I think it's the outsiders fear of mexico that makes visiting mexico such a heightened experience, and i think my heightened state when i am visiting mexico tunes me in to the magic of mexico, even though i don't believe in magic from the time i was about 21. I made it a very high priority to visit as many foreign countries as i could, though i was almost never in a position to afford to visit them. I've visited europe many fold more times than i visited mexico. I've been to mexico, maybe five or six times, but i feel much more at home in mexico.

In the winter of 2014 2015 i drove an f-350 ford pickup truck with a dirt bike. On a rack on the back from the bronx down to puerto escondido in oaxaca, i was in a very like heightened state of i don't want to say despair, but i was in a sort of a weird transition. I drove down for my 40th birthday present to myself and it was a trip i just the stars aligned and i got a gig that enabled me to like pay all of my bills for four months and finance this trip and my intention was to learn how To surf by surfing, basically every day full time and that overland trip having mexico unfold very slowly and gradually all of the different regions of mexico and covering so much of the country. Wed me to the nation, and because of all of the news and the sensationalism about the cartels, hollywood exploits that angle of mexico.

Almost exclusively, there is almost no mexican cinema. That's american made or foreign made that i know of where in the drug cartels are not part of the story. In my experience, when you talk to people they sort of offload a little bit of their fear onto you, i had a friend whose father worked in the state department, his entire career, and this friend was like well they're. Gon na shoot you they're gon na.

Take your truck they're gon na just hijack you and kidnap you, and i mean i don't know the exact numbers, but if you really think about it, when was the last time you heard of a american person going down to mexico and being killed or what have You it's, it's always huge news. I mean there are isolated stories and we can all think of a few, but it would be huge news and you just don't hear about it. Every week in america, you hear about a school being shot up or a mall being shot up. I used that logic to not frighten myself out of just saying the hell with it and driving down there.

When you get down there, one of the things you realize is there are tens of thousands of people like you who are also down there doing what you are doing. There are people from england. There are people from australia, there are people from new zealand. There are people from europe and the more time you spend down there, the more integrated with these people you become, and all of that fear stuff just kind of melts away.

It's just kind of it's bad, it's in the back of your head and you're, and you have to be careful. My landlord told me don't ride my motorcycle at night, because the cartels don't know that i'm a gringo, that's what she said. I didn't travel at night. I didn't drive at night when it after it got dark.

That was the end of the day. I didn't have anything flashy. I had a big dent in my truck that i was unfixed. When i went down, i had a very old motorcycle, so there was this consciousness of the fact that you're in a country that's essentially in a civil war and is essentially a narco state, but the i don't i i don't have the right word.

I keep saying the word magic and i hate that word, but the the magnificence of this place would just lift that concern from your consciousness and you could just enjoy the beauty and for me it was so much driving. I took like two weeks or something to drive down mexico. I purposely went slowly. I purposely went through back roads and so forth and there's a saying in mexico that in the united states everything works and nothing works out, but in mexico nothing works and everything works out, and that is exactly the experience i had.

I was two years sober at the time and part of you know, alcoholics anonymous is letting go, is sort of putting yourself in god's hands and having faith that it's going to work out and to me, mexico is a training ground for that faith. Where you see the results very quickly, all kinds of stuff goes wrong. You know on a big trip like that. I broke the rack on the roof of my truck and just found a welder in town, and he just like covered the truck in um, wet blankets and put on his mask and just welded it.

You know took a couple hours charged me whatever, like 50 bucks, maybe less than that you know. I got a flat on my bike on my motorcycle and there's these tire repair places all up and down the highways i pulled in guy it was the rear wheel, took the rear wheel off disconnected the brakes undid the chain took the tire off the rim took The tube out of the tire patched, the tube put it all back together, put it back on the chain, reconnected the brakes, and i think he charged me something like three or six dollars. It was something like that and in america, if you get a flat, i think the labor is just automatically ninety dollars and it's a it's a place where the culture is very much intact. It's not just you know, bulldozed and petcos and strip malls, even in the water, the local mexican surfers friendly, unlike any place, i've ever been friendly.

In fact, one of the guys on one of my first days warned me of an american tourist and said that guy's a thief be careful of that guy. I didn't experience this, but i heard of this place that had like volcanic hot springs, and sometimes the tide would be high enough and the waves would wash in fish into these tidal pools and when the water went back out, the fish could not escape and they Would boil in these hot spring pools and you could just reach you and reach your hand in, but you could, you know, take a fork or whatever and pull the fish out and eat it right off of the bone and there's this region that i went to. But i didn't have enough time where you hire a guide and rent a couple donkeys, and you go up into these mountains where all of the monarch butterflies in the world migrate. And if you wear floral patterns on your clothes, they cover you like fur.

I didn't get to go there, but i dream of it. The magic i experienced was very visceral and i kind of it was almost constant. I had spent the day in this with my with my friend chloe and her cousins, and we had spent the day in what was sort of like a bird sanctuary. It was this beach where there was no people, and then there was maybe like a river or a tide pool or something that made very shallow water.

And there was just every kind of beautiful birds, blue herons, white, herons, beautiful little birds, big birds and that night chloe's mother had arranged for us to go swimming in this bioluminescent water and what it was is these bioluminescent creatures are basically like the size of pencil Shavings from a pencil sharpener like tiny little creatures and when you move through the water, that's what stimulates the light. So when you go like this, it's like a blue light, so you can take a bucket of the water and dump it over your head and your whole head will turn blue. It's such an all-encompassing experience and we jumped up and it's in the mangroves and we had just seen crocodiles in this same water. You know earlier that day and i remember just being in there and being so exhilarated with it and i swam in first and chloe and the cousins were like.

Is it safe and i was like it's worth it. If you die it's worth it. If you die and chloe's mom was trying to get her attention for some reason and chloe just yelled back, i have to be here right now, mom. I have to be here minutes later.

It's pitch black out we're in this little skiff this little boat and we're driving through this little canal back to the dock, and we go through this little river. You know river as wide as this room 10 feet wide and on the right side is beautiful. White tent illuminated from underneath with maybe 500 chairs perfectly lined up and um tables, and it's a pitch black knight pitch black and it's the little canal and the tent. Here on a little island, and then here is a road.

Okay and the road is illuminated by pickup trucks that are parked on the side of the road and the road is there's. Maybe this much water - or maybe this much water in the ruts of the road and that's why they're not driving their pickups down and the men were carrying the women through the water in their beautiful dresses. And they were back lit by these headlights. And they were all going to this wedding, that's what the tent was for, and it was just something we drove i'll, never forget it and it was just something we buy really quick and you look up and you see these lights and you see the silhouettes carrying Through the water and then over here this empty tent, and that was the same night as the as the bioluminescence.

While i was down there, i was trying to do nothing but surf, and while i was down there at some point, i got the idea for this channel for the spirited man for the whole concept of it and as we get further and further away from that Experience from that mexican experience, my heart just longs more and more for it, and it's almost at the point now where i think this whole thing like. I was subconsciously doing this whole thing so that i could afford time and money to spend more and more time in mexico and it's sort of far out of my mind. Now it's it's kind of becoming a distant memory now because it was seven years ago that magic. I keep saying that word magic, because it's the best way to describe the phenomena of mexico.

I kind of feel like i've lost my sense for it or my ability to to recognize it, maybe or to experience it. And now i'm planning the next one and i'm planning to bring my family and the perception is that it's just as dangerous and just as scary. But i have this feeling that everything will be okay and that everything will work out and we'll see, we'll see what happens this week on the patreon zine one has been retired. Zine two is available to the next 378 new patrons who sign up here's the link.