Reflections in an Outdoor Cafe

Sitting in an outdoor cafe in the main square of Guanajuato, acid jazz gently throbbing in the background, people dressed in vibrant colors meandering down the streets. No one is in a hurry in this off-season university town. I dutifully wipe off some chili sauce from one of my fingers, left over from a melted cheese gordita with salsa roja, fried earlier on a huge gently curved round grill. The woman who served me beams when she asks, "Only one?" and I say, "OK, dos, esta mejor." (OK two, it is better).

La gente aquí es muy diferente. Creo que es la falta de tráfico, porque casi todos las calles aqui son demasiado confinado a permitir la pasaje de los carros. Esto crea una tranquilidad que es inapreciable. El coste de la progresa, en nuestras vidas modernas, es posiblemente sencillamente el falta de los sonidos tranquilos de las caminantes y la musica de suyas conversaciónes, y la capacidad a oir nuestros propios pensamientos.*

(The people here are very different. I think it's the absence of traffic, because almost all the streets are too confined to allow the passage of cars. This creates a peace that is without price. The cost of progress, in our modern lives, might simply be the lack of the peaceful sounds of people walking and their animated conversations, and the ability to hear one's own thoughts.)

I find myself beginning to appreciate the beauty of the Spanish language more deeply as I learn it better. Ideas seem to express themselves more freely and simply even in my stilted speech. Hay una riqueza en la lengua de la cual el inglés parece faltar. (There is a richness in the Spanish language that English appears to lack). I understand a little bit better now why my brother Don became enamored with the French language when he was a teenager.

However, I do find myself making up words to facilitate conversation. Two of my favorites are:

• margaritar: to drink margaritas; a regular "ar" verb that could probably be extended to coronar, cervezar, etc. But I think it should be reserved for margaritas.


• noviar: to try to make a woman your novia. This could be used both for men and women, with the understanding that when women noviar they are not necessarily finding a woman. Of course it invites an opposite, soloamigar.

Things I will miss most about Mexico...everyone always paying in cash and never having to stand in long debit/credit card lines, the long summer sun, the locally grown food ending up in tiny tiendas serving homemade gorditas, going for days without seeing a traffic light or even a stop sign, strolling down cobblestone streets dotted with the dung of burros while sipping a large glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Maid service, laundry service, and spending six dollars on a night out. The simple amigability of the Mexicans, animated Spanish conversations with my tutor, and of course los amigos. México, usted ha ganado mi corazón y un pedazo de ello siempre quedara aquí. (Mexico, you have won my heart and stolen a piece of it).

I realize now that el endulzando de mi vida (the sweetening of my life) that I have written about before occurred in Hawaii last August. Something indeed changed me there. The mood comes back easily: the ambient electrically-charged energy of the volcanic rock, the endless ocean spilling wetness into the air, and the majestic coconut palms.

A cab driver, who had been recommended to me by a woman whose life had been forever changed by the work I'd done with her in the seminar, drives slowly through the dusk as we discuss huna teachings. He says he likes my energy, tells me he will rent me a room for $300 and tries to cajole me into staying on the island and letting my flight go off without me. I am tempted to take him up on the offer but am thinking of my rented apartment, the next seminar in Vancouver, and all the work we want to do in our practice groups. I keep his number and while waiting for my plane on one of the beautiful outdoor benches in the damp evening air of the airport a Hawaiian woman from the seminar joins me and hands me another card showing the best web sites to get apartments in Hawaii.

Flying home cramped into a tiny stained seat on a Northwest jet with a six-hundred-pound man slowly expanding in the seat beside me, we pass over the US-Canada border and I instantly feel a cold sticky feeling as if we are making our way through spider webs composed of tiny shards of broken glass. At that moment I realize that with all the changes I will never see Canada with the same eyes again and have a deep knowing that I need to leave the country.

A few weeks later at the Vancouver seminar I meet my new friend Celena who tells me about living in San Miguel and she invites me to come live in the city. I know it is the perfect place and remember telling Terry two years earlier that Plan B was to live in Mexico, that all I needed was a place to go. Not long after this, I write an email to Celena whose energy now seems a little different, forecasting that I´ll be in San Miguel but she will not, which she calls silly. I hope I'm wrong, but of course I'm not, as two or three weeks after I arrive she changes into an entirely different person and essentially breaks off all contact with me. I'm quite upset at first as I was hoping she would introduce me to her healing group and some of her friends. But eventually I remember that she helped open the door to this wonderful place and in an indirect way also to new and interesting parts of myself. And of course the universe does bring me all these things and more, in its own time. It's as if the universe always has a backup plan.

This is what you find when you read some books, that as you near the end the climax consists not of the good guys shooting the bad guys but of revealing a new part of the story that makes the entire previous account a little bit bigger. Hopefully that's the case here!

* If you want to check my Spanish use imtranslator.