Perhaps some parts of the adventure only really ´land´when the adventure is over... it felt that way to me as Girls on Top 2008 came to a close and our little team disbanded in an unceremonious hour of bag stuffing, rash treating, bite scratching, money finding and gift grabbing. The jungle really left its mark on us all and Natalie, Chloe and Renee are bringing home more than souvineers, I could see their welts, blisters and hives glowing as they trundled off in a three-wheeler motor taxi on their way to Lima. A very different team to the neat, combed, wide-eyed Sheilas I met a month agao at Sydney airport. I wonder if they feel the same?
I felt like a special constellation of souls was ending a union, and I hope that what we created together as a team has been as inspiring and as empowering for each of the girls as their donations so obviously are for Amazon Promise and the Rescue Centre. We always set out to make a genuine difference for ourselves, as well as to help make a difference in the world, and I would be interested to know what that might mean for everybody.
For myself, it was a journey that centered around trust, around connection to the vision, around accepting the flow and knowing when to paddle, when to push, when to relax and those few times when it is better to just get out of the boat for a while. I think I got it right a lot more of the time, and what i know I learnt most about is the very real need for me to remain as aware as I can of the influences around compromise, fear, silence and possessiveness that western culture has on me. I love that I am born into a (first) world which offers me so many choices and so much advantage, but I am growing so vividly aware of how abundance and opportunity can become greed and self-seeking... there is a middle road, and a healthy spirit is the compass toward it.
It was only a week in the Amazon but it feels like an age, and since our guest appearance at the Belen festival here in the mad, racing, overheated jungle city of iquitos we have been deeper into the jungle hunting pirhana, spotting birds, meeting medicne men and .. shopping! Travelling into the Amazon is a rite of passage of its own and the chance to dive deep into jungle peace, jungle flow, jungle time gave us a chance to rest, soak up another kind of ancient mojo, and donate blood and sweat to god knows how many kinds of hungry bugs.
i hope the team will send their tales of how it was for them, for me what stood out most, even though the village people we met were living without ´necessities´like power, toilets and shops - and clearly in need of some of the things we wouldn´t think twice about, like band aids, pain killers, worm treatment, water... they had the glow that only a contented spirit can shine... do you know that kind of illumination?
I might be able to beam a little of it out right now, because even though just Lissy and I remain, and soon i will be all alone in the amazon, it has just started to rain. Rain like it can only rain here in the jungle. Rain as wild and joyful, as free and deep as the river from which it was born. It does not drip onto the streets, but pours itself over the pavements, drapes itself through the tree branches, stamps its feets on the metal rooves, salsas down streetlamps, does the mashed Potato on the empty boulevards where bent dogs swim like seals through vertical rapids. Rain that comes with a clatter of saucepan lids and rolling of barrels from the kitchens and cellars of the moody heavens, feeding the dry day with a smorasboard of wet memories from high in the Andes where the store rooms of the Amazon are full of fresh ice and snowflakes.
What next for me? I think it´s definitely a good time to get everything I currently own into a laundromat. After that, a slice of apple pie, a Sunday evening stroll along the edge of the Amazon, and some time to write postcards, choose a new adventure, make friends with life in yet another way.
Jadex