Mexico (Part Nine)

The students are on holiday, a one month Easter break. Came as a bit of a surprise to me: term-time don’t mean much to a postgrad. We’ve not got any classes as such till mid-April, and the last one was in February. Pretty much forgotten that I’ve actually work to do. As far as writing goes, all I do is type my blog, though will no doubt get down to essay action mid-May sometime, when the deadline’ll be a-loomin’. Ain’t the student life grand?

Lack of students also means a decrease in playing and refereeing football, which is good. My body is exhausted, and in need of rebuilding. I played a game last Thursday evening and although the engine was still functioning – ie, I could run fast the whole game long – my touch had deserted me, which is a bit of a shock when it happens. The ball just pinging off my foot for no apparent reason. Brain and leg no longer working in harmony. Although weirdly enough I scored more goals than usual, deciding that since the touch had gone I might as well just swing the old leg and shoot. And they kept going in. But a bit of rest most welcome.

And the plan? The plan is to finish this Mexico malarkey and then to see what I feel like planning. So…

I’m done with my Yandara talk. I left there finally and once and for all I guess satisfied with having ridden it till the end. What began with high hopes of perhaps finding a place to settle for a while – remember, this was still an open-ended trip even at this late point (the beginning of December) – turned out to be nothing more than the revealing to myself that yogaheaded bliss ninny days were well and truly over. I didn’t want to be there or be around that vibe. It simply wasn’t me. And so on I went.

There were two more places to go to in Baja. One was, obviously, the hot springs canyon, which I had come to believe was the point and culmination of the whole trip all along, and the other was John Milton’s Way of Nature, now shockingly revealed to me as having burned down. And yet John was still due in late January to run a course down there and I had thoughts about connecting with him then. John who no longer returned my emails. John who had once been so close and now seemed so distant. John who still held such a fascination for me…

I went up to the Way of Nature one day while I was staying at Yandara. Todos Santos is a short easy hitch to the north. Things hadn’t changed much in the town – still the same old fish taco stand, the galleries and such. New shops had opened but as many old shops had closed. Again, remarkable that it had changed so little such a short distance from the burgeoning Cabo.

Todos Santos, so extraordinarily familiar to me. Two months there in ’99. Four months there in 2001. And that groovy narrow dirt track that winds down to the Way of Nature that I must have walked hundreds of times, the memory of the first time I walked it burned in my brain forever. The guava and the lemons. The purple flowers. The…

…farmers’ fields – good old Augustine and the dodgy knee I healed, his hand plough and his chillies and beans – gone now, replaced by big houses and walls. Tasteful, mind, but changed…

…and on down, winding along the path, noting the differences, noting the similarities, until, right at the end, there is the Way of Nature ex-bed and breakfast, where so much happened for me right back in my youth and…

…it’s charred. It’s burned. The palapa roof which looked down over some of the most momentous changes in my life is gone. Bamboo and cariso windows and walls I helped build are gone. Everything is black and wrecked. And yet…there’s more there than I’d been led to believe by Craig. The shell still stands. It’s somewhat inhabitable. Patti’s proud kitchen the scene of so many tortillas and lentil delights. Craig’s magic sauces. The happy young souls we once were still there standing and smiling and chatting and rapping, excited by life, still doing it all right now in front of my eyes, imprints of their ghosts. If all moments exist in the NOW then we are all doing forever more the things we did back then.

But the kitchen I see is gutted, no longer proud or neat or functional. The room I painted with Rob – the massage room – the room I slept in with Ashargin, which Craig built – the cariso mandala Shane made my first week there, still surviving – the once so neatly manicured tai-chi circle overgrown and –

Everything is destroyed. The sadness of something once so beautiful and lovely and cared for, where my young heart opened and dwelled in love and passion…wrecked and burned and graffitied and left to rot. And yet…

A Mexican family live there now. They take care of the place for John – to stop the looters and the graffitiers, I guess – and that’s their rent. There’s no electricity anymore, nor running water. The gardens and pathways are overgrown. The man drives John’s blue four-wheel-drive with the Colorado plates that he had even when I was first there. Keeps everything running for when John comes back. John’s room upstairs. The roof Canadian Dave who now lives in London used to sleep on. Everything burned. And then…

The table. The dining table. The big elliptical brown table we sat around every morning, every evening to eat and talk and laugh. The table I received John’s teachings at those first six days. The table at which I first listened to him talk, when I hated him. Me and Rob and Patti and Craig and Rani and Shane and David and Emily all gathered round and listening and smiling and laughing and eating and learning and –

A thousand, millions memories around that table. And the table still remains.

The table is off to side, forgotten and unused. No chairs. Black marks from the fire where things from the roof have fallen down onto it and burned. But it survives.

I walk over to it. I put my hand on it. And in an instant I see –

Everything. All my memories of being there with John. The laughter and the growth. The whole thing I went through in ’99 right there under that palapa roof.

It hits me like electricity. Rockets up my fingers and my arm as skin touches wood. Everything so vivid, as real as visions. The –

I have to get out. I have to leave these kind smiling Mexicans so open and welcoming. I…

…go stumbling through the grasses – past the overgrown Buddha fountain – along where Shane so carefully used to manage the dirt irrigation system of miniature dams with a hoe – where I would come and ask him questions and then leave him hoeing to contemplate the answers, so new to my young and seeking brain – and into the old overgrown camping area, where my tent once sat, where I…

…woke up that morning amazed after blissing out in oneness kissing dirt and gravel and Rani sat on the steps with me holding my hand and smiling and saying, your eyes, they’re full of stars and…

…where sad and hiding in my tent Craig gently cajoled me into asking John if I could go on the wilderness solo, and leaving my comfort zone and humbling myself before another, my whole life changed because of it.

My whole life changed. Everything changed. Right there.

I walk to the edge of the camping area. I face away from the palapa and the kitchen and the Mexicans. I fall into the grass on my knees. And everything begins to shudder, and tears stream from my eyes, and I don’t know why.

But what it feels like is this: that coming back to this place was the whole reason why I came back to Mexico, not the hot springs. And that I’m simultaneously dying to something while also rediscovering a little piece of my soul. That’s what it feels like – but the tears are beyond words, beyond understanding, and I don’t know why they’re there. Something…

A pilgrimage. A pilgrimage right across the great big body of Mexico to a charred forgotten table wherein a little piece of me dwelled. Where everything once happened. Something I’d never been able to let go of.

A pilgrimage I didn’t even know I was on, till I found myself sat shuddering in the sharp yellow grass where I once slept.

And that’s what it feels like. These tears. This outpouring. That something within me is dying. The something, perhaps, that has never been able to stop thinking of Mexico, of Baja, of my time there at the Way of Nature. The something that I’ve forever been looking back on, and wanting to get back to. That way of life. The discovery. The spirituality. The excitement and the newness. My youth. Always I’ve thought of Mexico – in jobs – throughout uni – with women – and now I return. And when I do, I die. Because, at the same time, I’m reclaiming something of my soul. That makes no sense, but that’s what it feels like: that I left a part of me there, in that place, and that I’m getting it back. Which part, I know not. But that’s what it feels like, and so I shudder and cry and let the emotions and the energy do what it will. Falling into the grass. Opening myself up to it. Lost to the tears and the sadness and the –

Whatever you want to call it. Feeling. That’s all it is. A feeling that cleanses and renews and leaves me…

…grateful in the yellow grass. Grateful for everything. Grateful for John, and for the mad life that led me to him, and for the mad trip that brought me back. For the table that was still miraculously there. For the visions from its touch. For the vividness of those memories. For the magic of those times. For…

…everything that had transpired since. For uni and grounding and for the fortune of my life: a life that still allowed me the freedom to give the energy and time for seeking these experiences. Five months across Mexico. All those thousands of miles. All the detours and the people along the way. Not even knowing whether to head for Baja or Peru. The signs that took me to Xela and Cuauhtémoc and Mexico City and even there at the Way of Nature, another Coco-like story/premonition wrapped around a girl called Holly that put everything into place…

The magic of life. Of wonders. Of…a goddamn table, fer christ’ssake! But oh how so powerful and beneficial and heartfelt and real. All that way to touch a table and cry in the grass. So absolutely worth it.

I return to the Mexicans fresh and new. We smile and chat and they’re lovely and tell me all about John and the place and hand me a bag full of avocados freshly dropped from the trees. I tell them what it was like back in the day, point out the various places no longer there or changed beyond recognition, and they give me free reign to wonder and explore. Up on the roof, to dangle legs over the side and think about Canadian Dave and all the other times I sat up there looking down on the circle where I first did tai-chi, and first watched John disappear, and the magic cactus. Then to go wondering down the overgrown paths past the cabañas Craig built in later years, in which I slept with Eve, beautiful beds with nets and romance, now collapsed and barely visible underneath the grasses. The trip began with ruins and ends with ruins. But ruins that mean so much more to me. The ruin, also, of the little church I built in 2001, a pentagonal palm frond structure built between the perfect space created by five trees. Craig gave me the materials and the freedom and the encouragement and it was one of the best things I ever did. But Patti told me it got washed away in a flood and a storm a year later. And yet…still the trees remain, and the magical space that first attracted me and whispered to me to build it there and – unbelievably, the screw holes from my cariso wall poles remain: ancient tiny lined-up holes in trees made there by my own young hands. So many memories, so much to find. But…

The catharsis has happened. A part of me has died and a part of me has been reclaimed. I’ve got what those thousands of miles have led me to. And once the place has been poured over, and the shuddering sadness accepted and integrated…the man is born anew. The door has been walked through. The door can never be walked through again. The place is…the table is…

The table is just a table. A beautiful table. A magical table. But what it had been holding for me, it has passed on, and it dwells within me now. Reclamation. Recapitulation. The pilgrimage complete.

It was never about the hot springs; I understand that now. That was the carrot that dangled so juicy and sweet. That was the picture of the beautiful girl that drove me on across the ocean and all that land. But really it was poor old burned out Way of Nature, and a table, and an epiphany in the grass that I could never have expected.

Even the first time, all those wonderful years back, magical though the hot springs were, they were but the precursor to what awaited me with there.

And yet…having completed the pilgrimage, and found what I so patently set off unknowingly to find, the hot springs remain. And it is to the hot springs I must go…