DISRUPTIONS

Disruptive events aren't a big deal for those who drift through life simply reacting to events and situations around them. Such people have no particular goals other than doing what everyone around them is doing, and possibly in enlightened societies that's not necessarily a bad living strategy. However, I don't consider the materialistic, money-based societies available to me as enlightened, so I have my own agenda, and in general I don't welcome disruptions. I don't like to be interrupted by phone calls, visitors just wanting to kill time, a neighbor's barking dogs, on and on, because normally I'm doing what I want to do.

However, even for me disruptions sometimes turn out to be agreeable. For example, the recent tumor-removing operation on my back disrupted my weekly trips to Temozón to buy fruit and granola (muesli) because for two weeks I've been unable to ride a bicycle. At the rancho, fruit and granola are the mainstays of my diet, so new meals and food-preparation routines have had to be figured out.

Here at the rancho we grow bananas, custard apples, chicozapote, pineapples, mamey, several kinds of citrus, and more, but none were producing now, except for the Star-apple trees whose fruits grew so high that I could reach only one or two. Now instead of my main calorie source being fast-and-easy-to-prepare granola it became beans, rice and yams I'd been saving for planting when the rainy season returns. In the garden I was grateful that the young okra plants and heirloom Crimony tomatoes with their blackish flesh were just beginning to produce, and I increased my intake of kale and mustard greens.

The disruption further obliged me to become reacquainted with the homey smell of a pot of beans bubbling over a campfire's embers. I made something like tortillas by baking finely ground corn paste (concocted from packages of store-bought Maseca) in a skillet, and for me there's nothing better than refried beans on a hot tortilla topped with a slice of ripe homegrown tomato, with a little cilantro and chopped onion and jalapeño, all spritzed with lime juice.

In short, it's been pretty nice. Moreover, watching over bubbling pots of beans gave me time to think about an interesting dynamic of the human character. That is, we tend to fall into routines that, if continued long enough, desensitize us with regard to our being packages of awareness in mobile bodies free to explore and experience at will our parts of the mysterious, unspeakably complex and beautiful Universe.

So, maybe our Universe is fixed up so that any mentality that might arise is automatically saved from becoming absolutely insensitive to its mind-boggling context, through the agency of disruptions. Maybe that's why in higher-level mathematics sometimes in equations meant to express in symbols certain phenomena of very complex natural systems, you have to introduce at least a little of the element of chaos. Maybe that's why the traditional folklore of indigenous Americans often included the Trickster, and why many of my Maya neighbors still believe in and pay homage to mischievous, gnome-like aluxhob.

Funny how a back problem can make you appreciate the Trickster and aluxhob. However, everything is tied to everything else, some folks like to say, and maybe that explains it.