The border I crossed without paying for it
Coming home to Querétaro, and the price of a threshold
I got back to Querétaro last night, and the rains had already started. July is the wettest month here in the Bajío, and most afternoons the sky opens and the streets run with water for an hour or two. After a few weeks away, the familiar streets felt easy under my feet, and that ease is a good part of what home means to me now.
I had been on Long Island, at my mother’s house, the one my parents chose more than twenty years ago. My father made his transition in 2011, while they were wintering in Florida, a place he loved even more than Long Island. I go back to my mother each summer, and the visit always carries some of him with it. Leaving her house and flying south is its own small crossing, and this year the distance between there and here felt both wide and closely joined.
The border I cross to come home is an easy one. I carry the right documents, I answer a few questions, I get a stamp and a smile, and I am back in the life I built here. My move to México was a choice, made at the end of 2024, and the welcome I have found in Querétaro has been steady and real. That ease is uncommon, and the news I came home to made it hard to take for granted.
This week the government of México said it would pursue legal and diplomatic action after documenting the deaths of seventeen of its nationals connected to United States immigration enforcement. Fourteen of them died in detention. They had crossed a border in the other direction, most of them years ago, most of them looking for what I found here, a place to build a life and a ground to stand on. I moved south into welcome. They moved north into danger, and some of them will not be going home.
Joseph Campbell wrote about the threshold, the point where a traveler leaves the known world for the unknown and meets the figures who decide whether the passage is allowed. For some of us the guard waves us through. For others the guard is a locked door and a system that forgets the person inside it. The old story counts on the hero surviving the crossing and bringing something back, and this week reminds me how many never get the chance to return.
Carl Jung believed that whatever we refuse to face in ourselves comes back to meet us in the world. A country can avoid things the same way a person does. It is easier to talk about borders as lines on a map than to sit with the people who die trying to cross them. Part of living in a place that welcomed me is keeping those deaths in view instead of letting them blur into one more headline.
In A Life Aligned I describe integration as the fifth movement of the process, the point where what you have learned gets folded back into how you actually live. It is the least glamorous of the five and the most demanding, because it asks you to change once you know something you can’t unknow. This week integration means holding two things at once. I am grateful for a border that opened to me, and I owe something to the people it closed against, and gratitude without that second part turns into forgetting.
So I am home, the rains are washing the streets, and the city took me back without asking me to prove anything. I want to let that welcome change how I move through the coming weeks, with more attention to the people near me who are still looking for solid ground. Whatever we carry home from a journey is meant to be shared, and that is the point of coming back.
If you have crossed a threshold of your own lately, a move, a loss, an arrival, I would ask you two things. What did you bring back, and who helped you across? And is there someone near you still waiting at the edge of a crossing? The rains here will keep falling all summer, so there is time to think about it.
— Mark
A Life Aligned: The Journey to Allowing the Magic in Your Life is a companion for anyone moving through real transition, available in paperback, eBook (Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others), and audiobook at drmarkarcuri.com/a-life-aligned.
Mark A. Arcuri, Ph.D., is an integrative health & wellness coach, educator, and author writing from Querétaro, México, where his work explores alignment, belonging, and the inner life of transition.
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