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Beauty in Poverty: Images in Mexico

Have you ever been drawn to things without a definable reason?

Its at a deeper level than the intellect and a flood of emotion and power rises up from in your core and overwhelms your senses. Kind of like your spirit knows something, understands something that your mind does not. And when you come into contact with that thing, your spirit is moved and it communicates its desires in waves of energy that run through you bringing tears to your eyes and breathlessness to your stomach and an interior knowing that you have brushed against something of utmost importance.

blue laundry sm

Its like that for me when I visit the poor. I am only using the word poor for your benefit because it conjurers up an image in your head that is the image I want you to have. You see ramshackle houses with dirt floors and no running water. You see chickens running in the road and skinny dogs sleeping in the sun and rusted tin roofs and scattered rolls of barbed wire and car parts and toilet seats and piles of broken rock and old tires and you understand the picture I am attempting to paint.
poor houses
But other words need to be used to capture the balance. One word that wraps itself around my heart as I am looking at the scene is beauty. How can beauty coexist with poor? It exists in flowering bougainvillea vines and colorful laundry billowing on the clothes line and piles of oranges and neatly braided hair and bright smiles and sacred trees growing in the middle of the road and the smokey smell of tortillas cooked over an open fire.

flower fence sm

These are the things that move me.

school girl sm

This place where beauty and poor mingle is a place of magic of the purest kind.

I am still attempting to plumb its depths.

In awe,
laura

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