Lent-Least act

​How to explain being in the midst of the seemingly unexplainable? How, especially, when you’ve been a participant, even a passive one, in the current pervasive global disorientation? You can abhor, resist, rail against and distance yourself from the cynical chaos swirling around you, but you can’t deny responsibility for it comes from the very system under which you were born, thrived, now live, that you embrace and accept as its citizen. How then?

This question clouds our first waking moments everyday, even in the golden warmth and blue-skies of our ex-pat high-desert cocoon here in noble Mexico. This time of year, as the dry season settles into true summer, as Lent takes hold of the local calendar with a familiar but still exotic parade of Catholic-pagan rituals leading to Semana Santa, we again take stock of our fortunate lives of wintering here and start to prepare our return to the inkling of spring and reality of tax time in the still cold northeast corner of Connecticut next month. How can it be that our routine hasn’t changed along with the world this clement Mexican March?

 Señor de La Columna has completed its posada from Atotonilco to the Parroquia before Ash Wednesday. We’ve had our annual festive Mardi Gras dinner with our California expat besties, the Scarletts (although the one New Orleans eatery here that annually hosts our carnival revels, Hanks, turned us away despite a long-held reservation. An omen no doubt!) Our Grammy-nominated neighbor, Michael Hoppe’s annual concert at the Angela Peralta Teatro for the benefit of art education for the local children of the campo has concluded. Just yesterday, the surrounding indigenous community dedicated the day as they have for centuries to drumming and dancing around the main Jardin in celebration of Seńor de La Conquista*. And we’re busy adding more art, décor and cooling mechanisms to our casa ahead of our renters’ arrival for the intense summer just after April Fools.

But this disturbingly unchanged busy Lenten season is anything but routine for it’s overwhelmed by a kind of melancholy for us gringos here, a different kind, not one of pious religious introversion or penance but of a sad discordancy with all the hitherto comforting signs around us of continuity, communion and community. This lent we seem to be wandering alone in our desert paradise.

These days there is an almost exhaustive, long-suffering acceptance bordering on amusement cum pity for the gringo population here by the Sanmiguelenses. They’re used to the clueless self-referential attitudes of their over-privileged northern neighbors. Now they’re merely adjusting to absorbing the addition of fear, guilt and defensiveness amongst them. Like their savvy and pragmatic but unflinchingly proud president, they know how to handle us because they have little choice as we are a given.
*If the indigenous folks can celebrate being conquered by Spanish Catholicism while hanging onto their pagan rituals then the Mexican State can boast its economic savviness in navigating the manipulation of their giant Northen neighbors.:-)

Now the large Canadian contingent here is a somewhat different story. They too are melancholy but also angry, mostly at us Estadounidenses but also at themselves for being the biggest dupes of the continent for a couple of hundred years. They are, of course, among our most talented, kind and welcoming of ex-pat friends here. But I have to admit we’re steering clear a bit till our return north in a few weeks. By then perhaps the Tariffs of Damocles will have either fallen or been sheathed and Easter will be a true re-birth or a sign of the apocalypse. And perhaps I'll then try an explanation of the unexplained as tonic to these days of living precariously. 

In the meantime, we look forward to a SMA visit from an dear old friend, Mike Downing, gird our gringo loins for re-entry into Yankeeland (with a hope we don't share the same fate as the last SpaceX Booster.), prepare for week on the Upper West Side, followed by Pawleys, a birthday concert and a rare dip into the Western Europe!

 Stay-tuned, mi lectores preciosos!