The Unruliness of Strange

In my travels I have found all the laws we think we are governed by do not hold water in my cupped palms. They are tiny silver chains that slip through fingers. The law of reason stumbles drunk in the street. That of phase change bends solid at the waist and vaporizes. To say it simply (which I rarely do): everything moves differently abroad. 

Time is a circuitous slipstream. Yesterday is a photo where I passed a distant night in a hammock on the Rio Amazona and tomorrow already came and went on an overnight train to Bangkok. I can see a month away but not next week. I prefer it this way, though it must not be the same for the smoldering one who just now drove past me on a motorbike because she took off yesterday and is long gone. We are all here to measure the comings and the goings as we please.

Language is a thick kneed stranger sitting next to you on an airplane. The jaw hangs heavy against trials of proper grammar. Worlds of words do intertwine here where elbows crook as dance partners in a square. The graceful tumble of Spanish or the thick pita bread dough of Israeli accent, and the daring snoring French men and the gracious inflections on a Thai tongue that darts like a quicksilver fish. Can I be fed, will you walk with me, remember how it was and leave me alone here. We are all trying to say the same thing. 

Habits fall away, along with the swagger of familiarity. Home is the last place you recognized a semblance of your past life. Economy is measured in the lightness of your backpack. I fill long spaces of the day without words and without silence. Perhaps you can not understand this. Perhaps you already do the same. The law of gravity is hanging from the rafters asking you to climb. Heat from the pungency of papaya to stop the sweat cold. You must walk farther to stop the swell in the false structure of your ankle joints; your skeleton is a story. We are all here to witness.

Lose yourself and the laws you once thought governed your being. Find the world and find the truth: the only law is limitless.

healers

I am nursing myself back to health, being tender in the way I set myself down and lovingly spread tiger balm across the parts of me so shaken and torn. I stamped with a bamboo stick out of the jungle, determined by pain, trampling through the undertow of a darkening river, and saw the slipping of sunset on my way to the hospital. I have found so many healers since then on my unlikely path. A man whose eyes lit up to watch me, who held my ankle and gave it three days. What beautiful optimism lies in the healing power of words and brief time lapses. The powdered tea for inflammation that fills my being. The arnica gel from a friend who clutched my face in his hands and breathed, "you are the toughest girl I know". The strangers who hold my bags, who clutch my arm, who send me secret gifts of health. I know this because I do the same to you. 

Another unknown healer; a woman who became my mother in a shop where I never thought I would see such textured colors, such brilliance lining the walls and the shelves. There are no dressing rooms from what I have come to see here so I am stepping out of my white linen tucked into a back corner when she comes to watch me try her tiny leather skirts. She buttons it around my waist and finds it hanging from my hips, turns me around to see me bruised and shaken (bent but not broken!) She gasps and runs away, comes back to rub me with a healing balm across my backside. Lifted my arms to assess the scrapes. Sent me hope with a bag of treasures.

I seek out the heat when I feel cold under a stark sky. In a sauna a woman watches me pick across the wooden planks and set myself down like a secret. She passes me hot water that hinted coconut on the back of my tongue. I sweat and bent over the flame and thanked my breath. Listened to the backs of my knees purr thanks. 

There is so much doing in the passive action of healing. Everyone is your secret healer.

Original Eve's Note to Self

Forgive yourself when you back away from this connection because there is never regression only growth and then decay. That which is fleeting you will no longer need on your journey, it's only extra weight in your hips. Recall how constructive it is to destruct.

You're moving inward, and your past awakening was just the blissful entry before the real work began, like the gate to Eden. And now you're kneeling in the garden pulling weeds out on the full moon and watering on the new moon and tending the corners and drying velvet herbs and watching it all grow; and the onion bulbs roll and wink and the green shoots do shoot and the spices sing in your cauldron.

Now women give birth to red apples and bake them in the clay. They bleed on the rock and wear the mud proud.

slipstream from a fast

I think about the spaces between my vertebrae the same way I think about you. I'm on my back and under mosquito netting when this dawns on me. I breathe you, we all do one another.

People's energies get passed from person to person in the slipstream as we pass by, so you are always being recreated and represented elsewhere.

Guard your Self, but share what you do feel is worth protecting. It's the only way to keep it alive.

Our Body is the First Layer of Our Soul

I thought this with my legs up and ankles crossed over the seat in front of me, glancing out a pink frayed curtain like an old western playing with the light from a new eastern sun. There is new inherent knowledge here about honoring this body, and I imagine bringing it to some place I will learn to call home, in a new bathtub in a new city where I can be alone with my heart and lay it down to soak in bubbles hot and frothy. And my feet will keep me there. And my lips stained a crushed country curtain. I watch the unfolding and the re-creasing of anothe year in the skin off my elbows, in the dip below my throat. I can shape the way I intend to feed and the way I will absorb. I recognize all my sisters, one with a long curved foot like a silver fish, there in a smile I watch age in my minds eye. They are sitting nearby on a bus also heading inland, maybe westward. They float by, they pass on. Nobody ever really leaves, not really.

You know, the feeling of knowing you are falling asleep is the same as the feeling of knowing you're becoming awakened.

Breathe is the work but the body is the office. I'll cross my ankles under a new oak desk and with my palms bring cooling blue behind my eyes if a screen is too much and take out a pen that excites me in more ways than one, from there I set out to continue my task.  I have found meditation when I am locked on the side of a wind whipping boat and I can lick sea salt off myself or whomever I please. I will never regress there is only ever growth. Oh and what of decay? "I've died before," I told a friend today on a double-decker bus heading inland, "I can do it again".