As I walked up the driveway this morning just after a sudden and short downpour, I remember the recent request of prayers for more rain in light of how dry the ground has been. As I walked atop wet pavement and wet grass, I remembered Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god.
Our relationship to the clouds, which may or may not bear precipitation, is an exercise in faith, trust, reliability and adaptability, of living in the midst of unknown, which sometimes becomes dying, though not as often as we may imagine or anticipate dying.
I first met Tlaloc as a massive stone icon at the entryway of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in el Distrito Federal (aka Mexico City) in 1994, a tumultuous year for Mexico with the emergence of the EZLN revealed on the same day as NAFTA. This history reminds me how social, cultural and economic pressures push, more like many jetstreams fluid and in motion, abating for brief times of respite, but largely on-going, less like two opposing teams playing for a finite amount of time on a defined field for a little more or little less than an hour. The pressures of economic domination, growth, absorption, domination go on year after year, decade onto decade, from one century into the following century. An era defined by the decline of the PRI, initially overtaken by the PAN, yet 2 decades later eclipsed by MORENA, which was an outgrowth of the PRD. With President Sheinbaum, Mexico has a woman as president who happens to be Jewish, who has the conviction and courage or simply some capacity to speak out against genocide in Gaza, when the people and systems of the United States have not elected a woman, not elected a Jew, to be POTUS. These stories twist and reveal where democracy lies and there is more nuance and complexity in our societies than broad platitudes indicate.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 