One of my oldest and dearest memories is waking up in my grandmother’s house. The sun light coming through the gaps on tile roof, hearing the creaking sounds of the floor as I get off the bed and feeling the old wood touching my feet. I always felt like the entire floor would collapse onto the corn storage room underneath. As I walk through the door, I can already smell the mesquite burning. My eyes adjust to the blinding light, I see my grandmother in her outdoor kitchen. A little shed made of sticks and fiberboard, the stove made of clay and adobe bricks. Behind the kitchen, corn crops, banana trees, and different kinds of colorful flowers that she took care of as if they were her own children. In the distance, nothing but hills and mountains.
I can’t explain the feeling I get every time I think of those days. It’s always been more than simple homesickness, an existential fear of losing my connection to that place. An irrational fear that one day that place would disappear and I’d have nothing to go back to, and a part of me would be erased. This has been a pattern in my art, my so called writing and my dreams.
I spent quite a few years trying to figure out where home is. I looked for it in many places, in different people. Everything always fell short of the rich surrealism of that place. The ceremonies, the dances, the music. The strange mixture of Catholic symbols and indigenous rituals but above everything, the overwhelming feeling of safety.
For quite some time, I have been trying to decipher what the extreme changes in environment and socio-economic status will do to someone’s mind. I thought it so strange that I could go from a place with no running water or electricity, to writing about my experiences at a coffee shop in Vienna, across the street from the Opera house where Mozart once conducted.
It just doesn’t seem natural. A question started to formulate in my head for some time, and I have been rhetorically asking lately, “What does that do to your head?’ It’s one thing to simply throw that question up in the air, as if it’s someone else’s responsibility to answer it.
But then someone looked right at me, repeated the question: “What DOES it do to your head?” waited for an answer and I did not have one.
I’ve never truly wanted to know the answer.
There was a moment at the Okunoin Cemetery on Mount Koya, where I reached the Gobyล-bashi Bridge, and past that point, you could no longer take pictures. There was a temple at the end, I can’t remember what it was called, but there was a beautiful Shinto shrine inside. I went in like any other tourist, and then I reached a set of stairs going down to a basement. In there I saw a woman, dressed in ceremonial robes doing a ritual prayer, much like Muslim prayer, kneeling down and touching the floor with her forehead then standing up again, perform a kind of adoration with her hands and kneel to touch the floor with her forehead again. In front of her, there was an altar, and something that looked like an eagle talon attached to a staff.
I remember having this strong feeling that I wanted to join her in the ritual prostrations. I did not understand it, but I felt this powerful need to do it. She saw me. She invited me to join her. I felt this strong current of life go through me, as if I was a vessel for some sort of cosmic stream that was compelling me to do it. She insisted again, but something blocked me. I wanted to do it, but something kept me from joining that stream of life. I went up to the upper levels and back to the cemetery. I started crying and I didn’t know why. For a long time, I wondered what all of that was about. At the same time, I didn’t want to know.
That was in 2023. I am now remembering that I fell into a deep depression when I got back from Japan. I’ve always liked to keep little mementos from all of my trips. Train tickets, flyers, tourist guides, and even receipts. I like to keep everything and make scrapbooks, only this time I couldn’t. I left them all on the corner of my bed for almost 18 months. They did not move, and I am almost sure that I didn’t even change my sheets on my bed for that long. It was a dark depression and I didn’t even know that it was happening.
I got caught in a loop of self-destruction. I trained my body into a state of central nervous system fatigue on a regular basis. I found Olympic weightlifting back in high school, and heavy training has been a part of my life since then. Except for the periods of time when I insisted on trying to drink myself to death.
What I did with training during this time was nothing less than torture. There was no set discipline, no routine, no records kept, no progress measured, I was going in for 3 – 4 hrs everyday until my body was so beaten that I couldn’t go on. There were times when I would see the 375 lbs in the rack, about to do squats, and get emotional because I did not want to do it. I would then tell myself that I was weak for not wanting to and do it anyway.
The aggressive training and the extreme diet would push my body into a state of chronic stress. I was even losing hair in chunks. My insomnia was so hostile that I was hallucinating during the day. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings and I’d show up to work at 11, looking like I was beaten with a baseball bat the night before.
I was trying to kill something inside me. Living became so unbearable that I had to escape, again, to a different country. This time, I picked Romania. I saw a YouTube video about an old cemetery in northern Romania, and I thought, well, I have to go see that… what is it with me and cemeteries?
I arrived in Bucharest and rented a car. The next day, with horrible jet-lag and the worst insomnia of my life, I drove 10 hrs north, right to the border with Ukraine, to a little village called Sฤpรขnศa. I drove far, trying to escape myself, not realizing that I was taking myself with me everywhere I went. Now that I look back on that, it was a very dangerous drive. I can’t even be sure that I wasn’t out there looking for an accident. My driving was so reckless, passing semi-trucks on one-way lanes while looking at another one coming straight towards me, imagining what if? There was one really close call. And I think about it every day. It was raining, the sound of the trucks horns at my bullshit maneuvers, and me saying, well, I’m in a hurry. To get nowhere. I’ve had dreams about the headlights coming straight at me through the rain.
What was I trying to do? There were times after the trip when I’d have intense existential moments and wonder if I actually died that day, and what I am living now is an illusion… My therapist would call that dissociation. The entire event was a massive manic dissociative episode and I didn’t even know that it was happening.
I finally reached Sฤpรขnศa around midnight. I found my accommodations, a small traditional Romanian room and finally passed out. The next day I visited Cimitirul Vesel (The Merry Cemetery). As I walked through the graves and the hand painted crosses I had a realization. This looks very similar to the cemetery in my parent’s village. I thought it funny and absurd that I traveled across the world to visit a place that resembled my own home. I remembered having the same thought driving through the rural regions of Bulgaria, outside of Sofia. I had very special moments driving through both places, having a faint thought that hadn’t yet materialized until I was standing in that cemetery: Home is everywhere. I don’t have to belong to a single place and time, when I belong to the world, I belong everywhere, at any given place and at any given time.
The next day I drove towards the Carpathian mountains. As I went up the Transfฤgฤrฤศan road, I reached a spot covered by thick fog. I had a strong feeling that I wanted to hike around that area but I kept driving and then I felt it was too late to turn around. Suddenly, I remember having a clear image of a shamanic figure, with antlers, emanating white smoke. The opposite of the black Shaman figure I’ve always dreamed of before. The feeling to turn around overtook me, I did not wanted to refuse the call again as I did in Japan. The fog was so thick that you could barely see what was in front of you. To this day, I don’t know why, I performed a ritual dance that I used to do in my early 20s to Aztec music playing on my phone. I danced until I was exhausted. In the middle of a thick fog. I have now done that in the mountains of Nagano in Japan, the Scottish Highlands, and the Transylvanian Alps. And I couldn’t tell you why. All I know is that for a brief moment I had a renewed interest in life.
In November of 2024, I went back home for Day of the Dead. My sister wanted to take her daughters back home so they could experience the traditions and culture we grew up with. She mentioned she’d like me to go too so I could drive everyone around the city and I hardly need an excuse to book a flight. During this trip, I tattooed Tezcatlipoca’s skin on my left leg. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time. I had no idea that by doing so I would be inviting something else into my life.
In the oldest Mesoamerican creation story, Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror) along with Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) descend upon the world, covered by a void that came to be inhabited by a primordial beast, Cipatctli, after the destruction of the fourth era. Their task is to slay the beast, one representing light and the other one the forces of darkness. Shadow and light coming together to create the world. In the struggle Cipactli, part crocodile, fish, and toadโwith insatiable hunger and mouths at every joint, catches Tezcatlipoca by the foot and tears it off. By creating this distraction, both Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl were able to vanquish the beast and from its skin they created the world. The Smoking Mirror sacrifices his own body to create something new, so he is always depicted with a missing foot.
6 months after tattooing the Smoking Mirror’s skin on my calf (the plan was to do the entire leg), I tore all the ligaments on my knee and damaged a meniscus. When I finally got up from the floor, after the sharp throbbing pain had somewhat passed, I sat for a few minutes and wondered if I could still finish my workout.
What followed was a certain type of hell that I was ill prepared for.
In a way, I had my own confrontation with a primordial beast, only this one was inhabiting a void constructed internally through a subconscious death drive that manifested itself through hyper-productivity, chronic stress, depression and a strange sense of having to prove myself, I just didn’t know to who. Who exactly was the audience I was trying to impress when I’ve never cared to impress anyone? Suddenly, the guy that couldn’t sit still, that was running from one place to the next, that was trying to carry more than I could handle, couldn’t move at all.
In the middle of the worst pain I have ever felt, the true torture came from my own mind. My psyche flooded my vision with entire segments of my life I had never fully processed. My mind took me for a rollercoaster ride of all this history, all the unexplored life, grief, real tragedies and imaginary ones, all lodged in dark caves of the psyche and forced me to look at them. Tied to my bed, I couldn’t do anything but to look at all of it.
After Cipactli was vanquished, Quetzalcoatl descended into the underworld to rescue the bones of men, he steals them from Mictlantecutli (Lord of the Underworld), and with them he gives life back to people and repopulates the earth.
I proceeded to do the same. To rescue every single aspect of myself that got stuck in time. Every version of me that did not know how to move on. Every identity I had to create and then abandoned in order to survive the jump into the next stage of life. I collected every one of them, as Quetzalcoatl collected the bones of ancient men, and re integrated them into the present. It became a mission, a purpose I have never had before. Not for my family, not for other people. A rescue mission for myself. I was bringing every version of me that was still hurting, stuck in different timelines, into a fixed point in the present.
I had to learn how to sit still with the memories, how to ask for help, how to walk again. It was then, and it couldn’t have happened any other way, that I finally allowed for these images, memories and dreams to fully enter my consciousness and allow them finally to become an integral part of me.
โThe years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.โ โ Carl Gustav Jung
That’s when the idea hit me for the first time.
I have gone through multiple socio-economic stages in the course of my lifetime and I don’t think the human brain is designed to handle drastic changes like these. Starting off in a rural village in the mountains of Southern Mexico, adobe brick houses, no electricity, not even a toilet. The world of Mexican rodeos, the extreme violence, the traditions, the music. Then the colonial city of Queretaro, the low income neighborhood, but access to private education, high art and classical music lessons in beautiful old colonial buildings and cathedrals.
Coming to the US and being exposed to an entire different language and culture. Starting off as many immigrants do, 14 people in a two bedroom apartment, working at the swap meets of San Diego, going through high school culture totally sedated, playing guitar in death metal bands. Getting sober and discovering a world outside of the Hispanic immigrant cultural bubble.
Teaching myself a skill that eventually would become my career. My first and only job at a high level corporate setting, slowly climbing up the economic ladder, the corporate ladder, and eventually being able to visit 15 different countries to find even more life altering experiences.
Most people live inside one cultural atmosphere, one economic class, one language, one moral code, one cosmology through most of their lives. I have lived inside several worlds stacked together, each with its own laws, gods, language, and survival strategies. And my brain has had to rewire itself every time. The average person would be crushed under the weight of these massive cultural shifts. It seems unnatural. The psyche shatters under the pressure of these constant, painful adaptation demands.
I was forced to evolve at a speed faster than the mind is designed for. Most people canโt do it without breaking, numbing, or becoming violent. I have done all three and somehow, I survived them all.
I had no idea until now just how depressed I was after my last trip to Japan and all that happened in a period of 3 years.
This is a very long story, and I still haven’t answered the original question. What has it all done to my head?
Well, it filled it with an overwhelming sense of guilt. An oppressive, corrosive guilt.
No one in my family or the village that we are from has gone to the places I have gone to, seen the things I have seen, or experienced the things I have experienced. I have never had to work the fields, as the men before me did. I have never had to do manual labor, construction, or even work in a kitchen.
I am an artist.
And for some reason, for the longest time, I have felt utterly and destructively guilty about that. Every time I would put my body through gruesome physical punishment, sleep deprivation, starvation dieting, I was only doing it to compensate for the guilt that I felt over the fact that a long line of people had to suffer immensely so I could have the life I have now. This was the audience I was performing for, they are who I was trying to prove my worth to.
A long line of dead people.
Then the real questions I had been meaning to ask came out. Why would someone who barely escaped dying during a massive earthquake, who almost choked in his sleep from constant throat and lung infections, who was in and out of hospitals as a child, who almost died of a cholera infection, who saw dead men thrown in the back of trucks like ragdolls…
Why would the universe pick me?
Why me of all people?
Was it simply because I refused to die?
Was Death really that impressed?
Is the answer to these questions what I was searching for all over the world? Is that why I made a point to visit all the religious centers of every single city I’ve ever been in? I have been to Eastern Orthodox mass in Bulgaria, Athens, and Romania. I’ve been to Shinto and Buddhist ceremonies in Japan. I have been to Muslim prayer in Istanbul. I have been to Catholic mass at the Vatican and cathedrals in London, Edinburgh, Austria and Prague.
Every time I’ve heard of experiences like this, it was from the typical affluent simpletons looking for themselves after reading banal and self indulgent manifestos like Eat Pray Love.
I was looking for a reason not to kill myself.
As this realization dawns on me, the clear answers as to why I was so beaten and depressed for years and why I escaped to Romania with some sort of death wish in the back of my mind, why I broke my body like those men thrown around like ragdolls at the rodeos where I grew up… I couldn’t breathe.
Realizing that all those times when I held a knife to my throat, during the worst years of my drinking, thinking that it was better to end it all than to continue to live that way; that energy never went away. If I couldn’t drink myself to death, I was going to work myself to death. I was going to disappear somehow.
I was sitting in my garage writing all this and I felt a massive energy about to erupt. My brother was in his room. My nieces were in my living room. I locked myself in the bathroom and I let this accumulation of repressed emotions come out, in silence, locked up in the bathroom. And as if the universe was playing some sort cosmic joke on me, a reminder that not all has been tragedy and mindless suffering, a funny little reminder that everything had a reason in the end: I heard the clumsy violin notes from my niece practicing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while I was sobbing by myself. Then as if by magic, produced by the hilarious rendition of the children’s song, I started laughing uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop doing both simultaneously.
Finally, I could breathe again. I see now that the first half of my life is over. At the beginning of the second half of my life, I have no other task than to enjoy the life I’ve built. And that’s terrifying. I have no idea what that will look like.
After being forced to abandon home so many times, looking for it all over the world, accidentally, I became it. I became the space I was looking for and I did not even know that it had happened. I became the space in which other people’s lives could safely unfold.
As my nieces grow and I see their little faces transform into adults, I hope that whenever they go through difficulties in life, and they surely will, they can look into their memories and remember all the times that they spent the night at my house and woke up in their grandma’s room knowing that everything in the world was safe.
Maybe that feeling of safety will be enough to carry them through some of the fundamental painful lessons in life.
The power of those memories carried me for long enough.
Rodrigo Albarran Art 