Category Archives: Musings

Where I Belong (20)

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Today I cross the carretera, choose the little bus that goes through the village first. I like the little bus best. It’s more simple, more bare bones, has no curtains, no cushions. All the windows are flung open, and kids in their school uniforms chatter and laugh and shout. Older Mexican women get on with their heavy groceries, sometimes only riding for a few blocks along the narrow cobblestone streets. I like being drenched in the bustle. By the time we get back up to the highway again, things have quieted. The after-school flurry is over.

The bus heads west. I breathe in wet earth from last night’s rain. I settle into my seat. I am going again to the next town over, to San Juan Cosolá. The wind blows in, making straight dark hair dance against the backs before me. The driver has the radio up loud, and ranchera music washes around us like the summer air. In the midst of all that is familiar, that for all its foreign-ness has become home to me, I am overcome. It happens to me often on this stretch of road, a kind of Mexican enchantment, I think. But still I am surprised. I am taken by a big burst of joy to be living here in Mexico, joy washed by gratitude that makes my eyes brim.

glimps of Lake Chapala

I look out the window, my throat tight, my heart pushing against my ribs. I watch the hills, a swathe of color on my right. I catch glimpses of the lake in the distance on my left. My mouth is open now, my jaw loose, half taking it all in, half awe. I wonder if part of what overtakes me on these bus rides is that seated on the bus among these dark-headed people, I feel a part of things. We are in this together, this riding on the bus with the air rushing in and the music resonating in our bones. On the bus, I feel like I belong.

Banished Again (16)

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Almost a third of my year is already over, and still I struggle with my chosen focus for this year’s blog. My friend Colleen once suggested I could stick with it for awhile and then abandon it at some point later in the year. “But I don’t want to abandon it,” I told her. My tone was cranky, miffed, defensive. I had made this choice, and there were endless possibilities to write about within it. There was no reason to give up on it. There was every reason to persevere. But in the time since our conversation, her suggestion whispers in my ear from time to time. It tries to seduce me. Stubborn creature that I am, I shush it. I turn my head away, present it with my back. I refuse to listen. And yet, when the whisper comes, when I feel the warm breath on my ear, it is a siren call. Today, I even counted on my fingers. If I stayed with Mexico for six months, when would half a year arrive? October? It wasn’t soon enough.

“But I don’t want to abandon it,” I say again out loud. There is no icky tone now, no crankiness, no bridling at a sibling’s suggestion. I really don’t want to abandon it, even as the idea of letting it go calls to me, full moon to high tide. But I am afraid. I was out of town, two short trips back to back, weeks lost to preparations, to journeys, to recovery. I am a week behind on my blog, me who wanted not to fall behind this year, not to spend time playing catch-up. But I know there is more than the ordinary resistance to writing behind my delay. I glimpse part of my problem–trying to write about all things Mexico is not only my fear of failure, of not doing it justice. I think fear lives in the fact it is so complex. It is not simple for me to think about Mexico. I can’t make broad, clear claims because it is all too layered, too complicated for that. My mind is always studying the complexity, weighing the distinctions, wondering about the reasons. I become overwhelmed. How do I capture the intricacies? I know in my heart I need to write about the specifics, not worry about whether or not the largeness of things seeps in. But my head worries about oversimplifying, about getting it wrong.

How do I write about the racism I felt there? Will my readers understand how tiny the percentage of people were who faced me with resentment, even hatred? How can I tackle something like that without talking about all the reasons their feelings are understandable, without comparing it to what people of color face every day in the United States? How do I take on something so big in one blog post? How do I explain my longing for life among Mexicans, for their natural grace, that warm and gracious generosity? Will my readers believe I think people in the United States can’t be as welcoming? Do I really want to try to dissect our stereotypes in 500 words? And what about the idea that most of what I know about the Mexican people comes from only one strata of society? People make claims all the time that are not true for all of Mexico. It is not one thing. It is not only Baja California Sur and Jalisco. The United States is not only Alaska and New Jersey.

Goldfinch on tube feeder with Mexican birds of paradise and tecoma blossoms

I sigh and take a sip of water, set the glass on the patio table beside me. I listen to the quiet sound of the misters, watch a goldfinch alight on the thistle feeder. “No,” I say, a laugh in my voice now, “The United States is not only Alaska and New Jersey.” I shake my head, a small smile on my face. I am satisfied in the aftermath of release, my fears banished again in the act of relinquishing them to the page, a second exorcism on this chosen path. Mexico is not only Baja California Sur and Jalisco, but I will write about them anyway. I will write what I know. I will write what I believe, what I think, what I wonder, and I will trust my readers with the rest.

The Moon and the Stars (11)

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I am sitting cross-legged on my purple yoga mat in the courtyard. I sweep my arms up, my eyes following my hands in their arc. I see a thin sickle of moon framed between the big fan palm and the pine tree, white against the pale blue sky. In the act of drawing breath, of sweeping my arms up, the flicker of thought comes to me to look for the moon. I’d seen it two days in a row from under the pine tree when I filled the finch feeder with thistle seeds. And now, just as I am thinking it may not be visible, that it rises later and later each day, the moon appears. It always surprises me, the unexpected gift of it, a greeting and a message, both. Whenever it finds me, it makes me stop, brings me present, tells me I am not alone. Hello, little one. Here I am. Here we are together.

moon with palm and pine

It feels like divine intervention, makes me feel tended with exquisite care, the moon placed just so, my gaze angled just so, positioned and poised to receive the gift, the true present. When it happens, I feel affirmed. I am in the exact spot I am meant to be, at the exact time. I have stopped on Palo Fierro, that day the raven and the mockingbird danced across the sky, showing me the late morning moon. I have stopped on Benito Juarez in Ajijic, neck craned, blocking the narrow banqueta, my eyes traveling across the vivid fuchsia bougainvillea trailing over the orange wall to find the half moon waiting for me in the afternoon sky.

The first stars in the evening feel a bit like this, too. When I walk at dusk I look for them, alert for that one moment when the sun’s light lessens its hold on the heavens and that first starry glimmer appears. I don’t know many names of the stars and the planets, but I am fond of Venus. When I lived in Todos Santos, it may have been Venus who greeted me in my semi-third floor roost. I’d sit outside under the small corner of roof in a tall chair beside the low parapet. I spent all my free time up there, when I wasn’t working or out walking, feet propped on the metal railing, my world spread out below. I faced southwest. In the mornings I would lean out to the east to watch flamingo clouds, listen to the village roosters taking roll. In the afternoons I’d watch the sun glint off my sliver of sea.

sliver of sea from roost in Todos Santos

moon and Todos Santos sunset from my roost

I can’t count the evenings I sat to watch the sun sink into it, the whole Pacific ablaze. After, I’d watch my hill to the south lose its outline against the blue black sky. But before the colors disappeared, when I spotted that first big shining planet, and after I made my wish, I’d lean way out over the rebar rail, twisting to search for the other stars who made a big cross against the evening sky. I saw it once long after I moved back to the United States, but it was in the wrong part of the sky, at a strange angle, my cross but not. I want to say it is the Southern Cross, but I don’t know where that comes from, like the odd word that pops into your head when you’re working on a crossword puzzle, just as likely to be wrong as it is to be right. I discovered the long narrow cross on my own one night in Todos Santos, and I looked for it every evening after. It felt like the moon feels to me, like a companion, a familiar presence. You are not alone. It whispered to me, sitting in my perch in the late dusk or the dark of early night. And I was ever grateful, I who was so far from home in a foreign land, no firm earth beneath my feet.

Manna from Heaven (9)

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It is April, my first spring break in ten years. I am indulging in yerba maté this week, and my first cup of tea is exquisite. I walked with my lime umbrella this morning, neon green against the bright clouded sky, the rain a gentle rhythm against the fabric, the storm clouds clinging to the rims of our mountains. It made me wish I had my camera. Now the sun is shining and the barest spattering of rain is coming down. My father told me there are Native Americans who believe when this happens, this joining of rain and sunlight, a new moose is born. Today there are two new moose. My empty teacup beside me on the patio table, I open my notebook to write. A small white rectangle of paper drifts out of it, falls into my lap. Auntie Christel’s old cell phone number is scrawled on one side. I turn it over and see it is the tiny flyer for yoga classes in Ajijic. At first, I just stare at the little slip of paper in my hand, dumbstruck. It may as well have fallen from the sky, I think, than to flutter out of my composition book like that, a piece of the world I left behind.

cropped image of the yoga flyer

My mind begins to work again. It must have slipped in the other day when I was using my notebook as a table, writing thank you cards against my knees, paying the dentist bill, when I had my pathetic address book out, stuffed with a crazed fat pile of other little scraps of paper collected over the last handful of years. I remember I picked up the flyer at the health food store in Ajijic, the one next to the nursery at the bottom of my hill, on the frontage road beside the carretera. I bought big bags of yerba maté there from Argentina, the best I’d ever tasted, and the herbal tincture for Sofia’s urinary tract issues. I read the flyer now, surprised I don’t know all the words. When I lived there, I wasn’t really working to build my vocabulary, was just trying to keep up from day to day. I’d understood the gist of the words on the flyer, and that was all I needed. But now I am struck by the language, and I remember the woman wasn’t in practice for the expatriate community there. Indeed, if she had been, I think, the flyer would have been in English. She taught the Mexican community, maybe Mexican tourists, as well. I look up “bienestar,” well-being. “Come and recover your vigor, health and physical well-being.”

I have returned to yoga at last after long years of abandoning it, and now I wonder what it might have been like if I’d returned years earlier. What if I had acted on the longing that awoke in me when I picked this up that day in Ajijic? Would my life have moved differently? I remember the woman taught out of her home in La Floresta. It was in a neighborhood south of the highway, a block, maybe two from the lake on an east-west street. I saw a sign for yoga on a wall there in one of my wanderings. I loved the feeling of those streets, the oldness, the buckled sidewalks, the moss on colored walls, the big trees, the birds, the quiet. The sign for yoga was on a nine-foot painted wall beside a metal gate, a bell. There were huge old trees that canopied the yard behind the wall. I remember standing outside admiring it all. I ached to return to yoga there, to let the peace of that place permeate me. But I didn’t get myself there, and then I moved away.

wall with fuchsia metal door

“Hatha yoga is a discipline that teaches the natural way to live,” her flyer says, and I am struck by that now, by how simple and how true it is. I’m grateful I’ve returned to the practice after more than a decade. And holding this slip of paper in my hands, stroking the Spanish words, evidence of my life in another world, I am struck again by the generous nature of the universe. How many many times are we offered these gifts, these chances to be supported? If I had stayed in Ajijic, would I have made my way one summer morning to Evelia Lara’s home behind that wall, my body eager to return to the practice, the cobblestones wet beneath my feet from last night’s rain? I wonder, and I rub my thumb across the scrap of paper from another life. I marvel, too, at the way it fell from the sky today, manna for All Things Mexico.

Exorcising Demons (7)

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It’s my seventh week, and still I’m afraid each time I won’t have anything “good” to write. I worry I won’t be able to enter in, that “having” to tie my post to Mexico will make it boring or contrived. I worry because I think I have already told you all my good stories about Mexico, my first whale, my magic walking loop in Guanajuato. What else? I have brainstormed lists of things I can write about, and still every week I’m afraid. And I don’t want to spend all year afraid. I want to break through this. Surely I can find things I want to say about a place that goes so deep in me, whose images swim through my days, wade through my sleeping dreams, whose people live inside me–vivid, dark skinned, brown eyes alert and present. I want to find my way in and stay there, watch my blog grow, be happy with what I touch, excited about what’s to come, each new waiting post a pleasure, another chance to write about what I love, what moves me, makes me feel, come alive. I want to banish the damn fear once and for all. (Does it ever work that way?)

Brian laughed at me when I told him. “I’m sorry, ” he said, still laughing his wonderful laugh. “I’m afraid you simply can’t feel that way.” He was teasing but not teasing. I know it defies logic, is ludicrous in light of my scribbled lists of topics. But each week I become tight, braced, hands out in front of me, warding off monsters. Nothing to say? Nothing worth reading? Nothing I can remember well enough? So make it up, I think. You told your readers you might write fiction. So, write fiction, then. Easier said. Maybe I’m really afraid I can’t do Mexico justice. How can I bring Ana to life, laughing in the living room on Aldama? Rodolfo, offering me a taste of his exquisite pipián, eager, watching my reaction? Iris, a wonderful sly smile on her face, bringing me my birthday dinner at Il Giardino? How can I let you know what they meant to me, alone in a strange country, my lifelines there? How can I explain why I almost never call them, how even now my heart breaks a little and my eyes fill? How they weren’t only my anchors, my buoys in a foreign land, but they seemed to love me so completely, took me just as I was, found joy in me?

patio at Las Flores Posada in Todos Santos, my writing notebook on the table

I wipe tears away with the back of my hand from where they pool above my upper lip. One stray one slides down my left cheek. The misters cool the pre-dusk air, and a hummingbird alights on one pointy tip of the big cactus, taking in their moist cloud. For now, my fears abate, chased off by this release, I think, and because I’ve touched these memories for myself, even if I am no more confident of presenting them to you. I breathe, and sigh, sip my water, listen to the evening chatter of the house sparrows in the hedge behind me, the pwitter of the mourning dove’s wings as he flutters to the ground from his perch atop the wooden fence in search of fallen thistle seeds. Maybe, I think, I only need to become present to do this without fear. And maybe that’s where I’m afraid of failing.

[Editor’s note: This photo shows my writing notebook and binoculars on the patio at Las Flores in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur.]