symbols – WELL WORTH BEING

As I plan the next Pilgrimage, I reflect on how I got to this point and how my embarking on this journey to raise awareness for Mental Health has both negatively and positively impacted those in my circle, my community and my life in general … and the corresponding impact others’ attitudes, words and actions have had on me.

Depression has become that kind of familiar place that I am now able to visit—albeit unintentionally—and, despite the mostly unbearable discomfort and burning desperation to either just die or get out, I can sit in the stench of it and allow it to show me the neon signs of my next destination.

Sometimes I simply want the signs to say, JUMP! or TAKE A VERY LONG WALK INTO THE OCEAN! Sometimes I don’t want to notice the EXIT sign because life outside of this black hole can seem too scary compared to this familiar discomfort. Most times, as in this current case, the signs are so glaringly powerful that they kick my ass out of there with no choice but to follow the trajectory they are pointing me to.

When I stopped anaesthetising the discomfort of my dysfunctional marriage with alcohol and sugar 15 years ago, I took to running … and running … and running some more. And when I again chose an abusive relationship that ended in verbal and sexual violation, I walked 450km in Portugal on two separate and consecutive Camino de Santiago routes.

Sitting in the trenches of this most recent depression, I was booted out only on reaching the point of knowing the only thing that could literally save me was to walk … far … long … intensely and intentionally … and in collaboration with my most pronounced character trait and, consequent greatest value: showing up in service to individuals, communities and to the environment in a manner that allows whatever it is that life is wanting to live through me.

I can inordinately deliberate over choices. Reaching the decision to walk 1,000km across Spain, and subsequently coming to the realisation that I wanted to do it in an altruistic manner, however, happened in less than 24 hours. It took another 24 hours to reach the decision to turn it into a community collaboration by launching a BackaBuddy fundraising campaign to ask for support in order to support.
https://backabuddy.co.za/campaign/walking-for-mental-health

With full transparency and gut-wrenching vulnerability, I have revealed truths about the foundations of my innate need to walk and my motivation around raising awareness for Mental Health whilst guiding others on their own unique walks to wellness. And I have revealed my desire to do this through my existing social media channels, a new YouTube channel and on a crowdfunding platform so that others can ride the karmic wave of altruism and awareness.
https://linktr.ee/Walking_for_Mental_Health

Asking for help is the most difficult thing for me—it exposes me to the vulnerability of growing up with no support. I may as well be standing stark naked in front of the cathedral for how open my heart is in the asking. This led me to writing about the Symbols of the Camino de Santiago and back to the beginning paragraph which I will elaborate on in another post that will detail each of the most significant (to me) of the symbols and how they have highlighted so rapidly the support, direction and purpose that have come from somewhat unexpected places.

These astounding growth moments in life shake up my prior beliefs, hopes and accidental expectations and fully recalibrate my mind, my heart, my soul and the entirety of my very being into a new stronger holding pattern that weaves a new narrative around the thread … that single piece of fibre … I am left holding, when all else has unravelled.

This is the end. And what I choose to weave—and with whom—is where I begin.

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