there's a place up the hill from mazunte. no sign. no google pin. just a dirt road that keeps going until the jungle decides you've arrived. zapotal.
the fire is the center of everything here. not a fireplace. not a decorative thing. a stone circle where people sit and stop performing. where kids run barefoot on volcanic rock and nobody tells them to be careful. where the smoke smells like copal and the conversation happens in three languages or none at all.
i sit here with my kids and i watch them do what kids are supposed to do. touch things. get dirty. stare at the flames without needing a reason. no screen. no timer. no educational agenda. just fire.
the adults are the same. someone brought a hat. someone brought mezcal. someone brought nothing and that was enough. the jungle holds the whole thing — palms overhead, birds you'll never identify, the pacific somewhere below doing what it always does.
stone circle.
barefoot kids.
smoke rising through the palms.
no wifi. no agenda.
the original operating system.
i build servers for a living. i wire up subdomains and docker containers and reverse proxies. and then i come here and sit on a striped blanket and watch wood burn. and both things feel like the same practice. arranging something carefully so it can hold what matters.
the fire doesn't need my code. but the code needs this fire. needs the reminder that the point was never the infrastructure. the infrastructure is just the stone circle. the point is who shows up and what happens when they stop pretending.
mazunte teaches you that. every single time.