The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Amethyst: my birth stone, a healing stone, a fitting stone to be passed onto me by a friend to wander across the sky with. We spend an afternoon sitting on the floor of a silversmith's workshop, coaxing liquid silver into pendants and rings with the hot kiss of a bright blue flame. The silversmith's gnarled fingers deftly weave the elemental silver into a cone to slip over my purple rock and the amethyst is ready to wear and to heal shattered hearts.

Such skill is so lost in the sprawling metropolis that is city life. We are so alienated by the people who sweat over the objects we possess, yet here people personally know their tailor, their jeweller, the baker. Not only does that make the dress or the necklace or the bread more meaningful, but it makes one fully appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into such things and the true scale of human achievement. To pick out a sheet of material, to be measured and to watch it grow is so much more beautiful and satisfying than walking into a bland and anonymous shop.

We dodge inquisitive sadhus and a wild white horse and ignoring the warning signs nailed to the fence and we scramble into the jungle and over the crumbling wall and we are inside. We wander wide-eyed around the desolate remains of the ashram once belonging to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where The Beatles stayed in the sixties to study transcendental mediation, and wrote a lot of 'The White Album'. We wander in the hazy afternoon sunshine, being careful to watch out for elephants, as the mountains sigh above us and the only butterflies I have seen in Rishikesh flutter lazily past out heads. I step inside a meditation cave overrun with brambles and wildflowers, and wonder at the phantasmagoric mind of John Lennon looking up at the same walls and dreaming.

We stumble across the shell of the old satsang hall where rafters hang precariously from the ceiling and the walls have been painted in technicolor by people who claim to be artists, writers, shamans and dreamers, all searching for something and perhaps finding unity and peace here in this place where there is space to 'imagine'. I leave a plastic flower on the altar as an offering to those madmen and wandering minstrels who infiltrate small town bedrooms and shake up the thinkers scrabbling in suburban graves, whispering into their ears that escape is possible, that there is more to the world, tugging with restless fingers at their shirtsleeves.

We climb the skeletons of stairs, passing room after room with cryptic messages and lyrics scrawled on the walls where many seekers have traipsed before us, hoping to be filled with the same raw genius as the band. I reach the roof and ascend a rickety ladder that stands against a water tower until I am level with the sky and I let the prickly peace of a perfect moment saturate my pale skin and think about those overgrown minds that have gone before me. I am constantly following wild minds to the ends of the earth, searching for those fabulous yellow roman candles that explode like spiders across the stars.

Later we wander along the beach, wondering at the lives of the sadhus who live in the rocks looking out at the Ganges, here where it smells like the ocean, the salted scent of freedom and adventure. The laws of the moon and the tides here mean that the nightly offerings to Mother Ganga get washed up in this spot. There are hundreds of flowers resting on the shore, looking as though they have bloomed right from the mouth of the gentle surf. Huge daisies and fat pink buds dip their petals in the water, acid coloured oranges and stray strands of gold shuddering in the breeze.

I spot a huge shape silhouetted against the rocks; bloated, matted, two legs, two feet, face down in the sand and wrapped in an orange shroud. It the body of a holy sadhu who has renounced all worldly possessions. It is a dead human body, swollen with the river, rotting in the amber Indian sun. My own living body is trembling in horror at the audacity of death daring to show itself here among the living, in the beauty of the beach under a tinkling waterfall.

I came here partly to escape the morbid thoughts relating to death that were pressing on my chest, the uncertainty of what to believe grating at my soul with sharp fingernails. I came to reflect and to find reassurance and yet here is death; unannounced, unapologetic, raw and naked and gruesome at my bare feet on the beach.

We inform some gentle Indian ladies from the ashram who are wandering among the flowers and they explain that for religious reasons, particularly holy people cannot be cremated in the traditional way. They tell us that this person would have been given a ceremony and left to be washed away in the river, that they would pass a message to the other saints and they would come perform the necessary rituals to send the body back on its way, merging with the prana or life force of the Ganga. They were calm and philosophical and told us that the incident was a message from god that one day we would understand.

I think that the message is this: death is an intrinsic and inevitable part of life, it is almost a rite of passage, just like all of the other human milestones like hitting puberty or giving birth or reaching old age. Death is unapologetic and it does show up in beauty uninvited. Life in India is pure and visceral, sweating and throbbing life and death, undiluted and in plain view of us all. It is a place of extremes and of contradiction, bursting with colour and with life but with death and cruelty and tragedy too. Yet isn't this life itself in her most pure form? Loud and bold and intense and real, shattering your rose-tinted glasses and forcing you to gulp down the sugar and the bitterness.

It is a reminder of the transience of the bloated exterior of our bodies, the shell of the soul. The sadhu looked inhuman and misshaped because that which made it alive was gone: the soul, the prana, the life force.

Sobering as my discovery was, in the end it is a very fitting end to my time here. Before I came here I had witnessed death for the first time and I was horrified by it, and forced to confront the burgeoning awareness of my own mortality and the mortality of the people I love. Here people simply accept death as an absolutely necessary part of life, which it is. In the West, we tend to keep death behind our floral curtains and hidden in our teapots to be supped in dark whispers during wakes and in churches and yet here death is revered and paraded and adorned with bright flowers.

We try to control nature but we cannot for we are nature. Eventually we will all crumble back into the earth or get caught in the tide and washed up against the rocks and we will rot and feed the worms and the beetles and fertilise the soil but that is a beautiful thing. The world keeps turning and life feeds life and it is very difficult for us to grasp but we are part of the eternal, brilliant cycle and only when we accept this can we truly be able to live.

A wizened baba on a balcony passed me a card to slip into my bag which reads:

'Life is short, fix your mind on God
Try to understand yourself
Time is passing fast, your death is waiting
Follow your intuition, listen to your inner voice
Open your third eye, wake up
Everything is possible, God bless you
Universal Love.'

The next day, Badrish the palmist performed a puja to get rid of the rest of my negative energy. He said some mantras and gave me a handful of rice, which I passed over my head to symbolise the last of the negative thoughts leaving my mind and afterwards I threw them into the river, with a flower offering for god. He performed a healing ritual with a wand made of peacock feathers and physically brushed the negativity from my body and into the ground with his hands.

It is curious, when I first came here and imagined negative energy leaving my body during meditation, i visualised it billowing from my mouth in clouds of thick black smoke. Yet today when I close my eyes the image that comes to me is of wispy, rust coloured smoke, as though all of the darkness has gone and this is the residue, like the embers of a dying fire.

As we finish the last of the chai that we will share together, Badrish says to me 'My heart has become very close to your heart. I feel like I am your family, you are the same age as my baby and that is why I wanted to give you this mantra, to heal you'. I throw the rice into the river and say a prayer and it rains down into the water like a pearlescent firework and I feel light and golden.

On my last evening in Rishikesh, I leave the crowds of the town as they prepare noisily for a n annual Shiva festival and head instead to the stretch of beach that I love to run along in the mornings before the tourists descend on it, when the beauty of the mountains and the sand and the water feel like they belong to me. Armed with a bowl made from leaves and stuffed with petals and sandalwood given to me by a tiny boy and the candles left over from my birthday cake, I find a suitable rock to perch on and unwind the auspicious red wristbands from various temples from my wrists, to be given back to the water.

I say a silent prayer of thanks to the universe, for leading me to this place when my soul was guttering in the wind like the candle in my hands and for making me grateful for this wonderful life that is mine. I push my flower basket into the current and watch as it floats along with the water and into the lilac darkness, setting off on its own journey into the world without me. I realise that we must trust the natural ebb and flow of the tides of life and only then can we shine most brightly.

I write these words from London and there was a time when I was drowning when I thought I would never make it back here, everything was too hard, the journey too long, my life pointless and meaningless. There is not one specific event that changed things that I can pinpoint, it is more of an accumulation of experiences and the time and the solitude I gave my mind to heal. I am looking out over the rooftops that I thought might never be mine again and I see that they are beautiful and I feel like I can do anything.

I still don't know what to do with my future, or what kind of person I want to be, or even how I'm going to make the money to simply live in the immediate weeks, but today I read a great book and drank a perfect cup of coffee, and I walked home in the dusk as aeroplanes in the sky left pink trails across a premature crescent moon. I dug my hands deep into the warmth of my coat and peered into golden windows at lives that will never be mine and felt the warm bubbles of contentment rising in my stomach, because I have remembered how to ride along on the current, and there is no need to worry anymore.

Palmistry lessons with Badrish

I climb thirteen stories to a temple nestled in the mountains and there is a sense of peace up here in the sky such as I have never felt before. I look out at the jungle and the city spread below and I feel small and inconsequential. Not so long ago, that thought would have filled me with a wild sense of unruly panic but today it felt good for in reality I am small and inconsequential: one living breathing part of this throbbing, heaving world and that is a beautiful thing. The city is bursting with trinkets and coloured fabrics and smoky incense and crumbling bookshops fat with books and I could wander around it running my fingers along the fringes of life forever.

I am having palmistry lessons from a self-proclaimed mystic named Badrish, who claims that he was saved from suicide by a vision of god and a rainbow light, and that he has the divine power of healing. I want him to heal me. He draws me a map of the alignment of the planets at the time of my birth from a complicated book written in an alphabet that is alien to me, and advises me of the right gem stones to carry and which auspicious days I ought to look out for. Every day I sit in his austere room as he tells me stories of my future, of his past, of the people he is currently healing and he teaches me mantras and gives me lessons about life, playing the part of each character with theatrical gestures and different voices. He explains the movements of the planets I was born under in alignment with the mounds of skin on my palms and I scribble it all down in a gold gilded notebook, tasting witchcraft on my tongue.

Sometimes there are power cuts and we sit on the balcony in the light overlooking the street, as the neighbours make us chai in metal cups and he smokes his five o'clock cigarette. He spits his dreams and disasters onto the pavement below us and talks about his wife and his children and life in the mountains. Today he told me one of the best ways to release negative energy is to dance, and that everyone should dance every day. He is a shambling shaman with a wicked glint in his eye and a lot of patience, and every hour I spend with him is strange and wonderful.

The first day of my twenty second year on this earth dawns, and I suck up the fear that tugs relentlessly at the ends of my hair and jump onto the back of a motorbike belonging to a magic man from the mountains and we career wildly along the chaotic roads of India to visit a temple. We weave through the streets where real people live and dance and cry and sweat and love, where bags of grains and seeds and rice bulge into the road and plastic flowers spill into the dirt and a wedding band dresses in red sequin jackets carry imitation gold pillars to the venue on their heads.

We make water offerings at a Shiva temple, as people chant and play instruments and weave garlands of fresh flowers as offerings to god and the faith and humility of people is so strong that it gives my slowly healing soul warm hope beneath her bandages. The man from the mountains tells me that this temple was not made by man and that it simply exists, that throughout history various people have tried to destroy it and yet they cannot. People put god before everything here and while I am not blessed with such belief I can't help but envy the trust that they have in a higher order, in karma and the idea that everything will happen naturally the way it is supposed to.

I ride past the river and up into the mountains for green tea, where I am given another blessing and sit in the sun with a yoga teacher and muse about life until it is time to collect my astrology chart from Badrish. He pulls a necklace made of white stones from his bag, a gift for my birthday to symbolize peace of mind. He knows that I am hurting, he can see it in my hand and he repeats a mantra and tells me that I have no need to feel the way the way that I do, that the world is good and I want to cry. He sits cross-legged on the bed in his bare room and I watch his face crinkle like a brown paper bag as he says a prayer for me and I feel for the first time in a long time that everything will be okay.

I subject myself to a traditional ayurvedic panchakarma massage where my naked body is rubbed with a rough bag of wheat and a lady sits on my head and teases the knots and the strings and the balls of wool and the thick black smoke and the tension of a thousand unanswered questions out of my tender muscles. I sit with new friends at a table overlooking the Ganga, as the reflection of the candles on my birthday cake dance on the water like falling souls and I let it all wash over me, tasting honey on my skin.

Swamiji, the leader of my ashram made a speech during the evening aarti about how birthdays here are not merely celebrations: they mark a rebirth into a new life and a new frame of mind, free of all the pain and the burdens of the past and one infused instead with the spirit of this place.

Angels appear in a multitude of guises here and every conversation forces words from my fingertips like bursting lava melting the pages of my notebooks and after a period of such stony silence it is like summer rain upon my body, my barren mind finally flowing with the monsoon season like streams of coloured ribbon unfurling from the tops of mountains, saturating my pages with tongues of fire and great bulging blooms, setting the worlds in my head alight.

I meet a lost soul in a juice bar who is carved from the same molten rock as I am, who completely embodies everything I have ever felt about the world. She feels just as trapped as I do by the tight shackles of societal convention and she has thrown them off and emerged sparkling. When people ask her what she is 'doing' she fires the question back at them and finds more often than not that they are short, of time and of love and of happiness and of living.

She gives me the courage to vocalize thoughts that have been swimming through my blood for a long time and I realise that all of the pressure that piles on my head in London like a hat full of bricks is completel;y self imposed. The dark brown stain of an empty day, the panic rising in my chest at my own confusion and my repeated failure to create, to produce, to build is  merely a result of my own state of mind. It is perfectly okay to take things slowly, to drink a coffee or to read a book, to walk in the park and to enjoy all the small moments of your day. Life is not about achieving things or making money or climbing climbing climbing that ridiculous ladder that actually, ultimately doesn't lead to anywhere. It is more beneficial to stop for breath and enjoy the view, to enjoy the here and now, to gulp the air and to see what is happening around you. This may sound obvious but this viewpoint has been hidden for me by purple storm clouds like bruises of expectation and ambition flowering constantly under my sun-starved skin.

I take a laughter yoga class and spend a morning lying hysterical on the floor, miaowing like a cat with a room of strangers and chanting Hare Krishna and throwing my hands in the air and the teacher sings us a happiness mantra before telling us that everything: our bodies, this world, our material possessions, other people, are all transient and yet the soul is eternal. These fleeting illusions will not make us happy. Happiness is something that comes from inside. Once you learn to be happy, choose to be soul-happy in any situation, giggling with sheer joy at the wild accident of beautiful life, then you will be happy and only then can you make others happy.

I can't believe I couldn't see it before but this dazzling realisation courses through my veins and makes my skin tingle with light. Instead of toxic smoke now I am coughing up gold dust.
I spend a languid afternoon gorging myself on the present moment and watching Ma Ganga flutter her eyelashes from a tree house far above her, when a great plume of smoke billows from Laxman Jhula bridge and creates an ethereal cloud above the water. A backpacker at the adjacent table tells us that it is the ashes of a spent human being scattered from the bridge. The wind takes the broken body into her bower and carries her gently into the mountains as Mother Ganga opens her mouth wide and swallows the crumbs whole but the soul lives on and beautiful life falls into beautiful life and the world turns and turns and instead of being dizzy I am moving with her.

Unravelling the tangle

As always, it takes a while to match your footsteps to the same pace as the locals, as they sup steaming mugs of chai and stare out onto the water, letting the long and wide hours of life wash over them gently. I wonder sometimes if that is all any of us are really doing; simply passing time in this life until death. If this is the case, if our jobs and the lull of our daily routine are merely things to keep us entertained, then surely none of it really matters, and we ought to pass our days and waste our time in whichever way we choose? Or perhaps that is a selfish way of looking at the world.

Life here consists of scrambling up the sides of mountains to reach fairytale waterfalls, being wary of the elephants and panthers lurking in the darkness. Mountains have a quality I have found in no other form on earth, simultaneously imposing, humbling and frightening yet also watchful, gentle, almost motherly. They symbolize the power of nature over the human race for mountains are dangerous terrain for many of us, although some men have conquered them, an interesting paradox. We watch thunderstorms wrapped up in knitted ponchos and clutching glasses heavy with the sweet secret of lemon and ginger tea. We sit cross-legged for hours on the floor listening to a classical Indian sitar, as the music twists and curls above our heads like coloured smoke and a tiny Indian prince dressed up in sequins and beads twirls in the ash clouds and everything seems beautiful. My austere little room is draped with brightly coloured salwar kameez and ethereal scarves, washed with love and drying in the gentle breath of the afternoon sun. I race along the beach feeling the ragged breath in my chest and I look up at the Himalayas and I remember that I am alive. We sit at the feet of holy men in enchanted gardens as they hand us rosary beads made from the dried fruit of trees and stare deep into our seeking souls invite us to ask them the meaning of life. We exchange worn pennies for exquisite reams of fabric and are led into family houses consisting of only one room, to have our measurements recorded to be blessed with creation on a foot-powered Singer sewing machine.

I love the decorative aspect of India - everything is colourful and sparkles in the most unnecessary way. Ancient cars are strewn with garlands of fresh flowers, motorbikes are tangled up in tinsel, even the donkeys wear beaded necklaces and women dress in full saris to clamber up the sides of mountains. Gruff looking men have mysterious gem stones rammed onto every stout finger and teenage boys cram friendship bracelets onto their thin arms. Everything is bejeweled and the most mundane items glitter in the sun. The crumbling buildings are painted with delicious pastel blooms and even the temples have strips of gold foil hung from the ceiling, dazzling in the light. This attention to detail is representative of an attitude to life: things are beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful. To bring joy and light and laughter to the eye. In a world of wilderness and darkness and danger and despair I think that this trivial decoration is such a brilliant and absolutely human trait. The art of doing something just because. If all the world is illusion which will fade and change, why not dress it up and enjoy it, before it is gone?

We were graced with the presence of a real life guru in our yoga class this week. Rain poured from the balconies and onto the heads of the giant Shiva statues standing guard over the lush ashram vegetation as she sang vedic mantras to us. We sat in the darkness like crumpled lotus flowers blossoming against all the odds as this wizened brown owl spat pure gems of wisdom into the air. Rubies and sapphires tumbled from her lips, disappearing beyond the reaches of our hungry fingers, teasing the egos we are trying to leave behind.

She made a distinction between what we perceive to be the 'I': our history, experiences, family, job, personality etc. and the real self that goes beyond all of these things to which we try to listen during mediation: pure consciousness, evidence of the divine within all of us. This is why we ought to learn to control our minds, in order to actualize the real and eternal self. Although this idea seems intrinsically tangled with the concept of reincarnation and the idea of the soul coming to earth in a variety of forms, I cannot help but think that perhaps that perhaps here Eastern philosophy has touched upon something of incredible importance.

It is that feeling that is deep inside many, if not all of us, that thing that we can see in the eyes of wild men and women, that glint we try to make Other with stories of gypsies and vagabonds and runaways. We condemn drop outs and hermits we push those without permanent addresses or bank details or facebook accounts to the fringes of society because we fear them. We are scared because they are brave, because they listen to that ripple of discontent that glimmers in all of us.It is the feeling that makes us want to stay curled up in bed in the mornings, the reckless impulse that makes us want to tread on the grass, to stay up all night, to run through the wilderness and get drunk on stars and feel dandelion clocks in our hair. The temptation to leave it all behind, to burn our money and to give away our possessions, to scream on an empty beach and dive naked into the ocean, to turn our backs on civilisation and be reunited with this wild, wonderful insatiable earth.

Is this feeling evidence for what the guru was talking about? Is it the revolt of the eternal self, crying out deeply from the dark caverns of our bodies, begging us to break free from the shackles and the constraints and the conventions of society to be allowed to dance freely in the balmy air, the true essence of what we really are?

We practiced our asanas outside one afternoon and when I was breathing in time with the mountains and smelling the blades of grass between my feet and feeling the gentle sun soaking my skin like a hot bath I felt the most golden sense of peace. As I listened to the wind and peered through half-closed lashes at the cornflower sky I felt so in tune with my surroundings, so light and so free and vibrating with life.

How do we take all of these elements of philosophy and yoga and inherent feelings about life and these golden moments of perfect peace and incorporate them into our daily lives? Which is most important? All of this talk of moksha and enlightenment is very well, but I also derive pleasure from inane and meaningless things like cups of coffee and wearing pretty dresses - surely these are valuable if not important parts of life too?

Before I came here, I was despairing over the idea that there is nothing more to life, that we are born and that we die and that the rest is merely make believe. The idea of this was overwhelming me, permeating every aspect of my existence and making me weep into my morning museli. So far, instead of answers to my big questions I have made a list of even bigger questions, however the one thing I think that I have found is reassurance. Here people believe so wholeheartedly that they see meaning and destiny everywhere and in everything. They are desperately aware of the spiritual apsect of the human psyche, and I think that is what draws seekers here. I am yet to find answers, but I am finding reassurance in the fact that perhaps we don't have all the answers, but that something, somewhere does and all of our energy and our hopes and dreams and disasters are not in vain.

India?

Rishikesh, India, is a place for seekers. I am not even sure exactly what it is I am seeking  but I am certainly looking for something. My soul is screaming and I giving her a place in the mountains to roar. It is full of enchantment, steeped in a cultural awareness of something larger than ourselves, illustrated in technicolor gods and goddesses wreathed in golden flowers.

 I came here to find the silence to listen to my own mind but was not prepared for how incredibly noisy this country is, filled with a flurry of reckless vehicle horns and the relentless cries of street vendors pushing their wares. Heady swirls of sandalwood, nag champa and cow manure permeate everything, choking my mind. Beads and trinkets glister from every corner as fresh papaya rots gently under the orange sun.

Everything here is a contradiction. I walk through ripe gardens in the darkness at six o'clock in the morning, barefoot and dressed in white to practice yoga and to cleanse my body of impurities in order to make room for prana, the life force of the universe. I meditate in thunderstorms as monkeys swing from the balconies. I drink endless chai and read endless books and sit around a sacred fire every night to sing and to watch the sun set, as people float little boats made of leaves and filled with flowers and candles down the river Ganges. I am learning about the colour of each chakra and how to decipher my moon sign, conversing about karma and destiny and wondering which path to carve for myself, listening to eye witness accounts of levitating yogis and watching the man who owns the currency exchange healing people with huge chunks of crystal.

There is incredible peace and beauty here but it is also frightening. Strange deities and hungry eyes loom from every corner. Here skin colour indicates wealth and my own translucence appears to glow in the dark. A creature covered in beads and peacock feathers lurks in the streets trying to prise money from unsuspecting foreigners. Everywhere is full of trickery if not magic as emaciated cows and wild dogs snap at my ankles. Darkness falls early here and nights tucked away in my sparse room in the candlelight, to be woken by the ominous call of chanting and ringing bells are long and they are lonely.

My yoga teacher is trying to teach us about acceptance and balance. She said that we ought to accept difficult situations in our lives as a result of our past misdeeds and that we can do nothing about them now. She told us that our emotions and passions should not get the better of us, and that the path to enlightenment is rooted in balance, in accepting our difficulties and annoyances and letting them wash over us.

I am trying my best to live in the moment, to listen to the birdsong and the wind blowing through the jungle leaves during morning meditation, to feel the rise and swell of my own breath like the ocean, to appreciate the crude, transient and unapologetic nature of this wild life but I am finding it so difficult.

It is so tempting to turn my back on all of this, to leave the confusion and the fear right here and to walk right back into my life in London.

And yet even the most skeptic among my new friends admit that they cannot deny the pull of this place, the recurring idea that perhaps life is not merely a string of coincidences, and I can't help but feel that something brought me here.

In a sense, the niggling sensations of restlessness and insecurity and loneliness tugging at the edges of my scarf  are representative of everything i am trying to leave behind. I want to learn how to exist in the moment, how to forget about the omnipresent pressures and questions and fears stacked in my head like piles of heavy books waiting to be read. I came here to find answers and clarity and yet I am more confused and afraid than ever.

But I am trying.

The state of my soul

Sometimes, when the world throws you a lifeline, you have to grab it with both hands and hold on for dear life.

Have you ever felt an unavoidable an uncontrollable pull towards something, regardless of what your mind or your heart or your body seems to say? An ache for something abstract, the urge to be in a specific place, in order to feed your soul.

I have no right to be drowning.

I am over-privileged, over-educated, over-achieving, oversleeping, overdrawn and over everything. I have no right to feel like I am floundering in this concrete city of ambition and aspiration and opportunity and yet I am. I am suffocating under the heavy, cloying tarmac, free falling from the jagged tip of the phallic Shard, screaming into the stale, unwashed air of a Tuesday afternoon.

Within the hungry belly of this city, where people are employed to wash phone boxes and polish street signs, I have lost my hunger for life. The reflection of my pale face follows me from shiny surface to surface, making doleful eyes at me, scrabbling to break into the realm of the living and to dance in the leaves again.

People cannot understand why this world of everything is not enough for me. Surely this life is everything I should want?

It is everything I wanted, once. This city of rooftops and rivers and red wine and sticky, sun soaked pavements and candlelit taverns suddenly feels vacuous, empty, filled with false smiles and meaningless ideas and the relentless, repetitive bitter winter sting of the everyday struggle.

My own restless ghost goads me from across the street, shining brightly in a flurry of heady perfume and clattering shoes. I don’t understand how the blistering bonfire that used to rage from the tips of my toenails to the ends of my hair went out, but now I am coughing up choking black clouds of toxic smoke.

I feel weightless, translucent, floating from place to place as though one eager gust of wind could blow me off the side of the world for good.

Even the plastic sunflowers wrapped around my bicycle shriveled and died and I just can’t help but think that there has to be something more than this.

But

you have to keep you ear close to the pulse of the earth, because from deep within the knotted turmoil and the carnivorous chaos, the cosmos offered me a glimmer of the stars.

A single book left on a shelf in the middle of the Irish countryside, in the midst of mourning and hopelessness, offered me a lifeline, and a very tiny taste of the sweetness the world used to hold for me.

Which is why I am leaving everything and thinking not about what is best for my mind or my heart or my body but what is best for my soul.

You have to be alert to the signs, and when the universe offers you a lifeline, no matter how weathered and fraying it may look, how gossamer-thin and delicate it may feel, you have to put your trust in it and jump.

And in the streets we're running free, like its only you and me.....

Your father lives in the attic of a tiny red brick gingerbread house. It smells of bike oil and of incense. We find a sunshine yellow tea kettle on the street and fill it with sunflowers we pick from someone's garden on Barts Street. He tells us about his nineteen sixties orange sunshine experiences with Ken Kesey, dressed in a lavender shirt and a pink tie, a briefcase full of liquid madness. He tells be about an Ernest Hemingway quote he remembers from childhood, that the most important rule for being a good writer is to LIVE, for one ought to have something to write about. I cannot agree more, in essence is this not what my whole madcap journey through these green years of my life is about? We are from a similar egg. He reads us spiritual poetry and lets me leaf through his notebooks, thick with stories. When we leave next morning, he gives me a lined composition books to write in, and tells me to send him my stories. The kindness of this world surprises me every day; the horror too yet it seems that beauty is ever present in unlikely places.

We dance and drink wine and you get up and sing at the front of the bar, the star of our own show. We toast champagne flutes filled with stars and play with words projected across the walls in the gallery downtown, while boys with cut off Ramones shirts and tumbling blonde curls talk about Burroughs in a sweet yet stuck Kentucky drawl.

Every day we get a little closer to the place where my life used to be, where i will be thrown into the madness once again. Who knows when next we will meet? The uncertainty of life is dreamlike and beautiful, but goodbyes will always break my heart, especially to one such as you, who has taught me so much. For now, there is still tomorrow. There is always tomorrow, and if tomorrow fails to come, then we won't be around to worry about it.

We arrive in Chicago as the sun is setting strawberry kool-aid in the sky behind the elephant skyscrapers and the boats dream gently on Lake Michigan and people are walking their dogs and there is a Billie Holiday cover playing on the radio and we have finally arrived, yet we both have so far to go.

We fall in and out of homes and of hearts, dancing the blues and waking to a glass wall overlooking the vast lake, a potent blue reminder of the vast ocean that is soon to separate me from the rainbows. It is always me that is leaving. Goodbyes make my bones  feel dead and hollow, like dry and broken autumn branches, white noise in my head.

At the airport the flight attendant asks me to write my permanent address on my luggage tags, yet i am merely wandering. As we fly over the Ireland of my childhood, on a detour via Paris, other passengers open the blinds covering their windows to look at the human world below and the sunlight creates rainbow circles on the roof of the cabin. The rainbows make me cry because my own colour-infused world of palm trees and sheer freedom is so incredibly far away now. My heart pounds in my chest, but at least the pounding is steady and regular, a beat to keep the wild music of my life clinging tightly to the musical bars. Flying over England in order to get to England, what strange games we play. Nobody knows that i am flying right over their heads, everyone thinks that i am still in Chicago. Spaghetti legs, mushy ravioli heart.

And then i am back, back in the rambling, crying, wailing, dancing, afternoons-in-the-park-nights-in-the-pub-mornings-in-the-marshmallow ramshackle city. I am already losing that golden sense of inner peace, yet i am so very happy to be back, so excited to start the next wild chapter. Afternoon tea on Primrose Hill, drinks in our favourite pubs, grimy dancefloors, a bundle of sunflowers, a homemade birthday cake oozing through the cardboard box, a long velvet skirt and three hundred long more miles and i am home and it is my mother's birthday and the kettle is boiling and it smells of fresh laundry and she is there, soft in her pink dressing gown and it is like nothing has changed and i'm home, i'm home.

It is impossible to summarise the things that i learned in the delicate gossamer bubble of California, impossible to articulate what i found and what i have left behind, but now i am here with old faces, old places, with everything that once made up who i am. The Olympics is sending electricity through the city and there is fruit cider and grey afternoons and woolly jumpers, i'm watching Blur in Hyde Park and i'm sleeping in a tent by a lake somewhere in Cambridgeshire and we are those two tasselled and carefree flower people again. There is an enchanted forest filled with dolls houses and paper cranes and a funeral in the mud and all i want is to dance here with you forever. My future is written on the wings of an Angel, of a church with a spire and a canal and a kitten. We have no money and no responsibilities and days are spent riding new bicycles and getting lost in real mazes of books. Boris Johnson is flying through the air on a zip wire and my friends are playing ring of fire and my brother is laughing at my shoes and there is a baby rabbit living in the living room and my mum makes endless cups of tea and there is sharp wit and cynicism and there is less sunshine here but perhaps more love and i am very happy to be home.

For the road is most certainly life...

"To rule the state, have a known plan

To win a battle, have an unknown plan

To gain the universe, have no plan at all

Let the universe reveal its splendour."

The life of the city beckons me home, wherever that may be. We draw flowers in the dust on your old Subaru and pack up ou lives with the company of only each other and and a few old cassette tapes, and set sail on our relentless journey from California to Arizona, through New Mexico to Texas, to Louisiana through Mississippi to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Illinois, through couches and friendships and floors and kittens and kindnesses and the trunks of cars and endless freeways through the sky to London and then finally to back to my family and to Sunderland, the beginning of it all.

One dollar tacos, sangria, plastic flags and plants and strings of coloured lights hang from the ceiling of a corrugated iron shed in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Leathery grilled cactus and a Fleetwood Mac tribute band. Disco balls and photo booths, you are so excited in your wedges at the prospect of anonymity and it is fresh and thrilling and beautiful. Bearded boys in hats strum guitars and remind me of whence i came from, as long velvet kimonos and purple lipstick glisten from the shadows. Red, red wine and i am so very excited and so very scared to be back in my own dirty city once again. We trip across Sunset Boulevard and into a gaudy techno club come brothel, where an inflatable octopus looms glowing colours in the PBR light. We scream Blink 182 down the highway an sleep in an Irvine mansion upon a pile of soft mattresses, every inch the Princess and the Pea. You buy us breakfast and we bid yet another salty goodbye. No goodbyes, only see-you-laters? I grow more doubtful with each bittersweet parting.

Laguna Beach, Orange County, his parent's beach opens onto the turquoise ocean and life is no longer real. Venice Beach again in the jelly-infused sunlight, graffiti and feathers in my hair, an American flag bikini faded by a myriad of days of sunshine and a pair of John Lennon sunglasses. The cop pulls us over in your rabbit ears. Sushi on Santa Monica Boulevard, karaoke in a hot and heavy bar, we dance to David Bowie in an English-themed pub. We run barefoot on the beach in the darkness, burning white sage to ward off evil spirits. It is bad luck to light it without a candle, yet even Laguna Beach has a river of urine running through it. We wake to the sound of the waves crashing upon the shore and i feel safe, cocooned in this mad-love world, as the water gently nibbles at the toes of the edge of the earth.

Heat. Hot and sticky, dripping. Dirt-streaked legs and my blackened foot prints pressed against the car windscreen. Deep yellow heat, singed brown bodies, sickly green pounding sun. Rivulets of sweat catch in the crease of my belly button and the backs of my knees. Tiny delicious pearls. Our air conditioning is broken so we play pop punk speed metal and wind the windows down, letting the wild desert air ravage our delicate California skin. We pluck flowers and feathers from parking lots and adorn ourselves with stars and stripes to fake patriotism and citizenship to the notorious Mexico border patrol.

Tempe, Arizona is a flaming ball of dirty guitars in grimy bars. We feverishly drink gin and pineapple juice as a saxaphone plays and cold water is sprayed in a rainbow haze from jets strung among the coloured lights above our heads. The crowd sways by the outdoor stage as torches of fire flame by the door. We twist our souls to blistering funk and return home to sleep on the floor of our friend Nat in a house full of lutiers.

We couch surf a night in El Paso with a man named Gio who lives alone in his mother's house. Old lady frills and flounces are adorned with star wars memorabilia, as a tiny white dog with blue bows in her hair licks my face and chews up my makeup brushes. He takes us for breakfast and we give him a false hula girl tattoo, which he excitedly pastes across his skin and leaves for the sauna.

Austin, Texas. Mimosas to start the day, floating down the river in rubber rings. Four Loco and sunflower seeds. Old leathery man wizened from a thousand days in his weather-bleached garden, wind chimes and worn tyres, wooden toys and broken flowers in his front yard. Kind eyes, a pair of bright yellow tape-measure braces. Barefoot in the dirty old school bus, falling from our seats as we clatter drunkenly over the ramshackle road. Cold water, one thousand tiny flies skim the surface and tickle my feet. Blue dragonflies the colour of the forget-me-nots on my shorts land on my ankle and knee bones. Music drifts from further down the river as we hazily float along with the current, no agency, no urgency. Simply letting things be, arching our bodies like cats under the hot sun as light dances like chimes and bells on the water and fronds sparkle in the evening calm like ladies with long hair weeping. The sky is translucent beneath my mirrored sunglasses and i'm sure i can see into heaven (it is here). The whole world is reduced to sky and water, water and sky. Are we floating on the surface of the river or are we caught in the clouds? Which way is the right way up? Right or wrong, up or down, left or right. Is there even such thing any more?

California-hippy-car leaking oil. Dried Jerusalem Artichokes that match the one imprinted on my skin are strung across the dashboard. We stop for gas in the warm Texan night air and a man with one eye tells us slowly and deliberately to 'Watch out for the............deer'. Sparks are strewn behind us like fireworks as we speed through the dusky air, fearing for our lives. The skies here are furious and full of blood, left behind are the gentle lilac hues of the West coast. Dreaming dreams in a dreamlike life. Images and people and lives and lessons all caught like flesh beneath my fingernails. How am i to immortalise the absolute freedom and beauty i have learned across this lotus-eating country?

Lou Reed, Jonny Hobo, The Runaways. We meow like kittens and shake our hair across the interstate, stopping only to fill up our water bottles and marvel at the tiny fragments of life lived in those moments at the edges of the road in semi-abandoned gas stations.

Austin is a smouldering cocktail of tattoos and heeled boots, of nose rings and cowboy hats and grimy terraces filled with loud music and sun caught drinks and filmy sweaty living breathing writhing bodies. We spend the night baking in the car in suburbia and wake up in a faint. We get asked to leave the bathrooms of the 'war building' where we crept to cool our clammy faces and brush our teeth. We peruse South Congress vintage shops and antique stores. You buy a red polkadot dress and become a perfect Mary-Lou. Nighttime brings Pimms and slam poetry about Ginsberg and vaginas in the Spider House. We sit in an empty bathtub and dance to a band in Hawaiian shirts called Purple Grape and everyone is beautiful. We swim with salamander in the fresh spring water of Barton Springs. Leopard print bikini, butterfly bench. We sit under cold jets and drink jalapeno cocktails, letting our lives grow rich and abundant in spice. We don ankle-length dresses and learn to Texas two-step with old men and smoky cowboys named Corey before falling asleep on kind stranger's sofas. We drink coffee by the bucketload and soak the midnight heat in dark and drug-fuelled saloons, watching girls vomit in all night diners. We fall onto the floor of more warm hearts and curl up with kittens and cockroaches. Bloody Marys in the afternoon, wearing red lipstick, forgetting about time and money and remembering how to be free, free of all constraints. The punks are flying across someone elses living room now as we meet strangers on steps and swim naked in the pool as coloured waves are projected in technicolor across the living room walls, dancing wildly in the hot summer rain. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

New Orleans. Rambling, ramshackle, swashbuckling streets. Plants spill from rickety balconies, hungry for water. Paintwork is cracked and chipped, sides of houses are crumbling. Gnarled wooden shutters that have seen it all sag under the weight of the heat. Curtains hang heavy as windows are flung open and strings of white lights and flickering lanterns make fireflies and glow worms in the balmy air, like a slice of melon in your mouth. Danger and beauty lurk around every corner. Hot and desperate jazz leaks onto the street, combining to create a raucous cacophony, made bearable by the dead weight of the bruised sky. Thunderstorm in a graveyard. Lightning illuminating the mausoleum. Ornate iron gates are creaking. When hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused New Orleans to flood, decomposing bodies rose to the surface of the graves, making it harder to identify those who were killed in the disaster. 

Jazz at the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street, hot sticky wild saxophone, a stranger in a hat teaches me to swing dance, we sit on the pavement and skip through the dirty-bright electric darkness, illuminated occasionally by neon lights. There is a piano in the bathroom and a white cat sleeping under the star-spangled banner. Corona on the porch and another airless sleep. Sprawling, spicy, blood and salt rum wonderful hurricane-drunk. We sleep on a piece of foam in an airless, lifeless room and awake to heat induced hallucinations, to sweat crawling across our skin like spiders. Then up, up and on, on and on to the next thing.

Fourth of July. God bless America. In Louisiana sex education is illegal and so is buying liquor on Sundays. The land of the free, indeed. 

Memphis: unlike any city i have ever been in. Very poor, beautiful old factories lie abandoned as street trollies rattle by old warehouse, lettering peeling and fading. Blue flashing lights and relentless sirens patrol the streets as revellers failed by their country stumble around, numbing their sadness with liquor wearing star spangled Jeffrey Campbell shoes in an act of forced patriotism. Streets are closed, megaphones boom. We visit the motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated yet the museum facade is sponsored by Bank of America. We look into the window where the assassinator took fire and watch the lights of the bridge in the water and smell july fourth firework smoke in the air. We drink beer from dusty bottle and listen to the jukebox as an old man cooks soul burgers in a fryer behind the bar and a Tennessee drawl plays pool in the back. You tell us that this place used to be a brothel, it is certainly grimy delicious. The upstairs is closed today, the owner tells us, but when we visit the bathroom we spy through the holes in the ceiling up at the gilded wallpaper and wonder at those past angels of the night. We wander through the midnight heat and stop outside the huge abandoned Hotel Chisco, were Elvis made his first radio broadcast. So much edge in this dangerous and chaotic city, a real burning sense of people feeling and fucking and failing and crying but living and breathing and working together and simply trying in this madcap world, because that's all any of us can really do, isn't it?

You keep watch on the corner as we mount the railings and fall into the bushes below. We crawl through an abandoned parking lot and slice open our thighs squeezing through a gap in the wrought iron fence. Two weary old men pianos lie waiting for us in the darkness. You play an eerie tune with trembling fingers and it echoes in the full silence. I am scared.We make our way through the hotel, keeping the tiny glimmer of our flashlight away from the telling glow of the windows overlooking the street below. We carefully step around water damage, broken glass, musty ballrooms, old kitchens, marveling at scrawled notes still stuck to the walls. We can only see what is immediately in front of us, and there is no way of knowing what lurks in the huge darkness around us. It is wonderfully terrifying; every inch of my body is trembling, alert. 'Always be prepared to run', you tell us. We climb spiraling staircases until we reach the roof. Iron ladder after iron ladder, we cling to the rust with all of our strength until we reach the highest point; the metal rigging upon which the neon hotel name once hung. We climb. The metal shakes as the wind tugs my hair across my face. My long purple skirt is tucked into my knickers. The power of having my life placed literally in my own sweating palms is tantalising and electric, heavy. One wrong foot, one missed hand hold, one rung too weather worn and i will tumble to my death from one of the tallest buildings in the city. Who will think to look for us in the sky of Memphis, Tennessee? We reach the top and i am alight with anticipation and fear and it is so incredibly beautiful up here with the birds. The whole city stretches around us. Lights twinkle everywhere, a giant premature Christmas display, just for us. It is so quiet up here we can here voices calling from the street and the callous call of every blue siren rings in our ears. The whole world, the whole night, ours for the taking. Independence day fireworks shatter around us, one thousand tiny falling stars. Police megaphones crackle at our feet. It is as though there is no one real left on earth.

Crooked, wicked, brilliant demon-angels marveling at life.You point out the old brewery, the phoenix hotel. We descend to the foot of the sign and drink beer and talk revolution. The world is falling apart but you are fiercely optimistic. I drink the night with my eyes. This dirty, dangerous, ghetto fuelled spicy city is intoxicating. That golden allure of the danger of possibility. Or is it possible danger?
Briefly we are lost in the old hotel, until we return to our beds in another co-op full of beautiful souls to curl up with kittens. A place where people cleanse negative energy with electric scientology probes and a boy lives in a bathroom, sleeping in the tub and keeping his books on the disused toilet. We burn the flag, lighting sparklers or cigarettes as cicadas laugh in the hot early morning air. Little birds setting the stars alight in an identically emblazoned bikini, wearing cow ears and kissing boys on the steps as we leave and giggle and shriek our way up the interstate to Kentucky,



TO BE CONTINUED..............................