This month my first article appeared in Mexico News Daily, an English-language outlet read across México. The piece was about my first year in Querétaro. Seeing my name under a headline in my adopted country turned out to be a particular kind of milestone, different from publishing a book, closer to being introduced around a neighborhood, and it set me thinking again about the inner work of transition that brought me here.
I have written for a long time, mostly in forms that keep a certain distance. Clinical work has its formality. A book took me the better part of two decades. These letters find you in your inbox, one reader at a time. Placing a short personal essay in a local paper felt more exposed than any of that. A book is a room you invite people into, and a newspaper column is more like a window someone opens while walking past. I found I liked the window more than I expected to.
The readers who wrote back
Then readers began to write back. One wrote from her own version of the journey, saying México had lived in her spiritual DNA long before she arrived. Others wrote about their own crossings, their own reasons for leaving one life to look for another. There is something specific about being read by strangers who are carrying the same questions you are. It is a form of belonging that arrives through the work rather than through proximity, and I did not expect to find it in a comments section.
Carl Jung wrote about the persona, the face we present to the world, and how much of a life goes into deciding what it hides and what it reveals. Writing in public is a negotiation with that face. You choose how much to show, and in what light. I have tended to keep the settings conservative. This essay nudged them a little, and the response that came back was warm rather than unkind.
In A Life Aligned I described alignment as the practice of letting your outward life match your inward one. Publishing that first essay was a small act of exactly that. Writing plainly, under my own name, in the paper of the place I now live, is a modest form of visibility, the kind that comes from participation rather than performance. It has taken me a while to prefer it that way.
A trilogy on the inner work of transition
The book turns out to be the first of three. A Life Aligned came out in its revised edition this year, and the second, Paradise (re)Discovered, is in editing now and arrives this fall. The third is still ahead of me, unwritten. I did not set out to plan a trilogy so much as discover that the questions kept opening into further questions, each book becoming the ground for the next. Watching the arc take shape has changed how I hold an ordinary writing day.
I write now from El Refugio, on the edge of Querétaro, in a life arranged more around rhythm than around output. The morning has its walk. The work has its hours. Publishing here, at this point in my life, feels less like ambition and more like joining a conversation that was already underway in a place I have come to call home.
If you would like to read the essay that started all this, it is linked at the top. And I will leave you with the question it left with me. Where in your own life are you being invited to be more visible, to let the outward version match the inward one? The rains here will keep falling into September, and there is time to answer.
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro
These reflections arrive first as letters to subscribers. If you would like to receive them in your inbox, you can subscribe to Letters from the Interior on Substack.
A Life Aligned: The Journey to Allowing the Magic in Your Life is the first book in a trilogy on the inner work of transition, available in paperback, eBook (Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others), and audiobook at drmarkarcuri.com/a-life-aligned. The second, Paradise (re)Discovered, arrives Fall 2026.