What would make a young loving wife
and mother rise at two a.m. and kiss her twenty months old baby child goodbye,
not knowing if she would ever hold this treasure, this one beautiful thing in
her life, ever again? To venture away
from a foreign island to even more foreign and unknown lands, far, far from home? I don’t know how I did it, but I did. Looking back the ice still clutches my
heart. A battered wife, I was in a state
of reactive psychosis - a sleepwalker in a cold hell. Leaving my child where she would be secure,
knowing I could not defend her in my confused abused state. Nor would I ever divide our family by
snatching her from her father. It was
Solomon’s Sword. I was the dummy
mummy. Fooled by a system I could not
combat. I needed space to think. So did he, but I had to leave to give it to
him. Given his past behaviour I had no guarantee our marriage would survive,
but it was a gamble I had to take. I was not going to live with the lies and
brutality another minute. I had to find the Love and the Reason and Meaning of
It All.
Yes, after leaving my husband and baby girl on
Formentera, in the cold two a.m. morning after my twenty-eighth birthday, my
heart suspended in some cryogenic force field to be revived by the kiss of love
when I returned – or so I had then so vainly hoped, I walked out of that remote
Spanish island finca into the
blackness of deepest night, stumbling along the rough dusty track to the waiting
bus from La Mola to the port of La Savina to catch the early ferry across to the
nearby island of Ibiza. In the pre-dawn hours I wandered the empty sleeping
streets of the Ibiza port, wondering what I was doing, numb and distraught. Then
almost sleep-walking, I boarded the dawn ferry to Barcelona on the Spanish
mainland.
Which was where suddenly life upended on me and my path and destination
became clear.
Because on that Barcelona bound ferry was
Tom. Osiris. Satya Pal. Brother Thomas. Abdullah.
He took a different name to suit the religion of whatever cultural
situation he found himself in. He was
presently in Brother Thoma mode, to suit the Spanish Christianity. We were
instantly attracted to each other. A cosmic magnetism that endured and except
for a few hours here and there, we didn’t leave each other’s side for the next
18 months, sharing many adventures as we walked in Morocco then across half the
planet all the way to India.
Tom was, he said, the motherless son of a wealthy Californian/Swedish
father. He had run away from home at twelve and split, as he put it, to Maui in
Hawaii where, as a surfie gremlin, he
survived by begging off tourists until he was
sixteen. Then he made his way to Sweden
in search of his ancestors where he lived as a student in
Malmo, the university town. In his twenties he flew to India where he spent some
months studying in ashrams and became a pilgrim of “The Way”.
Now 25, he was the vision of a Nordic prince. At over 6 ft he was a standout in any crowd, striding
along with a fast direct gait as if he owned the world, tall lean and proud,
shoulders back, long shining gold blonde hair swinging, drawing the eyes while at the same time as his
eyes saw far over the heads of other mere shorter mortals able to avoid
potential dangers while finding the best route to his destination. Those
far-seeing dancing eyes were such a sky blue I felt I could swim in them and
from his laughing mouth a deep manly voice seemed to embrace the word Love in
nearly every sentence. He looked so
healthy, so clean, in light Indian white flowing cotton long shirt and loose
pyjama pants. Across one shoulder hung a cream Ghandi Khadi-cloth hand spun blanket
and a set of small Indian Tabla drums.
The other supported an Ibizencan basket containing all his worldly
possessions with, and I suppose what clinched his creds for me, a surfer’s hand-board
protruding. Only a dedicated surfer
would carry a hand-board among life’s necessities. He had just arrived back in
Europe, was on his way to Morocco to surf, but wanted to return to India to
live as a sadhu.
I was immediately charmed by his
ethos, his air of freedom, of being a real traveller and a surfer and by his intense
fast-talking spiel, preaching the religion of Freedom and Love and Universal
Truth for all. Was I a sucker? Let’s
just call it vulnerability. Love at first sight for us both !
As I later came to realise he was a
hippy preacher man like Johnny Appleseed, spreading the seeds of the New Age doctrines
as he travelled across the planet, giving him an open sesame to so many
receptive doors at a time when great change was shifting values. Religions had
not delivered and the empty voids needed filling with Love, with renewed Hope
and Joy. As I also later found, people everywhere got confirmation of their
inner need to be validated in this new creed he spread to anyone who would
listen. In shops, bus queues, street corners, in parks, to drivers we got lifts
from, even the police who would come to check him out – it was what he did,
what he said. His M.O, his credo, his magic carpet ride through all strata of
societies, reaching all classes & creeds. Many found him simply a harmless
curiosity and invited him home to show the wife and kids. But almost without
exception when he left he had given them the gift of a new way of thinking to
ponder, even if they were not convinced or converted.
But when I first met him, as we stood
at the ferry rail watching in fascination the magical light show as the
strobing first rays of the rising sun reflected fire from windows on the receding pink and gold glowing island of
Ibiza, I had no idea who or what he was.
I only knew he was a fascinating guy going, like me, to Morocco. I wasn’t fazed by his wild life story - it
seemed to me that if that was what had happened to him it was just him coping
with his world, just as I was trying to cope with mine. I simply had no idea. But as we got closer
his positive philosophy and warm affectionate presence lifted me out of what
could have been a terminal depression and gave my soul wings. I could relate to
everything he said. Yes, we are Love. Everything is natural. By giving Love we
get back Love. Children of the Great Mother/Father, each of us a vehicle of Joy
if we let Love into our hearts. We are all One.
And so on. Well I do chuckle at
all that now. But then as an ideology it had legs and we were walking, fast and
free.
I had a destination a quest. In my crazy
twisted head I had a wild notion that somewhere in Morocco, perhaps in the
Atlas Mountains, I could find lost Atlantis, or some feeling of Atlantis. It
represented that advanced Utopian spiritual super race I felt we were all once part of.
I was such a dreamer! More practically,
I had heard of legendary good surfing on the Moroccan Atlantic coast.
My dreams had been fuelled by reading the stories of gutsy British gentlewomen like Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark - adventurous women who
walked the Pyrenees, lived in isolated Iranian harems, married chiefs on Melanesian islands, explored Mesopotamia by camel or lived with nomadic Bedouin.
I decided I would buy a donkey to carry
my gear and walk the Atlas mountains to see for myself what the myths and
legends of Atlantis, supposedly once part of northwest Africa, felt like in
real time experience.
All this fell into
place in my mind as I wandered the pre-dawn streets of Ibiza, waiting to catch
the ferry connection to Barcelona. If I was going to have time out from my
marriage I was determined it was not going to be sitting in a bar in Barcelona
crying into my vino. I was sure my little baby daughter would tame
the beste sauvage and bring my
husband to see the reality of my dream as one family and the need to cherish each
other. He just needed time to relocate
that dream of love we once shared. We
were a long way from home and our clean surfing lifestyle. London had twisted us both beyond
recognition. The changes that more than
two years of travelling had brought about in each of us needed to be looked
at. To me the marriage was intact, but
needed real glue. Time out would make
him see the error of his ways and what real values should be for a father and
husband. Or so I deludedly thought as I
locked onto this fey companion of the road fate had dealt me and battled with
my inner demons.
The idea of Atlantis needed to be put
to the test. I needed to know the Truth.
To start from a core of real testable Truth starting with our origins I needed
to differentiate between mythos and logos.
It seemed I was destined to do this thing. Of course I knew very little about evolution,
then. Having left school at 15 due to the family’s need for my income, my
knowledge base was pathetic, riddled with romantic nonsense that needed
sorting. The opportunity, the means, the
reason and the right companion all came together on the Ibiza ferry as if by
divine intent or magic and I did not look back.
I was on the road. Sucked into a
magnetic energy, a common dream scenario that has enmeshed many before and
since. Legends of the road to Morocco,
of Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs,
Jack Keruac, Allan Ginsberg. Existentialist poets who came to inhale the
ethos and the kif. But with my own magical supernatural
overlay. It did not occur to me that
these other writers were sometimes seen as degenerate reactionaries - paedophiles, Nancy Boys and
junkies. I only heard the call of the
intellect, not the lusts of base flesh or the whining seductions of chemical
annihilation. With my need to make a
better world I would follow the Pied Piper to Hell and back if I thought it
would give us the Truth
I also thought that in Morocco I could
find a quiet retreat near the surf where
I could practise my yoga, meditation and macrobiotic diet to make a better me
without the sneering brutal husband who saw my interests in Jung, Eliade, Zen
and Tibetan teachings as “mystic bullshit”, some heretic betrayal of all that
it meant to be a “real Australian”. That
was one part of my dream, to find the truth in those ways of thinking. The other involved my screaming inner desire
to expatiate my energies in surfing big waves. So I got out my map and, tracing a possible route, I put it to Tom that together we could walk
on quest for Atlantis and good surf where the Atlas Mountains fall into the Atlantic. We could purchase a donkey to carry our bags so we could walk free, starting out
from Essouira walking south along the Barbary coast towards Agadir.
Being a Californian surfer, Tom liked
the idea. And he liked me. He liked me a lot and took very good care of
me as we journeyed down the coast of Spain and into Morocco via Tangiers and
Marrakech. He seemed to know a lot of
people in places we stopped. Years of
working the trade routes. It just
didn’t occur to me that this fey hippie godling was any kind of operator. I was
delighted that he had made so many friends in his previous travels through this
region. I was so trusting, under his spell, captured by his caring attention in
my shredded mental state, the grief biting deep, the guilt and pain torturing
me to madness and psychotic episodes. I
retreated into an inner cocoon world, barely noticing the passing Spanish
scenery, but finding myself suddenly in another of Tom’s friends’ pocket worlds
when we came to rest each night.
The kif we shared helped. The
soul medicine of the bereaved. The
virgin princess had no idea that it was all illegal and fraught with horrific
penalties. But then Alice had yet to
step through the Looking Glass.
No comments:
Post a Comment