Flowing into new moulds

Today is comfortingly familiar.




I had this day yesterday. And the day before. Back and back. For a lot less time than my mind has me believe.

But the familiarity is a sizzle of overwhelming ecstasy that pushes fingers into my brain and shakes it.

I am awake.



It is barely 11.00. I have already run four lengths of both beaches, splashing through the waves in bare feet, the sun peachily low in the sky. I wash in the cool, clear surf, cliffs rising through white sea mist, waves tumbling my body in bubbling spirals.

At the top of the beach I run up the concrete stairs to our room, ducking under lines of fresh washing from the restaurant below, opening the door to find my man still dozing on his back like a baby. I join him, entangling limbs and pressing damp skin.

I listen to the soft rhythm of his breathing, feel his hair prickling my lips, savour the grind of sand between sheets and the undulating roar of the waves in my ears. He begins to wake and the spell is broken. We dance around the room for a bit, talking crap. The day begins its rolling pace.

I prepare English breakfast tea in the camping pan, looking wistfully at the dwindling supply of bags that, despite our obsessive rationing, will be gone before the end of the month. We sit on the bed, munching granola and fresh melon, feeling the cool breeze of the fan that has become one of the few fundamentals of our current lives.



Today is Easter Sunday. A month since Michael's arrival.



***

Yesterday I tried to work out the day and failed to get even a rough idea. So we asked. I still cannot believe it is April.

We have found paradise. I wake up every morning wide-eyed, shocked to see that other face, peaceful beside me.



We are caught in a swirl of being where time and event do not matter. We pass smoothly from vivid, swirling dreams into a vivid, swirling reality, where we circle each other like halves of a molecule, coils of DNA, turning and bumping, floating away and being sucked back in to our shared centre.



Two months ago I could barely think of this, avoiding the images in order to protect myself from the ache of not having what I craved.



Our minds have veiled that time and pushed it beyond the realms of recent memory. This seems like the only reality that has ever been. London is made up of the wispy sensations of dreams, barely clinging together in my mind, wandering in half-memories through my sleeping hours. Almost every day I get a pang of longing for the rolling hills of Cornwall or the love of my people, but I know now to let the nostalgia flow through my mind.



Instead, we practise being here, now.





The sea pounds through our days. A time of water, and of flowing.

Cytokinesis

Waiting in the airport arrivals hall I drink a pre-mix tequila cocktail from a can, clicking my fingers, tapping my feet. My teeth chatter. Each time the doors open to burp out another swarm of musty, wrinkled travellers, I push to the front of the crowd.  Stand on my toes.  Search for the face that has haunted my every hour since I last kissed it, almost four months ago.


Smiling grandfathers and baby-hugging mothers watch me with quietly concealed interest. I see their version of my story unreeling in their heads. I swear softly under my breath.


It's as if throughout my life I took a little of the emotion from every day and placed it in a bottle; every dreaded exam, fairground ride, sickening race, revealed secret.

I am now shivering with the side-effects of a cool gulp of this life-juice. I feel it coating my insides with its syrupy intensity.


The security guard asks me to step behind the line, for the second time. I tell him why I am acting the way I am, more to stop him and his uniformed mates from staring at me than for anything else. This doesn't work. I take my muttering self to the toilet to check my hair and wash my hands unnecessarily.


As I return, crushing my tequila can, I see Michael walk through the door. My walk turns to a stride and I push aside joyful families, throw myself into his arms.

My face feels like it is splitting.

His face is the sun, blinding me. I try to look at it but fail.

I bury myself in his shoulder.

We are both breathing as if we've run here. We don't know what to do. We don't even know what to say. He hands me a bar of much-missed Galaxy chocolate, as if this will replace a sentence. I hand him a cold beer and he looks so relieved he might cry.

We sit on the warm benches, sticky skin pressed into bumps through the holes in the metal seats, holding each other for over an hour until we feel strong enough to stand up again.


It is nine o'clock on a balmy Mexico City evening.


There is no need to rush.


***


For two people so known for our ability to "chat shit," we are surprisingly quiet.

We are shocked to relative silence by the strangeness of the other's face in three dimensions. He looks so different to the face I captured in snatches from my 50 square inches of computer screen. My mind is a peeking seashell, protecting itself, refusing to believe.


We walk around the hotel room, staring at each other from opposite ends, alternating the dizzyness of each other with the vertiginous view across the city from the eighteenth floor.


We stew ourselves in the jacuzzi bath and infuse the air with rediscovery.

We are in a perfect circle of water.

Completely coincidentally, it is exactly six months since we got together.

We get to know each other once more, this time with less urgency and more hunger. Our laughs carry the loud echo of disbelief.

We talk well into the night and fall asleep reluctantly, lightly, waking every half hour to footnote the last sentence.

Above the bed, imprinted in the plaster, another perfect circle haloes us in our bliss.


***


We are floating. El D.F. is so much brighter than it was in November. To all purposes, a different city, seen through another's eyes.

I see myself in Michael's face as his senses are blasted with Mexico's mighty vehemence. People, everywhere, shouting, laughing, dancing, crawling; pervading our perception with spicy spikes of colourful intrusion.  Street sellers invade our bubble.  Fierce smells burrow into our nostrils.  Movement tickles the corners of our eyes. 

I catch his hand, force him to slow down.

Back then, I blinked away the flood with my loneliness.  Now, his disorientation is grounded with the gentle kisses of companionship and the sanctuary of our hotel.

Our two days together in the city are are necessary exploration but an unnecessary symphony of distractions.  Once again, I crave bland beauty.

I introduce him to Mexico's famous night bus.  Our instincts point South.

We curl up in our seats to await the new world of the morning.  In twelve hours, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, will materialise from the darkness.  Our souls cry out for the sea.

Desert sun bleaching

I say goodbye to Luis, the quiet bringer from afar, almost two weeks later.

We have lived in the desert of Zacatecas.  This last, unplanned stop in my journey, although a whole day's drive away from where I met Luis, is reassuringly just a short drive from my first destination, Real de Catorce.  This does not surprise me.


I have lived the life of the chosen one, treated to presidential suites, gifts, tours; waited on hand and foot whilst being inducted into the Ways Of The Light. In just a short time he has become a father of sorts. From the centre of my pile of presents I feel much younger than twenty-five.
Like a sparkling snow dome, the information he places within my swelling skull needs time to settle before I am able to see my way through.

A delicate network of carefully constructed threads is forming, a throbbing organism, extending primordial limbs -- fleshy tentacles that incarnate my innate knowledge and seal form in a giant web, designed to catch even the tiniest wisp of instruction blown my way.

I feel simultaneously mighty and helpless. In our weeks together he has mentally skinned me alive and left me prostrate, my bared innards glistening juicily, pulsating, vulnerable and exposed in a way I have not experienced. I react with erratic waves of rage and exhileration, swooping easily through everything in between.

It is a complete mental scrub.

I cannot sleep.

When I do, my dreams tease me with half-formed shapes and moody premonitions. I long for next week, when my long-lost love will arrive with a suitcase full of normality and eyes widening with that warming resonance. My companion, my other half. I long for his company to share all of this with, his strength to walk by my side.
And yet I do not want this time to end, for I feel myself resonating with a clear harmony that I have never felt before.


When Luis and I part, it is under the knowledge that our separation is only temporary. At some point in the future, we have a journey to make. Only I will know when the time is right for that journey.

In the meantime, I have been instructed to empty my head before bed, slow my already lilting pace, and stay completely connected to the things around me.

As long as I relax, and carry on as I am, everything will unfold, just as it should.

I spend the last days before Michael's arrival in a Holiday Inn in Morelia, Michoacan, paid for by my new benefactor. I eat books with the same zeal as I had when reading Alice in Wonderland at the age of four. I must be the only guest ever to spend every evening alone in their room, dogmatically preparing salads in a camping pan with a blunt knife nicked from the downstairs restaurant, rinsing chilli and lime remains away in the shower.

I am a shaken champagne bottle. Any moment I feel I might explode, fizzing love over everything around me. My bottle would be refilled a thousand times over, never depleted, an eternally regenerating source of life.

I cannot remember ever being this happy.

I look down at my neck, where two silver amulets glint whitely in the sun. Purchased in shining Zacatecas, the desert oasis; salmon stones, windows glinting, raw scents of life in a barren earth. El serpento y el caracol. The snake, half of winged serpent Quetzalcoatl in a spiraling figure eight, representing oneness and connection with the earth; the snail, home on his back, undulating with sticky strength, slow enough to sense everything in the smallest gust of wind.

As I place them around my neck I am reminded of my words, borne from the depths of my loneliness, back in November:

"The snail's head of my intrigue retreats back into its shell, leaving only feelers, slowly waving."

Now my antennae extend powerfully ahead, muscled extensions of my senses. Nuance shades my perception in a thousand rainbow colours, the sun pressure-washing my mind, blasting away a crust of unnecessary memories, bringing innate sense into sharp relief.

For my last night alone, I return to Mexico City and the same hostel in which I started this looping journey.
 
Mi viaje solita is bracketed. The circle is closed.

The duality of sense and bewilderment

After breakfast, I allow myself to be taken by Luis to the other pyramids at Tzuntzintzan, the ancient capital of the Tarascans, holders of the Lake Patzcuaro territory. The tip of my tongue trips and taps over the name in ingeminated, gratified triplets.

The pyramids are larger, more numerous and seemingly more alive than those I visited at Ihuatzio a few days ago. I wonder how to broach to this well dressed, expensively perfumed gentleman the fact that I very much want to meditate here.

Before I do so, Luis tells me this place is a centre of energy. He asks me if I know how to "charge" from it.


Taken aback, I reply, "Yes. I think so. Sentar y sentir. Sit and feel."

He nods, satisfied, and beckons me through the alleyway between two of the central pyramids. Then he points to a position on the crumbling stone. "Sit there," he commands. "On the third level up, in that corner."

Once sat, he orders me to uncross my legs and arms, place my palms on the stone, and close my eyes. Asks me if I have a mantra. The only one I can think of is the one contained within my Mayan Yellow Sun dreamspell - "I am that I am". He tells me to focus on my breathing and repeat that. He will tell me when to stop.

Slightly self-consciously, I do as he says. Within around five minutes I feel my forearms twitching. The visuals on my eyelids swirl excitedly and I feel almost as if I have pins and needles running up my arms.

After fifteen minutes, he whispers my name from his position on the ground, bringing me out of my trance. He tells me to stand and raise my arms to the sky, and then to climb down. He places the palms of his hands on mine and tells me to close my eyes.

His hands start to vibrate. For a moment I am flooded with fear, for it feels like I am electrocuting him, and he is so frail. When he takes his hands away, I open my eyes to see him smiling. "You have a lot of power, Julia," he says, with no hint of embarrassment. "Even before we came here I could feel your power. You radiate heat."

Once again, as so often, I am grateful for my poor Spanish; providing a convenient mask when I wish to remain silent.

We walk around the site in a circle, and I remember my meditation a few days ago at the pyramids of Ihuatzio. I have the urge to tell him about the red bird; for some reason I know he will understand. When I do so, he smiles that ever-more familiar quiet smile. "Do you know what that means, Luis?" I question, knowing the answer, knowing he is not going to tell me.

In the silence that follows his nod, I then get the urge to tell him about the stranger in England who told me I'd find answers in Mexico. His smile widens even more. "This is one of your answers."

I can't help thinking, But I don't even know the questions! But I remain silent, still thinking about the red bird and what it could mean. We continue to walk in circles in front of the pyramids.

I gasp. There in front of me is an identical red bird, darting between the trees. Behind it is a bright blue bird.

I stammer Spanish like an idiot, stating the obvious. "Otra pecaro rojo! Y un azul!"

Luis looks surprised for the first time. "Now you have two. Two red birds. And a blue. This is very special, Julia."

I do not find out the answer until later on in the day, driving around the lake, enough time and mind-bending conversation having passed for me to know, with all my being, that something momentous is occurring.

He tells me that enlightenment and states of being are represented by the colours of the rainbow. Blue is love. Red is life. The highest form of being. I am seeing red because I am deep inside life right now.

As he tells me this, we drive over a large piece of bright red plastic on the road, next to a man standing at the edge wearing a red shirt.


I am caught between the wide-eyed silence of disbelief and the clamouring curiosity of the very young. I ask him question after question, processing the increasingly bizarre answers with lengthy stares into the shimmering lake. It does not take long before he mentions the principle of everything being the same thing, and in excitement I tell him about my tattoo.

He stops the car.

When he looks at it, a strange look shadows his face. I ask him why. To this, he replies, enigmatic as ever; "This has a very special meaning for me. I have been expecting you. I think it is you that has a message for me."

I can barely do justice to the events I've related, let alone relate everything that occurred that day. Of course, as will likely most who read this, I found it extremely hard to let go of my scepticism. How many times have I been warned about kidnappers, fraudsters, rapists, who here seem to be just that little bit more professional, that little bit more elaborate?

But I rationalise to myself that whatever he wants can have nothing to do with money, given the amount he seems to have. And I do not feel threatened. If this is a hustle, he has outdone himself.

Of course, I could be letting myself in for something extremely dangerous. But I have committed now to travelling on my instincts; following coincidence. And there were a great many coincidences that day. If I stopped because I was scared, I know these coincidences would stop with me.

When he asks me if I would like to travel with him for a few days, I say yes, before I have even thought about the reply.

An instinctive answer. And thus the correct one.

Later on, when my mind kicks in, I will suffer the paranoia and fear that is missing from this moment. But right now, in this car, I feel I have no choice.


Thus, I flow into the first stage of my entrenamiento.