After flying to Mexico to teach English to Mayan children in an effort to escape the pain of losing my husband-after being challenged by an old Mexican man to lay down my agenda and just live with the locals-I finally let go of fear and grief and lost myself in a culture not my own. I spent the next five years living all through Mexico and Central America. For a time, I even lived without electricity and without running water. I rented a house in a poverty-stricken community so I could see what living in poverty was like from the inside. My life became an experiment. But the results of my experiment were more than I bargained for. I unexpectedly found a spiritual thickness hovering over Latin America. From Mayan pyramids and cavernous entrances to the underworld, to shape-shifting beings and places where time and space bend, I found the remote rain forests and islands are rife with other-worldliness. As my journey took me deeper into the bowels of a land wracked with poverty and human suffering, I became increasingly aware of how the struggle for survival on this narrow isthmus is not won in this realm, but in the one beyond.