Letters & People's Guide to Mexico
Onion-Like Website
by Tom Gibbs
I anxiously await any and all info on your new living-retirement efforts. I greatly appreciate the frugality of your general perspective in the PG. And I am as curious as I am puzzled by your stationing in the center of the expat community near Guadalajara for research.
The web with its infinite flexibility offers one answer to the problem of being accurately descriptive regarding real estate and rental costs. Pictures with verbal description, and costs at a marked point in time - which could be updated with approximations as valuations and inflation change the conditions. Presently housing costs on the web center around established expat and tourists targets. While this is frustrating, I take it as a good sign - since I assume it has nothing to do with the bulk of reality.
Thoreau's Walden offers the second answer, and I am as interested in your work now as I was in Walden 35 years ago. Don't disregard his careful accounts and record keeping in Walden - still valuable and informative 150 years later. The reason being that even though valuations changed there is a gold mine of information to be deduced from the relationships between the factual entries. It is irrelevant that 1840 bean seed prices are out of date. It's the proportion of expenditures between pencils, bean seeds, a chair, shoe leather, his other costs; the interrelationships in his time expenditures; and the interactions of all these factual things that sum up greater than all the parts: the gain is spiritual.
Looking at St. Francis, Thoreau, Ghandi, or Mother Theresa; spiritual meaning comes from an assemblage of embarrassingly simple, homely acts and facts. This holds true in art: the spiritual level, when attained, comes out of the relationships between the material parts. When the material achieves a spiritual level it is magic. ..... A heavy blizzard just to explain that I would prefer you give a Thoreau-type accounting that a mind can disassemble.
I can find many similarities between Walden and the PG..... two good handbooks for living.
You guys are a class act!
Tom Gibbs
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