My Week of Digital Detox Amongst Ancient Cave Paintings.
You may have noticed that Wisdom Well has been graced by a few consecutive guest posts from great MEA alum writers this past few days. That’s because I was blissfully offline for a week in mid-Baja, the Sierra de San Francisco mountain range where Baja’s only on-land UNESCO World Heritage Site exists.
The rock art of the Sierra de San Francisco is one of the most outstanding concentrations of prehistoric art in the world and, yet, because it’s only accessible through multi-day mule treks and relatively primitive dry camping conditions, the paintings and petroglyphs have stayed in beautiful condition for thousands of years. The artists who created these paintings are a reminder of the hearty soul of the human condition as they’re painted high up in mountain caves often twenty and thirty feet in the air on sheer cliff faces and cave ceilings. More recent indigenous people believed it was giants who created this art because it’s hard to understand how these ancient societies were able to engineer the elevation to produce such masterpieces.
Located an eight hour drive north of MEA’s Baja campus, this Great Mural Region includes 300+ cave art sites and, yet, even with the UNESCO designation, maybe only 100-250 people per year make the trek down into the Santa Teresa Canyon where the most impressive art is located. Groves of trees (we saw lemon, orange, grapefruit, and pomegranate growing), palm forests, and natural springs dot the bottom of the canyon so you feel like you’ve landed in the Garden of Eden amidst the rich grandeur of the vertical mountain wall faces.
Fresh from my first hot shower in nearly a week, I’m proud that five of the seven of us on this trek were in our sixties so it’s just a reminder that trekking and adventuring doesn’t have to end prematurely. And, the last time I did a digital detox week was five years ago when I did a silent vipassana meditation and kayaking trip amidst the Loreto Bay islands with MEA faculty member Mark Coleman. We all deserve to take a regular break from the incessant pull of the online world.
When will you schedule your next digital detox?
How can we become the kind of ancestors that future generations will admire?
For those of you who’d like to see a short video of me and the cave paintings, here you go.
P.S. LAST CHANCE to sign-up for MEA’s 8-week online course “Navigating Midlife Transitions” as this specific course won’t be taught again this year. The course starts this Saturday. You can get a $50 discount if you sign up here (you’ll see the offer as a pop-up).
