Describe where you live and work, and what is it you do.
I live in Guatemala, a country with 7 different micro-climates,37 volcanoes, beaches, mountains. rain forests, jungle, rural countryside and big cities. In Antigua I can go to the beach in the morning and be up in the mountains within the same day.
I am a photographer, a cacao maker and a Mayan Ajq’ij, a spiritual guide and day-keeper and I live among the Mayan people. The recipe for our cacao drink comes from the ancient side of their culture.
Gg, photographer and chocolate maker, Guatemala
If what you do for a living is an extension of your identity, who you really are, then perhaps it does. But in the world we live in today, this is difficult to achieve.
Being a photographer provides me with a certain amount of personal freedom so that I can practice what I believe.
Making an organic, natural drink enriches my life and being a Mayan Priestess expands who I am.
I also spend a lot of time planting vegetables, fruits and nut trees around the country as I like to see myself as a ‘sembradora’, one who seeds the soil.
Is your work part of what defines you as a person? If so, why?
Does your work allow you to feel a connection to life and its sustainability, not just through the product you provide but by how you acquire it and work with that product?
I think we separate ourselves far too much from everything and from each other. We often act as if Nature depended on humans for survival instead of the other way around. Life is inherently self-sustainable; we’ve just forgotten how to be in harmony with its natural cycle.
Being a photographer compels me to be connected to the world around me, capturing it and often times preserving views of what no longer will be.
Making cacao brings me right to the source of where the food I eat comes from, and to the energy that is required for the whole process to happen: going to the farms, being with the people who grow and pick the fruit, transporting it myself, then working it by hand into the final product.
This changes my appreciation for every bite of food that nourishes me.
It has been said that modern day, conventional farming on a large scale no longer involves the intelligent input of the farmer. No need to work with the crops, observe and refine them, and work with nature’s elements for health and resilience as everything comes out of a packet for maximum yield.
How involved are you in the process of what you do and provide?
Modern farming, indeed, has very little of the human element involved. And this in ‘first-world’ countries has had a negative impact. Not only in the rates of illness and obesity through a lack of connection to the quality of our produce but in the emotional effect that mass-produced and genetically engineered food has had on people and the environment.
Our cacao is not mass produced; it’s grown on small farms by small groups of people or families and we use pedal-powered machinery, hand-grinders and recyclable paper bags or clay jars for packing.
I take all the waste from the skin of the cacao seed and use it as a composite when I plant.
Each batch of our cacao is blessed as we offer prayers of health, love and happiness and no one is allowed to work on the cacao if they’re in a bad mood! Seriously, no negativity when working with the cacao.
What makes you happy and content? How do you spend your moments of leisure if there are any? What do you give thanks for?
Happiness is not about how much you have but about how much you have been able to give.
Life makes me happy and content - it just keeps on giving and giving and giving.
My leisure time is spent working as I always carry my camera with me wherever I go.
And drinking hot cocoa make me happy during moments of leisure!
I give thanks for every breath, for the earth beneath me and for all its magical creatures, for all the love in my life and the love I find inside of me. I give thanks for the faith I see in people;
it’s inspiring.
I always carry seeds with me, so I plant everywhere I go as well. If you always smell the flowers, you never have to make the time to do it.
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