The longer I stayed here, the more I realized how much of a place is carried through its people.
Not only through museums, books, or official histories, but through conversations overheard in passing. Through neighbors greeting you on evening walks. Through stories shared freely by someone who can tell you are genuinely curious.
I arrived expecting certain kinds of learning.
The residency itself spoke of dialogues with Maya communities, archaeologists, and cultural historians. Those experiences never unfolded in the ways I imagined.
And yet, somehow, the learning still found me.
Just differently.
A Didi driver explaining a local belief.
A conversation over coffee that turned toward mythology.
Someone pointing toward a tree, an animal, a symbol, and revealing the story attached to it.
Again and again, people here shared pieces of cultural memory not as something preserved behind glass, but as something still woven into everyday life.
I think that is part of what stayed with me most.
Not the feeling of being instructed.
But welcomed into curiosity.
There is something transformative about moving through a place where you are not fluent in the language.
It slows you down.
You begin paying closer attention to expression, rhythm, gesture, tone. You learn to listen with more than words.
And in that slowing down, the world becomes unexpectedly vivid.
I noticed more here.
The faces of people.
The way conversations linger.
The way evenings gather slowly in the streets.
The ease with which strangers acknowledge one another.
People in the neighborhood recognizing me when I pass by on my walks and stopping to ask how I am. Or taking a moment together to admire the full moon overhead.
Small moments.
But moments that slowly reshape your understanding of what community can feel like.
Where I come from, individuality often feels like the dominant rhythm of life.
Here, I often felt something else.
A quieter awareness of one another.
A sense that life is still lived collectively in ways I had forgotten were possible.
And I think I fell in love with that most of all.
Not an idealized version of Mérida.
But the humanity within it.
The openness.
The curiosity.
The willingness people here have shown to share pieces of themselves, their stories, and their history with someone willing to listen.
As this residency comes to an end, I keep thinking about how much this place sharpened my sense of curiosity.
Not only about history or culture, but about people.
About the ways we move through the world with one another.
Mérida reminded me how much remains undiscovered when we allow ourselves to move slowly enough to notice.
To ask questions.
To listen.
To remain open to unexpected conversations and encounters.
I do not feel finished with that kind of exploration.
If anything, this experience has deepened it.
It reminded me that unfamiliarity can be a gift.
That not fully understanding can open us more deeply to connection.
And that some places leave an impression not because they overwhelm you, but because they quietly return you to a more attentive way of being alive.
And for all of that, thank you, Mérida.