I have never opened a ripe mango and not wanted to lick it.

It may be true that my first mango was not until I went to Mexico.  If there was one before that I can only say it was not memorable and who cares about a forgettable mango anyway.  No it was in my late twenties and, with my friend Lisa, we had earned a vacation hanging hotel wallpaper until our shoulders bowed over like old men and we said what are we going to do with all this money and no work left to do.

The globe twirled and tired fingers fell on Cozumel in what would be my first trip out of the country other than Canada, which did not count anymore than a bad mango.  I lived in a time when we thought of Canada as our poor relative that was still trying to be a real country.   You didn’t even need a passport and as far as I was concerned, that sealed the deal.  Canada was chump change.

Lisa found a cheap flight and a cheap hotel and we cashed our last paycheck from Fall River Comfort Inn to pay for both.  It was all very exciting to me though I was still invested in appearing cool so the excitement was on the inside and what was on the outside was blasé no big deal and as I recall I stayed that way until I looked out the airplane window and saw the water of the Caribbean.  From then on I belonged to the moist woody smells and the slow hips of the land where blue was invented – the Yucatan.

It was on the first morning of my week on the island that two things happened – I ate the previously mentioned mango and I had a spiritual experience.  It’s unclear to me how these two events affected each other but I can simply say that first I had the mango and then, an hour or so later, I had the spiritual experience.  And in between the two I thought I was going to die.

The mango came from an old Mayan woman.  It cost 5 pesos and she handed it to me in two halves, split open with the pit removed.  I had not ever put my tongue on something that color before – the closest I had come was when I used to eat crayons as a kid to see if they tasted like they looked.  The mango not only tasted like it looked, it felt alive to me.  I believe I may have made a spectacle of myself, what with my face pressed into the mango cup, devouring it like a new lover, my tongue half crazy, the juice sliding down my face and neck.  I got a hold of myself after finishing the first half and ate the other without incident.

From the mango lady, I headed into the jungle on a moped I rented from a randy teenager who insisted on making sure I knew how to drive by riding on the back and nearly causing me to go off the road what with me trying to steer and keeping him out of my shirt.  We finally struck a deal, money rather than sex, and off I went.

Maybe it was just in my mind, but I remember that day to be both rainy and sunny, overcast and sparkling at the same time.  I don’t know what to make of this but I can’t get it to turn out any other way no matter how many times I’ve replayed it in my mind’s eye.  There is fog and there is sunshine; the fog leaving my skin coated with dew, the sun baking it into my bones.

I rode through the middle of the island on a jungle path until I came to a tree that had fallen across it and I had to get off and walk my bike around.  The bike engine stalled and it was at this point that I became afraid – as a child who grew up with TV shows, I remembered the traps set by banditos and pirates to slow an unsuspecting traveler enough to take at least their wallet if not their life.  My mango breakfast lurched upward as I came around the far side of the tree and two men stood quietly looking at me.  I did not know what to do so I acted like I didn’t see them and while they watched me I walked my bike beyond their reach.

“Mire, señora, allí aumenta un puma delante,” is what one of them said to me, a phrase I translated only later to mean “watch out, lady, there’s a cougar up ahead” and that the men were not the danger at all.

I won’t drag you through the details of my encounter with the cougar as you can  clearly see I was not killed by it.  But I will tell you that the things that I fear are often not the danger and that spiritual experience comes at the strangest time.  That driving through the jungle, alone as I have ever been, feeling the limitlessness of my own life while at the same time recognizing that it is with the flick of an eye that it can end, well it changed something in me that has never changed back.

I will also tell you that fear and desire live in me like twin sisters, each wanting top billing while knowing they are so closely related that one cannot be without the other. I can’t always tell them apart but I need them both, one to propel me forward and the other to hold me still.

I walked into the oncoming path of the cougar with my heartbeat strong in my ears – pumped from the encounter with the hombres and wanting nothing more than to get me and my bike back to town.

We made eye contact.

And now, not a time goes by, when I eat a mango that I do not see the color of her eyes – firey orange  – and I do not feel her gaze as I walked by, deciding whether she wanted to eat me or not.