I’m at that place in my trip where I come and go when I choose. There is no destination, just potential. I’m hungry so I turn down a dirt track that I am pretty sure will lead me to the beach and it does. Now this is when letting time and instinct just happen really coalesce. In front of me is a half-shell beach enclosed by hidden, enclosed towering cliffs, small rocks nudge playfully above and below the surf. The water is that color that you dream water on “your” perfect beach should be. Waves roll in at the pace of four deep breaths. A palapa sits at the west end of the beach and this is where I head. I’m sure its not a restaurant but I’ll give it a shot. A woman, I’m certain she is Nahuatl (Mexica for those in the know, others Aztec) engulfs a chair in the sand (actually she could be hovering she is so large there is no chair to be seen). I ask her if she sales food and she replies in Spanish, “yes I have the most delicious fish for sale”, “I’ll take it”. I peel away my riding clothes and dive into the water and transcend. Yes, here in Mexico when you point your bike down a track that looks as if it goes nowhere, but it certainly goes somewhere it is that easy to find transcendence. Hello that’s why I am here. As I am floating I watch the round woman (everything is round about her, her face, her arms, her fingers, her well your getting the point) pull two fish from a basket and begin to strip them of their scales.

Earlier in the morning I was sitting on the beach watching the sun rise and trying to decide which of the 5 pelicans in front of me was the better fisher bird when a Frenchman came up to me and said, “hello, so yoo ar de one hoo is on dee big moto and sleeping in dee little teent”, “yooo arr a veery strong man for sooch a treep”. We talk for a half hour or so and I ensure him in time that I am certainly not such a strong man in many endeavors, this endeavor maybe, but I have many weaknesses in other areas. He says to me that this does not matter because here I am peeling away the minutiae of life by choice (you have to do the French accent yourself from here on) now when I am still young and I am not waiting until I am old like him. He tells me that he has no regrets in life, but….

I have been floating in the water for maybe 30 minutes now pondering those questions. Which questions, well the ones that you begin to ask when you discard all of the distractions, the minutiae. You begin to ask them in your normal, cyclical life but they are ephemeral , easily put off and for most of the you (us) it is much easier to let them lie (play on words for those not so quick). I take a minute and look toward the palapa, it looks as if the senora is back in her chair pondering her own existence, no worries I am sure my “delicious fish” must be now marinating in its “delicious sauce”.

to be continued