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.
“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 stare at the words on my laptop screen, images stare back at me. Like a 3D puzzle, it makes sense only when I stop trying to see what I know … surrender to what the image knows of me. I discern the bigger picture when my eyes learn the images in a different code. Everything I require requires something from me.
Arrival in Galle at Le Bella Inn 1912 is to a celebrity welcome. Procrastination terrifies me so, with my precrastination skills, I made this reservation four months ago. Exalted as the very first person to book a room here, it is presumed that my lucky charm energy resulted in subsequent non-stop bookings, including a dozen from South Africa where the owner has recently toured. Within five minutes I have his oath to assist me with a long term visa extension next time I am in Sri Lanka. Wise action is the path to manifestation.
For me, the first thing to do on arrival anywhere is to walk. But a sign outside proclaims that life starts after coffee. The 19-year-old waiter brings me real coffee; his t-shirt tells me that dreams only work if you do. Manifest is a verb. So, the second thing I do is walk … compelled to keep walking until my feet have drawn the maps on my body and my soul starts to recognise the terrain. Competency building to find my vibe; to dispel my demons into the cobbled roads. The difference with aging as I travel is that my inner elements require a little longer to find resonance with the outer; I need a little longer to calibrate; to integrate. If I don’t immediately do the thing I fear, I get locked in the inertia of it. A cobra recoils into its basket, its flute-playing master closes the lid. Imprisoned. The gun metal ocean tones reflect the rows of cannons of this once heavily defended island. Gun fire shoots me back to the 5-year-old desecrated by her molester on the cannon at the not so defended Durban Library.
An ancient on a bicycle delivers coconuts to Tap House across the road. LKR200 he states. Tapping into the distinction between tourist and traveller I follow the trail to the source, encouraged now to leave the confined bastion of Galle Fort and venture to the street markets. The mania of the city always calms me; slows my stride; brings me closest to my core. Traffic that makes no sense; people and dogs slipstream in flow. I join the harmonic discord. Brightly embellished fishing vessels and cats devouring discarded tails counterpoise the stench of death at the fish market. I follow a cow across a traffic circle. Vehicles mirror me. Fruits and vegetables with knobs and spikes and colours never seen in Cape Town’s aisles of homogenised produce. And king coconuts for LKR100. I get two. One young for ‘drinking’ and one mature for ‘eating, drinking’. I stroll the streets and back through the sally port still eating the flesh on arrival back at the Tap House: Cool King Coconut LKR450 affirms my mini adventure that stretches me into the edges and keeps me real. What ‘feels right’ is simply what feels familiar. When’s it’s uncomfortable—when it burns—that’s when it matters.
Forged in the fire; more beautiful for the fire; I find equilibrium in the water. But first a run—the fire of dynamic meditation to release the kundalini energy to cleanse my emotional body. I do four laps of the fort walls; each re-turn to the lighthouse exhibits another sublime perspective of the rising sun. I have my skipping rope. It strobe-lights the view and I zone out as my entire being becomes a part of my sensory experience and my cells vibrate with joy. Whereas I once I adhered to following my blisters, I now surrender to Joseph Campbell’s true adage and follow my bliss. Exorcising self sabotage is not a once-off event. Magick is a process; practice makes practice.
Writing too takes practice. The foetal heart is formed as it travels in contraction over the brain to nestle in a knot of chambers in its slotted cage in its chest. I write with my heart brain. I write until the writing writes me. Reconstructed. The Tetris Effect.
Imagine a city where the culture isn’t about sitting down to eat or drink; where the main purpose of walking isn’t to shop. Imagine reverting to tribal culture being genuine progress, where people connect and engage over music, dance, shared experience. Where you can be normal even without an addiction. Conversations can often sound something like back and forth WhatsApp exchanges—threads frayed, only randomly matching. Glimmers of a stitch.
When I travel my body reprograms my brain with felt senses and shifts my approach from top down to bottom up. Sensory signals or guesses; I get to choose which side of the scales to place each experience. It is only with the heart brain that one can ultimately fully comprehend. Cognitive dissonance lingers in a dark skull box. The blueprint knows where to inspire and where to protect. Denied ecstasy … also disillusionment. I feel.
I stare out the taxi window en route to Colombo Airport; words look back. Forests and hanging fruits. Fecund. Phallic. Feral I am. The wanting to stay taints the wanting to go. Gratitude. Grit. The wanting. The waiting. The pause. Breathe. The driver straddles the lanes. Neti neti.
Waiting at the airport for the international flight to Chennai, the tension of the opposites waits with me. I attempt to connect the dots back to who I was when I arrived at this place a month ago. Deer-eyed. Interrogated. The Circle of Zen is not always a simple brush stroke. This cycle that has brought me back to the same place is an explosion and collapse of rainbows and black holes. Order, chaos and everything in between. Each new day a new me. Travel creates the earth’s tarot cards that give direction based not on cardinal points but on the ever-churning and spiralling internal highways that never get me lost. Because I can never be lost. Because I am always right here. Where are you?
After a month in Sri Lanka, I will have to re-orientate my being around my old lover; India … to feel if her devotion is strong enough to hold me. Usually when I’m anxious I shop online. The only thing available to me is an upgrade. “Gulp!” I don’t want to leave but know that I must … it is only in the leaving that I will be able to return. Sri Lanka has chipped away at my heart and snuck inside. If you look real close you will notice the chains are broken.
WELL WORTH BEING 