I’ve fallen off the metaphorical wagon in regards to blog posts. Several reasons for this, but the primary one being – I have been so busy. Not the greatest excuse, but it’s the one I have. I’ve been spending a lot of days communicating with others, and once it’s time to turn to writing/communicating more about the work I’ve been doing personally, it’s like the words vanish.
Anyway, please accept the apology ahead of time for the uninspired introduction to what was a very inspiring week in Valladolid, Mexico. I’m cognizant of the fact that this was 7 months back, and while not recent, this was also not 750 years ago, as my memory would otherwise insist. Some cons to an overdue and overdeliberated post like this include the fading of certain memories, like:
~ I can’t remember how long our drive was from Cancún to Valladolid. I know it was most definitely not what our GPS had told us, because we had definitely taken a long route, slowing down to admire the towns in between, turning off due to closed roads, pausing to let a dog cross the street. Was it 2 hours? 4? Nobody knows.
~ What did we actually do, in detail, every day? My mental movie montage of this trip includes primarily highlights, but we had to have been bored at some point. There’s just.. no way. I always linger with undecidedness in the 4pm hour if I don’t have a structured activity to anchor me in.
~ What route did we take to get to our “favorite” Yucatán cenote? (And other directional wins) I think the best part about staying in a place for more than a couple days, is when you are finally at a place in which you can navigate easily without using a map for directional context. At this point, I can only guess with trepidation.
Other things – colors of the building on the way back from a day out in Río Lagartos/Las Coloradas, the songs blaring out of the shops, the Maya words that one local had shared with us by a cenote that I swore to myself I’d once and for all learn how to pronounce appropriately without doing its beautiful linguistic sphere a disgrace. These are all softer, faded, mostly taking up residence somewhere in a cabinet in my brain that I can’t access upon request anymore. Maybe they’ll come to me in a dream?
That being said, there’s a few wins in taking forever to share these images:
~ Starting and ending with the obvious: reliving these moments.
It’s been long enough that some details have gone missing, which, for lack of a more honest expression, really sucks. The weather was hot, heavy, and slow. My hair was curling into the sky from the humidity, and my skin never seemed to fully dry. It seemed that every other house had a woman selling food directly from her living room, and it always felt like an honor to have it shared our way. The dogs that belonged to the street ran in packs, and the paint chipping off the walls were a work of art within themselves.
I think to myself, I should have made more time to take more photos. So many beautiful walls and trees and Guadalupes by the door to keep falling in love with every time you see their image. Alternatively, I’m grateful to have had the chance at all to vacillate between longing, loss, and the reintroduction of what the world felt and smelled and looked like for that short period of time.