Columns

My wife and I landed in a small pueblo that, on the drive down, no one beyond Jalisco seemed to know of.  We quickly moved into a recently renovated house in Ajijic ... and found home.  This was the early 1960s. 

Putting aside a recent dip into life’s and the electronic world’s bumpy lessons (illusive wifi presence) that mauled a useful column into unintelligible mush, ventures into new territory are exciting, metamorphosing experiences.  But such change demands both unwavering and lively attention.  Thus the Zen Master Ikkyu’s brusk command when asked by a student for “a maxim of highest wisdom.”  Ikkyu slashed his brush across his tablet:  “Attention. attention, attention!”  

President Enrique Peña Nieto is generously feeding a eager and hungry nationwide gambling market, even among near-empty-pocketed campesinos.  He’s stimulating a Niagara-sized, eager exchange of money among betting-inclined folks who find the antics  of Mexico’s chief executive an inexhaustible source of bizarre-loaded – and richly humor-wrapped – gambling game.  (“Chinga!  Not even he would be loco enough to believe something like that doesn’t stink,” said one Jocotepec friend, speaking of Mexico’s president, whom he judged recklessly wayward).    

The Raramuri indigenous people, with a population of about 60,000, are the largest tribe in the Republic north of the Valley of Mexico. With quiet, individualistic determination they cling to the sheer rockslide flanks of some of the most remote barrancas of Mexico, surrounded by a demanding environment in which even the smallest error can be dangerous, a large mistake, fatal.

The disagreement, debate, argument and name-calling regarding the continued public display of the Confederate Flag on government properties – and widely accepted lies about the Confederacy – continues (with a heavy load of irony) today.  This in the wake of killings of nine parishioners at South Carolina’s  Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church June 17.  South Carolina was the first state to secede from the United States on December 20, 1860.  And continues to be the most recalcitrant.

We lay well up on a rising slope, chins on our crossed arms.  It was Father’s Day in the United Sates that morning.  But at that time in Mexico nobody paid that any attention.  Fathers didn’t seem to count.  “You see anything?” my companion said.   A hawk soared high on still wings noting us as he scanned the mountainside.  I nodded at the bird.  “There’s nothing to see.”