I was on a bus from Saskatchewan to Belize one time – don’t ask – and somewhere in the middle of the journey I looked out the window and said: ‘This is it: the perfect time to break out the Lotus tape.”

In addition to packing a few extra bottles of Pepto, I had prepared as well as possible for this trip by bringing a ton of music I hadn’t heard before, partially to break up the monotony of endless bus travel, but also to partner each moment with its ultimate soundtrack on my Walkman (remember those?). And this moment was, without question, the Lotus moment.

Outside the bus, it was night time in Mexico City. Mexico City will blow almost anyone’s mind; the sheer density and size of it, the endless layers of humanity, life and death, construction and decay, are striking even from inside a jumbo jet flying over it at hundreds of miles per hour… never mind from a groaning bus as it lurches its way through the smallest side streets at what seemed like several hours per mile. And the amount of street life so late at night! I was transfixed. The driver’s area of the bus, a veritable shrine to the Virgín de Guadalupe, was blinking with random colored lights like a Christmas tree. Ahead, people – so many people – would step out of the bus’ path mere inches from being hit, and the driver’s foot wouldn’t even graze the brake pedal. A yellow-haired, blue-eyed image of Jesus looked on.

My relationship with Carlos Santana’s music was already intense. Having heard some of it in childhood, I rediscovered it upon falling in love with the electric guitar, and for several years had been immersing myself in it like a type of meditation. The first time I had lived in Mexico as a teenager, there was no other music that spoke to both the rock & roll of my Canadian background and things I was experiencing around me in this foreign place. I couldn’t imagine understanding a song like ‘Europa’ until I heard it pouring out of the doorway of an all-night cantina as I stumbled through San Miguel’s cobblestone streets at night, high on youth and romance. But as I grew into a more spiritual curiosity about life, Santana’s music grew with me. I was now graduating from the acid-addled abandon of his Woodstock freak-out days to the introspective, earnest Coltrane-isms of the man who wore a white suit and called himself Devadip.

For whatever reason, the albums Caravanserai and Lotus had escaped me up to this point, and they represented the peak of this crucial part of Carlos’ journey as a person and a musician. I bought fresh copies of both before my trip and vowed to wait until the right time. Because of this, for the rest of my life I will associate the sound of these two records with the sights and smells that washed over that smoke-spewing bus to Belize. I felt like I was the sound of that electric guitar, piercing through the heavy night air as a battery of percussionists throbbed in time with the crazy Christmas lights and the pulse of an impossibly huge city.

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