On Things Lately

little thoughts, big dreams, things starting to work out, the colour green

A green corduroy jumpsuit and cowboy boots. Pink glasses and a silver necklace that looks like a walnut. It isn’t a pendant and no, it doesn’t open, though it would be cool if it did. I am beginning to think that the proximity of this sealed silver lump next to my heart is more symbolic than anticipated. My heart isn’t sealed, but it has been enclosed by a wall of self-protection and fear. I wear a lot of green these days, and I like to think that it is connected to this gradual opening of my heart and deconstructing of the wall. Green makes me think of saplings and grass after rain. It is growth and renewal, the heart chakra and the colour of my eyes. I used to wear and see a lot of yellow, representative of fire, our energy center and where we connect to the other. After doing a lot of work healing and opening my solar plexus, I have moved onto the next; the heart; the colour green. I like the jumpsuit, but its weird to go to the loo on a plane and have to sit there half naked. I know no-one is probably thinking about it, but I get this sense that when I make my way back to seat 18C that everyone will be thinking about the fact I was partially nude as I did a number one. I only ever sit in the even numbers.

I have a lot of bags with me, but I like to think I don’t come with too much baggage. Nothing I can’t carry myself at least. I’ve spent over a third of my life in therapy, and that has to count for something. But arriving at this beautiful art deco building, I realise suddenly that I am burdened with more than I can manage. I have carried my life with me for the past two months, shifting from home to home - none of which have been my own. It has been beautiful in many ways, but I am tired, and I nearly lost my sense of humour waiting two and a half hours at immigration. The green corduroy was no longer a symbol of transition and renaissance and was rather becoming a sweatsuit; unforgiving in both heat and chafing. I want to shower off instability and uncertainty and yet it seeps out my pores. The taxi driver asks for my number so we can organise a trip to the pyramids. Why am I so unable to say no to things like that? Flustered, exhausted, and at the same time exhilarated to be back here, I try to sweep my mop of hair into a semblance of order as I begin to pack myself like a mule and enter the building. It is called Casa De Las Brujas, which is in part why I chose it. The Witches’ House. My life is permeated with witchcraft and magic in somewhich shape or form, so what better way to begin my stay in Mexico than here? And, as though by magic, a man enters the building right as I arrive, coming back, I assume, from a dinner or late night stroll. His energy is seemingly gentle and resolute. He smiles as he holds the door open and asks if I need help carrying my bags up to the fourth floor.
There isn’t a lift, he says with a gentle laugh. There’s definitely something comic about the amount of stuff I have with me. I imagine an outsider sees a visibly naive, green-eyed blonde in a subtle-yet-loud green jumpsuit and cowboy boots and makes a lot of assumptions. He is curious, too - I can see it in his eyes. He doesn’t know I’m here because I’m a runaway, and though I know his jest toward my luggage is harmless, it reminds me of how I ended up here. Something inside me flinches. I smile back and laugh.
Yes, I would actually.
It is obvious he goes to the gym, so I don’t doubt he can manage carrying a bag up four flights of stairs. If I could run away in the middle of the night with all my worldly belongings from an island in the Pacific North West and catch two ferries back to the safety of the mainland, then he can certainly handle a 21kg suitcase. It is a bag, not my baggage, that I am handing him after all. We begin our ascent, he, I and the security guard who forgets the keys and has to go all the way down again to collect them. I offer to do it, but he isn’t at liberty to tell me where they are. Figures. While we wait for the keys, the man stays with me and we talk, maintaining a weird amount of eye-contact given how uncomfortable it makes me to feel seen. His eyes are shards of ocean water, at once deep and clear. I want to swim in an understanding of what they have seen and what they are looking for. Or at. A few days later he will interrupt me to tell me that my eyes are beautiful and wild and I will be caught off guard by the sincerity of his compliment. The security guard returns with the keys and I open the door. The apartment is beautiful, a small studio with the most perfect miniature balcony and wooden floors that might rot or turn to dust. They haven’t decided yet. A night with a balcony is all I could hope for as it reminds me of all the homes I have had and how happy they have made me. I have also come here in the hopes of finding a new home so the balcony feels, in its very small way, auspicious. Witchcraft and balconies, something I can’t seem to escape even if I wanted to. The man helps me bring my stuff in and I make an embarrassing joke about welcoming him to my humble abode. I must’ve been a father in a past life because I make dad jokes like it is no tomorrow, and they are always bad. Perhaps it is simply out of kindness or his evident curiosity about me, but he is gracious enough to laugh. A silence is held in the space between us until he asks if I want some camomile tea and a microdose of mushrooms. I say yes and go down to his apartment, aware that this could be the start to a horror story, but certain it isn’t. Another part of me wonders if it is the start of a love story, but I don’t think it’s that either. It is eclipse season, and I keep that at the back of my mind.

I left Mexico on the 29th March 2022 and not a day went by since that I didn’t think about how much I wanted to come back. There were signs and synchronicities and an unignorable longing. I decided in September that I would move there, unable to resist any longer and desperately in need of change, growth, newness. When intuition calls, you answer. But then something in the realm of witchcraft and magic arose and I decided to halt on the move out of the need to protect my own energy. My walnut heart is resilient, but even the strongest nut can’t withstand a nutcracker. Having decided not to proceed with the move I began to steep in mould. It was necessary and medicinal (isn’t mould the source of penicillin?) but nonetheless it was uncomfortable. It lacked green and yellow. These months of stagnation and discomfort led me to an island abounding with beauty but lacking in safety. So I ran away. And once I ran, those same signs and synchronicities I had seen when first I left Mexico began to reappear, reminders of a dream I chose not to follow but that was still very much alive. Certain colours would present themselves in profusion - purples, greens, yellows. Conversations I would overhear in the streets all seemed to be about Mexico. The number 34 became as apparent as my own breath, just as it had been during my first trip and the proceeding months after leaving. I was introduced to people who had just returned from this place I was longing to return to. Having run from Canada to California I had subconsciously run closer to where I wanted to be all along. Each leg of the journey saw me don my travelling garb of a green corduroy jumpsuit and cowboy boots, so I figured that it was the only appropriate way to arrive here. Swathed in green, the colour of heart and life. The colour of Casa De Las Brujas. The colour of my “beautiful and wild eyes”.

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Time is peculiar. It is constructed to create order and yet consistently disobeys its own rules. In linear time, the night I arrived to a man and a microdose and the house of witches was only 12 days ago. But that night and all that has happened since transcends the rigidity of a 24 hour framework. It has been lifetimes, at once slow and light-speed. A concentrated vacuum of experience and opportunity and connection and discombobulation and confirmation of what my intuition was telling me. A river of dancing and talking and meeting and opening and revealing and, unfortunately, smoking of my trusty Camels. It wasn’t until someone asked me a few nights ago how long I’d been here that I realised just how much has happened since arriving. How can a lifetime be condensed into such a short space? What is it in the energy here that makes me feel like I exist in multiple dimensions at once? Sure, we are multidimensional beings, but to live each day consciously aware of it is as bizarre as it is beautiful. I came with a dream and to have it start to materialise in such a minute timespan is surreal. It is also slightly daunting. But perhaps it’s the very act of living in alignment with a dream that is the source of this temporal transcension. To be in accordance with a deeper level of one’s own truth transplants you from the linear into something much more nuanced. Minutes cease to matter and at the same time they become matter. It’s like being in a flow state or deep in meditation. The confines of what is known and constructed melt like candle wax and pool at your feet, begging the question, “where do you find your reality?”. If it is based solely in the external world, chances are there is a discord somewhere within. But when that little voice inside you pops up from a place only you can hear, and when you choose to listen to it, you begin to retune and the discord melts into harmony, a marriage of the world within with that with-out. You have tapped into that bright yellow energy center. Things just start to align. The signs and the synchronicities start to make sense. You meet people or have conversations with strangers that leave a lasting impact. The job you were looking for is offered to you, or you meet someone who will help you achieve it. Living in alignment isn’t a call to resignation that the Universe will just figure it out for you, but it is a call to surrender to your deeper knowing, a call to listen and follow and trust. To focus on the light of the candle as opposed to its waxen spine.

I haven’t worn the green jumpsuit since I arrived. In part that’s because it’s too hot. But really I think it is precisely because, after months that leaked into a year, I finally arrived back where I needed to be. As for the man, he was a triple Leo, which a recent astrologer warned me to stay away from.