First Nights

It is a strange feeling to be in a country for the first night. The air seems to move under a different weight, as if adopting its own peculiar walk. In Mexico, that air walks in circles around me with a heavy fullness. The spaces between people are filled with it. It is as if the air becomes the meeting ground for noises and smells and all that combines to make a place. The air has a feeling to it.

I arrived in Mexico this evening, exhausted. After waking up at 4:30AM to catch my flight, I spent the second half of the trip from Chicago to Mexico sitting next to a woman and her three year old daughter - adorable, but lacking in any understanding of good ol' American personal space. I kept scolding myself after picturing the scene from Dirty Dancing - "This is my dance space. This is your dance space." Oh, I should know better than to be this possessive over air.

From Mexico City, I traveled about an hour and a half to Cuernavaca. The trip south begins in the mass traffic jam that is the center of D.F. (Destrito Federal). Street markets, business people, tourists, buses, taxis, bicycles all collide in a wonderful crash of color and sound. Slowely this wonderful commotion begins to subside into city neighborhoods with houses rather than buildings. Cement walls surround the more expensive homes but do not keep out the gentle roar of the city that is like an undertow that keeps these suburbs tied to the city. And then, finally, the roar of the city dies and is replaced the silent music of the mountains. Jagged rocks rise on either side, lined with fluorescent green moss and grass. Then suddenly a valley breaks and there, nestled in the richness of the green are the familiar corrugated tin roofs of little pueblos. A man's horse plods slowely forward while a child runs quickly buy.

Do we know how fortunate we are? Do we realize the richness of cities and pueblos?

I know that it is on these evenings, having arrived again in a new and familiar place that the fullness of the air and the life that it holds suddenly feel more precious. It is on these first nights, before I am used to all that surrounds me that I realize how overwhelmingly full of life and beauty this world is! And then I think, I want to be a part of this world. I want to live here. And then I realize that it is precisely because it is new that I am struck be it, and that this life does surround us, wherever in the world we find ourselves.