I went to Puerto Vallarta for nine days, and Puerto Vallarta did not waste a single one of them.
I had told myself, before going, that this would be a "short trip — maybe a long weekend, in and out." Nine days is not a long weekend. Nine days is a quiet declaration that you needed more rest than you were willing to admit out loud, and that the calendar was going to have to live with it.
The rhythm built itself fast. Mornings were for writing on a balcony where the light came in sideways and the coffee was always slightly too strong, which is the correct strength for poetry. Late mornings were for the private beach the place was tucked against — the kind that's reached by a path through actual jungle, where nobody else seemed to have figured out the trail. Afternoons were for not thinking. Evenings were for the dinners.
The dinners did most of the unannounced work of the trip. Three courses, each one paced like the hosts had no plans for the rest of the week and assumed I didn't either. The first night I rushed it. By the third night I had learned. By the seventh I was the kind of person who orders dessert he doesn't want just to extend the table by another twenty minutes. That is travel teaching you how to slow down by feeding you slowly until you remember.
Travel Life
Journey far, explore life's embrace, Endless paths, each a thrilling chase. For life's too vast, too full of grace, To be confined to just one place.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →I wrote two poems and the rough scaffolding of a third. None of them were about Puerto Vallarta. That is usually how it goes — a place gives you the calm to write about something else entirely, and the gift is not that the place ends up in the poem, but that the place ended up in you.
The day I left I sat on the balcony for a long time with nothing in my hand. No coffee, no notebook, no phone. Just the morning. I am usually too restless for that. Nine days had finally trained it out of me, at least temporarily. By the time I landed in Albuquerque the restlessness had already booked a ticket back, but I noticed it returning, which is its own kind of progress.
I came home rested the way you can only be rested when you have stopped trying to be productive about it. Puerto Vallarta did not give me revelations. It gave me, briefly, the better version of myself I keep meaning to make time for at home.