In San Pedro Town this afternoon, after school, a couple of boys come up with their own game. Tarzan’s jungle can be any place on the planet as long as there is a little boy who puts two and two together.
One of the boys grabs one end of a dangling palm branch, holds on, then swings himself out over the beach and water and back to dry land. The branch might break and send him crashing but it is a risk worth taking.
While he swings, the other boy waits his turn.
A couple of girls, outside the picture, shake their heads and call the boy’s crazy.
And, we are.
There are at least two hundred invited guests but anyone can join this wedding..
Wayos is a popular beach bar in San Pedro Town and Wayo, pronounced Y -oh, is a popular owner.
When the groom arrives in a black golf cart limo, there is applause and cheers. As always, his bar is open and weather is uncooperative. It rains in spurts and people crowd under tents, roof overhangs, and in the bar to escape another torrential downpour.
The wedding ceremony is short and the couple recites handwritten vows under a big tent overlooking the Caribbean Sea.. They promise to honor and cherish and encourage and support each other, and, in front of important people in their life, draw a big heart in the sand with their names inside it.
Before, during, and after the ceremony, people re-connect. It is a close knit group on this Isla Bonita and meeting people is not difficult here. When people come here they cast time and routine out of the boat and lifting anchors that hold them elsewhere.
It is a good wedding and a happy time.
Nature isn’t co-operating but another lady well wisher, standing next to me, tells me it is good luck to be married on a rainy day.
If that is so, this couple will have enough luck to take care of all of us.
From eleven to twelve, the Walkaholics stroll from Crazy Canuck’s to Wayo’s without wetting a whistle.
From twelve to four, on the way back, there are stops at the Sandbar for drinks and lunch, Licks, the Runway Bar and Crazy Canuck’s for more drinks and toasts.
The sun and surf and sky give us a show.
We are numbers in a mathematical equation, written on a chalkboard, described by Einstein and Newton, buzzing in time and space like sand fleas on a great sand beach. The equation looks like a bird nest.
There are times when the universe’s mystery puts your skull in a nutcracker and cracks your head wide open until the confetti inside is picked up by the afternoon breeze and scattered.
There are several water taxis in Ambergris Caye. The Belize Express goes to Caye Caulker and Belize City on a two hour schedule, and Chetumal, Mexico and back once a day.
Inside the enclosed boat we are shaded from intense sun.
We follow the reef as we head north back to San Pedro Town from Caye Caulker. Sea colors are blue, green, with white crested breaking waves to our left.
When you see a moving boat coming towards you, you look at it with relief.
Looking at stillness too long changes things between your ears.
Ak’Bol was built into a business by a couple who came to Belize twenty years ago with a dream of nature, health, spirit, and capitalism. The entrance is not well announced and if you are driving you will zip right past in your sprint for bigger resorts on the north tip of Ambergris Caye. Along the new paved road north, Ak’Bol just has a simple sign, is a clearing in the jungle down a winding shady path to the Yoga Retreat.
Sitting at the breakfast bar is a mix of young and old, long hair and no hair, hippie chicks and old men with pony tails who never let the sixties loose.
I talk with a young woman who stands as she eats eggs benedict and tells me about her inner child and achieving adult battles and her boyfriend who is from Taos, likes to fish, and is on the pier in the moment.
A couple to my right are checking e mails, Facebook, Google and nursing health drinks.
The Ak’Bol menu has a section for drinks with alcohol, if you want them, and the coffee is Guatemalan. It is a natural setting and, checking their website, affordable. Visitors seem friendly to talk with like minded souls. Food is moderately priced, and judging from empty plates- good.
On my American Airlines flight from Dallas to Belize City I overheard a local telling visitors about places they might like to check out on the island.
” Ak’Bol is very good, ” he said. ” The food is wonderful and the people are nice and the pier is a good place to snorkel the reef. ”
I can see, on this visit, that reconciling your inner child and achieving adult is a herculean task for which yoga and eggs benedict is the best answer.
Going out without an umbrella is taking a risk in San Pedro Town.
Rain is forecast and today doesn’t disappoint. A woman, passing in a golf cart, waves back at me while I video this drenching.
The storm is over in fifteen minutes. It gets hot and humid as water begins to evaporate, flows into low spots, and soaks into sandy soil.
Residents love rain and talk ruefully about dry season.
” In summer, ” they remind me, ” you would sell your own mother for a rain like this. ”
My mother would be the first to tell me to enjoy this moment today.
When the rain is done, I head back to my lodgings, walking down a dirt path that looks like an aerial view of Minnesota’s 11,884 lakes.
Not even a mother knows where her kid’s will end up and what they will or won’t accomplish.
Life, as a puddle swallows my right tennis shoe and rain water soaks my tennis socks, is mostly a blessing, as long as we feel it that way.
This passport takes me to 2021, well past end of the world forecasts.
Closing in on Belize, an airline steward passes out forms to be completed in ink for Customs and Immigration Officers in Belize City. These days all travelers need a Passport and are asked to provide one as a prerequisite for International travel.
The Passport is an odd document, more legal than personal, more business than pleasure. If you really want to know about someone you shouldn’t ask for their Passport; you should ask for their diary.
These days the Passport lets me move about the world in anonymity. Governments, who can barely keep roads paved, are not going to get to know me well enough to know if they are safe from me by looking at my Passport.
I complete forms because I am told I have to.
Do people run the State, or does the State run people?
If I don’t belong to myself, to whom do I belong ?
It isn’t here yet but Halloween is galloping down the road and the headless horseman will soon be here.
New Mexico and Mexico have much in common this time of year as our town celebrates both Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos or ” Day of the Dead. ”
There is no border between the countries of Mexico and the United States and buses run regular from Juarez to Albuquerque. Everyone here knows border talk is just talk and the cultures of North, South and Central America are merging like shoppers at a great flea market.
Brother Mark, visiting for a few days from Denver, wants a photo in front of the Breaking Bad Bus that takes visitors on a tour of Albuquerque locations featured on the popular TV series of the same name.
Shopping, we find pinon incense for his wife Leigh in one of the shops off the main plaza. There are also flashy ceramic tiles, polished rocks, pinon coffee, chili socks, wooden Indians, serapes, Day of the Dead skulls and statues, turquoise jewelry. One shop has Breaking Bad posters on the wall, and, in another, Sheldon looks at the world with his Big Bang Theory.
When you say the words Halloween and Albuquerque, over and over again, you start to lose your mind.
On the way out of Old Town, I scratch my head to make sure it is still up there, and, thankfully,it is.
I’m on my way soon for Belize and Ecuador.
I don’t, like this headless horseman, want to go anywhere without having something between my two ears.
.
Music is accessible.
You can be wearing a tuxedo and tails, coveralls, golf shorts, uniforms, diapers, or your birthday suit, and it sounds great. You can be wearing a wedding dress, a pearl necklace, spiked heels, a flimsy cocktail party dress, cowboy boots, turquoise earrings or a bikini and it sounds great. You can be white haired, bald, or a long hair and enjoy. You do not need to know how to read or write to get the rhythm right.
This afternoon a little girl stands in front of the Band with her father’s approving look and does an impromptu dance.
She can do worse than hang out with serious musicians wearing suits and swinging with intent.
There is her future ahead.
Possibly she will fall in love with a man who fits her and walk down the aisle with her father holding her arm to be given, with her father’s blessing, to a lucky guy? Possibly she will have happy children and a family? Maybe she will fall into a career that fits her abilities and interests?
This afternoon the band plays and people move into and out of the picture. Some tarry. Some show appreciation. Others barrel through the moment like ordnance in World War 1. Some try to avoid the camera.
Music speaks across place, time, people and ideology – in its own voice.
When local rancher Mack Brazell found extraterrestrial debris on his ranch and reported it to the local Sheriff a Pandora’s box was opened.
The local Sheriff called the local Air Force Base and a whirlwind of misinformation, disinformation, cover up was begun.
The Roswell Incident is known around the world, and, at its epicenter, Roswell has a museum dedicated to UFO’s and alien visits from that summer of 1947.
On Sunday, when people should be in church, inquisitive souls browse this museum, watch a Hollywood movie on ” Roswell “, snap pictures to post to their Facebook page.
The story, as told, is one of an alien crash and dead alien bodies. Mack reported strange metal scraps strewn over the desert with strange inscriptions that were impervious to destruction and, when squeezed, returned to their original shape. A mortician reported small bodies with four fingers and large eyes. There were sworn deathbed statements that documented unearthly events.
Official reports promoted weather balloons.
It is a question of faith in the absence of facts. Participants in the event have died, committed suicide, or told survivors what they saw, or did, or knew.
I wrestle with thinking versus intuition.
The explosion of technology, after 1947, is significant. The automobile was still a youngster on the block.. Television was barely into living rooms of the most wealthy. Then, after 1947, you get exponential scientific breakthroughs.
What our government is working on, in secret, is beyond this planet.
Did Einstein sit up nights discussing the universe with green men?
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