For the next four months I’ll be living in — and posting my WOW Factor blogs from — Guanajuato, the capital city of the state of Guanajuato in Mexico. I arrived here last evening, and I wanted to share my new view with you:

I’m staying at a friend’s lovely home here, while she and her husband spend the summer in Nova Scotia, in exchange for helping her with a solar-cooking book project. The solar oven they’ve designed and plan to manufacture on a greater scale, called a UiTzi, is pictured right. I’m excited by this challenge.

From this terrace I can see the city spread out below — in all its multi-pastel-colored glory. I can hear Mexican music blasting from somewhere nearby, dogs barking, birds chirping, cars’ horns blaring, children laughing. I have an eggplant attempting to slow-cook in the UiTzi right now — my first experiment. If only the sun would come out behind the rainy-season clouds.

While I’m here — learning Spanish, learning how to cook with the sun,  expanding my world and my view — my condo in Taos is being rented by a woman in her 70s too who is visiting Taos from Thailand for four months. My newest next-door neighbor in Taos is an 81-year-old woman who has just come back to Taos after living for many years in Bali.

This is the time of life, it seems to me now, when we who are “of a certain age,” no longer in the work force, unencumbered by “stuff,” and free, can fly to other parts of the world, not to simply breeze through in the comfort of a tour bus but actually stay a while.

This is how we learn to love the world, I think: Let new places and new vistas seep in slowly, over time. Learn the language (or give it a try), eat the food, dance to the music. As the old song goes, “We’re only dancing on this earth for a short time.”

Ah, the sun has just broken through the blanket of clouds. My new view is sunny.