HOT, DRY WIND

From the village of Santa Rita to the Rancho the shortest route is by a narrow dirt trail passing through woods on both ends, but with a middle section crossing a broad, open expanse of weedy, semi-abandoned pastures and cornfields. I like biking across that open part. Everywhere else here trees block the winds and limit the sky but, in that middle part, hot, dry wind and dazzling sunlight blast and scorch you, and somehow that just suits me.

I was returning from Santa Rita because in Ek Balam the Internet was down, and Santa Rita has a nice little student-supply shop, a papelería, with five computers and a wifi signal available for ten pesos/hour, about 50¢US. The Internet service is supported by a government program for isolated indigenous communities, to help them integrate. Usually there's a local lady tending the store, often babysitting a kid or two, transfixed by cartoons on a computer.

So, that day, after issuing the latest Newsletter, I'd checked the world news, and as hot, dry, wind and heavy sunlight parched by body, my mind spewed thoughts about essays I'd love to write about what's happening in the world right now.

But, hot, dry wind somehow focuses the mind, and teaches this: Where just a few days before there was lush greenness in which pooled whole worlds of fragile possibilities, the time comes when flowers and fleshy leaves, like dreams, dry up, shrivel, crumble, maybe die. What endures, if anything, is the hard seed, and the tough, knotty rhizome keeping a low profile deep in the dirt. Maybe rains will return, but maybe not. Only the very moment's hot, dry wind is for sure, and maybe that's good enough, unless you've let yourself fall in love with flowers and shadowy moist places amid fleshy leaves.

Somehow that scorched, puckered-up perspective made me remember what happened toward the end of the last rainy season. At that time I'd decided that the spiritual insight I'd been groping toward my whole life finally had taken enough form in my mind to talk about it. And then through my philosopher friend Eric in Mérida, I'd learned that that very insight had a name, "monism," and that Plato had understood it, and untold numbers of thinkers and mystics before and since had, too.

But, instead of humanity embracing the insight, accepting that we are enmeshed in an infinitely complex web of interdependencies among all things, and that we should be careful about screwing things up for our own personal gains, the masses simply ignored it. Among thinkers the concept fractured into conservative, liberal and simply bizarre interpretations that morphed into cultish schools of thought and religion ornamented with ceremonial and administrative add-ons, so that now "monism" is just part of humanity's mental clutter, a minor entry awash in the Wikipedia database.

So, there's no need for more essays, except for the mere fun of writing them. Such essays are flowers at the end of a rainy season, and the world news as manifested on the Internet in the little papelería in Santa Rita testifies that humanity now faces another of its cyclical dry seasons, the character of which the deforested, soil-destroyed, invasive-species-choked middle part of the trail from Santa Rita to the rancho is a harbinger.

Crossing the field I breathe it all in, and breathe it all out, and then I enter the shadowy woods at the other side, and the trail goes on and on until rancho dogs run out barking my welcome home, as in a dream.