August 25, 2020

Sometimes, on a grey, rainy day like today, I wonder why I’m here, and if I want to stay here. Amatlan is an outlying community, and insular in many ways. People aren’t unfriendly, but only a few welcome outsiders through their doors.

I’m a city person by nature, and when I was young and still living in the UK, I expected to spend most of my life in London, which was less than an hour away by train from my hometown. I ended up living in or around Toronto with its millions for forty years, and I still think of that as my home city.

My long-term concept of home – Toronto’s waterfront, seen from Centre Island.

How I arrived there is an unusual tale, and for years I’ve tried writing a book about it. There are three incomplete drafts on my computer, none of which come close to satisfying me. Partly, it’s to do with shyness, or at least an internal debate over privacy; partly it’s to do with perfectionism; and partly because while what I went through back then still fascinates me, I don’t feel my personal story is particularly interesting. I was an observer of my small tribe of iconoclasts, not a major participant.

Now, not having finished a book puts me outside of a particular local club. My buddy Don Karp was first, writing his own memoir called The Bumpy Road a few years ago, detailing his various ups and downs before settling contentedly in nearby Tepoztlan. Shelley (Ixchel) Tucker, my frequent hiking partner, last year published Forever 25, about how she’s dealt with the death on military service of her son Gabriel, which happened while she was living in this village. And a few weeks ago, my neighbour Robin Rainbow Gate published Calling Myself Home, about how she finally found a sense of that mysterious entity called “home” in Amatlan.

Ixchel’s book strikes a powerful chord, since she and I bonded over finding we’d each lost a child. In my case, it was a three-year-old daughter with an undiagnosed condition: I was there with her on that terrible morning my Amanda went. In Ixchel’s case, her son died in Afghanistan, just at the end of his tour of duty, and thousands of miles from home. After publishing the book, she’s found a new community among survivors of war, and the families who’ve lost a child in war, while still living in Mexico, a forty-minute walk from my own home.

I finished Robin’s book three nights ago, and I found it tough going. She and I share certain attitudes to life and to our own selves, and various people crop up in her narrative that I know, or that have been part of my own experience. I can therefore fill in a few details she tactfully chose to omit from her narrative.

But she and I took opposite routes once we came here, a decade ago for me and 14 years for Robin. For her, it’s been a gradual journey into the community, where she has made a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. She’s studied and embraced some of the traditional ways, studying the herbs used in healing, and many of the old customs that linger among the local people.

I had some intentions to do the same thing when I arrived in 2010, but my core inclinations didn’t agree with the conscious intentions at all. I’d made a decent start on the language at The Spanish Centre in Toronto, and I figured I might achieve fluency when I’d been here long enough. But I made the mistake of going to a school here run by a woman who’d try to pack too much information into her students. She didn’t grasp that covering three tenses in one day wasn’t teaching, but a means of producing utter confusion. I left there with my confidence shattered, and spent months climbing back up to rudimentary proficiency. I finally figured out how to communicate with people, but I’ve always had to battle with local expressions, contractions and oddities of dialect.

Maybe if I’d come here earlier, I’d have had a more flexible attitude; Robin was two decades younger than I was at the point each of us found Amatlan. But I’ve always been frustrated by the language, even if at times I’ve felt “I was almost there today!” Going back to Canada for three years didn’t help, even if I did take more Spanish Centre lessons while I was in the city.

Reading Robin’s book, I’ve had to face that I’ve always needed to straddle two worlds. I chose living here because I didn’t have enough money to retire comfortably in Toronto. My long-term job disappeared after the 2008 financial crisis, and I arrived a couple of years before I’d planned to, with less preparation and less cash than I’d wanted. My plans to explore the country bit by bit didn’t get too far when cash became tight, I couldn’t work here legally, and my iffy language skills meant even illegal work would be limited.

And so on, and so on. But at root, I made a different choice.

Working through Robin’s book, I had to look at a number of things about me. I have only a qualified affinity for Mexican folk practices, or the messier aspects of rural life. I still flinch from the way animals here are treated, or how litter is tossed into ditches, eventually to make its way to the sea. I see popular Catholicism as a limiting thing, not an expression of emotionally moving traditions, and I’m not sure how deeply the non-Catholic practices are rooted in antiquity. Further, my spiritual perspectives come out of the “big” esoteric traditions, both Asian and European, not the ones field anthropologists come to study.

I want, in sum, my old lifestyle with its deep-rooted philosophical attitudes, but in a congenial climate that doesn’t feature five months of wind-chill each year. I want to wander hillside trails with vistas stretching miles, but also to know there are okay restaurants at the end of the walk. (There are).  And I want both local Mexican foods and food of a style closer to what I’ve always eaten. The quarantine makes everything harder, naturally, but I have to accept that I might live here with a permanent dissatisfaction.

The view from a hillside trail with a vista stretching for miles, down over the town of Tepoztlan.

Robin describes times when it was difficult, but she’s pushed hard to make a multi-aspected life for herself. She’s fought to improve her understanding and reach, as the book shows, while I’ve often (not always) tended to think “Nah, not my thing.” And I’m going to continue feeling that way.

Maybe one day, I’ll go back to these three book drafts and try to convince myself I can lick that story into shape, and join the Amatlan Memoir Club. I sometime wonder, in fact, if for me “home” isn’t in a place, in Mexico, the UK or in Canada, but in being honestly rooted in shaping life-events, and the always forward thrust of life. Robin’s book, for example, traces her own history in some detail as she fought with what she’d been told or taught, and looked for what she truly wanted. Home isn’t necessarily found, so much as attained.

That’s a theme for another post, though.