On this day, Gwen graduates from kindergarten at a local community center.
It takes some urging to go on stage with her aunt April, but she walks on and is recognized.There are recitations by some of the kids, comments by teacher’s and invited guests, a small lunch afterwards.
We have no crystal balls to know the future.
We hope Gwen has many graduation ceremonies, has dreams and achieves them, takes advantage of her abilities, compensates for her shortcomings, finds the people she needs to find.
By the end of the ceremony, balloons are broken or fly up and away into the coconut trees.
Proud parents and relatives walk home with one hand on a paper certificate, the other holding the hand of their future.
Buildings on Marinduque run the gamut from simple to complex.
They can be as small as this tiny wood frame square box with a thatched roof, unscreened windows, padlocked front door, built off the ground, no air conditioning ,no electric, no plumbing.
They can also be more modern with fancy windows, air conditioning, tiled bathrooms and kitchens with huge refrigerators, huge electrical panels and hot water when you want it.
Buildings here are nailed or screwed together, formed in concrete pours by the wheelbarrow,walls bonded by rebar to hold up to flooding and typhoons that can last for days.
Local wisdom says to start your building from scratch in Mogpog to get the best value for your money.
Local legend has it that the last family to rent this little wood house saw their kids playing with ghosts and moved out in the middle of the same night.
It hasn’t been occupied since.
Airports are portals to the world.
The Denver International Airport was built in cow pastures to the east of Denver, after Stapleton closed, and was turned into condos.
To fly out of Denver you follow I-70 east till you see white sails in the country, shuttle parking lots, arrival and departure ramps, east and west terminals. There are other ways to see our world but by air is the quickest and most dominant. Percentage wise, air travel is safer than walking to your local grocery.
Airports have not been designed for long term comfort though, which causes sleepless nights for those of us who travel.
This trip, the quietest place to sleep, is an interfaith chapel in the east terminal overlooking TSA processing on the commons below.. A note on the chapel doors reminds you not to put your feet on chairs, move furniture, leave trash, or interrupt prayers.
This spiritual portal should be full of travelers since we are all about to board aluminum cans and be carried thirty thousand feet up into the sky, but no one is here but me.
The screening to get on planes is daunting, but nothing compared to the screening we have to go through to get into Heaven.
I admire Mark Twain’s quip that ” I want to go to heaven for the climate, but go to Hell for the company. ”
Stuck in the airport till my flight boards for Manilla , early in the morning, I am feeling like Hell will not be a place I want to go even if Twain says the company is good.
I bet the seats down there will be several sizes too small and the sound system will be blasting rap music as loud as it will go.
Yoga studios are prevalent in Tulum.
At nine sharp, practitioners dress in loose fitting clothes, clutch their orange or green mats, make their way into the yoga studio and begin exercises with a background of soothing music and the reassuring voice of a Yoga master who has learned the same way, on a bare floor in some distant part of the world.
Yoga Shala is similar to many of the hostels here, a compound of thatched roof cabanas, most with shared bathrooms, limited cooking facilities and wide open air porches for catching sea breezes and writing in notebooks in the afternoon.
On a wall at the head of outside stairs leading up to my second floor bungalow is a circle of painted Yoga positions, each position taking years of work and concentration to achieve.
Living without amenities grows on you.
Doing simple things well is hard work.
Learning how to breath was never something I used to have to think about.
At this point in our acquaintance,I’m not sure Yoga and I are meant for each other.
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.
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? ”
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.
There is water wherever you look, but it tastes salty and won’t take away your thirst.
Water falls from the sky, but, on land flatter than a tabletop, it doesn’t run into rivers and down into the sea. Water seeps into the ground and collects in cenotes, underground caverns with stalactites and stalagmites, blue blue water, fish and turtles. There are rumors that ancient Mayans dropped their sacrifices into these cenotes weighted with heavy stones.
This history doesn’t deter us tourists from donning brightly colored snorkels and masks, showering, slipping into the cool waters, following rope lines into underground caverns lit from underneath with lights, over thirty feet deep.
This particular Gran Cenote is written up in guide books as having colorful fish, but, for the record – the fish are small, not in a multitude, and not at all colorful.
On this morning tour buses out front of the attraction are already unloaded, overweight men and women parading in swimming attire to the pools, Mayan descendants renting them towels and equipment.
There are a few scuba divers who can swim far underwater in the caverns, holding underwater lights, that swim farther than we can and see what the rest of us can only imagine.,
When they surface, they look exhilerated,
Places where the insides of the Earth open up have always attracted the curious.
I don’t see dead bodies but my shivers remind me there is much more we don’t see, than what we do.
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