This is what I do

I actually work a little bit from time to time... This is something I wrote this morning:

You might have seen his sand sculptures by the Malecon. You might have even seen him sitting next to them in the sand, with his long hair and bearded face, resting after a hard day’s work. You might have seen all that, but you probably still haven’t seen the man behind it all. This is him: Juan Guillermo Corbera Aleman, a 28 year-old from Mexico City.

One day, about five years ago, Juan found himself sitting in school, halfway through his degree in Anthropology (he already had a law degree), unhappy and thinking “What I am doing here? I’m always dreaming about being somewhere else, about seeing the world. So why don’t I just do it?”

So he did. He packed up his backpack and left. And for five years he traveled around Mexico, sleeping wherever he could find some shelter, while making a meager living from selling silver jewelry – until one day when he came to Vallarta, with only 200 pesos in his pocket and nowhere to stay. “I came here six months ago, on December 24th. I was really on my way to Los Cabos to try to sell some silver. But as I was walking down the Malecon with my backpack seeing if I could maybe sleep on the beach, something caught my attention. It was these wonderful sand sculptures.”

Impressed by what he saw, Juan walked up to the sculptor and asked if he could watch him and maybe learn from him. The man agreed, but only if he was willing to work. Juan started working that same day, and two weeks later he made his first sand sculpture.

For Juan, the sand has its own life. “There’s something in it, something that wants to be set free,” he says. “Sometimes it’s something amazing and beautiful, and other times it’s something frightening. But it’s out of my control. I’m just the instrument, setting it free”.

The sculptor is gone now, but Juan is still here, making his own sculptures, earning his living from tips. Today he has found his happiness, but he is still dreaming about seeing the world, about sculpting on the beaches of Spain. “I will probably stay for another couple of months,” he says. But you never know. They say once Vallarta has got a hold of you, it will never let you go.”