And so, to continue with the tale of two years ago Mexico, for whatever reason, the same old reason that I feel compelled to type down every stupid thing I ever did, even though yesterday I had this moment of KNOWING – not just THINKING – but KNOWING that it was all of course pointless and worthless and spearheaded/propelled by some weird delusion that there was value in it and this is what I was supposed to be doing. Me who is also working on theories that fiction and maybe even all writing is valueless beyond helping the writer himself move forward emotionally and mentally through expression – a tool – a message to the Universe – a list of…
You see? Already, only one paragraph in, and I’m already losing all sense of shape and clarity and structure. The bee resides – takes over – dwells therein pulling the levers and dictating the words – these words – and these – already heard several seconds before they appear on the screen – with imaginary audience in mind – and although this sentence – this recognition of bee-powered illegible
[breaks off to answer a text; can’t remember where he was]
So…Mexico
…to board a plane for Baja. A short hop and a skip across the whole rest of the mainland and the Sea of Cortes Baja California hot springs canyon just west of Santiago
Baja.
Out the plane.
Into the bright blue sky.
And the mountains right there, by the airport.
Home.
Home, sweet home.
My spiritual home.
That’s what it feels like. Eight, nearly nine years away and once I’m back on that desert highway, looking out over the cactuses and the dusty scrubland and digging those green and majestic Sierra de la Laguna mountains it feels like home. Everything’s so familiar to me. Everything so all at once right in place. Only the red brick streets of LS6 – where I live now – produces a similar effect in my bones. No alarms and no surprises: those are the words that occur to me now.
Well: I’m sure you know what home feels like.
But what a surprise to feel it there, in that North American desert, after all those years.
It’s like I’ve never been away.
I get back on the highway. I set off towards the other side of the mountains, towards Todos Santos, where Shane and Craig from long past Way of Nature still live, still doing their yoga and spiritual thing, but now on their own land a ways out of town somewhere by the beach. I’ve got an invite and I figure I might as well do that before I check in at the hot springs
But I guess the reason they don’t bother me is ‘cos I know I don’t need to be there, I gots my own places to go. One mountain, one beach – and both a long ways from the type of people that Los Cabos attracts.
But, oh, what fate awaits my beloved hot springs
What if they goddamned bricked them up, or cemented them, or the whole thing is overrun day and night by booze-swilling American youths whooping in baseball caps and ogling busty girls in bikinis? What then?
And I guess that’s another reason why I delay going there.
In any case: I’m on the road. I’m hitching the dusty highway. And I’m standing right back in places that I stood in in ’98, ’99. I recognise them man! I remember those times of being stood right there by that supermarket, looking towards that gas station, thumb out the night after Sophie and Shane and Chelsea and I went down to dance at some Cabo San Lucas nightclub and Sophie teased and eased me onto the dancefloor and I had my first ever dance. Epiphanies there. And epiphanies later, as we talked and held each other down by the marina. And all that feeling and emotion, right here down in Baja. All the growing I did, my most formative years…
And in that supermarket and gas station spot, struggling a little bit and not making as much progress as I’d imagined, looking over concerned at the setting sun, and reminiscing and thinking back – and thinking on Craig, and thinking what a mostly good father-type figure he was for me – who should appear in his cracked-screen Toyota pickup truck and pull up alongside me but Craig himself? Bearded funny Craig. Still coughing and awkward. Still affectionate and smiley. Still laying it all out front – his thoughts, his feelings, whatever’s going on in his head, because honest and unedited truth is what he believed in then and probably still believes in now, and I guess there’s some value in that.
It’s good to see him again. All those musings of the things he’d done for me. Feeling in my heart. Gladness and appreciation. And also apprehension because…well, mostly it’s gladness and connection and despite those eight years apart there’s an ease and a fondness and he wants to know all of what I’ve been up to and I want to know his things too. And so we catch up. Me first. And –
Wow! When you lay all those eight years out in a row and sum it up in ten minutes – what a perspective it puts on things.
Where you been? What you done?
Well you remember Eve who I was here with last time in March 2001 –
March 2001? Really? Is it that long? But –
Oh yes, definitely: I keep it all recorded. Dates, I remember. Dates, I can’t forget. Probably you ask me where I was on any given date – especially between ’96 and 2001 – I can remember. And what I was doing too. Test me. More or less.
But the above I don’t say.
Yeah, well, that all went to shit and – well you know how crazy I was back then? So, yeah, that was grounding I guess – man, she broke my heart – cheated on me with – and I just crashed right back to Earth. Went back to Yorkshire . Had to realise a few things. Cried for two months. Tried to be normal. And then Sophie – you remember Sophie?
Sophie. Was she the one who?
No, not here: I’m not sure who that was. That was Emily I think. No, Sophie was after that, she was –
The one with –
No, I think that was after I left. She was [explain, explain] and, anyway, we got together, and were together for like four years, and I went to uni and got a degree and lived in Canada for a year, out near Toronto, and then we broke up and…I don’t know what I been doing the last few years. Lived back in Yorkshire, lived a bit in London
And he lays it all out too: things went mad at the Way of Nature and he and John Milton got into some right old wranglings. John wanted more money, Craig says, made it untenable – though later I found out it was more to do with…well, what John saw as Craig’s dubious practises. Practises with women. Practises with women who weren’t his wife. And it all…
Then the complications come: complications in my head about how to tell this story. Because, you see, what you’ve got is things going back a long time that I’ve never really written about. And things that I heard from Craig’s wife Patti, when I saw her a few months later in Canada
Craig’s a good guy. He’s got a lot of good things about him and he’s done me a lot of good too. He seemed to care for me back in the day when I was young and lost and searching and, in all honesty, without his goodness in taking me in when I landed on his doorstep in February 1999 I don’t know where I would’ve been. I wouldn’t have discovered all the things I did with Shane. I wouldn’t have met John Milton. And I wouldn’t have experienced what came to be something of a father-son relationship between us – in some small ways – plus also Shane as brother and Patti as mother – and yet…
There are conflicts. People are not entirely one way or the other. We’ve all got a bit of good and bad within us. And in some people, despite how much good, there’s a certain bad that’s difficult to turn a blind eye to.
Funny that I find this so hard to address. It’s weird and that it’s weird is perhaps testament to the way my young mind was –
Because even back then I had certain feelings that –
And maybe to tell it one has to rewind all the way because –
What other way would there be to express the sentiments that I have in my head? I mean, even though you’re reading these words and I’m imagining that we’re connecting on some level – what I’m not really getting is how much you’re missing, and how much of the words unsaid – the words I still hear in my head, even when not typed down – that I on some level think you’ve heard because they’ve been heard by me – are missed. Every sentence I go to type on this subject gets butted in on. But to type it like I hear it would make no sense – which is what we’re ending up making anyway. So maybe by taking it back…to the beginning…to ’99 and the two months I spent at the Way of Nature…with Shane and Patti and Craig…you know the story, right? You’ve read my book and my blogs? You know how I came to be there and what I was up to and a little something of these names that appeared and recurred in my life so many times back then? Not forgetting John Milton, of course.
Or maybe it would be better to do a small recap on that too. For one thing I’ve learned through writing a book is, wow, people hardly take in anything at all. Take my girlfriend, for example: she’s read my book, before we got together. But sometimes when I recount a story or touch upon something that’s in it – big and fresh and obvious to me – she’ll stare back blank-eyed and have no recollection whatsoever, so…
Well, the point is it’s been about a page of beating around the bush and trying to work out some place to start and I guess it’s time to go. So…go:
I’d been at the hot springs
That was Shane. Blonde-haired. Dreadlocked. Calm and weird and full of odd strange spiritual juju, all clean-living and pure, such a contrast to my beer-swilling anarchy madness and dark.
But he had happiness, and when I left the hot springs I thought I’d go pop in and say hello and that was where I met his stepmom Patti and she invited me in and hugged me and had big wide bright blue eyes too and even though I’d only gone there for an hour or a day I ended up staying two months and everything I’d began to see at the hot springs came to fruition and took root in me and bloomed, for better or for worse. For better, because I got my head sorted out and found a fount of love and got off my trolley on mysticism and had several experiences that were beyond the normal everyday things of this world and also quit the booze and drugs and pretty much changed completely.
And for worse, because, like I say, I was off my head on mysticism.
But, all in all, it was mostly for the better. And Shane and Craig were a big part in that.
Craig was running a B&B. The B&B was called the Way of Nature. The Way of Nature was owned by John Milton. And John Milton was a spiritual teacher and kind of mystical coyote in the tradition of wily trickster shamans but also a tai-chi master and several other things besides, and it was with him that I did my first vision quests and they also really changed my life for the better. I mean, wild and momentous times. And so much to tell; I should write a book…
There. Scene set. Me invited in to help with various little tasks around the place and given a spot to park my tent and food to eat, and also four or five other young groovies doing exactly the same thing – camping and eating and helping out though mainly delving into spirituality and learning – while paying customers came and went and that’s why I always call it a B&B/spiritual retreat.
Well I don’t know what the fuck it was, it all seemed so normal at the time; in any case, one of my first nights there I kind of left my body and had an encounter with my soul – some sort of taste of divine union – perhaps a satori – and given that it was the most blissful and wonderful experience of my young life thus far I decided I wanted more of that and devoted my entire being towards learning all about this spiritual thing, which the guys there seemed to know a bunch about. And so I started with tai-chi and meditation – though the main thing we were into those days was this kind of honest and raw sharing that Craig referred to as speaking in unedited truths. Now I understand it as a kind of California Esalon thing that people were grokking on in the sixties and maybe thought was the future and the way to go but probably isn’t – but back then I knew nothing of that and just went with the flow and followed people who obviously knew more than me and, anyways, saw the benefit it was having on me in helping me be less aloof and guarded and uptight and ashamed and secretive ‘cos it is actually really awesome when you say things you’ve kept inside for decades, or release things you think would never be allowed to release – all those negativities and childish feelings and insecurities and stuff – and find that people don’t mind, they just accept you for it.
Like, we’d sit in circles maybe even with ten of us and do it for hours and hours at a time. Or me and Shane would do it just the two of us, get into it after lunch and still be sitting there five hours later, everything explored and expressed and his face dissolving into groovy colours and shapes and my being expanded and filled with peace and love and joy. It don’t make much sense, I suppose, unless you’ve done it. One of those things wise people would probably say, don’t even try to put into words. But wisdom ain’t my thing – while trying to put things into words is, even if I don’t try very hard. But for that you’ve got to blame the bee…
In any case, all that talking and sharing was groovy and I learned a ton by it and it helped me to progress immensely – but also sent me a wee bit doolally – especially when I went back to the real world – because we did it so much there was a stage when I couldn’t do anything but. Which is why the restaurant scene in that movie with Elliot Gould from the sixties – I always want to call it Rita, Sue and Bob Too – which is a very different movie – makes me laugh so much. ‘Cos waiters don’t want to hear your emotions in unedited truth when they’re trying to take your order. Don’t need to know how the colour of their tie makes you feel. Won’t benefit from hearing all about your childhood traumas, even if that’s what you feel like telling them…
Craig was a bit like that: inappropriate is the word. Like I remember him once several months later – this was when we re-met up in Colorado – telling this sixteen-year-old girl about how he was abused and molested as a small child – all within a couple of minutes of meeting her. Though I think this was something he told to girls a lot. I guess he had his reasons. No doubt he could justify it in some way. Like, it was for their benefit, man.
Lots of inappropriateness. Particularly around young girls. In fact, only around young girls…
Patti told me Craig’d been caught out a few times doing sexual things with girls he was ‘connecting’ with. One on one sharing sessions in which the girl might have reached an emotional block and he’d suggested one way to get beyond it was by touching them, fingering them or something. Feels pretty yucky and ridiculous writing that now. This is stuff I remember Patti telling me back in ’99. She would struggle and remonstrate with him over it and he’d always placate her and say it wasn’t sexual, it was just therapy, what needed doing in the moment. You know, how do you feel? I feel a tightness in my chest and a tingling in my knee and I recognise that I’m repressing the desire to tell you that I want to touch you at the top of your thigh. How do you feel? Like my stomach is full and when you said that about my thigh I felt all hot and tingly down…
And, anyway, I don’t know how it happens and whether it’s anything like that at all but Patti did tell me he’d been doing these things, and that he’d said it was okay, and kind of got mad at her for insinuating otherwise, and it made her feel confused and shitty and mad at herself ‘cos she wasn’t able to accept – and me being sort of Yorkshire and real world would think, but that is shitty and unacceptable – and yet at the same time I was venturing way out beyond any kind of life I’d ever lived, with people who certainly knew more about life than anyone I’d ever met, and everything was up for debate and open to questioning and who knew anything anymore? What rulebook? What moral guidelines? Those are the things you feel when you get into those areas of attachment and ego and aren’t we all just more than the body anyway, who is it that’s feeling jealousy, who are you really?
Mad stuff like that. This is how abusive cults happen. This is what bought Franklin Jones his stupid island in Fiji
So Craig was good and Craig also did things I found a bit sickening and weird. But I was grateful and learning and I didn’t dare say anything, except this one time when I’d left the Way of Nature for a few days and had some really quite marvellous experiences on the road and came back stronger and with more self-belief than ever and questioned the things he got up to with girls. He got all defensive – and meanwhile semi-attacking – and made me feel bad for what I was insinuating and naming…
…though other people sometimes said things too. Outsiders, like a wise old local woman who didn’t like Craig one bit and said to me when I said how kindly good he was for taking people like me and big tall handsome Rob in, well that’s probably because he knows you’ll bring girls down…
…and John Milton, who was of course above and beyond them all, spiritually speaking, and who clashed with Craig over many things. Regarding the sharing practise, he said it was useful and could indeed lead to people experiencing pure actual spiritual love within themselves. But it also said it had its dangers, and could lead to unhealthy attachments, and with regard to Craig and also Shane – who was also really into doing it with pretty young girls – he said, if you must do it, I recommend doing it only with men. And when he said this I saw Craig shudder and gulp, and by John’s smile I knew he’d said it to push a button and show him where his own attachment and maybe even addiction lay.
But he carried on with the girls, talking and sharing, and maybe plenty else besides.
And I’d had my reservations, and tried to say my thing and been knocked back, but I guess I was mostly in the dark and innocent, being the wrong gender and all.
It was only a couple of years later, when I reconnected with a girl I had known there, that I realised I had been on the nail that self-believing night in challenging these practises of Craig. Turned out she’d slept with both Craig and Shane. Yep: father and son. And she felt sick and horrible about it – manipulated, used – and could barely bring herself to even contemplate that time. It was all groovy back then, of course – we were all high on spirit, doing whatever felt right in the moment. But we were kids – twenty-two, twenty-three – didn’t know what was really going on. With a couple of years to think about it…well, she didn’t feel good. Traumatised, in fact. And I got angry and remembered that night when I’d brought it up – unedited and accepted truth my ass! – and mourned my own confusion as well, in having my intuition and convictions manipulated and lied about. That hurt. Though my hurt paled into insignificance compared to hers.
And yet, again, I have to reiterate that in so many other ways – in nearly every other way – he was good. A good man. Life ain’t no black and white thing; not some maths puzzle lived out on paper where everything makes perfect sense and balances out rationally. I got my good and bad too. Although, I gotta say, I don’t think I’m no manipulator of women, even though I’ve seen and caused my fair share of tears…
So that’s the back story. No doubt anybody reading this don’t like Craig very much by now. This man whose pickup truck my literary former self is presently sitting in reminiscing and laughing and remembering how good he was to me. I have to keep stressing that to create some sort of balance. And, I suppose, to explain myself – because even though in an early draft of my book I touched on some of these issues I pretty quickly expunged them. It was too hard to make sense of. It still is. It’s all so subtle and complex and merely hinted at and, when the character is otherwise great, so difficult to reconcile in the plastic pages of the written word. I guess that’s why most characters are two-dimensional. Another nail in the stupid coffin of literature as valuable and/or pertaining to something real.
Craig. Craig and me in the pickup truck. The sun setting and the desert highway and mountains flashing by. The old Pacific roars blue and crashing off to my left. Somewhere down there the beach where I did my first vision quest and my whole world irrevocably changed.
And the relief of seeing how little this part of Baja had changed. Sure, the Cabos had grown immense. And, sure, there were new houses here and there and certain beaches had been fenced off and built on. Even, unbelievably, the top off the hill at the north end of Los Cerritos where we used to sit and watch sunsets overlooking the bit of sea where I very nearly drowned blown off and flattened by dynamite to allow for the building of some enormous mansion or hotel. And yet…so much of it was still wild and dust-blown and even abandoned and ramshackle, other houses crumbling away and discarded even as new properties went up.
Good old ragtag Baja, still mostly populated by cactuses and space…
Craig told me his story. A story I’ll embellish by what I heard later from Patti, as well as others. I’m not sure when it takes place but it must have been a few years after I was last at the Way of Nature, maybe back in 2004 or 2005. Craig and John Milton at loggerheads over something. Does Craig tell me John Milton wanted more money, a bigger cut of the B&B profits? Perhaps. And does Craig feel like all this was unjust given that he’d built the whole thing up from scratch, and put a ton of money into building new rooms and cabañas and that whole shebang? Funny thoughts then – because I remember sitting down and trying to help the two of them reconcile some differences way back when I was first there, listening to their various demands, trying to draw up a contract that was mutually acceptable and managing the peace. Little young me! And remembrances also of that occasion and how I thought it was all just a big play by John to push Craig, to bring things out, and to maybe give me the opportunity to feel valuable about my real world self. But, no matter: the tensions re-arose and they got to being at loggerheads again.
And then: some local scandal. Craig getting it on with some young girl and it creates a ruckus not just in her mind but also in the community and John don’t like it one bit. He wants him to stop. Patti gets heartbroken. There’s unwelcome heat and the rumours are rife. John wants Craig out: he’s gone too far, been playing around with too many chicks. Craig gets it on with another young passing-through girl and this time they stick. Craig and Patti separate. Craig and this girl are still together. She’s about my age. She’s a yoga teacher, and good at it too. Also, off her head on divinity and in need of some serious grounding, in my jaded and post-UK opinion. And Patti’s out, and left with nothing. And Craig and Shane are out, and together they buy some land some ways out of town and start themselves a yoga school. And a little after that the now empty Way of Nature mysteriously catches fire and burns down and ever since then it has stood but a charred and empty shell, so they say.
Craig reckons it’s bad karma come back on John. I have imaginings of Craig with a gasoline can, getting his revenge. Though that’s probably mere projection of the demon in me and what I would have done had I been pissed at someone back in the day.
In any case, Craig and Shane build their yoga school and things have never been better for them. Every month thirty young yogaheads fly down and pay a couple of grand a time to qualify as yoga teachers and they’ve got buildings and a kitchen staff and gardens and yoga studios and even a paid band. Everything’s going groovy. Patti’s back in Washington State
And that’s the story.
And that’s me and Craig pulling up into their yoga school, Yandara, and after all these years I’m back there with surrogate papa and surrogate brother and it’s kind of like the Way of Nature all over again – except I’m thirty-three years-old and no longer the thin, starstruck, blow away in the wind, airy-fairy, bliss ninny head in the clouds spiritual seeker and sadhu and madman I once was. Now I feel mature and grown. Manly and strong. Eight years of playing football and living back amongst the world. Having relationships and working my way down to Earth. Realising things in a whole different way.
I just want to say, says Craig, that I really appreciate your energy. Very strong, he says. Very…solid. And he bunches his fists and indicates the universal pose for “strong man.”
Thanks, I say. But I’m not going to get into any of that back.
It’s such a Craig thing to say.
Yoga school. Introductions. Shane’s off somewhere surfing with some girl. It’s the middle of the course, Craig says, we’ve got to tread carefully. Some of these girls have been through a lot.
Girls?
That’s right: I typed girls.
It’s a mis-type, of course: there are a couple of guys there too.
Also, maybe one or two older women.
But the rest of them – the other twenty-five of them – and I don’t know where they find them all – are these like twenty-three-year-old starry-eyed yoga mamma girls, all huggy and pretty and with long hair down their backs and in love with life and open and expressive and sexy and, I dunno, all in touch with their yonis, walking around in arse-declaring yoga pants and what the Americans call ‘tank-tops’ (what we call ‘vest tops’) and no wonder Shane says later when he’s telling me about the whole thing and smiling, I’ve got my life set up exactly how I want it here.
Every month, twenty-five to thirty fit young open-hearted women come swanning in, and do their yoga, and express their love, and Shane and Craig facilitate the whole thing and get paid for it too.
But, of course, I’m not being fair here – I’m leaping ahead to what I felt like by the time I left there, and also implicitly and explicitly stating, really, that I think Shane and his dad are a couple of sleazebags. I shouldn’t do that. Life’s much more complex than that. People aren’t black and white, etcetera. It took me a while to gain my opinion of what was going on there. In the beginning it was…
In the beginning, it was good to see Shane. He was gushing, of course – he always is – and glad to see me, whether feigned or otherwise. You can never tell with Shane. He’s always just saying stuff, I think, because he thinks it’s the right thing to say. But there I go again, rushing ahead with my latter opinion and belief. Sheesh! It’s fuckin’ hard with these spiritual types – ‘cos like I’ve intimated I used to be, they exist on so many different planes. They’re not just your standard everyday human being like the boys I play football with – and actually really like – there’s so much else going on, so many layers. Are they who they are or are they who they’d like themselves to be? Are they being true to themselves – and if so, which part of themselves? Are they their hearts, their souls? Are they their egos, or are they denying that, or transcending it, or neglecting it, or repressing it? Are they some image of something they read in a book? Are they some image of some other spiritual person they once met who was maybe doing all these things too? Are they someone who has recently undergone a vast transformation and is now acting on that, not realising that they’ve yet to integrate it and things will change again? Are they but mere puppets lost to delusion, acting out on ignorances, off their faces on bliss? Wee little ninnies?
Man, it’s a complex business, this understanding of the people who are in that game. A game I played for a long time. A game that I still don’t really understand.
But a game, nonetheless, that I came out the other side of.
Shane. Shane who still loves everyone and everything and has a thousand friends on facebook – don’t know how many of them are girls, though he did tell me I was one of his few actual male friends, despite the years we hadn’t seen each other – and on said facebook profile writes over and over stupid little status updates about how we’re all one and I am you, you are me, and bliss and enlightenment and isn’t everything wonderful, blah blah blah. Every fucking day. And in reply the ninnies and the cute little yoga girls say, Yes! and, you’re so awesome, you changed my life in so many ways, you’re full of love and light and – ugh, it makes me want to puke. Sometime before that, sickened by the whole thing, I’d written some angry message about it and – well, I don’t know what I said, but when I was there and we spoke about it mano-a-mano and in honesty and he said, I just write that to make myself sound more enlightened than everyone else. And there was a truth in that that was refreshing and accepted.
Shane. Shane who loves everyone and does every little thing he does for God – but who also stays up till two a.m. every night watching youtube videos on his iPhone and waking up tired. Much like I have done, I suppose. But me not pretending to be no yoga-lovin’ Buddha, me just a daft little failure of a human being man like everyone else all doing our insane little things in houses and in bedrooms and on high streets and in cars for reasons we probably don’t understand. Like this typing too. And Shane sort of like the Shane of old but sort of not also: the purity perhaps lost and something a little more sinister in its place. An arrogance in place of that pure belief. A stubbornness where once there might have been openness. And too many years as a teacher of innocent young souls perhaps concretising in place an entity that seemed to think he was a teacher to all – and maybe he was once to me, but not any more…
And yet – Shane and me in one of those early days sit down and recap our years and find how similar they have been. Similar and parallel. Similar and parallel adventures in work and in relationships; in the types of women we have chosen and been through; in the thoughts we’ve had about our lives and where they were going at the various different times. Joy in the connection of that – yes, my girlfriend was like that too! and then I got this other one who was more – yes! mine also! And plenty of sheeshing and head-shaking and the realising that all that time apart and –
So little contact. Hm. So little contact indeed – and yet memories of the time I was having a real difficulty in life and I wrote to my closest friends – Shane included – and how all of them replied except him, and him who is Mr Love, one with everything and who is there on his facebook account every day loving and hugging everyone and feeling them in his heart even as he types no matter where they are in the world to the joy of five hundred gushing girls – yet far too busy with all that love and all that oneness to even fire off a one-line reply to me during my hour of need.
Mister full of shit Shane. Mister I just talk the words Shane. Mister I haven’t got the time for you Shane, unless you’re twenty-three and have got lovely yoga boobs and want to hold me tight Shane.
Shane’s mum died when he was pretty young: it’s my theory that he’s been hungry for feminine energy in his life ever since that day, and maybe before. She had mental problems, apparently. Not nice thing to go through but…
And this is not me being a good friend but…
Again, on New Years Eve, I wrote my long heartfelt letters to my nearest and dearest and, again, who didn’t reply?
Mr Love. Mr Oneness. Mr Enlightenment.
Bitter? Moi?
Actually, I’m not sure. But I’ve got a few things to get off my chest – and if there’s one thing I hate in the world, it’s spiritual bullshit and the manipulation of young women. And I know that’s two things and maybe I’ll think of a third too: oh yeah, not replying to my heartfelt emails when you think you’re some enlightened dude who loves the whole world more than anyone ever felt possible.
But we’ll rest at three.
We had some nice times, I guess. As before, they welcomed me in and made me feel at home – sort of – but now that I type it I realise it was purely in a physical way. Sure, I got my place to sleep and my food all provided for – more than I was expecting or asking for; I was only thinking to pop in for a night or two – but as far as the rest of it…well, they were running their school and…who was I anyway? Just some guy from the long distant past landed on their doorstep – though at their invitation – and not wanting to stay but being asked to stay and so going with that because it was good before and hoping that it would be good again but –
Too busy with the yoga chicks. Shane expresses all manner of things and gratitudes and platitudes – but it seems like if you ain’t got tits you ain’t worthy of the time. And they all swoon and flutter and, wow, how it made me sick to see him doing his same old trick of hour long hugs right in front of the kitchen kneading their young little backs and whispering his New Age sweet nothings and – I tell you what, when he hugs me and gets to kneading and whispering, it feels yukky – it feels like someone trying to take something from you, suck something from you. New Agers have this term called ‘Energy Vampires’ for people that just want your energy, leave you drained – and though I wouldn’t go that far, that’s what it reminds me of.
And yet, only a certain kind of energy. Female energy. Young hot yoga chick energy.
I got it set up here exactly how I want it, he says. I made the world the way I want it. So I don’t have to go anywhere else to find what I need.
And in they troop, month after month, with their hair and their vest tops and their yoga arses and their open, loving hearts.
Twenty-five, thirty every month. I even heard talk that Craig wanted it to be a female only thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they vet them to keep the percentage of guys down.
Who wants hairy yoga guys when you can have lovely soft yoga girls?
But now what you’re thinking is that I’m just jealous and bitter because they wouldn’t let me in and I of course like lovely soft girls and wanted to get my dirty man paws on them too. But I don’t think that’s the case: for one, the yoga girls turned me off. It was like…well, what was it like? It was disturbing. It brought back memories of my own days at the Way of Nature. Sure, we got high – but where was the grounding, where was the balance? Our spirits soared and we floated off into ecstasy and thought we’d made it, man, into the pure Buddhafields and everything was just gonna be ecstasy forever, so much better than any drug ‘cos this was a drug that was natural and free and everywhere and without comedown – except come down we did – and what to do then when you’re lost in some delusion having traded in your life for a year or two of spaced-out bliss and come to possessionless and drifting and with no idea how to get back to Earth feeling naked and vulnerable ‘cos so much of what you’ve believed in was absolute shit? I mean, it’s one thing to get people high – that’s pretty easy – but it’s another to take them to a place of integration and balance and “feet on the ground, head in the clouds.” That’s what this place seemed to be lacking – it was all about the soaring. But what of the world when they left and went back to their lives? Or maybe they didn’t care.
It was my spaced out youth all over again: Way of Nature days and later even higher Amma days getting ridiculous and wasted with Eve thinking myself Jesus and her my Mary Magdalene. Days before the crash and the return. Days still going on for others in their own first days of spiritual awakening and realising the love inside themselves and swooning in the deep pool blue reflections of Shane’s loving eyes. Shane the being of light! Shane the holy guiding brother who loves me and wants nothing for me but my own good! We hugged for one hour! He told me that he feels love for me! He’ll be there forever!
But what about when those days are done? What about when the drug wears off? Where will you be then?
So there were girls – yoga girls doing their yoga thing – but they weren’t girls that appealed to me. That whole yoga thing, man – that whole New Age thing – it just makes me want to gag. There was one girl there who kept trying to get into the staring thing: you know, you’re there over your salad and then you just catch someone’s eye and then you end up staring at each for like four fuckin’ hours thinking it’s the most deep and wonderful thing in the world, really connecting man, really going somewhere. Sighing and breathing out and maybe seeing things. Putting feeling into your eyes: here’s some sadness, here’s some joy. Better still, generate a few tears. Better still, crack up into hysterics. Or give each other ‘messages’. And then, when it finally feels ‘done’ – get up and hug and spend the entire rest of the day in an embrace – maybe till fuckin’ dawn – and it’ll be friends for life.
She keeps trying to stare at me. I know the drill but I don’t want to get into it. I’d rather talk about football or something. Real world things. I guess I’m not the same.
I like your energy, she says, it’s…
And I’m suppose to say something back, about her energy – about what I perceive it to be – and then we’ll get into some game about what she’s feeling, and what I’m feeling, and next thing I know it’ll be twelve hours later and we’ll be hugging and crying as the sun comes up and who’da thought the whole night would go?
I’m cynical, I know. Once I would have wept for experiences like that. But things have changed. I’ve moved on, I guess. I’ve come to see things a bit more clearly. I went through hell with those delusions and weirdnesses and I don’t want to go back and I don’t want anyone else to go there. I’m not playing the staring/feeling game. I divert my attention.
You can’t do that, of course, in this world – that’s running away, avoiding, repressing. What are you afraid of? All that kind of bullshit.
But I’m not afraid of anything, I just don’t want to play this game.
Never get so high you forget your zipcode, old Stevie Jay used to say.
But I got so high I forgot my own name.
And never open your mind to the extent that your brain falls out.
But I chucked my brain away voluntarily, and declared it the enemy.
Six months getting high, six months integrating, John Milton used to say.
But I thought, fuck that, and devoted two years to going out of my tree, and spent the next six or seven trying desperately to come down.
Follow your bliss, they say, but stay grounded. But what they don’t tell you is how to stay grounded. They don’t tell you that here either. It’s all about getting high. These girls are going out of their minds. They’re doolally, and they’re getting into all the sharing, and Shane and Craig are still running their circles, and it’s all good – ‘cos if you resist that’s your shit doing that and it’s the shit we’re trying to get out – and there’s not a peep of a word on the dangers of spiritual delusion and bliss ninnyism, like John Milton used to teach.
John Milton, of course, is the enemy. He was big and bad and he paid for his naughtiness at the hands of karma, that poor old burned-down Way of Nature.
So, no, I wasn’t jealous of Shane having all those yoga girls. You can keep ‘em. Way too floppy for me. Though I won’t deny there was a little sadness in that: all those years of thinking I wanted to get back to spirituality and escape the drudgery of our everyday world in which I felt such a weirdo and a stranger – and here I am among the meditators and the yogaheads feeling like a weirdo and a stranger too. All old stuff to me. All like the toys of my childhood, groovy at the time but no longer appealing. As likely to want to embrace these mystic staring contests and emotional sharings as I am my old teddies or a Panini sticker album. And more than that, the whole thing just feels yukky…
Built my life exactly the way I want it. Right here deep down in Mexico
Mr Love. Mr Enlightenment. Writing everything on facebook about the beauty and oneness of all our loving Yandara yogakind yet too busy to…and up half the night…and still searching for…
Wow, I’m really writing some kind of damnation reportage on the place, huh! I really didn’t mean to.
But that’s how it’s coming out.
Still, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind – it don’t get much more unedited truth than this.
Although the whole thing could, of course, be misinterpretation and projection.
But…
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