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.

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.