random Mexican mementos

Dinner with Jenn´s boss our last night in Isla Muheres (I owned that game of cards: ¨golf¨)

Wandering down a crocodile pier outside the Coba ruins (alas, I didn´t spot any of the 6 meter reptiles)

Bicycling around the Coba ruins, and being the first of the day (or in history, in my imagination) to conquer Nohoch Mul, the ¨big mound¨.

Trying to learn spanish on the fly, and the taxi driver having great fun with me when I tried to pay him instead of the bus guy (even though he had indicated earlier that was where to buy tickets...meanwhile the bus ticket guy decided to take a break minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave)

Wandering the streets of Coba at night, and feeling more like a traveller than a tourist (a guy getting a haircut from his buddy just outside his grocery shop, kids running down the street, dogs lolling about, a cake being prepared for someone´s birthday while I poked around their shop, and people generally doing what they normally do)

A bus almost hitting the dog that thought the middle of the highway would be the best place to defecate.

Reading voraciously and concluding that a direct relationship exists between reading time and happiness.

Playing in the surf with my Love, and jumping the Caribbean waves together!

Communing with basking iguanas.

Trailing hermit crab sand trails at night by flashlight.

Standing stunned as 10 tigers drove by as we tried to cross the road (of course, the tigers--most of which were white tigers--were not driving, they were in hitched cages)

Waking with the sun that rises outside our cabana in Tulum (and watching the moon rise later and later each evening)

Shifting paradigms

If life is hectic long enough, busy becomes habitual. This past month I have moved cities, hauled everything from my office, tied up work threads, stuffed most possessions into two mobile cubes, and prepared to survive from a backpack for 3 and a half months. The storm of change crashes around me. I have chosen this. Through this storm lies the even sky of the equator. To disengage from my daily habits, to remove myself from expectation and the knots of responsibility, to discover what I did not know--that is the goal.

Each goodbye becomes a reminder of the adventure ahead.

And now, through the magic of physics, Jenn and I have soared from snow to summer.

I take a deep breath.

I am ready to embrace the unknown, to push beyond the zone of comfort, to push myself beyond the person I am today.

Time to let go...