“A Sense of Place” – Rincon de Guayabitos, Mexico
“You? Getting married?” My former high school English teacher shrieked
with astonishment. “Well, she chuckled, “I guess anything is possible.”
I’d never really liked her. After all, she didn’t know me. No one did.
Not really. I was a secret even to myself.
Allowing myself to be chosen and loved extravagantly was a new and
transforming experience… Learning to receive [Larry’s] love, I was beginning to open up to all life’s possibilities. So I moved toward marriage with a determination that I have since rarely shown in moving toward anything – until we moved to Mexico. Once again I was cutting family ties and taking on the mantle of becoming something more than I’d been before. Maybe the mark of a real virgin is she says, “Yes!”
—Excerpt from Virgin Territory: How I Found My Inner Guadalupe
The journey to the deep feminine, what a person really is, involves step-by-step acquiescence, opening up and agreeing to become something more than how others – or we ourselves – have conceived us. It involves nurturing the seed within. To watch the overnight growth of anything that is planted
during the rainy season is to know that the land which is Mexico
is a fertile womb indeed, a womb that is
always full and is always bringing forth. Cobblestone streets turn green and furry, coco palms spring up through the grates above drainage ditches. Overnight, pale fresh leaves appear on shrubbery and trees. Mexico is a place where any seed grows.
Susan J. Cobb’s memoir of leaving one life behind and opting for another will transport you to the rural lushness of Mexico’s Pacific Coast, a region bursting with today’s promise while still being deeply grounded in the past. As she puts down new roots in an ancient land, Cobb reshapes her perspective and discovers a larger sense of who she really is. The Virgin of Guadalupe installed on the jetty near her home, along with a variety of indigenous goddesses and modern feminine icons, add a rich tapestry of focus, folklore, and color to her journey’s landscape.
Again, from Virgin Territory —
[Guadalupe] is a current symbol of an ancient ethos, a touchstone
for what is colorful, primitive, and fundamental to life itself.
For me she is a symbol of a universal spiritual ideal, the untapped
potential of what lies at the core of every individual. On a personal
level, she is the memory of what I once was and what I can yet become.
“Like a coming of age story for mature adults,” comments one reader.
Welcome to Virgin Territory! 