Puerto, The Waves that Saved Me
IT WAS IN THE SUMMER OF 2024 THAT I FIRST HEARD THE name Puerto Escondido. It was a line in Caloncho’s song, Post Química, that goes “desde Baja hasta Puerto Escondido” and those words resonated like a call. So it was that in July of that year that I left everything behind in San Luis Potosi: the future that had been laid out for me forever - marriage, a house, a profession – for a castle in the air. I bet on the love of a barefoot Argentine who was passing through who said, “Let’s go to Puerto where everything is magical.”
We arrived with Luna, my puppy, our backpacks and a sea of doubts. We first stayed at a dark and chaotic hostel in Rinconada. It was there that I contracted dengue, and I learned that the life of the traveler was not what one sees on an Instagram post. But it was on my third day in Puerto, at the Bruja Olvidada, on Rinconada that I chanced to meet Barbara Schaffer, the poet and publisher of this magazine. She invited me to read the Spanish translations of her poetry in public and to collaborate on an article. (See Viva Puerto #41) And that same afternoon I also met the yogini and surfer Estela Corzo who, without being asked, offered me the opportunity to give my first yoga class. Puerto, I thought, was where the improbable becomes routine.
The hostels were my first homes, rooms shared with other travelers, walls that smelled of fresh paint, and getting to meet people from all over the world. I improved my English with the laughter of the foreigners. I broke up and made up with my Argentine boyfriend so many times that I have lost count. Now he is in his country, but that’s another story.
I left Puerto with a broken heart after what I imagined was our final breakup, and I went to Oaxaca – the city, the valleys, the mountains - with my puppy. By some freak chance I was hired to act as an extra in a beer commercial. Then my face appeared on billboards throughout the state to remind people to change their license plates. I had signed a contract, but the pay was very little.
Soon I was in shows all over Oaxaca, and I felt like life was playing a game of disguising me with different versions of myself. I felt like a child who had dreamed of becoming a famous actress. I laughed at myself. How had I arrived here? Finally, I moved to the Valle de Etla, close to the museum of the artist Francisco Toledo, surrounded by art, festivals, and hills that seemed to protect me.
And then, one day, I found myself in New York. There I was accepted inside the yellow walls of a yoga ashram with the silence of meditation, the balsamic mantras, the rigor of the practice. There I discovered that calm could be born out of chaos. But Puerto came calling again. I won a grant from Vida Yoga (Puerto’s first yoga school) to become a certified yoga teacher. And I had to choose: the north of the continent or the south of Mexico. I chose to return to the shore where my voyage had begun.
Today I write from a small apartment facing the sea. I don’t live in hostels and I don’t follow my Argentine hippy boyfriend any more. I don’t have my dog either, nor the idea I once had of forming a family. I live alone with a motorcycle that takes me over streets of sand to my yoga classes.
Sometimes I exchange my knowledge on social networks for classes on singing and theater and some other holistic formation. Some times, the low season is difficult and it feels like I won’t be able to manage. But Puerto has taught me that the biggest waves always arrive after the calm.
Here I continue to learn how to live, how whoever listens to the sound of the sea knows that there will be another wave, that perhaps it will knock her down but she will always dare to begin again.
August, 2025
________________________
Instagram @brenmarsol
WhatsApp +52 444 393 1313
