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.

Circle spirals

Three weeks of early mornings, full days, palapa-roofed afternoons and lake-mirrored moons.

My first class leaves me limp with relaxation at the sound of my voice transformed. My students sit silently, unwilling to break the peace.

I feel as if I've done this forever. Knowledge speaks from somewhere deep. Intuition ferments it into gradually strengthening wisdom.

Before I have a chance to let my ego panic, I am a teacher.

They hand me my final certificate in a circle of candles, the same circle we've been sitting in for weeks. I look around at my new family of sisters, faces made even more compelling in the flickering light.

We drum with our eyes closed, pulsing with the music. Ten new teachers beat out an undulating tale of discovery. I don't even know how to drum, but the noises coming from this instrument are rhythmic and transporting.

I have been writing this blog for eighteen months. Eighteen months, constantly turning corners, uncovering new vistas.

Except that these are the corners of a circle, the only geometric shape that has no corners.

I perpetually slip and perpetually discover, but am never halted by the punctuation of a real edge.

A circle is the strongest protection and the purest link. It unites and forges.

It takes you away and away and then loops you back round to where you began.

You send something out and you receive it back. It surprises and convolutes but guarantees you resolve.

It has neither a beginning nor an end.

For eighteen months my writing has been stamped with circular references. Looping, curling, hooping, round, curvatures and revolvatures, swirling and whirling. Ringing a point, creating a centre. In every spinning tale I've included at least one reference to this symbol of wholeness, however tenuous.

All that time devoted to the centrifugal forces within my life. All that time writing about each infinite corner of my perpetual circle. All that time spent within the glittering scoop of my hula hoop, spinning like a dervish, swirling in my moving meditation.

In all that time, my story has been like the geometric flower of life, a series of perfectly connected circles in one ever-flowing net.

But for three weeks I've stopped slipping, and have been instead still, a vital bond in this perfect shape. For the first time, I feel like I have found my hole.

And it is only on the last day of this, my yoga teacher training, a culmination of at least a few circles of life, that I notice the formation we've been sitting in.

And I realise that, morning, noon, night; before and after and during every lesson, every meal, every evening drum session, I've been literally sitting in a circle. This new family, my surrogate sisters, arc around me on either side, every hour of every day, embracing me in the strongest circle of all.

Destiny giggles...from a smoothly rounded corner.

The drowsy fantasy moment of every lonely dawn...

I roll over to the 5:30 alarm clock, eyes stuck together, head reacting to the sound like a cat being lowered into a bath.

As I roll over, I catch a glimpse of the morning sky through the giant window in front of me. It is grey, streaked with the bold creationist's strokes of dawn, mere suggestions of the paint to come. Mist curls threads of ideas around bamboo huts and slinks heavily over the still lake surface.

Even at this time, the light hold secrets. It dances on the lake in rounded ripples, winking.

All my life I've been a bed-monster, struggling from its warm folds, battling negativity from the moment I open my eyes. The duvet has been my protector for as long as I can remember, and unrolling myself from it has been like giving birth to myself, complete with blood, tears and the cool punch of morning air.

I've grown accustomed to my introvert self, waking up in the prison of my skull and wrestling with Day for the keys.

But in my twenty seventh year, I have all of a sudden eased into life in a way that makes me, for the first time, want to rise early. In the same way that I prefer the 'getting ready' to the actual night out, in the same way planning a holiday can be more entertaining than the real thing, the anticipation of the unknown fuels me.

Sheer potential hangs with the mist, evaporating with the hours.

Alongside it, the silence purifies me in a way the day rarely can. For that lonely hour, I own my space. I hold in my hands blank potential, pausing, blinking, before the day is apportioned in sweet slices to the rising crowds.

As I sit down to breakfast at nine, having already meditated, jogged and practised yoga, I think perhaps my drive comes from this sense of achievement. Most likely it is the tasks I set myself. I love what I do. I feel my body pliable, under control, as I fold myself up and eat cross-legged on a palapa mat.

On the lake, it is light before we see the sun. The volcanoes shield him behind strong, pointed fingers, until he becomes too strong and peeps blindingly between.

Until then, things pause. The silence before the shift. Everything intense.

I've fallen in love with Early.

My eyes shiver in half-open ecstasy as I flow through my practise like water. I bask in the space within my head. My mind explores that other world with sticky octopus fingers, contracting swiftly at my command, to re-enter myself from a new door.

Who am I?

She sits across from me, cross-legged, knee to knee on the uneven planks of the dock. Below us the water shifts restlessly. My skin prickles under the sun, soothed by the breeze.

They tell me to look into my partners eyes. My gaze slides off her face, as if we're opposite poles of a magnet.

We begin with the words, "I am."

Our teachers encourage us to talk in a stream of consciousness, all the time keeping the gaze to draw out the truth from the other's face. We are the channel; a straw to our deeper selves, pouring.

I falter.

How can I define myself? How can I describe the complexities of myself with mere words? How can I speak for seven minutes about me, only me. I feel mortified.

This is the point our teachers are trying to make. Words are never enough. Finding oneself lies far away from reason and analysis, the twin culprits of a false path.

Unintentionally, we all begin with facts. We keep them positive, reaffirming our belief in ourselves.

I am a sister. I am a daughter. I am a friend. I am a lover. I am blue haired. I am smiley. I am beautiful to some. I am British and American and Central European. I am twenty-six years old.

I am a woman.

I am a child.

I am a student. I am a teacher. I am a carer. I am a dancer. I am a cook. I am a yogi. I am a writer.

I am an observer. I am a creator.

I am a healer.


Subtley the flow of words carries us on. The ego's perceptions of itself and traditional compartmentalising of the persona blends with emerging acceptance of darkness beneath.


I am blind. I am whole. I am wise. I am loud. I am in love. I am in hate. I am broken. I am confident. I am naïve. I am burning. I am excited. I am scared. I am happy.

I am peaceful. I am cold. I am nervous. I am clean. I am lost. I am magnetic.

I am hiding. I am emerging. I am gentle. I am angry. I am mean. I am argumentative. I am kind. I am generous. I am insecure. I am compassionate.

I am strong. I am weak. I am running away. I am running towards.

I am transient. I am pure.

I am completely unique.

The calm envelops as we talk out loud. I am staring straight into my partner's eyes now, the veil lifted, my muscles relaxed. The sun pierces my retina but I don't close my eyelids.


I am a million different people from one day to the next. I am new for every person I meet. I am an amalgamation of everything I've ever done.

I am smaller than the simplest particle. I am nothing. I am a speck in time.

I am overwhelming. I am insignificant. I am supremely powerful.

I am a bubble. I am a bubble on the surface of an enormous cauldron of simmering Everything, elements fusing with other elements to make new entities. A perfect model of the sun. My rainbow-coloured surface reflects what is around me. I am full of nothing.


I exist momentarily in my unique state, formed from the whole, hovering above the ever-moving sea of existence, before I explode into nothing, my remains sucked back into the swirling potion, to be fused with Everything once again.

The teacher winds a stick around a gold singing bowl, its clear note vibrating through us to signal the end of the lesson. We sit in stunning calm, our words falling down around us on the lakeside dock like confetti.

I am the universe. I am love. I am everything.

The wild contrasts between statements leaps out at me. Each phrase has an opposite. Inner duality is something about myself that has bothered me for a long time. Now I realise we are all made of it. I can not just be strong. I am weak as well. I can not just be lost. I am found. I am neither and I am both.

I, like everything else in this world, exist in duality. As they say, fear is the same sensation as excitement, only perceived differently. We are all trying to fit together two ends of one spectrum, circles of definition stacked one on another to form the entities that we are. A giant spiral.

What she said about herself is an exact description of myself. What I am is what she is. As they say in sanskrit, om tat sat. It is what it is. Everyone else has the same experience as us. We all just are.

I am left with an overwhelming feeling of oneness.

The question "Who am I?" becomes ridiculous. We are all the same; not just in a figurative sense but in a real, palpable, pinch-able sense.

I get the feeling that if we'd been given endless time we would have repeated every possible attribute to each other, finding a little of everything within us, before finally returning to the only truth:

"I am."

Centred

Rid myself of purpose, in order to find my purpose.



This, in essence, was the purpose.


People ask me what I've been doing with myself, incredulous that I've spent so long not earning any money.

As if I was being offensively indulgent.

I want to tell them what I've learnt. I did write a list, but it is too long to be interesting to an outside eye.

Very few of the items would be in place on a CV. Sometimes this makes it difficult to communicate, people often needing things put in terms of 'doing' words.


A lot of the learning comes through meditation, often in combination with stunning natural beauty or ancient sites. I am often reluctant to dwell too much on this, for fear of what people might think. In doing so I am being untrue to myself and of course ignoring what I've learnt, for it seems this path has become my purpose.

****


Back in August I spent a month at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, during which time I was led, by a series of synchronous events, to La Finca de Yoga Mistica.


At the time it was a community in the making, deserted during the rainy season. Empty garden beds lay sodden from the rain, several small pelapa huts hunched dripping and empty, one large rancho semi-finished, smelling of fresh-cut wood.


It was the cleanest kind of peace.


I was a guest of my new friend Randi, who consolidated my daily yoga practise with calm words and dedicated sentiment. Every morning was ignited with meditation on the small dock, mist hanging heavy over the lake, the only noise the soft paddling of early fishermen in dugout canoes.

I fell in love with everything then; the lake, yoga, sitting still. Myself.


I left the farm calmer than I'd ever been, the clear water flowing through my veins. I knew I'd be back.


In the months following, there came an exchange of emails with the farm's coordinators, which resulted in an agreement. I was to receive a yoga and spiritual teacher training in exchange for time working on the farm.


One day I woke up to my soul's autopilot and realised I'd found something I not only really wanted, but had, almost without realising, made happen.


There, crystallising from a long, heavy mist, appeared the Purpose.


It was so simple. Yoga is the synthesis of body, mind and soul, with the ultimate goal of inner stillness. Far more than the commonly perceived 'stretching,' it was designed purely as a moving meditation to sink one deeper into other worlds.

Although I had practised on and off for five years, I had never considered it more than just a beautiful activity. It is still unbelievable that I took so long to realise this could be a life choice.

The more I did, the more the lines blurred between the physical and the perceived. I sank easily into postures, my mind settling like a sudden dropping of the wind.

Without movement of air, there is no wind. Without thought, there is no mind.

Now, early March, I find myself for the first time on a timescale. I pass through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala at speed, like a fly, darting randomly in seemingly useless directions but somehow making it to my goal with time to spare.

I ride a speedboat across the lake, swaying up and down with the rhythms of the waves, rushing into the unknown. Volcanoes tower over me on all sides and I realise the entire lake must be one supervolcano.

I am in the centre.

Primeval queen

Before I kill him, I hold him.  I am careful not to squeeze him too hard. I don't want to harm him, or worse, scare him. 

I can feel his heart beating.  I like the warm weight. 

His feathers are soft and glossy, fading from  deep, terracotta red to iridescent green-black.  Beautiful.  I think about the earrings I am going to make with them later.

I stroke his back and look into his yellow, darting eyes.  I project calm.  Although my heart beats hard, I do not want him to feel my nervousness. 

We hang him up from a tree by his feet and leave him there for the blood to drain to his head.  I apologise to him for the situation.

I put my hand over his chin and beak, covering his eyes.  I don't want him to see the knife.  Hanging upside down, wings open out like an inverted umbrella, he is so helpless that I have a sudden urge to save him. 

I feel a pulse in the artery underneath my thumb.  I think about how he is alive.

I slice the knife across his neck. Warm blood spills over my hand and drips onto the grass.  I don't know why, but the temperature surprises me.

For a moment, the chicken is still and I am left with a brief silence, during which I can almost hear the liquid falling from the knife and my hand.  Then he starts moving again and Jimmy takes the knife from my hand, hacking his head completely off.  It falls to the ground like a discarded toy.

The headless body starts to flap its twisted wings and cluck, as if the soul of the bird is echoing its life as it leaves the body.  On the floor, the head twitches.  The movement of the body is so violent that I stand bewitched, watching the blood fall to the floor as the carcass tugs and swings on the rope.  After two minutes it falls still. 

"Ya," says Erica.  Enough.

We pull feathers from the body to save for jewellery.  If I pull too hard, skin comes off with them.  I will need to wash these.  When I've taken what I want she dips the whole thing in boiling water, loosening the cuticles and enabling us to pull the remaining feathers out in wet handfuls.  They lie on the compost heap in soggy balls. 

She toasts the naked body on the fire to burn off any last hairs.  I scrub it all over with a soapy scourer.

I tell them I would like to butcher as well.  The family gather around the stone sink to watch.  I think they find it hard to believe that this twenty-six year old girl is not only unmarried but has never killed or butchered a chicken.  I am not sure what to tell them, other than, "things are different in England."

But I want to do this.  For years I have wanted to do this.  I have always felt very uncomfortable about the fact I had never killed anything.  How could I be happy eating meat when I was not happy to kill it myself?  The food we buy in Tesco is so far removed from its origin that it is hard, sometimes, to remember that it was once a living, breathing thing.  In some twisted way this process is a token of respect to the animals I have eaten.

Erica holds the legs apart as I cut around the anus. 

I must be careful not to contaminate the meat with the intestinal contents. I slice down the left hand side of the spine, opening a cavity through which I carefully pull the innards.   I wonder how machines carry out such a delicate job.

When I chop the feet off at the lower joint, I am left with something barely resembling the chickens I'm used to buying at home.  I wonder what they must pump them with to make them so rounded and white.  This one is wrinkled, thin and bright yellow.  The flavour will be impeccable.

The whole job has taken almost an hour.  I have turned a bright-eyed, beautiful creature into food.  I am hugely aware of the significance of what I've just done, and the inappropriateness of the usual indifference we have for meat.  But I feel relieved. 

I hadn't realised how much it bothered me that I had eaten meat most of my life and yet never killed an animal with my own hands. I feel slightly less of a fraud. 

I whisper a promise to the chicken soul; to always be thankful for the life of the animal that I'm eating.  I am a strange, yet conscientious cross of a primeval hunter and a privileged hippy.

I sit at home, cadaver in the fridge, and twirl silver wire into earring springs.  Time to adorn myself with my kill.

Caribbean kingdom

One minute I am eating tacos and chatting in lively Spanish, next I'm face to face with black, dreadlocked border officials, trying to decode the lingo.

Of course… I forgot. Belize is Commonwealth.  This lilting, smiling language is actually my own - or was, once.  I finger through to the underlying meaning and emerge with another stamp in the passport.

I climb up in to the ex-US schoolbus going down the only main road south.

People of all colours climb on, speaking their rhythmic islander's talk, speckled with unfamiliar slang.  I keep forgetting, asking questions in Spanish.  The bus driver plays reggae and I talk to a child next to me.

She is the smartest girl in her class.  She is also the oldest, with the one class serving children aged 8-11.  We hold up a five pound note against a ten dollar bill, comparing the Queens.

Her school is 'non-profit.'

Sea air frosts everything with a salty crust.

The landscape of northern Belize is flat, dry and less interesting than I had anticipated.  The settlements, however, are intriguing.  Wide, dusty roads, sprinkled with homes and jungle palms.  Run-down schools, labeled as Hurricane Shelters.  Wooden houses, paint peeling in the sun, propped up precariously on stilts. Some of them lean beyond reasonable stability. 

All in all, I feel very much like I've stepped back in time.  I cannot get over the language, and how it relates to my country.  I feel strangely like a modern-day pioneer, painting the Caribbean with my flag.

I am slightly embarrassed to be British.

I talk to an old woman, Mary-Lee, about my predicament.  When she was born the country was called British Honduras.  I ask her how it has changed. 

"Independence don't mean freedom," she says, with a sorry shake of her head.  "Dey keep telling us dey'll help us, but everyone lies.  No politician ever follows through.  It jus' gonna get worse and worse."

I tell her; "if its any comfort, politics are the same everywhere.  We have a new government and already they're breaking promises.  At least you have the sun!" 

She laughs and agrees.  "I spent ten years in England before I decided Belize was a better life.  Ain't so sweet over there either.

"But it be same everywhere.   World's covered in fire n' flood.  Evil be spreading."

I ask her what she means.  "Worlds endin', girl.  Jus' you wait."

The bus journey goes on for several hours, through towns seemingly named by fantasising children. Orange Walk. Cool Shade Camp. Ladyville.  Until finally I am in Belize City. 

It is tiny, yet energetic.  After the sprawl of Mexico it feels wrong to call this a city.

I had been nervous -- as usual, with no guide book, I am going on word of mouth.  Depending on the age of the adviser, this has not always been positive.  But five minutes into the city and I am relaxed.  Everyone here has a smile on their face.  The women move with an enviable rhythm.  The men are, in general, very attractive.  Everyone calls me baby. 

The wind keeps blowing.  I hear Belize is all about the coral islands. 

I have a little time. 

I buy a ticket for the last boat to Caye Caulker, enough food for a week, and sit in the sun to await my chariot.

God of Small Things

I'm on a bus heading south. Sitting across from me is a woman, perhaps 20 in age, with a small son who has no hair. She wants US dollars, I want Belize, so we swap and start talking.

She wants to know where I've been, and why I don't want to marry and settle down in my own country. I give her the standard spiel. The spanish rattles out freely and I enjoy the surprise on her face. 


***

Once upon a time, I watched football. I shamelessly supported the Mancs because they were the best and because my boyfriend did. We used to ritually tramp to Brixton's Elm Park Tavern, sun illuminating the pub in dust rays, pint of cider on the table, to pass a Saturday afternoon esconsed in drama and delight.

These days, although I love the game, I have no time and no patience for the delicate advertising-machines running the pitch. These are the glorified soap stars, paid sickening wages and supported by self-righteous masses. Without the pub and the boys I find it hard to take an interest.

***


The conversation moves over to her. She is Honduran, married to a Belizean. She doesn't speak English but is trying to learn for her son; given that they live in Belize, English will be his first language. She hasn't been home for four years because she doesn't have the money.


He is three years old and has cancer. The hospitals in Belize don't know what to do with him, so she's been taking the five hour round-trip border-hop up to Chetumal in Mexico to get his treatment.


I ask her how often she goes.


"Every day," she replies, with a smile. "Every day for a year."


My heart aches for them and I feel like a fool for my indulgent life and naïve cries for freedom. I feel desperate to help. I want to fly them to England and make him better. But I can't. That is the lesson I learn every day - that everyone has their own agenda. You can only ever give so much.

***

Going through my belongings, shapeless lumps in the attic of my father's house kept for reasons unknown, I uncover a Manchester United strip. I pause for a minute, pondering how to get rid of it. It's too small for any of my fellow fans to get away with. It would be a shame to send it to a charity shop.

Although now, to me, it symbolises the Dirty System, it once represented comraderie, love and a shared passion. And it might one day mean something else for someone out there.


So I bring it with me. They love football where I'm going. I know I'll find a home for it somewhere.


***

When she climbs down from the bus, halfway to Belize city, I pull the earrings from my ears and press them into her palm. With my other hand I give the Manchester United strip to the boy. He looks up at me with big eyes. He is huge for a three-year old but the t-shirt is still so big he will drown in it if he wears it right now.

Maybe she will sell it.


But maybe, if he grows older, he will play football in it one day.

The other home

Its hard to describe the feeling as I fly over the turquoise shores of Quintana Roo. Something bordering on ecstasy, but far too calm for that word to fit.



I am alone again - and instead of feeling lonely I feel full. High on myself. Elated. The warm wind that hits me as I exit the airport at Cancun is the same wind that blew me here in the first place. It whispers to me and I shyly yield to its touch like a lover.

I just cannot believe how happy I feel.


I packed Mexico away into a neat box in my head, barely sniffed at in six months, and yet in just a few minutes it tumbles out; a surprise party, bursting with song.


Dogs, casually roaming. Dirt roads, playgrounds for the happiest children I've ever seen. Smells, pulling me in every direction. Old men, gossiping toothlessly from their chairs in the roadside shade. Shrieks of tropical birds, with something to say every minute of the day. People, everywhere, smiling.

And that wind, that soft, warm wind.

I avoid Cancun altogether in favour of the more genuine Puerto Morelos, checking in to a beautiful room at Casitas Kinsol. It is a haven under the shade of fruit trees and the baleful wide eyes of a chihuahua.

I borrow a bike and ride through a few kilometres of mangrove swamp to the white beach, where one of many of today's contented sighs slips out to join the wind. In moments I am paddling the shallow turquoise water, washing myself clean of my 60-hour journey. I make some friends, who buy me a beer. I sink my toes into the sand.

Tonight is full moon. It is as bright as the sun in England. I honour it with enormous prawns a la diabla, re-anointing my mouth with the familiar chilli fire of Mexico. I frequently pause my baptismal meal to tend to a small child, whilst the mother and grandmother serve the locals around me and the father, grandfather and uncle lean back with machismo.

I eat slowly, and afterwards spend a long time sitting at my table, facing the street.

It ain' awll bad, son...

Being on a budget, I thought nothing of accepting a 36-hour,3-flight journey in order to save a few pennies. Being on a budget, therefore, I take with grace the 60-hour epic that eventually unfolded.


After the first 10 hours I emerge in San Francisco. Grey, drizzling, cold. I actually find myself dreaming of the sun I left in London. I somehow entertain myself for 8 hours. Return to the airport at 10pm to be told one flight is delayed, another cancelled altogether.


Time to whip out the sleeping bag. Other travellers eye me with jealousy as I steal my first 3 hours sleep in 24 hours on the airport floor. A further 3 hours stretched over free seats on the plane and I can be almost be counted as awake when I stumble out in sunny Atlanta, Georgia.


My mind twists as I try to work out what day it is and what time my body clock is following. But in the third time zone in thirty three hours it is only 9am and I know better than to capitulate to the heavy eyes this early on. So I check into a hostel. Shower. Leave.


Despite the dragging mind, I'm glad I had this extra time in the states. It reminds me of why I'm not staying.


I still have a lingering sense of attachment to the American Dream. I still associate the ideal with the safety and love of my childhood. Its almost a forbidden vision of a possible future. And, goddammit, that makes it exciting.


As I child I believed I would settle in the Promised Land. As an adult I find myself torn between this dream and the rejection of the whole concept of the country. I simultaneously love and despise the excessive use of fast food. I hold myself back from the glitter of the malls. I don’t want anything they offer - but the advertising works so well.


But today I had a revelation - aside from idealism, a true reason why I can never settle here. A reason I can accept, and be at one with, without feeling like some kind of opinionated idiot. The clincher?

It starts when I realise I am walking the streets of Atlanta alone. My only pedestrian companions are the crazy and the homeless, of which there are an extortionate number.

And then I remember. 'Outside' is a strange concept, here.

Everyone drives everywhere. Every single shop has its own parking lot. The consumption of space is ruthless. I have been to city upon city, West, deep South, South East and North East and all of them sprawl, eating up the landscape. Away from small downtown hubs, sheer distance gives people no option other than be slaves to their vehicles.

And they are happy to. Billboards everywhere preach fear.

The first sign to greet me at the airport: "there are other ways to lose your life than dying".
The metro voiceover: "surveillance cameras cannot guarantee your safety."
When I tell the hostel people I will walk (*shock!) downtown: "Keep your hand on your wallet. Don't talk to anyone."

Everyone is scared of everyone else.

The answer to their fear is to keep behind doors - the airconditioned doors of offices, the sliding doors of shopping malls, the slamming doors of cars.

I feel like I'm in an apocalyptic video game. I walk the streets avoiding stumbling meth-twisted zombies, countering their approaches with English politeness and a smile that cracks my airplane-dry lips. I cast my eyes over the concrete Olympic Park and swerve to avoid Coca Cola World.

I'm almost relieved when my legs start to give way from exhaustion. I can legally (my own rules) go back to the hostel. I buy myself a pot of Ben and Jerry's and curl up in front of Friends.

Well, it ain't awll bad...

Valentine's Ode

Home was a calling that I didn't know I'd heard
Home was an accident, for which I was unprepared.
Home was a siesta after a year of wandering -
Home was the answer to my silent pondering.
Home was beds and walls and hugs and multitudinous Things
Home the nest in which to rest my aching open wings.
Home compacted years of life to tiny scraps of days.
Home became the doorway, to open the next phase.


Home was overwhelming, in a shiny kind of way
Home regurgitated things I didn't want to say
Home cut me a window into all my previous lives
Home made me a passenger on other people's rides.
In home I found the things I left, reasons I had to go
But home exposed the things I love, the reasons for the flow.
My home can only ever be the root of all of this -
The home of all the ideals that I never thought I'd miss.


This home is now a flame to light the path I choose to take
For home, you see, revealed to me the lonely choice I make.
At home live friends and family who actually understand!
But home they stay, far away, while I flee to foreign lands.
My love hides there, love for them all, for I can't bring it along
As a passenger, it eats away the heart that once was strong.
But my home is not forgotten, although it is far away
Home for me is everything. I just wish that I could stay.

Emotional Warrior

I have always valued the strength of my emotional reactions.  I feel everything so deeply.  I cry a lot, but I laugh even more.  I am happy more than I am sad.  Although I get frustrated at manic fluctuations from hour to hour, I believe the intensity of the highest highs can only ever be the same as the intensity of the lowest low.  Rather than pushing pain away, I eat it with gusto, swallowing down the scratching edges and squeezing the nourishment out.

As such I find myself shaken regularly and aggressively by my emotions, an icily intoxicating cocktail of rainbow colours.

It makes for an interesting life.

Take, for example, my recent break-up with Mike. Yes, it happened. 

We realise that we needed to be in different physical spaces.  He is no longer fulfilled doing anything other than his music, and his music has started taking me to places I have no reason to be.

Rather than continue to hold each other back, we plan our parting to coincide with a visit home for Christmas.

Our last week in the States is spent honouring our relationship, toasting it with friends, reassuring ourselves it is the right thing to do, and crying into each other's arms at the bizarreness of life's gifts. 

We release each other in late November, exactly a year from when I first flew out from Heathrow.  From the moment the decision is made, until a couple of weeks after we part, I feel it all intensely.  Every day I wake up with a new head full of thoughts, and every night I sleep lightly, dreaming of the revelations of the morning to come.

The Mind Fishermen hook me more frequently, raping my thoughts unabashedly.

There is indeed nothing like a break-up for philosophical reflection.  And yet I write nothing.

Despite the shock of having half of me ripped away, I am happy.  It is self-mutilation.  I am the warrior, trapped under a boulder, forced to cut off my own arm in order to survive.  I know that the decision is the right one.  I had always known it, really.  But I had seen it through and learnt the lessons, and for that I am proud.

But it hurts.  My emotional cocktail shaker blends me, and the Fishermen taste me.

Iced Heart Indigo, Loathing Lime.

Lonely White.

I do the time.  I feel the things I need to feel.  I meet each emotion head on, exploring it, accepting it, letting it go.

Anticipation Amber.

And then, I am fine.  Totally fine.

I shock myself by how quickly I am fine.

December comes and Great Britain turns white.  The snow falls around me, erasing the dirt of London town and the mud of my mind, and I feel enormous.

I am surrounded by friends and I can't believe it.  They are MY friends!  I can talk to them whenever I want!  Gone are the days of relying on one other person for all my emotional needs.  Gone are the days of the lonely hotel room, writing emails to faceless people who no longer need me.  They are here and they love me.  Christmas Crimson envelops me.

And my family.  They are close enough to touch.  Two sisters, a brother, a father and a cat. 

Emily and I march over Hampstead Heath, past frozen swimming ponds, emerging with armfuls of ivy; a pre-constructed wreath.  I am driven home in my father's carriage of safety, past crunchy rivers and a sunset bonding with the crispy white hills. Wrapped in fairy lights and tinsel by my sister's happy face.  Leaning over the stove, stirring cranberries and cinnamon. A clockwork Santa playing carols in clear, repetitive notes.  A log fire warming my heart more than it has been warmed in years.

I pass a wondrous Christmas surrounded by love.  I give out as much as I can.  Entire relationships are enacted within tiny timeframes.  I flit from place to place, seeing those who matter and not worrying about those who don't.  Cornwall's incredible energy revives me and its seas pummel vibrancy through my veins.  I emerge in frosted glasses, delicious flavours.  Long Walk Rose.  Full Bellied Cream.  December Sunshine Yellow.

On the last day of the year, I cut off six inches of hair.  The split ends and crumpled curls fall thinly to the floor.  My head feels light. 

I swish.

I finish 2010 feeling calm.  I trust myself again.  It worked.  I dealt with it all in real time and emerged righteous.  I felt it all.  The tears were worth it.  My emotions knew what they were up to.

January dawns in ethereal mists, and I can barely see the sea from the window.  The sky is lit with streaks of colour.

Surreal Cerise.  Cosmic Coral.  Triumphant Teal.

The guts of the Mind Fish

Many people ask me why I have not written anything since August.  I fumble and excuse with poorly rehearsed lines, confusing myself as to why my spool of memories has failed.  With a familiar start I realise almost four months have passed since I made the decision to leave Guatemala and re-enter the western world.  So many philosophies, so many moments, unrecorded.  They dance underneath my eyelids, taunting me with half-formed answers.  I reach to grab them and my fingers close over empty air, the moment vanquished.

The truth is, every time I sit down to write, a Mind Fisherman, high up in the clouds, stabs his hook through my skull and pulls, hard, until I find myself floating several feet above the ground and unable to reach the keyboard.  There I stay, sometimes flailing, sometimes still, waiting for the fisherman to either pull me up for inspection or release me back into the wild. 

For months, I have been the subject of examination by those above, who comb my brainwaves for meaty morsels, judge me on the beauty and fleshiness of my thoughts, while I stare at them with shiny circle eyes. 

After each encounter I am left confused and decompressed, with a hole in the head, leaking words in a stream of empty metaphor and overly descriptive expression. I am fit only for laughter or tears, or both, in a manic combination of emotion too strong to withhold.




But for now, I am free.  Finally I am able to finger those thoughts, squishing them and rolling them in search of meaning.

America... America was, well... not so bad, actually.

I enjoyed myself.  I made a lot of friends.  I'll probably go back.  But I'm not in a rush.

Most Americans are wonderful people.  They have travellers, just like the rest of the world.  Except this generation of travellers all have the same passport.

They don't seem to mind that every town looks the same.  The landscape is, as they say, awesome.

We went to some festivals unlike anything I've ever seen.  We drove around with a group of kids from Indiana.  We stayed high, high up in the mountains.  We ran along deserted beaches.  In three months, we stayed in just three hotels.  The rest of our beds were donated by the seemingly endless generosity of the locals.

America certainly is the country of superlatives.  Biggest.  Wildest.  Most Generic.  Craziest.  I saw a lot of crazy things, actually.  Naked people riding bicycles through the desert.  A greenhouse brimming with fresh marijuana.

San Francisco, the city that everyone raves on about, was mediocre.  A city, really.  A nice one, sure, but full of twitching meth-addicts and shiny-shoed fashion victims, alongside slow-walking tourists and over-priced chips.  I smiled blandly as person after person warned me of the horrific dangers of Mexico, and stared at the corner of Union Square where a German tourist was shot dead outside Macy's department store the month previously. 

I admired very much the hippy mentality of northern California.  There, amidst stunning mountain backdrops and small, colonial towns, a subculture has become a monoculture and everyone buys organic.  The people are unbelievably jovial, love yoga and religiously re-fill their shampoo bottles at the corner store.

But despite the similar vital statistics, I did not fit in, even there. Everywhere I went, I found ego to be too huge a part of life.  People seemed obsessed with labelling themselves.

There, you do not just like yoga, you are 'a yogi'.  You are not just an independent, free-spirited woman. You are A Goddess.  You cannot say, "I like to paint" without someone replying, "Ahh, so you are An Artist".  And everyone asks you what your star sign is, and nods knowingly when you reply.  Even if you lie.

To be honest, harsh though it sounds, I just got bored of people talking about themselves.  Perhaps it was just the people I met.  Ironic really, for me to write this in a blog of My Take On Life.  But at least I see the satire.

Despite this, I loved almost everyone that I met.  Some of them were incredibly inspiring.  Take Jay - the man who picked us up as hitch-hikers on the road from Yosemite. He had just finished scattering his wife's ashes to the wind.  I sat down in the front seat of the car and promptly broke the urn.  For some reason this meant something to him and he drove us six hours west to Santa Cruz and gave us a bed for the night.

He talked of his struggle to make his life his own since his wife's sudden death a year previously.  He'd started by getting up at 4am every morning.  He had pictures of a year's worth of sunrises, seen from the beach.  The light from these suns shone from his eyes as he talked.  Then he made a vow to rid himself of 'two square inches of surplus stuff' per day, in order to recover his house and his mind from a dead person's weight.  I understood every nuance.

I cooked him chickpea tagine and told him stories, and watched his face animate in front of me.  He later told me he'd started to cook again for the first time since she died.  He dropped us off in San Francisco with two new rollmats (a rather large 'two inches' he cheerfully cried), sheets hemmed by his wife, and forty bucks to buy myself a jacket.  We were left to hitch on Golden Gate Bridge, hidden by the mist and the bewilderment of a man who gave everything just for love.

Now I find myself in England.  It was, as always, almost an accident.  A split-second decision.  By coincidence or design, I can't be sure, but I arrived home exactly a year after I first left.

I've a ticket booked back for January.  I have, dare I say it, A Plan.  But of that, I will refrain from writing.  That is a morsel best conserved for me.  I currently have both feet firmly on the ground, fingers rooted to the keyboard, and mind free from molestation.  I spill my guts voluntarily, this time.

The Second Circle

One of the last notable things to happen to me in Mexico is another stranger giving me another crystal. This time it is amythyst quartz, an angled finger of glasslike transparency, tipped with the purple tint of the seventh chakra.



The crown chakra is the representative channel of energy from the universe through the top of the head down through the body. A purple and white stone like this is said to resonate with that chakra and is ideal for meditation.


The gift comes at a time when I have so much energy focused on meditation and my seventh chakra that it seems almost absurd that I was not given this stone previously. I hold it in my hand that whole day and my palm turns hot and sweaty around it as I fall asleep on my last night in this country.

I spend this night in the same hostel as always - my third visit. The return is yet another closure; of a circle looped twice before with my arrival back in November and Mike's arrival in March. Unknowingly I have completed a figure of eight around the country, centred on Mexico City. My physics friends might call it an infinity symbol.

Tomorrow I travel to the airport to meet Michael again as he returns from Veracruz. Another chapter in our near-far relationship, stretching our bonds only to ping us back like plastic toys on the end of an elastic rope.

I haven't spoken to him in a month; our Time Out bringing silence and personal growth to the two of us in an intensity neither of us has experienced for a while. It is hard to tell what the transition between solitude and constant companionship will be like. The typed version of him I read through my computer screen resembles very little of the original man.


I force myself to take each moment as it comes.


I fall asleep, crystal hard in my flesh, dreams punctured by the horn beeps and fried chilli scents of Mexico City.

Is anybody else scared of America?

The week has passed like a slow-time camera shot of a highway; red and white headlights smearing into lines of hurried intention.



I've rushed from here to there in a smooth path from Lago Atitlan in Guatemala to San Cristobal in southern Mexico, and then to Mexico City via that old favorite… the womb-like night bus.


On Tuesday I will be flying to San Francisco, California, via Miami, Florida, and Chicago, Illinois. The decision, like most of mine, was fluid and fast, and the reasons why I did it have escaped me, like perpertrators at a crime scene.

Wednesday brings a new kind of life.


I am scared of the States. Simply the nickname 'America' makes me nervous - that pseudonym so easily grabbed, with no attention for the fact that Mexico and Canada are also both part of the continent of North America. I find myself face to face with the bully of school - a bully in the form of a too-clean, polished blonde with sharp nails and an alarming ignorance. I can feel her already looking down her nose at my ragged clothes, scraggly hair, small wallet.


I feel my loneliness when faced with her - that longing to be both at once a part of her and as far away from her as possible.


And yet she resides within me. Politics and stereotypes aside, I cannot deny my roots.


My mother's family is from Connecticut. I spent a shiny string of shimmering Christmasses there as a child, my once-a-year reconnections fading with the death of my mother in 2004. Since then, I have had little contact with her brothers and extended family, who still live along the east coast, and other than my brief sojourn to Texas at new year, no basis for adult interpretation of this country whatsoever.


Thus I am torn between the eyes of an impressionable child and an empassioned young woman - two fires within one girl.


America used to be magical. Literally.


One uncle had a mountainside log cabin in Vermont, the other a mansion in Virginia with a jacuzzi on the deck.


We would traipse through snow-glittered maple woods, ice-skating on frozen lakes and warming up by a log fire. My sister and I would have gifts lavished on us by my grandmother's friends, enraptured with the two little English girls who skipped through their neighbourhood every festive season. We were princesses and this land was everything our doodling imaginations could create.


America was fairy lights and snow boots, ice-cream parlours and new clothes, McDonalds happy meals and as much food as a greedy child could eat.


All that seems like another world. It has been frozen in black and white and archived deep in my mind, crumbling from reminiscence. The strange and unintentional severance of contact with half my family has had the effect of killing this country in my mind.

Mom's ashes are buried in Vermont. One day I will go.


Until then, my attitude has been to reject everything that country represents. Frequently mistaken as an American in the latin world, I quickly refute: "No soy gringa!" (I'm not a yank!)


I hide my passport like a sin.


From where comes this racism? For indeed that is what it is; just because the US is part of the 'first world' doesn't mean this worldwide xenophobia isn't in most cases as grossly misplaced as all other instances of race-based stereotyping.


Of course, aside from the bible bashing, gluttony and consumerism, the glaringly obvious answer is their interference overseas. They have become the world' s police force. And no one likes the pigs.


The sentiment, however, rather than outright racism, stems from a kind of advanced resentment borne of fear and helplessness.


It has grown surely and in many cases fiercely over the last years, particularly amongst my own generation of Europeans - which is of course the only voice I can really lay claim to understanding at this stage.

It appears to be fairly common to view Americans as, in the (fairly derogatory) words of my favorite comedian, "happy idiots." The natives themselves largely do not help their case, often remaining ignorant, particularly regarding the appalling state of international affairs wherever the US military is involved. Most of them do not even own a passport and show little interest in the world around them.


In contrast to skin-crawling atrocities such as Guantanamo Bay or the US funding of wars worldwide, the Americans we see on television build themselves an image of a happy, simple zombie, cooing under the power of the fluttering stars and stripes. They do not appear to have noticed that the governmental hold on their country is alarmingly similar to that of Germany in 1938.


Never has patriotism been so terrifying.


But. The big but.


I shrink from such wide-spread accusations of a nation.


How can I possibly write the above, let alone brand it to my name on the internet?! How could I possibly judge a nation of 300 million people on George Bush's delightfully-punchable face?


If this is the face of the States as seen from the outside, I cannot wait to see it from the inside. I cannot wait for my stereotype to be disproved. I cannot wait to meet the freedom-fighting gringos bubbling under the dead-pan of the newsreader's face.


I know that for whatever reason, my heart is drawing me there - even despite my somewhat irrational fears.


Yes, I am scared of returning to the 'real world'. In my eyes, I've been swimming happily in raw life juice for the last nine months. Those cold, clear waters are where I belong. I don't want to be drawn in to the sparkle of the new world. The idea of getting off the plane and spending a week's worth of Mexican accommodation money on a meal, just because its what people do, makes my breathing shallow.


Bigger fears lurk over the superficial ones. I am running out of money and don't know how to make it back. Thus America might be the end, at least for a while. Plus, facing the dream means disturbing it. Even if it is wonderful, it will still never be the same as it was as a child.


Even more daunting: Michael is getting ever more successful with his music. If he wants to pursue it, it seems like life will make it easy for him to do so in the Promised Land. But I don't want to settle yet.


So, once again, the bigger flows make themselves felt and having committed to following my own goals and heart there is nothing I can do but relax into them and see where they take me this time.


Your world is what you make of it… as every day here teaches me. If I'm scared, then those things will drill into my brain and leave holes, just as I fear. I need to remember that wherever my heart takes me I will be safe.

And what about Mexico… my love, my home.


In Mexico I feel like I have discovered the heart of the world.


There is just so much. I struggle to express the feeling Mexico inspires in me. It is universal love. I look at her swooping mountains, wild beaches, stark deserts, chattering jungles, and I can feel my whole body contract with yearning and respect.


More than just love, this feeling alone has led me to places previously unachievable during meditation and has been critical to my spiritual growth.


This kind of love is something I've only ever felt for the land around my house in Cornwall.

The energy fields across this enormous country sway and band like ribbons, streamlining the people underneath it and drawing them to exactly where they need to be.

There is a deep knowledge here, rising with the lava in its volcanoes.

Many things will come to pass in Mexico in the next few years. I feel the imposition of a future pushed and pulled by enormous forces; earthquakes, hurricanes, political explosion, people's rebellion. Water flows. Spirituality. The knowledge of the ancients, returning to imprint its symbols on a modern day nation of passion and raw beauty.

Somehow I know there is more for me here. Thus, I sign out under the knowledge that these winds will blow me right back here where I belong, as soon as I've gathered what I need from its bigger bitch of a sister.

Mexico, Mexico. I do not abandon you for her.

I leave as a messenger, of the strongest intentions. I will stay only long enough to pluck what I need for you and your people. I leave to learn - for how can I form a full picture of the world without having been?

Reading over the strangeness of these words, I wonder what I have to learn that is so important to bring me to California?

Buds bursting

I look over at Felix and his frizzy blonde locks, bobbing as he laughs from his cross-legged seat on the ground. Under his overalls squirms a kitten, running lumps through the material as it tries to fight its way out.

The kitten has been brought here from the neighbouring village, on a motorboat, in someone's pocket, to kill the rats.

The rats have been brought here by the recent addition of human food to this land.

The humans have been attracted by the unusual flatness of the terrain; hard to find on the shores of Lago Atitlan but a necessity for an eco-village.


From the almost-whole shack - the only building on the land as of yet and the base of operations for Green New World (GNW) - the future seems tiny with long-distance perspective. But it is growing, fast.


GNW, a charity focused on providing much-needed help to the ailing lake, have just purchased the land and are finding their feet. Through them I have already helped with a basic-level sewage project for San Marcos, stopping at least some of the raw effluent from running into the lake. Now, I find myself on the side of a mountain, observing the fetal stages of a proposed eco-village. Like many in the area, it hopes to set an example to the locals by providing easy, green solutions to traditional problems such as farming and washing.

Right now, they lack even basic facilities.

Without these, much-needed volunteers are repelled. Without volunteers, the project struggles.

I don't have long but I want to help. I lay stones for the kitchen floor and cover myself in clay in a long day of digging and hauling in the toilet pit. Once in use, the toilet will be kept dry with sawdust to allow decomposition. Once full, the pit will be closed off. Unbelievably, after two years, a full pit of sewage will turn to rich compost that can even be used to grow vegetables. Such a simple idea, and yet the lake is about to go toxic from hundreds of years of human waste settling on the bottom.

We drink creek water through a clay filter and I try to understand where it all went so wrong.

I realise how much I love the simplicity. There is no electricity and our only music is the whisper of the wind through the avocado trees. We eat from the forest floor and piss amongst the coffee leaves. I haven't seen a mirror in days.

In the silence of the forest I find my retreat.

Although I'd originally planned on committing a month to a meditation centre, I realised quickly that organised spirituality is exactly the kind of practice that I reject, no matter how good the intention. Instead, I practise yoga underneath a morning mist that breathes lightly over me, fishermen my only observers, paddling dugout canoes with tender strokes.

Sitting here, the view of the lake sparkling between the trees, I understand that it is nature, pure and simple, that gives me my truth.

The trees whisper an ancient language. The bees fly lines of interconnection. The rain washes webs of oneness, united and yet barely noticed by those who are a part of it all.


The earth speaks to me in musty tones, humidly rising warm through my being.

I resonate.

The other side

Lago Atitlan is the most beautiful lake in the world.



So proclaim a history of writers and explorers, drawn here by the mystery of the morning mists over the water. Ancient volcanoes sleep at its edges and the Mayans, isolated to the extreme, appear to live as they have for thousands of years. From village to neighbouring village, one's ears prick with completely different dialects. Weak sunlight glints from the sparkling fabrics of the ladies, who keep their spirits alive in the startling threads of the full, traditional costume.

I first came to Guatemala in 2008, on a trip designed as a test for this current journey.


At that stage my hula-hoop loop was just a twinkle in my eye, and the perspective of that holidaying office girl painted a perfectly-proportioned picture of my future quest.


I spent ten dreamy days on the shores of Atitlan in a sleepy village called San Pedro, absorbing myself in the solitude of single travel and the intense peace of the rocks.


I had rarely seen such beautiful evenings.


Today I return, this time in the middle of a moody rainy season that paints the mountain-scratched skies with emotion. We enter San Pedro on one of Guatemala's famous chicken buses, painted beautifully kitch colours and packed eight across.

I barely recognise the town.


From the emptiness of the Christmas weekend two years ago has birthed a town for tourists, crawling with white faces and shamelessly-plugged memorabilia. The locals unsmilingly rip me off at the market and, in sharp contrast to the rest of Guatemala and Mexico, flatly refuse a bargain.


I am shocked at the difference between this town and my memory. Not only that, but I quickly discover that the lake has turned toxic and is only weeks away from a devastating algal bloom.


It is as if this postcard memory has been decomposed by first-world scum.


The worst is the singing. Every morning at 6am, the loudspeaker cries of Evangelist churches echo in symphony across the lake, blasted from each village in a call to convert the few remaining Mayans.


The 1970s left a crater of devastation in the wake of civil war and natural disaster, providing vulture-like missionaries the perfect conditions in which to descend. In the midst of destruction and agony, new religions proliferated and churches, foreign-funded, were often the first buildings up in the most hard-hit areas.

Converts tell tales of miraculous healings. Gifts of money and American trinkets.


Now, perched smugly upon the old houses of San Pedro, a church more like a wedding cake than a building shits over the spirits of the lake.

I am disgusted.


The same thing has happened to virtually all of the indigenous traditions across Mexico and Central America. No doubt to the rest of the world.


While to the untrained eye, the locals may look as they always have, in reality the addition of new religion has divided neighbouring villages, keeping people under strict, unofficial laws (in many villages the church owns the land, dictating where the villagers may work and live and when they may leave).


But (I pathetically justify to myself) this is nothing new. Catholicism, unsurprisingly, is the principal religion of the region, brutally imposed by the conquering Spaniards hundreds of years ago. Indigenous practices survived this steamrollering by learning to adapt and unite in a deeply interesting combination of traditional beliefs and that of the Vatican. Up until the second half of the last century, the music of the ancients continued to sing in this syncretic meld of faiths known as costumbre (custom).

Somehow, however, the loudspeaker ceremonies of the Evangelists seem unbearable in comparison.

The voice of the ancients, crushed under the pretence of development. I am left slightly flustered, wondering what to do.

Nothing can take away the beauty of this lake.

But the changes within myself have been highlighted by my return.

I realise how uninspired I am by the idea of going out to drink in cute, themed bars. I watch old hippies, drawn by the energy of the lake, overtly take photographs of the locals as if they are no more than animals. I see how repulsed I am by the damage the rest of this world has done to the culture of this village.

I do not want to make it worse.

When Eva and Toño leave after a few days, I happily board the boat away from this town.


I seek retreat.

Hitch-hopping

On the first of August I leave Michael and resume the trail solita. He has his work to do, I have to explore my soul. Both of us need to do this alone.



I'm not quite alone though… Eva and her banda boyfriend Toño are heading towards Guatemala. It's with them that I find myself waiting for a lift in the rain, on the highway leading out of San Cristobal, sipping thick pozol (chocolate-tortilla drink) that sends curls of steam into the misty air.


It takes us just two days and four rides to make it to the border. We share pick up trucks with tarpaulins, small children and, on one particularly memorable ride, several hundred cans of pizza sauce, around which we contort ourselves in the storm-force winds.


I duck down to protect my face and when I raise my head I am captured by the most beautifully brief moment… a rainbow in the field next to me, hanging clean and sparkling and radiant with stunning colours, perfectly poised for a moment before it is whisked away in the slipstream.


I am left with the traces of a kaleidoscope smile on my lips.


We swerve to avoid a cow in the road.


In the next town they stop to haul a pizza oven into the back of the truck. I assume they want us to leave, but they insist they can make this work to meet everyone's needs. They spend half an hour levering the enormous hulk of metal into the back, shifting can after can after bag of pepperoni in a tetris solely designed to ensure our (relative) safety.


I do not understand why people would go to so much effort, just to make sure there are three squares of space for a few bums they've picked up, when clearly the addition of the 2-metre square pizza oven to the truck is a strain alone.


Eva says simply: "Because they can."


They drop us at a border town, where a fairground has just pulled up. The need for the pizza oven becomes clear. We are left in the flashing lights of a pathetic-looking rollercoaster and the enticing oil smells of fresh-fried churros.


For la banda, every hour can be a work hour. Toño plays drums at restaurants as we pass, begging for a few pennies to buy himself a beer. We see the same two skinny girls that we met on my birthday, twirling their fire, seeming small and out of place at the semaphoros.

We eat popcorn and hula hoop under the tinny sounds of the fair and I feel wonderful to have regained my independence.


I miss Mike but I am glad I am here alone. Crouched under the lights, echoing fairy lights from a time long gone, I realise how important it is for me to have the space to be truly me, not cramped or compromised by another.


I have a fire inside and I need to feed it. I cannot wait for Guatemala.

Nos sentamos en la calle

I turn twenty six on the twenty seventh of July. It is raining in San Cristobal de las Casas. At 6200 feet the drops fall cold and the ancient rocks of the pavement seem slicker than normal.



Michael and I spend all day looking for plush hotels and decide at the end that we'd rather spend the money on food.


Eva is here; my long-lost buddy with whom I spent December. It is wonderful to have a friend, although I've spent enough time here now that I recognise faces on the andador. We pass the evening on the slick streets, drinking maiz spirit and coconut juice out of plastic bottles and hula hooping through the puddles alongside la banda.


La banda. What a wonderful phenomenon to be part of during my travels here in Mexico.


It literally means the band, and is a term used to describe Mexico's hobos: a network of young pirates, dreadlocked, pierced, dressed in an assortment of rags. They travel their country in the back of pick up trucks, conjuring pennies to live by working the streets, the restaurants and the buses.


You're not banda unless you have a prop - a tambor drum, a fire stick, a roll of macrame bracelets. I have a hula hoop, therefore I am accepted as one of them. Whenever I travel with Eva, we listen for the sound of drums.


Like a subtle web of entertainers for the nation, these kids are always present, always audible. Their tambors sing the same rhythms in every town. Their jewellery glitters under streetlights. Traffic light junctions are fought over as the best location for fire spinning, where the perpetrators spend hours in exhaust fumes and whirls of flame, paid five pesos each by the most generous drivers.


Tonight my attention is caught by a pair of girls. Their collar bones show sharply under stained t shirts. One of them has shaved the sides of her hair and allowed the rest of it to dreadlock in a kind of parrot's tuft. The other wears a coloured scarf round her head and has eyes that move too fast. They pass a stolen cigarette between them and try to blend in. They are only seventeen.


I've seen them on the semaphoros, one with poi and the other with a fire stick. They look like they might break. They sit in the puddles like scruffy dolls, seeking their adventure in dark streets, far away from any family they may have had.


They dance well and guzzle their beer with prowess. They have the urchin look down to a T. The only thing that belies them is the nervous darting of their eyes.


I wonder where they came from…where any of them came from.


Some run, bored, from families with big homes, rejecting the streamlined world of the rich mexican for the grit of the streets. Others have no relatives at all. Some just haven't come up with anything better to do yet. These details don't appear to matter because each is accepted within the greater family of la banda.


They are the people's army; the underbelly, proudly displaying the happiness that having nothing can bring. They proclaim the alternatives: that you do not have to have a regular job, a safe house and a non-descript image to be happy.

The conditions for the movement are perfect - anyone with a grain of sense can earn money in Mexico, albeit at different rates. There is no web of legislation to climb through -- if there is, no one cares. Hitchhiking is commonplace, and pick up trucks form the greater part of Mexico's fleet.


Life on the road is exhilarating. There is no purpose to it other than to live and continue to live.


I am happy to flit in and out of the situation. Their company is interesting for a while but as Eva points out, one can become bored easily when faced with too many nights of sharing caguamons and paying for things with handfuls of change.


A stranger might look at me, hair wraps, hula hoop and holes in my clothes, and place me in their box.


For me, the difference is subtle and comes in a cup.


I am happy to have included the luxury of coffee within my budget.


For la banda, the coffee shop is on the other side of their grimy viewing window. They peer through it with interest, knowing they would never choose to fritter away hard-earned beer money on a meaningless hot beverage.

Rain splats the glass as they sit, crouched, waiting for the customer who will whisk them away.

And then there came...

Eight months down the line, I'm done with large-scale wandering. For the moment, at least. The last few months have been a paintbox of thoughts, blobbing vivid emotion through my days. I've hopped and skipped and last-minute-escaped so many towns that they are beginning to look the same.



Although I have no intention of stopping, and still pump the thrill of a long-distance bus journey through my heart at every beat, I sense the need for a purpose.


Purpose.


That dreaded word.


I remember proclaiming loudly and perhaps slightly smugly at my work leaving party, fifteen months ago, my need to experience life without a purpose. When asked by puzzled faces what on earth I planned to do, I replied easily: I plan to have no plan.


But the P words are pursuing me with persisting pestilence. I know deeply that something needs to change.


Unintentionally we seem to have made our home in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.


The cheerily nicknamed San Cris hosts hoards of tourists, who come here for the quaint cobbled streets, rainbow houses and mountain-fringed vistas. They are helped in their explorations by organic coffee companies and delicatessens that are run by a high proportion of ex-pats - a.k.a. travellers who never escaped.


Under the too-clean streets lies a fractured past, marked recently by the Zapatista rebellions of the mid-90s in reaction to the large-scale governmental seizure of land from the huge indigenous population. This land is much more like Guatemala than Mexico but there is something inherently genuine about it, as if it is more Mexican than La Republica.


We move between our friend's unnecessarily large, isolating house and noisy, centre-of-town hostels. We punctuate our stay with two-week long trips out, during which we leave behind all but a change of clothes and our passports (just in case).


In doing so, we fall in love with Chiapas state.


Endless, deserted beaches. Tiny Mayan villages, high in the cool mountains, where life continues in the same way it has for centuries. Scattered emeralds and sapphires of God's jewel basket, twinkling in the Lagos de Montebello.


Steamy jungles hide the endangered Lacandon culture amidst deadly snakes and undiscovered ruins - just rocky humps in the knotted jungle. We eat lunch on a cracked Mayan calendar at lost Lacanja and swing on liandas in the Indiana Jones land of Yaxchilan.


We loop around dusty border towns ruled by cartels, who hop the river to Guatemala every time the police invade and stand there waving under foreign safety.


We straddle the border ourselves to renew visas, then hop back when we realise how much we miss Mexico. There is a strange pull towards 'home'.


We return to find Nantzin in our villa.


Nantzin is a Mexican-American midwife. She is here on a volunteer mission, learning the ways of the people here - reconnecting with her roots. She has just been given a job working in a woman's refuge in town, taking care of mothers who have no where else to go.


I spy a book on natural medicine on top of a stack of interesting titles and understand why we needed to return.


Nantzin is a powerful woman to have by my side. She knows where she is going and what she wants to achieve. She has been in Mexico for less time than me but has achieved all of the things I dream of achieving, including apprenticeships to Medicine Women and volunteering with her healing skills. You can read her blog here.


From Nantzin I learn basic home recipes and share veggie food, experiences and giggles. She represents more than one part of me that I've felt missing in the last month or two. Not only is she a curandera to look up to, she is a friend. Watching the world pass by with her on the pedestrianised Real de Guadalupe makes my coffee taste that bit sweeter.


I see that this is part of the next step for me and at the very least a pointer to where I should place my attention. I feel this to be a further confirmation that healing is my path; at least for the moment.


Nantzin represents for me the beginning of the shifts. The persistence of possibility.


The beginning of Purpose.

Searching for Dragons

Dan turns up at the end of July. Film-maker Dan, with whom I spent February and most of May. Dan, the man with the van, who left us in June to continue "searching for dragons" on the final leg of his 4.5 year journey to Panama.



Now he is returning, finally. You can tell by his energy, which no longer scouts but feels buried into the idea of home. He pauses long enough to meet Nantzin, who is one of the last jewels in a necklace of synchronicity that has taken him from Alaska to Panama and half-way back again.


A year ago someone told him to seek out a shaman named Don Lauro. Don Lauro, born to the Mayan heartlands of Mexico, was taken to Tibet as a child by monks. There, he became Red Dragon, the famous martial artist. Now, he owns Las Montañas Sagradas (the sacred mountains) to the south of San Cristóbal, seeding a sustainable community of permaculture and flowing fields, where he heals the flocking public with his powerful energy.


For one reason or another, Dan never met him. However, when Dan meets Nantzin, on his way out of San Cristobal, she unwittingly informs him of her plans to see a shaman named Don Lauro the next day.


Dan is accustomed by now to the strange synchronicities of fate. Given the first pointers to this man a year ago, he seems relieved to be able to close this circle. I am not surprised when, the next day, I find him and his assistant Forbes still in town, waiting out this seemingly prophesied meeting.


I am invited along to the meeting. After a month or two of stagnancy, I begin to feel wheels turning again. Dan has a strange ability to make one feel like every moment is meant to be.


We sit around the kitchen table and put together an offering, based on the teachings of Dan's adoptive Blackfoot (native american) father back in Canada. We burn sage and sweetgrass, cleansing ourselves and imprinting prayers for Don Lauro's family into the red-wrapped bundle of copal and tobacco. Then we wait.


Don Lauro is sheathed in mystery. Everyone we ask replies with a mysticism that suggests him to be more like a spirit than a man, appearing here and there when least expected and never available to be found.


We wait for three days. Four visits.


While we wait I explore Don Lauro's kingdom. Domed buildings lurk under bright, alpine growth sparked with rainbow ribbons. A small garden, working the best of permaculture, is a secret uncovered from the back of the kitchen. The place is mostly empty.


We celebrate the beginning of the Mayan new year with some of the residents. We gather around a sacred fire, into which we throw seeds, candles and all the dirt from under the fingernails of our souls. We emerge renewed to the year of Red Overtone Moon - a modern interpretation on the classical Mayan calendar system, suggesting this year to be the catalyst for uncovering the 'great teacher' within, who will guide us to our rightful path.


The days pass easily and I feel a resonance with the place that comes from more than just the legend. I ask about staying, but space is at a premium and the only option is to live in a tent on the very top of the mountain, where the rainy season sloshes down in giant balls of hail.


I think about my options as we wait.


The company of three unexpected friends does me good. They can see that something I'm doing right now is not quite settling right with me, and they encourage me to rediscover myself through the things I already know within.


Although it does not seem quite the right situation for me here, it makes me realise what it is I'm looking for. The waiting in itself has given me direction. I jump up and down: 'Life is good again!'


Nothing like a bit of sitting still to organise one's head.


Don Lauro turns up at the end of the third day. He is short, round, with slitted eyes and far too few teeth. He shouts at dogs and moves quickly; a man clearly distracted by larger dragons than ours.


We are relieved. We don't really know what to say. We hand him the offering.


He bows at each of us in turn and tells us his house is our house.


Before we can say anything else, he leaves.


We are left with an anti-climax that makes us laugh and shake our heads.


Dan is not worried. "He is a man, just like us. Just because some people show up, feeling that this meeting is destined, does not oblige him to do anything other than greet us graciously as he did."


I consider the life of a famous shaman, sought out by people from all ends of the earth who expect deliveries of wisdom and deeper meaning, and in doing so realise that the wisdom lies in seeing that we are all the same.

Even shamen are just men.