Myths of Separation

I have been in the emergency room twice in my life. The first time was when I was four or five, I think -- Ashleigh Wahl taught me how to ride a bike on her purple Schwinn with the banana seat. Buoyed by my success with this newly learned skill, I decided to try it without hands, which didn’t work out as well.

The second time was a couple of days ago in Bogota, where I spent the weekend following ten days of blissful non-space-time-continuum living on the Caribbean coast with some friends and alongside a group of soul-searching plant medicine voyagers. Having suffered a series of ear-nose-throat maladies over the course of several months – the last one resulting in reduced hearing in my left ear, -- I started to feel a bit like Woody Allen’s character from “Manhattan,” imagining brain tumors and other possible tragic revelations. I figured I should try to see a doctor before I left the Spanish-speaking world for the uncharted and Portuguese-speaking territory of Brazil to see if I could get some answers. At the beach, we had tried all manner of remedies, including boiling oregano leaves to extract the oil and drop it in the ear, glycerine, jumping up and down, yawning a lot, meditating and visualization. Still, I was living in an echo chamber and trying to understand the metaphysical reason behind my repeated illness and this new and uniquely unpleasant symptom.

After a synchronistic run-in with my old friend Pablo Escobar during the Saturday afternoon paseo in the north part of town, another friend took me to the ER of one of the better hospitals, determining it offered the best chance of seeing a doctor on a Saturday. The good news is that I don’t think I have a brain tumor. The doctor was impressed by my Spanish, which is still at around a seven year-old level of sophistication, but not bad for a gringa. She couldn’t see anything seriously wrong and actually the situation seems to have improved somehow on its own, so for now I think I have escaped an untimely end.

I’ve been thinking about healing, though, and how the body crumbles in such specific and appropriate ways at such specific and appropriate moments. I’ve been thinking about how suffering makes us seek a spiritual path. A few days into my own personal rogue beach retreat, a group of New Yorker yogis left the finca and a group of mostly North Americans arrived to engage in the aforementioned plant medicine work. As fate would have it, one of the leaders of this group happened to be a writer from New York who I met in a café about 15 years ago – a conversation struck up by my choice of reading material: The Portable Jung. Jung never fails to get people talking. The world is a handkerchief, as they say, and so it goes. For the next several days, I observed from the outside – because I chose not to participate in this group’s work – and heard bits and pieces of people’s accounts of their experiences, revelations and nightmares from the journeys they traveled in the night. People wanted to talk a lot about what they were feeling and going through, and I had some interesting conversations with a few members of this rather large and diverse crew as they broke down and rebuilt themselves. Mostly I stayed out of their way, though, so not to get entangled in the mess of energy and karma being churned and stirred and purged in the darkness.

I did my own ‘work:’ merged with the ocean, wrote, practiced slow yin-style yoga with my friend Lya, ate coconut and cacao and arepas and huevos haros, stared at the sky from various hammocks, slept an obscene number of hours, sang to myself and wondered if I would ever hear normally again, acquired and then balanced a gringa tan, read the transcribed lectures of Yogi Bajhan, walked barefoot through the jungle, swam in pools made by waterfalls. Yos and Claudia, our beloved hosts, took the best care of me. We philosophized, laughed, ate some delicious cookies and marveled at the wonders of the natural world.

I also befriended a magical seven year-old (right at my level) Kogi named Roxanna. The Kogis are one of the indigenous tribes in Colombia, and some were invited to teach and speak as part of the plant medicine retreat taking place at the finca. Roxanna and I both improved our Spanish while making paper fortune tellers and drawing pictures for each other with some crayons left behind by one of the previous seven year-old visitors. The Kogis, like most indigenous people I’ve met, are quiet and seem possessed by a tranquility and stillness mostly unknown in our turbulent societies.

My friends Lina and Jaime received me back in Bogota with love and enthusiasm and plans for an excursion from the city for my weekend visit. Lina, a beautiful dancer, is learning to walk again after undergoing a new and rare type of knee surgery on both knees, so she relaxed and soaked up the nature and community at Suezca while Jaime Franco – like Lina, another delightfully enthusiastic liver of life – took me on a ‘small bike ride.’ We started meandering country roads, then met up with a team of mountain bikers and Jaime suggested we join them – ‘just for as long as I felt like it,’ he said. I told him I might not be able to keep up but he said not to worry and off we went. In the great tradition of under-promising and over-delivering, I’m proud to say that I huffed and puffed my way past most of the team, scaling a gravel-strewn vertical incline – all at about 8600 feet of elevation. Part two of our physical adventure day was rock climbing – something I did once last year with Jaime and another friend, and while I survived it, I’d figured I’d quit while I was ahead rather than risk trying it again and possibly failing. But my poetry-reciting, art-making, joke-telling, confidence-inspiring homeboy Jaime Franco coaxed me back to the rock to face my fears. He told me to become a part of the rock – I abandoned my fears of separation and realized again – perhaps even more acutely – how literally not being able to project more than one step at a time forces one to be present.

On the way back to Bogota for my flight to Brazil Sunday night, Jaime continued recalling to memory the words to the T.S. Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – a line from which I have taken the name of this blog – and also told us a joke about why men and women don’t understand each other. Men, apparently, are more compartmentalized and have brains divided into separate rooms, including something called the ‘nothing’ room. Women, on the other hand – perhaps being more intrinsically connected to the oneness of the universe because of our role in creating and sustaining life – mix everything together, and there is no ‘nothing’ space. So when a woman asks a man what he’s thinking about and he’s in the ‘nothing’ room, he answers ‘nothing’ and the woman can’t fathom how this is possible, because she neither has nor dwells in such a void in her own being. I realize I may be opening myself up to criticism for setting up this dichotomy -- and actually, I think there is a good reason for this difference in our ways of organizing ourselves psychically. In any case, please speak your truth.

I arrived in Sao Paolo this morning and was received by my new homegirl Sandra, who I met through Kate, one of the yogis whose retreat I caught the end of on the coast. Yet again, a friend of a brand new friend has welcomed me into her home and her life – and even more uncanny is that Sandra knows and used to live with with the one other person I know in Sao Paolo, though I know each of them through completely different contacts.

We are in every room, and every room is ours.