Outtakes

My mind flicks images like film memories. I close my eyes and watch the last six weeks flash by in a montage I'd give anything to record.

   Scaling the pyramids of Palenque in the searing midday heat, jungle rising on all sides under a deep, indigo sky.


   Crouching next to the fire in our borrowed, three bedroom house, burning pine copal incense and a list of all the negativity we want to spring clean from our heads.


   A moment's interrupted sleep on a concrete patio on the beach, four-way-sandwiched between a rollmat, a mosquito-net, Michael, and a love-deprived cat, who shows his appreciation with a sharp-clawed massage and purrs as loud as the waves behind.


   Rejecting Saturday night drinking in San Cristòbal de las Casas, in favour of apple juice and mariachi in the square and a packet of ham for the street dogs.


   Eating termites from a jungle tree, mouth bizarrely filling with the taste of buttery, peppered carrots.


   Laughing as the heavens open on the first day of the rainy season and squealing with delight and blessed relief as I am soaked to the bone. Retiring to a hammock under the shelter of a rustling pelapa roof, darkness so thick I am aware of my friends only from the sound of their breathing. The evening strobe lighting - so familiar now - flashes images of my swinging feet in snapshot stills.


   Running through a forest that blooms a green carpet in three days of solid rain.

   Hopping the fence to the restricted area of the ruins of Monte Alban; the highest pyramid of all. Being ordered to climb down. The surreality of the pale brown, pyramid studded landscape far below, as if it belongs to the future rather than thousands of years in the past.

   Winning my first ever game of chess in style on a home-made board (card, marker pen and nail varnish). Subsequently winning again.

   Breakfasting on pork tortas by the side of the road, from plates that have "unimpressive" printed around the edges.

   Watching the live chicken stalls in the covered market, birds passed upside down by their legs to bargaining old ladies. Shock deepening as we compare this apparently cruel treatment to the western style 6-to-a-box, beaks-cut-off factory tradition. We buy a bag of fake meat and retreat.

   Crumbling fresh-baked cookies in front of a log fire, clothes steaming, rain teeming.

   Running after my inebriated friend to save her from the clutches of a man. Feeling my feet slide from beneath me. Smacking the stones of the polished pavement with outstretched hand and smashing bracelets.

   Sitting on a bench in the rain watching the embroidered skirts of the Mayan ladies, like colourful dolls, crouched in front of piles of vegetables and coal-grilled corn.

   Plunging my hands into giant sacks of dry black beans, cool and liquidlike.

   The dampness of the sheets around Michael as he moans with the aches of Dengue fever. Reversed roles when I contract a stomach infection the following week.


   The utter silence of a mountain morning, lit by the ethereal beams of sunlight through a tent door.

   Burying feet deep into sand the exact shade and fine texture of wholewheat flour, lapped by coral-slowed, translucent waves.


   Running through the drenching rain in San Cris, where the cobbled streets flow like rivers and the lightning freezeframes the mountains around us; fairy lights in the central square twinkling through the blurred darkness.

Student of the Vortex

Fuck Spanish lessons. It appears Guadalajara is to make me student of other arts.

Because I'm 'not supposed' to be here, I feel like I should leave. So much for my disdain of cities. But in actual fact I have stumbled upon a centre of creativity, epitomised by Frank, who seems to be an endless source of energy - constantly producing, creating, literally singing his love for life.

Inspiration juices over my computer screen. I spend days in the hammock on the leafy terrace, attempting to record just a fraction of the information I'm receiving.

After a week and a half Dan arrives for a few hours, and like me is drawn in to stay for a further couple of weeks. Every time we try to leave we feel ourselves pulled back into the centre of the vortex, the flow so strong we do not even attempt to resist.

The hostel is small but it is a magnet for the people I need to speak to. I leave less and less.


Pecas, one of the helpers at the hostel, knows everything I want to know about the Mayans. He helps me understand the complexity of their calendar system. I plug him for information, pulling it out in long, savoury strings, chewing with unsated appetite, swallowing ravenously. When I finally digest it I will attempt to regurgitate it here, but for now I need to let it sit, slightly uncomfortably, in my stomach.

I am tattooed. An overwhelming lesson and a story in itself.

I meet a shaman, who feeds me even more information. His name is Marcos, and his Mayan sign is Cosmic Wind. Messenger from afar.


I feel like a human sponge, and wonder when all this started happening.


He gives me keys for my future journey - tells me to learn to heal with my hands, and correctly guesses that I have already felt the ability to do this without having been taught how.

He gives me the name of the man who will teach me, who I can find on a beach on the coast of Oaxaca state. We can stay there for free, and learn about self-sufficiency at the same time.


I will be with Michael then. I wonder if this will fit well with his own journey, whatever that may be. But then Shaman Marcos tells me there is also a collective of people there who make instruments. I can barely conceal my excitement when I talk to Mike, who has many times talked about his wish to record the sounds of the world. The perfection seems a little odd, even with my belief in all this.


Marcos makes my brain hurt. He is a shaman of three different cultures. Before this he was in prison for robbing a bank at gunpoint as a teenager, his head twisted by the images received as a 'body collector' in the Vietnam war. He heals the migraine of the only other hostel resident by placing his hands on her head for ten minutes. His right thumb is bent at an angle where he allowed a rattlesnake to bite him in a ceremony.


He spent years camping next to the Pyramids of Palenque before they were 'discovered' (Palenque is one of the Mayan sites that tell the prophecies - he was one of those who told the Mexican government about those famous glyphs; something he regrets deeply to this day).

He believes 2012 will bring the return of the Mayans through the black hole at the centre of the universe.

My brain is not quite ready to take all of this in.


I try to write down at least some of his stories. I wrestle with indecision over whether to put all of this in my blog, for fear of what people will think. But the indecision is momentary - of course I have to write.

I don't know enough to be able to comprehend what he means when he says the Mayans will return. Instead I focus on the more palpable information - what his people believe will actually happen in the next three years.

"We have dammed the rivers - the earth's life blood. We have moved mountains from one place to another. We talk about the future, when the Earth will be ruined by our mess, but little do we realise we are already at that point. We have destroyed it far more than we ever admit to. Look at Mexico. Every week there are protests because someone fell into a river and died, not from drowning, but from poisoning. How many rivers are there that can be swum in safely?

"The earth is in huge imbalance. You know enough about flows to understand that this is unsustainable. How can it continue to function in such an imbalance?


"Despite what we believe, it is infinitely more powerful than the human. Very soon, it will reveal this power. The Mayans knew that. We just don't want to listen. It may well mean the end of everything as we know it. And it will be a lot sooner than we think."


Into my mind floats an image of the earth as a dozing dog, having its hair plaited and its paws rearranged by bullish children. It waits patiently. But how much time is it going to be before the dog becomes so uncomfortable that it has to jump up, suddenly, shake itself violently? The plaits come loose, instantly. Buildings, dams, the construction of our lives, all razed to the ground.


Dan brings it back to reality: "The real question is, what will we do if the economy collapses. What will you do if you can no longer buy what you need from a store?"

All I can do right now is become the messenger. Enlighten by reflection.

One day I wake up and know it is time to go. By this time, I am armed with everything I need for a final two and a half weeks alone before Mike's arrival.

The Mayans come to Yelapa

It so happens that when I finally get really sick - amazingly not until 2 months after my arrival in Mexico, I am lying in a real, double bed with real, crisp sheets and a real live pillow.

This is no ordinary room. It is a penthouse. It squats above the Yacht Club over in town; a name that suggests much more glamour than the corrugated plastic roof and concrete floor in fact impart, but a fitting name all the same, for this building balances itself directly over the water, and the sea is as much a part of its existence as the bricks it is made of.

Looking out through the glassless, iron barred windowframes from the comfort of my sick bed is like looking from the window of a boat. I am just a few metres away from gently folding, turquoise waves.

The sea explodes against the beach below; wakes me gently every half an hour from delirious dreams. The breeze strokes me to sleep, fluttering coloured scarves at the windows that float around me like Mexican spinning dancers.

Now I am alone with my blue sky and my stomach spasms, attempting to order my increasingly unfamiliar brain. I feel like my body is doing this to me to force me to think about these things and address the things I am struggling to digest.

Dan showed up yesterday. His original plan was to travel for a year, interviewing people to make a film about the shifts that are occurring to our world. Instead he has been on the road for four years, following coincidences like me, on a looping, curious path seemingly seeded the entire way through by the person he last interviewed.

On his doorstep in Canada awaits a pile of film; everything from shamans, to Nobel prize winners, to scientists, to people he picks up on the street whose eyes shine a particular light. His battered van has taken him from the Arctic, through Canada, the States and half of Mexico, and will eventually drop him in Panama. Along the way he has lived with several different groups of indigenous people, been given a dog, gained and recently lost a love, and been sent well on his way to enlightenment. (You can read his story here).

Confidence and understanding seeps from his pores. He distils things so simply. I want to resist, want to be sceptical, but I am drawn in because I know I have to be.

We spend days in conversation. I learn more from him than I have perhaps the entire journey. Here is someone who truly has the voice of the people; the truth we are so protected from. And it is clear to him that the world is in flux and is due a serious change, very soon.


Yet again, the prophecies of the Mayans are the centre of the conversation. Yet again, we find ourselves dissecting the possibilities.

Most people believe the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012. This is not true. In actual fact, the messages they left actually show a calendar that ends on December 21, 2012. This date corresponds with the date that the sun will eclipse the galactic centre.

The following is taken from Daniel Pinchbeck's book 2012: The Return of Quetzacoatl. (This is the book that came to me from Taylor, following the coincidence I had in Sayulita.)


On the winter solstice of December 21, 2012, the Sun will rise within the dark rift at the center of the Milky way galaxy, an event that occurs every 25,800 years. As John Major Jenkins describes in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, this alignment represents a "union" of the Cosmic Mother (the Milky Way) with the First Father (the December solstice sun)." Mayan hieroglyphs describe the center of this dark rift as the "Hole in the Sky," cosmic womb, or "black hole," through which their wizard-kings entered other dimensions, accessed sacred knowledge, or toured across the vast reaches of the cosmos. In September 2002, astronomers verified the existence of a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, naming it "Sagittarius B."


Most people also believe that this is just the prediction of one civilisation. This is also untrue. There are many other ancient civilisations who also talked of the end of an age in 2012.


The Mayan calendars were divided into a number of 'eras' of varying lengths, that grow shorter the closer we get to 2012. These are encoded into the pyramids at Palenque,Mexico; Chichen Itza, Mexico, and Tikal, Guatemala. Each of these eras represent a different stage of consciousness.

In brief - (again, borrowed from Daniel Pinchbeck's book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl).

The initial level, 16.4 billion years ago, proceeds from the inception of matter in the "Big Bang," through the development of cellular life on Earth. During the second step, beginning 820 million years, ago, animal life evolved out of cells. The third underworld, starting 41 million years ago, saw the evolution of primates and the first, rudimentary use of tools by human ancestors. During the fourth underworld, beginning 2 million years ago, tribal organization began among the ancestors of Homo sapiens. During the next underworld, 102,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged developing spoken language. The next sixth underworld, beginning 5,125 years before the approaching birth date, when we created patriarchal civilization, law, and written language. The seventh step, beginning in AD 1755, introduced industrialization, electricity, technology, modern democracy, gene splicing, and the atom bomb.


The current era started in 1999, and corresponded with the birth of the internet - a global connectivity unlike anything seen before.

Time is 'speeding up.' Things are happening faster.

The next and final era of this age of history begins in April 2012 and ends in December later that year. There is much speculation as to what this final stage will bring. Many believe there will be a fundamental change in the way we think, and the way we connect to each other and the world - a connection to the 'global consciousness'.

Certainly in every era there is an increase in consciousness. And certainly the signs of this can already be seen.


The end of the calendar could mean many things, but the consensus is that there will be huge change, marked most likely by increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters. While I am slightly sceptical that something can happen so quickly, I only need take a look at recent history to tell me things are already starting to shift.

In terms of what will actually happen on December 21st, 2012, opinions are hugely divided, ranging from anything from meteor collision or volcano eruptions to the arrival of extraterrestrial Mayans (the glyphs in several temples show what seem to be spaceships...). Others speculate that crossing the 'dark rift' of the galaxy could cause a magnetic pole reversal, as the earth spins in an external field.

Again the consensus is that society is going to change completely and in the process shed a huge number of people and their constructions.

Maybe nothing will happen in 2012. But if not then, it seems clear that something is going to happen soon, and the better prepared we are, the more chance we have of staying alive to see the change occur.


Dan is preaching self-sufficiency. From what he has seen and heard, it seems to be the only way to attempt survival through the coming eruptions. It rings with the voices deep inside me that have been urging me to keep going, whilst keeping one eye half out for a piece of land on which to create my nest. Whenever I start to worry about money I make myself relax, for I know that if it is right, the money will arrive.


We start getting into 'headfuck' area when we move on to the Law of Attraction, and the very real possibility that 2012 is a self-fulfilling prophecy. For if the world brings us what we think about most, it shouldn't be so far-fetched to suggest that the increased awareness will breed the things that we most fear.

My mind is swollen with conflicting emotions; acceptance and resistance, understanding and confusion.

I lie in bed, shivering with the aches of a mild Dengue fever, feeling my body process the information it has been loaded with in the last few days. I am forced to become one with my thoughts and to truly consider what path to take. I could view all this as hysterics; for after all, have there not been several occasions in the past when a small group proclaiming the end of the world have been proved wrong, again and again? Besides, it is far easier to ignore it and carry on planning a future of security.  As the philosopher Neitzche pointed out, our tendency to be drawn towards the mundane and the secure and ignore the things that seem outlandish or scary is vital for our survival.

But how much does it blind us?

My instincts are shouting at me. Listen! There really is a lot of truth behind all of this. The Mayan prophecies have actually all been right so far. To the extent that they even predicted the date the prophecies themselves would be discovered. And even if the Mayans were wrong, how long is the Earth going to put up with what we are doing to it? It is not so far fetched to believe that a serious shift could occur in my lifetime.  We are accelerating. Technology and development are speeding up. Can we really expect this exponential curve to go on infinitely?

If I really think about it, I know this is why I'm here.

I'm not here to 'see the world'. I don't care about cathedrals or museums or 'canopy tours'. I'm here because I know I have to do something. I have no idea what.  But I'm here because on some level I've tuned into something that told me I need to be here. I don't see it as a coincidence that the place I'm in is at the very heart of these prophecies. Arguably, if I was in Africa I would be hearing African prophecies. But I have been brought here, so these are the ones I have to hear. I wanted to know about all this. I NEEDED to know about all this.

Whether any of this is true or not, this is part of my personal journey.  Bizarre as it all seems, I´m confident that it will all become clear in time.

In the meantime, I feel like I am to collect and distribute information. Take it as you will.

A few days later, when I have stopped shaking, I leave Yelapa. Once again, I don't know where I'm going. Only that it is time to go.