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Playa Azul. Michoacán

January 18, 2015. Playa Azul. Michoacán The Tao of the Broom and the Mop Just about wherever I am going doing those ordinary needful things that are an auto trip, gas and bathroom, specifically; I encounter the holy people wielding brooms and mops. They are in the Pemex lots where they sweep across the pavements before the gas tanks, around the stanchions of air and water, around the stands of engine fluids, oil and anti freeze, and in the larger turn around areas. There they are sweeping the detritus left behind from all the other ordinary people like me making auto trips either across their town or across the state. In the convenience stores, there are older women and some men also sweeping with a tall broom and a dust pan on a handle. They sweep and clean and lift the plastic bags, the plastic trays, the plastic cups into the larger plastic bags that hang off the cart that they push around with them. At both MacDonald’s and Burger King where I know I will find fr…

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Beetles are Forever: VW’s are in Mexico!

Well, you were thinking that because of all the smog rules, and the traffic rules and all the other rules (some of which you are not even aware of rules) that the Volkswagen Beetle had about disappeared from the scene. Except, maybe, in some collector’s garage.

Think again. This one I can prove. The following post today is a collection of the Beetles that I have taken pictures of all about the deserts, cities and byways of northern Mexico. Bon Appetit!

A take down souped up model in Culiacan. This might be a BIG mechanic!

The paint attracted me so I turned around and leaned out the window… what you see is what you get…

Side street in Guaymas next to ceme…

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Dateline: Navojoa

January 4, 2015: dateline: Navojoa Se Vende: what’s to sell? Who’s to buy? The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well here in Mexico. It is pushing carts, it is under thatch and plywood board roofs along every highway, it is on the streets of the towns, in the parking lots of the glossy plazas, of Wal-Mart, along the boardwalks at the shoreline, on the right of ways along the highways, at the stop lights in the cities and just about everywhere! The vendors are young and old, many are men, some are women with their children, or there is a husband and his wife holding the baby and herding their offspring among the crowds I witnessed especially on New Year’s Eve in Guaymas. Everywhere are shack and shanty businesses; they coexist with all the other kinds of service establishments built of cement block, plastered and painted bright colors with signs that are the same hand painted and colorful. There is everything from the llantera (tire) places along the highway, hat and…

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This is not exactly a travelogue

January 2, 2015 Guaymas, Mexico This is not exactly a travelogue A while ago I looked up on one of those interesting internet sites that feature synonyms to discover what other words there are besides journey to describe this precedent setting trip to Ecuador. The first obvious one is ‘hegira’ which is actually rather religious in nature like the journey that Mohamed made from Mecca to Medina. It didn’t seem to fit this kind of road trip mostly, I think, because I cannot be classed with any sort of religious figure. Along came the word ‘trek’ but somehow Gene Roddenberry first used this word to his and our advantage quite some time ago. It also made me think of some kind of trail blazing accompanied by other intrepid types seeking to be the first to – trek – unknown territory. Following already paved roads across well mapped countries just wasn’t what this term signified, not to say across parsecs of deep space either. Already done! Along came ‘peregrination’ but …

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It’s Always Best to take Good Advice: Making it to Guaymas

December 31, 2014 It’s Always Best to take Good Advice: Making it to Guaymas The route takes me onward: Sonoyta, Santa Ana, Hermosillo and finally today, the last day of 2014, to Guaymas, even further south in Mexico, from the dry desert to the humid air of the Gulf. I pace myself each day because I simply do not want to drive a great distance each day and the roads, although paved, lined and often with wide shoulders, are not entirely smooth. There are rough spots; there are dips and places across the bridges (puente) where the pavement has not been made even. So the road is somewhat bumpy and it takes a continuing attention to drive especially when the rough and ready big trucks or the sleek modern busses whiz past me doing 110 Km while I am tootling along at a relatively easy slow 80 km, about 50 mph. The kilometer to miles math is about multiplying the number of km by 6 and lopping of a digit to discover mileage. So, I am driving only about 120 to 150 km a day w…

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Jonathan Livingston Seagull

I had not seen much of Jonathan for quite some time since I left the coastal regions of Washington State about 2001. Raven favors the desert uplands where she scavenges for carrion doing her kind of clean up eating also berries and seeds from the Joshua tree and pinyon pines. Family member, Jay inhabits the sierra forest where she dominates with her raucous call and bold ways. But, Jonathan is a coastal bird soaring above the waves from dawn to dusk, congregating in flocks on the beaches also scavenging. There is a certain squat and plumpy waddling majesty to these winged ones padding with webbed feet on the sandbars at shore’s edge. With grave attention to the speed limit in order to make the most of the efficiency of the engine, I rolled down #5 from the Pemex station to San Felipe in search of a bank or some way to turn my American cash into pesos. No dinero, no gas! It was a quite a trip to nurse the gas tanks seeking to discover just what it would take to once a…

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Dateline: Pemex, Mexico #2

Older ladies, and probably gentlemen as well, are awake in the night. Sometimes I am awake for a couple hours, sometimes meditating, in the old time in the coach, I might be working on the computer or sewing. It is a sweet time, quiet and undisturbed because most of the rest of the world in my zone are sleeping, perhaps to be dreaming. And I also waken rather more early here in the van because I do not put up screens across the windows to simulate the dark. Van life is a dawn to dusk reality. Yesterday, I explored the yard where I am parked. It goes back toward the mountains behind quite a distance with a junk yard at the very rear piled in well rusted equipment, trucks, scrap metal, and a magical assortment of unrecognizable metal and wood stuff. There are lean-to buildings that somehow manage to remain upright, spanning the area beneath them also filled with piles of scrap. There were at least two very old mechanical machines which I do not know the purpose and one old …

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Dateline: Pemex, Mexico

The gas company in Mexico is called Pemex. Everywhere in Mexico you will find Pemex and gas is the same price wherever you go. I thought that to be a really great idea. As a van-gabond, gas stations can be terrific places to stop to park, use their bathrooms which are usually decently clean, get gas and even stay for a while, a night only or a few days. After making it through the international boundary Friday afternoon, the confusion of Mexicali confronted me at about 35 miles per hour in near to dusk evening traffic. It was necessary to tune up the intuition quickly because it was obvious there was nothing about that would serve me to park overnight. I took a side street to the west until I realized there was to be nothing there to help me and so I turned around on a side street with the request to find the freeway south. Behold, an almost unmarked entry point presented itself and I turned down the on-ramp onto the freeway. It seems that even drivers in Mexico can be…

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An End Run: The Final Days

The value of friendship cannot be under estimated. Two of the very best showed up on the last Saturday in November to put in a big day loading everything that had been in the coach to stuff the van floor to ceiling and right to the doors. I drove out of the driveway of that very last day complete of an Aguanga friendship which spanned about two and a half years. My gratitude is unbounded for what I experienced in that place which expanded my visionary awareness and solidified my resolve to seek an entirely different kind of end game than what might have been expected of a 75 year old/young woman. In that time, I came to understand that I did not wish to simply wait around for the end of the end game. Somehow, it just did not sit well with me to waste what I have come to know and be to just allow the passage of days without participating at some meaningful level. Once out the driveway, I drove myself to be with two other friends, this time in Anza, where it was utterly obv…

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At last making it to Mexico

It is somewhat of a shock to be in Mexico after the United States with its rather orderly streets and buildings, signs and signal lights, its overall standard of living. Mexicali is chaos after all of this. The streets are narrow without lines anywhere. The stop signs are the same shape, red and they say, ‘alto’ which even the most dense of us can recognize for what they are. The vacant lots are piled in cement scraps, bits and pieces of bricks and wood, and lots of plastic trash. This is desert land and so the underlying dirt is actually beige sand that has a way of blowing everywhere in the slightest wind. Buildings are mostly unpainted often cement or brick and many windows are broken out. There is unruly trash lying around just about everywhere. People are walking on the sidewalks and they look what my mother used to call: shabby with old dirty trousers and sweat shirts. If I was not so curious and willing just to watch, I might be depressed by the distance I observe betwee…

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Journey of the Lotus: Chapter One

Are you wondering how this all begins? I mean the idea of an exit strategy might not be the first thing on your mind today. What I am discovering is that my own idea of an exit strategy began quite some time ago: the late summer of 2011. At that time I was completing an earlier cycle of my life over in Mountain Center. It was showing me how to empower myself and to grow up all over again after 70. It was showing me people who, simply put, were going nowhere. They actually lived in a fantasy world based on their appetites and what it was taking day to day to satisfy their cravings. Some of it was money, some of it was food, some was substances of varying degrees of legitimacy. All of them were downhill freeways to an unanticipated and unrealized futility: literally until they were flat on their ass in the dirt! What the bleep? I like to catch myself before I stumble by paying attention to the rocks in my path that come in the form of messages from all directions and tha…

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Cotesa

COTESA Ricardo Cartin Presidente - EcoConsultor cotesacr@gmail.com Consultores Tecnicos Financieros SA Tecnologías Verdes Alternativas

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Parsha Bereishis – פָּרָשָׁה בְּרֵאשִׁית

https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8165/jewish/Chapter-1.htm#v=1&showrashi=true

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָֽרֶץ

In the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1–6:8 פָּרָשָׁה בְּרֵאשִׁית Rashi comments:

בראשית: אמר רבי יצחק לא היה צריך להתחיל [את] התורה אלא (שמות יב ב) מהחודש הזה לכם, שהיא מצוה ראשונה שנצטוו [בה] ישראל, ומה טעם פתח בבראשית, משום (תהלים קיא ו) כח מעשיו הגיד לעמו לתת להם נחלת גוים, שאם יאמרו אומות העולם לישראל לסטים אתם, שכבשתם ארצות שבעה גוים, הם אומרים להם כל הארץ של הקב"ה היא, הוא בראה ונתנה לאשר ישר בעיניו, ברצונו נתנה להם וברצונו נטלה מהם ונתנה לנו:

In the beginning: Said Rabbi Isaac: It was not necessary to begin the Torah except from “This month is to you,” (Exod. 12:2) which is the first commandment that the Israelites were commanded, (for the main purpose of the Torah is its commandments, and although several com…

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Nibiru Artlive Poem

"Come little children, I`ll take thee away, Into a Land of Enchantment. Come little children, The time`s come to play, Here in my Garden of Shadows. Follow sweet children, I`ll show thee the way, Through all the pain and the sorrows. Weep not poor children, For life is this way, Murdering beauty and passions. Hush now dear children, It must be this way, Too weary of life and deceptions. Rest now my children, For soon we`ll away, Into the calm and the quiet. Come little children, I`ll take thee away, Into a Land of Enchantment. Come little children, The time`s come to play, Here in my Garden of Shadows."

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