The first inklings of change are the heat and discomfort emanating from your stomach. The gurgle is more primordial, it feels like the gaseous swamps of creation where meteors slammed into a churning earth and microorganisms split and swam in their perilous and short lifetimes. You can tell an entity is awakening inside you. The dimensions of the room start to change, and the darkness becomes heavier. Each light and figure are like a Plato’s cave, huge and distorted shadows build into castles and vast cities that morph away just as quickly.
You start rolling, heaving with the surf inside your stomach. The Frenchman is the first to go.
I was asleep in a treehouse one night several hundred yards away, and I couldn’t mistake his ceremony commencing hurl. It echoed throughout the jungle with resentment and relief, a bitter purge that only a French could muster.
He goes first next to me and shatters the relative calm, almost to signal to everybody else that it was time. More faint cries, mutters, or stomachs so loud that they can be heard in full volume. Another person heaves, this time a British girl, so well-spoken and mild mannered, now bent over with a high-pitched wail and spewing into her container. Those shitty little plastic buckets were a stark contrast to the mountains of incense, perfumes, crystals, various feathers and excrements and other high holy insignia of the ceremony that serve less of a purpose than our Fischer Price puke buckets.
I start to feel the wood floor, in a way that I’ve never felt anything. Like when in the movies an ancient hand graces the bark of a tree at sunset, I’m sure if observed someone would have found it oddly erotic. On the way up you become overwhelmed with beauty, with how its embedded in everything around us. I began to think about women I know, women in the room. How they seemed like a python ready to strike, or a soft and inquisitive bird of paradise. How they moved and held themselves and had an impossible Schrodinger’s box attractiveness that had to be observed to be real. How every ounce of health and beauty and vitality was borrowed, and what we lack or can’t create in ourselves we find balance and potential in others. I understood why beauty exists; it pulls, it compels, I will do anything to get a taste of that which I don’t have but see in you, to bring that light into my own existence even just for a minute.
I saw vast timelines of life and aging, and how we get this torch to burn and share and show the way, and it fades as you get older and some people hopelessly cling to it. People get resentful of those more attractive, younger, fitter, wiser, things they can’t touch. Suffering gets bottled up neatly in their organs, and sealed in with alcohol, denial, workaholism. Eventually they become a rusty shell of a human that limps through the day without noticing anything.
Flashing images of traumas, maybe imagined, suffering of people in the room. Thinking about how a guy in the group was named after a prize fish; like his namesake boiled down to being held on a line by a smiling fisherman admiring his physique and power. I was fucked.
How all my aunts and grandma faked every interaction because a glimpse of sincerity would ruin the whole façade. How unresolved generational traumas slink down through families because nobody can face them in their lifetime, only to hand that baggage off to the next of kin. And those kids develop their own issues that stunt their growth, so they can’t broadcast their beauty or see it in others. Their energy becomes like a blocked stagnant river that starts to smell like shit. People turn away. There is no exchange, no flow, no movement of pain that wants to be let go of.
Out of all of this, when approached by our facilitator and asked if I was okay, all I could muster was “it’s all borrowed”, as I stroked the wooden floor and rolled around moaning in pleasure. Having sex in this state would have been impossible to conceive, I began to understand why it’s off the menu when doing this. Though curiously it seems like orgy juice in those initial stages when your body is purging normalcy and zooming your consciousness onto another plane.
This was the state of affairs for some undetermined time, minutes, maybe hours, until all hell broke loose.
Wanderthoughts 