Another amazing day, blue sky and water slapping the side of the boat. Sadly it’s already starting to become “normal”, the beauty surrounding me fading into everyday life. I find myself searching for that awestruck feeling I had when I first arrived here on the island of St. John in the Caribbean. I’ve been living on Sushi for almost a month now with Fuego and Sandwich, my friends that I shared a dome with in the desert for a month when we worked DPW together at Burning Man. They are in the process of buying Sushi, a double-ended red 32 by 12 foot sailboat.

Boat life is amazing, charming and rather rustic. There is a sweetness (or maybe I should say a saltiness) to it all. I was paddling home in the kayak today I watched a procession of broccoli and mushrooms tops float past me, outcasts from one of our boat neighbors. Life has a sense of now to it, the fridge being weak and small and rather smelly thus not keeping food very long I think of meals on a day-to-day basis requiring a certain amount of creativeness to each one. Water, clean and salt free is a life source not to be wasted. When it rains it is a celebration, we can rinse our dishes in the water caught in the boats “bladder” a plastic bag kept under one of our leopard skin couches that doubles as a bed when friends stay over. Often its salty coffee or salty pancakes in the morning due to the salt residue left on the clean dishes which are washed in sea water. We collect water and wash the dishes in a red bucket with a rope tied to it that is cast over the side of the boat. The daily commute to work starts off with a kayak ride up onto the white sand beach, stepping over the black and red “love bugs” that are always making love and then usually hitching a ride into town in the back of a pickup-truck. The island is all winding hills and stunning greenery. Bathing consist of a daily swim in the ocean and clean hair means a shampoo with ocean water (for me at least, Fuego and Sandwich have access to clean water through work). I’ve had only three fresh water showers in the last month (not counting my few cups of rain water that I use to shave my legs). Yesterday morning at around 6:30am we had a rainfall and I later washed with the water I collected in a bucket standing on deck. I have moments of feeling like I will go insane with the dampness and mildew smell that prevail.

For my first two weeks here I was experiencing really bad land sickness. After an hour or so of being on solid ground everything, including my body, would start to rock and sway in the motion of the boat. I would become really dizzy and have to hold onto something. As soon as stepped back onto the boat I would feel immediately better. It’s a strange feeling indeed. I began to feel like a sea creature that became so apposed to the solidity of land!

Time. It is an odd thing. The Mayans believe (which I wont get into) time is speeding up and by their calendar we have been climbing to the top of a time pyramid for thousands of years and that it will come to a point in 2012. Everybody that I have talked to recently reflects to me that sense of illusion around time. Days, weeks and months slipping past us. Life is slow and sweet here, the days running into each other with no definition and no need to find it. A common saying here is “relax mon, its island time”, and its true, though sometimes I find myself forgetting it.

I spend two days a week working in a sweet little import shop in Cruz Bay, the main hub of the island which is also full of drunken frat boys. At the store we sell things imported from Thailand, India and Indonesia. I really enjoy my two days a week surrounded by meditating Buddha’s. The other two working days of my week are spent in Coral Bay (a few miles down the road from our Jhonson’s bay) working at Aqua Bistro where I serve fresh Mahi Sandwiches and catch up on the local gossip. It’s all open patio with lots of greenery and orchids, lizards hiding in the foliage and a wind coming off the ocean which is right across the street. On Sundays I work with Lisa, the sweetest bartender ever who is in the process of teaching me all the different types of drinks and gives me samples of the best liqueurs that the bar has to offer.


On my days off I often hang out with Mel and her eighteen-month on daughter Chione (pronounced Chai-own). They are such a beautiful family and Mel and I have an endless amount of things to talk about. Chione has learned to say my name and we have wonderful times playing on their her big yellow boat. On Friday Fuego and I took a hike down the Reef Bay Trail and went and saw petroglyphs carved into the rock that date back to 600-1500 AD. The images carved into the rock are unique to the island and are reflected in the wedding rings that Sandwich and I share to keep the islands boys at bay. With many of the local men conversations begin with “where are you from? Are you married?”. A little wiggle of the ring finger is almost as good as setting a firecracker under their butt as marriage seems to be the only thing they seem to respect. Engaged or with a boyfriend just doesn’t seem to cut it with these boys. Anyways, after the petroglyphs we explored some old haunted sugar mill ruins from the slave days and then headed down to the beach where I drifted in the shallows watching baby sharks swim around me feeding on the schools of flat blue-eyed silver fish.

A glimpse of my work on the Down Town Eastside for the past two years.....

www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/bc...AMSinsite.wmv

Skin. My skin and only mine. I wonder. Does it grow thicker or thinner with time. Am I lapsing into some sort of tochless oblivion, sour and old, or am I waiting for the right fingers to penetrate my shell made of airplane hide and foreign waters. I am transient but caught in the web of wonder. Where to. Where calls me. Where does my heart desire. Flowing and yet stuck. Like water slowly trickling over a beaver damn. I lack momentum, caught in the comforts of now, my tummy roles making themselves known in my lack of walking cities around the world. Everyday I remind myself be gentle…slow. Too long I’ve abused my body in various ways without realizing it until it was too late. The last two months I’ve shared space with too many people. Sleeping, making love, living, eating, working, playing all in once space. I am in polar opposite environments. Hot and dry to humid and cold. Intense physical labor to thirteen hour days of sitting only moving to get tea and then back to work. Snip snip snip. My body changes again. My mind wanders foreign lands while my body is stuck….Soon. I know. Soon.

Crickets are in the background. The fall sun is creating patterns of light across my arms and face. Sitting down, in the slow serenity of life on the sunshine coast. Slow...slow....slow. I am beginning to breath again, become aware of myself, my body my needs and wants instead of throwing myself in a mad furry of sleepless nights, psychedelic drugs, work, adrenalin go go go.... I feel as though I am only now beginning to process my journeys of the last month. The changes that have taken place in my perception of the life that I have lead for the past two years in Vancouver have been the biggest gift of all. I feel as though I have crossed a bridge and am only now able to look back and let go of many things that I clung to, my so called safety net.

In the beginning of August I journeyed down to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada where Burning Man takes place every year. I knew little about the D.P.W, Department of Public Works, the crew that builds Black Rock City before 45,000 burners role in to party it up for a week. All I knew was that I was ready to work, to push my body to its limits and let go of as many demons as I possibly could. After two years of working on the Down Town East side my mental stress was starting to take over. Images were constantly in my mind, I felt as though I was attached to the people, the community and the neighbourhood and I didn't know how to get out. Heading down to the desert for a month seemed like the best way to make that separation, and its was.

There is nothing like griding your body through intense physical labor to release emotions and go into an almost mental oblivion. What a a relief it was in many ways!! To forget life at home, to go by my newly found playa name, Left Hook, leaving society behind forgetting the burdens of money and responsibility. I re-created myself un-burdened by perception and free to explore many things such as my sexuality and the beauty of women's bodies, something that I realized was totally unknown to me. For a month a lived with a man and woman. We created a family. For me it was a time of great exploration, the next step. There were many first times for me, many eye opening experiences and what a gift! Each of us being in such different place in our lives we somehow created a loving harmony, free of jealousy. We slept together, huddled in a pile of pillows inhabiting a dome in the desert as a city was built around us. We created beauty in my minds eyes. We created love in a whole new way unknown to me. The first time that we were all together and I watched them make love I didn't know to laugh or cry. I felt as if an electric jolt had been sent through my body, the energy that was created between them, her face, his eyes on mine was an experience I will never forget....I was in such awe I didn't know how to move, I couldn't be touched. I felt as though I finally understood what making love was, finally saw the energy that was created between the union of two people. Even now I don't know how to describe or process it....The contrast of life was beautiful. The moments of pure physical ecstasy and the out of body experience I had when being bound and flogged for the first time was ecstatic. Moments of being fully in my body, pounding metal into the hard desert, creating sweat upon sweat making love and yet leaving my mind behind on the ground through psychedelic adventures, the pure freedom or re-creation or flying over the city in a six person plane....

The word "burning" has taken on a whole new meaning to me. Funnily enough I missed the actual burning of both men (the early arson Tuesday morning for those of you who don't know) and the second on Saturday night which was actually a female with an eighth rib and a phoenix on the face. Burning for me is no longer the act of burning something, a monumental structure of emotion or beauty, but a way of life, of letting go. Of being utterly present in the moment and not looking back, regretting things that burden you but taking them as a lesson and appreciating what you may learn from them. When I was on the playa I became sick first with heat stroke and then battling a fever on and off for week which bit into my immune system and wore me out to the point where my body lost its ability to heal small cuts and scabs. I was forced to come home instead of staying on playa for restoration as I had planned until October. I was ready to leave my life in Vancouver behind, leave my life completely and forget about it for a time, I was frightened of returning to the city and getting caught up in the whirl wind of it all again. Being back for a time has brought a sense of relief though. I feel as though I am no longer running and at moments have thanked my body for being sick as I can really flow now without looking back, feeling as though I am running from the life I have left behind.

And so I continue to burn and go. Following whatever roads my lead me. Putting my trust in the universe, leaving the comforts of loved friends and the space and room that I have created for myself. I have no plans, I have let go, let go of preconceived notions of where I am and where I shall end up. Loose plans drift in the distance, being in San Fransisco for decompression at the beginning of October, spending time in the Virgin Islands with my two lovers and possibly Guatemala in the deep winter. Perhaps the dreams of India that I had on the playa will come true...I am no longer living to survive, but living to live.