I stood on the tarmac of Guadalajara International Airport, watching a bright orange sun sink behind hazy mountains. The smell of jet fuel and wildfire hung in the air, a strange cocktail of familiarity in my nose. Noa and I had just flown in from LA and were on our way to Puebla. We hadn’t spent any time outside of the airport in Mexico’s second biggest city, but as I watched the Mexican Sun set from the tarmac, I felt something well up in me. Indecipherable in the moment, I largely ignored it as I was whisked away up the rickety stairs onto our budget airline flight.

Days later I found myself gazing up in awe at the Piedra del Sol in Mexico City. I had seen dozens of images throughout my life, but none of them were able to capture its presence. The volcanic rock itself seemed to radiate, highlighting carvings through which deep red sacrificial blood once ran. I could picture it dripping onto the altar at Tenochtitlan. Those lives ended atop the stone and those who looked to it for meaning remained in that porous rock. More than an artifact, it was a beating heart, a tribute carved in violence and belief. A tribute to the same lifegiving Sun that hangs above our heads while we live, die and crane our necks skyward. Leaving the museum, I stepped back into the Mexican Sun. I noticed its warmth on my shoulders.

It’s the same warmth I’ve felt other places and other times. In Valle de Guadalupe when day was fading behind purple mountains and corridos played for a group of new friends, in Rio Lagartos as I watched an alligator slip silently through a lagoon, on the sidewalk in Mexico City as I leaned over the perfect pastor taco, in Baja Norte as dark cyan Pacific lapped against empty coastline and on the tarmac in Guadalajara waiting for a plane. That warmth, the warmth of the Mexican Sun, is what it feels like to be enveloped. Brought into a place wholly its own. Beautiful, romantic, tragic, hopeful, challenging and beaming with life. Mexico, its Sun, and everything under it.