Category Archives: photography

Colonia San Antonio, photography, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Surprise encore: For the Queen of the Night, beauty shall not be denied

And the Creator said, “epiphyllum oxypetalum, you shall be a cactus, though you do not look like one. Once a year and only at night, you shall bear forth beautiful flowers while the world sleeps. Before dawn your flowers shall wither away, but only before being ravaged by bats.”

The epiphyllum oxypetalum did not understand this curious fate but it knew better than to argue with the Creator.

Perhaps the Creator felt a little guilty because later, the epiphyllum oxypetalum was given a lovely and pronounceable name: Queen of the Night.

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Colonia San Antonio, photography, San Miguel de Allende

Dress rehearsal for Sunday’s Convite de Locos was crazy, man

Well, this explains so many things: Anthony de Padua is the patron saint of the insane.

Now the Dia de Locos — or Convite de Locos — isn’t so crazy after all.

Well, yes, it is. Crazy, I mean. Very very crazy. In so many delightful ways.

What better way to honor the patron saint of people who have lost their minds than to assemble thousands of people in costumes that suggest they, too, have indeed lost their minds?

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photography, Rants and raves

‘If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.’

“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

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Colonia San Antonio, photography, San Miguel de Allende

Dance! Dance! Dance!

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.

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Colonia San Antonio, photography, Reviews, San Miguel de Allende

Mean girls, marching mice, and mad hatters — season of the Locos launches in San Miguel

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.

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photography, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

An all-natural pod cast on a world wide web

“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.

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photography, San Miguel de Allende

Off to work

Guitarists walk down Callejon de los Suspiros on a warm San Miguel de Allende morning.

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Colonia San Antonio, photography, San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized

TOSMA Saturday market finds a temporary home as a garden of earthly delights

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?

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photography, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

In San Miguel de Allende, give us this day our daily miracle

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.

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photography, Reviews, San Miguel de Allende

Catharsis: Blowing up stuff on Easter Sunday

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.

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