purification – WELL WORTH BEING

“a dream
there should be somewhere on earth,
a place which no nation could claim as its own,
where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration,
could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority,
that of the supreme truth;
a place of peace, concord and harmony…”
— The Mother … (had a dream)

A dream is a portal. So too is a nightmare. Chaos and order both are portals. Auroville was that dream. And Auroville is that portal.

When my son finished school he chose to go straight into his studies. I’ve claimed his gap year. Has we slipped dimensions. Cause. Effect. Unlawful Degree by Distinction. I extend my stay at the sublime 4 East Coast Home and book a flight to Delhi for the 8th of February and a flight to Dharamsala 3 days later. Movement can come incrementally. I am exploring options to stay till July… or August … or forever. Will either of us make it back. Is back even an option. Forward is also an anomaly.

Most people dream of a life that is a dream, an illusion. Some dream of a life grounded in reality, in humanity, in freedom and in truth. I’m settled and decide to stay that way. I’m well and happy and finding ways to recalibrate. I have my moments … but they are more like salt in a lake here than salt in a glass of water.

For me. The forest is the portal. Running is my vehicle. I am curious about a path but lack the courage to take it. Yet. I run through a spiderweb. That too is a portal. Superhero. I run. Step by step … no other way for now. Spiderverse awaits. I see a mongoose … My eyeballs search my brain; looking for the plural. I run some more. Everything… the good, the bad, the beauty and fear … comes in plurals.

Altruism is not necessarily grand gestures of generosity and service; altruism can be as simple as being happy and, in being happy, holding happiness for those around you. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is a smile. Sometimes moving a fallen branch from the road or stopping to treat a fallen scooter driver. The paths are dry and sandy. I stoop to retrieve a shoe on the sandy red dust road. Croks it says—erroneously spelled brands come cheap here. I place it on the foot of the small boy who dropped it riding pillion with his mother. A hybrid Cinderella portal to that time way back of wedding sari buying and Nic back-to-back with me on the moped, shouting, “go fast over the next speed bump, Mum, so we can get more air!”

I pass a field of boys playing cricket, pausing to slip into the many memories of four, six and seven-year-old Nic on his Indian cricket tours; playing on the ghats in Varanasi, the town square in Darjeeling, parks and beaches in Goa. I remember the excitement at the IPL in Bangalore and how content he was joining in every cricket game we passed and jumping on the backs of motorbikes with my young colleagues in Auroville for daily cricket games. A part of me wishes he were here and I was studying law.

Space time glitches with precision. Looking for doorways … trying to draw them into my objective reality. Will I still be writing on the other side? For three consecutive days on my forest flings, the same ancient cyclist dismounts his equally ancient cycle at the exact location as I approach in the opposite direction; the same bare-chested Korean teenager runs past me at the exact same junction, and the silver moustached man in a saffron hoodie gives the same steely stare as I cross the new road lined with the remains of the trees. The Chainsaw Massacre was banned in the same era as the birth of Auroville; another thread tethered to inception.

When I recognise the anomaly, it stops happening. Am I through, I wonder. Are you still reading this?

Wild boar sandpits keep me moving forward. I run. The portal to a memory of reading of Ulysses’s wild boar scar on the morning I later encountered a wild boar trapped in a wire fence … human-made in conflict with nature. It is also my trail of crumbs to Penelope in waiting. I can’t stop. My sweat evaporates only when I’m in motion. I stop. Mosquitoes land in clusters on exposed flesh to suck my blood. My edges blur with the steam rising off my body and the mosquitoes drown. Sweating blood, words are like threads through blisters.

I pass the Youth Centre, aging and not yet wise. Perhaps I am straddling the time warp; gradually dissolving across the threshold. My toenails blacken and I run some more.

Feeling stuck in a Philip Pullman novel, I remain on the limen, crouching, my daemon beside me. An elephant. Too heavy to carry, this elephant guide crouches beside me, Diana on her back, my real mother and guide—both creature and human. Both. Because everything travels together. In tree pose, she joins the forest, passive activist; ever-present. Compassionately mothering me into the adult who knows who I am and who isn’t afraid to be the Bohemian she was.

As the sun snaps open its brazen eyes and seeks me out between the silences, leaves spray dew, christening my passage through this puzzling tunnel. I don’t look up, It smacks of ambush. I keep looking over my shoulder. Paranoid South African. It sounds like I am being followed. It takes me a couple of runs to figure out it’s the sound of the nylon running baggies I borrowed from Nic shloofing together between my thighs.

I encounter a herd of cows. They block the path; look docile. But I am wise. I back away, remembering the cow in Varanasi I got too friendly with that horn butted me in the solar plexus; left me breathless and unable to call for help. Some things are more scary than they seem.

Everywhere puppies are suckling. Calves too. The puppies stretch themselves to reach the mother’s teats. The calves contort. If humans had to suckle a cow, I wonder, would they still believe they need its milk. Cognitive dissonance. A herd of goats freely graze, stretching as they do to reach things partially inaccessible and I am taken to the Annapurna mountains of Nepal where the sock-eating goats stretch to reach trekkers’ laundry.

If the tree represents the forest, the road represents humanity. The trees will not get defeated because they are not at war. Holotropic breathwork masters. They know we aren’t yet able to breathe. We fight instead … and burn. False breath, false transformation. We fight because we fight the ignorance we neither desire to confront nor change. The opposite of caring isn’t not caring; the opposite of caring is caring too much. And like a heart breaking doesn’t destroy the heart but only opens it to more love, the trees collude with the elements and the creatures to ensure their seed spawn travel beyond this imagined utopia. The trees don’t fight back. They lift their roots like Ents and retreat to safe haven, a simple manifestation of a current incarnation in wait for the roads to crumble to dust. They trust we won’t last forever.

A man squats in a field; his morning constitution. He holds a newspaper—read and wipe. My sari-clad being makes it into the Hindu Bureau; I feel a sense of relief it’s only online. A dog shits on a speed bump—I share the sentiment. The bumps and dips in the roads, like the bumps and dips in life, build my resilience through the bruising and the pain. I learn to put pressure on the pedals when I ride the potholes so I don’t break my vagina.

The light rain has done nothing to settle the red dust. Everything steams. It’s humid. I crunch the dirt thrown up by motorcycles, cows and construction vehicles between my teeth.

I take refuge in the trees. I offer my love. I breathe. The trees breathe back. I sing with the birds. The temples sing in response. Life is a chant. I spiral in birdsong and shade. And from the villages beyond the trees, Bollywood blasts from a megaphone and my body moves in synch. I dance in chaos and move to flow … and back again. Both polarities can reside in harmony; a harmony borne only through the portal of conflict. Order leads to chaos and chaos will ultimately always make way to order. Harmony isn’t calm … harmony is about being able to move between it all and not get lost in the clinging onto just one aspect of the entire range. Order is safe but chaos brings change. Within everything is the seed of its destruction. Struggle always manifests new life, generates resilience.

Post a 4-day water fast (translation here is 4 days no water as opposed to the 4 days only water that it is) I choose an integrating walk in the forest. I see a runner in the distance. My competitive subconscious kicks in. I run to overtake him. Podium position. It feels simultaneously pointless and fun. I get my dopamine where I can. Not running away from anything. Running towards everything.

The head of a kid goat lies with a vacant stare on a roadside table, its severed body already butchered, more distressing than butchered trees. Trees grow back, goats don’t. Nearby, an old goat sits on its concrete block not wanting to move where the rope no longer tightens around its throat. The other side is tied to a tree, beneath its branches a shady patch of grass. It reminds me that I too feel like I am tied to the branches and pulling away despite it throttling me. At the end of my tether. How often do we tie ourselves to that which seems to bring comfort only to find we are strangled by our own knots?

It takes 2,979 hours to walk to Japan and 1,850 hours to walk to Bali. My journey stretches out like the thousands of steps and I feel such liberation in my diminished attachments and in not being missed. I won’t be returning as planned on 11 April. I won’t be walking to Japan or Bali but I will be flying to Kathmandu. They offer a 90 day visa and I’m thinking it would be a waste not to utilise all 90. My work is loved here; I feel I am too … both appreciated and received … but I must leave. Some aren’t ready to heal. The trees have spoken and I need to let the dead leaves drop so the new can grow; I need to expand my branches and drop aerial roots so I can expand outwards to provide more shade for those who need it.

The world that I am used to is gone and I am on the limen of finding the new. I buy a magnificent scarf emblazoned with golden dragonflies and when I reach my bedroom door, there is a dragon fly clinging to the string tied to the lock. It flies in after me.

Reminiscent of clearing my storage after four years; moving only what was absolutely essential into the house I built, so too have I cleared my inner storage containers and what I now put back in is what will stay and sustain and support.

I have become the woman who would have taken care of me as a child. And now I take care of the me I have become through the portal of travel.

I don’t only walk to preserve my budget. I walk to get lost. To see things the driver obstructs; to hear things the engine exiles. Humming birds and porcupine quills. I walk fast; my feet attempting to keep pace with my brain. Both, therefore, get lost fast too. I don’t only get lost of my own volition; I get lost following the erroneous lefts and rights, mismatched hands and words, often both unwittingly pointing me in directions I am loathe to explore. My internal maps plot emotional puzzles poured out of the box onto muddy roads, and I hold both the anxiety of not knowing and the wisdom of where I am.

I spiral the town. A tuk tuk driver has passed me several times on the 10km walk to cover a 4km distance trying to find my way to the Wewurukannala Vihara Temple. “Get in. No money, I help you”, he says, and drives me left where the last hand indicated right. Giant Buddhas and the tunnels of hell. Formidable trolls and grotesque monsters. Torturers and demons. I run from Dante’s Inferno into the den of the temple elephant fighting its chained feet in its own version of hell. Punishment can sometimes come without crime. Movement is not always a choice.

Pushing into physical, emotional, mental and psychic (sweet) pain is the system’s means of purification and it is with this knowing that I follow my path. The roaming map of cardinal points and dotted lines is redundant. To plot the sights I have to find meaning in the terrain. It’s never this OR that. No absolutes. It’s only ever both AND that. Travelling expands me into the dynamic landscapes of the outer and the inner and gives me prompts to live into. It shifts my perspectives and changes my reality, stretches me to shed the ego system in favour of the eco system that informs my knowing rather than my known.

INJF, 29/11, Enneagram 4. I have attached to labels that work for me to shed the ones maliciously given. I struggle with my tangled mind and restless body over liquid marzipan dressed up as a regular flat white, at Dots Co-working Surf Cafe. I’ve been avoiding the coffee spots here. Because it’s Ceylon. It’s all about tea. Opportunistic to a fault, though, any market here is swiftly seized; entrepreneurship aroused by Europeans clamouring door-to-door for real espresso. If Hiriketiya is the goldmine of coffee lovers, Dots is the golden goose and the coffee costs its weight in gold.

STaY WEiRD demands the wall behind Hiriketiya Beach. Last night’s storm has brought the cold river to the ocean. I swim in pockets of remembered waterfalls and ride the waves. Bodysurfing; floating; buoyant. It often takes complete isolation from the regular distortions and distractions of daily life to sit with Me; to not turn away from the things that haunt and hurt; to allow those too to dissolve and discharge. I merge.

Having compensated for so long around ADHD and narcolepsy, perched on that cross-over spectrum with autism, has been a struggle to some degree but mostly a blessing. It has caused me to almost lose or take my life; has gotten me into a whole lot of risk taking, and resulted in some radical burnout episodes. Yet it has also forced me to up my game in motherhood; driven me to all kinds of personal, financial, health and study achievements, and encouraged an immense amount of courage to bubble up from my depths. It is my superpower.

As with maps, labels and identities do not a human being make. They give a guideline to better understanding. Integration is the full access key to cohesion. The terrain is in a constant state of dynamic change as other factors come into play and change the landscape; as new developments get constructed, as new roads get build, as old ones grow over or go into disrepair or are totally demolished. Being is also a verb.

Men with hoes dig and sandbag; the beach collapses like I do into the river in flood. Sun beds teeter on the edge. Always alert, evaluating, deliberating, I show them where to dig a channel to let the water out. Diversions are sometimes required. I linger at the beach, perched on a rock at the far end where my eyes can soften and settle on the hazy palm-encrusted crescent panorama of sea, surfers, sun worshipers, and that spray-painted wall on the very edge of the surreal.

When I travel I don’t have the same drains on my energy. My attention, intention and energy are (hyper)focused on making things good in the world. I feel a great call to go where my work is most needed and valued. I give of my gifts, my skills, my experience and logical thinking. I give of my heart and my commitment. There’s a sense of symbioses that pulls on my year’s word, Equanimity. My work changes lives. It is egotistical to feel insufficient. Arrogance and humility are upside down. I treat a young foreigner. I ‘see’ violation. “It’s not your fault”, I say. She weeps. “It’s not your fault”, I repeat. #metoo

‘It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person.’ — Amelie Rorty

I recognise the irony in how inconspicuous I feel in a place I am so different and yet in Hiriketiya Bay where there are so many people who look ‘like me’, I get that uncomfortable edge of standing out. I micro-dose on public exposure and retreat to the containment of my homestay where writing and meditation are my closest allies and comfort. Detecting a tendency to be infatuated with being the outlier; the weird one; the pioneer who many only understand in hindsight, it can also find me fatigued. I have lapses justifying myself; I play myself down; lose focus trying to conceal myself. The pendulum is my kryptonite; it swings too high. Vertiginous.

The inner parts, both real and also not true, are identities to observe and let go … parts that need befriending not battling. I hold it all in dualistic dynamism: the anxiety with the joy; the isolation with the connection; the contraction with the expansion. The true warrior transmutes conflict into dance and thus the battle ends. Building courage is like building a muscle. I am not fit like I have previously been, but I am strong. I have lost inches of physical matter and, since the cells hold memories, the secreted physical waste drains emotional and mental sludge too.

Hot bitter coffee juxtaposed with warm mango and coconut flesh. My body takes it all and condenses it into a concise and accessible mingling of tastes and textures that create my human experience. I greedily assimilate, remaking all that dwells beneath my skin. I want to change my name to days of the week. Every day is a poem; a metaphor; a waymarker with no final destination. And my body is the poet.

My last day in Hiriketiya brings symbolic showers, an apt affirmation of renewal as I wander to the Bay for a final swim. The ocean is my church. I lie on my back and gaze at the clouds; gentle rain anoints my face.

Next stop, Galle Fort.