The Wolves in Our Pack – The Innovator
The following 5-Part Series will examine men’s friendships; how we find them, how we cultivate them, and what they do for us, and our friends.
Circa 1998 on a late afternoon in August, Rafael and I stood atop a mesa near Lake Texcoco, outside of Mexico City. The mesa was the site of an abandoned Aztec ruin not under the supervision of the government, and in the warm sun, countless birds flocked around the mesa, the winged creatures now the owners of what may have been a minor oracle to the Aztec tlatoani, Nezahualcoyotl.
I looked over at Rafael, birds flying about, and I studied his facial features.
“Yes,” I thought, “We are indeed brothers. Look at us! We look so much alike!”
We were also coming down from an intense psychedelic mushroom trip, and I felt connected to everyone and everything at that particular moment in time.
It’s true Rafael and I are brothers. For one, we were in the same fraternity in college, and two, we are ethnically from the same branch of human civilization in the Americas. He from the megalopolis, Mexico City, and me from Santa Fe, New Mexico, the once remote northernmost province of the Spanish and Mexican and Indigenous empires of yore.
Our ancestors were once fellow countrymen, but wars and borders eventually separated us. Such is the story of Mexicans from the country of Mexico, and those people from the Southwest United States of Chicano or Mexican descent.
For these reasons, the connection between Rafael and I is certainly brotherly, he the big brother who has done and seen it all, and me the younger brother who is still becoming. Once, in college, when I tried to smoke a cigarette (trying to emulate my big brother, of course), he said, “I never want to see you do that again.”
Rafael has always said he believes in life before death, and as such, he’s lived each day to its fullest. He’s experimented, experienced, tried, tried again just about everything, and discovered new ways of doing all the things. Truly, ALL the things.
He’s the first to adopt to a new technology, and he will integrate it into his life as though it’s always been there. But despite his highly advanced affinity for the modern and new, he remains absolutely grounded to the earth and the wonders of nature. He’s somehow living just a bit into the future in an elegantly simple, human way.
Rafael has always been the innovator. He’s been the one to teach me how to conquer my fears of things like Twitter and ChatGPT, while at the same time reminding me to eat slowly and pay attention to the nutrients I’m consuming. He’s opened ceremonial space for me countless times with the help of both plant and synthetic medicine, while also holding space with silence as a therapeutic interchange between friends.
Innovators are the trail blazers and risk takers. They show the way, even if that way is fraught with danger. Without innovators, we remain inert, missing what could be there, what might propel us to be better. Rafael is one of those friends, one of those brothers, whom I’ll keep for good. For guys like me who always live with a little bit of fear and anxiety, I need those influences to remind me to stretch and bend my mind, while loving myself completely.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
