On the wall of a shop,these Cupid twins smile lustily, with a trace of the Devil in their expressions.
Cupids are often known to have smiling faces, flowing blond hair,rotund bodies. They fly in the air with ease and are particularly in evidence in palace gardens where men and women socialized in times past, held heart to heart talks on shaded benches and exchanged beautifully penned letters.
In this shop, the twins share one arrow and one common purpose – to release their arrow into unsuspecting humans and send them into the tizzies and trifles of love.
Poets, from Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams, extol the virtues, joy, pitfalls and pratfalls of love, a human condition celebrated on Valentine’s Day with flowers, cards, gifts, fond words, grand gestures.
None are immune from Cupid’s arrows and these grinning faces already have plans for this evening when they will fly out a partially opened window, buzz the town, and find victims.
Once shot by an arrow the results are not fatal, but wounded lovers sometimes yearn for death instead of living with the pangs of love.
Love and lust have little in common but they often bump each other in the night.
Along the Hotel Zone main road in Tulum, Mexico there are diversions.
There are small coffee shops that sell Mexican coffee, flavored with sugar, and delicious pastries for individual palates. Restaurants push seafood, Indian food, Italian, Chinese, Vegan and Mexican cuisine.Bars serve late at night and hotels have Vacancy signs hanging where they can be seen. Boutiques display designer clothes for women who need to look good, always, whether they are on the beach, dancing in a disco, taking kids to soccer practice or listening to pickup lines in the grocery.
Moments before this photo is snapped, a long legged woman in red, positions two mannikins on the street in front of her shop.She carries one out to the street under her arm and stands it next to the other.
With both mannikins positioned she turns and strides back to open her business. It is early in the morning and only a few vehicles are on the road. Light filters through trees and through her loose fitting dress that moves seductively as she walks.
It is not difficult to see who is and who isn’t a mannikin.
Movement shows life.
Rock colored birds face the wind so their bodies aren’t scattered like bowling pins.
Pelicans circle us above, dive like missiles, their pointed beaks becoming spears, surfacing with wiggling fish.
Sea colors, shades of green and blue, modulate.
Waves move as far onto land as they can go, then recede from our toes..
Fitting into nature, seamlessly, was what was lost in our Fall from paradise.
Now, we are observers of nature, on the outside, looking in.
At dinnertime, a pelican begins his dive.
He circles his target, turns himself into a projectile by tucking his wings to his body,and disappears head first into the surf. When he comes back to the water’s surface, he shakes his wings and recomposes, a fish struggling in his enormous beak.
Not long after, a fisherman wades into the pelican’s same fishing hole, net in hand, and the pelican takes off like a seaplane from an Alaskan lake.
The fisherman moves slowly, studies the waves, the light, the wind.
Positioning himself, he casts his handheld net with both hands,lets his net fall to the bottom, then draws it back towards him with a rope line, hand over hand. When he drags his net onto the beach it holds silvery fish twisting in the bright sunlight.
He and his friend transfer fish from the net into a plastic bag, then lift up and climb back on their bicycles and pedal home, the net draped over a bike’s handle bars to drip dry.
If you live simply, how much of the day needs to be used up working?
What is so important to us that we work sixty hours a week?
There are several postcards about keys on Scotttreks.
There is one postcard on a Montevideo door lock and three keys that look the same. There is one postcard on a break and enter situation in Belize when Jack’s renter doesn’t leave a key and he has to get his AirBnB apartment ready for a new tenant coming soon. There is one postcard on a key found at an Albuquerque golf course parking lot, the key to the box of forgotten dreams. Now, there is one postcard on a bent key to room number 10 at the Yoga Shala in Tulum, Mexico.
At the beach, you don’t have pockets. This key and its colorful leather chain fit comfortably around my neck.
The odd thing about this key is it’s severe bend..
It took a lot of not paying attention to do this kind of damage.
Where this bend comes from is a story known to Angelique in the Yoga Shala office. She reminds me ,when I mention it ,that she has another key to my room if this one fails to work.
In Mexico, there is no need to fix anything if it isn’t broken.
When you walk in Tulum, you become accustomed to meeting bones.
There are full fledged skeletons sitting on park benches, skulls with sunglasses and jaunty caps on shop shelves, brightly colored ceramic skulls with smiling teeth and bulging eyes. It is February and Halloween has long since been packed away in warehouses.
In Mexico and other warm climates, death is never packed away. It is on display and in your face as you sip coffee, have a pina colada on the beach, drive in a taxi to a tantalizing tourist adventure.
I sit next to this fellow and have a conversation about the best beer in town.
He tells me he misses drinking,going fishing, his wife and kids.
He tells me he doesn’t have much advice, but his all time best advice is that ” people hang themselves in their own nooses.”
I ask him, gently, what noose caught him?
He turns and smiles at me with good teeth, and says, ” You got an hour? ”
Tides are capricious.
Some places on this beach you find no nasty presents from high tide. There is white sand, pools of trapped sea water, an occasional shell. Other places you find a narrow strip of seaweed, like Christmas tinsel on a living room floor. In the worst places you find piles of seaweed drying in the sun, an obstacle to beachcombers and an offense to noses.
Early morning, hotels hire men with shovels and rakes to move the unwanted seaweed and beach debris. Sometimes they cart it away in wheelbarrows, dig holes and bury it, cover it up with sand, or,best yet, haul it off in a wagon pulled by a tractor.
Each morning there is a new batch to be disposed of.
Even in paradise there are menial chores that wash up on our beaches. For every happy tourist, in a beach chair, there are two or three locals working behind the scene to make the place postcard perfect.
It doesn’t take more than a whiff to know that shoveling seaweed is a job waiting for Mike Rowe to put on his television show..
This is a job that makes me appreciate roofing, concrete work, painting, digging swimming pools, having to assign student grades and facing an overflowing class of maniac eighth graders.
Today, I’ve met a job worse than most of those I have had to do.
Cats are everywhere in Tulum, Mexico.
These gatos sleep during the day and hunt at night. Even when asleep they can wake instantly, move into a predatory stance, run up a tree trunk to safety amid sea grape leaves. They are used to people, allow themselves to be stroked, take food offerings when they can get them. They have no collars, no tags.
Cats have perfected the art of being asleep and awake at the same time, the art of living in the moment that humans at Yoga Shala work to achieve on their mats, doing deep breathing exercises, twisting their limbs into pretzels, listening to the voice of a guru who is where they want to be.
Studying cats is my plan of the day.
The ability to take cat naps is worth all the study I can give it.
The sea changes like a model’s face.
One moment it is smooth as glass all the way to the horizon, the meeting of water and sky straight as a pencil line drawn by laying a ruler down. The horizon is so straight that you believe the world is flat like old explorers believed and imagine their fear as superstitious sailors neared the edge of their world, as they knew it.
On good days, the water is turquoise, clear, and you can see white sand twenty feet underneath blue waves.
Palm trees move in the wind like a sea of jungle ants scavenging on the jungle floor. Leaves in the canopy move all directions and it is difficult to see what direction the wind comes until you look at the slant of the tree trunks.
It is no lucky accident Mayan royalty built their retreat here but they had no idea it would become a tourist zone for foreigners looking for paradise outside their own urban concrete and steel jungles.
The Mayan’s couldn’t totally duplicate, in their culture ,the richness of what they saw around them, but they could and did pay homage to the God’s that led them here.
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