“Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden — in all the places.” — The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
It is easy to get lost in a garden,
No matter how small it might be.
There you are, sitting in full possession of your mind
Ready to conjure great things that will soon become
Continue reading
I met a woman, in my dreams last night.
Her senses are scrambled.
She touches through her eyes.
She sees through her nose.
She tastes and smells through her skin.
She listens through her mouth.
She speaks through her ears.
Speaking isn’t a sense. I know.
But this was her dream.
I only happened to walk into it.
“What a fine mess you are in,” I say.
“Or is this a path to enlightenment?
“Or a punishment? Some sad karma?”
Mainly, she remains mute, confused.
As would I, in such a confounding scramble.
I ask her if I could walk a mile in her shoes.
“My shoes?” she cries. “Do you mean to say that I still have feet?”
Just what she didn’t need, someone else in her shoes.
“Are they still at the bottom of my legs?” she asks.
Under the circumstances, it was an unkind thing to say.
Swapping sensual responsibilities has its strengths.
Imagine listening through your mouth,
Drawing in another’s words with your breath.
Savoring them, absorbing them, digesting them.
You would actually have to listen.
Rather than think of some clever retort.
Suppose you speak through your ears.
That requires special talent well beyond small talk.
I don’t even know how it can be done.
My dream offered nothing on this.
Maybe, intently listening is a form of speaking.
Silence does speak volumes as others chatter on.
Putting your senses to work in areas
For which they were not trained
Sounds like a grueling, but potentially rewarding, exercise.
Sort of like the blind man whose other senses
Compensate by growing intensely acute.
Perhaps all senses ought to be rotated once in a while,
Like the tires on your car.
We grow lazy, only hearing through our ears,
Seeing through our eyes, speaking/tasting through our mouths,
feeling through our skin, smelling through our noses.
Shake them up, I say!
And when, again, we grow too comfortable,
Rotate them once more!
Keep the fine treads of our senses staying sharp.
Perhaps if we employ all our senses to share the load —
Let the eyes do the speaking, let the ears do the seeing,
Let the skin replace taste and smell …
Soon, all our sensations grow muscle and power.
Newer sensations arise, previously unknown sensations.
Next thing you know, the heart and brain
Want to engage in this circus of sensations, too.
And, then, won’t things get interesting?
We are fully present in processing our environment
We are fully engaged in evaluating, understanding, inhabiting.
Deep immersion, full immersion, absorption and immersion.
Life gets more interesting because we will be, well … living.
No longer just data-processing and consumption machines.
We are higher beings. At one, for once, with the various universes.
The woman in my dream knows none of this just yet.
She is still trying to …
Touch through her eyes.
See through her nose.
Taste and smell through her skin.
Listen through her mouth.
Speak through her ears.
Find her footing.
I try to tell the woman in my dream that it will get better.
But her face is blank. She betrays no thoughts.
The woman in my dream moves on, back to the shadows.
She seems neither excited nor saddened.
I gather it will take some time.
Perhaps she will come back on another night
And show me what she has learned.
_______________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing and passing on the link to friends. It is all free. To subscribe, click on the three-bar thing at the top of this page (in the red circle). Feel free to share this post!
The locos danced through the afternoon under a hot and humid sun, made more challenging by the layers of costuming and bulky headpieces. After hours of parading and trance-like dance, catharsis must come, a cleansing, a purifying, exhaustion.
I don’t know how they do it.
Still, as the sun began to dip behind the San Antonio church, the locos gave way to the folkloricos.
Continue reading
What’s a Sunday morning without a few crazies parading through the neighborhood?
Empty indeed.
We got our share today. The first of three parades around San Miguel de Allende began at the Parroquia an Antonio de Padua around 10 a.m. and danced down Callejohn San Antonio before hanging a left on the Ancha and heading for Centro.
Continue reading
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” — Pablo Picasso
Spider webs are beautiful things. Unless you walk face-first into one in the dark of night.
Then, not so beautiful. Or interesting.
My friend Sonny once sat for hours on the floor of our Cape Cod house staring at a spider as it wove a stringy orb behind a door. Sonny insisted he learned a lot from observing the construction of the web.
Continue reading
Guitarists walk down Callejon de los Suspiros on a warm San Miguel de Allende morning.
_______________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing and passing on the link to friends. It is all free. To subscribe, click on the three-bar thing at the top of this page (in the red circle). Feel free to share this post!
Wow. Talk about landing on your feet, if only for one Saturday.
Last week, the popular Mercado Sano took a hit when an outside electrical fire forced its closing, through this weekend apparently.
What to do with the hugely popular TOSMA market that occupied the back parking and cavernous storage buildings?
Continue reading
I say it often, perhaps insufferably often for some people, but every day that I step out the front door in San Miguel de Allende, I expect a miracle to happen.
Oh, not a big miracle. Not always.
Just little miracles.
Like the smile on the face of a mother herding her three children toward the church.
Like the carpet of lavender jacaranda flowers worked into a patch of cobblestones.
Continue reading
Maybe if every place had a day when you could blow up life-size papier-mâché effigies of bad people, the world would be a happier place.
I was definitely in a happier place after watching San Miguelians blow up about two-dozen effigies on Easter Sunday. They call them Judases.
I know, not your typical Easter Sunday celebration. Just roll with it and enjoy.
All week San Miguel de Allende has been observing the tragic (or glorious) end of Jesus Christ, reliving his life and death in an almost real-time series of processions and pageantry. By Easter Sunday, the story is largely played out.
Time for some catharsis.
Continue reading
They’ve got it all backward.
The Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City ought to start with the collection of medical harnesses and contraptions that the artist used to alleviate the pain, to stand upright, to obtain a modicum of normality in her life.
Instead, the very devices that she so cleverly hid beneath her layered dresses and shawls come at the end of the journey. They are shocking, horrifying.
They make you, finally, grasp the essence of the pain which dictated and influenced so much of her life and art.
It is only at the end that the courage, the determination, the resilience, the bravery of Frida Kahlo come into the clearest focus.
Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 