Onto the next adventure
We have arrived in San Miguel de Allende. Now is the time we re-establish ourselves and complete the home & studio construction. Here’s an update for anyone interested.
Today begins the first day of the present and the future. This would be appropriate for any living organism, but it is more fundamental and a milestone for my family & I. Today we arrived in San Miguel de Allende, in the center of Mexico.
We’ve done this many, many times before. Our relationship with this town began in 2018, but was more of a relationship to see how we felt about it. Migration is not something that is foreign to us - we've been immigrants for most of our lives. We left the land of our birth many decades ago, in search of meaning, opportunity and purpose.
Since the late 1980s, I’ve lived in the United States, at the age of 25. It was a culture shock then for a young lad from Australia to go from a small city where I grew up to a place where the entire population of the county in which I was in, was about the entire population of the country I was born in. Everything fast, furious and compressed. It took me a while to learn how to think and integrate, but I did. And that led to my “level up” process in my chosen careers.
Now 35 years later, it happens again. But this time an experience shared by my wife & dog. We spent decades in the USA, and the past 23 years in Arizona. The desert began to take its toll on us, as did the economy and the cultural divide. I felt that we had worked so hard to build security & fortune, but it was all for naught as we realized that in the world of the divide between haves & have nots, the middle class had been hollowed out, and if you lived in that middle space, you ran the risk of being destroyed by it.
The things that ultimately you choose to be your calling had to be made to be compatible with this dysfunctional world. The things you felt sacred, like art, philosophy, music, culture, etc. were now just another financial transaction. The artist was destroyed by this – they couldn’t be an artist without a “day job” and the day job took 75% of their waking life from them. What was left? Certainly not enough for the artist to be focused on the most important mission – the art.
And so art suffered. Everything became a synthetic representation of the past. Nothing new – just AI infused, computer assisted art. Why? Because no one had the time to really delve deep within their human self, and do the hard work that creates great things. Everyone wanted a hack or a shortcut to success. They had to – the rent was due, the medical bills piling up, the kid needs to go to college supposedly and the dog needed to be fed. Maybe after all of that was done, you could then clear your head a focus on the art. By the time that was done, it was a new calendar month, and you had to do it all over again.
You get older. You get wiser, but you also get aches & pains. You realize you are a organic creature with a life expectancy and if you are truly devoted to your calling, you have to make hard decisions. And we did. We left behind the habits of 21st century living in Scottsdale, to the more rough around the edges life in a country that was more embracing of the things that you held dear. For us, that is Mexico.
After months and months and months of prep, we finally drove four days to get here. I’ve never driven four days straight in my life. But we did it. No major incidents, but many a time having to prove to the various gatekeepers along the way that we and our possessions were worthy of the journey. From immigration to customs to law enforcement, we pushed through. Eventually landing in San Miguel de Allende.
Now onto the new home, the studio, the new life. It won’t be easy – I never expected it to be. We have to adjust our minds and expectations. Not in a bad way, but the programming that the 21st century American culture that seems to empower and protect the banking class at the expense of regular folk takes a while to excommunicate.
Bear with me while we go through this transition. It won’t be without its ups and downs, and I realize that we will be making regular trips back to the USA all the time. That goes without saying, but I hope to try and demonstrate to those up north that life shouldn’t be about everything being a financialized transaction all the time. You have to know your purpose and you have to make decisions that are aligned with it. It isn’t easy. When I hear people making excuses for that, I wonder if they will ever be happy in their lives. Some decisions are to choose a hard road ahead, but that is what makes us all grow.
I’ll keep y’all well informed of the progress here. For now, I need a few days of rest to recuperate from this process.