In the past six months, with the excellent example of the cattlemen of San Martín, I've been learning the use of time. Today I am fleshing out some new scenes in a story, and I have to discipline myself not to become distracted pulling weeds. Solitude is a necessary part of creation for me and for many people I know who create a body of work. Not only being alone when I'm actually setting words down on paper, but great unbroken spaces of solitude. I crave an unhurried process, waiting for the myriad of ideas to sort themselves out into telling actions.
I see the cattlemen of San Martín, old codgers in their 80's, pace themselves; a flurry of activity when they first get here on foot, by truck or on bicycle. Mild under the most primitive conditions as Don Manuel and Don Isidro seem to be, without getting dirt in the cans of frothy, warm milk. A pajarete of raw milk and cane alcohol to open your eyes and take the chill out of old bones, and possibly to feed a life-long habit. Look for lost calves early in the morning before the sun is hard on man and beast.
Take a little time out for an almuerzo of beans and whatever else was sent from home; light a fire and use any old rusty piece of metal as a comal to heat tortillas. Roll them with the palm of the hand; use them to wave in the air to illustrate a point as well as to enfold beans and cheese.
Then the cowboys are fortified to repair fences, steal fence posts from untended lands, burn the padding off old mattresses to use them as gates for their parcels of land. Time also to tend sick cattle, and possibly to walk from Fracc. San Martín into downtown Jocotepec for medicine. In severe cases, call the vet, the one named Calixto, the one with a wry sense of humor.
It used to surprise me that these octogenarians are capable of sustained enthusiasm for their tasks, a feeling that supercedes the body's limitations. So, I learn to break my job up into walking outside and smelling the flowers, sitting in the sun and writing in a notebook. Writing shouldn't all be serious drudgery.
Pacing figures in the scenes I write, too: slow involved conversation or quick repartee, words batted back and forth like tennis balls. A series of quick actions narrated, passing over blocks of time, or movements slow to the point of languid, lingering on one scene.
Living in great stretches of silence, fields of milo-maize and flocks of birds in my favorite colors; this shouldn't be ignored. The cattlemen don't ignore it. Sometimes they spend a long time looking around and shooting the breeze, but at the end of the week their lands are cleared of large patches of the curses of the campesino: huistache bushes, cat's claw and hidera, a shrub so irritating that if you touch it, your skin itches for days.
I share with them a life of reasonable tranquility, having the opportunity to live more fully in nature than I ever have. I don't feel alone, but accompanied on my fictional voyages by dragonflies, praying mantises, all manner of moths and butterflies and a population of daddy long legs so large that the group look like hair growing on the stone walls of the garden. I insist that Ray not kill them.
I've dropped out of going to the gym, playing bridge, spending hours on-line reading about trivial and or fascinating tropics on the World Wide Web. Mexico is for me a simpler time. I think of all the new stories crowding just below consciousness, like white butterflies on a puddle. Giving up the 21st century distractions was easy. The trade-off is that I don't have to rise at 4:30 am any more to write. Not that I could any more. Growing older. Pacing my days.
