In this pocket weighing in pebble by pebble mountains of consequence my passport in that pocket of expat artifice American dollars translate to big houses high walls with shanties built into their pockets poverty that never knocks at carved doors, iron gates shoulder pushed against shoulder on cobbled streets in the same slight tide as…
Category: mexico
Ode to Allan R
Another perfect day. A great day for madcap rehearsals for the massive community theatre show. But was it the power or the water utility responsible? I don’t remember, and the people i’d ask are either dead or otherwise out of touch. Anyway, the town had no water. No water is no big deal as far…
Being Here, Now, Part Two
So, I was saying I met Ram Dass? That is to say, in the library of the good people who invited me to live in their house (and made it seem I was doing them a favour by house-sitting), among the books was this dark purple one, called ‘Be Here Now.’ I’d never seen anything…
Being Here Now, Part One
Long ago, in Mexico, I lived by myself for the first time in my life. All alone, in a traditional Mexican house, which closes firmly to the street, but opens into a courtyard, which ends at a rough stone wall, shared by several neighbourhood houses. I’d lived in that town for about half a year,…
In Honour Of Lifelong Learning, on this Day of the Dead/Dia de los Muertos
With love to Margaret, and all my many beautiful teachers. You are the Gift. Today, I am an adult. I read, long ago, that Cherokee people count 52 as the age of majority, when one attains to the full rights/responsibilities of adulthood. It resonated with me, the notion that, by 52, one’s had kids (if…
1989: Image and Reality
it’s 1989 i’ve become accustomed to the song of cicadas in the patio the nightly drop of avocados morning’s race to get my share before pirate rats taste them all; accustomed to flipping fruit to find toothmarks in the hide and never a glimpse of fur or tail. i’ve grown used to the softness…
1988: Para Empezar
it was 1988 the morning after a thunderstorm that washed part of the mountainside down i caught my first sight of Ajijic. my plane arrived late, and the first i knew of Mexico was rich tropical air, and then, the white-painted waists of roadside trees in the heavy, sub-tropical night. i woke in a room…
Day 26: Blessing Song
when i first came to the city, my fear rode on my back cities don’t love indians. but i didn’t know better than to walk everywhere, because i could. and i began to admit there was life all around me, from the first crack of dandelion leaves up in march, through the stubborn winter song…
Wood Grain Magics
Spent part of the morning staining a fence, observing the swift and easy rise of minutiae by which Life lets us know how relentless it can be. How long, i wondered, would it take for the small legions to take down this fence? A little longer, now, where the stain drags time down to a…
Prairiepomes 