I am not an addict or so my dealer says. Because I can stop whenever I want. I probably won’t, but that’s a different story. Today, for example, is Friday. It would be ridiculous to quit right before the weekend, wouldn’t it? I blame Guadalupe or Lupe, as she prefers. The thirty-seven-year-old supplier has spent […]
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Almost a quarter of your skeleton lives in your feet. Fifty-two bones. Dozens of joints. They will carry you 75,000 miles over a lifetime, enough to circle the Earth three times and usually without complaint… usually. Yet we spend most of that time ignoring them. Not to mention what lies beneath them. The trouble is, […]
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Pan American Highway near Oaxaca © Tony Burton, 1981. The Pan American Highway is a dark asphalt ribbon. To the east and west, low brown hills rise in the distance. To the south, Oaxaca. To the north, Mexico City, many miles away. It’s quiet, deserted, nothing in sight but the jeep heading across open […]
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As I mounted my red, Honda SL 175 combination bike a cool drizzle sprinkled Mexico City. The city only had seven million inhabitants then, but still presented a puzzling maze my three week visit hadn’t deciphered. Today’s tourists complain about the lack of highway signs but there were even fewer in 1971. Two possible potholed […]
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Men are strange creatures. On the hazy fumes of a drunken evening, they will compete over anything: V8 vs. V6 engines, grill surface area, lawn stripes and, after sufficient cerveza, even personal appendage metrics. But in a brightly lit taquería, when the conversation behind me turned to hammocks, I couldn’t help overhearing. For research purposes, […]
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Airport Lounge (Villahermosa). Image (cropped): Vmzp85, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The First Class lounge floats like Olympus on the second floor at Benito Juárez Airport, a discrete distance above the multitude herding like hungry cattle on the concourse below. Inside, soft leather couches surround TV monitors offering fútbol and the latest […]
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Alvin Starkman, M.A., J.D. The naysayers, as well as many pundits and so-called mezcal experts, are critical of the agave distillate industry, lamenting that it is no longer sustainable. They are the same people who blanketly criticize multinational corporations and celebrities owning mezcal brands. They appear to be against big business being in the industry, […]
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Magic is Mexico’s superpower. Here, the ordinary and the sacred intertwine like smoke and spirit. The sacred still whispers, and its relevance is ever-present to those willing to listen to its wisdom. Alongside colorful towns and festive celebrations runs a steady stream of healing rituals, sacred medicines, and ancestral wisdom that restore body, mind, and […]
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Encaustic collage with calligraphy © Thea Evensen 2024. The air is clear and cool inside the church of San Felipe Neri as a small cluster of reverent women kneel at the altar rail chanting to the Virgin in hushed voices, their supplications echoing through the vaulted nave, the smell of disinfectant and old wood […]
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We left town early, just before la madrugada. Up and down the deserted streets the soft glow of lamplight turned cobblestones into golden ingots in the dark. This radiance bathed everything in a spectral beauty and I could see ghosts hurrying along in the shadows of the Inquisition: women wrapped in rebozos, priests in […]
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