SUNLIGHT, WIND & KARATE DOG

While describing my experiences busing to the border to renew my visa I told you what I like about the Mexican bus system, so now I'll tell you what I despise. The first-class ones show movies, and those movies usually are awful, very loud, heavy on car chases, blood and guts, teenagers doing cute and mindless things, and you can imagine what the adventures of Karate Dog are like. Two days and nights of it, one movie after another, I lost count. Outside, sunlight, wind, buoyant caracaras, gyrating mesquite and sugarcane. Inside, endless Karate Dog.

I know that most people like car-chasing and teenagers doing cute things but, some of us, just to remain sane, must channel our minds through the clutter and focus on sun and wind beyond.

This brings up the interesting question: What's the essential difference between Karate Dog's world and the world of sunlight and wind? Both are merely stimuli working on the mind -- images, odors, sounds and such.

In terms of remaining sane, the main difference between the two worlds is that  to those who would pay attention Nature imparts insights into sustainable paradigms. Paradigms such as simplicity, recycling and the conservation of resources, the innate strength of diverse systems with interdependent and self-disciplined components, and the spiritual component of the evolving whole.

But, Karate Dog roots us in none of that. An endless diet dished up from the Karate Dog world at first pleases with its novelty, then sours, then disorients and finally conveys to us its own paradigms, modes of behavior and thinking that are unsustainable, unhealthy, and really rather ugly, in my opinion.

From the bus windows, one can at least try to shut out Karate Dog and focus on the wind and sunlight outside, the dancing Mesquite, the swooping caracaras.