The Night-Blooming Cereus is putting on quite a show in our Colonia San Antonio courtyard tonight.
One night only, folks. By morning these beauties will be withered old crones, bereft of the intoxicating scent currently filling our home.
Rose spotted the — what shall we call it? — the chrysalis of the Cereus earlier this afternoon. Raul our gardener was just as excited to see them — there are two. We missed the blooming of several of the cactus flowers earlier.
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Parque Juarez, with its countless shades of green, sometimes surprises.
This one was a stunner, to me.
A bougainvillea, alone among the carefully parsed trees and bushes, backlit by the late afternoon sun.
It was as if on fire, a brilliant fuschia fire.
Life in San Miguel de Allende is forever magical.
When you least expect it to be.
A reader pointed out yesterday that my blog post on flowers which included some from Cape Cod and Newport, Rhode Island, was sorely lacking, in his opinion.
He essentially asked, How can you post pictures from these two places and not include a single ocean view?
In the writer’s own words, “No cape or Newport there..no ocean in site.”
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In San Miguel de Allende, we call this the rainy season.
Many days, the clouds will roll in during the afternoon and by 5 p.m. or so, there will be rain, thunder, and lightning.
It is happening right now as I write about it. A little early in the day, 1:30 p.m. but nobody ever complains about the rain.
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Sometimes, you just have to go with the material that is right in front of you.
Today, it is nothing more than clouds.
Just clouds.
“You should see the clouds,” Rose calls out to me. I am in my favorite chair, in a cool dark room, battling ignorance and mean people on Twitter. “They’re really beautiful.”
She is right. Rose knows her clouds.
Big beautiful fluffy, floating, languid, lazily hithering and dithering clouds.
Not “looks like rain” clouds. Not trouble-ahead clouds. Not massive gray-dark sheets of roiling angry wetness.
Just legions of marshmallow clouds floating over San Miguel de Allende on a summer’s afternoon.
The kind of clouds in which you can see famous faces, clowns, ghouls, horses, funny dogs, dragons, elephants, and cars.
The kind of clouds for which soft fields of grass were created, so you could lie on your back and see famous faces, clowns, ghouls, horses, funny dogs, dragons, elephants, and cars.
The kind of clouds that inspired Joni Mitchell to write “Both Sides Now.”
The kind of clouds that John Constable painted in sprawling vistas like “The Hay Wain” and “Wivenhoe Park.”
Where would poets be without clouds? Looking at you, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Maybe they are the same clouds, just recycled two centuries later?
Still hanging around, but posing now for iPhones.
Or, the kind of clouds under which young people fall in love and old people fall into reminiscing.
The kind of clouds for which the word “chiaroscuro” was invented.
Nobody can say that, back in the day, they had better clouds than these.
I’ve seen the evidence.
The best clouds ever — and always — are the ones that capture your imagination for a moment, just before morphing into whispy cotton candy swirls.
Timing is everything with clouds.
Pull your head up out of your cell phone, your busy works, your depression, your self-obsession, your shoe gazing — and look up.
Don’t let a day go by without observing the clouds, no matter how many or how few.
Don’t compare them to clouds past. That is not why they are here.
This is no cloud fashion show.
Clouds appear because they are trying to tell us something.
Seek out their shapeshifting secrets.
Learn their names, understand their reasons.
Follow the shadows they cast upon the ground.
You won’t find a pot of gold.
Maybe something better.
Love?
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Thirty things I can not do — according to the 876 e-mails that I just deleted — now that my only debit card has been hacked and terminated by my bank:
I also can not:
Pull pesos out of an ATM machine.
Order a new book from Kindle.
Pay for a meal in a restaurant.
Buy a case of wine.
Load up on dwindling medications.
Get U.S. dollars when I fly to Boston today.
Pay for a hotel room.
Pay for the rental car I reserved a month ago
Pay for gas when I drive to Rhode Island.
On the other hand:
I can sit and read a book
I can write to people
I can call family on the phone and chat
I can sit in the courtyard and ask the birds how they managed before the Internet.
I can turn off, tune out, and drop out.
I can go for a long walk in the countryside.
I can sit in the Jardin and listen to Mariachi bands as the sun sets.
I can sit on the roof terrace and watch the sunset.
I can count the church bells and make sure they are keeping proper time.
And I turned to you and I said No guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature And the father in the garden
–VAN MORRISON, “IN THE GARDEN”
So I sit here in the garden, in the early summer light
A cup of coffee grows cold beside me
In the stillness that morning brings, fleeting stillness
The workers next door have not yet stirred to break the silence
With their hammers and saws and boisterous shouts.
There is still room for the birds in the dense green
To sing their songs, perform their magic,
Find love among the branches.
I don’t know the geography of this garden by name,
Only by the heart, defined by what my eyes take in:
The delicate flowers, the flirty birds, the twisty vines,
The shaded coolness of the branches. So many voices
of green, vying for my attention. I know
Only that it is too beautiful for me to rise and exert my will
Where it is unwanted, unasked for, upon another day.
An empty bag awaits upstairs with a ticket to somewhere far
And I only know I don’t want to leave the garden.
I want to sit here in the peace, in the coolness,
Listening to the plants breathing ever so lightly
Parsing out their secrets ever so lightly
Unlocking a state of grace ever so lightly,
Grace I can not achieve no matter how hard I try.
Outside, mothers and fathers walk their children
Hand in hand to school as church bells chime,
A touch of grace all its own.
I see their shadows pass on frosted windows,
And I sit and listen to the plants.
And listen to the birds.
And listen to the silence.
And my coffee grows cold for I dare not move
I can not move,
I don’t want to move.
I want only to become one
With the stillness.
In the garden.
While there is still time.
You want to hear about how my IT wizard supercharged my streaming media speed so that I can actually watch a movie uninterrupted (sometimes) off my FireStick?
Nah. Me neither.
How about the coming Sriracha shortage because drought conditions in northern Mexico are killing off the chiles harvest and the hot-sauce factory has closed?
You already know that one, huh?
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When I first heard that the Instituto Allende and I were born in the same year I had some mixed feelings.
I mean this venerated arts center on the Ancha de San Antonio in San Miguel de Allende looks ancient. Old stone and mortar. Buildings and walls that go back centuries. An architectural graybeard.
And me, well, I’m … I’m … well, never mind.
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Leopold Bloom poses a tantalizing puzzle in James Joyce’s epic novel “Ulysses”: “cross Dublin without passing a pub.”
Thanks, I suppose, to computers, GPS, and Google maps, that puzzle has been solved many times over. Why you would want to do it, is a puzzle to me. When in Ireland. …
Here’s a tougher puzzle: Walk across Dublin and not see a reference to James Joyce – be it a photograph, a statue, a quote on a wall, a bookstore window, a mural, a pub name, a simple conversation, or a T-shirt in a tourist shop.
It feels like Joyce is Dublin and Dublin is Joyce, and though he has been dead these many decades, the full ripe glory of his passion for this city is everywhere.
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Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 