Bill Apablasa

I have a confession to make. I don’t have the world’s best breath. It’s not camel breath. It won’t drop you to your knees. But by no stretch of the imagination is it inviting, which explains why, in my house, I tend to get the cheek much more than the lips.

Nobody has mastered curiosity more than a child. Give a kid a rock, and some bubble wrap and their imagination will light up with possibility. From a blade of grass to their own shadow, the whole world is a child’s playground, ready to be explored, investigated and questioned. Unfortunately, as we get older and busier, our curiosity narrows to what’s practical or will get us to the “next level.”

Down in Baja, at the Modern Elder Academy, metaphors and waking dreams spread like wildfire. They’re in sunrises and sunsets, turtles and sticks, guacamole, margaritas, and frijoles. They’re in the dirt, water, and air—all buried into the skin like DNA. It’s an easy place to talk in metaphor—to describe the world in a way that isn’t literally true…where one thing always seems to be symbolic of something else.