One fine day in Chiapas

This time, we get out of bed the moment our eyes are first prised open by the waves on our doorstep. It is not as hard as we imagined. How quickly one can forget the trauma of an early morning alarm clock. How dramatic the improvement a pelapa-thatch roof and the sound of pounding waves can be on one's awakening.

We play chess while we eat our eggs next to the silent lagoon, twenty metres away on the other side of the sand bank from our hut. I lose again. Today, that does not frustrate me as much as usual.

A baby manta ray has found its way in to the shallows and basks in the bath-like water, camouflaged against the grey sand.

We take a lancha across the lagoon to the mainland, watching the spit of sand that has housed us for the last week slide slowly into the horizon.

It is like a tongue, licking the sea, the palm trees its taste buds, studding skinny barrenness with spiky bursts of flavour.

The Frenchlings come with us in the boat. They have been our casual companions this week. We decided to stop drinking for the month of June and this has in some way caused an impenetrable rift between us and any potential friends. On the other hand, the rift could easily have been Mike and I's reluctance to do anything other than be with each other, playing chess, writing music, exploring.

But this morning, however, their presence makes a difference. It means that when a taxi arrives, there are six of us waiting for a lift.

This does not matter in Mexico. We pack ourselves in, four in the back, Mike and I sharing the front passenger seat, the driver, wallowing in space, peering through a cracked windscreen with one surplus arm waving in the car's slipstream. As we accustom ourselves to the speed and the proximity, he introduces himself as Francisco with a wide smile to each of us in turn. He is visibly exalted to be sitting next to Mike.

"Miguel! MIGUEL!" he cries in happiness, patting Michael on the back and laughing. Michael appears to be enjoying the attention and replies in return, "Pancho! Panchito!"


Our driver looks about to wet himself with pleasure at being called the diminutive version of his nickname.

To celebrate the occasion, he turns the mariachi up. Stoic men in gold buttoned suits and white cowboy boots serenade us through the speakers in penetrating shades of brass and strings. Halfway through the joyful anthem, Pancho realises this song will not quite fit and slows the car to a halt. He unceremoniously removes the CD from the player. After a few moments of searching he inserts a new CD, forwarding to track number 8. A tune almost entirely alike the one paused earlier starts blasting from the speakers. Satisfied, he begins to drive again.

He appears to have installed a sub bass in the boot. The Frenchlings in the back are squinting from the volume.

He begins to sing.

He suggests going for a beer. One of the Frenchlings is in a hurry and says no. The driver is disappointed. He changes the song.

The third song hits the spot. He begins to yelp.

He pats Michael on the back again and cries his name into the wind, swerving to avoid potholes in the road. He buys chopped chili mango through the window, from a boy stood at a speed hump, and passes the bag around like juicy chips. Whenever the energy within the car seems to drop, he begins yelping again. Mike looks at me. "This is the most inspiring taxi driver I've ever met!"

I lean further out of the window in a failing attempt for more air. There is not much to do but laugh and sing along, which we do for almost an hour of back twisting, fist clenching, life dripping Mexican experience.

Michael looks like he's on drugs, such is the admiration and aspiration he has for this man. Rarely does one ever see someone so high on life as our Pancho. When we leave, uncrumpling bones in the square at Tonala, he kisses everyone on the cheek and thanks them for the pleasure of their company on this fine morning. We shuffle slowly away, marvelling at the spicyness of our early morning adventure.

But the day is not over yet. We leave Tonala having looked at a large-scale map of the area and pointed to a place down the coast with another lagoon and an interesting name.

The man in the sweet shop waves us towards the market. The man in the market waves us on to the car park. The man in the car park waves us on to a mini bus that drops us two hours later on a motorway, where there is another man who gives us the keys to a shop with a toilet and points towards another minibus going south.

That minibus leaves us in the rain. Once again, the human sponges, sloshing along in slippery sandals.
The women on it tell us we need to carry on our journey from the centre of town. We are hungry and we still haven't bought proper rain jackets. So we take refuge in a cute looking restaurant where a young man with one and a half arms serves us shrimp and black beans.


When we are finished he begins, as they all do, to ask our story. Where are we from, where are we going. Do we like Chiapas. The thing is, we're not at all sure where we're going. We picked a name from a map, that may or may not be possible to get to. So he invites us to talk to his parents, who are sitting just behind the restaurant, celebrating fathers day with their son and their nephew.

We walk into the room and they greet us with huge smiles and make us take our place at the table. They offer us coca cola and beer. They rattle off the same questions as their son did moments earlier. They are delighted with our answers.

The mother has never been on a plane and never will. The men tease her about her fear and she giggles into her beer bottle. "I like Chiapas and Chiapas is where I will stay. I won't go in a plane. Unnatural things." I agree with her and feed her glee with tales of our fifteen hour journeys to get to Mexico from London. England is grey anyway, and cold. She shivers with delight. "Yes, yes, Mexico is beautiful. Stay here, chicita, where the wind is warm." They ask how old we are and cannot believe the answer. To Mexicans we look like teenagers. They ask if we are brother and sister. We laugh a lot. Then their daughter sticks her head in the door and asks the same, and we realise that we all look the same to them in the same way they all look the same to us. They laugh with us.

Then they tell us they will host our wedding. "You must have the party here! Here in Chiapas we know how to party. We will fill this room with people and keep going for three days!" We are like Alice stumbling across the Mad Hatter's tea party, apart from these merry-eyed people are not mad, not even drunk, just high on life and happy to have such unexpected guests at their afternoon table. We leave them with sparkling smiles all around and promises for invites to our future (never-going-to-happen) wedding.

The next bus is driven by a young man who tells us he does not go as far as today's mecca. The village before it, where he lives, is called Zapotal. "Zapotal it is," I reply, and ask him if there are any cheap hotels. He laughs and looks sideways at the woman in the passenger seat, who turns out to be his mother. "Zapotal does not have visitors, but I have a restaurant, and you can stay with my mother if you like."

When we arrive we understand. This is the sleepiest little village I've had the pleasure of stumbling across yet. Thatch huts house snoozing families draped two-to a hammock, televisions barely cutting through the shrieking of the cicadas. Children sit barefoot in the pavement sand. The empty beach, just a continuation of the hundreds of kilometres of identical beach along this coastline, lays silent and unexplored next to the restaurant.

We sit at a plastic Corona table on a small cement patio with a bare lightbulb shining invitations to the mosquitoes. The bus driver turns waiter and lights a cardboard egg carton to place on the floor next to our table. The bites slow in frequency and we get out our homemade chessboard.

Within moments a steaming plate of garlic prawns, the cheapest thing on the menu twice in one day, arrives in front of us. We do not stop our game. This time I win one in four games. I make my head hurt and begin to see everything in terms of chess moves (...thank God the table is in the way of me and Mike's chair - it could take me in one move and I have no back-up. But he should be careful too. His eyes are just one L-shaped Knights move from being taken by his mouth.)

We are presented to the grandmothers bed, a small island under an enormous empty space of a house that looks more like a petrol station forecourt than a residence. As I prepare for bed I am watched by two small grandchildren from behind a curtain that serves as a door, who dart away like fishes whenever I let their attention be known.

The water tank has a turtle in it.

The night presents a continual stream of spectres to keep us awake, under satin sheets slipping against hot limbs.

The power goes off and with it the fan. Without the wind, the mosquitoes move in, burrowing into ear canals with dentist drill wingbeats. The grandfather arrives home and cannot figure out who is in his bed. The grandson, called in to help, shines a mobile phone in our faces and then apologises profusely. The cicadas grate their endless song, drilling through the concrete walls.

Eventually sleep's long fingers begin to take me. Silhouettes of our phantasmagoria of a day creep along the walls. Squinting through the warm waters of a lagoon. A cackling taxi driver and his love for music. Rain, beating on the windows of a minibus. A salad made of chopped hot dogs on the lace tablecloth of a laughing family. The kindness of an old woman and her scampering granddaughters, sleeping in an unknown location under our corrugated cathedral.

Just when we begin to doze off, our host's alarm begins to bleep.

4.30am. Time for another day.

The Void catches up

June brings a loss of direction. My world becomes black and white and blurry.



I plunge headlong into the Void.


I have felt it tracking me for a little while, catching me unawares with flashes of barely-provoked anger and periods of dizzying emptiness. When it finally slips itself under my feet, I fall, rag-doll-like, through its dank depths.


The Void has engulfed us all, once in our lives. You know it from the creeping shadows around your heart. The imps in its employ, sniggering on your shoulders, whisper insults into your ears until you believe them to be true. The tremors of uncertainty blurs lines between reality and nightmare.


This time it comes to me in a disabling lack of self-belief. The path in which I had so much faith seems to have faded.


My self-confidence, boisterous only months ago, has vapourised, leaving me achingly aware of how loosely constructed it must have been.


What, on earth, have I been doing? Why the hell am I here?


I have been out of work for well over a year. I have been rolling around Mexico for seven months. My money is drying up, like the daily puddles spat down on us by June's heavy clouds, and I have no concrete plan for how to replace it. I know I can't go back to work in an office and this thought, once so liberating, terrifies me.


I have had so much time, and yet seemingly done' nothing apart from convert tacos into spare tyres.


Michael encourages me as best he can. He reminds me of all the things I have developed that cannot be written on a CV, such as my healer's hands and my understanding of myself, as well as the things that can, such as my mastery of conversational Spanish.


He tempts me with ideas for how to turn my writing into a career, but I am shocked by my own lack of motivation. I just don't want to do anything. I just don't think I can.

My listless lack of a plan, once so peace-inducing, has become a growing emptiness.


It is during this time that we find ourselves house-sitting a three-bedroom villa (complete with the luxuries of fridge, hot shower, fireplace and beds with real duvets). I cannot remember the last time I was in a room with four walls and no holes.


I throw myself into my long-term passion for cooking, producing elaborate feasts for my boyfriend, who largely sits in front of his computer, working. Mikey, annoyingly, has it sorted. He gets paid for remixes on the road. He deals with them easily and with style. At the same time, he gets handfuls of offers for his new tracks.


His need for the computer and my need for safety means we spend most of our six weeks in San Cristobal indoors. I quickly realise how incapable I now am of doing this.


We argue frequently. Admittedly, the times between arguments are still idyllic and there is no doubt that we are madly in love. But I am strong enough to know that these moments of pain are indicators of deep knots in our lives that need to be massaged out for risk of becoming crippling.


I am also able to remind myself that this journey is and was always going to be about balance - particularly the yin-yang balance of positive and negative forces within my path.


So when I feel myself slipping, I recognise the signs enough to throw out a hand. I catch myself before I fall, like I have done so many times before.


And there, I swing.


I hang on to the edge for a long time, caught between fear of the nothingness below, and fear of the choices above.


You can travel as far as you want, but wherever you are, you will still be you.

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.

Rain, rain, clean my brain

In the middle of May, the rains began.



Until that point, the world held its breath. It pushed as far as it could under an airless environment -- began to swallow down on barren lungs.


Everything was brown. Plants were skeletons that crumbled at the touch. Even those that remained green -- banana palms, coconut, papaya -- seemed almost frozen in a vacuum that pulverised the life from us.


We flailed limply, like damp dishcloths, drinking in water by the gallon only to vaporise it almost instantly from our pores.


In Mexico, the dry season, although one of the wettest on record, was the only reality I could conceive of. It had always been dizzyingly hot. Rivers had always been dusty. I had always balanced the dry heat of the coast with an escape to the cool, pine-clad mountains forming the spine of the country.


But in the month before the rains came, I barely moved. Things stopped quietly around me, without me really noticing. Wasps lurched drunkenly from one melting pastry to another. Ice cream paused briefly in its frozen state, before giving in to the shimmery air in a sticky slide of white along the forearms. Even birdsong became lazy.


When on the coast, the only way to survive was to stay under cover. Ideas came and went, too slippery for the lazy thinker to clasp his sweaty fingers around.


The world around me and within me was pregnant. Pregnant and uncomfortable, with all the things that could be and that weren't.


Energy built up and intensified and waited; steam in a closed kettle, whistling with impatience.

My head pounded.

And then, in one day, everything changed.


I was at a petrol station at the time, on the side of the carretera running down the Pacific coast, having just crossed into Chiapas, the southernmost state. We were packed in the back of film-maker Dan's van, sulking on the bunk under the weight of the cloying air. I had stepped out for a little respite and to clean the windows. The grease on them almost obliterated the waving palms and swelling mountains taking over the landscape with heavily approaching footsteps.


I had just picked up the bucket, much to the amusement of the macho service men, who hollered and stared as I took their job from them.


Within less than a minute I was soaked to the point of dripping. Or was it flowing? Hard to say. It was more that me and the water were one and the same; I was wetter than I would have been if I had just climbed fully clothed from a pool.

The air was my sea. Around me, people fled like animals from a fire.

Dan banged on the window, urging me to get inside.

I just stared at the sky, blinking the water from my eyes and feeling the streams running down my cheeks.


This rain was to me the sweetest gift in a long stream of beautiful moments. I had waited for a long time. With it came the release of a million trapped thoughts and the relaxation of muscles turned taught by stagnant energy.


Bizarrely, I remained the only person outside on the petrol forecourt, washing the windows with soap that slid off the sodden glass in an instant, laughing at the ridiculousness of all those damp souls hiding under shelter, staring at me with confused faces.


The interest they offered me evidently discarded memories of just hours earlier, when they had all hung desperately from car windows, tongues flapping in the wind like dogs, or fleshy sails breached wide to catch the wind.

The concrete soon ran with inches of warm water that sluiced residue from roads in greasy channels.


Eventually these new rivers would find their way to fields, where earth lay waiting, imitating rocks, anticipating the day when the water would release their particles in crumbling mini-avalanches.


Under that earth lay seeds, dormant, parched. Many were dead.


But for some, the water brought life. As I jumped up and down in the Petrol Station Lake, tiny proteins started forming within them, deep below the ground. All over Mexico, seeds began to germinate.


By the time I climbed, sodden but happy, into Dan's van, laying a towel on the bunk to catch my drips, things had already started to grow.

The windows were sparkling and so was I. I watched the mountains stand straighter, like pictures of evolution from monkey to man, becoming more confident as we progressed, and yet smudged into doubt by the rivers of water that raced in diagonals down the windows.


Water dripped through holes in the roof. The bunk grew damp. The road became rapids, but the cars did not slow down.


And in my head, the thoughts that had been hanging unattached like dust for so many months began to congeal, like the earth in the fields.

Within them, awaking from the incubation of many months, things began to germinate.

Medicine woman

I know from the moment I see Catalina I know I have to talk to her. Something about her seems familiar.

Seven decades of wisdom are concealed in long, grey braids and a still-beautiful face. I am slightly intimidated. I feel as if I know her. I don't understand her Spanish, spoken through lisping, wrinkled lips, but I sit below her on the garden steps with my morning coffee, attempting to follow her growling dialogue as she rules over her tiny, exquisite empire.

On the third day after her arrival I spend the morning picking capers to pickle from the nodding nasturtium plants crawling over her terraces. She does not see me.

That afternoon she calls me over to talk to her. She bends down to the nasturtium flowers and asks me if I know about the plant. I tell her about the capers and that I like to put the flowers in salad.

She tells me the leaves cure cancer.

Instantly I know she is the owner of the notebook I found on the shelf a few days ago. And before I even think about what I'm about to say, I tell her bluntly: "I want to know what you know."

She does not seem surprised. In fact, it is as if she expects it. I wonder what brought her to tell me about the nasturtiums in the first place.

Instead, she tells me she will give me her notebook, in exchange for a present. I ask, "what do you want?" and she replies again, "a present," with a shrug of her right shoulder and downturned lips. I understand that this is more that just wanting something new. She is testing me in some way; seeking my character. "Bien. Gracias." I nod. So she gives me the notebook.

This time I open it not with trepidation but with hunger.

I have been after this information ever since I bowed gracefully from the Rat Race early last year. Given the magic that has occurred since, I am not surprised that it has arrived in this fashion.

I am, however, slightly surprised at the turn things have taken. Ever since Marcos told me to learn to heal with my hands, back in Guadalajara's cloudy January, I have been the subject of a series of people who want to teach me. Guide after guide, I am sucked into hula hoop loops of wisdom, almost effortlessly.

From Guadalajara I travelled to Patzcuaro, where I met Luis, who told me I was a kind of shaman and that he was my chosen guide. From there to Mazunte, where James spent a month downloading his knowledge of energy healing and massage. From James to Cristina, who taught me about symbols and vibration as methods of healing. From Cristina to Catalina, who hands me a leather-wrapped pile of papers, tied with a beaded thong. I have barely input anything.

The next day I sit in the sun and the quiet to copy the notes. I understand about fifty percent of the Spanish. When she asks for her book back, I have still not acquired a present, but she does not appear to mind.

I go into her room anyway. I sit on the floor. She hands me a jar of honey and tells me to drink from it. I fill my mouth with the globby nectar of the divine, the taste of the mountains clogging my senses.

She begins to tell me her stories. She tells me of the time she cured Parkinson's in three days using leaves. The time she cured a child dying of gastritis. The time she evicted a dark spirit by speaking mantras into the person's eyes. I am beginning to understand her Spanish a little more but I still struggle, asking her to repeat things in her gravelly voice. She puts her drink down in a patch of sunlight on the floor. I know she is going to ask for my hand and I hold both of them out ready for her to read.

She tells me I am lucky. I am lucky in money, and I shall never want. In fact, I shall never want for anything, as I have Jupiter, king of the gods, looking out for me. He will always come when I ask.

She tells me I will get married twice, perhaps more. This discredits everything she has said, as I do not believe in marriage and believe it would be a mistake for my fickle mind to ever be joined with another. But then she goes on to say that I will not marry for love, but for documents. Perhaps to become a resident in Mexico, as she once did. Perhaps to give my own visas to another.

I raise my eyebrows. The truth of my situation - my desire to live in a country I do not belong to legally - reshadows her words with credibility.

She peers closely at my left palm, as if searching for something. She looks and looks and then sits back, satisfied that she has found what she needs.

She points to a tiny cross between my upper and middle horizontal wrinkles. She tells me that healers have this cross. As if to confirm, she asks for my other hand, and smiles when she sees the results. I have three crosses in a line on this hand.

She shows me hers. The three crosses on her palm perfectly mimic my own.

She tells me I need to charge for my healing according to the means of the person to be healed. I feel uncomfortable bringing money into something so pure.


But she tells me, "You have to eat too. I healed for many years before I was able to buy my land, my house."

And suddenly, it hits me. The similarities between us. It is as if she is me, fifty years ago. I look around at the terraced garden, the house, with its cosy refuge and space for a community. The kitchen. The plants. The peace. I cannot believe I didn't notice it before. But this place exactly fits the dream in my head. This could be the home I asked for on Punta Cometa on the 21st, and the haven that has occupied my thoughts ever since I left London a year ago. And back and back, perhaps even before I was born.


I had no idea how I would make this dream happen, only the faith that somehow, knowledge and means would arrive. And now, slipping its folds around me with a finger over its mouth and a giggle behind its dancing eyes, the vision has arrived, so smoothly I did not even notice.

I think she has just told me how I can earn the money I need to make a place like this happen for myself.

By this time I have sunk into silence, content just to listen and continuing to concentrate hard on her low, low voice. She recounts stories that mirror my own. She left Spain when she was young, following the spiritual path. Had her very own Luis. Married to become Mexican.

Then she says something that makes me go cold.

"Do you know about the eagles?"

I didn't. Until two months ago, when I saw three eagles in a short space of time. Luis told me this was a sign. I asked him what the sign meant and he answered with a story.

He told me that they live for many years. After surviving for forty years in the desert, they fly to the mountains to find a place to hide.

There, they hit their beaks against the rocks until they break. They scrape their claws until they fall off. They render themselves unable to eat.

They rid themselves of everything that aided them to survive in their old life and they sit and wait in pain until a new beak and claws grow. When they do, the eagle is renewed. It is reborn, like a mage of its species. They go on to live another thirty years as the most powerful thing in the desert.

Luis said I'd seen the eagles because this is what I will have to do. I ignored him at the time, because I did not want to hear this kind of prophecy.

When Catalina tells me about the eagle, in relation to my palm, I suck in a deep breath. I hold it for the entirety of the metaphor.  I release it slowly. I look outside and see things crystallise in sharp corners. One of my possible destinies, presented to me clearly.

Catalina gives me one more key to add to my growing set. She assures me I already have everything I need to be a doctora naturista. In principle I can heal with energy, herbs, massage, and more.

Although I am cramped with doubt and self-belittling traps, everyone I have worked with tells me I have powerful energy. I have the knowledge; I just need to start practising. She tells me to start as soon as I can.  For now, my fear of myself keeps me contained.

When I leave I hand Catalina a necklace, beaded in the colours of the fierce Mexican sky. In doing so I feel I am completing a kind of circle.

Under the same skies, back in bleaching Zacatecas, that necklace was placed around my neck by Luis.

Flowers, clouds and clues

San Jose del Pacifico. Dogs are barking.

The sign on the door at Casa de Doña Catalina is peeling. I wonder if Catalina herself is dead.

In the garden her geraniums nod happily. I long to meet the carer of this paintbox of plants.

Sometimes we end the day in a cloud, an explosion through which the sun stretches dying fingers. We float away in our wooden boat in a wispy flood of white.

It feels as if we are lost.

Once again, a vortex of energy has sucked us in to a slow whirlpool of routine.

Over the last few weeks we have watched the sinking slopes of the valley ahead of us emerging and disappearing into clouds of a hundred different variations. We have explored the mountain trails through the pine forests, neon lichen and huge cacti like great, tentacled aliens, resting on the red carpet of the forest in surreal colour clashes.

We have continued to function without running water, pouring buckets of dirty dishwater down the toilet bowl and washing from a bowl of rainwater. Like so much of Mexico, Oaxaca state is not so far from seasonal abandonment for lack of water. Prophecies echo from state to state: the next world war will surely be over water.

Night rushes in, velvet skirts rustling and star-splattered. We retreat from the terrace to the cosy, low ceilings of Catalina's living room, walled in on all sides by psychadelic murals, bookshelves, musical instruments and brightly woven cushions. The lightshade is a carefully-arranged plastic bag. Against the window is a wide ledge filled with soft things for sleeping in.

In the other corner stands a bookshelf, with titles in a handful of languages, ranging from Carlos Castaneda to Madame Bovary.


The spine that grabs me belongs to a small notebook. I open it. The first thing I see is a piece of paper dated 1958. It is someone's Mayan horoscope. Whoever owns this book has the same energy as me: in modern Mayan interpretation, Yellow Sun, representing the Enlightener. In ancient readings, Kame, representing the beginning, harmony, vision, cunning.


The next page is a list of diseases.

It takes me a moment to realise that besides each of the diseases is a cure, encoded in Spanish. I wonder whether this belongs to Catalina. The looping script shows me my place and I feel I am prying.


I snap the book shut, but fail to forget.

After about a week we consider leaving and play cards for the decision. The cards tell us to stay.


That afternoon, Catalina herself arrives home from a month at the coast.

The cottage in the sky

From the land of the water in Mazunte, where we learnt to flow together again, we have moved to the land of the air. A time of thinking and of learning.



They call this town San Jose del Pacifico, because some days you can see the Pacific; a thin glint on a laminated horizon.

We are living in a bubble 2000 feet up, shrouded in nature's cocoon. The clouds rise and fall, an elevator between the valley floor far below and the comforting peak behind.

Our home for now is Casa de Dona Catalina. 200 pesos for a double bed in the dormitory at the top of the log cabin as well as whatever meals or drinks come our way during the day. 200 pesos for the two of us wanderers to become a valued part of the fizzing household, made up of a few long term residents and assorted drifters, who come here to socialise - in the most laid-back of senses - whilst sampling the botanical delights of the ethereal pine forests.


Each day the group changes, morphing its way through a rainbow of atmospheres. Each day brings more points of view, more shades of social interaction.

Dona Catalina is a witch. She understands plants and spirits. She is conspicuous in her absence - for the last month, watch over the land has been held by the residents.

When we walk in on the first day, fresh from a cloud-forest journey from Mazunte, the first person we find is Shaman Marcos. We sit down underneath a floripondio tree, otherwise known as angel's trumpet, with large orange flowers hanging from it like gramophone horns.

Marcos tells me the flowers are the dark side of hallucinogenics; without care, one can drive you mad. My eyes widen and I ask him if he'd ever taken them. "I had three this morning!" he cackles, and looks at me with kaleidoscope eyes.


The dark side indeed. Shaman Marcos has a wonderful heart, but his 'shamanic practises' have taken him so far beyond this world that I doubt he will ever return. 

I wonder what his coincidental appearance means for our experience here.

A year of unusual events

Today marks one year since I left my job, my flat and my life. A year ago I ceremoniously left my well-paid job in London, surrounded by a faithful army of friends, my sister close by and a social calendar that still spears cravings of nostalgia through me at the most unexpected moments.


In celebration of this fact I would like to post something I wrote early last year. I find the juxtaposition of these words with my current position reassuring. No offence is intended to anyone left behind - I respect that each person has their own choices and the same situation for another person would have meant something entirely different. I also appreciate and value the fact I had the opportunity to live this kind of life, and the choice to realise it was not for me, when so many do not have the choice.  This is merely my opinion brought on from a soul-drowning job and a fire inside that needed to grow somewhere else.


I wake up full of a nervous energy. My insides vibrate as if I am listening to a deep bassline. But my room is silent. As the last tendrils of my dream slip away, I have the sense that I have been looking for something, fervently, all night.


The thoughts fold under themselves like waves in the multiple snooze of my alarm clock, and become lost in the rush of the morning. My fevered mind remains vaguely mesmerised by what, in the blurred moments of waking, had seemed the most important thing in the world.




Now I just feel a lingering sense of confusion and a longing to be back in that lost dreamscape.


I dress myself in skin-tight shades of grey, slick hair and shiny lips, masking myself with the strangling uniform of business. I take the bus in to the office, mechanically changing vehicles on the Euston Road, staring out unseeing at the concrete and the rush of occupied minds.




I say occupied here to indicate the fact that people in London seem to be shut off to anything that is not included within their own agenda. From the moment they wake up, their brains are full of tasks.



But occupied also means conquered, subjugated, dominated.


Under enemy control.




This dual definition is appealing. The word becomes stuck in my head. With no other thoughts in there to challenge it, it repeats itself incessantly for the whole of the journey, until it starts to lose meaning.



Occupied. Occupied. Occupied.



My day passes, as they always do, in a mundane blur of traffic and computers. I procrastinate on my task list until four, when I am able to cross off half of it in a flurry of hastily-dialled phone calls.


My job filled me with excitement when I first took it, 18 months ago. The people were bright and the company new, and every day had felt like opening a present.




Now it just feels like it is stealing my life.


Every day it forces me into the synthetic, waxy mould of a corporate doll. My soul feels empty and I can’t do anything about it.


I am trapped.


Even the hours outside of work feel like they belong to someone else.


Sometimes I scream out loud, pulling at my hair like a mad woman, diving at the people sitting blankly in their desks and venting my frustration at this calm acceptance of a robot’s life. Then the world swirls back into reality and I realise I am in fact sitting quiet and accepting in my own desk, in a row of quiet, accepting people, and no one has even blinked.


One day I think I might actually do this.


I cannot wait for the day when I hand in my notice. I think of that moment at least once every hour. Perhaps more like three or four times. Some days it is all I can think about. I picture myself going into the CEO’s office, letting him wax falsely lyrical about my supreme consultancy abilities, trying to build my confidence so I seduce the clients more effectively. I imagine myself springing it on him mid-flow. Like flirting with someone for hours and then turning away when they try to kiss you.


I would thrust a letter in his hand which detailed methodically and unashamedly all the corrupt twists and suppressive rules of his beloved company. I would laugh at the blind devotion to a loosely-concealed totalitarian regime. This virtual furnace that consumes souls and spits out money. My words would reduce it to a pile of ash.


I just haven’t found quite the right ones yet.


The thing that pains me most is seeing the sparks of my co-workers (my love for whom still remains loyal enough to keep me here) condensed down to the same, standard-issue ambition as him. They will complain about the money-driven mentality, the repression and being told what to do by a self-centred, clueless manager, but they will remain silent.


The London in my head is an eerie toy town, operated by Stepford Wives, dolled up and twinkle-smiled and ‘yes of course, Sir, anything you want, Sir’.


They will be fucked up the arse until they bleed, and they won’t notice because their eyes are on their glittering futures; dreams grossly deformed by that pre-ordained framework we rarely dare to question.


As a child, we are consistently asked what we would like to BE when we grow up. Our entire lives, we relate our future job to the verb 'to be'. A career is part of our fundamental make-up. It is an apex to climb, in order to prove our worth as a person.


And thus, we dutifully tick the boxes.


School, college, university. Education, packaged prettily.


Job.


Soon we will have a great CV, that menu of clichéd attributes, and a fantastic social life that spans the breadth of London’s pretentious wine bars. A well-matched partner to take Sunday walks with, and a pile of savings which we will watch grow until they die.


All these people, building their career. A career that occupies them. Conquered and subsequently dominated for the rest of their lives. They will be promoted to managers and they will have finally made it after all these years. They will buy a house and have a lovely wedding in a country manor and end up with gammy-mouthed kids who will go on to do the same.


Security. They need to know where they are, otherwise they lose themselves.


This kind of thing terrifies me.


Isn’t your ‘career’ just what you’re doing right here, right now?


What I’m doing right now is utter bollocks.


Old people say life is what happens while you are planning your future.


I think we should listen to old people.


I think I’m so different. And yet still I put myself through the excruciating pain of getting out of bed at half past six every day to go into a place I despise.

Shifting Sands

One afternoon we sit in a giant tree.

We climb up to the palm of its branched hand to drink our way through four caguamons (1.2L beers bottles) and watch ants march up flaking bark.

Our tree becomes the perfect place to see through the shimmeringly hot afternoon. We bite into sun-warmed mangoes, burstingly fresh from the ground and watch an iguana flick along below us . When it becomes cool enough to move we jump down, bidding the day farewell with a swim in the crushing surf.

The time to leave has come.



We walk down the beach to stop in on James, swinging under candlelight in his blue terrace hammock, watching the stars through a palm-fringed window of sky above. We cook dinner there and eat in comfortable silence, listening to the crickets and the waves.



A month's study with Mazunte's Gandalf has taught me basic herbology, massage and a kind of energy healing that leaves my hands burning. I am glowing from my bi-weekly treatments and Michael is glowing from his experience as my guinea pig. We've spent a good few days covered in aloe vera, waving the spiky branches around like tentacles and moving stickily yellow and monster-like over the beach.



Yesterday I worked with a girl called Cristina. She has tumbling, shiny hair and a baby called Miguelito with a face to melt even the most intolerant of hearts. Together they are the image of Mary and Jesus- there is a light between them that will never come out in a photograph.



Cristina is the same age as me, but if I can achieve just half of the peace that radiates from her I will be content. She has travelled Mexico for the last ten years, learning indigenous methods of healing. While I am working with Cristina, Miguel thumps on a tambor and gives himself hysterics that bubble from his toothless smile and turn his eyes to happy slits.



I would like to learn more from Cristina. I feel a slight sense of loss as we say goodbye and forget to exchange email addresses. But the winds are moving us inland. Our month by the sea has joined us back together, after our stressful four months apart. We are ready to start the real travelling.

The road behind Mazunte leads to the mountains, seen from the beach as grey silhouettes against the sun. They call to us with cool breezes. While the sunrise over the beach is ethereal and makes me glad to be alive, it burns a hole in the day, forcing us to listless shade between 11 and 4. Activity is squeezed like toothpaste into small dollops at either end of the day. Even at night, a walk slickens sweaty sheen over darkened faces.

We will miss this place.

In the morning we leave on the first collectivo out, balanced on the back of the public pickup truck with tongues hanging out like dogs.

To the mountains.

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.

Punta Cometa

We walk behind James over red earth. He is barefoot. His white hair and beard flow behind him. I want to hand him a staff and cloak.

Early morning on Punta Cometa. Spring solstice. The rising sun already burns.



The view stretches miles in either direction to cove after yellow cove. The sea shines, a shifting plain of mirrors. The cliffs fall into the churning sea in dramatic angles.



The reflection of this place to the steep cliffs of Cornwall runs further than simply cosmetic, as I realise when James begins the narrative in his cinematic boom:



"Straight ahead there are over 190 degrees of sea. The next land is almost exactly due east. This is the most southerly point of Mexico. The end of the North American continent."



I grew up on Lizard Point, a peninsula in Cornwall that forms the most southerly point of the UK - one of the reasons why Punta Cometa resonates with me so much.



Luis told me that today was a special day and that I should take care to position myself at a 'centre of energy', to meditate and think about what I wanted. At the time I was not sure quite what he meant. It was only until James told us about the vortex that it became clear: life's flows had taken me exactly where I needed to be.



On the end of the point lies the cactus that I've been watching from a mile away on the beach. Close up it is enormous; at least thirty feet high and almost three armspans around. The lower arms have aged into bark so that the cactus has a trunk, like a tree. James estimates it to be at least 400 years old, although admits that he really has no way of knowing.



I open my arms around it and press my face to the bark. Ants crawl over my hands. I swear I can feel the energy of the cactus. My insides feel the same as they did when I stirred the Tibetan singing bowl - as if something inside me is humming without sound. I visualise becoming connected to the bark and allowing whatever flows within the cactus to flow within me too.



I come away from the encounter almost shaking. Whether psychosomatic or not, I am charged. The light glinting from the water looks even whiter.



I sit in the red dust and consider the situation.



Sometimes even the most bizarre of events can seem normal. When this starts happening I know I'm not paying enough attention to the now.



But it's so easy to get taken away with memories and thoughts and inventions and miss what is right in front of you. The trick is to centre yourself on the moment instead of the private world in your head. Otherwise you are never really where you are.



So. I am in a life where a typical day includes following a man who looks like Gandalf to an impossibly beautiful location, to listen to magical stories and hug a giant cactus.



Thinking this, I feel proud to have moulded my life in such a ridiculous form. Top points Ju, for making the stupid credible.



For this seems more normal to me, and so much more sensical, than enclosing myself in an airconditioned box, clicking my mouse idly and making the morning's tea break the highlight of my day. I can never go back to that; I know that now. There is a library of reasons, none of which really need explanation.



The essence is,` it can be very difficult to see when one's world is enclosed around the self and the self's actions. In London my world was a sphere, stuffed with action and friends and events. Full to the rounded edges until it became too full and burst and released me and all my stories into the ether.



Now I am an empty, open bowl.



I may have little, but I can be filled with new delights every day.



And I know I'm in the right place. In a way that could never be conveyed to those who have not seen it, Mexico is real. Raw. It is life, unfettered. I see all the things I missed in my city routine and know I cannot live without them.



Here, I meet people every day who shine with the confidence and tranquility that comes with feeling like they are 'on their path'. Every day I have real conversations, that delve excitedly into the mysteries of life. Every day the synchronicities descend. I may not be 'achieving' anything in the traditional sense of the word - I have been out of work for a year and have not really done anything that could be written down on a CV - but I have learnt more in this year than in my whole life. And most of what I have learnt has been achieved by just sitting still and shutting the fuck up.



To look, really look, is to gain wisdom. I am far from being wise but being humble is the first step.



I feel something inside me wanting to prove myself to James; prove my worth as a student and display my talents. But at the very least I understand that now is the moment for stillness. So, I make myself quiet and allow him to talk, and I make sure I follow every word. When my mind starts to drift, I slap it and bring myself back to the present.



The present is a redbrown spit of land and a foaming turquoise sea. The snaking arms of a giant cactus and the endless indigo of the sky. It is a natural energy vortex. A pair of men from opposite ends of life. A moment of meditation. It is the centre.



We amble to the end of the point and scramble down the cliff to a giant rockpool forming a natural jacuzzi at the end of the world.



Waves rush over a gap in the side and fill the pool with fizzing white, tossing bodies carelessly in its swirls of bubbles. Even in a world of freedom it is the most fun I've had in a long time.



Once again, the scene mimics the head.



I watch as a giant wave rises over the rocks and fills the pool, sending mini tidal waves right to the edges, to be reflected back in an endless, effervescent pendulum.

The accidental search

Before Michael arrived I was told to learn to heal with my hands by Marcos, who tells us he is a shaman even as he pours his first beer of the day at 11am.




Marcos gives me the name of a man who will teach me; James, who can be found on the beach at Mazunte, Oaxaca.



In the same week, Mike is given a scrawl of a map by friends, showing three places he should visit. He holds it up to the camera during one of our Skype conversations. Even through the blur of the video call my eye was drawn to a huge black arrow taking up most of the page. The arrow pointed to Mazunte, Oaxaca. Yet another coincidence in a long line of synchronous surprise.



So, after a few days in the backpacker's world of Puerto Escondido, we emerge on the beach at Mazunte. Line of yellow beaches backed by dusty cliffs and licked by fizzing turquoise. The sunset to our right is obscured by a long reptile of land reaching down to the south. My eye is drawn to a giant cactus, visible on the end of the peninsula; cupped hands scratching the sky in stark contrast to the bare rock of its surroundings.



The drama of the cliffs reminds me of Cornwall. But this is unmistakably small-town Mexico. The sand stretches to the road, where a small line-up of restaurants offering an eye-widening selection of menus forms what is known as 'town' to la banda.



Comedors offer cheap quesadillas and loaded tlayudas (huge crispy-barbequed tortillas filled with cheese, refried beans, meat and vegetables) under palm-leaf shelters and flickering candlelight. Fierce locals protect their village from the commercialism of the surrounding coast, shielding strong stems of individuality and quality in their establishments, that set this place in a different league to its peers. The mechanical squeaks of tropical birds blend effortlessly with the soft rhythms of tambor drums, somewhere on the hillside behind us. Mike itches to play; I long to hula hoop.

We run as far as we can to try and catch a glimpse of the sun before it disappears. We squeeze under a gate to get to the highest point we can and pause, giggling like drunks at the incredible view laid out for us.

We are captured.

The next day we hand over 1500 pesos - about 80 pounds - for a month's stay in a room on the sand that looks like the inside of an orange.

We are floored by contentment.

A fan, a bed. A doorstep of sand and a view of the sea. Faint memories of shopping for unnecessary crap seem inconceivable now. We can think of nothing more that we need, except perhaps a musical instrument for Mike to play.

I need to find James. We splash through the waves to the next beach, stopping on the way to talk to a man called Lorenzo. He sits, staring at the sea, jerry can of mezcal in his hand, sombrero proudly on his head. A self proclaimed "Noodist Booddist", voiced in the only accent that allows the two to rhyme in the singing manner of a mantra.

He has a drum. He agreed to fix it for its owner four years ago. He is leaving and wants to lend it to us.

As if this is not slick enough, it transpires the drum belongs to Shaman Marcos, who actually brought us here in the first place.

Mike's face lights up in amazement and I recognise the same light that has been shining from my own eyes. In that instant he catches a glimpse of that something beyond. I know his thoughts mirror mine.

Lorenzo brings out a Tibetan singing bowl. Seven different metals combined, bashed into a deep silver cave. He drags a small, metal cylinder around the edge and it hums with a stomach rumbling vibration that makes all those in the near vicinity turn towards us. He believes it resets any turmoil that might lurk inside.

I try it and feel my whole body respond to the vibration. The sounds is almost ancient. I am a bowl myself, singing, feeling the sound through me and a part of me, sifting and settling.

After over an hour squatting in the dust in front of him, listening to his stories, I remember the original purpose of our walk and continue onwards, asking wisened faces if they are James. The humming in our ears and the drum in Mike's hands give the journey a fated edge; it takes less than five minutes before we are standing on James' veranda, being welcomed like old friends.

James reclines in a blue hammock, wearing a pair of ragged shorts under a dark brown chest that is connected to the air with white wires. His face hides under a huge beard of grey. He must be almost seventy.

He pulls himself up from the hammock and I am dwarfed by his height, lost in an embrace, during which I feel energy pulsing gently from him.

He speaks as if he is the voiceover for a cinema blockbuster, intonation pressing heavy words into us, forcing us to question our reality. We pass the evening swinging in his hammocks, listening to his stories.  He offers to take us to explore Punta Cometa. Realisation dawns as he explains this to be the long point of land to our west, thought to be an energy vortex since ancient times. I understand why it has been drawing my eye.

He would like to teach us the stories of this sacred place. He would also like to teach me everything he knows about healing.

We sleep deeply, the waves in our ears, our new gifts painting dreams in explosions of colour.

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.

Maybe it was me

Raul talks in singing Spanish, seemingly not too worried whether I can follow him or not. Within a few hours we have covered natural medicine, shiatzu, reiki, energy alignment, the truths contained within pyramids, and a concise and accurate assessment of my character according to the alignment of the stars on my birthdate. Then he starts to write down the seven laws of the Egyptians.

Number three is, Como es arriba, es abajo. As above, so below.


This is enough to weave me deeply into the knit of his words. We pass the Saturday afternoon by the sunny square, parrying a consistent stream of beggars and children selling gum, drinking our way through a succession of expensive beverages. He tells me to go to a place called Tepoztlan, another centre of energy near el DF.


This is the message I was expecting.


At five o'clock he receives a phonecall from a friend, Luis, an Ecuadorian-turned-Mexican, well-known in the town for his money and his kindness.

Apparently he does not call Raul very often.

Luis invites him to the cinema in Morelia. I hear Raul explaining that he is with a friend from England. Hear Luis invite me along as well.


At first I say no. After an afternoon of gunshot Spanish I am craving the peace of my room. But the answer does not sit quite right and, a few minutes after he has put down the phone, I concede.


Thus I meet Luis Soria de Silva. Slickly dressed but humbly disposed, with a wide smile and humorous manner. He is only forty-one, but a hump in his upper back, and his resulting shuffle of a walk, makes him seem much older.


The evening passes easily, popcorn scents and flowing emotions of the cinema balanced by stone-baked pizza and late night shopping centre. At the end of the evening I drip from the door of Luis' white Mercedes, drained but satisfied.


I spend the next two days with Raul, by the end of which I feel depleted. He likes being around me a little too much. I feel him feeding off my energy. Now that I have spent time with him, I feel obliged to meet him again.

To combat this, I pack my bags to leave.


The morning of my departure, I meet Luis for the second time, at a pavement cafe. Raul is not there. I don't know Luis, but he seems harmless and he wants to buy me breakfast, so I happily chatter away in the sun, amidst mouthfuls of chilaquiles and freshly-squeezed orange juice.


He asks me a lot of questions, about my life in England and about my current direction. He laughs when I say I want to write a book about my experiences; apparently one so young cannot amass sufficient stories for a bestseller. Feeling the need to prove myself, I become confident and direct, believing myself to know secrets that he does not. Speaking in Spanish, I am able to separate myself from my words, saying things that would be considered rude or arrogant in English.

I feel myself getting into the flow, enjoying talking about myself. I unpack some of my mantras for him, laying them out neatly and savouring his reactions.


He doesn't seem surprised by anything - only committed to continuing my soliloquy. When I say that I believed someone in Patzcuaro had a message for me, he immediately asks me what Raul's message was.


I am not sure. It could be a number of things. I tell him about Tepoztlan. However, my usual credence on these matters is absent. Deep down, I know this means I was wrong.

Luis looks at me with deep eyes and says, with absolute confidence, "Do not go to Tepoztlan."

I am startled.

"Why?" I ask. He replies, "Now is not the time for you to go to Tepoztlan."

I nod. Not going to argue with that. Then he says something very strange.


"On Saturday, I invited Raul to the cinema. This is very unusual, but I received the impulse to do this and so I followed it. Raul told me he did not want to go. I started to drive away. There came a point where, if I turned left, I would be at the cafe where you were. If I turned right, as I was just about to do, I would be on the carretera out of town, and the moment would have been missed.


"When I was at this point, Raul called me and said you'd changed your mind.


He looks at me seriously, piercing my eyes.


"Thus I met you."


I look at him with new interest. "So... Maybe it was you I was supposed to meet?"

He nods, slowly, and smiles a quiet, knowing smile. "Yes. Maybe it was me."