Locked into the high Rocky Mountains for six years it surprised me how intensely I missed, I longed for the Ocean.

Most of my life I've lived near her, felt her immensity.

She is a woman. There is a reason the word for Ocean and the word for moon is feminine in most all languages.

After hanging out with the Monarch Butterfies I returned to the truly beautiful city of Morelia, capital of Michocoan.

Morelia is a city of high culture. And yet Morelia is a city with a bad reputation. In her streets of well crafted stone walk many university music students with their instruments. There are concerts of classical music, jazz festivals, cinema festivals, art - always. And yet, the atrocities of organized crime scream out from the headlines of the local newspapers.

I had a wonderful time playing music and discussing Selassie with my Rasterfarian brother Damien Garcia, of the Reggae band Meketrefes, and of the Tequila Sunset Hostal. I played harmonica with that great, old man, of the Chicago Blues, Chris Sanchez and his two sons. And I weathered Semanya Santa.

During Semanya Santa most everyone in Latin America is on vacation. The impact on the transportation, lodging, tourist and restaurant businesses is what you'd expect. There are those who are drunk the entire week. The alleged sacred and the profundly profane are mixed together in disturbing ways.

The Monday after Easter I was on a bus bound for Zihuatanejo.

Zihuatanejo is where Tim Robbins' and Morgan Freeman's characters Andy Dufrene and Red find the Shawshank Prison Redemption. Or, at least that's the way Stephen King wrote it.

There are things here that kind of remind me of my homeport Mystic, CT.

There are many soap-dish, toy boats of the rich. And yet, there are more simple, durable boats of the people. The waterfront has a hard-working, piratical cast of character. Here, you can make your stand on the waters.

I think of Jose Salvador Albarengo, a fisherman who set out from the village of Costa Azul, in Chiapas, with his buddy Ezequil, in November 2013, in a 22 foot fiber-glass boat. It was suppose to be a one day voyage.

A storm blew the boat far out to sea. The outboard engine failed. Ezequil lost the will to live and died one month later. Albarengo, and his small, severely damaged boat washed up on a coral atoll in the Marshall Islands a year later. He survived 13 months at sea.

¿I wonder what that experience of the Ocean would do to a person?

I see viejos, old men of the sea, working their boats as they cruise across the bay, to the open waters of the Pacific. They work with the effectiveness the Ocean demands. There are some that have the posture of those in the face of Mystery.

I came to the Ocean as a Pilgrim, I came to the Ocean as a lover - to be breast-to-breast with her - to immerse myself in her.

There are times when I think I know something of the Ocean - how to fish for lobsters - how the Human is changing her.

And then there are times when I know that I know nothing of the Ocean, except that she is a Mystery, where that great, albino, mutant Mystery - Moby Dick - abides.

P.S. It has been a re-occuring theme in "the narrative of the voyage of the bloody, snake chariot", (see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com), that I am, as that old Mexican song so aptly puts it, sin dinero, (without money). The universe giveth, and the universe taketh away. I have enough money, or something like that, to bus back to Austin, Tx. I'll be seeing you pinche, carbrone gringos soon.

And yet, the voyage continues.