For the brokenhearted.

Loving the world as it is.

Lake Chapala, Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. (April, 2023. C.M.)

Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.

If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it,
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

—Lao-tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell

16 MAY—What is it about the earth and its lands? The mountains and meadows, valleys and deserts, rivers and oceans, the wind and rain and snow, the sky and its clouds, the multitudinous colors and fragrances—what makes them so wondrous to the human senses? And how is it that all that beauty can be held in the song of one small bird? Is it that, as if reflected in a mirror, you perceive your own beauty in them—and recognizing home, you come home to yourself?

Exile

My partner and I crossed the border at Laredo on the morning of 21 December and began the final leg of a 2,800 mile odyssey driving deep into Mexico. We were headed to the small village of Ajijic on the north shore of Lake Chapala in the state of Jalisco. It was to be our new home. Like thousands of other people flocking south, we could no longer afford to live in the United States.

A lack of affordable housing, the absence of livable wages, a decline in standards of living—all of these are symptoms of a deeply broken political system. Forced into exile by the policies of a government that prioritizes warfare and corporate profit over the welfare of its citizens—I had become a political refugee. I realized it only later, when the grueling drive had passed into memory, and as anger at having to leave my country set in.

But back to my story.

I’d been looking forward to the final stretch of the journey. It would take us past the city of Monterrey, where a great grandmother had been born and raised—a woman shrouded in mystery, who died young leaving three small children orphaned. For the first time I would be seeing one of my ancestral homelands.

Perhaps I should have expected what lay ahead. Once we’d left New England behind, much of the trip south had been a scene of carnage on a grand scale. We drove through thirteen states and the District of Columbia, down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia with the Blue Ridge Mountains keeping us company, through western Tennessee, across the northwest corner of Georgia, diagonally through Alabama, into Mississippi and out again, across Louisiana and then into Texas.

It was all a blur. The Shenandoah River was a flash of light on water as we hurtled over the short bridge spanning its banks. The bridge over the mighty Mississippi was longer but its dark waters were barely visible beyond the guardrails. These were places I’d heard of and read about and had hoped one day to see. It seemed now I never would. It was not the way to experience what might remain, if indeed anything does, of the beauty that was once America. Not to be missed: The very technology that made our journey possible—the Subaru Forrester we rode in—was implicated in the devastation that unfolded around us.

However unique and distinctive the environments of these states had once been, seen from the highway they were almost indistinguishable—indiscernible even from states I've been through much farther north and west. Miles of land, once forest, field or marsh, were deformed by the metastasizing cancer of suburbia and urban sprawl. I was bearing witness to a truth about my country, about its priorities and values, which are not to be ignored.

All of it reminded me of the lyrics to the 1960’s song Little Boxes. Vast swaths of land had been paved over and covered in strip malls, all featuring the same outlets, restaurant chains, and big box stores, one shopping center identical to the next—monuments to corporate monopoly and the god of profit. In the dense metropolitan areas, monstrous freeway systems were clogged like calcified arteries with trucks and cars pumping poison into the air. Even in rural areas the traffic was ceaseless. Though the towns themselves, especially in Texas, looked deserted and haunted.

Amazingly, none of it had prepared us for Monterrey, Mexico. As we left the border crossing at Laredo behind we noticed a sickly yellow haze hanging over the dessert. 140 miles to the south, the pollution of Monterrey loomed menacingly on the horizon. With increasing wonder, we watched the poisonous dome grow in size over the hours it took us to reach the city.

Monterrey has a long history as an industrial center. With almost no business or environmental regulations, it is rife with corruption. The city was a natural magnet for corporations looking for cheap labor and no oversight. Since the passage of NAFTA in 1994 it has morphed into a toxic wasteland. Countless acres of dessert are covered with manufacturing plants, producing many of the products modern humans are addicted to. Even with the windows rolled tight our eyes and lungs burned and continued to long after we left the city behind.

It was a scene out of The Lord of the Rings. If ever a land looked and smelled like Mordor, dead and smoking, this was it. We were, as my partner said, “driving through the hell of NAFTA.” The devastation of Monterrey was the consequence of globalization, deregulation, and the endless pursuit of profit—the logical end to insatiable greed. 

Mexico. (Unfinished, oil on canvas, 2023. C.M.)

Home

In an empty lot across from our hacienda, construction workers erected a small wooden cross atop a dirt pile. For weeks it sat next to a heap of rubbish that had been crowned with a broken toilet. Just down the road, plastic bottles and assorted garbage litter the shoreline of Lake Chapala. The beautiful and the unsightly mingle and merge in the landscape of Mexico. This is often the case where there is poverty. The sacred and profane exist side-by-side in a way that is both humorous and heartbreaking and that invites one to contemplate deeper truths.

With very few places to walk in our neighborhood, I have adopted the habit of taking short hikes into the mountains during the cool hours of early morning. The terrain is rugged and steep and during the dry season, which is most of the year, the dirt and rocks shift dangerously beneath my feet. I walk slowly and I don’t go far. My purpose, beyond exercise, is solitude and prayer.

It is there in the mountains, in the brown and parched forest that I come home. Within the silence I remember myself and find within my heart the peace and strength to love all things and all beings.

In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese sage Lao-tzu offers in six pithy lines, the antidote to these troubled times,

If powerful men and women
could remain centered in the Tao,
all things would be in harmony.
The world would become a paradise.
All people would be at peace,
and the law would be written in their hearts.

This is what the Buddha meant when he said that the essential nature of things is peace: Within the awakened heart, all things are of the nature of equality. There is not one degree of separation between the profane and sacred, the unsightly and the beautiful. The mind centered in its own Buddha nature, in the Tao, perceives the purity of all things. And perceiving thusly may be the most meaningful response to the ignorance of our time.

If powerful men and women could remain centered in their own nature, all things would be in harmony.

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