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June 27, Journal

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May 11 – Day 47, Journal

4 plus 7 is 11. It’s 10:11am. Not long until cleaning time at the lodge. Of course that’s 11am. Every day.

But I disappear on Saturdays, and I keep getting away with it.

Today, on May 11, Saturn goes into retrograde and we’ll find out what Jacinda has to tell us about the Coronavirus lockdown.
When will we be free?

Eleven keeps following me. Why does it care? Why do I notice it? The Israeli kids climbed to 1100 meters yesterday at Lake Hawea. Lake Wanaka is 311 meters deep. The iPhone 11 just came out. The numbers on my license plate add up to 11.

There’s a massive eleven painted on the side of every KFC in every major South Island town. Of course the colonel has 11 secret spices. Dammit, Sanders, what’s the secret?

There are always 11 new Instagram posts. In case of emergency, dial 111. We watched ‘Inside Out’ a few days ago – the main character is 11 years old. The dog that I met on my walk today was also 11. In the news yesterday, only 11,000 Coronavirus tests were issued in Cambodia. The WHO classified Covid-19 as a pandemic on March 11. There are 11 biscuits in my dark chocolate Tim Tam package.

The family has a ticket home for June 11. Miriam keeps saying that her daughter, Adele, is almost 11, not 10. Eleven insists on itself, doubling itself as if I’m supposed to get more meaninglessness out of it. Miriam and David have been married for 22 years. We are 22. On February 22, 2011, an earthquake devastated Christchurch. The characters on my room’s heater have always read P4:22.

Actually, I have cracked that particular secret code. That means it’s cold and the lodge owners are ‘thrifty.’ Thanks, universe. Another profound mystery revealed.

I need to stop looking at my phone… that thing is all ones and zeros anyway. How can I avoid double ones when I’m glued to a handful of them? No electronics (too many pitfalls there: date, time, temperature… endless quantifiable data…), no more neighborhood walks (addresses, license plates, road signs, prices, and weights), and no more labels of any kind (there’s even a round white sticker, leftover from some Ikea assembly project, on the wooden slats under my mattress that simply says: 11). It’s ridiculous. And embarrassing.

I’ve escaped to the dining room, to wait for our cleaning groups to gather. Shira just cracked an egg into a bowl, and two parallel strings of egg white linger in the air: an eleven in a numberless place.

The family’s arguments have been spilling and stomping through the hallway all morning. The mood here is changing.

People are looking outwards now, past the lockdown. We all desperately expect to be set free, so it must happen, through the strength of communal belief. Joseph told me that he feels imprisoned; they all do.

I like my patterns here. I’ll stay at least one extra day if the lodge owners will have me. My room smells of rich and nurturing sesame oil now that Jessica’s gone, as I’ve been able to do my abhyanga (head-to toe oil massage) every morning. I want to prepare for the Mormon’s cold caravan. It’s such a voluptuous pleasure to show my skin how much I love it. The sesame oil is thick, and it smells like a stir-fry, but it stains my skin a lovely golden color, and I can imagine how my ojas* is also growing plumper and more golden.

* https://svasthaayurveda.com/11-ways-to-increase-healthy-ojas/

… late afternoon

Everyone’s abuzz. Jacinda says we’re free in three days!

It’s like trying to start a lawnmower for the first time in the spring. Nothing’s working, and everybody’s shuffling their possessions back and forth. At least 3 of the camper vans are experiencing mechanical difficulties. Ariel just walked by to remind me to mention that in this blog, and I appreciate his support of my number fetish.

We’ve all grown comfortable with each other. They seem satisfied with my vague responses about my next destination after we’re released. What would they think if they knew that I’d only be travelling a few kilometers away to my secret lockdown lover’s caravan? They all have exotic plans: climbing Mt. Cook, taking a helicopter tour of Franz Josef glacier, and tramping in the forests of Abel Tasman. They’re so good – adventuring off into the light!

I’m going the other way. I’m tunneling down into the clutches of a simple, broken Mormon. I’m going to see how much semen I can wring out of him before his caravan lifestyle becomes unbearable. With as much kindness and love as possible, I want to see who cries ‘uncle’ first.

The Mormon has assured me that he can match whatever pace I set sexually. He reminded me that he was born in the Year of the Rabbit. He told me that, if his alone time was any indication of his appetite with a partner, I’d be a very busy woman. I do love him: he’s funny and arousing, but men like to talk shit, so I’ll wait and see.

Men live in a world of words, don’t they? Making deals, setting prices, writing laws… it’s our world, so we love it, but the words don’t always match reality. We’ve all had that moment – when you pay $30 for a nice dinner, and it’s tasteless and horrible and not at all what you thought was being described on the menu. Men make promises, exchanging words for goods, and they don’t always deliver. It makes a person crave truth.

We value adherence to reality; judges, teachers, religious leaders, cops, and politicians are all chosen because they align with what we think is the truth. Their words have weight. Why?

I think their words are viewed as law because they are rooted in each other, in one common belief, and that creates its own gravity. It’s simply too many old men that want the world to look as it does, so they willed it into being with words, spreading their story by conquest and propaganda. Really, it’s just their idea of what reality should look like. It’s not actually true. A guy living on one side of a border is just as valid and valuable as a guy living on the other side, but they’d have you think that an arbitrary line makes all the difference.

What’s true is what our senses tell us. It’s just easier not to make the effort to explore with our senses and let someone else tell us the truth. You can’t experience everything, right? Unfortunately, if it’s not inside of you as your experience, then it’s not true, it’s just words. You can’t cheat the system. But because people are lazy; they allow others to think for them, and then, well… the mind replaces the heart as the primary receptor of information, and that’s a lot of sweetness left untasted.

The mind is just a tool, just a framework to understand reality. We’re not meant to get stuck there, behind ideas and stories of the past and future, where reality is relegated to those rare times when the present moment is impossible to ignore and our hearts can expand unfettered. We’re meant to be, to live. To make a promise is to cheapen the perfection of the present moment.

Men. Do they even know reality? Do they even see the infinite layers that cocoon the heart? Have they ever lain in the sand and felt each grain as evidence of the love affair between land and sea; felt the millennia of heat and geologic shifting that it took to compress mountains into brutal hardness so that they’d be a worthy consort for the ocean Herself?

Words are ancillary. An addendum to the vibrant truth of the present moment.

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April 16 – Day 22, Journal

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March 31 – Day 6, Journal

I am establishing my role as distant friend and eccentric spiritual leader. I don’t know what I’m doing here, in this little town on the south island of New Zealand. If we could just banish the idea of property, what a difference that would make in the world.

My yoga classes are none of my doing. The people here are wonderful. All these aspects of God shining honestly.

22 is a big number. It was Mark from Nimbin’s life number. He has Papa’s birthday tattooed on his neck, except it’s exactly 50 years later. That’s the birthday of his son.

It was so easy with Mark. We felt like we already knew each other. And I saw every one of my ex-boyfriends in him. Jason’s possessiveness, Keith’s denseness, and James’ blackfella-ness. Ben’s devotion, the magician’s desire, and the Canadian’s need for gratification.

He was incomprehensible and impotent like the Mexican waiter, he was insistent and irate like the half-Filipino drug dealer, and he naturally took charge like Paul. He was unstable like Mike, and talkative like Jake, although those two don’t count as boyfriends.

He was oblivious, like every single one of them, to the nature of God within him.

It seems like I’m the only one that sees myself when I look into other people’s eyes, but I know that can’t be true.

Pup is the only one, and Rogue, too; they know the truth of One-ness.

And the dog at the beach near Nelson, too; the black-and-white shepherd mix with intelligent amber eyes. I loved her for her proud carriage and impeccable guardianship of her lonely blonde mistress, swathed in black flannel.

My eyes shone to see her goodness, and our eyes met as the two passed, her jaunty tail held high, mistress downcast. They walked on and I lingered. I poked through the sand for seashells (and possibly Pounamu) and padded through the gentle waves.

They returned, the mistress breezing past first, dark and silent. I’d turned in the other direction (probably south-east) and i didn’t see her coming. The dog approached me from behind as well, two moments later.

Long, silky fur brushed past my left side, and the dog paused and looked up into my face. Clear, honest amber eyes filled my vision and the words, “so KIND” filled my mind.

A second later, she was gone, trotting close to her brittle mistress.

How can any of this be true?

How can I be stuck for 4 weeks in a messianic lodge in the middle of New Zealand with 17 Israelis and 4 fundamentalist Christians?

What am I?

God.

What game is God playing?

Global pandemic?

I don’t understand this comfortless reality without Pup. I don’t like it.