~George Henry Lewes
I leave Abnormal Aetherius in ten days. I have been thoroughly (and lovingly) introduced to the realm of bonkers wherein shelves are filled with books on alien transmissions from Mars, toilet covers are put down to keep energy from escaping through the bowl and down the pipes and no matter where I hide, I can't seem to avoid the penetrating gaze of Dr. George King... but I have not yet been converted nor have I been driven completely mad.
So leaving in ten days is probably for the best. I'll have loads of stories to tell and be still be sane enough (hopefully) to tell them.
Saturday was the Master Jesus' birthday (according to the Aetherius Society), so Harriet drove to Holdstone Down to celebrate and was kind enough to drop Michael and me off for a stroll along the coast and a mosey inland to Hunter's Inn.
The quiet, contemplative company of this perceptive, receptive nomad has been such a beautiful respite for me over the past two weeks.
Whenever I'm feeling irritated or... or bulldozed by Harriet's caring but critical persona, I find my South African, grab the guitar, take off my shoes, and walk down to the beach to listen to the waves and what seems like South Africa's version of Jack Johnson.
It's all very, very calming and I usually feel ready to respectfully close the toilet lids and listen sympathetically to Harriet tell me how difficult it is to run a business while staying true to her morals/divine calling.
I guess that having posters of Jesus avec flying saucers lining the walls and serving wheat protein sausages for breakfast isn't exactly creating a booming business.
On one of these soothing walks, I popped into the Spar and bought dried sausage and a strongbow pear cider -- which I surreptitiously hid in my sack and smuggled into the meat-free B&B.
I'm such a rebel.
Michael explained how to manually adjust the white balance of my Nikon D60 as we passed sheep scratching themselves on fence posts like Baloo from The Jungle Book, European robins chittering, flittering through the sunshine gorse and mud squelching, belching under our boots.
My life feels like one of those maddening landscape puzzles, I smiled thoughtfully as we stopped to look at a lone kayak cutting through the Atlantic. My homeschool years were like the edges -- it was mindlessly easy to find pieces and place them together because everything was so well defined. My university years were like the middle part with the quintessential quaint Swiss Cottage and the bubbling brook and the random, soft-eyed animal. Every piece was radically different, but they were so different that I understood where to put them in relationship to the edge. Now I feel like I'm in the clear blue sky portion of the puzzle and the pieces all look the same. I pick one up, try it out at every angle, and put it down again. Pick another up, try it out at every angle, and put it down again. Then I pick one up, try it out at every angle and... click. It fits.
The piece I needed at this moment was Michael. His mindfulness is bringing me back into the moment.
We ate a picnic of nuts, cheese, hard boiled eggs and smuggled sausage with our feet dangling into what looked like an abandoned well. I read a chapter from "The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared" between sips of green tea. A chilly breeze brushed against our backs and whispered through the well, but the sun on my face and the warm tea between my palms took the teeth out of the cold.
Harriet picked us up from Hunter's Inn (which looked surprisingly like a quaint Swiss Cottage) and we would our way back to Combe Martin in her sturdy, dirty Honda.
So much mud. I love it. Marks from soiled boots stained the car carpet and lower portions of the doors. I settled back into my seat and let the warm sun carry me into a fuzzy trance. Seher would have an absolute panic attack if her car was in this shape, but I... I just love mud. And grass that sticks in my sweater and sand that scruffs up my shoes and those gummy seeds that cling to my pant legs and the curious spiders that venture into my hair while I'm sprawling in a field.
I made the mistake of reading over past blog posts when Michael and I returned from our walk. I breezed through them with a "Gallivanting Grasshopper" book in the back of my mind.
I certainly have enough material, I thought when I saw the 270 posts over the past three years.
And then I actually read through the blog posts and understood that although I have 270 of them, they could probably be summed up succinctly in a paragraph of, "My life is difficult, but exciting. I'm lonely, but I'm learning a lot about myself. Delightful. So much delightful. Ah, how I love relying on the kindness of strangers. Am I lost again? How did that happen? I drink too much coffee. Why can't I stop drinking coffee? BACON!"
So I put aside thoughts of a GG travel book and made hot carob with Michael.
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