Structure
One

Living in the moment. The jungle claims Calakmul. The past is forgotten. (Map this!)

For several days, I have been thinking on and off, about the comment Jan made about living in the moment. I was first introduced to this theme when I was studying Sartre several years ago, about our relationship to the past and to the future. What are these places, the past and the future? The future is a fictitious place that can never be reached because it always lies just beyond our realm, our event horizon. The past is an even stranger place, crudely drawn from our very imperfect ability to remember it. It may not even exist at all, as a perfectly consistent world view can follow from the proposition that the world is only five minutes old, brilliantly constructed to appear as if it is billions of years old. Or, for some, 6,000 years old.

Colorful Wild Turkeys.

The only time we can have any degree of certainty about is the moment we are living in. The time is always NOW! But, somehow, anxiety and expectation about the future and regrets and triumphs of the past color our experience of the moment. How can I free myself of these shackles and enjoy the very “now-ness” of time? Even the previous statement shows coloring of the future, it shows an expectation to “enjoy” the moment, rather than just “be”, let it just pass over like water.

Living in the moment

The ruined Maya city of Calakmul takes some effort to visit and a degree of roughing it while there. A huge center in its day, archaeologists have identified over 7,000 structures scattered throughout the humid jungle, including two massive Peten style pyramids that have been excavated. Calakmul fought and defeated some of the more well known Maya cities including Palenque and Tikal and extended its control over a vast region with a combination of alliance and war. Their buildings exude pride and permanence, how many of our buildings today would last over a thousand years without maintenance?

Deadly Embrace.

Calakmul today is largely jungle, visited by the occasional intrepid tourist willing to suffer a little. Suppose that a resident of Calakmul from its heyday were to be transported here to see the crumbling buildings claimed by the trees and obliterated stelae featuring forgotten personages. Now suppose that he is transported back with the knowledge of Calakmul’s Ozymandian fate – would he work just as hard to preserve a legacy destined to be largely forgotten? Or maybe he might attempt to live more in the NOW, since that is all there really is? Calakmul is a living example that the past is destined to be forgotten, and the future never is as it is predicted to be.

Green Tide	Mesoamerican Ball Court

How
Relaxing!

Curious geological formations. The betrayal of the Cocom’s. Learning swimming.

In the Yucatan one finds the curious geological formations known as Cenotes which are formed by a collapse in the limestone to reveal the water table contained within. The most interesting and scientifically romantic cause of Cenotes is the Chixhulub meteor which exterminated the dinosaurs and as a small side effect caused a collapse in the limestone to create cenotes.

Improvised Life Jacket.

Cenotes come in an amazing variety of forms – ones that are completely open, those that are fully enclosed by a cavern, and ones that have a partially collapsed roof that admit a dramatic shaft of light that illuminates the emerald green water. The latter are the most dramatic – close to Valladolid there is one that has the long roots of a tree reaching down into the cavern onto an internal island.

The Maya revere cenotes, as well they should, since they provide the only water during the dry season. So what better way to revere a deep body of water than to throw stuff into it? Dredging the sacred cenote at Chichen Itza revealed human skeletons, jewelery, and copious quantities of the sacred blue color.

In the 1500’s the Xiu ruler wanted to make a pilgrimage to a sacred cenote to celebrate a victory over the Spaniards and presumably to throw stuff into it. As luck would have it the route passed through Sotuta, capital of the rival Cocom dynasty. The ruler, Nachi Cocom, remembering the slight that the Xiu’s had committed against his great-grandfather, craftily agreed to provide safe passage for the King and his entourage. After four days of intense feasting and good cheer the Cocom’s fell upon their Xiu rivals and slaughtered them to a man. The resulting internecine carnage allowed the Spaniards to conquer and dominate the Yucatan for almost four hundred years.

Happy together!

As with the Maya, cenotes have taken on a special meaning for us. They provide an excellent learning environment for aspiring swimmers and it is here that Neena honed her skills to tackle the wilder environs of the Caribbean Sea. These deep sink holes that no Dinosaur swam in will always have a special place in my heart.

Cool guy

April 3rd, 1965 – April 3rd, 2008 – Shreesh completes 43 years.

The Mexican way of saying “Happy Birthday” is to sing “La Mañanita“. In Oaxaca, staying as we were in an affluent neighborhood, we would hear mariachis at dawn singing exactly this song, filling the first waking moments of the birthday boy or girl with it. Well I couldn’t really hire mariachis for Shreesh, but he did get his Mañanita sung for him by a really nice Mexican couple at Tulum, in one of the few precious shady spots at the site.

Tulum

Tulum is a lovely Maya city in the quirky sounding state of Quintana Roo, with an unbeatable view of the ocean. Cooling breezes from the sea uplift the dense cloak of heat that pervades the area since 8:00 in the morning. After staring royally out like a Mayan prince across the ocean like the helpful sign suggested, Shreesh celebrated his birthday by swimming in the cool blue Carribean Sea with the Mayan ruins a forming wonderful backdrop.

In the evening we celebrated by eating at an Italian restaurant that had something no Mexican restaurant seems to have – a good glass of wine. Why is it that we think of Italian food and good wine to celebrate a special occasion? This is not comfort food for us, neither one of us grew up in households that regularly cooked Italian food. It may be that every bite of pasta brings back memories of our life together and we get a chance to re-live those moments. We remember going to Italy for the first time with our close friends Fred and Ada and Jonathan; of taking Italian classes and making lifelong friends there, Liz, Barbara, Jerzy, Ayse and hence Tom and Ian.

What is he doing?

We think of our inspirational teacher Francesca whose opera classes opened up a whole new delightful world for us and of studying Dante with Stefania. It also brings back bittersweet memories of Pietro or Peter who is no more with us.

And as the flavors of the tagliatelle combine with the Soave I am drinking, we think of making spaghetti bolognese with Pavarotti blasting in the background, of the numerous happy evenings (and sometime days) spent cooking in our tiny kitchen at 645 Stockton St. Each sip of the Lagrein brings back the many pleasurable evenings at Bacar, one of the first few wine bars in San Francisco, spent learning of and enjoying the various and complex European, American and Australian wines with the help of Andrea Immer’s excellent book. And as the osso buco (even if it was the wrong cut) melts in our mouth, we remember our next door neighbors Salvatore and Amanda, who are getting married this year; Salvatore’s first attempts at hand rolling pasta on the floor; tasting the wonderful wines that Amanda would bring over.

Sleeping in comfort

And we remember Tom’s ski cabin up at Tahoe and the many evenings spent drinking wine, eating pasta from the Earthly Delights deli and watching movies like “Coffee and Cigarettes” with our ski cabin buddies after an exhausting day skiing the chutes of Granite Chief or the steep, wonderful slopes of High Yellow at Alpine Meadows ski resort.

Although we may not be rich and successful; we may not have pursued our careers to make loads of money and have houses and cars and kids; we have managed to live our dreams for the past sixteen years and been happy together. My hope and wish for Shreesh is that he continue to see his dreams realized; be it learning Hungarian or studying entomology.

Friends	Easter	San Francisco	Dolomites

Feliz cumpleaños, Shreesh!

Hot but happy

The role of fortune in our daily lives. A meeting with a nuclear engineer and a WW II vet.

“You are so fortunate to be able to take the time off for this trip” is one of the most frequent comments we get. We are fortunate, yes, for being born in relatively well-to-do families, for having trained in an area that is in high demand, for getting the lucky breaks that enabled us to hold well paying jobs and most importantly, for being so well matched that we enjoy taking long vacations together without stress or compromise.

Yet what is “being fortunate”? There is definitely an element of choice in being able to take long vacations, we choose our path to some extent. So we own neither house nor land, we did not sell our souls to the digital gold rush, we are willing to risk losing a comfortable and happy existence in San Francisco in return for our long and frequent travels.

“I feel so fortunate in my life that I was given the chances that I got”. We were speaking to Lindy Ferguson, a World War II veteran from a small manufacturing town in Wisconsin. We had been searching for apartment rentals by the week when we ran into Lindy in the ex patriot corner of Merida. We ended up spending the evening listening fascinated to his stories of being down in the engine room of ships used for troop transport, of heading towards Okinawa and certain death, of the gallows humor of the engine room resulting from hazardous and perilous work. (For “What would you aim a torpedo at? The engine room”!).

After the war the chances of finding a job in manufacturing towns were slim. He went on to relate how his experience with steam engines allowed him to get a job in the nuclear engineering department of Argon National Labs, how a boy from a mainly blue collar town with no relevant training worked with and among Nobel prize winners and of meeting Oppenheimer. And all through this fascinating narrative there was a pervading sense of gratitude for such unexpected rewards.

Yet, over a pint of (terrible) Mexican beer at a (pretty good) pizzeria, we remarked how unusual it was to meet an eighty year old whose conversation was not limited to complaints of his aches and pains, who was obviously enjoying himself inspite of any setbacks that he may have had, who was genuinely amazed and grateful for his good fortune, who never uttered a negative sentence in the entire conversation. I wonder, was it good fortune that led to his success, or his refreshingly positive attitude?

At Uxmal

My fight against onychophagia (nail-biting)

I realized just the other day that I need to cut my nails frequently on this trip. This is not exactly an epiphany, but the odd thing is, in San Francisco I rarely needed to. Whenever I looked at my nails they were bitten or picked down to the skin and no amount of self reprovals helped wean me from this habit. So I contented myself with filing them down so they wouldn’t look so ugly.

Nail-biting (onychophagia) is a common stress-relieving habit. You may bite your nails in times of stress or excitement, or in times of boredom or inactivity. (Yahoo Health)

Most nail biting is merely a bad habit that most people eventually break. But constant, severe nail biting can be a sign of anxiety or compulsive behavior. In such cases, you may consider consulting your doctor or a mental health professional for further evaluation.
(The Mayo clinic)

Eek!

Lets examine some of these causes as they may relate to me:

Stress – The most common cause attributed to nail biting seems to be stress. Having avoided taking on managerial responsibilities successfully in my life, my jobs weren’t very stressful. Challenging yes, stressful – rarely. That’s what you delegate up. Some people actually think that being on vacation is more stressful. Certainly one of the most stressful moments of my life was packing up the apartment.

Excitement – On the job? Rarely. On vacation? All the time.

Boredom or inactivity – They may have something here. Jobs can be repetitive and boring, specially in these extremely specialized times when you can’t deviate from your well defined pattern.

Free of anxiety

Anxiety or compulsive behavior? – What’s the cause of more anxiety – living your life according to a well defined routine in a job you know how to do well among friends and family that you know well? Or to move to a different place every new day in a foreign country where they speak a different language; where you have to go on an expedition to find a laundry or a pharmacy or even an ATM every time you need it?

Relaxation – I added this one because the fact that we are on vacation should mean we lead a more “relaxed” life. Lets see – I am reading a pedantic tome on the history, culture and architecture of the Maya, I spend a significant time maintaining the blog, I pay bills and track the budget as usual. Windows and my DELL laptop breaks more often than I would like. And sometimes we attend intensive Spanish courses where you spend at least 7 hours studying one way or the other. And oh yes – ordering even a cup of coffee requires mental focus to use the normal conditional form correctly.

The Dell craps out. Again.

So our life is no more relaxed or easy than it was in San Francisco, it is as hectic as usual and we have more things to do than we have hours in the day. Maybe it is the fact that we work when we want to on whatever we want to; the end result gives us creative satisfaction (as in the case of writing the blog) or delights us with new information (as in the case of learning Spanish or reading about the Maya) so there’s more “job satisfaction”. Maybe my mind is too busy processing all the new input to remember to bite nails. Or maybe its just the fact that we’re way too busy! So my remedy for nail biting? Take a long vacation!

Cathedral

On the road to Merida, Campeche is a lovely stop. (Map this!)

The moment we pulled into Campeche, I felt a strong desire to spend more than the couple of nights here than we had originally planned. A World Heritage site, Campeche is a walled city located on the coast, with a refreshing breeze blowing in from the sea dispelling the tropic heat. The houses along the streets are all painted in pleasing pastels; must be a city rule as all the colors go so well together.

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An undiscovered gem, it seems devoid of the usual tourist surge. The government seems to have high hopes that tourism will take off, though, as most of the beautifully painted houses are actually façades with just grass, blue sky and old ruins behind the closed doors. With such a beautiful setting, I have to assume that one day it will be as popular as San Cristobal.

Me Grumpy!

A beautiful palapa beckons. Roman asses. Bad Spanish.

Learning another language is always an adventure. Not being able to communicate clearly can be quite frustrating, but the rewards of sticking with the native language are great. One gets to speak with people with whom you would not normally speak and overall people are quite touched that you have at least tried to learn their language. In Campeche we had an hour long conversation with a tough looking no-neck guy who was the owner of a private security firm. In Villahermosa we talked with an aerial photography team – about their work, their lives, and how one hails taxis in town (it was counter-intuitive).

The mischievous beginner can use his imperfect understanding for humorous purposes. During an evening out with our Italian teacher and an acquaintance from Rome, where the gentleman, having had entirely too much to drink, blathered on and on about the greatness of Rome to the point of tedium. I saw my chance when he used the expression that Rome was the cradle (la culla) of western civilization – I restated his statement but substituted the similar sounding “il culo” (meaning ass, rump, bum) for the word for cradle. “I know that Rome is (il culo) of western civilization, but there are many other great cities in Italy”, was the phrase I used. An innocent beginner mistake

Is it possible to have a bad time in such a pretty spot?

The location was stunning – next to a turquoise blue ocean and simply constructed palapas. We prepared ourselves for an amazing seafood experience, but alas it was not to be. The smug waiter was entirely too full of conceit and needed taking down. Here is a transcript of the postprandial conversation:

Pakal

Palenque rises out of a sea of green. A brief history, focusing on Pakal. Theories on collapse. (Map this!)

Temple of Inscriptions

Our introduction to the ancient Maya was the site of Palenque, majestically set in the green jungles of Chiapas. Strategically located in the foothills over looking the green fields of the Yucatan peninsula, Palenque rose to prominence around 500 A.D. The ruler most responsible for what we see at the site today was K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who was dubbed “The Mayan Astronaut” by Erich von Däniken in his infamous book “Chariots of the Gods?”

Astronaut? © Merle Greene Robertson

Scholars call the greatest florescence of the Maya the ‘Classic Period’, which lasted from about 100 B.C. to 900 A.D. The early part of this period was dominated by the great Mayan center of Tikal which controlled the trade with Teotihuacan in the central valley of Mexico. In a severe turn of events Teotihuacan declined around 535 A.D and the fall almost caused the Tikal to collapse. But the Maya recovered from this “Middle Classic Hiatus” and went on to reach even higher peaks. In the power vacuum of the hiatus rose four power centers where previously Tikal had dominated the landscape. Palenque was one of those centers.

The building that dominates the central plaza is the well proportioned Temple of Inscriptions. In 1952 archaeologist Alberto Ruz cleared a passage deep into the edifice and the tomb of Pakal the Great was revealed to the world. Arrayed in fine jade ornaments Pakal was laid to rest in an ornate sarcophagus. To von Däniken the carving on the lid depicted Pakal piloting a space ship. Scholarly interpretations are less fantastical – Pakal being accepted into the Mayan underworld or Xibalba with the sky guardian looking on.

Steep stairs

In the morning Palenque was misty and cool, with calls of howler monkeys echoing through the site. A Keel-Billed Toucan (yes, the cereal box bird) flew past and put forth his grating call from a nearby tree. In looking at the splendor of the buildings and the monumental task of clearing and grading such a large surface, I immediately began to wonder why such a civilization would collapse after a millennium of successful accomplishment in art, architecture, and agriculture. The most popular theory quoted by the guides is that of ecological destruction – they destroyed their environment as we are doing today and hence faded into history…

Temple	Palace	Neena	Lizard

The theory of ecological disaster seems a little simplistic to me – how can a people who successfully exploited the environment they were in for a thousand years all of a sudden become incapable of it? Many scholars today believe the fall may have been a combination factors – ecological destruction, loss of confidence in the rulers, invaders from outside, etc. Maybe it was a perfect storm like a war in Iraq, sub-prime lending, and a collapsing housing market?

At the zocaló in San Cristobal de las Casas – The pedestrian and car traffic created interesting pictures!

At a busy intersection in the zocaló, ghostly feet compete with traffic!