A bardo is a gap or intermission between two incarnations.  I have always considered travel to be like a bardo, specifically being on a bus, train, plane, boat, driving to your next destination.  You have left where you were and not arrived at where you are going yet.  Time is suspended in a way, locked up in that small cabin with you, as the world passes outside the windows.

At eleven o’clock I called for a taxi and arrived at the airport way early.  It was a good thing that I did because they had sent me a health check survey for COVID that I hadn’t responded to since I didn’t have service on my phone.  An agent tried to get me connected to the airport wifi, but my phone wouldn’t connect.  In the end, he waved me through anyway, an act of compassion I won’t soon forget.  When I got to the gate, I still had three hours to kill.  I drew a stone for the day and was chagrinned to see that it was Isa or the rune of danger.  That didn’t bode well on a travel day.

To kill time, I bought a copy of the Metro newspaper and read about all of the accidents and fatalities the previous day.  A twenty-nine-year-old man was killed in a motorcycle accident.  Another man was run over and left to die on the road.  Eleven had been executed in Michoacan.  A taxi driver was trapped in his car after the crash.  I didn’t read anything about plane crashes.  What about that danger rune, anyway?  Was it trying to freak me out?  I turned to one of the back pages.  Someone was putting the blame for obesity on a demon.

After waiting for hours, the flight was then delayed another hour.  I started reading the Book of the Dead again, all about a soul blown by the wind of karma without support.  The mourners cannot hear it crying.  There is the gray haze like the light of an august dawn.  Now comes a great tornado of karma and total darkness.  Mountains are crumbling.  Lakes are flooding.  Fire is spreading.  It is all a projection of your own mind.  Was the delayed flight just a projection of my own mind.  If so, it was working to agitate me, so in that sense was real.

When the plane did finally arrive, the people who were on it needed to get off, and then they needed to clean it.   Then we boarded and had to sit through endless COVID instructions.  My thought was that perhaps they wouldn’t be taking the pandemic that seriously in Mexico, but that opposite seemed true.  Nearly everyone was wearing masks, without being reminded to. 

A guy next to me sat chatting into his cell phone as if no one else existed.  I waited with growing impatience; my feet pinched in my shoes.  There are billions of people on the planet and most of them consider themselves the center of the universe.  How can this be?  All these people eating, defecating, copulating, dying, still so sure of themselves and the order of the day.  Our dreams and ambitions are so controlling, yet we give over to them again and again.  As soon as one is laid to waste, another one springs up to take its place.  All of these seconds, and minutes, and hours in the day, and there is still no time for peace. 

It was a two-hour flight to Cancun.  As soon as we were airborne, I kicked my shoes off before my feet could explode inside of them.  There were no freebies on this flight.  You had to buy everything, sodas, chips, snacks.  I considered trying to meditate, but couldn’t stop thinking dark thoughts.  By the time we landed it was dark out and pouring rain.  It looked like a tropical storm.  I’d booked a room for seventeen dollars a night.  How can a hotel be so cheap?  I was about to find out.