Episode 176: Indigenous Wisdom Stories: Going for the Tamales

What does it mean when someone we love doesn't come back right away — and no one panics?

In this week's episode, Julia Carmen shares a fable her mother used to tell — one that traces back to Adjuntas Del Refugio, Zacatecas, the village in the mountains of Mexico where she grew up.  No phones. No landlines. If you needed to reach someone, you sent a person — usually a child — and off they went.

When that child took longer than expected to come home, no one scolded her. Julia's grandmother would simply smile and say, *"Se fue por los tamales."* She went for the tamales. Not sure when she'll be back.

The phrase has its own story inside it. Julia's mother used to tell it as a fable: a woman in town with ten daughters, sending them one by one to an aunt's house on an errand — and each one lingering, pulled in by tamales, chisme, and the aunt's delight in hearing about their lives. By the time the mother went looking herself, she found the whole family gathered, and understood exactly what had happened. She sat down too.

Julia traces the phrase through three generations — her grandmother to her mother, her mother to her, and now to us. "That's how these teachings travel," she says. "One voice, one kitchen at a time."

Soul work is remembrance, not reinvention — and this is a remembrance.

The teaching underneath the story: "she got distracted" carries judgment. "She went for the tamales" is loving. It names something without punishing it — an errand that became a visit, a task that became presence. Julia asks the question this episode turns on: What are your tamales? What absorbs you so fully that time disappears — and is that really a problem, or is that the medicine?

"Find your tamales. Not to escape the task — but to stay alive to what's actually here."

If this one lands for you, Julia's invitation is simple: come find more conversations like it in Dragonfly Chisme, the community home at The School Without Walls.