Apparition premonition

I wake up early. The morning gathers up tendrils of night, slowly breathing light over the coast. I begin to run with eyes barely open, waves playing with my feet. As each wave recedes the sand grows soft and I pump my legs harder to keep the pace.



By the time I cover four beach-lengths I am running with sweat and sea, salty fingers pulling at my body. I dive in. Feel a stingray touch my leg.

The sea is calm and grey and I am completely alone.

The quiet cliffs remind me of Cornwall. I sit. My seventeen-year old self comes silently up behind me and squats in the sand, looking out at the blurred horizon.

I study this child. Right now I look more like her than I have in ten years. Her skin is transparent and I see the sand in drifts through her chest. She echoes through time and space, longing written all over her face.

I remember being her in this moment. I know what she is thinking. Something just happened to her that came as a shock, and she is deep in it, deep in the swirl of those big life questions.

This is the first moment she ever accepted the importance of not feeling insignificant.

She thinks that she will die before she is thirty. She is convinced, in fact, and she doesn't know why.

The sea looks the same to me as it does to her, even though mine belongs to southern Nicaragua instead of southern England. Twenty-seven years creep onto my face, hang from my limbs. As I look at this girl, so small and yet so endless, I am split by a deep understanding and at the same time a total incomprehension.

I don't quite know how to interpret her thoughts, so I walk away.

I pad through the sand to the water's edge, heels imprinting in the sand. Dive in once again. The water is cool and flows over my face. I duck again and again, feeling the heat being carried away from my burning skin.

The softness of everything wraps me gently. I watch the shore, as my younger self slowly fades away. Once again, I am alone.

Time = rate of change

Guatemala City is enormous, loud, and covered in Christmas. I had forgotten, of course. Its imminence should be obvious, but by now I'm used to that confusion; sometimes I genuinely have to decide whether it is May or November.



Every roundabout along Avenida Reforma radiates light. We pass a Gallo Cerveza tree, the traditional angel at the summit replaced with the beer company's neon cockerel head. Then a Coca Cola tree, perfect twinkling cylinder of red and white. Kind sponsors of Christmas around the world.


Krista and Mindi are my companions in the car; two in a long line of deep friendships formed over the course of this year. Friends like these are few and far between, or so I used to think -- I have probably made more good friends this year than in my entire twenties. They surround me like cushions, peppering this continent with little conversational havens.


I have left a lot of people behind in my life, especially recently. I like to think that the best ones are glued on, and time has so far proved that to be true. But inevitably, in anyone's life, let alone in one like this, a few of them have to go. I am making my peace with that.


Home is no longer the place I think it is. Friends drift away, connections fade. People have joined the drifts of belongings in my wake. Every time I shift, physically and mentally, there are one or two who move just a little too far away to touch. I realise that it is perhaps emotionally easier for me to reduce my connections over there. But at the same time, never have I felt so completely in my element, never have I attracted so many like-minded people.

Regardless of mental space, I have put myself in a position whereby my main form of contact is email. Despite my sometimes irrational condemnation of technology, I depend on it. If this flow is not maintained, a relationship without deep foundation can dissolve. And thus, without really understanding so at the time, my move away from the UK has inevitably resulted in loss.

I believe I can be easily misunderstood, despite the level of intention I place on my communication. To most, I have run away. To me, I am still running towards. But all I can do is stay true to my own understanding, and keep an open enough mind to allow others in with it.

Everyone has their own path, and everyone has companions who walk it with them.

Those I once counted as part of me may morph into something impenetrable. Those I once trusted may become something else, and this distance might be too big to discover them anew.


But for all the shifting connections that may surround me, right now, in the centre of this torn city, I feel completely safe.


Time is a rate of change. I stand at the window of the mall and look out over the throughway, my eyes tracing cars in bewilderingly straight lines. Streams of traffic and lives blur around me in bright trails, momentarily blinding me.

Home is a moving vehicle

We walk into the controlled climate of a giant shopping centre.


The entire mall is covered in fairy lights. A red- and white-striped signpost cheerily points us towards Santa. Soft clothes, perfectly clean, seem glued on to plastic abstracts of the human form. Things, endless things, surround us.

The colours and smells are overwhelming and I am overcome with the urge to spend money.

My wallet contains four dollars and a few Quetzal, but even if it were full I would be unable to hand it over, paralysed as I am by this incredible shinyness, this impossible choice, the enticements of the advertisements and the lighting confusing me. I am bedazzled to such an extent that I simply follow my friends, wide eyed and silent, an idiot's smile belying my incredulousness.

I may still be in Guatemala City, but in this moment I realise the enormity of the gap between where I am and where I was.

Perspectives contract a huge, incomprehensible world into something small enough to be seen through your own, personal window. Most people spend a lot of their lives looking through the same window again and again, literally and figuratively, because that is what creates solidarity, that is what begets security. That is what makes it easy to do whatever they do; when they decide to look, they know what they will see.

In some ways I wish that would satisfy me. I could look out of my window and feel comfortable. But for whatever reason I was born into this body, a vehicle with an insatiable desire to move. My little eyeholes and my clamouring mind need constant change.

Perhaps this is why I enjoy bus journeys so much. The trouble is, when your window moves so much, a society that has previously seemed so logical can become a virtual reality, a shadowy vista on an endless road. And one day, you look back... and the concrete of a previous life is just candy canes and bottled smells, processed cheese and flimsy, pointless garments.

I feel left behind, in a sense. Step off the gravy train and the engine still chugs. Without realising it, I have signed myself out of that world… and not yet found another to sign myself into. Am I looking for something? Or am I just wandering aimlessly, the eternal fool, destined one day to return to a world that has moved far from my comprehension? These are the questions that walk circles in my head.


At the end of the day, although I may feel longing for that home I once had back in England, how many times can I say, "I live here now," before it begins to become true? And when my search for 'realness' over this side of the Atlantic means I meet such a huge concentration of people whom I truly understand, and who truly understand me, then perhaps at some point I do need to consider which world forms the best fit.


At some point, time became more valuable than money. With that choice, my windowframe collapsed. I think about my enormous, past collection of belongings... and I cannot remember where it all went.

For Nico, who talks with his hands

Over a mystical year his hands span my memory.
In a bubble of existence, a blurred reality of growth and subsistence
It was his hands that so often brought clarity.

The fundamentals unwound, broken down
With earnest gesticulation
Hands like starry exclamations, weaving connotations
Unspooling spirals of logic in the air.

Clench contracts possibility
Fist smacks sensibility
Fingers print indelibly
Pulling chewy strings out from under the limbs of poorly-constructed theory
Drawing abstract conceptuality into a thin stream of truth.

His fingers open wide and capture something invisible.

So complex a creature
And yet so perfectly, beautifully succinct.
Strife of mind, search for calm
Expressed in these five lines
Intersecting in a palm.
Like conflicting perceptions, crossing at strange angles
And him
Like a question mark
In the middle.

These hands stand as channels
Visual aid to his stories made in a vault of curiosity and quest
They never rest
They dance with his voice
And with the tiny, telling lines around his eyes.
For this brother is wise with a wisdom borne of thirst
A communication forever bursting from him
His palms outstretched
Imploring me to explore, just a little more
The ideas I take to be true.
"You are my rock here," he said
But he was mine, too.

The Space Between

I sit in candlelight and watch smoke curling from the glowing tip of a joint. It dances in the air, every direction at once, gathering and spreading and contracting in white drifts. As I watch the ember I watch my mind. Ever moving, ever grasping. Never stopping.

The only addiction I've ever had is to weed. They say it is the only classified drug not to be physically addictive, but the mental addiction can be crippling. I used to smoke every day, when the routine and caffeine of my life formed walls and wide-open pits in which to wallow. But I like to think I left that habit in London.

These days, I rarely explore that hole. I prefer to live my life in clarity. But as with any vice, it can still get out of hand. The spiral into that blurry other dimension happens quickly, and usually signals the need for reform.


I have been stoned for two weeks. For whatever reason, I know profoundly that that little farm over the lake is no longer my home, and yet I cannot leave; not yet, for I have made a commitment to hold space here for the next month at least.


To feel something so deeply and yet not act on it throws me sideways. I almost cannot bear the lie.


And so I retreat as always, away, away, back to my zone, where I try to sift through the swirls of emotion currently de-rooting me, read patterns in the drifts in the air.


Before I even go back there, I begin to say goodbye.

I spend a lot of time staring. Mainly at the lake's surface, swept into white peaks by an incessant gale that completely cleans the skies, pushing November's cold deep inside. In my head the loop is playing. "It's time. It's time. It's time." I hold on to things, tightly, to keep myself from being blown away.

The smoke and the wind blur the edges. They slow things down, spread them out, until I can see the spaces between. I push myself into the cracks and wait it out.

In mid-November I return from a El Salvador, leaving friends and my sister behind. A course has descended on the farm and I have to pull myself out of my stupor. The girls fill every space with their laughter and self-exploration. I alternate between getting drunk on their raw spirit and hiding away in my kitchen, putting all my energy into their meals. But for the first time ever, my heart isn't in it.


I visit my man in Santa Cruz. His face is so familiar and yet somehow so far away. Our connection strings through lifetimes, but I fear that in this life, our current paths are too erratic.


I sit on his bed, with its wide-open view, and close my eyes to the blustery day. "The wind is blowing too hard," I say, without really understanding my words.


In my head the sentence continues. Too hard to be grounded here by such a tiny little thread. When I walk out that day I feel like I'm walking out forever. But I do not doubt I will see him again.


At the end of November Nico, last member of my farm family, leaves. With his departure my roots finally retract.


I begin to get my belongings in order.

Earthquake awakes

The moment I arrive back at the farm I realise it is time to leave.

I cannot explain what it is that changed my mind. I have lived here for nine months; eight and a half months longer than expected. I have grown comfortable, collected things. I had envisioned staying here for a while longer.

And yet I feel totally displaced. It is as if my energy has exploded and is dispersed, hanging together just gently. It spreads wide over Central America and the lands I have just travelled, the spirits of my sister and my friend Sacha echoing from opposite ends. I have no doubt that my urge to leave is connected to this; to the fact that they are both unexpectedly in the area.

But there is something else. I look on the lake with a new awareness. An understanding, somehow, that Lake Atitlan could never be the one I am looking for.

Perhaps it is the remoteness. The contrast between here and the beautiful beach in El Salvador where I just left my sister. Or the people, the divide between native and traveller. There is a dark side lurking under every corner and a history steeped in blood.

Or perhaps it is the quaking of the land, a shaking that wakes me up at night. Sometimes I lie in bed and I cannot tell if it is the earth or my heartbeat that moves me.

In a sense I am disheartened. This was a real contender; this gorgeous lake that ticks so many boxes. I try not to look into it too deeply; apparently, I can only ever be loosely tethered to this earth.


The land around me slides. The lake before me rises. And in the middle there is me, shifting and moving, ever wandering.

I will follow through with my commitment the the farm. But inside that wind blows strong. I look at the water's surface, whipped into white peaks, and brace myself.

Sister Sun

This is the kind of evening I live for. The window presses patterns into my elbows and the metal of the car edge burns. In the wind my hair feels sharp.

We ascend a slight incline and the low sun snipes my eyes in a flash of intense orange.

Leaning back I enter the grey pleather world of a minibus, occupants occupied with books and white earphones. I lever my head and shoulders back out of the window. Insert myself back into the land flying past.

The difference is stark. The lid comes off the sky and I morph from the observer to the observed. My heart feels like it is expanding. Somehow this evening shows everything as it truly is.

I think of my sister, waving from the side of the road where I left her an hour ago, and have to resist the urge to jump out into this golden world.

It is hard to believe I have just spent two weeks with Emily - they seem to have passed me by in a whirl of activity, pierced through with the clear light of the new dry season.

Just a week ago she ripped up her ticket back home. For whatever reason, she felt the same pull taking her away from our homeland. Now, like me, she is dislocated. Thanks to destiny's fine work, Central America now houses two wandering Randalls.

Separated for years by winding lives, once more brought back together under this metalled sun. For the first time we find ourselves together in our abandon, and the focus shifts to our similarities instead of our differences.

If I hadn't needed to return for work I would have skipped down the Pacific with her. But instead I am on a bus back to the lake.

The coast of El Salvador marches along the sea in dramatic cliffs and endless lines of surf. Fields of sugar cane and coconut palms flaunt highlights in sprays of green.

Everything is on fire.

Ahead of me lie eight weeks of hard work. Beyond that… only this sun knows. The swelling inside reminds me not to stay away too long.

The wind teases tears from my eyes. I miss her already.

The other side

The lake is swirling. She spreads her weedy reach wide, trailing watery fingers over unsuspecting shore. I cannot stop looking at all the land she's claimed.

Sometimes the lake is paradise. Sometimes far from. I suppose that is the case with anywhere.

I arrive home from a night away to find our puppy, Bear, missing from the farm. He is absent for the first time since he was born in the greenhouse in June.

A few local women are fishing from the lake's edge near our dock. They stand bare-footed in the murky weeds, colourful wrap skirts sodden at the hems. I ask them and they giggle, waving their hands vaguely down the path.  Esteban, one of the farm hands, tells me Bear was violently sick all afternoon.

My heart starts to beat. Hard.


I furiously search the coffee plantations either side of our land, but little Bear appears to have vanished.

At a certain point the next day I give up.

Esteban finds the remains of poison in the field next door. Ironically, it seems the owners meant to target Bear's stray mother, who darts out from the spot looking perfectly, frustratingly healthy, her again-pregnant stomach tauntingly swinging. Full with Bear's brothers.

A couple of days later a fisherman paddling his kayuko in the shallows finds a puppy's swollen body floating in the weeds. Evidence, discarded. I think of the laughing women, who were standing right… there.

I do not look. Nico and Esteban remove it and lay the remains out for the vultures. Within a week there is nothing left but teeth.

I release my grief in a quick burst.

It is stupid -- I know deeper pain than a dead dog -- but I feel dislodged by the poignancy of it all. Somehow floating too, weeds catching in my hair.
For me and my farm family, a rainy summer. For another, a life. In a strange way I feel honoured to have seen one from beginning to end.

I'm not sure what to learn from it other than to remind myself of the edge, so easy to forget when surrounded by beauty. It feels balanced to be presented with the other side, if only for a moment.

To me, his body, swollen and floating in the shallows, is just a speck of an indication of the lake's power. For how many countless villagers lie under her surface?

I am surrounded by the terrible beauty of Atitlan.

She surges over the shore.  Claims her own with ease.

I sit and watch, quietly.

Nature's mercy

At the beginning of October a tropical storm hits the Pacific coast of Central America and we lose sight of the sky for three weeks. It rains day and night; thick, oily drops falling heavily from cloying cloud. Several people lose their lives in mudslides and the main road into Panajachel is closed for a week.

By the time I get back from my visa run to Mexico, the lake has risen by almost a metre on top of the half metre or so already gained in the first half of the season. The entire lake edge is littered with semi-submerged houses and farms.

Trees arch gracefully from the water. Everyone has a new dock, and every dock is built precariously over the remains of others. The shops near the water in Santiago are filled to the ceiling.

There being no outlet, Lake Atitlan is vulnerable to weather and follows cycles of growth and recession that the locals meet with ancient acceptance.

If this had happened anywhere else it would have made international news, but the pace of this creep over six months of rain is too slow for today's press.

I arrive home to a considerably smaller farm. Reed islands have lodged themselves on our new dock, shielding the farm front with a wall of green. Kale lurches soggily from the shallows, the leaves of a baby lime tree barely surfacing. The lakeside path has shifted to run around the yoga shala, which used to lie twenty metres from the water's edge when I arrived at the farm in March.


At this rate, the entire farm will be under within a couple of years.


I fall into bed in the dark and wake up crawling in ants. I rip up my mattress and watch as hundreds of red leaf-cutters scatter, desperately collecting waxy white eggs and disappearing between the floorboards. Every surface blooms pale with mould. The eaves are strung with a dense network of dusty white spider's webs and my clothes are full of giant crickets.
My home has been reclaimed by the jungle.


I spend an exhausting day scrubbing and beating as much life from my belongings as I can. The rain beats rivers down the windows and the light fades through a grey imperceptibly tinged with pink.


Nico and I eat in silence in a damp rancho. With no residents at the moment the farm is strangely empty. At some point, the rain stops. I fail to notice exactly when.

I wash my dishes and walk outside.

Above me shines a star.


A small patch of the night sky overhead has cleared. It has been a long time, so I walk down to our new dock to watch from the water. The lake is glossy.


The atmosphere is light with shifting energy, the post-deluge air impeccably clean. A clear line divides the sky; on one side the nothingness of thick cloud, on the other sparkling pinpricks of light. I sit and watch for an hour as our world changes.


Like a magician, revealing his last secret, the sky is gradually unveiled. The line moves across the sky as the black hole recedes.


The wall of cloud slips behind Volcan San Pedro and at once the sky is infinite.

And, just like that, the rainy season comes to an end.

Sliding Doors

On two occasions now I have passed Salina Cruz, on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, at sunrise. From the window of the bus it appears ethereal, despite the offshore oil rigs; a jagged, undulating town built over rolling sand dunes, edged by white beaches turned pink in the morning light.

When Sacha and I find ourselves in Oaxaca City with no onward destination, an image of Salina Cruz comes to mind. Hours later, we are unceremoniously regurgitated from the night bus, into a station dark with 4am shadows. I pass out face down on the clinically-tiled floor. Wake up to the birds of the tropics.

Salina Cruz, once more at dawn.

We get the first collectivo half an hour out of town, to a highway turnoff that I spotted from the bus window a year ago. Opposite, a hand painted sign points us towards Playa Azul. Site of today's vested hopes for adventure.

Our mystery beach turns out to be an hour's sweat-sodden walk down a sandy track, humming with heat and violated by huge potholes. The weight of our bags draws us from our sleep-deprived stupor. We begin to itch.

The track comes to a dead end in scrubby bush and we wonder if we should start thinking things through a little before we do them. We push on regardless and emerge, steamy hot and mosquito-ravaged, on a deserted beach, edged with palapa huts seemingly abandoned for the season.

An old man with loud dogs melts silently into his small home. A lone woman rakes the sand into parallels. The water swirls with strange currents and the beach aches with emptiness.

We do not quite know what to do.

We survey the silence and decide to sit with the sea for a moment, hoping for a plan.  Although we have not voiced our disappointment, it is clear this beach is not for us.

We sift the sand into piles through our fingers and wait.

A silhouette of a man appears at the top of the beach, close to the woman raking. He does not look like a local. His hands are on his hips and he seems to be watching us.

It occurs to us how strange we must look: two blondes with backpacks and a hula hoop, squatting in the sand at 7am on this deserted shore.

We look at each other and reach for our bags. Any information at this point would be helpful.

We reach the hut just as he disappears, and when we round the edge of the building we see not one but three men of our age, loading belongings into a little red van.

I hear Sacha's voice transmit silently into my brain. "We're going with them." Without looking at her I nod and we drop our bags, smiles spreading wider over our faces. They look vaguely surprised to see us.

The van's sliding door reveals a window into Betty Ford, treasured home of three wandering australianos and rescuing chariot for these lost inglesas.

Right now, this door appears to me like a portal. Somehow more than just a van door.

This little square in the air is a passage into another world, another set of spooling stories and another three faces in an ever-growing cast. It represents a choice to step from this reality to that. A visible reminder of our junction with another path.

I know I am going to step through it before we even exchange names.

As always on these seemingly pre-determined meetings, I am struck with the perfection of life's clockwork. I think about the first time I saw the sign for Playa Azul, all those months ago, and I remember the little jump in my heart that accompanied the fleeting vision. I wonder for how long my subconscious has known of this conjunction of lives.

We have no idea who they are or where they are going, but we climb in anyway. Playa Azul has served its purpose. The back windows are partially obscured and as we drive away I do not look back.

Small child advises smaller child about a horse

  


"Don't look at that.  It's just snot and two holes."




.

Take his body over where?

For some reason the phrase 'Lleva su cuerpo alli (take his body over there)' keeps repeating itself in my head. I think it unlikely that I've heard the phrase out loud, so I have no idea why it would lodge itself in there. I say it, rolling the phrases over my tongue.
Ye-ba su cuer-po ayi.

It wound its way around in there for quite a while before I noticed, listened properly, translated it word for word. Came out shocked at the result. The nuances of perception within it - is it talking about taking a man home or moving a cadaver? Why on earth would that phrase be in my head?

I have no doubt that if I analysed most of my thoughts in this way I'd come out just as confused. There rarely seems to be much of a pattern. This morning, for example, I woke up feeling somehow dislodged from the day. My dreams were powerful and left lingering tentacles around me long after I woke, drawing me back in, dulling my waking world until I sought solitude.

And so I search for treasure in the cracks between the stones, fingering crumbling wood and bleached white bones, zoning in on my surroundings and healing this strange turn of emotion in the way I know best.

Endless horizon over curling sea.
Frothy white parallels expanding towards me.
Watercolour sky arching in pale yellow greys.
First tint of the sunset creeps.

Water colliding with rock.
Pulsing rhythms in an ocean with a sheen like fine chocolate.
The land swallowed up by the sea or the sea, resisted advance by land?

And me, like a snake on warm stone, writhing as I comb the rubble for driftwood and broken mother of pearl.

I am alone other than the surfers, the burnished, dark-eyed Salvadorenses and the honey-coloured extranjeros, all seeking a few second's thrill on those shining tubes of water. From my throne they are helpless insects, steering their way through hills and valleys of shifting power in the name of hedonism.

I hear the waves calling me. But I put off that moment in favour of this warm wind.

I stare at the sea for a long time, breathing in time with the waves.

Inhale,
water rears in expectation,
Exhale,
waves curl and crash before me.

In front of me, duality of wave.
Within me, duality of breathing.

Noise filling everything, the crashing sizzle of the waves and the ribbons of wind through the palms all fizzing into one dizzying hum.

I come unspun.

Reel myself in again and roll back down the beach. Sea rolls inside and waves just there are breathing and its me again, just me. The cadaver has been removed.

Ponderance

At the moment, the three residents of the farm are all dealing with the same thing.
The integration of our free spirits into working life.
How we can survive in a world where most of the population takes for granted the need to work every day in order to buy houses and have children.

Basically, we all want to stay away from offices forever.
They kill our souls and we'd rather be dead than ever have to pretend we care again.

We've spent so long drifting, not making any money, existing without obligation, in a world of exchange.  Now we're readjusting to a commitment of sorts through living and working at the farm.  Trying to fit expanding, wispy selves back into some kind of structure.

Always a part of us remains aware of the other world. Somewhere out there exist constraints.
I realise this as my dad writes to me to tell me my bank is calling him, wanting a payment.
It signals the end of my savings.
Reality crashes in.

I am not scared, but I know this means change, and decisions.
I try not to feel frustration and trust that this is merely a tool to take me to new things.

Life is nothing without perception. At least I have my hands.

It is hard to believe they are mine.
I see them covered in marks and I cannot remember where they came from.
What is 'mine' other than just a word to describe something that is in my life for a while?
And what is life other than simply a challenge to understand what is actually mine, really mine, for a bit longer than a while?

I feel like I've spent quite a while already trying to understand that thing I call 'mine'.
I could say I have a better picture, now.  I could probably continue though.

But fact is, I'm pondering and wandering in a world that requires little pieces of paper in exchange for things I need.
So now, on the list of things I need, I've added 'little pieces of paper' in the hope that some will blow over to me soon.

Much as I'm contemplating how to fit my drifting self into the 'real' world in order to make money, I really don't want to go back.
I don't need much money, really, if it's just me.

A child is strange and faraway. But I know how much I change.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Julia I become in a few years is really quite keen on the things.
And where would a child fit in this world?

Sometimes when I write down a ponderance of mine I come out with an answer.
And sometimes I don't.

But why do I meditate?

For once, I am not daydreaming. I exist here, now. I am in the matrix, that dimension where everything is one and nothing, everything is real and yet nothing exists. Some would say that in this moment I am meditating. Others might say tripping. I lose all form and direction and become simply a voice, watching my mind, whirring and spilling like smoke.

Everything stops. Sound pervades.

This stillness hangs, for a moment. And then, something shifts. It happens in an instant. Somehow, in some way, I connect back with my swirling mind. There rises a niche in the flow that snags me.

I slickly slide back into the river of thought, the splurging ocean of hallucination and memory eternally whisking me through time and space. I am unaware once again.

Here winds my perpetual mental routine.

Wherever we are, we exist in the mind. One of the most frequent topics of conversation between myself and my good friend Nico, the farm director, is that of the mind and the effect its seduction has on our sense of peace.  We share our frustrations at the incessant analysis and never-ending fantasy that keeps us locked somewhere other than the moment, which at the end of the day is all we have.

Bless us little humans with our littlebig brains. We grasp the deepest subtlety and yet we so easily become tangled in daily drama. I marvel at our artistic capabilities, our boundless imagination, and yet watch how we are swung helpless through storms of emotion every day.

From wake until sleep is a journey in itself, a story played out over aeons labelled as hours, and even on the most eventless of days we fall to the pillow exhausted, released at last from the perpetual journeying within.

It is often only during meditation that I am able to step outside. The edges of my perception become blurry. I am sucked upward and away from what I call myself. My form disappears and I become part of the formless, the everything.  That which pierces every other thing.

For a short while, I exist somewhere other than in the mind. For this short while I am gutted, ploughed, smacked with the unswervable knowledge that I am something other than this Julia I feel and touch. Just like the instantaneous confusion I feel in that moment of waking, every morning, when I realise my fantastical dream world is fading into shadows, likewise whilst I am in this omnipresent state the world in which my body exists seems temporary.

This, in a sense, is my raison d'etre right now. Or should I say, mi razon de ser, al momento. For if you spend your entire life stuck in your own mind, shouldn't it make sense to spend some time making yourself comfortable in there? Creating a little bit of space within that relentless festival of imagination? A little pause, once in a while, in which to survey that broiling mess, in the midst of which we are destined to exist?

The great teachers, the legendary yogis, the Buddhas and Christs of this world, were masters of disassociation from the temptations of the mind. History is studded and shaped by figures that tried to teach us this virtue. Yoga itself was originally conceived as a path to this peace, through the attunement of the body, the taming of the mind and the use of the breath to root oneself to the moment.

Although I try not to brand my ego a yoga teacher, I do share yoga and I do maintain awareness of yogic principles. But no matter how frequent and intense my clumsy attempts to impersonate Buddha, sitting cross-legged out on my dock with my belly round and my body wholesome, the peace remains largely external… for my mind is still so young and I am still so enraptured by reality.

The chatter in there is not negative -- in fact it is usually moderately entertaining -- but it is more the sheer speed of this mental train that presents the issue.  For the more I seem to seek respite, the more my brain is enthralled by life. In the midst of that resounding silence, deep in meditation, my mind simply seeks even more beauty in the world in an attempt to keep myself there.

All things considered, being pulled into a lifelong search for beauty is not exactly something to worry about.  As a result of my mind's creations I feel I move more deeply in each space.  Whether physical, mental or spiritual, I am increasing the intensity of my exploration.  If I choose to sit and be with the sea for a while, I am completely with the sea.  I mentally swim with it, energetically move with it and I breathe in time with the waves. 

And the moment I enter into meditation and feel that dissolution of reality, I exist in just that. It becomes everything. I give myself completely to it.  My mind, my surroundings, my breathing. They all fade. Like the silence between the inhale and the exhale, I am neither moving forward or backwards, neither thinking nor not thinking. My world pauses.

And then. My conscious mind catches sight of a polka-dot scarf, a scrap of unbearably interesting mental flotsam waving at me from behind a rainbow-coloured waterfall.

Panting with anticipation, it leaps excitedly from thought to thought, sending wobbling disturbances out over the astral plane with every crashing connection of its roots. I make a half-arsed attempt to call it back.

My mind, that monkey of wildest imagination, looks at me, pausing for mere seconds, before leaping wildly off in another direction. For there is always another view, another colour, another contemplation.

Paper sailboats

Its my birthday. I'm making a wish.



I wish I'd written down all the wishes through my life. A line of past Julias jostle for attention as they whisper their deepest desires.

As a child, I didn't understand them, and they didn't understand me. I just wanted black hair.

As a teenager, nothing quite fit. I wished only to be the same as everyone else.

Later, I wished to be different.

When I was 18 someone told me about Taoism, and for a while I wished that everything would just carry on being as it was supposed to be.

When I was 19, my mom died and my first love broke my heart. I wished that life was supposed to be something else.

At 21 the drama faded into peace. I wished that I could always stay grounded like this.

At 24 I spent days in front of a computer screen and ages dreaming about sex. I wore tight suits and wished for the day when I could call myself free.

At 25 I shed my skins and sought adventure. I wished for coincidences, and mystery, and teachers.

At 26 I realised I had no idea what I was doing. I wished for clarity on the wandering path of the lost.

And now, at 27, I am suddenly content. I survey my kingdom and find it wholesome. If I look, really look, I have found my heaven.

I send my wishes away on paper sailboats that bob across the lake, falling apart in its watery hands. My thoughts get carried away and Fucking Hell I realise I'm in paradise. And now it's my birthday and I find myself searching for something to wish for. It feels somehow foolish to wish for anything more.

And so I wish that I should always be able to see my world like this, in the golden light that falls with joy. For it is my choice to see my heaven or to not; it is always there, beautiful, waiting. The veils of time and circumstance simply tint my view with emotion, and I need only peel them apart.

I wish that I might hold that picture for a while, gently looking. And then I wish to forever remember that here, in this precious corner of paradise, in a lake lost in the clouds, I have been truly happy.

The whispers of sickness

My body is purging. My stomach churns and I have no desire to eat, only to return to my classic self-space -- in bed with the rain.

I only burn two candles tonight. Their flicker chases shadow creatures in erratic bounds over the iron roof.

I don't mind the sickness. It gives me the exuent, the opportunity to bind myself in blankets, cocooning body and mind. I recognise and salute the fact that my body can take control where the mind is too blind, taking me out of a situation and forcing me to process.

Given the daily bliss I exist in right now it is almost difficult to pinpoint what is being digested, or not, as the case appears to be.

I close my eyes and focus on my breathing. The angular constructs of my brain begin to fade.

I see a dark cave, and as I walk in I see only a short distance ahead of me. The light falls in soft grains.

The vision dissipates as my analytical mind sets in and tries to steer, placing fantasy objects in the cave and trying to validate the vision with constructed mystery.

A bang on the door brings me out of my dreaming and silence falls like petals around me.

The farm is perfect. I have a huge garden, a magical forest, perfect climate and breathtaking scenery. I have fulfilling things to do everyday and I am constantly inspired by those around me. I invent wildly and regularly in a fully-equipped kitchen and I retire by candlelight to a glass-fronted attic room. I wake up to a pink sky and ethereal lake through the expanse of glass. I have a sauna, musical instruments, library and pets. And wherever I am, cloud-hugged volcanoes loom over my vision.

But there is always something. One always feels the need for more.

Even when I have all my needs met, I find myself searching for something else - coffee, sugar, the long, open road. Family and long-lost friends. Dubstep and a dirty dancefloor. Real cheese and smoked salmon. My dress collection, hidden in the attic of my father's house.

Of course, the search comes from within. That Void inside, ever hungry, growing and contracting in muscular darkness. Most often I stuff the gap with food or exercise and it seems to lessen. Sometimes I pump it with weed and it feels satiated for a while, but the smoke lacks substances and dissipates quickly, leaving a monstrous hunger unable to be sated.

Life on the farm is as wholesome as it gets. I am more balanced than I have every been. The Void seems like a dark shadow of the past, most days.

But then, when I am least expecting it, that cold edge will touch my heart. A subtle knife point. Dark strands, webbing my core, tangling the shining silver of my breath, questioning. What is all this for?

Wherever I go, I will never find what it is I am searching for. Because I don't even know what that is. I don't even know if I'm searching any more. I suspect the search itself may be the goal.

I live here, on this magical farm, a place built for no purpose other than for people to exist. A place where anything can happen.

The farm is a place that does not exist except in imagination. It is made of our minds, of paper that cannot burn, where time stops and reality clicks along in star-sparkled clockwork. I am part of the product of an elusive man, a flute-playing yogi from China turned shaman in Peru and magician in Guatemala, who bought some land a year ago and magicked a whole world into being. It has literally exploded into life from the seed of his dream.

From here, daily worries, the horror of current affairs and the mediocre complexities of existence in the twenty-first century are the things of another life. This shiny reality seems to be all there is.

The only truths that can breed in this place are those bred in dreams. Everything else fades away, until we realise our Selves are out, again, searching for more, and we understand we need to pursue our integration with reality with more determination.

Even in paradise, one needs constant vigilance to stay true to oneself. I know it makes me happy to start my day with meditation and yoga, to steer away from sugar and smoke and to work a long, hard day. So why when in a routine do I seek disruption? As a Covent Garden fortune teller once cried to me; we are our own worst enemies.

My life is there on a plate. I have placed within it only good, pure things. But just because it is there, doesn't mean I automatically connect, and certainly doesn't mean I am present and fulfilled in every moment.

And at least I know I am in-tune enough to recognise when I need to renegotiate. Here in my glowing bedroom I step back, examine, and re-enter. Self esteem is directly linked to self-discipline. And self-discipline relies on a non-attachment to passing things, to Void-Fillers.

My insides feel less empty the more my thoughts unravel. Instead of sweeping over this darkness, I stare straight at it. Colours soak the edges of my view.  For at its depths I find only quietness. And in quietness, truths pierce.

Rainbow realisations

"Today I am neither a warrior nor a diablero. For me there is only the travelling on the paths that have a heart, on any path that may have a heart.  There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is for me to traverse its full length.  And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly."

The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda.

I am walking in the Parque Central when the woman stops me, asks me if I speak Spanish.  When I say yes, she begins the interrogation.  Name, nationality, vital stats.  Why I am only wearing one earring.  "I hadn't noticed," I reply. 

She is excited by our meeting and I do not know why.  Without doing anything I seem to be satisfying her.

I say I am going to eat and she tells me she will accompany me.  I agree because I think she might say something that I could interpret as divine instruction, and right now I need some help with my decision making. 

We eat quickly and force conversation, and by the end of it I am searching my mind for questions to ask this strange woman.  She has no children and lives with her aunts.  She has never been outside of Veracruz state. 

I feel that familiar embarrassment edging over my face as I explain my story.  I don't know why, but I feel ashamed of my money, especially as in my own head I have very little. 

To them, I am rich.  How many nuances within perception.

I ask for the bill and I see her eyes dart over to me.  I can see where this one is going, so I put down the money for my own meal and push the cheque over to her.  She looks up at me and I stand, quickly, and kiss her goodbye.  "Que te vayas bien, amiga."  Go thee well.

Although I seem to have pleased the woman, the awkwardness of the impromptu dinner makes me feel uncomfortable and  I realise I'm slightly lonely.  I can't understand why I crave my space so much, and then feel lost when I have it.

I wander through the square, dulled by low cloud.  It has finally stopped raining.  People stare at me, as they always do in these kind of towns.  I must be the only blonde they've seen in months. 

My clothes are beginning to dry.  I'm not quite sure how to entertain myself next.  And then it hits me. 

I think I've done enough random wandering.

It is a revelation.  I believed I would travel forever, the eternal nomad.  Of course, I'm certainly not ready to return to England, but the idea of trading my backpack for a wardrobe, building a nest, seems heavenly in comparison to my bare hotel room. 

It is blindingly obvious now I think about it.  My reasons for travelling were largely to do with finding purpose.  Remember - remove all purpose from my life in order to reveal the true calling?  Well perhaps I've found it. Or some of it.

It no longer seems so necessary to break boundaries and do things that no one else has.  There was a time when I chose to study Physics, because I wanted to become an astronaut.  Not because of a deep desire to be on the moon, but because of a deep desire to do something no one else had ever done. 

But I realise now that I am doing that, every day.  No one else does what I do, in the way I do it.  I see how I touch people without even intending to, and its not me that does it, its whatever I represent to that person.  To the woman in the town square, I could be a manifestation of her dream to travel.  I could be an exotic friend, or a child to care for.  I haven't done anything and yet I'm now part of her story.

Its not about marking yourself as special, its about recognising your talents and using them to better consciousness.  All of this journey has been about finding my little ripple on the world but as I am the one making the ripple, not feeling it, how could I ever sense it?

Half a rainbow hovers uncertainly over the town.  Here it is called arcoiris.  Arcoiris… I roll the word around my tongue, thinking about that face of nature I identify with the most.  If I were likened to anything I would like it to be to one of these.

Rainbows are entire circles, the other being hidden behind the horizon.  They are formed in restless conditions, the elements coming together in a sparkling, snatched spectrum, enlightening observers in brief seconds before fading away to nothingness.  Shifting from place to place, cloud to cloud.  Sun and rain, air and earth, bound by colour.

Visible without ever actually existing.  As the townspeople continue to stare at me I resonate with the rainbow even more deeply.

The true triumph in my journey is this absence of urgency or desire I feel now.  I have, for the moment, stopped seeking and started being.  Literally and figuratively, other than this brief sojourn to Mexico, I have entered a phase of stillness.  I am at peace with where I am and where I am going.

Like the rainbow, I appear and disappear quickly back into non-existence.  But if I can momentarily lead people up into the sky and back down again, then I could say I've found my purpose.

Waterlogged

We close the farm for two weeks as July swans her way in on a chariot of thunderclouds. Morale is low as the wet season's sickness sets in and the realities of living on an isolated farm, with far too much to do, become less bearable.

Besides, my visa is almost up.

Mexico calls me with her brassy tones.

A year ago, I left San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, for Lago Atitlan, Guatemala, hoping to find my truth. Now, I leave my truth to get perspective in Mexico.

Sweet symmetry.

I learned early on that to read the last page of a book first ruins the story. Thus, I usually steer clear of divination. However, before I leave I get out the medicine cards - each one with an animal and a story from Native American tradition.

The frog hops out at me, symbolising cleansing. That makes sense, I suppose, thinking with downturned mouth as my eyes trace the artwork on the card. It tells me to be careful of becoming waterlogged, caught up in emotion and logistics.

Reading this makes me nervous, as I am facing a return to San Cristobal de las Casas, my home of last summer. So much happened there and it wasn't always positive. The streets will be paved with memories. I wonder if the nostalgia will be too much.

As I hop over the border with my amphibian legs I am captivated by drifts of clouds, snagged on the furry green of the northern Guatemalan mountains. The land flattens as we cross the border and the sun burns my arm through the window. The rain starts, as usual, in the early afternoon, and I watch as the road flows down a hill.

I'm not sure what I expected but I am somewhat underwhelmed on my arrival. I quickly move through the market and the french bakery and then find myself at a loss. Although it is pleasant to return to a town I know and love, I understand instantly that I'm going to have to look elsewhere for my inspiration.

The ghost of my former self runs barefoot along a street flowing with rain, hand in hand with the ghost of my former boyfriend. But the vision raises little emotion. Perhaps my frog skin is thicker than I thought.

The restlessness of indecision plagues me for a day before I decide to simply start walking to the bus station. On the way there I pass a banda boy I said hello to in a shop earlier. I recognise him because his legs are strange in some way, the feet bent and small. He has an inviting smile under tiny glasses.

I stop to say hello again and the greeting turns into a coffee. By the end of it I have a page of scribbled notes and an instruction that starts with getting the night bus to Mexico in 45 minutes.

I'm on the move again.

Two days later and I'm in a nameless city on an unseen map, somewhere on the Gulf Coast in Northern Veracruz. I've wandered the streets and indulged in my first bit of shopping for months. I've written a poem. I'm damp.

The rain hasn't stopped since I arrived, alternating between a light, but quenching mist and furious sheets that fall so hard they fill the air with spray and turn the streets into instant rivers. At the farm, I frequently talk about how much I love the rain. Now, I remember what it's like to travel in it. Once wet, always wet, as they say. Who says? Only me, perhaps.

But its true. You just have to get used to being damp. Or sodden, as is the case during today's visit to the El Tajin ruins. The site is different to the other ruins I've seen; so different in fact that archaeologists cannot understand who built it. The temples are covered in spirals.

My attempts to dodge raindrops fall flat as I feel my trousers sticking to my legs. I try to evoke images of bustling streets in pre-Colombian Mexico, building the temples up in my mind, drawing energy through my feet as I slosh through the puddles. I sit down on what was once someone's house to eat a huge mango and I think about how clean everything is underneath the water.

After two hours I collect my pack from the entrance with a sigh and trudge through the rain to the motorway, trying in vain to mentally ascertain an onward route from a plan that doesn't exist, on a map that I have never seen.

I duck into a collectivo going to the nearest town and wipe the steam from the window with my sleeve.

I see a hotel and impulsively tell the driver to stop. The room is cheap but has hooks to dry my clothes. I make myself some guacamole and ground down, pulling myself together, solidifying my thoughts from their fluid-flowing escape. When I am satisfied and more-or-less dry, I go out.

It is still raining.

I am wandering the streets of this new town, trying to make the most of my decision to stay, when I remember about the medicine card and laugh out loud.

Waterlogged. They have to be joking.

Skins

I slice open a ragingly pink pitaya fruit.  Hold it for a moment, captivated by colour, then look down at my left hand, where a large pink patch delineates the awkward union of boiling water, a broken thermos flask and my skin. I wiggle the fingers, carefully. The burn no longer hurts.

I've followed the progress of the injury carefully, from the first hot days of juicy swelling, through to the flaccid, moist, collapsed blister, hardening in a dark brown layer before peeling and fracturing over a pinky white new lamina, completely smooth in its perfection.

Yesterday, Nick and I passed the afternoon on his balcony, each taking turns as the story teller, weaving tales of past lives and sketching worlds for the future. We watched as this naked opening gradually took on the wrinkles of my old skin, pinkening in the sun, exposing itself for the first time to the raw elements.

Since this morning, deep ridges have appeared, parallel along the back, slicing down from the knuckles, then crisscrossing in folds as they grow out from my thumb joint, like cracks in breaking ice, or grooves, written in to a record.


I am literally watching myself age.

Most of the time I forget how old I am until I look at my hands. More and more scars, every year, skin drying up, wrinkles becoming deeper.

They tell such stories. Their arching lines follow the textures they've caressed, flicking as they dance and pressing strong as they support my weight. They reminisce on food they've fed me and feel the ripples of the seas they've swam. They radiate the warmth of the other hands they've held.

I often question the idea that we are all on one constant growth cycle, in one body with one lifetime. I wonder if all the souls in the world simply bubble up in different locations and times, flickering in and out on some other dimension and appearing in time and space in different bodies, like a badly-received tv signal, living a million lives in the span of one lifetime and a million lifetimes with just one life.

At other times I wonder if the real us remains hidden forever, showing itself in glimpses through papery layers, perpetually falling away. Like a wasp's nest, the perfectly constructed sum of everything around.

Either way, we morph, constantly. The events of my life are imprinted on my soul and in the big pink patch over the back of my hand, whispering from every wrinkle and marked with every scar.

Nick and I realise how fortuitous life must be for us to have met here again here - in mental and spiritual space as much as in physical - after nine years of wandering our somewhat directionless paths. As schoolchildren we moved in different circles. Whoever he was then never connected with whoever I was then.

Now, he resembles perfectly the child I went to school with, but he is so completely remade he could be anyone. We have flowed along our winding, separating channels and come out in this lake, only to find that, with all of our individual metamorphoses and layers shed, a new friendship lies waiting.

I turn twenty seven next month. The years line my face and I realise how much I must have changed as well, or rather how robustly that new self has grown out of the old, like ferns from a rotting log. I see that I will continue to grow and die, shedding skins and revealing the new.

In nine year's time, the Nick I see here might not recognise me. But he might recognise himself in my layers. Even now, he weaves himself into my story just as much as his words weave pictures in the air. As my skin grows, he, just like all the other characters in my expanding community, grows into it. Our shared space reveals a new corner of life on the lake.

In nine year's time, looking back, we might find it hard to place our thirty-six year-old selves in a twenty-seven year old's memory. But just like now, when I recall laughing at his poems in English class, he might remember a time when half of my hand was raw and newer than the day I was born.

There might be barely a scar to prove the vision, for the memories will have grown deep into my skin.

Flying, spying

Sometimes, when I put on a certain song, I drift into a montage of my own life and I feel as if I'm about to die.

I'm drowning and in my gasping I suck up image after image of reality, romanticised into a stream of rose-hued scenes.

I see the culmination of dramas and the closing of circles, flicking past in a cinema reel of history. I replay events until I doubt their existence. Reality begins to blur into dream and I enter that world of waking, the confusing change of state when I lose touch with which is which.

In a single second I am both watching the clouds from a floating dock and diving deep down into a salty sea.

I pull my elbows in as a blur of ladies flows around me in a market.

A stray dog looks up at me, big eyed. I roll over onto my front, thumbing a book, legs bent, feet waving.

I taste soup and it is too hot.
They tell me how unusual it is to see shooting stars every time I look at the night sky.
I grab a warm handful of dirt, and throw it at my friend. We talk in accents and laugh until it hurts.

There are the volcanoes, imposing against a colour-shifting sky.

And I'm speeding along in a motor boat, a human masthead, leaning out as far as I can and looking down at the water rushing along below, as if I am flying.

In real life, I sit in the garden, drinking coffee, trapped in a world of plans. I think and I think and I think. Often, I remember to exist in the moment, and I will notice an insect hovering over to the left. And then I will start to think again.

Later on, when I remember this moment, I realise I was thinking in a perfect patch of sunlight, dragonflies floating on unseen currents. The memory is stunning. The image I see on reflection is simply the image, with nothing of the thought attached to it.

It is important to stay in the moment. It is also important to retain memories. Memory provides perspective. It holds lessons. It exists in the present. In remembering, we find a view of ourselves from outside our heads. It is like looking at yourself through the eyes of another.

Through the eyes of another this is a perfect moment. I swoop out of my head and away from my coffee break and hover with the dragonflies.

I watch myself from afar, the enigma, Julia Randall, star of her own film. I wonder what she thinks. I watch the emotion cross her face and how she interacts. I watch her reactions, influenced by unknown perspective, and I see how her actions are reacted to by people with other perspectives.

I see how she shrinks away from conflict, how she goes to strange lengths to avoid killing insects. I watch her obsess about waste, find new ways to create, and I see how passionate she is about colour. I see how much time she spends glassy-eyed, caught in a huge net of fantasy.

I sense her deep desire for balance. I see how she does anything to be alone.

I watch her talk to plants, not just to their shiny surfaces but to their actual spirits. The nymphs and elves emerge smokily from their stems at her call.

I can almost see what she sees, but not quite.

Who knows what communications lie deep down, what things cannot be viewed from this position.

I see her dreaming face, framed by pillows, but I know not what her soul does during her sleep. I see her eyes closed in meditation, but I know not who she talks to. I see the spirits crowd her but I know not if she knows.

She seems happy. I think that if she died today, she would be at peace. From this position it is easy to understand that death would not be the end of life. Her soul seems much older than her body. If it was time for it to leave that body, it would need to be for a good reason.

It is plain to see, from my rainbow-winged perch, that the eyes she controls now are just windows for her soul. These tiny windows can only show her one world. As I look over at her, cross legged on the warm ground, squinting, planting baby cabbages with the tenderness of a mother, I realise that she probably has thousands of these windows to look through before she is done.

Photo by Christina Chandler

Milpa truths

Corn will not grow unless it is removed from the cob, dried, and planted. In other words, it relies entirely on interaction with human beings.

Everywhere I've travelled so far, the local people eat corn for every single meal.  Not only does the man survive from the corn, but the corn survives thanks to the man. So corn represents the interdependency of humans with nature.

Corn started its life as a mutation of a tall species of grass. Thousands of years ago, humans recognised plants with unusually large seed pods, and made the decision to cultivate. Corn in its current form could never occur without human influence, because left alone it does not have the means to propagate. Arguably, humans within a certain region would not have flourished without corn.

In growing our ego, we have cultivated our individuality. We have selected uniqueness as a trait that we would like to conserve. We have explored it as far as possible, until we've become so unique that we've ended up unknowingly craving that which we've run from.

I see it on the road all the time - drifts of travellers, washed up from their previous lives, awkward in the real world, trying to express their strangeness by running away to Guatemala where they realise they're at home with a thousand other gypsies who all look the same.

Only the tattoos, like barcodes, define their differences. Through their tattoos they try to express their truth, dividing the uniformity of non-conformity.

Perhaps we have taken the search for ourselves too far. We, the children of the earth, have stretched our umbilical cords so far from our mother that we've forgotten her call. We're floating in space and all we can see when we look down is our frail little bodies, and all we can do to feel at home is to mark our bodies with our mottos.

Consciousness splits itself in order that it might become more conscious of itself. In molding the formless into form, in every possible permutation, it provides itself with billions of facets to its own prism, each reflecting the universal energy in its own way, each providing a deeper insight into the true nature of itself.

But in becoming conscious, it is easy to delve deep into your own 'path' and forget the bigger picture.

Grasp a hold of that cord, joined deep down within your core. Pull. Feel the vertigo as you swing closer to the centre. Open your eyes and take in the sights. Here is nature, pure and simple. Look at her beauty, her incredible manifestations. Sense how effortless she is within her complexity.

Corn is sacred to many cultures. Not only is it valued for its tortilla-making potential, the variety of sugars and starches contained within, but it is revered in a spiritual sense as well. Corn is so much more than just a versatile food substance. In corn we see the truth. We need nature as much as she needs us.

Contrary to popular belief we are not the only species with a story. We are all in a delicate balance with each other, sensitive to shifts way beyond our understanding.

Move away from the ego. The ego tells you humans are the superbeings, worth saving above all else. And the ego tells you that you personally are special amongst humans, different to everyone.


The truth is you are unique, an individual expression of the whole. But you are the same, and you are interdependent with each and every thing around you.



Go and sing to the mountains, go and sing to the moon.

Go and sing to just about everything, because everything is you.


(Elephant revival)

Serpent spirit

Joey and I are brother and sister from the moment we meet. Like the farm cats, we curl up into each other's bodies whenever possible, seeking comfort and warmth, caring for each other deeply.

Joey leaves the farm in early June. In his last few days, he gets sick. We are all sick. We try to combat the parasites by flushing our systems with several litres of salt water. The experience is bonding, for sure, but ineffective as far as I can see. We all continue to struggle each morning.  It would get us down, but everyone enjoys the companionship that shared misfortune brings.

Rainy season is in full flow, washing chemicals into the lake from the land. Bacteria colonies begin to clog up the bays with luminous green mats. These floating islands are talked about but tolerated, just like the piles of rubbish drifting up on the shores. To the residents, this is just part of life on the lake.

I swim once in June. It is a beautiful day and we've been digging all morning. We dive in and feel the water rinsing us free of earth, trying to ignore the sensations of the bacteria strands touching our skin. It is uncomfortably like being in giant bath full of dog hair.

The spirit of the lake loops around me with her serpent swirls, wide-eyed and barely there. Blinking.

Joey leaves and I try not to cry. His face looks so happy and I know I will deeply miss his energy. I watch his boat as it turns into a dot in front of the volcano. The lake is magic this morning.

Days later, Guillermo, one of the lancha captains, tells me he had to make an urgent trip to the hospital because Joey lost the ability to walk.

My heart dives.

News filters in - Joey is paying $1000 dollars a day to exist in the intensive care until at Guatemala City Hospital. They still do not understand the reason for his paralysis. He is bedbound.

I think of Joey, laid out in hospital white, and superimpose an image of him as I saw him last. He is such a beautiful dancer. He does not obey any rules when he dances, he simply goes where his body wishes to move him. We once said we could watch each other dance forever. I feel panicked.

News of Joey spreads across the lake. And with it come further tales of neuropathy - two cases in Panajachel - and speculation about the water. The green strands in the lake are cyanobacteria, caused by too many nitrates and phosphates in the water. Of the millions of strains out there, a few produce a neurotoxin when they biodegrade that can cause numbness and paralysis in humans.

We don't know for sure that this particular type of bacteria is present in the lake, but the coincidence rings hard. Suddenly our toilet humour and blasé attitude to swimming reveal a darker side.

I look out at the glinting lake, cradled in its gentle volcanoes. They say this is the most sacred lake in the world. It is certainly the most beautiful - of that I have no doubt.

But then I think of my friend, with his dead legs and his cold hospital, and my serpent takes me down to her depths. I try to pick her free of the strands but she can no longer open her eyes. Her elegant strength, her diving flows are sodden and clogged with rubbish.

What have we as a species done, that we have created such horrors within perfection?

Heavenly threads, from thine to mine

Last night, when we had no where to go, a man invited us to his house and told us to cook ourselves a meal from his cupboards. We sat on the veranda in well-apportioned rocking chairs, watching the flick-flick of pink lightning silhouetting the volcanoes across the lake.

Just when you think life couldn't get any sweeter, she gives you a meal and a veranda.

Tonight we walk up the hill to look for rice and beans. The afternoon rain has just started and my trousers are instantly sodden. They flap against my legs and I look down at rapids of brown water gurgling over my feet as I walk. We search for half an hour, wandering slowly in the rain, before we finally concede there to be no hot food in this town.

The last time I saw Nick was in the final months of high school. It seems hard to believe that was nine years ago.

Our reunion is spontaneous. As if we'd expect anything else.

He is drawn to Lake Atitlan in the same way we all are. The spirit of the lake wraps her wispy whirlpools around the hearts of those she desires, seducing them into her volcano-ringed embrace. Once landed, she holds tight, captivates them with her beauty and her mystery.

And so I find him, just two days in to Guatemala and already captured in a volunteer exchange in Santa Cruz, on the opposite side of the lake to the farm.

He speaks and I realise I had forgotten his voice. He moves and I realise I had forgotten his height. At six foot six he easily wraps me up and I feel instantly calm in his presence.

A strange experience, meeting someone again. Often I leave these reunions slightly disappointed, for the person I am and the person I meet are rarely linked by anything more than aging photographs. I tend now to avoid such meetings, to skirt around the dull awareness of being so very far away from my childhood that even stories regaled of past skirmishes are not enough.

But this time dives deep. Instead of creeping around stories of the past to try and forge new links, we get to know each other as we are now, two nomads bumping together on the seas of self-discovery. Rarely do I meet anyone with whom I instantly connect so profoundly.

From the beginning the world seems eager to encourage. It turns into one of those elongated moments in which our surroundings seem somehow constructed solely for our personal pleasure.

Hence the veranda.

Tonight, in lieu of rice and beans, we buy a pile of tortilla chips and elotitos, stuffing plastic packets into our pockets until we find ourselves a den in which to consume. We bless our food with smiles, thanking the world for delivering us nourishment of such vibrant colours.

At some point, the rain clears.

On our way back from town we stop at the top of the hill to look over the lake. Rain still falls blurrily at the edges. The view here is different again and we look across the surface at the Santiago bay.

Just behind Volcan San Pedro, across the bay from Santiago Atitlan, lies the farm. The sky above it is tinted pink with the sunset, reflecting from behind the mountains. Sausage-shaped clouds part in blues and greys, revealing the mouth of the bay and the path to my home. It looks like a painting of Heaven.

Here, now

I find myself thinking momentarily of my mother, of how I should call her and tell her my news. The realisation is fleeting, as always, before I remember that she is no longer here.

I am left with a feeling of warmth within as I see my progress from her point of view. Wherever she is, if she ever could know, she would be looking down at her daughter, grown up, finally fulfilled. Yoga teacher. Chef. Gardener. Healer. Sharer of truths.

I take a group through a meditative yoga class, every move flowing with the breath, blurring the lines between the mental and the physical as we inhale, extend and exhale, surrender to gravity.

But how could I ever explain to anyone other than a yoga teacher how it feels to close a class?

I could say it is like coming down from a hallucinogenic trip. My students, dragging themselves up from their final resting posture, pulling themselves from within, hair tousled, eyes closed, swaying to their own rhythmic breathing. Me, colours swirling, noise muffled, re-surfacing from my zone to realise the sun is shining and the birds have been singing all along.

My daily reality is becoming more and more dreamy, the edges of my mind becoming blurred.

At long last, I am me. I feel myself reaching into all those new roles, played with the solid step of inner guidance.

Echoes of those previous journeys ripple out through time and space and wash back over me in my new expression of myself. An old healer looking at my palm, comparing it to her own. An old man waiting for me, calling me a shaman he must teach. A voice telling me to study energy, another telling me to go to the lake. The labels cease to fit as the energy begins to flow in its own gush.

Every morning in front of the volcanoes I heal. Myself, the lake, anyone else. The dog or cat on my lap. Bathed in the ethereal light of the lake, I beam this energy out in hot, white lines. With my mind I focus positivity to flow through the lives of those it hits, and I feel my core searing with heat as I do so.

Who knows what I am doing, if anything. But this feeling is strongly, purely, positive.

I am not weird, I am not special. I just channel life in my own way. The purpose finds the owner, provided the owner allows space for that purpose to rise.

As the clear note of the singing bowl hums to close out meditation I dive back into my body, pulling on my skin like a glove, my soul peering out through the eyes as I realise that here, for now, I am three dimensional. Here, for now, I am happy.

Photography

I am put in charge of the garden. The soil is volcanic sand, hard as stone. As a result, I pass many hours forcing shovels into the ground and fingering through manure.

Scorpions curl quivering tails from underneath bedspreads, erotically poised to sting those who worry about them. Nick has a near-miss with a baby fer-de-lance, one of the most deadly vipers in the world. I continue to walk around in bare feet, worrying more about flattening the tree frogs than about painful death.


I spend days with a seventy-five year old man who says he is releasing so much energy right now that he has to masturbate three to four times a day. Horrified, we ask him how he gets away with it, whilst sharing a room with five other men. He tells us he is "quite effective" as long as he lies on his front.


The rains have started early and the lake is already full of clumping strands of algae, fed by the rushing run-off pulling agro-chemicals from the land into the water. I no longer swim.


I live in the mezzanine attic of a small, wooden cabin called Amor. To get to my bed I have to climb a ladder and duck under the eaves, crawling on my knees until I trip into my futon bed. I ease myself into sleep with candles to brighten the light-less night.


I take my first day off in the town of San Pedro, on the other side of our volcano, two hours away by boat. I first came here almost two and a half years ago and fell in love. This time it feels strange to meet friends who have been drinking all day. I am woken up by the yelps of a couple having sex in our dormitory. My fond memories of before contrast sharply with my discomfort of the memories of today, and I realise how much life has changed.

One of the guests tries to move seats in the sauna and grabs the metal chimney. His hand sizzles and he leaps outside, naked, screaming in pain. We try to take him seriously as we avoid looking at his swinging ballsack. We pull together our painkillers and smear his hand with aloe cut from the garden.


When in town, I buy twenty metres of black tubing to make and sell hula hoops. As I descend the steep hill down to the dock, tube heavy over my shoulder, a man actually stops his ascent purely to laugh at me. A few weeks later I see the same man in another town. I don't think he recognises me without the tubing. Regardless, he once again begins to laugh. I look down. Huge yellow genie pants, bulging backpack, hula hoop and djembe drum, all balanced awkwardly as I attempt to suck smoothie from a sandwich bag. Forget him. I make myself laugh.


We are working in the kitchen when we notice that fifty or so wasps have entered through the gap in between the windows and the roof. Within an hour they have all spontaneously died. I uncover two of them in my grated carrot.


We have to piss in one toilet and shit in another. We frequently discuss how difficult this is. Once a week Nick has to stir the number 2 toilet tank. It may disgust, but we're some of the only people that don't dump their sewage in the lake.


Twelve ladies and their children walk the path from Chakaya, the nearest village, barefoot and sparkling like jewels in their beautiful woven costumes. They have come to sing for the farm director's birthday. Singing develops into a church service, recruiting us to evangelist hoards. I stay in the kitchen and make mango buttercream.


I am woken frequently by the cries of a dog who has worms and howls as he drags himself along the ground. He was called Gary, until we found out he doesn't have a penis. Now he answers to Gariela.


We get high one night by drinking pure cacao. We drum and dance like sorcerers in strobes of candlelight.


And then we pause… for a moment… in the electricity-free night….

Look up at the sleeping cone-shadow of Volcan San Pedro, silently eating the stars.

Owls bassline the forest symphony with eerie, flute-like notes, toads with cartoonlike feet expanding their throats in reply.

Fireflies flick along the mountainside in dissonant sparkle, spotlighting our secret arena.