It was late and I couldn’t sleep, worrying about returning to Los Angeles in less than a week, back to the same unemployment and uncertainty that I’d been living in since the pandemic had brought me back from Vietnam in early 2020.  There were some international jobs that I’d been offered, but now I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, besides to work on my writing.  There was a newspaper I’d picked up that afternoon, The Extra, that I browsed through, noting all the accidents and fatalities of the previous day.

A driver had been killed trying to protect his car.  A man was killed in a bar.  Another man had his head bashed in.  An up-and-coming rapper had been shot to death.  A woman had killed her three babies.  A gangbanger, El Loco, was booked for murder.  Two borrachos, or drunks, were killed by the police.  Singing star, Vicente Fernandez, was barely clinging on for his life. 

We come into this world with such high expectations.  There are things we simply won’t accept for ourselves.  We have opinions about how others should live.  Then one day we are gone and never return.  How do we even function?

When I left my hotel that morning there were riot police outside of the door, unloading clear plastic shields out of the back of a truck.  What was the emergency?  No one seemed to know.  I had to walk around the corner to find a taxi.  There were plenty of buses to Cuernavaca that day.  It was only a two-hour trip.  I’d never been there before, but my father had once gone with a small contingent of pastors to study Spanish for a week.  He might’ve learned to say hello.  That was enough to make him consider launching a bilingual ministry.

Cuernavaca was larger than I imagined it was going to be.  It was almost a wonder that I found my hotel with the hand-written directions I’d scrawled down in Puebla.  One of these days I’d get a sim card when I went to Mexico.  That would be a whole new ball game.  It was hard to imagine I’d once traveled without a phone, a laptop, or anything, not even knowing what I’d find until I’d arrived.  Somehow, I’d survived.

They were very hilly streets.  At the top of one I ran into a dead end, which was the front of a museum.  The guard knew the street my hotel was on.  I had to walk to the end of the block and take a street that ran downhill from there.  The hotel was seven stories high and looked like it was being propped up by a few pillars.  Fortunately, I was on the ground floor, right next to the pool.  Would I swim in the pool?  Probably not.  Did just having one improve the quality of my travels?  Immeasurably.

The rune that I’d picked for that day was Kaunaz, or the rune of insight or enlightenment.  As soon as I’d stashed my stuff away, I set out to explore the city and take its picture.  The museum where I’d gotten directions to my hotel from was also a garden, the Jardin Borda.  I returned looking for a good setting for my picture.  There were a few small fountains and shaded walkways. 

One of the fountains was full of crystal-clear water that reflected the surrounding trees and the sky.  Next to it was a twenty-foot skeleton, left over from Day of the Dead, in a black tuxedo.  The lapels of his jacket were decorated with colorful hummingbirds and flowers.  I sat my rune on the edge of the fountain and took a picture.  The sunlight filtered down through the trees.