A few weeks after I moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. I was in desperate need of some time away from the city to breathe fresh air, get away from people, and feel that I was in nature. Thankfully, I had just made a new friend, Carrie Haugh. Carrie was in the final stages of acting in a short film that would go on to be an official entry in the Guanajuato Film Festival. The last scene they needed to shoot was a dream sequence that takes place in a flowering lavender field. Although, there is a lot of agriculture in this area of Mexico, it is mostly known to be a hot and dry climate. One is much more likely to think of towering prickly-pear cactus trees than French lavender fields. Alas, this place is always full of surprises.
After forty-five minuets of barreling down a Mexican freeway in an old van with questionable steering and brakes, we pulled onto a dirt road and followed the signs to an enormous lavender farm. For various reasons, Guanajuato is a state from which men emigrate heavily to find work in the USA. The sad side effect being that whole towns are left with only women, children, and the elderly to continue to support their community. Rather than allowing these pueblos to sink even further into poverty and ultimately disappear, an NGO out of Albuquerque, New Mexico is bringing in The Lavender Project. A wonderful program, these co-op lavender farms have created a fantastic renewable source of employment and income (Please visit their web page to find out more: http://thelavenderproject.com/). The products they make are divine and they have a chocolate-lavender soap that smells so good I could live in it.
It was such a relief to step out of the car and inhale the fresh lavender plants drying out after a light rain. The film crew went to work and I was left with several hours and a field of my own in which to play. I even crawled over the fence and into some of the aforementioned prickly pear cactuses to take photos. It really is stunning to spend an afternoon in a place as surreal as a lavender field and I can assure you my need to “get away from it all” was quenched.
