Author: Well Worth Being

I have a passion for holistic health and non-prescriptive self development. I believe in an integrated patient-centred approach to personal transformation and will take each individual on a journey to their unique place of innate health using a variety of modalities including Craniosacral Therapy, Integral Coaching, TIME Meditation, Transformational Yoga, nutrition education and personal psychology. I am also a qualified Mountain Guide which I can combine with other therapies on guided trails. Our bodies are the vessels of our current existence and have an innate intelligence that we simply have to get in touch with in order to live well. Each body has its own stories; my job is to listen – to hear its stories as clearly as possible – and to respond effectively. Through bodywork and coaching sessions and I can re-establish the dialogue between your body and its inherent health and guide you to the best version of you that you can be.

Twenty Five: Death on the Carousel

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‘Hm’, I said, not meaning for it to be such a short sharp expression of a somewhat surprising realisation. I often disappear into my thoughts; occasionally I get jolted back with the realisation that I have spoken something—usually a question—out loud. Today, sitting in an armchair in the library of Kopan Monastery where I am staying for a week, I found myself unwittingly tapping on my phone, writing about death. The subject had been discussed in the earlier dharma talk and, on entering the library, my eyes and hands thankfully landed immediately on The Book of Joy by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I tend to experience excessive overwhelm when choosing a book in a library or bookstore and often the doors have closed while I am still drifting trance-like up and down aisles, touching and leafing through—and often sniffing—hundreds of books I fail to narrow down to just that one. It seems unjust somehow to eliminate so much unread potential with the accumulated value of hundreds of thousands of writing hours by hopeful authors. This is why ‘thankfully’ interjected there. As it happens, I read very little of the joy book. Surrounded by all those words and wisdom, a quite typical Penelope thought crossed my mind: I am more afraid of my luggage not appearing on the airport carousal than I am of dying.

I decided to unpack that—so to speak—in light of my current day of drifting in and out of sleep; my previous few days of stiffness in my knuckles, forearms and upper back; general tension and weakness in my body, and an incapacity to fully function. The now almost fully-healed wound on my right arm reminds me of the potential cause of these symptoms: a dog bite a week ago in Pharping Dollu. 

We are all on the limen of life and death and not one of us knows exactly when we will unwittingly cross. Yet cross we will. So, when the darkness beckons, I submit. Sometimes I go so deep into the dark without a flashlight and, to the alarm of many, I’m not afraid of staying there a while. And then I write and I share. But no one wants to hear these travel stories. People want to live vicariously … they want to suck the dopamine hits from my days on the road. They want romance stories not murder mysteries; they want beaches and sunsets, not oil slicks and smog. People want to be wooed by their projected fantasies onto the ones who leave; unwilling or unable to live their dreams into existence.

I have so often been dangerously and excitingly close to crossing that limen between life and death that I can freely claim to have intentionally dangled a foot over the threshold on more than one occasion. This time, however, I had to weigh up the risks of taking my chances dying from a disease I had a minuscule chance of contracting or getting a vaccine and risking injury or death from a medicine I had a minuscule chance of needing. Either way I might die and I had 24 hours to choose which death risk I was willing to take. Those hours felt like a hike through hell as I had to not only consider my choice to vaccinate or not but also navigate my unfamiliar discomfort with death standing vigil at the foot of my bed. 

Every breakthrough is accompanied by a fever.

I awoke from a torrid night with the absolute surrender to my mortality and my autonomy in taking my chances crossing the threshold potentially whilst still exploring Nepal. Life, after all is only a practice and death is inevitable … and if this is my destiny then my freedom to choose this was also pre-determined.

Like the luggage on the carousel, I recognise that suffering is in the anticipation only; the struggle and the resistance. It lies in the attachment. Some have suffering imposed on them and some get stuck in adversity as though an addiction whilst others embrace it out of fear of who they would need to be if freedom was their new reality. Still there are others who never experience suffering and adversity and always seek an elusive freedom as a fish seeks the water it swims in.

The weight on the airport scales is nothing compared with what I drag onto planes … the emotional baggage; the leaden soul. Dark nights and prolonged depressions are also travel. Longterm nomading has nothing to do with escaping anything and everything to do with facing everything … in ever-changing landscapes that highlight the myriad crises and give endless space to tease them apart … to sometimes break them open … to make space enough to step back, get perspective and rebuild with breathing space. Because nothing can be escaped. All I can do is express how it actually feels, not how I want it to feel. And not how vicarious travellers want to experience it either.

So I travel to recover and heal from a lifetime of living in survival mode, decades of abuse, breakdowns and mental afflictions such as narcolepsy, ADHD and autism. I travel to break down the walls of the necessity to function according to other people’s perceptions and expectations so that I can transmute and transmit my light through the cracks in the dark matter of dis-ease, dis-function and dis-order. I travel to free myself from the here or there or now or then; to find the moments of existence that contain everything and nothing. Because true freedom can only be found through the gateways. I travel to practice living well so that I can die well.

Death still lingers as aches and pains as I face up to where I am in its liminal space. As I stand at the carousel of life and luggage, I none the less give the three black monastery dogs an uncharacteristic wide berth as I walk to the Gompa. Just becasue I am questioning the power of my mind to slip either into healing or suffering and how prepared I am to cross the threshold does not mean I actually want to die just yet.

I travel to question my questions so that I may never find the answers.

Twenty Four: Handmade Himalaya

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Pokhara—Nepal’s Promised Land—comes with its own unique challenges and blessings. Bars and restaurants take over the Lakeside area with names like Crave and Paradise; there are strip clubs now and a Pokhara Disney Land. Tourists from all over the world consume in a frenzy anything on offer. I pass people on the streets who look like they have just stepped out of a video game and I am offered ganja and ‘a night to remember’ whenever I cross a certain threshold on the main road. Twenty-three years have not been kind.

Pokhara also comes with a gift I could never have imagined or anticipated: a room in an apartment with a balcony and Himalaya views. It takes several weeks before the rains clear the sky enough to see them and, when they appear, their golden morning halo is worth each day in wait. I share the apartment with the elderly Kashmiri man who, with his wife, hosted me in SriNagar after snow trekking in Aru valley; he has a shop in Pokhara and all he asks in return is that I attend to customers on Fridays while he goes to Mosque.

Whilst most people in Pokhara troll the main streets and the lakeside for dopamine hits in the form of fast food, ganja, liquor, shiny plastic trinkets and karaoke, the beautiful duality is that those I judge are also the ones who sleep in. I seek the sanctuary of the peace that descends in the early mornings when I go for my runs, my walks, my solitary yoga, and general contemplation. It’s the time of day when I am able to notice the things that matter … like superb coffee, tranquil vibes and friendly strangers … kindness and beauty also overflow here.

“The word peccadillo, which means a ‘small sin’, comes from pecus, which means ‘defective foot’, a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings life generously offers to those who seek them.“ ~  Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

And, as in The Pilgrimage, I too walk the path of generous blessings … whilst my shadow confronts me in the form of a black dog who snarls at me on morning runs and rips to shreds the stick I use to defend myself. With the crazy love affair I instantly develop with duality, the only way I can find harmony is to follow my compulsion and get out of the city only days after my arrival. Pokhara is just the foreplay; to experience the orgasm, there are literal mountains I must climb. 

As the Quintessential Pioneer, Explorer and Adventurer, I am usually questing at speed ahead of others … getting lost to find my way, and generally moving through landscapes with determination, strength and courage. So choosing to take a guide is not easy. We walk together to the permit office and after just those few kilometers I know we will travel well together. Ten days, I say to Tikka, and we can decide if we want to go further after that.

I last trekked in Nepal shortly after America erroneously declared war on Iraq. I have flashbacks to the person I was trekking the then 21-day Annapurna Circuit 23 years ago, fresh out of Barclays Capital with boots I had worn only the once in the High Street adventure store, carrying my 13kg Macpac (which has subsequently done several local trails and Camino de Santiago routes), crawling across suspension bridges at first and then acclimatizing to fearless scrambling across landslides. No smart phone, no Google Maps … no AllTrails or Komoot … only something printed off the relatively new Internet called the YetiGuide, pinned to my pack in a ZipLoc bag. If we got lost, we didn’t know it, because we were always somewhere and there was always a village tap to wash at, a hot dal soup, and a floor to sleep on. Each day just another day on the mountains, we walked in bliss of our youthful ignorance. It’s impossible to know the landscape before walking the territory so the gift is always in letting go of having to know the way.

It feels like having a guide is a betrayal to my independence … and yet somewhat reassuring to be able to follow for a change; to learn that he too follows no maps besides his own instinct and intuition, finding new pathways where new roads have cut away the old trails … that he too is sometimes lost without being lost. The first day or two exposes some resistance to the mecahnics of the trekking: recalibration around not needing to check that Tikka is ok; acceptance of his checking that I am ok; allowing him to carry my extra water bottle; submitting to his carrying all my vegan snacks, and feeling comfortable with his managing nightly arrangements for a free bed in teahouses of people he knows. It just takes me a few days to trust to let go of the needing to know; to sink into the moment-tomoment step-by-step and breath-by-beautiful-breath.

I am a wilderness guide who is also capable of being guided. Slow and steady the leader becomes the led. But slow and steady doesn’t always work for me. I overtake and usurp the leader, transforming him into the led. A potential power struggle becomes a game and then a comfortable rhythm as we mostly walk in silence with occassional fountains of inspiration at smoking stops (by the time we trekked again, he had quit). We climb relentless stairs for hours and days, get drenched in a thunderstorm, dry ourselves in a house that emerges from another dimension, walk in slow motion over literal carpets of rhododendron flowers, cross exposed ridges, push through thickets, gorge on wild berries, engage in fireside therapy with fellow travellers, and wake up to views of mountains that seem like a mirage. Days feel like months as inner landscapes of alchemically putrefying DNA beneath dirty hair and dehydrated skin becomes woven into my being as rapidly as the outer landscape changes. Some day—perhaps in another 23 years—I will have integrated the gavitas of this passage through the mighty Himalaya and grow the capacity to express fully the impact it has had. Not now. 

Pokhara becomes my base camp for over a month as I head off on explorations from there. A 10-day trek combining Panchase, Mardi Himal Base Camp at 4,500m, and several villages—including Lwang and Dhampus—flows into a week overlooking Begnas Lake at the tranquil Mountain View Eco Farm, and a return to Pokhara to meet a Spaniard I met at Low Camp. This flows into a 6-day trek to Mohare Danda at 3,500m, a trek to the Peace Pagoda, and a bad judgement call hiking to a homestay in Sarangkot for two nights. Each time I leave the city I settle, and each time I return I instantly vibrate at the frequency of fresh-brewed coffee, slow roasted cashews, perfumed fruits and Amul dark chocolate. I find I can no longer walk anywhere without confronting intense overstimulation. I duck into Disney Land several times to escape the vicious city dogs and slip dimensions into my Xanadu days, lacing up white skates—circa 1980—and whirling around the rollerskate rink. Courses in sound bowl therapy and Thai Massage in the city keep me away from zombie shopping and dopamine eating. And when I find myself resonating more with the latter, I make the decision to leave for good. It’s way too easy to sink into the familiar comforts of consumerism.

I have travelled well since then: back to the Mountain View Eco Farm at Begnas Lake where a storm swept through snapping massive trees and displacing anything not tied down; I have found hiking trails and cricket games from the hilltop heritage town of Bandipur; I have spent a week adventuring in the forested Pharping Dollu enchanted by the multiple temples, monasteries and sacred caves, and I have explored every square inch of the ancient and magical city of Bhaktipur.

I discard cells and possessions as I go; I lighten my load of attachments as a practice towards full renunciation. The less I have the more I am. The inner glamour girl is dead and the embarrassing number of little black dresses and designer shoes she clings to in Cape Town must go too. Born with fists tightly clenched, we ultimately all die with palms wide open. And in between, everything gets rewired from earth to ether … body and spirit … as I move across the landscapes that remake my map. I must integrate now before I can weave these threads and new narratives.

This is my current territory and new reality. This is my handmade life.

(See my Instagram profile for more places and pictures of this epic adventure).

Twenty Three: The Spaces Between

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Some people travel to find themselves, some to lose themselves. I travel to discover that which brings me to life through confronting death and adaptability. Travel wakes me up from the narcolepsy—and also the more generalised sleep—it informs me; wisens me. It opens the portal to the writer in me so that I can write out into the world that which I most need to learn … so that what needs to live through me can fill my vessel and reweave my narrative.

It’s the movement of travel that I most adore. The momentum, the dynamism … the swings and spirals to find that sweet spot of equilibrium and poise. Balance is an unnatural state—a new age erroneous desire—it alludes to a state of stagnation. Sitting at a desk in front of a window to write, the curtains are drawn on my mind. But put me next to the window on the backseat of a taxi on a bumpy, windy road under construction with an uncomfortably full bladder and an ache of hunger from a 7-day fruit fast, and I am instantly inspired.

Triggers confront me—consume me—as I am forced to work cell-by-cell on past traumas to remind myself that I am truly free and that I can finally write without fear of recrimination. I lean in deep enough to touch into the fears, the anxieties, the debilitating threats I faced of getting thrown out of home or losing custody of my child if I spoke my truth … if I shared my reality. Courage walks hand in hand with fear. I am known to overshare if given the chance.

The barrier on a bridge has been opened like a gate. A rusted reminder of mortality lies in the riverbed beneath. Giant stairways and planted beans stretch to the giant in the sky. Departing souls have easy access to high places. Also a reminder that first one must fall to rise. Death feels easy here. Heaven and hell are only as far apart as earth and sky. There is no separation, only perceived segregation. There is no ‘other’. The inner child takes the crone by the hand. They jump and skip. Heads thrown back, they laugh at the sky. The sky knows change. It is unmoved.

Houses retreat into rubble and dust, making way for a new highway. Memories of a Yangtze River trip invade my mind as people are displaced to higher ground. The road becomes like a river washing away houses … an unnatural disaster; a crime against humanity. It looks like a war zone; it’s difficult to breathe. My eyes seek attainment and attachment to the next dopamine hit. A bus with DELUXE emblazoned across its front is being worked on by two bare-chested men exposing cages of ribs. Deluxe is just another word—a branding that has no intrinsic meaning value.

I am reminded by rivers of rubbish down hillsides and in forests that there is no such thing as away. Like the tongue that keeps seeking the broken tooth, the psyche will consistently and obsessively keep seeking the wounded parts again and again. We think we can throw certain things away whilst accumulating other things when in reality everything always exists and it is simply we who are shifting in and out of the objective reality of those very things we believe we are either discarding or holding onto. So I discard words and, in deleting sentences and paragraphs, I detach also from the meaning they hold.

The silences between musical notes are what frame, contain and make the songs possible. The weft and weave of story is the same. It’s the spaces that allow the piece to breathe, that give it both life and death in non-dualistic harmony. Words are plucked and rewoven, always leaving a knot untied or that one loose thread as a reminder that nothing is ever complete or perfect.

As I learn to write again with honesty and authenticity from that fierce place in my core, I write away all the shields. And as I learn to cease the word vomit that perpetuates my narrative, I learn to re-create spaces between the words so I can steep myself in the breath of the present. I pour words on my skin like nectar until they wash away—slowly, slowly—the outer layers … until my armour can rust and fall away.

The aim is not enlightenment; the aim is truth. My voice and my silence is my message.

Twenty Two: Grazing on Garlands

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The calendar date is 11 April. The tiniest sliver of new moon glows saffron light from the sun. Eid Mubarak, it harkens. Navratri too. I check out of room 111 at the deluxe Delhi Terminal 3 hotel to check in to IndiGo flight 1155. It’s 11.11am as I hoist my bags onto the scale. My second bag weighs in at 11.1kg. I don’t know. But I understand. I can’t explain it … it is just so. Airports and aeroplanes are facades that make portals more manageable … more believable … less woo-woo. There’s absolutely nothing woo-woo, or comforting, about Delhi airport as the multiple security checks, without fail, leave my hand luggage spewed all over metal counters, where gloved hands perform surgery and extract seemingly innocuous objects from the bowels of my bags. ‘Yes, that’s a pen in my notebook’, ‘No, I don’t have a sharpener in my pencil case’, ‘A powerbank, yes, those are the cables for my laptop … uh-huh, a headtorch’. … duh (under my breath) … ‘Nope, I don’t have any lighter or matches’. ‘I don’t smoke,’ I thrown in for good measure. I get a visible sigh in response as he indicates for me to move on while I contemplate how I manipulated so much stuff into that bag in the first place.

There is that quintessential pre-arrival moment on the aeroplane when everyone starts shifting in their seats, fondling phones, craning necks and bobbing heads, ducking and elongating towards the windows … first this side and then that side, eager to find a gap. Clicking buttons and clicking tongues as the people in the window seats claim their entitlement to a full view of the kilometers-high mountains we begin to descend into. It’s terrific and terrifying.

Nepal is a country that is a slice of land holding most of the world’s highest mountain peaks … sandwiched by India and Tibet, now China, it has nowhere to go but skyward. In terms of surface area, if flattened it would be massive … bigger than the whole US of A in fact. The sight of the fluttering Nepalese flag mimics the mountain peaks with its double pointed triangle. Peaks and valleys make the country as much as they make the person. The quintessential Nepali Dhaka Topi mimics this too.

Same, same, but different echoes from 23 years ago. The name of a coffee shop I wanted to open. A parallel life. And here I am. Exactly where I always am. Draped in a garland of marigolds. The Nepalese Namaste affords everyone divinity in every greeting and is reflected in Well-Come signs everywhere with the hallmark symbol of Nepal: an outline of the bowed head of a woman, eyes downcast with hands in prayer position. This Kathmandu airport arrival is everything the Delhi departure was not. Reverence is a religion. Caressing the marigolds, I beam through the portal to Nic as a 6-year-old traveller in India as he grazed on the abundant marigolds at temples and celebrations and imagine him grazing on this garland. I miss him. And I feel hungry. But the expiry date on the bag of nuts is January 2082. I am suspicious.

To reinforce this time travel, I am told it’s New Year in Nepal in a few days. It will be 2081. Nepal is also an average of 15 minutes ahead of India, which is 3,5 hours ahead of South Africa. People’s birthdays don’t occur on the same date each year but on the day of their birth month when the moon is in the same phase as it was when they were born. My birthday in Nepal is not the 14th but the 27th of June this year—waxing gibbous 66% illumination according to moongiant.com. How many dimensions do I now straddle? My brain fires synapses looking for something familiar. A dog crosses at a zebra crossing—it’s black and white … chameleon identity crisis. The familiar can be dangerous though. It negates anything outside of my objective reality and offers no stretch into growth points of uncomfortable lack of knowing what I am looking at.

The sun matches my marigold garland; hazy orange suspended in smoggy sky. Recovering from being eclipsed—ego wounded. Three months ago I arrived in India from SriLanka to the same saffron orb between palms. Now it peeks between chaotic buildings and unfathomable wiring. Glitching like my brain. Trying to pull back the veils of disorder to investigate and discover what lurks behind … what awaits the blooming. A bald nun on a motorbike—a future trajectory beckons. ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ said Shakespeare. I will one day comply. Everything is a possibility; a potential for recalibration and transmutation. My apprehensive inner electrician awaits the next instalment.

Trusting someone with my safe passage, I am teleported into a valley at night. Less than 30km, it takes many hours. I can’t find my bearings in the dark on a mountain pass. I feel trapped in time and space. Pass and passage come from pace, which comes from stretch, something I am unable to do. The passage is rough and potholed. The driver shouts on the phone while he paces. Stuck! Lost? My birthing is stalled and my arrival gets misaligned.

People often ask why I need to plan. It’s so I can give up the planning. It’s my dichotomy. I have to know where I’m going next so that I can choose not to go. I need to know I have a choice (just the one) to protect me from getting stuck where I am. So when we find the place I plan to stay for six weeks to volunteer, the reality becomes somewhat different as I recognise my patterns of usually want to leave the moment I arrive anywhere. I try and blame the new moon but it is aloof in its dismissal of my hollow accusation. The planets can’t be blamed either. It’s only me. Edgy and wanting to flee, it is only in establishing an exit strategy that I can yield to where I am.

Since the external is always a reflection of the internal, I work until my fingers blister and my soul goes awry with the next push out the birth canal. I take on a fruit fast and call a friend in Pokhara. He sends a car to rescue me … from nothing more than myself. I lasted seven days in purgatory … and that’s ok. I acknowledge that this is also a guide to show me my way and there is no mistake in the making of such.

Life is full of answers and this is only one question.

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” Meno

Twenty: Notes on Travel

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“There’s no place like home,” lamented Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But home is not a structure. Just as travel is not a place we go. Home is who we are. And travel is our innate state of being. Home is an internal longing that moves us into the flights of fancy that require no planes. And travel motivates us to question our existential homelessness. We are essentially both always home when travelling and always travelling when we are home. Because there is no such thing as away.

Traveling, in my experience, is never a linear one-dimensional trajectory into the often unknown places I at times choose randomly from a National Geographic map sent as a freebie on subscription. Travel can meet me in places so foreign yet with a familiarity that is not from here or now, but from a thread that has come unplucked from a different story of another me. I see faces in profile—people in streets, on scooters, behind a glass window of a coffee shop—and I catch myself in the motion of bracing to orientate to a Hello or Vannakam or Namaste, before I comprehend fully that I am in a foreign place where everyone has begun to take on the look of a friend from somewhere else. I forget that I am the foreign place because I am also home.

Last year I packed the conventional notion of home in a box and threw it in the recycling bin. And 6 months into my travels, I feel like home for me is that discarded plastic bottle that someone has added to several hundred other plastic bottles and turned into a fleece pullover for Patagonia. It couldn’t be more different yet is has become something useful, beautiful and has created change in its very own changing. Upcycled. It has a unique narrative and plot.

Travel should always be unresolved. Travel should leave you feeling slightly edgy, like you’re missing something … or lost … like there is an existential longing for something and, like the cookie jar, is always just out of reach. For me that missing is like the pieces of myself I leave behind so I have a reason to return one day. Or perhaps they are the pieces that no longer fit; pieces that slowly become unstuck—unhinged—and fall between cracks in the earth. Like a newly extracted tooth, there is at first a sense of loss. And then—one day, with no prior warning or noticing—the tongue no longer seeks out the old but seeks only the testing and tasting of the new.

It’s a puzzle this drive to seek but not to find; the picture never completed. Perhaps there really is no such thing as completion. Our parents lied to us. Like perfection, completion is not a destination on any map; just a fanciful place. Like Neverland.

Translation comes from the Latin, ‘borne across’. I have been borne across oceans, mountains, borders, boundaries, religions. I have lost much in the process of translation—my language, my culture, my capacity to communicate with anything close to my prior vocabulary. But I have found more than I have let go—perspective, detachment, curiosity. Because just as there is no such thing as away with travel, there is also no such thing as lost. I am always here … in perpetual arriving to be where I must be for that which is arriving to meet me too.

I plot routes. The routes plot me. I walk the same paths but they are different. I am different. Same same but different. Through moving my brain triangulates the stability that sneaks through the portal of the not knowing. My plans move like the fascia of the body; tensegrity keeps them bound as well as free.

Movement is my magic.
Curiosity is my freedom.

Nineteen: My Lacuna Travels

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(Taken from my journal February 2024—exercise for travel writing course, Deer Park Institute, Bir Billing, India)

My very first adventure travel experiences took place at an age somewhere between diapers and being told to behave—beaten into behaving—in a manner more appropriate for a suburban showpiece primed to eventually marry someone who would take me off my mother’s hands. I was, however, an intolerable feral creature trapped in the lacuna between this world and that; not quite wild yet definitely not tame. That came later. But before I was cornered, I was free. I discovered a universe far and away from appropriately dressed knife and fork meals where every morsel must be consumed—swallowed like my words—from the exact same seat at the family table.

I travelled as often as I could … although then it was more escape than travel; more Houdini than Happy Camper. My destination was the giant roots beneath the sky-high canopy of the tibouchina tree stationed approximately 100m from the French doors to the patio. I travelled there with my black furball who followed willingly, enticed by the picnic kibble I packed for her to endure the journey. My own snackbox contained anything both edible—and some things not so—that I could reach in the kitchen. I ran the gauntlet of visibility across the immaculate lawn devoid of diversity, like my family, and ducked beneath the foliage of finger-like fern tendrils that seemed to hold and guide me through the final portal into the damp peaty undergrowth of my belonging.

I can’t remember if I left the house with clothes or if I discarded my perfect outfit in the flourishing mud of the fairy garden. I can distincltly remember that my destination was not fond of the shackles of such trappings. I had to be stark naked; this is how the fairies could identify me.

So close yet so far from the constricting home environment, I was able to exist in this lacuna between worlds. No planes, trains or buses were needed to transport me to this authentic dimension of my inner dynamic beingness, where the roots of this tree assimilated me and hid me from that other world where I somehow couldn’t exist; a place not of flourishing. The only world I knew for the hours—that were days and seeming eternities—was the one of magic that forged me into the being connected to all the trees I would later climb, visit and revere: the Banyan in Auroville that stretches its arms outward, sending aerial roots to probe the earth for support; the upright Fir in Diana’s garden that I would ascend like a spiral staircase to collect pine cones to start the fire; the Milkwoods on my plot where I am custodian; the Cherry Trees in London that for several weeks of each year pop pink candyfloss flowers and then lay them like carpets over the sidewalks in the road where I lived, and the Willows that have wept so much now that they are ready to sit down. They are my teachers, my paradise, my freedom.

I have feet, not roots, so I can can move. But I am forever connected to the underground network that somehow connects all these trees and acts as a transmitter of my forever … even when I find that portal elusive.

Eighteen: Alchemy and Ambrosia

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‘When we try to pick out anything by itself’, says John Muir, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ Water is like this. It holds and connects the memories, dreams, illusions and delusions of everything and everyone on the entire planet.

With the chaotic India I know and love loitering just meters beyond this walled compound, I stand with feet braced on marble slabs radiant with the morning sun. Undulating water captures the reflection of Amritsar’s Golden Temple, bewitching its leaking image to manifest magnificence greater than the structure itself. Mesmorised, I weep … viscous tears that stick to my eyelashes and blur my vision before, ever so gradually, building momentum to slide down my cheeks and settle at the corners of my mouth. 

Gu means darkness or ignorance; Ru means elimination of that darkness; Guru means light coming from darkness, and Gurudwara is the doorstep of the Guru. Amrit means ambrosia, a substance so aptly reflected in the name given to the body of water that, bar a 65m causeway, maroons the Seikh shrine crowned with a 500kg gold-coated dome: Amrit Sarovar. Simply looking at it floods me with a somatic response that hitches me to everything beyond the soma.

If water holds consciousness—or, in fact, is consciousness itself—then this temple amrit, where literal millions of people have come to bless and be blessed, is so much more than the sum of its parts; more than the sum of the pilgrims, devotees, travellers and nomads who plunge themselves beneath the surface of this sweet nectar to emerge, reborn.

Travel, for me, is like pulling a treasure chest out of the depths of the ocean. It is my rebirthing. All things both delightful and frightful; shiny and shocking. Covered with barnacles, seaweed, and throttled by umbilical rope, the treasure is locked away with rusted chains, seemingly impossible to access. Yet there it is, and the only obstacle to gold and jewels is reluctance, resistance, fear and ignorance. This is the growth point—the crowning—adapting through a myriad complex situations to bring new clarity.

I stand at the door—on the limen—to my inner guru, seeking the gold that only I have the capacity to alchemise. The treasure is the deep inner landscape of putrefaction; the transmutation of lead to gold with each step, thought, emotion and prayer. Yet, like my tears, water has the capacity to both obstruct and clear one’s vision. And so I too must annoint myself with this ambrosial amniotic fluid so I can bust open the rusted lock and emerge from the treasured womb of my dreams. 

Like the four or five hours’ long queuing that devotees must do in order to glimpse the holy book in the inner sanctum, there are no shortcuts to the treasure when a decision is taken to navigate the deep work of psychic dredging. If you want to get to the Inner Sanctum, you must be prepared for drudgery, claustrophobia, patience … gallons of it.

Where vision is blurred, alchemy brings insight. The tears that ebb and flow—the nectar-like medicine for my soul—this ancient wisdom claims, are the crystallised thoughts that life and love can trap. A holy dip strips me naked, to the bone, layer by karmic layer. Never gentle … always strong … water can cut grooves in stone; can rupture mountains; can ratchet open the mind and return its forgotten essence to the curl of the upper lip, where the tongue can catch a glimmer of it’s wisdom … a cyclical flow of watery tears to saturated consciousness awakening my psyche. A re-cycling; a re-viewing; a re-membering. In unbecoming, I become it all.

If the SriNagar lakes are for me the primordial fluid, and the tunnels through the mountains back into India, the birth canal, then Amritsar’s Golden Temple is the ritual purgation that prepares my new soul for incarnation. I use the experience of my body to access the inner dimensions of my being—my ultimate and quintessential source—to perpetually step up to meet my dreams … because it is only the wise who recognise that their dreams are always on their side.

The heart doesn’t wrinkle. Emotions grow only more fine with age. The mind surrenders. And the soul wisens and expands beyond it all. 

As I step into life, I get lived. As I live, I become life itself.

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Seventeen: Frequencies in Harmony

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Gluten intolerant Gretel without her bread crumbs, lost on a trail wanting to ‘just see what’s around that corner’, Google maps spinning … am I lost or is Google? The existential question of time and space.
Rerouting …
Rerouting …
Rerouting … 
The network of mapped algorithms doesn’t align with the reality of the territory.
Rewiring.

My mind wants to settle; wants to sit at a window and write for days. My body wants to move, housing as it does the soul that wants to soar … explore … fly free. Inner conflict builds the required curiosity to walk through every open doorway … the open ones here present in abundance. More of a chance to get it right—to not break my nose trying to get through the nailed-shut one—I find myself somehow still enjoying the space of the limen … the threshold … the liminal space that holds the potential of it all. And I keep finding magic. Because I’m aligned with magic. Like attracts like.

Travel inspires perpetual forced orientation, reorientation, calibration and recalibration. And, as each string gets plucked and tuned, my entire being begins to resonate with the synchronicities that are no longer an enigma. They are the norm. And whilst I relish in the dance and trance of dissolution and surrender, life creates a structure that negates my will and carries me. I simply show up … because showing up is my superpower … and the rest just happens. This is the nature of being. Being is not a passive existence. Existence takes practice. Practice is a lot of doing. Doing is essential in order to be. For me the being is contained in the exploring. Everything and all.

It’s been raining. A cleansing ritual both beautiful and inconvenient as I sit on the edge of my bed drying my laundry with a low wattage hairdryer. I leave for colder climes now—snow cold—packing wet clothes a dangerous choice. Unpacking to pack and packing to unpack again, another analogy for the life that is living me now. And I leave another place that has homed my doing and being … contained my un-containment.

The noxious odour dangles from the taxi’s rearview mirror, swinging out a metronome beat as we navigate the steep and gnarled zigzagging route down the hill from Junglaat in Naddi to Dharamshala. I think back to my arrival here; the smell of my luxe room stinging my eyes. I sweep the room like a sleuth looking for bugs … locate and dispose of all scent sachets and open the windows with the overhead fan on full. Freezing.

I glance up now as the sun catches the patchwork web of prayer flags marking my daily passage for runs, hikes, adventures and daily meditation at Tushita. A rainbow stretches out of its pot of gold. Good morning beautiful it says. Yes, I feel beautiful. Glossy hair and skin after braving a local hairdresser on the recommendation of a synchronistic meet up with a client from SriLanka. Weeks of enduring a climate that leeched the moisture from my body, I ponder the next planning phase that takes me back to the leech infested waters of the SriLanka rainforest. The next planning phase already begins. I won’t stop moving now … traveling is my nirvana. 

The metronome stops. My autistic brain settles. 

I don’t get the same pangs of longing anymore when I leave a place. I have rediscovered the feral freedom of my inner child trapped by suburbia now knowing that any place once discovered is a part of my cellular being and what resonates will draw me back.

Sixteen: Free Flow Exercise

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His name is Samraat. He asks if I am going to the waterfall. 

“I have a scooty”, he says. Tempted, I stop and consider his offer. Water drips from my waterproof hood. I wipe my face with water-logged glove. I feel like a child out on an adventure. “Time constraints”, adult me prompts. The inner child pouts. Plans are obstacles I curate to prevent me from getting bored … and then I regret not being able to free fall.

‘Bungee Jumping 1.3km.’ I see an arrow to complete surrender and wonder how far I would go to jolt my psyche out of limiting patterns and paradigms.

“You need a guide”, Samraat persists beyond my distracted mind. Water drips from my fingertips. I’m torn. My morning intention on lacing up my walking shoes was to baptise myself in the waterfall … just my head. The snow has been melting for several days now and the waterfall is my only access to the nirvanic nectar sliding down ravines carrying blessings from god. Not that I believe in god. I’m not sure what I believe in … besides nature … and kindness.

I gaged an hour and a half’s uphill hike would get me hot enough to take the plunge but it’s a rainy day in Bir and the snow is sure to come again tonight.

“Why do I need a guide?” I probe. Animatedly, Samraat tells me about a a big rock he will have to help me climb over. Indignant, I state my certifications as a mountain guide as well as a yoga teacher, qualifying me with both the strength and flexibility to conquer any old rock in a riverbed. But it’s a kilometre away, I’ve walked five and I’m no warmer than when I set out. My hair is wet, my socks are too and I have to be in class in 90 minutes.

I’ve been compared to a horse on an outride before — the whiff of home and I’m off. Focused, single-minded, I don’t need to check time to know it … to feel into it.

Samraat is speaking again, telling me about tours. I no longer hear the content; my body prepares for the canter. I am engaged and disengaged … ADHD. He has a captivating smile, a generous way of being. So, before my body engages full throttle, I retrieve my phone with cold-stiffened fingers. I pass it to him. “Add your number”, I request. “I would love to connect when the rains pass.” Because everything eventually does. Anicca, anicca, anicca.

For now I simply allow the holy drops to anoint me as I push through the veils of where I am and where I hope to be.