Ceiba fuzz
CEIBA FUZZBALLS

A few weeks ago our big dry-season-leafless Ceiba trees bore developing fruits. Now the fruits are mature and splitting open, allowing balls of cottony fluff to form around the husks, as shown above. As the cottonballs age they'll slowly expand and individual tufts of cotton will detach in the wind, each tuft bearing within a single Ceiba seed.

On a hot, sunny, windy noon I was walking out of Tepakán when a certain gust of wind brought dozens of brilliantly white, egg-size fluffballs around me. In the sky above, many fluffballs were carried along in a gushing, kinky breeze headed westward. Sometimes the wind-current dipped into the street, then maybe it swooped back high, always generally westward, toward Teya. It was like when a snowstorm's first big flakes start falling, or when certain butterfly species mass-migrate along beaches or over rivers; a powerful sense of movement, of intention, of elegance.

Two buildings down, all day long a fellow welds together iron gates and fences, with his radio blaring that kind of monotonously bouncy, cheerful, mindless music most Mexicans like to listen to, so the Ceiba fuzz surged and soared through that, too. And, across the street, an old Maya lady in her pretty embroidered huipil sat onto the sunlight-dazed street curb to mend one of her flipflops that had come undone, so she, the gushing Ceiba fuzz and burbling music and sizzling heat had me standing there in it all looking around mouth-opened so recklessly that like a drunk I kept almost falling, spinning around, stumbling, watching flock after flock of fuzzballs sweeping by.

The fluffballs must have come from a big Ceiba on the east side of town, beyond the rooftops and church steeple I could see. In the dizziness of my swirling around, the funny thought occurred to me that that big, invisible Ceiba was almost like some kind of mythological god generating dazzling creations to populate a surging, inexplicable Universe and, as with all mythologies, the mythology itself is myth, but the truths being transmitted by it are real, maybe even transcendent, ceiba-fluffball-like.

I laughed a little right then, partly from the gorgeousness of the moment, and partly from the fact that it's so screwy how I can't keep from seeing big things in little things, everything saying the same thing as something much grander it's part of, fractal-like, and that somehow everything I think about seems to be gushing forward, evolving, absolutely without any kind of explanation as to why, where, what, how, when, but leaving a notion, almost a kind of residual flavor or hue, that it's all One Thing.

And right then all of a sudden the wind dropped, the music gave way to an announcer, and the old Maya lady slipped on her fixed flipflop, got up, and went the other way. And in my own plodding manner I continued on westward, and somehow got to this little stone hut in the woods, where I almost feel self-indulgent to admit that even this moment most certainly is just another manifestation of the One Thing being Herself all the time.