Today, I stand looking at the sea, sky ringing red with our mistakes, and I know another world is possible. If only we would turn our heads daily to really see the human situation, wherever in the world we are, we would see beyond our own small lives. We would see our world.

In the tiny seaside town of Pie de la Cuesta, Acapulco, Mexico, where John and I have lived this fall, people are generous and stone poor. Garbage lines a hard-sand shore; fishermen taunt the fish from the ocean with plastic line wound tight around small squares of cast-off wood. 

Our house hangs high above this vista. More than 20 years old, it once knew the finest days: Villa de Cortez, home of General Cortez. Our view from floor-to-ceiling screened windows is spectacular and mad at the same time, ocean beating away at the hill that holds it, each pound of the surf rustling plaster flakes away from its fragile walls and down to the yellow marble floors. 

 Each evening a sun sets before our eyes in colors that seem impossible to improve on, and yet, they do. Each morning yellow and black birds nick away at drying palm leaves that swing close enough to our bodies to touch, and yet, they don't. Each afternoon, buzzards swoop across the veranda and dip low to feast on dead fish and carcasses thrown away by the fishermen, and left to rot in the solid sun. Old women comb the beach for timber to light their stoves.

This is a world of opposites; this is our human world. It will always be this beautiful and ugly, this tender and harsh, this rich, poor and unclean, this real. Here, in Mexico, we see tourists trying to make it something that is theirs, a place for them to escape from the stress of their work, a place for them to call beautiful, to pretend. But we also see the Mexicans, tan and looking older than their years, working to please these tourists, to feed their children, to hammer out a life that is easier or safer or free.

The temperature in Pie de la Cuesta, Acapulco, consistently hovers around the mid-80s, but the light changes considerably between September and November. The Mexicans rake the beach and burn the piles. The light feels and looks like autumn in the Midwest USA or Europe or Canada, where forgotten leaves blow across the landscape with a wind behind their lips that lifts them gently up to a crisp shine.

Nan