Chapter 7: Unexpected Stop

A wholly new journey began. A wedding. A matrimony. Of a dear mentor and a friend from past New York, Latin American, and Goldman Sachs lives took me to North. First to Colombia. Then to the Caribbean. I was invited, to crash the honey moon. At a pristine island where less than 500 inhabitants lived, with only one road, only one motorised 4-wheeled vehicle, and loads of ocean, loads of crab, and a lot of silence.

I did not observe my priorities from New Years. I brought all the luggage. All the anxieties. All the rumbling inside. Nothing was dealt with. All the heart succumbed and Demian watched from above. That I did. I walked to me. I continued. I knew I was doing it. My back was young enough to carry all the weight. The calendar occurred. I observed time. Yet, I was back to self. My own archaic, chaotic, seeking self.

The days merged from one to another with the help of a nitrogen high from a whole-hearted intense and rigorous start into what would become a passion of life: the art of diving. Oceans, atmospheres, fish, waters, accumulated on top, aside, below and I just persisted. I felt free. I felt meditative. I lost it. I was surrounded by no street lights. By no cars. By no sacrifice. I was surrounded by passion for living. I was surrounded by Creole culture and the happening reggae-chiva, the only bus in town, that took me from diving site to diving site, with the hearts of people who had nowhere to be other than there. Smiling from the spirit. Directly from the spirit.

I became the me I know. The one who is barefoot. The one who is tanned. The one who is unworried. Shares. And is free.

One night arrived. A mind slip. new times and the mind volcanoes, for such a long time asleep starting erupting. Revealing themselves. They spoke like this:

"Suddenly, the month is gone. Here I am. Immersed in the profound ocean, standing on floating earth, Providencia. For days, sounds and noise and Western civilisation ceased. It expired. My body awakening to the peripheral road travelling the border of the island. And nothing else. No more roads. Just one. Simply one. One destiny. Always defined.

The road is made with concrete. It is delimitated by a very primitive construction practice. An oval shaped road. An oval around tropical mountains that attentively gazes over the ocean. Ocean turquoise that hides the second largest barrier of best preserved coral reefs in the world. Untouched. Biosphere.

The sea, pending, ready, blue, turquoise, gentle, a total flirt. Transparent like crystal. This ocean, clearer than water. Clearer than my soul. I arrive with the goal of immersing me deep in it.

The Creole feel new, everywhere, a legacy not understood by the external. A mixture of struggle. Of turned backs. Of treasons. A tool for survival. None of them forgets where they stand in the struggle. The pride of the island. This, their language, is the real pride of preservation. I can hear them singing "you don't know me, you don't know me well, you, you, you don't know my father." A father culture. So complex. Only born in the heart. It cannot be acquired. No one tries. You would look ridiculous.

I take in every vista into the soul. Every external one at least. I keep the fresh mornings. I keep the sights of a simple life, by the sea, and bicycle transportation as a mode of living. The looks from the entire population, detached to the invader.

I take in each of the days spent there. They shall remain my alibi for criminal smiles, secrets, intense internal findings. Findings that can be fixed to the point that only one is capable of recognising and deserving. Deserving a place like this feels like nothing that was awarded to me. No. It feels, instead, like an arrival. An unexpected arrival in the midst of life-noise. This will mark something. A turning point."

The tentacles of my soul spread. Walking to the confines of deserted beaches or to meet Pichi, the humongous local who guided me into the diving trip. Who made me primitive. Who made me a shark. Who brought me to an internal adventure, after all, that cleared my limbs, pores, and gave equilibrium to my ears. I became a hearer. A person that listens. To silence I returned. I was suddenly and naturally within. A first step into wholly breathing in, and breathing out. To balance altitude. To control latitude. No anxiety. No stupid and careless kicking. Just control. Finally. A first step. It landed. Bubbles in circular shapes formed and it felt like bliss. Formations of animals, plants, and present tense developed below, around, beyond, and above. Little by little, I too emerged. To the surface. From within. To breathe. I too arrived.

And then, of course, a psycho-tropic night happened. And oh lordie lord... I did not see this coming. Not now. Not then. But it was what it was.

X rose from the hard structure he sat on. A combination of broken wood pieces and Tarzanic lianas no to so carefully assembled by the Rastafari who speaks Creole and owns this beach bar. A man, local to this distant and Caribbean island. The brown curly hair, his skin tanned, the lines that up his body glancing above into the dark night. Glances of stars. A constellation as thick as visible as that he often observed as a child is above me. Rum stupor. Air. BReeze. Reggae beats accompanying the movements of his body. A slight feeling of awkward Nirvana. And I do not know what Nirvana means.

This was not a cliche. But rather, a physical reaction that objectively constituted an ode to an actual trance. A state of spirit not felt by a man for times, for decades. for lifetimes, ever.

With the marks of the odd wooden sofa he sat on, firmly pressed on his buttocks and upper legs, the contour of his back, neck, and legs. X walks away. Barefeet and onto the beach. The sounds behind him. Ahead, a rope hanging from a palm tree that grew on forward in spite of being castrated of its branches. This palm tree's stem grew tall, and onto the ocean, slanting forward, saluting the waves, during this, the most serene of evenings. The water not quite touching his feet. If only indirectly, ocean touched him. The tide was high. The sand felt wet. The sand was perceptible.

Physical reactions spreading. All his senses focused on this rope, on the ocean, on balancing himself, forward, on mastering the chance of playful childish games on a virgin beach's shore. X himself felt as such. Like a virgin beach shore.

Abrupt ending to the hard felt seating. Abrupt ending to the special sense of solitude within a crowd. Abrupt ending to the music that had prompted the movement of his legs and the involuntary tapping of his bored fingers on the wood on which he sat before. He is uneasy.

He looked East, he looked West. Realising: I am standing on this beach, now, alone. By himself. The base and music felt disruptive still. He could not stand there. Soul craved space. Feet braved the walking into the moon lit darkness. Walking East made more sense. The sand spaces felt wider. The limitations seemed less. He craved vastness.

With a light step, and a foolish pace, he walked on the beach. The ocean felt nearing, the war water brought much welcomed fresh new sand to his toes, dripped his feet, and toes. It felt reckless to stand there at night. In evening clothes being bathed, if only fittingly by salt water. He thought an inescapable lightning storm is what he really needed. All of lightning, to fall him in, to stuck him deep. Then.

Lights of the street leading to the Rastafari bar gladly stayed put behind. They dimmed and dissipated as aggressively as the soun of music faded. Now, the stood tall, elevated, with his bronze looking body, facing the sea.

He had not been able to recall it when, but he rose to al altitude of 175cm above water. Barring international conventions. He also recalled he expanded to 32 inches wide. "I am still overweight, I want to feel sbelt. Not stocky but rather athletic." Paranoid he felt constrained and he jumped obtrusively over shadows, sediments, fossils deposited across the shoreline.

He wore a blue shirt, cut at his taste, a low v-line that showed chest hair and heart. That was really of no convention to dress codes of men of his statue or background. Shameful idiot. Being 27 years old, he thought it could be still allowed to wear that. Immediately, during this vane monologue spreading over his mind and retracting him from the present moment, rebellion sprung. He simply could not be bothered with superficial, terrestrial conventions. His shirt was not a manifesto, even when those around him forcefully prescribed that conclusion to the garment. All it was, was his shirt.

Somehow, X thought, his spirit followed by force, the similar forces. First, an exogenous request for restraint and composure. A subtle demand to fit the norm. Subsequently, a realisation, the apologetic thought that led to self justification. And then, to a rebellious, unintended, unclaimed perceived manifesto. That would be swiftly eroded by the ultimate realisation: a profound instinct that lay somewhere, beyond reason, this his spirit, is his, is self, is free.

The existential quarrel led to realisation of physical positioning. He was reminded of where he stood. He saw the ocean. He saw the beach. He wanted to be reminded. He needed that often. To focus. To come back to core. To remember to stay there.

Thus, he felt he continued to fail at the attempt of being present. Face value with the moment. Face value with the mind there not gazing elsewhere. He had felt an impending need to conceal his vision from this mind. The later had taken over at present. It felt as thought centuries went by in his mind, as sights charged, as conversations took place. And he was not there but rather in far off wonderment, deeo into his own existence. Going over past acts. Reconsidering future priorities. Mind did not stop.

X recalled, further distracted, a healer saying to him: "I see a lot of yellow in you. Do not confuse this with an aura reading. It is not that type of thing. No. It is your energy. Your mind does not stop. Your eyes are inquisitive. The soul is craving. From the moment you walked into this room, you have thought about the positioning of its furniture, quickly made a note of the view's beauty, and perhaps drew a plan to rearrange things, to your own taste. You have thought of how unusual my French accent appears to you here in South America and perhaps wondered about my apapdability into this society. You have thought about the plastered walls and that who built them. You wondered about their livelihoods and only then you sat. Now, you are telling me you feel a need to control this. Do so. It will be impossible without training. It will be the most excellent challenge to think about yourself, to train your mind to observe, and to rest, to find silence, to dim this intense yellow into a balance tone." X accepted this verdict and somehow found himself working on this at this very beach, months later, in a different continent, now, above a shoreline.

X decided to honour the stupor and psycho-tropical moment. The substances of music, liquid, ocean, nitrogen, done him a favour. They exalted the shining of the moon over the water. They revealed a path of water drawn and built on the sand for him to follow. He knew better. Blandly put, he knew he was high on visions. He knew the moon descended just as equally for men and women that very nigh and many nights before. Yet, he also accepted that this path over water had never been walked.

Barring Bible stories of water walking Jesuschrist, he knew, he was temporarily the chosen one. And temporarily insane. He realised he was finally back. There. At the beach. The moment. The lonely night. There was an urgent need to prevent the moment's escape and so he set on himself the plan of provoking a physical feeling that would serve as a reminder of where he stood. X said out loud: "I will honour this moment by jumping sloppily around."

He laughed at himself. But carefully carried on with the plan. The night was on.