Ulluriaq (Shooting Star)
Building in Guatemala after things fall apart. On meteors, motherhood, healing from infertility, and travel as the perfect rebound relationship.
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Just a wee note I am gradually migrating everything from my Medium profile to Substack. Jimmy Carter died at the age of 100 on December 29, 2024 which prompted me to re-share this essay on building a home in Guatemala via the international wing of Habitat for Humanity in the summer of 2007. Ulluriaq, in Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), translates to ‘shooting star.’ (This piece was originally written and published on my Medium profile in October 2019.)
They greeted each other and sat down.
“The world is big.”
“Yes even bigger than we thought when we parted.”
~Collected by Knud Rasmussen, 1921.
The night is actually cool for August. The blanket wrapping my legs extends warmth and a middle finger to the cloud of mosquitoes hovering over my knees. In the long shadows of firs, my pale Irish arms reflect what they can of the waxing moonlight. It’s 2008 and the peak night of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower when I begin the required drug regimen in anticipation of my impending In Vitro Fertilization surgery later that month. It will be my first and only attempt — I can only afford one—and the final option my former partner and I never tried together before our relationship bled out of me along with tears and the shedding of my uterine lining in a seemingly endless parade of failed IUIs.
We’d been together nine years when I called it quits and stepped away from him, from the drugs, the infertility treatment, those crazy, consecutive morning drives each month at breakneck speed to the clinic in Hamilton from my farmhouse in Elora, Ontario. I wore long sleeves those years to mask the tracks of endless needles that mapped the soft, antecubital insides of both elbows. My own growing constellations of longing. How do I describe the well of relief it was not to have to spread my legs 5 or 6 mornings in a row each month in some claustrophobic clinic room lit only by the green glow of a medical screen? Lying on my back, feet in stirrups, I’d recall the film Fantastic Voyage, imagining each intravaginal ultrasound transducer releasing a microscopic crew in an equally miniscule submarine to prod the watery depths of my body and guage follicular growth.
In the six years that dragged between the only two pregnancies we achieved (and lost), a total of sixteen babies are born to siblings and close friends. The revolving door of baby showers leaves me spiralling. How could my body house any hope let alone a fetus when depression had seeped into the walls like a mould? By the end, I felt like an army vet home from a long, strange war on foreign soil; soil damaged and depleted in which nothing could take root and grow. I needed leave and leave I did: first my ex, then Canada, briefly.
Because things had fallen apart, I have it in my head to build something so I head to Guatemala to aid in the construction of a home for Josefina, a single mother of six. On the flight south, a sanctimony of Bible-thumpers boards the jet in bright pink tees emblazoned with the phrase “Schools for Jesus”. I think to myself, “Cue the headphones.” But the weight of religion is inescapable in Central America. When we land, even the heat is a wall of moisture that baptizes us as we descend the steps to the tarmac. This is the closest I’ve been yet to the equator and the bright colours of buildings through the taxi-bus window blurs into a rainbow of welcome.
The group I’m with spends two orientation days in picturesque Antigua. We soon leave its swarms of tourists to bounce 5 hours on a bus heading west, out to las montañas. Via Escuintla, west towards Retalhuleu, through Quetzaltenango, we finally arrive in San Marcos. Every morning, our team devours an enormous breakfast meant to fortify our day’s work before we depart the tiny hotel and cram our bodies into a van for the hour-long ride to the rural site.
The sun is already hot at 9:00 AM when we begin our daily grind and it beats us into submission until rain proffers relief and respite. Each afternoon, like clockwork, we watch a storm approach from afar, climb over mountain peaks before it anoints us for our labour. We are a construction crew of about 10 strangers. On our break, we sit on sweaters and coats laid upon the damp grass, sharing stories and munching sandwiches the hotel staff packed for us. When the rain passes, our work resumes and small-boned girls with wide eyes arrive home from school to marvel at Canadian women in helmets and construction boots digging alongside the men, heaving wheelbarrows over precarious ramps and ferrying wooden beams between rows of high corn. The outhouse onsite comprises two planks — one for each foot — astride a hole in the ground. We each take turns throughout the day to crouch in the cool shade of the neighbouring pen through which a scrawny pig grunts as it eyes us.
One afternoon, during our second week, there is cause for special celebration and a large crowd gathers. The family next to Josefina’s build site has killed and hung a grown pig for butchering. Its meat is carefully divided and shared to feed many mouths in this small community. We watch a young boy, perhaps 14, slice slowly into its flesh like he’s carving marble and divvy the spoils. Flies buzz around the pool of congealed blood beneath the hanging hooves. Every bit of the pig is carved and apportioned to those gathered. The host family smokes and cooks some of the pork to share their bounty with us. Its flavour is enhanced by our long day in the sun. Kris, our Canadian guide, explains the enormous gift this gesture is and our gratitude is proportionate; we chew away in delight while children flock to us with cups of lemonade and water. Our bodies are caked in grime, but we feel like kings.
Beneath my tattoos, remnants of scars still linger where I cradled each ‘cemento bloque’ passed to me in a kind of factory line. Josefina’s children watch us, mesmerized. Our steel-toed boots mere steps from each other in a long row, we turn our upper bodies and limbs rhythmically reaching to receive a block, then twisting to toss it on like some robotic dance. The weight of each block and its rough edges bite into my skin such that, by the end of the pile, both of my lower forearms form tiny pin-pricks of blood in a polka dot pattern. Ointment is applied and we rest while two local men hold a rope taut over water to ensure the foundation they’re laying is level. Their hands in constant motion, ash drops from their mouths in place of words as they deftly smoke dangling cigarettes in entirety from lit match to butt without touching them.
Josefina’s mother, Marguerita, leads us to an outdoor sink where we wash our plates and cups and awkwardly attempt conversation in broken English and shattered Spanish. We need no translation guidebook for laughter. All the women understand one another without speaking. Sweat drips from our brows and runs in tiny rivulets between and under our breasts, dampening our shirts, but not our spirit of solidarity. The knowing smiles and silent nods exchanged while sipping coffee or cups of mosh become, in a way, our own Nushu fans.
Each ride home at day’s end is quiet with exhaustion. I’m asked to sing an Irish ballad. Someone sings a Greek lullaby. Our evenings in San Marcos are our own, but this isn’t Antigua. Most nights, all the entertainment we can manage involves the furtive purchase of liquor under the watchful and unnerving gaze of an armed guard. We stroll the warm streets back to the hotel to imbibe it, 2 or 3 of us to a room, doors ajar and our secrets open, giggles filling the landing. Dawn comes early again as we wake to the squawk of chicken buses arriving and departing.
I have never witnessed the level of poverty I encounter here. But the lesson of how joy is carved in the shade of these mountains has never left me. This ‘working vacation’ is the best (and most fruitful) decision I’ve made in a decade. It’s impossible to wallow in self-pity here in the wake of my breakup and years swallowed whole by grief. Instead, I am reminded every day of my immense privilege and humbled by the open generosity of our hosts, of Josefina and her family and everyone’s profound kindness. This land and these people prove an unexpected balm to the empty, gaping wound that is my womb. I feel the chasm of the previous decade closing. How to describe the emptying of emptiness? It’s like a helium balloon. I recognize the sensation. It’s been forever, but hope once again fills and buoys me.
On the final day of construction, a member of the hotel staff invites us to a local fútbol arena for a game. Since our arrival, half of our group have been working on a separate urban build within San Marcos while the rest of us are bused to the rural site. For the game, we now form opposing teams with some local children joining each side. Attempts to score against each other increase in equal measures of aggression and hilarity. Competition is fierce and the depth of passion and commitment is contagious. The second game ends abruptly when I take a hard kick of the ball to my stomach. So this is what’s meant by “getting the wind knocked out of you”. No harm, no foul. There is no further damage to my womb that hasn’t already been endured and the physical jolt is like a reset button. I cannot speak as I lie flat on the smooth arena floor. Handsome faces hover above my closed eyes and I somehow find enough breath again to laugh when someone whispers jokingly about resuscitation. Eight arms reach for mine and lift me up and when I stand, I feel my feet might leave the ground and I will float to the ceiling. My elation is not solely an adrenaline high from the game; this trip has meant the first unbridled laughter and release of sorrow in a decade. I love these people. I love this country. I am loathe to return to Canada.
Before we make our way back to Antigua and the flight home, we bid tearful farewells to Josefina, her children and neighbours. We hug the hotel staff. The vans navigate us north in a loop that descends towards Chichicastenango. We are granted the leisure of four or five hours in the picturesque market town of Panajachel where some of us hire a tour boat to explore Lago Atitlán, the deepest lake in Central America. Its basin, we are told, was formed by volcanic eruption some 84,000 years ago. Someone suggests a skinny dip and next thing we know, our male companions chuckle and politely avert their eyes as all the women disrobe and we slip into the water. Paradise. From the boat, laughter carries over the waves to where our heads bob and our limbs dance beneath us. We echo it back. It’s the cleanest we’ve been in two weeks. Shivering, but refreshed, we are safely navigated back to shore where smaller groups branch off to various venues for dinner and we close this magnificent day back in a hotel in Antigua.
In a handful of days, our team will part ways, but on the itinerary for the next morning: a field trip to Museo Iximché to explore the ruins of a kingdom that date from 1470. Morning rain cuts short our visit and, back at the hotel, we are given two alternate options: climb a volcano or enjoy a massage at a nearby spa. I opt for Volcán de Agua. At its base, I pay a young boy to guide his horse on the first leg of our summit. Her name is Muñeca, Spanish for doll. In Guatemala, the dogs and horses are so thin, you could use their stomachs as washboards. We slowly wind halfway up the volcano by horseback and then are told we must hike the remainder on foot. At this junction, another child offers me a long stick for money. I regrettably must decline; my pockets are empty. As we near the peak, we spy slow movement of bubbling lava bleeding beneath some of the black rock in the distance. Our guide pours water from his bottle onto the ground and steam rises. The rock becomes hotter the higher we climb and I realize now the need for the stick: not only is our descent a bit steep in parts, but we cannot use our hands. The rock is too hot to touch. The view, however, is breathtaking and I gaze down the long, dark swath of displaced earth that cooled in the wake of the lahar, a catastrophic mudflow that swept away the former capital city, Cuidad Vieja, in 1541.
From this dizzying height, my eyes are drawn down to Antigua and then out across the highlands of the Sierra Madre mountain range. My breath is taken again, this time more gently than by Guatemalan fútbol. Back in the hotel is a toilet that flushes and a hot shower to relieve aching muscles. We hug our goodbyes in Antigua and when I land in Dallas, I only just make my connecting flight to Toronto. I’ve snagged a window and sit in quiet repose when raised voices abruptly draw my focus. I witness what appears to my eye and ear to be a condescendingly racist exchange from flight staff toward a group of Japanese tourists who are clearly struggling to communicate. It’s obvious to me they are trying to determine what time it will be once we land. I tap one of them on the shoulder and point to my watch and they all beam warm, grateful smiles at me. Before the descent, eight origami cranes alight on my lap. The gesture brings tears and I cannot imagine a gentler transition or kinder consolation to the ache of leaving Guatemala and her people behind.
July 2008. I am seated, once again, in an office at the fertility clinic my ex and I had frequented, which has since been relocated to Burlington. Alone this time, I explain my desire to attempt IVF surgery via sperm donation. Tests are conducted and I’m advised the procedure will prove a waste of my time and money. I thank the doctor for his professional opinion and proceed to the front desk where I switch to a female doctor to pursue the surgery.
And this is where the stars find me, sitting in inky darkness behind my farmhouse in Elora, beginning my injections to make a leap towards motherhood. Before my body, stiff from immobility and cooled by dew, finally transfers to my bed in wee hours, I count close to 30 shooting stars. I wish on all of them. I wish that the IVF will be a success and that my dream of becoming a mother might finally be realized.
The stars align.
Nine months later, I push my baby out of my womb. They have a cowlick. Their eyes remain glacier-fed blue. I’m an agnostic atheist, but even I’m not stupid enough to deny that this child is a goddamn miracle.
Every night as they grow, they ask me to tell them the story of how they came to me. And I recount how I wished on shooting stars. How the stars heard me. And one star plummeted from the cosmos at such great height and speed, it shot right into my belly and formed them there. They love this story. Their eyes widen with wonder over the magic of it. Mine still do. “We are stardust,” sings Joni and I mouthe along as the moon removes her curlers, stamps out a cigarette and begins her night shift.
In 2016, I find myself alone, deep into the Arctic Circle in Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). It’s the birthplace of Knud Rasmussen, a Danish-Greenlandic polar explorer and I visit his home which still stands there. Rasmussen is only 54 when he dies in 1933, the year my parents are born in Dublin. Over the course of his life he is the first man of European descent to traverse the Northwest Passage by dog sled. Along his journey, he records and documents Inuit traditional stories, songs, customs, practices and mythologies.
Reading a book of his life the next year, I find among its pages a translation by Rasmussen of a poem by an Inuk woman named Uvavnuk, oral poet and shaman:
The Great Sea has set me in motion
Set me adrift
And I move as a weed in the river,
The arch of sky
And mightiness of storms
Encompass me,
And I am left
Trembling with joy.
~Uvavnuk, recorded and translated by Knud Rasmussen in the Hudson Bay area, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition
Her words speak so deeply to me, I proceed to google her and learn she has her own Wikipedia page.
I sit up in bed. My heart navigates by dog sled to my throat. Tears blur my eyes as I read what I find there.
Rasmussen entitled this story “Uvavnuk is struck by a ball of fire”, which he thinks is a meteor. This is the only story about her in that volume of the Thule Report; what is given below is the first translation from the Danish, by W. Worster.
Uvavnuk had gone outside the hut one winter evening to make water. It was particularly dark that evening, as the moon was not visible. Then suddenly there appeared a glowing ball of fire in the sky, and it came rushing down to earth straight towards her. She would have got up and fled, but before she could pull up her breeches, the ball of fire struck her and entered into her. At the same moment she perceived that all within her grew light, and she lost consciousness. But from that moment also she became a great shaman. She had never before concerned herself with the invocation of spirits, but now imiEru’jap inua, the spirit of the meteor, had entered into her and made her a shaman. She saw the spirit just before she fainted. It had two kinds of bodies, that rushed all glowing through space; one side was a bear, the other was like a human being; the head was that of a human being with the tusks of a bear.
~Collected by Knud Rasmussen, from the 9th of 10-volume The Fifth Thule Expedition, 1932.
Among the names listed on my child’s birth certificate is Perseid. For the meteor shower that brought them to me and for the light of them, how they illuminates my own moments of darkness and make the very stardust of me tremble with joy.
My kid turned 10 in May. Yesterday I discover that the month I was born marks the last recorded snowfall upon the volcano outside Antigua, Guatemala where I stood dreaming and trying to discern my future amidst the fading succession of ridges and peaks of the Sierra Madre.
Mountains of the mother.
Beautiful, and beautifully told.🤍
I loved reading this. Happy New Year Nancy to you and your magic star X