gaskin — a convoy of 300 followers in painted vans, VW Beetles and trucks, heading east to found an intentional community. He jumped ahead to find over 1,000 acres back home in Tennessee. They called it The Farm
Built on ideals of nonviolence, communal income, free sex, vegetarianism, solar power, and ecological responsibility, the Farm became a center for midwifery and alternative energy. The Farm also became a huge tourist attraction, bringing new acolytes and the curious from all over the world. Albert eventually became disillusioned with communal living and redirected his focus to biochar—not merely charcoal, as he clarified, but a “porous carbon matrix that functions simultaneously as a sponge, battery, and habitat”- charcoal. He spoke of it with a Don Quixote intensity that made you believe the soil itself was listening. I listened to him for hours
An Interview with a Witch
Sitting on a moss-covered log beside the glistening Toledo River was Starhawk[1], the supreme Wiccan. Her silver hair caught the dappled light filtering through the canopy. A silver mist appeared behind her as she prepared to bathe in the clear, drinkable water, waiting to share the one bar of biodegradable soap left in the camp.
The Rio Grande River bubbles up from a limestone outcrop two miles upstream in the Maya Mountains and flows twenty-seven miles to the Gulf of Honduras. It passes the ruins of Lubaantún (A.D. 730 – 780), the ancient Mayan site of the “Crystal Skull.” Even now, those unmortared stones seem alive with spirit
In this charged place, I asked, “Bathing here, do you feel connected? How does this fit with permaculture? You being a Witch?”
Starhawk tested the air, watching the current. “Permaculture starts with listening,” she said. “Before you plant or build, you watch how the land behaves. The land is already telling you how to live.”
She traced the water with her fingers. “At Lubaantún, people once lived in conversation with this place — planting cacao beneath trees that cooled the slopes, building terraces where the hill wanted to hold water. When that listening stopped, the culture loosened. Not in disaster, just in forgetting.”
The river murmured softly beside us
“So where does permaculture fit?” I asked
“Permaculture,” she said, “is the practice of returning to relationship. Not rebuilding the past but learning again how to let the land teach us how to live.”
She looked up into the canopy. “It’s not spiritual on one side and practical on the other. It’s the same thing. The sacred is that this river gives us life; the practice is how we let it keep doing that.”
A kingfisher flashed past
“So the ruins aren’t a warning?” I asked
“They’re a memory,” she said, “of how to fit ourselves to a place — stone to stone, water to time.”
She dipped her hands into the river. “You asked about Wicca,” she said softly. “The sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s here — in the water, the soil, the roots. If the Earth is sacred, then how we live on it is our practice.”
A dugout canoe passed silently by
“Permaculture,” she said, “is behaving as though that’s true. Listening before acting. Power-with, not power-over.”
“That is what we believe in also, we are connected to the energy of the earth and access it thru rituals, chanting, singing and dancing.”
“We don’t command power. We dance with it.”
“Power flows when we become porous—when we remember we belong to the great cycles of Earth and life. A witch feels the tide move through her, not at her command, but because she has learned to listen.”
Silence settled between us — the river moving, patient as time
We sat until the light changed. The river kept moving, and I understood a little more.
Note: This story will appear on my blog Richwineblog.com, which also features links to many photos from the symposium.
[1] ¹ Starhawk’s real name is Miriam Simos (born 1951 in St. Paul, Minnesota). She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from UCLA and an M.A. in Psychology from Antioch University West. An early leader in eco-feminism and earth-based spirituality, she co-founded the Reclaiming Collective in San Francisco andhas written extensively on feminist theology, permaculture, and social activism (starhawk.org/about/biography).
