8/19/21

By Josh Rubin

If anyone has noticed that I have been quiet lately, my excuse is that I have been spending a few weeks in Mexico. I studied for two of those weeks, to make the Spanish I try to speak a little less awkward. And, of course, I spent my time in places very different from the place I live, and the places I usually inhabit.

I know many of you have gone to Mexico, and have seen some of the sights, heard some of the sounds, tasted and smelled the air of a different world than ours. It is a feeling of extremes. On the one hand, as always I am struck by the similarities that bind us, our daily struggle to keep body and soul together. To raise children. Food, shelter.

But being there reminds me, by contrast, that I am only loosely attached to this earth below my feet, that I come lately to these places we call the Americas. My roots don’t reach deeply into the earth at all. I float above it, and I feel lost. And when I see paths worn by thousands of years of feet, I feel almost embarrassed by my modernity. Two days ago I stood at a Zapotec ruin, surrounded by stone, but looking down at a trail worn by red ants. The path, I mused, may have preceded by eons the trek across the land bridge that began the story of the human occupation of the hemisphere. The ants, the people, the seismic earth—all this makes me feel lighter than the wisps of smoke in the ancient air.

Nature’s vagaries reward us and punish us. They drive us. Forces that now seem beyond our control, like climate and Covid, will disrupt a world that has never stood still for long. Some will stay, and some will not. The world will never be the same.

It never is.