A splurge

I’ve been feeling a bit down the last few days. Troubles and fallings out with Ernesto. Listening too much once again to the complaining Canadian women. Abbie no longer talking to me. And further embroilments with people like Jenna and Jay and Alejandro.

I like them well enough – but when they come into my breakfast camp and fire and start smoking and talking about alcohol and swearing...I just think, what the hell? What are they thinking? Why am I subjected to this?

What happened here? What happened to the boy who just loved to play in the water, chat with the occasional person, mostly just dig the beauty?

I hardly ever go into the hot springs anymore, for one reason or another. Hardly ever go up to the waterfalls. Things just gone kind of weird...

A week ago I came back from my hike. I guess I have a memory of typing things out and coming to the conclusion that “going up the canyon” was the next logical step.

I went. It was pretty amazing. I loved it. Or rather...

That first day was magical, incredible, intoxicating, exhilarating. Ten hours walking and jumping and climbing and bouldering. Beauty incomparable. Excitement, and even a little danger. My shoes falling to pieces. Pigs and discoveries. And then the miracle of the camping gear hanging in the tree.

I felt so good that first night. Slept so happy. What a wonderful day.

But the next day my mind was full of lonesomeness. Lots of song lyrics circling around my brain on the subject. I thought of Tammy, and couldn’t work out why. I guess I took it all as a sign that being alone up there wasn’t what I needed, that it was other people.

But what if I got it wrong? What if it was just a layer of something being peeled off? The layer of lonesomeness? And some other deeper, better layer to be arrived at once that had been done dealt with?

I didn’t deal with it. I felt it, experienced it – but always planned to move on, to return to the world, civilization, other people.

I missed other people. Wanted Tammy. Wanted Philipp and Cabo. And wanted that feeling of movement and the joy in simply ‘walking’ that I’d had the first day.

No, the second day wasn’t as good. I ate more. Maybe I was trying to do or be something that didn’t really suit me. More stationary, more quiet.

Oh, for the purity and goodness and sheer holiness of that first day! But –

I had my mission. Source for my soul, and Ocean for the ego. And on I walked...

I reached the source – what I think was the source – after more beauty and wonder and adventure. La Ultima Puerta. The thirty-foot dry waterfall. Stumbles and falls, and the narrowing of the channel. Clambering through the brush. Climbing and climbing, and finally coming to the top of that hill, where I...

A snake was right there waiting for me when I arrived. It stayed a while and then I said “hello” and it slithered off. I wondered if it was meaningful, or perhaps just one of those things.

I looked it up later and figure it was a “Rosy Boa” – harmless, docile, a favourite of those wanting a snake as a pet.

I didn’t linger long at the source, and later regretted it. All those years of wanting to get up there – and once there, tossing it off and merely interested in making my way down. Laughing, even, at the initial belief that “there was nothing there” – another Israel, another America, another Chaley (so many others) – just an empty desire fulfilled, and chalked off the list.

Perhaps I sell myself short with that. Perhaps I once again fail to understand that it’s not during the doing of something that one gets their reward – to sit in meditation, and see colours and angels – but later, when life has returned, and the changes that occur.

I struggle my way down, and beyond the waterfall of unbelievable paradisiacal beauty, it was mostly tedium and tired drudgery and, perhaps, mistake.

Truly, if Ocean was for ego, I got my reward.

But I made it back, to the dark highway of night, and slept (eventually) of the Pescadero porch, and dreamed all night of snakes, in such strange and vivid ways.

I don’t remember it now, but upon wakening it was as though one of those nights where, after fifteen hours of driving, the nighttime brain is full to the brim of same. But that snake was only there for a few seconds – so why my head so overflowing with snakes all night?

A few nights later I dream the most incredible dream of being bitten by a rattlesnake. A dream that seems to last a half hour and include every detail of the process, from the initial bite and my initial reaction and feeling, through the changes in my physical body – swelling in my feet, the sensation of the toxin pulsing through me – as well as my emotional state, my mental state, and my thought process.

I try to meditate with it, be calm and aware. I think of John, and what he did. I wonder about seeking help, but also about the spiritual implications. Sometimes it seems everything is going to be all right, and sometimes it feels as though something terrible is going to happen.

Near the end, I look in the mirror and see blue and red lines almost tattooed on my skin.

Is it the poison, working through my system, the effects of it on my body, injuring and maybe killing it, or something else?

So vivid and striking and seemingly relevant.

But what does it mean? What does it mean? Is there something I should be doing? Is there a message I should be taking from this? Or is it more like an indication of a process that is happening, something beyond my control, my ever-changing inner-being reflected in my subconscious?

I tend to the latter. But still...

Something is happening. This hardship in being around others (again). This impatience and intolerance of their words. This feeling that I’ve heard everything, that there’s nothing new and it’s all boring. Tired of hearing about bloody drugs – sorry, plant medicine – and all the other post-New Age paraphernalia.

First I get sick of the material. Then the New Age. And now the jaded New Age.

There must be something more. There must always be something more.

“One must ever be prepared to leave one’s reality behind,” said Mother Meera.

Am I prepared? Am I ready? And will the new reality rise up to meet me?

It’s hard to conceive of a new reality, I’ve been so long in this one.

Where can it possibly be in this world? Where is there even room for it?

The New Age was always there, sitting on bookshop shelves, I just never looked at them. But now I find it hard to imagine there are shelves unexamined – or is the next reality somewhere beyond words?

Are there really a whole bunch of humans out there living and experiencing something infinitely beyond my current imagining? Why have I never found them? Brushed against them? Got even the littlest taste?

Do I have to live this current reality until I’m so completely sick of it that being in it is pretty much impossible? Something like how it was when I was first here, and touched by Lindsay – and the Hand of God – and knew I had to change. Wanted to. No going back.

Christ! I’m forty-one years old! Where will it end? And where will I begin?

I kind of wish Matt and Easterly weren’t coming. Though maybe it’ll be lovely. But I dread having to be the host, and having to be responsible for their holiday. And yet – they’ve done so much for me, and Matt has been ever so good giving me work, and basically safeguarding my material future.

I think of Susan and her offer of the land. Would it be crazy not to take her up on that? Why does it leave me so cold?

Would I really want to spend the next twenty years sitting on a bit of scrub outside El Chorro? And what need for ‘permanent structure’ when the tent is just perfect? When every little addition to that just adds complication?

Poor Susan – she seems so stressed and overwhelmed and lonesome. Working so hard for the watering of plants that no one wants to eat.

I guess I’m mostly afraid to get swept along with that – and next thing I know I’ll be toiling in dirt to pay for something I don’t even want or need, and all the while stuck once more listening to the complaining Canadians.

Poor old Lynn thinks I don’t like her – and maybe I don’t.

I mean, it doesn’t mean I dislike her – is that what she means? For that’s not the case – but I guess it’s true: for what is there to like?

I can’t understand her. She has such a strange way of speaking. Poor thing.

And Jeanetti – if she was as out of the way as Susan, or Helene and Alban, or a little less giving and sharing, would I spend as much time at hers and with her as I do?

Do I merely take advantage? Or is it more the price of the deal we’ve entered in on? The things I get from her – this computer, water, electricity, food – in exchange for my ears for her to complain into, and my arms to occasionally lift something heavy.

How did it come to this, that I got so embroiled in the village, when my heart always used to be pointed up-canyon?

To change it? To get back to the way it once was? For returning to nature very rarely seems like the backwards step returning to human life, or to a particular mode of human life, often does.

Nature is every new. A great reflector of one’s state of being – and people too, but new people, new places, new ways of interaction, not old, not familiar, not past.

I need to have more alone time, more nature time, more time growing and reaching out to Spirit – and less time listening to complaints, using others for my own ends, biting my tongue, or lashing out.

I need to take care of myself. To ask myself, “is this who I am? Is this who I want to be?”

Something somewhere along the line has gone a little wrong. Maybe starting with Pearl. Or maybe this is the way it was always going to be. Just time passing and the inevitable surfacing and resurfacing of my inner traits, my foibles and flaws.

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

Certainly, I’m losing patience with others. Taking out my general complaining Canadian frustrations on Susan. Scapegoating Jay for the intolerable mass of monologuing Americans. Dismissing Alex and Jenna for the barrage of Ayahuasca suppers.

And what of Ayahuasca? Should I just sup it myself, and see? “If you can’t beat ‘em, join em’ – that sort of thing?

It would be interesting. I wouldn’t want it to cost too much money. I’d probably prefer it without all the paraphernalia and ceremony. To drop into my life more naturally than the way it seems to be working for most people.

Just to shut up the voice in my head that judges, dismisses, looks down on.

But then again – it does seem like the Reiki of spirituality. You pays your money and you gets your kick. So typically Norte Americano.

And what good does all the years of so-called “ceremony” seem to have done someone like Jeanetti? (But then, meditation also.)

God, you see how much I hate the terminology. “Ceremony”. “Medicine”. “Indigenous.” A whole world I’m surrounded by, sort of fit into, understand but...am outside of.

Alienation.

In the beginning, of course, we are all the same

Wanting our toys

Loving our television

Eating our fish and chips

Stealing a little

Lying some

Discovering sex

Dreaming of our assured

Future riches and fame

And then

Somewhere down the line

We look around our office cubicles and

Something doesn’t feel quite right

Are we living in The Matrix?

Is this

The Truman Show?

Why do people seem so weird?

So false? So

Fake?

What are they saying?

What can’t we relate?

Why does everything make us

So crazy and sad?

Feel like that for a while

Let the feeling grow

And then –

Break out

Go to yoga

Get into meditation

Discover some

Happy, healthy, glowing

Exuberant people

And enter into our own bliss

Where everything now makes sense

Life has purpose and meaning

A new grander future is assured

And we don’t have to be slaves to the machine

Isn’t everything marvellous?

But

What happens

What happens to the few

What happens to those

For whom

Even these glistening walls start crumbling?

For those who begin to feel

The platitudes

The philosophies

The health fads

The gurus and techniques

Come also as

Nails down a chalkboard

See through this level of

The Illusion

Can be around yogaheads

As easily as the yogaheads

Can sit happy in crack houses

Listening to gunshots

Where do they go?

Where do we go?

Where do I go?

This is indeed

“A great and terrible world”

And –

“Up the mountain. Up the mountain. Up the mountain.”

These are the words that I hear in my head right now. Same answer as it was two weeks ago. Same answer, perhaps, as it ever will be. But –

What of Tammy, down here? What of Matt and Easterly, coming soon, and arrangements to be made? What of my desire to do something, to knuckle down and write, to at least have a go?

Householder concerns, eh? And isn’t that what I am? A material fellow? A man with women and stuff and computers on his mind?

Up the mountain I go, to be alone and miserable and thinking of others. Or – down the mountain I can stay, and be with others and miserable and thinking of getting away.

Ha! And – anyway – up the mountain isn’t miserable, it’s purity and goodness and heaven. It’s holy and peaceful. It’s great.

It just takes a bit of effort, that’s all. Some carting of food. Some planning, and some giving up of other things, such as company and comforts and tostadas.

Two weeks till Matt and Easterly come. Tammy only on the weekends anyway. Not that much required in the way of food or whatever, now I know the camping gear’s there.

Cool, it is, up those mountains. No Mexican music, or loud-mouthed Americans.

Nobody talking about Ayahuasca, or complaining about thieves.

Nobody haranguing me for twenty-five pesos, and no one to run away and hide from, or avoid.

Perhaps I need to go up there and cry tears. Perhaps I need to go up there and feel my aloneness, as I once did during wilderness solos nearly twenty years ago.

Perhaps I need, too, to listen to endless annoying song lyrics, and go mental.

I just hate to punish myself. To do the wrong thing. To force myself again into ‘austerity’ for some misguided purpose, when better things – and by “better” I mean, “the more right things” – await me down here, in the world, and in the company of others, as so often has been the case in the past.

But there’s a draw there, and an appeal. To experience the magnificence of it once more, and to see what’s there for me.

And to escape this situation, too, and this feeling.

To escape this feeling – is that what this is all about? A mere fleeing from current sadness? A sadness caused by doing things I should know better about?

I need to do certain things, whether I go back up the mountain or not.

I need to sort out Matt and Easterly, find out when they’re arriving, and how long they’re staying.

I need to make amends with Ernesto, and also Jeanetti.

I need to find a way to avoid Ayahuasca crowds, and smokers, and Jay.

I need to not get drawn into having to listen to complaining Canadians. And the best way to do that would be to stop using them and relying on them for certain things.

Also, I could choose instead to visit someone like Michael and Conny, a much more healthy choice.

I need a little food, perhaps. Or not.

Not that much, really. In fact, hardly anything.

I could check out Susan’s little solar tablet idea, and perhaps put the door up for her.

I could see Tammy this weekend, and go up after that.

I could get someone to have a look at the AC problem in the car, which I think is seriously sucking up the fuel economy.

It’s genuinely hardly anything:

1.         Go online. See what Matt and Easterly say. Arrange with Michael. Plan to be there for to pick them up at the airport.

2.         Talk with Ernesto, perhaps with Tammy’s help.

3.         Write a little letter to Jeanetti, explaining why I didn’t tell her sooner. But tell her to her face. And say you’ll make it right.

4.         Get some food for the mountain.

5.         Stop listening to people so much (just as you were doing in the beginning).

6.         Walk away from talk of drink and drugs and other things that no longer interest you.

7.         If you have to visit someone, make it Michael and Conny (although, pay attention to whether they actually want to be visited or not.)

8.         Go see Susan today, perhaps just before she goes to the birthday party in Santiago. Do the door thing for her. Don’t get involved in chat.

That seems like a plan. The main thing is to avoid complainers, and to not complain. That’s what this journal is for, and it works well.

Oh, what manner of fool am I! That I can climb so high – both literally and figuratively – and slump so low!

To be sneaking in past aged Mexicans, to save a couple of quid.

To be denting a kind lady’s car, and taking weeks and weeks to tell her about it.

To be getting so angry at good young people who are doing nothing wrong – and mixed-up older people, who are so obviously in pain.

To be thinking always of a thing, and doing nothing about it.

To be wanting sex, and following women.

To be losing and wasting so much precious time – or at least to be labouring under the illusion that that’s what I’m doing.

To have been granted so much, and to do so little with it.

To be on this collision course with oblivion, and helpless to do anything about it.

Only God can help me now – or, perhaps, one of His earthly representatives, if there are any.

Only God’s words can soothe my ears – or, at least, that’s what it feels like, when all human talk has failed.

Only God –

But, yes, I am a fool; of course I am. And lost in delusion, and in the Illusion. And, without pure self-knowledge of my true heart and intentions, my true body and mind, unsure of what to do next.

Whether to build a sweatlodge, and a place here in this piece of cowpat-covered squatted land.

Whether to write my books, as well as I am able.

Whether to walk up that mountain, and wrestle with my brain.

Whether to be nice to people, or shun them forever.

Whether to fuck women, and perhaps even marry one, or resist the urges of my pecker and my arms.

Whether to leave this canyon, and find some new place in the world, that is perhaps out there waiting to offer me more.

Whether to let the rattlesnake bite me, or whether to protect my body with all I can.

Whether to keep my mouth shut, and just smile, or to speak my mind and my opinions, harsh though they may be.

Whether to –

I don’t know. I trust that writing all this will have had some effect. That reality is now changed, both within me and out there. That they way will be made obvious and clear. That I don’t need to answers right now, in this instant, but that they will come, in due course.

That typing these words will weave magic, as it has done so often in the past.

I close the computer. I go to eat my breakfast – it’s 10.04 – and I walk, probably, once more into the village, to do what needs to be done, and to then leave.

And I do believe, that’s all.

El Chorro semi-blues

Well here we are again, feeling certain things and wondering certain things, and being a bit disgruntled and tired and lacking enthusiasm for things, all because of…

Today I’m beat because of yesterday, which beat me up (or down) – that conversation with Abbie which left me feeling drained and exhausted and sad. Just felt like a lot of words and fighting for my corner and being misunderstood. All those things I said weeks and even months ago, stored in her head and returned to me with interest.

Makes me feel like I wish I hadn’t said those things. Hadn’t shared myself with her. Had been more careful with my words.

Words. Just like I was thinking with Peter. Be careful with words. Realise their impact.

Is that what’s going on right now? I was saying that I didn’t really feel I had much to learn/work on at the moment.

And then the rest of it: what to do with my life, my near future, that whole business. Matt and Easterly and kids look like coming; that’ll mean another 5 or 6 weeks here, for sure.

Should I fix up the Santuario? Put some signs on the tree? Build up the sweat lodge and offer groovy things? Sit there and continue my hot springs maintenance and see who swings by?

Or hike up the canyon first and see who I am/what the world is after that?

That feels like a bit of a “yes”.

Then there’s always the writing…the idea that this could be the perfect place to do it…that all I need is some power and some shade and I’m good to go.

I think about that a lot. And I do still like it here. I’ve just had a bit much with people and talking and listening and all their complaints and opinions and chatter.

Hard work. All the village women (Conny excepted), and some o’ them visiting ones too.

I should have been less caustic with Jenna (and, to an extent, Lily and Abbie and Peter).

I don’t like it so much anymore. I do it to fit in, and because I sort of can. But if I don’t appreciate it when it comes back to me, I shouldn’t give it out (like that time with Shamus).

I probably got a bit arrogant too, a wee bit flip with my tongue, bashing Americans and blowhards like Pete and Jay, etc.

Showing off in front of the girls. Enjoying that sardonic jaded sarcasm.

Yes, it can be fun – but only for the right ears, and certainly not so much of it that I start to take it seriously.

Wasn’t that what I loved about not being able to communicate with people? That I couldn’t complain?

Sitting in the hot springs wondering why people were choosing to focus their minds and words on such negativities, when surrounded by so much beauty – but didn’t I end up doing the same?

I need to think more before I speak – and even to think more before I think.

What do I really mean? What do I really want to be?

Where is peace and niceness? Isn’t everything beautiful? What reason to be so mean in words?

I need to be better. I can hardly complain if I get my ass kicked, after all the nonsense I’ve been handing out.

Abbie smokes and swears and drinks. She may not be the best influence or company for me. If truth be told, much as I like her, I don’t know if I can really trust her – don’t know if I really know the real her.

She’s a good soul. She’s hip and nice and good at doing the right thing. But I’m not so sure she’s so good at being real.

She talks and talks, and spouts and spouts – non-stop, ceaseless, neverending – but when I hold her in my arms, everything goes quiet and she becomes tender and sweet.

Who is she, under all that bluster and ‘tough guy’ exterior?

And I shouldn’t have said anything about Stefan. Naturally she was protective, and defensive. She’s known him a long time. They were together three years. She has an investment in him not being a schmuck – because that reflects on her.

These are examples of thinking more deeply. In attempting to go beyond what people are merely saying, and feeling out what’s really going on for them.

It’s not enough for me to just say what’s going on for me. Though when was the last time I really got to talk? I guess we’re in one of those zones again.

It sort of shines a new rosy light on my time with Pearl – even though I was screaming to get out of there by the end of it (and several days before the end of it too).

Was Pearl the beginning of my downfall here? I was plenty happy before that. Dreams of books dissolved in experiences of women.

Wherefore went the hilarity of my OJ idea, and even the resurrection of MSWL?

Is that what I should be doing? Or should I be thinking San Miguel and San Pancho?

Sure, the rocks and water here may suit me – but are the people really on my vibration?

And Tamahara, of course – that was an interesting one. Weirded out, at first – the way she followed me to the rocks, stared at me, snuggled up into me, told me she’d be sleeping with me – but it was actually quite nice.

The softness of her body. Her giggles. Her laughing at my jokes (biting and sardonic though many of them were). And the way we didn’t have sex or kiss or do much of any of that sort of thing, really. Just wanting to fall asleep. Just wanting to feel another body close by.

I need to go up the canyon.

I’m afraid of what waits for me there.

It’s hot in the sun and cool at night.

It’s a long, lonely way – and perhaps impossible, and foolish.

I want to lie down and feel...

God. God. God.

Always my mind goes to God, in times like these.

A defence mechanism? An excuse, and a justification?

Or something deeper than that?

What difference my urge to leave behind North American complaining and chitter chatter than my urge to escape everything and find something more the first time I was here, in ’99?

Oh Momma. Oh Buddha. Oh Jesus. Oh Amma.

I knew nothing of all of you when I first came here, a young nobody, just 22.

Now I’m 41. Some things have changed; and some have stayed the same. But is the whole show beginning once more?

No John, no Shane, no Shawn, no Lindsay. That was all unknown and unforeseen back then. That whole mad unimagined world that I stepped into.

And now...a new world, a new way of life desired. Not the world of Abbie, of Biosana, of Jeanetti and Susan. Something different, something more.

Is something else unimagined still possible? I’m not sure it is. But I’d sure love it if it were.

Is it waiting for me, up that mountain, finally?

Or is that just more pipe dreams, like Israel desert, like a dozen more before?

What left is there? Save more of the same, and maybe just writing what has been?

Up the canyon we go, I guess. Nothing left to wait for – no pot lucks, no airport rides, no movie nights, no girls or people.

One month till Matt and Easterly arrive. A few good weeks then, I’m sure. And in the meantime...

Well, You see me: see what’s going on. See the people and opportunities that exist around here.

See the whole rest of the world, too, and know how to get me to move around it.

Erica in San Pancho?

That intrigued me, once upon a time – though the thought of her and mainland has faded somewhat.

In a nutshell: I have to be a better man. I have to get off my arse and go hike up that river, finally. I have to talk less. Find something more. Get myself back on track, and not be distracted by women and fruitlessness.

Also, watching a bit of comedy and telly might help. Snaps the brain out of its rut. A little light relief.

Laugh at other mad people, not real. :-)

[And then Tammy turned up and, as I type now, four days later, the idea that I was ever “disgruntled” seems sort of ludicrous. Thanks, Tammy! J]