Winnie the Pooh astutely observed that ‘when you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen’. Big Boots have most definitely been required. A Heffalump has haunted me.

The shape of my wandering and wondering through the forests of narrative has recently taken on the shape of a triangle—the Drama Triangle. I have found myself writing instead of ruminating since the latter can transmute this shape of things into something more akin to the Bermuda Triangle, an anomaly that I at times over the past four months have welcomed either to swallow me up or devour the cause of my catastrophising.

As I walk on the path, I become the path. I engage with the obstacles as well as the open road; I connect with the clouds as well as the sunshine. The world moves through me as I move across the world. I have no way of knowing what alchemy is working as I am walking. Travel is a way to gain perspective and stories are a snapshot that both clarify that perspective and also dissolves it completely. For the manifestation of non-duality is birthed from duality. So I surrender in trust to the aspects of both deep joy and intense struggle because to find unity it is essential to first find separation—to know the component parts before re-viewing it all as one.

I don’t travel to find myself or to create myself; I travel to meet myself … exactly where I’m at … until I become exactly who I am.

Bar the enlightened ones in caves and ashrams, everyone finds a corner of the Drama Triangle at some point in their lives. And often shapes don’t fit. Often we don’t fit. Stuff happens. Accidents happen. People happen. Puzzle shapes break and pictures change. Often, despite best intentions, a part of life fragmented by unskilled behaviour retains a crooked connector. It metastasises. The unresolved is known to show up again in a different format, gathering momentum as it travels. Because everything repeats itself … until it doesn’t. We attract the things we judge until we no longer judge the things we attract. A psychological circular error.

I once had an issue when people said, “whatever triggers you is an aspect of the other that you have inside you”. “All very well,” I would quip, “unless the person is a psychopath”. I now understand that even the psychopath is just a mutant emotional cell gone awry—a part that still finds resonance. Not all cancers are physical. There are emotional and spiritual tumours too, and there are people who show up as that manifest mutation in life. 

“Treat everyone like the Buddha,” an old adage goes, “but keep one hand on your wallet.”

Four months of my gap year nomading have been fraught with catastrophic drama and the abusive behaviour of a mentally unstable squatter who held my home hostage in Cape Town. She represented the tumour—a growth that came from an unprocessed part of my psyche … an element of myself that forced me to introspect. The cascading psychological healing crisis uncovered the underlying cancer: Shame … Threat … Injustice. Losing sight of my my wallet along with my sovereignty provided the tension required to force me through the portal of home as soul. And I finally understood: if I don’t feel my home is good enough then I don’t feel I am good enough.

Mutations ride shotgun on healthy cells preventing them from functioning to full effect and drawing attention from leucocytes that erroneously charge forth to target and destroy these haywire elements, causing massive collateral damage to their inherently healthy host cells. Photographs from the home front displayed a soul in crisis; a war zone that was fighting its way out of the four walls that couldn’t contain her rage … highlighting all those damaged parts. Not me or mine but also me and mine. Both/And.

“Compassion and humility may be among the most treasured of human virtues, but they are not useful in conflict. … Virtue is to be valued in proper context; only a sword will do in battle. … Training will still help you work out your fears, inhibitions and anxieties. In the case of conflict, no one, not even a veteran, is ever sure that they will come out alive from a confrontation. But they resolve to go in there and give themselves a fighting chance. This in itself is a triumph over evil.”

When you fight the cancer, you fight yourself; it’s not something foreign … the body knows it. She was only there because she is a mutant part of me, making me accountable to some degree. There is a real reckoning here; one that required a fully holistic approach. I couldn’t change the shitty situation. I couldn’t resist it or escape it. I could choose only to be with it and in it. I had to see this accident of this person as an opportunity to break patterns of a past haunted by abuse and to look at transmuting violation into loving kindness. Because when these things don’t change, I have only myself to change.

According to Buddhist Psychology, to seek revenge against someone who has harmed for no apparent reason is like punching the wall and expecting her to hurt. It’s no different to just silently hate them. To forgive, they say, is better but not ideal. Give victory to the enemy, this Buddhist practice entreats. When I read this line, I had to get the old me into a headlock and talk her off the ledge. Who I have become had to offer her assistance in her plight … had to allow her to win her one-sided war with me. Why? Because she wasn’t fighting me. She was fighting all the unseen, unvalidated parts of herself and she was looking to the aspects of me that represented those parts of herself and her life to reflect her drama and make her right. It wasn’t about me. And I didn’t have to step into her triangle to make her valid. Whatever we mirror for others, we become ourselves.

The worm breaks apart and grows into two separate and complete creatures. Exhausted and confused, all the I can’t, I can’ts gradually broke into the I can. One part of me engaged in divinations, ritual offerings and traditional healers whilst the other part engaged in the nail-biting legal thriller starring the best eviction lawyer in Cape Town. Discernment is seeing truth and acting with wisdom. Recovery sometimes means fighting and sometimes it resides in surrender; naturopathy and allopathy both find a place in healing.

“And, if you knew back then what you know now?” folk back home are curious to know, “would you still have let her in; would you have flown back earlier as intended?” The answer is always “No!”  Because, despite the potential PTSD she stimulated in my system, this accident of a person was the exact reason I needed to be here. This too was a portal to amateur and reactive past actions that took me to the funeral pyre of my karma.

I will soon return to my Phoenix home … to a new manifestation of a me … where I will live in the ashes, live life differently, and rise again … and again … and again.