Tag: adventure

Four: The Peak of Pilgrimage

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Mercurial Gemini with a strong intellect and speed, I get myself so tied up in knots over labels and judgements; flummoxed by the dangerous new age bullshit of either being in my head OR in my body. My pilgrimage this past year has almost broken me; taken jackhammers to my psyche trying to understand where the unique intersection is between the paper doll, the shadow and the self; made me sick wasting energy justifying who and how I am … on blending two parts of myself that were never separate.

“Now, about that word authentic. It is related to the word author—and you can think of it as being the author of your own self.” — Marion Woodman

Being authentic and spiritual makes me the more real, not the less. It guides me on those internal spiralling pilgrimages down passages of grief and awakening. I touch into every part of me that is also a part of you and therefore a part of everyone and everything in the universe. I can’t hide or deny any aspect of myself. And so I write and I walk and I journey to the places most are afraid to go; places I am mostly also afraid to go.

Slightly Chilled. The name of a guest house I pass on my walk to find real coffee. Nescafe signs send me away. Coconut time. I walk to the river and put my feet in the coolness. Vegetable Garden House is Super Chilled—the family, the garden setting, the beautiful young travellers I meet over delectable Sri Lankan breakfast dishes and weird Sri Lanka coffee.

I wake before the three alarms I have set. It’s 1h40. I am dressed in full hiking gear when I climb into bed at 8pm. My fast-pack is loaded with every warm item of clothing I brought with me, including the pink shawl (the Diana I take on every pilgrimage), a kikoi, extra socks, an entire change of clothing and merino wool gloves. Geared up with head torch and rain jacket, I emerge from my room to the sight of a woman also kitted out for the climb. Her name is Cami, she’s from Paris and it’s her 32nd birthday. It’s hard to imagine I’m twenty years her senior. I feel 35 again, meeting young travellers on their first round of adventure. I get the sense I am being appraised with a measure of curiosity; they are not sure which bracket to place me in as I am the age of the mothers who are in the process of making home and being normal.

Walking this path often means walking alone. And alone isn’t about being without people but without the capacity to articulate my sense of self. Relationships fail for me because I attach to an ideal based on what the world wants from me rather than what I myself want for me; I attach to the illusion of what it promises despite knowing that intentions are generally to ‘fix’ my rabid self reliance in order to make others feel less conflicted and more comfortable with their own erroneous attachments.

Most hikers in Cape Town know the Newlands Forest 400 steps. Add another 5,100, throw in a gazillion tons of concrete, hundreds of neon lights, tea stalls, sweet stalls, Buddha statues, snack bars and innumerable walkers from as old as ancient and as young as infant. It’s a lot to take in. I have the intention to do two nights in a row up SriPada. I am delusional.

Like the star at the top of the Christmas tree, the cluster of neon lights marks the end point of the climb, where the foot of Buddha is believed to have dented the top of the hill. I am initially captivated by the continuous row of lumens lighting up the path until I recognise the reality and the altogether fabulous absurdity of it all. A monk ties a white string around my wrist with blessings for the journey and, similarly to the Camino de Santiago scallop shell, I am branded a pilgrim and given kudos for my commitment.

I navigate new pathways and pave new neurological networks. Like the silk of the spider’s web or moth’s cocoon, the white pilgrims threads create initiation networks, a semi-permanent anchor on the railings. I lay paths that others may follow, not because I know my way but so others may know it’s okay to not know. There are no solid  lines on this map. Only hyphenated. A dot-to-dot puzzle. This is my Sadhana.

People sleep where they sit. A young girl walks holding her mother’s hand; sleepwalking. A man walks barefoot; it’s his 15th time to the Peak. “Is that a spiritual thing?” asks my walking companion. “No, my boots got too heavy”, he replies, focused fully as he places each footfall tentatively on the gnarled concrete. But I feel differently. That kind of pain can only be a spiritual experience. People carry babies and toddlers, people sing to encourage each other, and the elderly use the  railings to replace worn out knees. Babies cry; some adults too. It’s an endless river in flow, night after night after night. The same yet always different.

Everything in life is pilgrimage. Nothing we do or say or love is unique. Yet, in pursuit of being individual … special … we try to carve our own way and, in doing so, fail to recognise the struggle, the value, the pull, of all the millions that came before. And without proper ritual to honour the trajectory of sameness, we ultimately get lost.

I lie awake on the second night in the shadow of SriPada imagining the thousands more trudging to the peak, and I know that as weird and whacky a pilgrimage it is, I am bound to do it again … many times. People who judge me for my atypical free-spirited escapades also follow me vicariously; afraid to step into the groundlessness of the abyss … smothering themselves instead in the illusion of hoarding for something that never comes. A guru tells me that I’m on the right path when fewer and fewer people understand me. 

I travel solo so I can disappear into a framework of existence that doesn’t require justification or proof of my being. I travel solo to untether myself from these insidious and relentless chains curtailing my capacity to simply be. I travel solo so I can re-understand myself.

Courage is my currency.

Three: It’s a Jungle out there

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At international departures, Cape Town, a father bribes his daughter with a lollipop to “kiss uncle on the mouth”. The gateway to abuse. I’ve been there. Always having to ‘be nice’, to not offend, I still don’t always recognise it until in hindsight when boundaries have been violated and trust already fractured. It happened last year in India with an 80-year-old man I saw as a father figure, until he threw me out of his home when I denied his lascivious advances. My son called it, told me how obvious his angle was. I felt foolishly naive.

And it happened again this week in the spice garden. Well regarded and highly respected, I wanted to meet the almost 70-year-old herbal medicine doctor. At 50, his wife was run down by a train and he retreated to a cave on a barren hill where he has lived the past 17 years. Slowly slowly, sherpa style, he began by planting a simple vegetable garden to sustain himself and gradually expanded the planting, integrating his holistic medicinal knowledge. An area of regular landslides and death due to receding vegetation is now jungle once more. I caveat this with an ‘allegedly’ at the end of each statement as what followed gives me cause to doubt. I get a tour of the spice garden and a pulse reading and feel inspired to return as a volunteer to help him reach his target of adding another 8million trees to the 2million already planted. And then he hugged me and told me I would have to dedicate three hours a day to sex and that my energy was causing him to want to do things to me with his tongue. Confused, I busied myself in the herbal shop, got financially exploited for remedies I don’t trust are the real deal and fled in the getaway tuk tuk back to Kandy. Trust … boundaries … total weirdness … that’s life, although it shouldn’t have to be.

The benefit of approaching menopause is the transition from fertile body to fecund mind. I am driven more into the space of exposing sexual harassment; not remaining quiet; not protecting anyone regardless of how incredible a human they are (allegedly). Even when it still feels awkward and uncomfortable doing so, I want to work towards flicking off the ‘nice switch’ in the moment of feeling violated.

“From earth”, is the new retort to men more interested in my marital status than my birth place. I add, “my wife is taking care of my son.” A happy boundary. Despite my occasional need for a facetious push back, I have found the Sri Lankan people to be engaging, kind, helpful and super chilled. Safe I am.

Navigating a new country is like learning a new language. And Madugalle Friendly Gamily Guesthouse has become a familiar language. This is a new comfort zone. I consider canceling my trip to climb Sri Pada to stay two more nights … but there is also the tensile force pulling me to challenge myself on whether I have in fact found a new way to engage with this relentless downpour and climb 7km up 5,500 steps to almost 2,500m, a 1km ascent with a gazillion pilgrims … starting at 3am to summit for sunrise. This all sounds mad, right? 

Linda Goodman sums me up in her Sun Signs tome I discovered as a teenager when I had lost myself in the dysfunction of my family system. “Why walk when you can run?” is the single line adhered to my psyche. I use this as justification for my special kind of crazy.

One last delicious curry—green beans and sweet potatoes—at Mrs Madugalle. A walk for a final coffee at Natural Coffee Kandy. It’s still closed. And rain comes tumbling down … in drops, then sheets, then buckets. The coffee is worth it; waiting in the rain isn’t. The people are short enough for the countless umbrellas to take out an eye and the eaves drip exactly where the walkway is. I arrive home wet. Packed and as ready as I’ll be, the only thing to do is get to Vegetable Garden House in Nallthaniya, ten minutes walk to the start of the 5,500 step climb.

I’m great making choices when I have no choice. Confused the first time I heard this, I learn to let go of regrets and accept that I also have to do certain things just to know I don’t want to do them … which means often I have to just go with the (moment)um and know a fail is as good as a win. Not brave enough for the bus, not scared enough for a taxi … the tuk tuk always comes out top. I order a PickMe. I enjoy the road tripping and so far I have had super friendly humans behind the handlebars.

We stop for king coconut and tea. The road is good to begin with and then I understand better why taxis command such a high fare. The roads become potholed and corrugated and there are entire sections of wash away down the mountainside. I feel the bus may have been a stretch too far for me and am grateful for my wise choice. Eventually I hear the voices of all the bugs over the sound of the tuk tuk engine; I see waterfalls and hilltops; I see tea plantations and rice paddies beside dense trees and forest foliage; I see life. NOW we are in the jungle! The first 80km build the anticipation and I keep feeling like I must be there already but with the state of the flooding, the last 25km take as long. Huts, tea houses, shops and lodges hang precipitously from the cliffs. I see the remains of homes not lucky enough to escape the recent deluge. Four and half hours after setting out, the lush and comfy Vegetable Garden House stretches out into a field. It grounds me. No vertiginous sleeping. I commend myself on another excellent choice.

There is a fire in my chest. The doctor warned of a potential healing crisis and, if this is it, I’m going to be just fine. The past months are burning off me now and the two weeks I have been away feel endless and infinite. Before departure my body was in a condensed state of dis-ease and I developed a pathology that causes me to hold my breath. My diaphragm gets stuck; my soft centre curls in on itself … I can get to the precipice of blacking out. As with the packing process, I am paralysed by the phobia of taking up too much space. If I hold my breath will I shrink? I consider if this is why I push myself on runs and hikes. Is it the only time I fully breathe?

Tonight I practice breathing. Tonight I climb. Tonight I allow the jungle to breathe for me.

Two: Christmas Not

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Memories of Christmas Day are entangled with images of a hunk of pig flesh skewered by toothpicks securing pineapple rings and cherries. I stopped subscribing to Christmas cruelty almost twenty years ago and feel relieved to escape this insanity in Sri Lanka.

Mrs Madugalle, owner of Madugalle Friendly Family Guest House (Kandy Inn), keeps me topped up with porcelain pots of Ceylon tea and sits down to chat. I prattle away in my usual way, offering up 100 words a minute on the premise that if only 30 are understood, that’s a good result. Concerned about my lack of appetite since my water fast, she animatedly recommends an Ayurvedic doctor “only two minutes walking from my door”. What allopathic doctors, she says, couldn’t do for her in months with medicines, he cured in three sessions. I booked immediately. As a Buddhist, Christmas day is also just a Monday.

Pierced chakras and moxibustion heat down each shaft into my body and my freakish mind conjures up the Christmas roast. It’s painful … but in a good way. 
“I give you a little massage now?” With nothing more than threadbare towel and scant knickers as personal boundaries; I instantly feel regret for an offer too quickly accepted and, as my mind recreates memories, my muscles become taut at the impending experience of having a strange man’s hands all over my body. Accused of being a prude for most of my adolescence, desperate to be accepted, I dropped many vital boundaries. Perfect prey for the plucking. But this is post-Vipassana … “with a calm and equanimous mind”, I practice instead directing attention to the sensations of my body—“the reality as it is”.

The frequency at which I vibrate—physical, emotional, mental and soulful—attracts the same. If I struggle to trust, untrustworthy people will be drawn to me. As the protagonist changes so do the supporting roles; as the instruments change, so too the melody. I unravel the myth of my life to pull new threads and weave new narratives. It’s not always easy … which is why it’s called a practice.

From feet to head and hair, my entire body is slathered in ghee—ready for the oven—and my head with eucalyptus, until my chi and my trust are restored and detoxified. He’s thorough and brilliant and I feel safe in his healing hands. And that’s how I spend my first three hours of Christmas day and Boxing day—learning lessons in trust. I feel I have changed my tune.

The lotus perfume tacky in my nostrils as I gather with thousands of people at Sri Dalada Maligawa with their offerings. Babies start wailing; sweat drips off someone’s forehead onto my arm. I want to go NOW … a futile fancy. As an ADHD Duracell bunny with narcolepsy and a stroke of autism, there’s always a chance in high tension situations that I will either freak out … or nod off. The drumming begins along with a crush of bodies; a buildup that can only lead to denied expectations. Agitation … near panic; I cover my ears and close my eyes; the air is too thick to breathe. Every second seems like minutes waiting for tardy monks to open shrine doors to momentarily expose the Tooth Relic to masses intoxicated by their devotion. And, with the big reveal, the heaving horde gets propelled like peristalsis past a relic barely visible behind a large man in robes raking in bribes in exchange for enlightenment. Was it even there? Religious dogma. I am disillusioned. Forcing my way through clammy bodies, I at last burst out into the night. The storm clouds close in like primordial fluid. It’s time to contract and retreat to home base. 

Corresponding expansion comes twice a day with a circuit of Kandy Lake where, amidst the excessive sound, plastic and carbon monoxide pollution, reside furred, scaled, finned, fanged, winged and feathered creatures, all seemingly oblivious to the madness of humanity at their threshold.

As a foreigner walking around Kandy Lake, it’s important to trust boundaries … to remain equanimous with every offer of a tuk tuk ride to somewhere I don’t want to go … to never get frustrated repeating myself and to keep an even tone after countless, “no thank you, I want to walk”, “yes, I know where I’m going”, “no, I wouldn’t like to buy gems … wood carvings … your first born …” It’s crazy out there. I politely decline an offer from Lesley “look at my Trip Advisor profile … where you want to go?” to take me any of the places he goes, tell him I’d like to enjoy my walk, and move on. Two monitor lizards, a hundred bats, five dogs and a turtle later, there he stands with the dejected look of a man being dismissed at a bar, a foreign couple shaking their heads at him and moving on. I take his number. You never know, I say, I may want to go somewhere other than around the lake and to see the hope induced mirage of ancient relics.

There’s a worm in my ear that has been boring through my brain since Vipassana. It is the sound of ice cream trucks and rickshaw hawkers playing the high-pitched tunes of programming. Combined—simultaneously—with DJs smashing out some banging beats and megaphone mantras from temples, I feel an impulse. I call Lesley; it’s time for the jungle.

I travel to re-familiarise myself with the harmonious interplay between planning and whim … knowing that one requires the other. I travel to feel into … to breathe into … to emote into … to love into … the infinitesimal galactic marriage I have with the world. I travel not to find freedom but because it is always there.

And here I am at Lal Homestay, a haven from the city, after a tuk tuk tour to Dambulla Cave Temple, a roadside health food eatery in the Ayurvedic spice garden district, the essential coconut (“eating, drinking”), and a walk (scramble) in the rain to the top of Pidurangala Rock. A young girl climbs the rock in strappy Grecian sandals; I suspect they will soon be discarded along with the multitude abandoned footwear. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only choices around how I engage with it. Travel feeds me but hiking does more; the combination is my sweet spot. A quick up and down a rock, shrouded by fresh misty air, tropical rain and lush vistas is the alchemical elixir, the perfume fruit, the lotus flower.

Still restless, I walk some more. In Sigiriya village, I stop at a signpost at a Rasta restaurant: South Africa 7493km. It doesn’t seem possible it could still be so close; it doesn’t feel it should exist at all. I am in my bubble. If no one sees me do I still exist? To make sure, I ask permission to ring the big bronze bell at the monastery. I expand my wonder-full soul with sound. 

I decide not to climb the tourist highlight, Sigiriya (Lion) Rock, because of something I read to Nic from the India photobook prior to both of us departing. On the trip to Chennai Int’l the last time we went to India, I mentioned something we hadn’t had time to do and he said, “that’s ok, Mum, because it means we have something to come back for.” This inspires me to not only return again but to do so with the budget to view Lion Rock from the sky … in a hot air ballon. Yes, that’s a real thing here. And it’s in my crystal ball calendar.

I wake at 3.30am—my body clock having over-compensated by an hour or two—to rain as strong as my desire to walk. The world is a mysterious wonder and when I wander I find the mystery in me. It’s as much a calling as a compulsion. Strong black tea is delivered at 6am and a fruit platter at 7am. And then the wet weather gear gets reinstalled for a morning walk around the Lion in lieu of the summit. Alone on a road between a waterway and a jungle, I have noted the wild elephant warnings and have decided that, if encountered, I will take the waterway and just swim for it.

The squawk of peacocks comes first. An explosion of monkeys from the undergrowth follows.  There is eerie creaking, then the loud cracking and shattering of a tree falling towards the road. The chattering and squealing monkeys line up on the treetops; front row seats at the wildlife playhouse … there’s something there, and it’s BIG! My three Fs are Fight or Flight or Figure it out. Curiosity gets the better of me. But visibility is poor enough in the downpour and, failing climbing up to join the raucous crowd, I can’t see through the density of the first row of trees to claim a sighting. There is leopard here too. What a way to go. But I’m not yet ready. I walk away … slowly, lightly … I am neither prey nor predator.

Returning to Kandy, the real benefit of choosing tuk tuk travel becomes evident with the inundation of cars turning single lane roads into triple lane highways.. It feels like we’re in a getaway tuk tuk. I’m chilled; speed is my vibe. Between bouts of swerving and weaving and extreme driving skills, we take the crucial pit stops: coconut water and sweet fruits.

Roadside, a vendor adeptly carves a mango and bags it … peel and tip still intact yet dismembered from its seed. We stop beside a lake to eat with a view. I pull the skin back and sink my teeth into perfumed flesh, drinking each segment too juicy to chew. The earth stops still for a moment for me to savour what I am living into. Samadhi.

I have discarded the maps in favour of the territory and I am still just getting to grips with the lay of the land. And as I go, I plot my way. There really is no such thing as getting lost.

One: At the Bosom of Mama Lanka

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Those who do not move do not notice their chains. Proclaimed a shrewd woman.

The foetus curls and unfurls in development; contracting and expanding in a natural state of growth. Pupating. Never static. Everything needs space to find its place, to plug into the blueprint of becoming … to emerge and retreat in flow.

My home is that place and space for me. A Bohemian sanctuary of safe retreat and recalibration, this is my womb. Like being under water, all the noises of the outside world shut out, all I hear is the d-doff-doff of the eternal Mother Heart. Foetal eyes closed tight, it’s where I find my rhythm, my momentum, my impetus and vitality. It’s how I can move once more into the world.

And when I move, I travel. 

I travel not to find myself but to discover more of who I am beneath the layers that have been pasted like papier-mâché around my feral human form. I travel to return to mother soul. I travel to find purpose … or a reason to believe that the seeking in and of itself is that purpose. Not everyone has an opus. I go out into the world as a single instrument looking to play; as a puzzle piece with connectors revealed, looking for my bigger picture.

This time I travel to find my way beyond my own mothering womb of 18 years. Against the odds I have nurtured as sacred guardian a soul that needed genesis through my own genetic coding to emerge and flourish in both my shadow and my light. He birthed me when I birthed him, synergistically growing me into the mother he required. The infinity symbol harmonises; a conductor directing and collecting. Having leapt the chasm, he travels now through a new fallopian tube. Tumbling through more primordial fluid into an eerie void, he will land with a gentle thud in the universal uterine wall, transforming it into his own womb space of transition and transformation. His own new universe. A brand new birth.

There is a tensile force in everything—I often reference Jung’s tension of the opposites—and often when I begin my travels I can get stuck in the birth canal. I work hard to break the strength of this force pulling me back into cosy womb space until I feel into the strength of the equal and opposite force pulling me forward into the absurdly lit delivery room. Doha airport proves this time to be that tipping point, stuck there as I am for a seeming eternity, nowhere to go, exhausted from labour pains.

And then, schlooop, I am corkscrewed out. Safe now at the bosom of Mama Lanka in the delivery room of my new birthing, my newly opened eyes seek out the familiar. It’s like India … but different. She is a tired mama with the ravaged features of pillage. And I can’t quite find a connection.

“We must always change, renew and rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.” Goethe

I rest like a baby, waking for only a couple of hours at a time, discouraged by my floundering sense of adventure. I just need encouragement when courage fails me. Forceps or suction cup; an intervention. So I order a PickMe scooter, ride pillion and get transported to Mount Lavina Beach where dogs shelter from noon behind ancient fisher boats and tourists don’t. The sun feels closer here. It drains the dye from their towels as fast as it paints their transparent-skin puce. My walk is short. A mirage at the end of the beach entices me with seductions of marble lobbies and cocktails; dark roast coffee and a powder room. I draw close. It is a looming relic as old and as weak now as the British Empire that built it; it is the decrepit Mount Lavinia Hotel. I often quip that when I am done with this life, I will just take a long walk into the Atlantic. Some call this dark humour; those who know me nod and smile … whilst others offer to help me in. The Mount Lavinia looks done. Poised as it is over the ebb and flow of the warm Indian Ocean, each lap of a wave beckons siren-like. Rest now, they say.

It’s important not to fight the pull but to go with it to the very depths of where it is calling; only by sinking to the very bottom is it possible to kick back up. Never struggle against a riptide they say. I surrender to the incubator—Kosgama Vipassana Meditation Centre—for an 8-day sit. I arrive in basic black. Everyone is in full white. Shadow against light.

I write volumes in my head whilst sitting cross legged, mostly in the pain of closed eyed stillness. But the words get washed from my brain like monsoon raindrops on parchment. Diana, my paternal grandmother, is always near, shrouded as I am in the shawl I bought so many years … decades … ago when I did pilgrimage to her birth town, Mussoorie, in India. It had to be pink of course as I only just realise, as a counter to all the blue knits she created while I was pickling in utero in primordial juices of undifferentiated gender. I wasn’t meant to be a girl … yet here I am – SO girl and also SO not. It was Diana who birthed me into the writer, the activist, the creative, the adventurer … the quirky crazy bohemian. The exotic in her spawned the exotic in me. She needed an ally. She didn’t knit blue for a boy; she knitted blue because blue was her favourite colour. I have her blue eyes.

The spiritual symbolism of gecko is rebirth, regeneration and renewal. They are guardians and protectors and a symbol of Diana for me. As an apt reminder of her, each evening during the discourse, a black gecko launches itself off the pitch of the hexagon hall ceiling, it’s jaws clenched around a bug too big to eat that it likely caught mid flight. Bad ass. I am transfixed as it stays there in cobra asana before disappearing. The teachings become a hum of white noise until the bell sounds. I am back. Programmed puppet. 

For eleven hours each day I disappear. I am nothing with no identity and no voice … an accumulation of atoms in noble silence—meditator number 11 in room 6A. Room 6A is a mildewy space inhabited only by spiders and geckoes down a dark dusty corridor; the light at the end pulling me towards the cold shower at 4am each day. The big-footed frog clings to the glass doorway. It too is desperate to escape the prison-like barracks I call home for a week. I hate it. And I love it because I hate it.

There is a luminous white bird that flaunts a tail double the length of its body; its head is ink black concealing its enlightenment. A pointy-eared black dog approaches, wide-eyed. My shadow still lingers. I wonder if anyone else can see it … either the shadow or the dog. A black moth loses it’s way and touches down on my head; perhaps there is moonlight there now.

In the mornings I sit at my designated table. 11. It’s at the window high above the road with dense treetops showing off large green coconuts ripe for the plucking, and dates the birds and monkeys have looted; I watch them scamper off with the spoils. I am still not hungry, my body doesn’t want food as I enter day three then day four and five of water fasting.

I watch leaves float from trees so familiar with the letting go, and a frond from a date palm only partially severed from the source of itself and dying now with the umbilical cord still attached. It changes through the hues of the robes I observe on the monks in the Dhamma Hall and on the washing lines—saffrons and subtle shades of chartreuse, and reds. The frond hangs in situ, shackled by inertia.

DDDD-DOEM! Thunder drums and the string musicians pluck the sound of rain as it assaults the earth, first like needles then like baubles. Raised roots are unable to suck it up as fast as it lands. It rises, washing the parched soil like the gallons of water I consume cleanses away the dense matter of the past two months that has barricaded me into this piñata shape. The butterfly within is almost ready to open and expand after so much contraction. 

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” Alan Watts

It’s easy to break addiction to craving, easy too to break addiction to aversion … it’s the addiction to the peaceful place at centre that is the most difficult to expel. Sankaras get shaken to the surface and I grimace—I don’t want to see them but see them I must—then start again with calm equanimity. The pain I feel today will be the strength I feel tomorrow. Anicca anicca anicca.

A mosquito bites me three times and I spitefully murder it. Broken sila. The hall is plunged into darkness and I wonder if I have been sent to hell. Close to full moon, thousands of ants have sprouted wings and taken flight … on the wrong side of the walls of this octagonal building. Thou shalt not kill. The monk teacher has killed the thrill of lumens to enable a gentle sweeping of their confused bodies out into the free moon air. And the next day it is complete.

This course gave me exactly what I needed. The end. I can’t help but wonder if, just as one grows out of a particular therapist, I have grown out of the requirement for Vipassana courses, like a dudu blanket no longer required once the practice of sleep has been embodied.

The umbilical cord is cut.

Before you begin the journey, you own the journey.
Once you begin the journey, the journey owns you.

PickMe is the Sri Lankan taxi app that keeps the money here and gives it directly to the driver. You can book anything from a ride on the back of a scooter to an eight-seater touring bus. I used the scooters in Colombo, a car to the Vipassana centre in Kosgama and now decide the 3.5-hour drive to Kandy would have to be by tuk tuk.

First stop: green coconut. I pull out my bamboo straw to suck up the what feels like litres of soothing nectar. And the machete finale reveals there is indeed enough succulent white flesh to scoop up and take with me for the remaining tooth-rattling journey.

Tea flows and I crave coffee … sankaras are deeply rooted. “Sugar?” everyone enquires, with that drug peddling haze of desire. I try to see it as a term of endearment.

The church bells ring and I rise, zombie-like from my bed, conditioned now by the morning gong. What bliss! to settle back into slumber for a few more hours. The delightful Mrs Madugalle, proprietor of Kandy Inn (Friendly Family Guesthouse), has prepared vegetable curry for me for breakfast.
“No rice!?”, she clutches her heart, incredulous. 
“Oats porridge?” she ventures. I glibly shake my head. She slumps into the seat opposite me with a half smile, searching my face for irony. Feeling just marginally ashamed yet very much behind my conviction to no longer eat out of obligation, I counter with “simple fruit or veg is just perfect.” I watch my right hand directed upwards doing the wrist twist thing as I talk, adding an occasional sideways head nod, both knowing and having no clue what either mean. Chuckling, with the sideways nod, she settles on beans and pumpkin curry.
“With some dhal?” she adds tentatively. I nod and bow my head in gratitude for this council and opportunity to be heard in all my quirkiness around years of developing food habits that heal me.

Morning tea the British way, waiting for my breakfast, a cat approaches—black with piercing green eyes—and wanders into my room. I walk in after it to ask it to leave and find it has completely disappeared. Perhaps this too is a portal. I feel both nurtured and vulnerable; contained and adventurous … that balanced peaceful place between the aversion and the craving. Kandy Inn is nursing me with healing hands and soothing kindness.

It’s Christmas Day but really just another Monday. I have an appointment with an Ayurvedic doctor after breakfast and then I go exploring Kandy on foot. Natural Coffee Kandy and Tranquil Vegan Rose are first on my list, followed by a walk around the lake and an evening at the Tooth Relic Temple.

Part of the process of growing is to shed as much as it is to acquire. From brutal suctioned birthing into the delivery room, I am now here.

Welcome to the world, baby girl.

Zero: An Awfully Big Adventure 2.0

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I embark on my next delivery after an extended labour, birthing once more the now grown child who birthed me. A process towards the unfolding of this myth I call my life which is in fact a life that has me.

I am weaving again: Penelope the weaver transmuted to a weaver bird in the throes of nest building; the kind that hangs by a thread … I am following the thread that both time and life defy linearity, and all exists simultaneously in one single moment; one drop; one seed; one fallen leaf in the book of consciousness.

The first knot of the weaver’s lattice creation meets the last, which is also the first, that ties them all together in an amalgamation of existence … with that one lose thread of imperfection that can be a golden thread of a noose.

Strapping on my boots with my wings and pulling up roots like an Ent on the move, one piece of ground is no more or less important; only segregated by the ignorance of the construct of fear.

(written on the plane just before takeoff on 14/12/23)