Journey to Ixtlan

My son Jason and I took a 6-hour walk into the mountains behind Casa Tobalá today, 4 hours up and two hours down, counting getting lost in the descent and ending up the range over, at one point having to cross a foot-wide cement dam spanning a ravine to avoid backtracking to who knows where. That's the problem with taking a wrong turn--after the first every other turn is by definition the wrong one. But we managed to find a path that brought us in fact to the very bottom of our property, where an old abandononed house looks over the little river. Our place sits at about 5800 feet and we climbed high, high, high, up to the summit of one mountain, literally where every step was a step down, and looked out over the city of Oaxaca to the south and our own little shack in the valley to the north. Sitting on top of the world is a cliche I guess, but it's really possible to do so. I strongly encourage trying it.
It was so great share this trek with my son, visiting us for the holidays from Chicago, where he is doing his masters in architecture. He is very attuned to forms and structures per se, and here in Oaxaca they abound in such diverse examples, from ancient pyramids to colonial buildings to foot paths carved out by streams and the force of nature. And what a luxury to spend so much time alone together, where both the conversations and the silences on the mountain paths acquire such density. I learned from Jason about the concept in physics of the unit of "work," velocity x acceleration, and why we were generating "negative" force when going down hill compared to up.
Last week some friends invited us along on a journey to Ixtlan, the native terrain of Benito Juárez, way up in the Sierra Juárez mountains a couple of hours outside the city of Oaxaca. What dramatic beauty, especially when one is higher than the clouds. We drove miles up a twisted dirt road and reached another peak. It's an amazing thing to look down upon the world instead of up into the sky.