There are areas in Mexico where there are farms owned by the Amish. The younger members of the community show up from time to time selling cookies and cheese. They are always young, the men wearing overalls and straw cowboy hats and the women wearing long dresses and little traditional caps. They don’t speak a word of English, just Spanish but with blue eyes and blond hair look for all the world like gringoes.

Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico

Originally uploaded by waywuwei.
An Amish Vendor

Amor: Estilo Tienda Departmental

Love: Department Store Style

Just walking down the street one evening in Puerto Vallarta, I was stopped by this little scene in a local department store window.

Koi amaze me. They seem like something out of a dream. They silently cruise beneath the surface, just out of reach and blured by the water. They clearly associate the movements they can probably only dimmly see above the water with food which sometimes appears as if by magic. So they keep an eye open and stay just out of reach, to slide away silently if the situation feels threatening.

Rigged elections have been the norm here in Mexico. The only time the rigging has failed has been when the incumbents have been so outrageously corrupt as to stir a revolution, either at the ballot box or in the streets.

In the last 2 elections in the US, the political machinery has learned a thing or two and has found ways to rig certain critical states to swing close elections. This is what happened here. Despite clear evidence of illegal activity on the part of the party in power, the electoral commission, several of who are up for appointment to positions on the supreme court, found that this did not ‘influence’ the election. So a close election was swung to re-elect the incumbents. This is the new style of fraud. Using MBA’s and analytical computer software the fraud is applied with a scalpel rather than a hammer.

Recently Hurricane Lane stormed up the coast. We rarely get direct hits from hurricanes here because we are in a deep bay which is protected by a mountain range that skirts the south end of the bay. If the hurricane comes from the south, the mountains push the hurricanes farther out to sea. If the hurricane comes from the west which is rare, we can get hit. We were hit by Hurricane Kenna several years ago which did a significant amount of damage especially 3 hours north in San Blas. Lane dumped close to 5 inches of rain on us in 24 hours. It rained very hard for almost 12 hours. As I was paddling across my yard to my meditation room, I recalled that in India and south east Asia during the monsoon season, the monks go into retreat and spend the time in quiet meditation. The people provide them with the necessities for the length of the monsoon season so that they won’t be disturbed during the rains.

All along the Pacific coast in Mexico, each year in the spring the land crabs make their yearly migration back to the ocean. If they are lucky enough to actually make it there, they dig burrows on the beach, mate and deposit their eggs in the ocean. With humans increasingly populating their territory, they have to cross highways and cross properties many of which are surrounded by fences and walls. During that time we find them everywhere. Our little dog will often find them in closets and under beds. If I can catch them I take them to the beach. Sometimes they don’t survive the encounter with the dog. Sometimes they stumble into the swimming pool where the chlorine does them in. It’s a hard life being a land crab.

Hibiscus is one of the most beautiful flowers of the tropics. It comes in a huge variety of colors and color combinations. When we planted our garden, I found a dozen different varieties from pure pink, yellow with red throats, red with yellow throats, white with red throats, etc etc. Two years ago we had a plague of Cocinea Rosada, a bug that was imported into Mexico because it is a source of red dye. It has gotten out of control and it particularly likes Hibiscus plants and hardwood trees. The government in order to save the hardwood forests had a very intensive eradication program and we had to cut down all of our infested plants, mostly our Hibiscus plants. Most never recovered, just two redish-pink plants and one red that were particularly strong. We haven’t seen any sign of Concinea Rosada so we hope the plague has passed.

The other beauty of Hibiscus plants is that when the flowers close (they only last one day) you can pick them and dry them and use them to make a tea. They make a very tart red tea that is drunk all over Mexico as “Agua de Jamaica”. It’s very high in vitamin C and is an excellent diuretic similar to cranberry juice. Best served cold with a little sugar.

This year in Mexico has been an exceptional year for butterflies. They seem to be everywhere. The butterfly phase of their life is one of great beauty as well as being the culmination and flowering of their reproductive life. They live for a while as free flying will-o-the-wisps, fluttering from one place to another. It hardly seems that they could travel any great distance, but they do. All of it to complete their life cycle and bring forth the next generation.

Sitting here here on the California coast in Bolinas, watching the surf break on the reef, the sun sets and the moon rises, full over the ocean reflecting off of the reef and the surf… It’s a piece of nature’s magic.

This is a photo that I posted a while ago on flickr. Recently I received a comment to the effect that I should crop it and make it essentially square to remove the palm leaves in the upper left hand corner. Apparently they disturbed the author. I look at each picture that I edit and almost invariably, I edit my photos in the camera. Consequentially, I rarely crop my photos, since I have taken them the way I want them. This is a hard thing for many people to understand. Cropping is fine, because the aspect ratio (ratio of width to height) is fixed by the camera design and sometimes that ratio just cannot express what is intended by the photographer. In that case I crop to get the correct ratio, eliminating what I didn’t want in the original. See the photo of the cucaracha below. When I took the photo, I intended for it to be square to just fit the round glass, so cropping was my intention at the time of shooting.