Goulash of Crazy -- Devon, England

The days are starting to fade together into a goulash of crazy. Bung of bizarre. I hardly notice when Harriet mentions that she's having a "health crisis" or that the humble rock bookend is from Holdstone Down and filled with powerful energy.

I still chuckle internally when she calls Holland "cloggy land" and says "you know, the place with the yellow brick road" when she forgets the state of Kansas.

I'm no longer awkwarded-out when Harriet says, "There are cacao nibs in the cupboard to help with your period pains, Aimee. And Michael, you should eat lots of sesame seeds. Based on the homeopathic principle of like cures like, sesame seeds will help with sperm. Mmmm, yes, they look the same, don't they? The little sesame seeds and --"

I am only mildly put off when I go into the backroom to find some cheese and I hear,

"Aimee, is that you?"

"Yes, I'm just -- "

"If you're wanting to use the loo, you'll have to use the upstairs one. I'm in the middle of my enema."

"No, I... ummm... I actually just wanted some cheese from the umm... spare fridge."

"Oh, that's great then. Carry on."

For those of you who don't know (lucky bastards), an enema is a naturopathic procedure wherein a liquid (often coffee) is shot up the anus to flush out the intestines.

Everything about that feels so unnatural. Including the waste of perfectly good coffee. 

I had a more visceral reaction when she proudly presented pictures of unnatural looking stool over dinner last night. It was black and stringy and covered with mucus and did not add to the flavor of my baked onions.

"You look at that and you know it wasn't what you ate yesterday," Harriet handed the poo pictures to me and took a bite of her coleslaw. "Bentonite clay draws out 32 times its weight in toxins!"

"Oh, umm... that's a lot of toxins," the poop was so ghastly, grisly, gruesome that I couldn't take my eyes away. It was like passing a devastating accident on the highway. You don't want to look, but you just can't look away.

People actually photograph this shit? How do they eat at night? 

I looked at my onion again. I swallowed uncomfortably and gingerly closed the book.

Onion, I can't promise what you'll find in my intestines, but I hope it's a bit less grim than that.
 
I'm only slightly surprised when I creep into the living room at night and see Michael sitting quietly in front of the fire. His sketchpad and colored pencils rest on the hearth. The house guitar leans against the couch. He looks into the embers sending smoldering light into the dark room and I feel like an earthquake would not distract him from his meditation.

But the wings of a butterfly could. 

I still smile when I see the bright yellow flowers he sticks in his borrowed hat and I laugh when he weaves one into mine.

"You need this," he leans over to pull the stem through the dark blue stitches. "Yes."

I was very surprised to find that Darrell had prematurely up and left when I woke up on Tuesday morning. I knew that there had been a bit of an "energy clash" between the gardener and the host (Harriet had informed me of this a time or five), but he seemed to be the type of fellow to stick things out. However, shit hit the fan when Harriet discovered that Darrell had been accepting money for work she thought he was doing for free.

Harriet went into crisis mode and Darrell packed up and headed out.

I'll miss his vibrations. They were good ones.

Feeling angry and disappointed over her renegade helpxer, Harriet proceeded to explode all over me for adding beetroot to the juice (which diminishes its detoxifying qualities) and making it twelve hours before she would have liked it (which drains out all the nutrients).

"I just wanted to do something nice," I stood frozen with my pitcher of blood colored juice. "I thought this would make her happy." 

"It made me happy," Michael looked up from his dinner of vegetable curry. 

"It's just so hard..." I finally moved my feet to put the rejected, defective juice back in the fridge. "That's how my mom would have made it. That's how I learned to make it. With a beet, an apple, a couple of carrots, some ginger and celery. But that's not how it's done here, so it's wrong." I sighed deeply and closed the fridge door. "I see the lines I have to walk. I see the line that lies between offering the skills I already have and simply offering exactly what that person needs... but seeing a line doesn't make it easy to walk. It just makes me feel more ashamed when I fail."

Harriet blew through the door, apologized for her excessive reaction to my beetroot infected juice and ladled herself a bowl of curry.

"I wasn't angry at you, Aimee. I've just got all this anger and it's erupting out of me," she made an erupting motion with her arms, nearly knocking her flavorful veggies to the floor.

Darrell... I understand why you hit the road, but that wasn't very nice for the rest of us. Goodness gracious. 

My deeply perturbed host wanted to sort through the Darrell debacle the next morning, so she took me up to the rooftop and we sat on a tiny patio and wrote out our feelings.

Just... be... open.

I wasn't particularly excited to be trapped on the rooftop with Harriet, but I followed her up the narrow step ladder and leaned against the brick chimney all the same. Part of me was afraid that I'd be up there all afternoon and the other part was afraid that I'd immediately be abducted by aliens coming to send vibrations into Holdstone Down.  

She just needs someone to talk to right now. Someone to share this process in some way... to bounce emotions off of. I need to make sure that I let them bounce off and away and try not to absorb them all. Ach. My ego is a sponge. A dry, crackly sponge that absorbs everything and identifies with what it absorbs.

"I knew he was taking advantage of me --" Harriet started off. 

Bounce, Bourget. You must be queen of the bounce. Sit quietly and nod attentively. She just needs someone to sit and nod. I have no reason to not want to sit and nod. Other than possible alien abduction, of course.

So I wrote about my negative experience couchsurfing in Munich and my debilitating fear of anger. She wrote about how she could have reacted differently to Darrell and her course of action from here on out.

After an hour on the roof (this sentence sounds disturbingly normal to me) we climbed back down and democratically divided the rest of the deficient juice. 

Harriet couldn't finish hers because she thought it would send her into a healing crisis.

I didn't even blink.