Who Killed Mummy?

Of all those many taboos that lurk behind the brittle whiteness of the New Age smile, I think one of the most fascinating is the failure of female leadership.

Don’t you?

It was fashionable in the eighties (and remains so in the most dull circles today), for folks dismayed at the fiasco of leadership on most every level in modern society to wail… “if only the women were in power…”. A generation of us were trained by angry lesbians at University to understand the Horrors inflicted on female potential by men, and the likes of angry Australian writer Germaine Greer poisoned us with their weird viciousness related to being born female. We were whipped into silly tempers by nasty feminists who, while appearing to want to champion good things for girls, never seemed to really like anything about being a girl themselves.

The feminists wore Doc Martins and scowls. They told us we were inferior and that we should take revenge on the men who persecuted us, while we all secretly knew from playground politics that it was a million times more dangerous, in fact, to piss off a chick than any of the boys. Dangerous too, to be prettier, wittier or in any way vulnerable in the view of those most lethal of organised high school mafias; the popular girls.

Meanwhile, the lesbians and feminists encouraged a confused generation of girls into business suits, with shoulder pads, and told us that the boys were getting a better deal, more cash dollar and yummy power by spending their whole lives chained to desks in glittery castles in the city, and that we should invade that territory forthwith and partake in the spoils of that glorious thing known as a career.

They said it was about female empowerment. They said femininity was a construct forced on us by evil men who liked perving and jerking off over less hairy bodies. They turned off Bewitched, and tuned into a frequency that continues to lead hundreds of thousands of girls and women away from the healthy voluptuous symbols of female grace, beauty, sweetness and grandeur toward epidemics of anorexia, bullemia, abortion, alcoholism, loneliness, cosmetic surgery and hollow mortgages as the goddess image is eclipsed in favour of that of the hardfaced corporate bitch as a role model for women.

The feminists were not people who understood femininity. They were not people who understood masculinity either. They were seething bullies who wanted power and decided to bust into the boys club where they thought it was kept. And they still are. They were women twisted up the by the notion that men, already bewitched by the corporate delusion, were actually having fun in that vicious slave market, the workplace.. they were brittle with jealousy and rage. They wanted power and influence. They resented the magical arts and the mysteries of the female form. They sent fleets of us out to earn our share of the living, and ended up spawning a generation of female wage slaves, unmothered infants and broken marriages all acted out in lonely homes and empty gardens.

They were impatient with what became the ‘petty arts’ of home making, house keeping, gardening, cooking, healing, braiding, darning socks, mothering etc. They did not want the ‘shackles’ of the home and hearth to limit their potential to be rich or famous or powerful. They betrayed the ancient feminine arts of fertility, nurturing and nourishing, they shrugged off the notion of home as something that could be bought from Ikea on a Sunday, and did not wear ribbons or floaty garments or garlands of jasmine. Women’s work was no longer that which nature prescribed. Women’s work was violently severed from tending the living bonds of land and family – we left strangers and institutions in charge of the cradle and the hearth while we commuted in pearl necklaces and suit jackets.

In short, the feminists had no idea how to be women and they encouraged the rest of us to give it up as a dead end. They took positions of leadership and influence, scratching with a wild fury at every limit, bitching about glass ceilings and bullying their way up the corporate ladder and out of the kitchen with a brutality that took out anybody in their way – men, women and children. They loved to allude to the notion that they were bringing a ‘feminine balance’ to patriarchal structures as they took their seats on the board, in government, as editors and captains of industry, but mostly ended up as twisted role models that lent the stench of greed, self-importance, manipulation, cruelty and powerlust to the already sketchy archetype of the Good Woman.

Here in Vilcabamba one ex-patriot American woman has built a cult and a business on the thesis that the entire state of affairs on Earth can be blamed on men, and that angels and avatars have been assisting her miraculous quest through a series of reincarnations to de-throne the wicked male elite all over the planet so that the poor down-trodden Sheilas can get all that delicious power and make it a better world. http://www.unplugfromthepatriarchy.com/

I am not excited about this idea. Not one little bit.

Firstly, I think the logic is worse than off. I have found, in my own lifetime, that women who get fixed ideas related to the generalised corruption of the male principle tend toward being not much fun to hang out with. Everybody knows by now that putting all-female teams in positions of power so very often returns the most sour of all cocktails. Take a look at women in positions of public leadership and notice their hair, their eyes, their lipstick, their collars. Surely it’s time to admit what we already know; that ambitious women are the wrong women to have influence if you value the notion of calm, collaborative movement toward achieving harmonious goals in a friendly and rewarding manner. If you value femininity.

At work, in play, in the kitchen, the boardroom and across the thorny spindles of small town politics, it is all too often exactly the women that want to be seen as leaders who turn against each other with an almost audible electrical fizzle as rivalry, jealousy, the will to dominate and a million other hysterical fears and petty skirmishes over territory, beauty, influence and control eclipse the much-ranted-on-about benevolence of the feminine.

Secondly, I do not subscribe to the idiotic view that men are responsible for the mess we are in. I do not attribute the problems of the human world to a so-called patriarchy. And if I consider the likes of Hillary Clinton, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard and the latest addition to the counterfeit list of female leaders and mentors currently on offer, one Dr Kerryn Phelps, recently announced as Australia’s best archetype for the symbol of Motherhood, I am liable to become ill with rage and despair.

This weekend, when I saw that Ms Phelps was announced as Ambassador for the Mother of the Year pantomime in Australia I was so stricken with anguish I had to throw myself in the river to turn off my adrenals. It was an over-reaction, to be sure. And a spectacle to observe as I chain smoked my way through a fury that lashed and snarled inside me like a Medusa. For six hours I fretted and raved at the grotesque coverage of this woman, allowing herself to be drawn as the very image of Good Mothering.

This is a parent estranged from her daughter, who has feasted publicly on the trauma and dysfunction she created after abandoning her marriage and young children. Who is notoriously litigious, yaps spitefully about gay rights wherever it can get her a column inch and invests thousands of hours of her time ranting and clattering on about her gay marriage.. which has spawned two irritating poodles and plenty of liquid cash. Phelps has turned a profit from the pathetic tale of her sad divorce and its effects on her children by publishing not one, but two books about the ongoing misery caused by her pursuit of happiness while carving a niche for herself as a flatulently wealthy, flagrantly aggressive, notoriously mean and selfish successful lesbian. Her own family engaged lawyers to protect themselves at the publication of the second book, which was published without their having read it, and the turmoil goes on.

The big question about Kerryn Phelps is WHO CARES??????????  Dr Phelps, who made part of her fortune medically enlarging penises for who-knows-what-kind-of sad and desperate men across Australia, and the rest from exploiting every possible media opportunity for a gay doctor, was my neighbour for a year in the little hamlet of Bundeena near Sydney, where she distinguished herself as a complete bitch. What she actually has to offer as a public figure is a mystery to me, since she makes a clear personal profit from all of her activities.

As an icon for mothers, she is an imposter. And witnessing her over-shadow the powerful seat of Motherhood as a national icon makes my stomach turn. But let me make this vividly clear, because I know how hysterical lesbians can get: IT IS NOT BECAUSE YOU HAVE SEX WITH A WOMAN THAT YOU ARE AN UNFIT ROLE MODEL AND A RIDICULOUS CHOICE FOR THIS POSITION. I couldn’t care if Phelps had sex with a smurf, even if it was smurfette. What I care about is that women who do not reflect the virtues, graces, beauty or power of the actual feminine aspect do not deserve to serve as icons for femininity.

And when they do connive their way into these positions of influence they not only corrupt the beauty of the archetype, but are dangerously misleading to the public upon whom the confusing spectacle of their leadership is shoved.

Putting Kerryn Phelps into the seat of Motherhood in Australia is like using Cruela de vil as the patron for animal rescue.

In a nation possibly deeply autistic in its notion of maternity due to its gruesome birth and arguably abusive parenting by Mother England, whoever thought it was a good idea for a lesbian child-abandoning gay rights activist matron to be a symbol of female parenting to the people must have been hypnotised by Phelps’ notoriously cunning publicist.

Because surely there is a fee involved? And surely this is an excellent marketing platform for Phelps’ real ambitions, which do not include mothering anything or anybody other than her wildly unstable wife, and her annoying dogs.

Snakebite! – Evilcabamba Diary #3

As murder tops the list of crime and skulduggery in Vilcabamba this week, I am reminded of the timely lesson of the Snake Goddess: while sucking the delectable poisons of someone else’s myth, beware the compulsion to bite your own tongue!

She had been beckoning me for years, the snake goddess of the cubist pueblo of Vilcabamba in the dusty wilds of Ecuador. She summoned me in dreams, of course, because snake goddesses are prone to skulking about in invisible realms and don’t go in for facebook.

“Theeeese are important times,” she lisped in dreamspeak, with a slightly Austrian hiss. “The place, she is infested with the hippies, the weirdos and theeeese stewpid California shaman f$ckers. The Earth Mother, she is eeetchy. The Pacha Mamma, she is asking her revenges.”

After almost a decade between $2 cigarettes and cask wine with my favourite long-toothed lady of the magical cactus medicine (aka dark surfer of the magic slime, vomit-drummer and bitch, witch or wonderwoman, depending on who you ask) I packed my designer travel bags in Bali and sky-hopped for a week to the Other Side of the world to find that things were indeed going sideways in her wilderness.

I arrived amidst the unfolding story of the strange death of a beautiful American boy. People were bitching, there were vile rumours. Then, here in a parish marketed by land seculators and other parasites looking to turn a buck from an undeveloped (read ‘exploited’) community, as The Valley of Longevity, there were the consecutive deaths of a middle-aged foreign woman from cancer, a young local worker on a construction site, four youths in a car crash, an Ecuadorian farmer who suicided, the rape of at least four tourists in the heart of town, my own near-escape (and resultant sledging as a bitchy alcoholic slut who deserved it) and this week the unsolved bloody murder of a Canadian real estate agent.

Vilcabamba became famous as a peaceful place with a high number of Centurions. Those two ‘facts’, recently shaken into a persuasive cocktail by International Living and and others to lure life-style changers into the property market, have this decade caused the plundering of the lifestyle that presumably led to longevity, as well as the peace and quiet. So much for that myth!

But it’s not just the mass-arrival of the new residents that has caused problems, it’s their quality that is the real mystery.

My theory is that Vilcabamba is where all those kids from school: the fat, the greasy, the slimy ones who told the wrong jokes, had the wrong hair, smelt funny…  the ones we cruelly (but instinctively) rejected as flotsam on the evolutionary surge – have ended up. And here, with the advantages of being white, having some US cash, being over 5 foot, and with very high opinions of themselves (and not enough Spanish to understand the insults the locals snicker at them), they gleefully discharge the pus from the chips imbedded in their shoulders with no limits at all.

Vilcabamba is where losers get their revenge.

And since , if there are any cool people in town at all, they have sensibly made themselves invisible, like rats in a jar, the losers go cannibal and feast on each other.

If you take even the fleetest glimpse backwards you will easily find that rape, murder, bashings, the mysterious disappearances of land holders while others slip into their places, and a nasty, seething bitterness has underwritten the Vilcabamba story since gringos first started using it as a base to peddle their illusions and prosper from Other People’s land – which is what Ecuador is.

Not that the new Americans think so. With an ear-infecting jingoism and kitsch-glory nationalism, the new ex-pat residents (mostly hailing from USA and Canada, with some shameful inclusions from Britain, Australia and New Zealand.. you know who you are…) loudly insist that their residency (bought for $15,000 or secured by the hasty delivery of a convenient visa-baby) entitles them to the same sense of ‘ownership and rights’ in Ecuador as any actual Ecuadorian. They do not for an instant feel ashamed at the gross idiocy of such a claim, but ferociously insist that indigenous wisdom is soooo cool, and paste it all over facebook.

If North Americans were criticised for being ignorant about the world for lack of passports last Century, they can be insulted to their faces in this one for achieving a will to travel, but dragging with them their inflated arrogance, colossal ignorance, fierce narcisism and superiority delusions.

The new North Americans in Vilcabamba, here because they say they want a better, fairer, less violent life than that they have created for themselves in the States, are too loud. Too opinionated. Too secure on their disability/ mental health/ parents’ pensions, with their false names, their kooky ideas about Illuminati terror-plots and other ways to make it rich… too drunk on the venoms that have risen up in them over their experience as losers elsewhere to even notice that they are the enemies they are running from.

At least two of them seriously think they are present-day interpretations of Jesus Christ. One declares that he is a fully-integrated (is that an upgrade from enlightened?) being, several claim to be Targeted Individuals (of special interest to USA Secret Intelligence) and everybody in the plaza agrees that the CIA has a mole and nano-spies in the village because the expats oozing around are so very important and special and dangerous to other, similar ruling elites…  like the Pentagon, China and probably the Vatican as well.

Yes, the Snake Goddess and I agreed, the previously charming hamlet of Vilcabamba, once the perfect nowhere to practice shamanic arts like hammock-riding, gardening and river-listening was no longer nowhere. It was ranking Very High online with other Ecuadorian hotspots as the latest best place to start a new life. Peace in this shady oasis for wandering vagabonds, harmony lovers and refugees from the End of the American Dream in the 70’s, and other biographical wash-ups, for so long broken only by humming bird buzz and the sparkle of fireflies in the deep forest nights, was shattered. “The worssssst is still to come!” declared the Snake Goddess. “Thiiissss place, she is broken in the heart, broken in the spirit, and it is all from these stupid gringos! The Nature, she is very angry with thiiissssss… the Goddess, she is rising.”

Murder reported this week is tragic news, and after suffering violence and brutality there myself just 2 months ago, I know what it is to be afraid for your life. But murder is the logical outcome of the Vilcabamaba story. Double-crossing, bitch-festing, drug dealing, land pimping, gazumping, whoring, boozing, and exploiting the locals – of any colour –is de rigeur.

I heard reports from a recent meeting of the new feminist women’s community effort, Vilcamummas, which claims to represent the interest of the indigenous women of Vilcabamba, that there was a stand-off when the Ecuadorian women wanted to know where the money was going. “It was shocking,” I heard. “When the Ecuadorian women wanted to see the accounts, to know where the donations were going, the Americans got visibly angry, very defensive and practically shouted at them that they were being ungrateful!” This kind of pimping of a good cause is known as third line forcing and is an old trick in the cunning capitalist’s handbook. But is causes resentment, it displaces good people, it steals the stories from a culture, as well as their dignity, trust and peace of mind.

Bad joojoo has been pumping through the Vilcabamba ether at such an alarming pulse that talk of Black Magic abounds, even at the best tables. Violence really is escalating. Bitter feuds on the community fb networks (where somebody is called a bitch, f*cker, loser etc. almost every day in standard Vilca parley), rapes, gossip, ferocious cliques and factionalism are rampant. Tempers are visibly rising, boiling, bursting and re-infecting themselves. The police are insulted as uselessly corrupt, land deals are going sour, newly-built million dollar gated trophy homes are empty and for sale, thievery is rife between the gringos (of clothes, cash, ideas, lovers etc.)and the actual Ecuadorians? the people from Vilcabamba? They are largely inscrutable. Silently they watch, avoiding eye contact with outsiders mostly, as the prophecy fulfils itself… the invaders, they will succumb to their own wounds.

Six months ago two prominent spiritualists and long-term land-holders were warned by mystical sources that Vilcabamba was the site of a Black Magic War. The couple, already bound and bashed once in a previous home over an access dispute when they blocked ancestral trails used by locals, left. I saw them in Cuenca, they had a haunted look. She whispered to me, “There’s black magic everywhere! Get out while you can.”

At Christmas my only female friend, a beautiful heiress with longterm land and business interests in Ecuador, became concerned about the behaviour  of her daughter . She was recommended a shamanic intervention by the plumber at her luxury estate. “It was incredible!” she confided to me. “Unbelievable! He was a beautiful man, the Maestro, very serious and kind. He made a cleansing of the house. He said it was FULL of black magic. Satanic rituals had been there. He said babies had been killed! My daughter, he made a diagnosis of her by passing over her whole body with an egg. When he cracked it open you could see there exactly –  a kind of deformity in it, like a cloud. She was being possessed, he said! Incredible!”

Do you believe it? I asked her. “Absolutely!” said the heiress. “We are flying out on Friday. We are leaving immediately. The whole family.”

While Evilcabambans had been gazing starward, perfecting themselves for the dud End of the World event last December with mercury filling removals, coffee enemas and parasite cleanses in honour of the sexy aliens who would choose them to be among the new fifth-dimension elite (compensation for not making the grade in any sort of elite at all in the actual world?), they had failed to notice that dark forces were cruising the very ground they were shitting on.

Case in Point: the Vilcabamba Guru himself, one Kacper Postawski. The first time I met him he was lying on the modular lounge he was trying to make famous at his online ascension site Silent Furnace.com, lazily nursing a half-blown erection and boasting about his recent transcendental orgy fantasy, featuring  Pliaedian star-troupers. If you were going to have a Miss Ex-pat Vilcabamba contest, Kacper would be the perfect candidate.

The runt of a twisted litter, Machiavellian puppet-master to his obese gimp, Danish Joshua (the blubber that fuels the farting furnace), this self-styled plunderer of the lucrative niche in anxious online outsiders is a ruthless, unscrupulous, hair-backed jackal with pupils that slip around like marbles on an autopsy slab. He is just one among many using the Vilcabamba myth to his advantage, now peddling ‘special water’ to his lists online, and claiming that he has special access to cosmic forces from here when what he really has is special access to cheap land, hi-speed internet and zero alpha males.

And what do the real Vilcabamba leaders, teachers, medicine workers and shaman make of all this?

They call it Black Magic. They know it will seek out its own. They work around it in secret.

The Snake Goddess, she sips her wine salaciously and sings praises to the divinely elegant, sweetly fragrant, bitch-mother, baby-crusher, giver-of-honey, twister of continents and decapitating seductress, Nature. She beams adoringly at the tiniest flowers in her pleasure gardens, cradles their pretty bonnets with her long fingers and kisses them like babies. She caresses the sparkling shafts of the needle-fine thorns of her Great Daddy, the mighty San Pedro cactus, and pricks herself ecstatically on their demystifying points. “The Valley, it is thick with bad medicine,” she laments. “There is a fog, a slime, a heavy mist over everything. The new people, they brought it with them, it gets so heavy, heavy, heavy. On some days it feels I can hardly breath.”

The Snake Goddess is bored of the Apocalypse. She is bored of the politics as well. She is bored of listening to prospective clients for her powerful magic and wise counsel rant on flatulantly with their hobgoblin ideas about conspiracies, aliens, Armageddon and the CIA. She has not had her teeth re-engineered for ascension. She admires how her upper incisors are growing fiendishly longer. She sucks at her front teeth in a very snakish way, inhaling kisses and fluttering her eyelashes dangerously as she says, “the human mouth is full of intoxicating nectars as well as nasty poisons. This medicine is delicious! But what is coming from the mouths of these Americans… it is a poison and they are sipping on it every day.”

In my opinion, this Universe has a great love for sorting things. She is tidy, like my mother. She likes socks in the sock place, knickers (ironed, preferably) in the place for knickers, placemats here, blue footed boobies there, red crabs here, penguins over here, kookaburras there, and lets sprinkle just a few snowdrops over… there. Lovely!

There are so many examples of this that it’s unbelievable that Darwin and co. missed it. A curious one is a little island in the Cocos Islands that has an entire geology made only of flip-flops. Left ones, I believe. These flip-flops have sailed the currents between northern Australia and Indonesia and PNG, arriving, millions of them, in exactly the same spot.

Now, if a flip-flop had an idea (who knows?), it might think it was its own idea to head for the Cocos. But what even scientists have to admit is that the Earth sorted flip flops into kinds and had a tidy spot set aside for them, a place where they could be neatly stored, like any good mother would naturally do.

So, if we follow this logic, we can imagine that Mother Nature, the Flower of Life, Geometrical forces using currents, jetstreams, lunar radiation and whatever is required, has separated a particular batch of ‘types’ out of the human mix, gathered them up and stored them in Vilcabamba. Since these ‘types’ are human, and believe they (alone in the cosmos haha!) have Free Will, they are convinced that they chose to come here. But what if…

The Snake Goddess is unshakeable in her theory. “The Nature, she is in control of everything,” she proclaims, stabbing her cigarette toward the village. “She is more wise and powerful, more fierce and ancient than any beetch who rivals her,” she says. “Theeeese people who have come here to Vilcabamba, I ssssee them. There are many, many, many with this dark cloud around them, with dark entities upon them. They are possessed by demons, perhapssss. Those demons have made something like an eclipsssse on them, so that the person who usually lives inside the body, he is not really conscious anymore – it is the demons who use these bodies, and they use them as vehicles to get to Vilcabamba,” she concludes with a decisive explosion of American Spirit.

At first we were despairing. You could see the damage being done everywhere; original architecture gobbled up in cement facades, huge luxury homes, ostentatious mansions looming over humble earthen dwellings, cars everywhere, prices soaring, lowered gazes over shop counters, a slow-simmering resentment issuing from the real people of the land.

But then we saw it differently. Vilcabamba is an old, old place. A place of strong medicine, powerful psychotropics that grow naturally there in the Wilco trees and the cactus. One legend has it that the place was once a dangerous medicine ground for elite shaman specialised in powerful magic using the crushed seed of the Wilco, ground into the flesh of a snail to create a suppository (my reporting of which will no doubt create yet another idiot American to launch a business doing just the same).

In any case, Vilcabamba, where even I once saw Kali herself, smashing compasses and tearing down the veil of human thinking as she danced erotically through the back country, is one of Mother Nature’s special places – a sweetspot and a thunderdome. Perhaps, the Snake Goddess and I mused, it’s really all just perfect?

These unhappy people, these violent thinkers and sad losers, these mutants and orphans who disprove Darwin and are a disgrace to both the Condor and the Eagle… perhaps they have been brought here deliberately indeed. Sorted out from their tribe. Separated like rotten apples from a barrel, to be dealt with in the wild cathedral of Cosmic Magic. Perhaps forces beyond our imaginations, forces that were truly judging and choosing from among the Evilcabambans: elite or delete – was not being broken as the land was. Perhaps the judgment and the sorting, the descents and the resurrections were actually really happening -  inside their own heads in the form of a poison (as the Vedas describe), which had brewed there long enough, becoming rich and honey-like on bad thinking, unhappiness, evil and violence, jealousy, bitterness and indifference… perhaps these people are those who failed to read the moral compass, who never felt ashamed when they were being cruel and who had therefore cultivated a resonance, a nectar which used them as a breeding ground to inflict itself upon the host and its environment. A self-aware nectar, a mood, that had seized the personality and administered itself in continuous miniscule doses by a medium even more perfect and dastardly than the cigarette: through the roots of their own living teeth. A personalised, homeopathic, signature venom that vaccinates its own host with the perfect psychological state for its own destruction in order that the best of the species can thrive unmolested.

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May Glenn Sanderse have been spared from suffering, may he rest in peace and may his story join with the stories of others who have met with bad fortune, violence – physical, verbal and emotional in Vilcabamba – to bring an end to the abuse of this village and all who live there.

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Evilcabamba Diary #2 – Miss piggy cries wolf!

In the story of The Three Little Pigs there was the one who made his house out of straw, the one who built from sticks and the last one who was (unfashionably) fond of red brick.

I have had reason of late to wonder about this story. First off, what’s the deal with making up nasty little tales to scare the wits out of the kiddies, herding them toward hideous architecture and demonising wolves? Secondly, what about those little pigs? Surely there are terrible repercussions from having your house blown in? And what if they were girl pigs? Would they have called the police? Or were they secretly askin’ for it ????

And then.. what would have happened if there was a fourth little pig… one who came home tired and bored from a Crappy New Year in the feral little pueblo of Evilcabamba to a house made of adobe, and shaped like a dome with nothing but candles and a little orphan dog to protect her when the Big Bad Wolf came huffin’ by?

In twenty years of world travel I can honestly say that until 2012 I had suffered no more loss than that one pair of sneakers that went missing on the beach in Peru after a long night of bad salsa. The only times I was ever in danger were in Turkey and South America. Some time around ’94 I was in the filthy little oil town of Coca on my way into the Amazon when the manager of my decrepid hostel got that certain look as he gave me the key to my room. I slept with the bed pushed against the door which turned out to have been a Very Good Thing.

Around 1999 I was in Bolivia with the great and tiny Australian Mountainatrix, Sue Fear, when two dark figures broke the lock on our door after midnight. Sue, who always slept with a knife, got rid of them before I had time to join the fight, and we both went back to sleep without even a cigarette.

Things have changed since those days. And it’s not because traveling has become more dangerous. The reason it’s not safe on the road and in the villages, mostly, is because of the people who are traveling with you!

Since arriving in Ecuador last May I have had stolen; one phone, one sarong, a cardigan, woollen wrap, about $200 and been accused of thieving, lying, being a slut, a whore, a bitch and a moaner who looks old and untoned and is prone to a scathing meanness toward raw food millionaires, idiot mystics and ridiculous middle-class pretenders who claim to be shaman. And that’s just what the expats have said to my face!

In part it’s because of this blog. But mostly it’s because of the types of folk that are washing out of the first world on a murky tide of poverty, dodgey mental-health, pensions, criminal records and the intoxicating sniff of a profitable scam. It’s the gringos you have to watch out for. Even the locals are scared of them. And if one should dare mention any of the skullduggery that abounds in places like once-charming Vilcabamba, one can reasonably expect the same outcome as when one upsets a nest of scorpions anywhere.

The townsfolk of Vilcabamba, like the grizzled folk who have invaded other sweet hamlets around the world, like to brag that people who don’t fit in are eventually removed by mystical forces. They love to gossip about how ‘missfits’ are ‘taken care of’ by a mysterious force capable of eradicating those unworthy of residence in their precious gringo-landias, while ‘chosen ones’ are allowed all the cheap beer, real estate and treacherous friendships their swollen livers can handle.

Those who have been ‘taken care of’ by Vilcabamba’s invisible immigration elite over the years have been murdered, disappeared, bashed, raped, frozen out or gone bonkers on bad drugs and beer. These hints that you are not welcome in ‘paradise’ are largely blamed, of course, on bad indians. But you only need to order a pizza at Charlitos and tune in to the word to find out that it’s the cowboys who are the problem.

Scary shit and bad mojo is hard to avoid in Vilcabamba. The locals know that, and have known it for ages, so at the end of the year, when dark medicine runs thick in the veins of those who have been smeared, shamed, slied, shafted or sidewinded, the people take the chance to exorcise their demons, redeem their villains and get as violently pissed as possible… to make it all go away.

It’s the same sort of thing we do all over the world… people dashing about from one limp party to another, hoping to be popular and to avoid their debtors and ex’s, people being asphyxiated by trillions of dollars worth of fireworks before spending the newborn hours of the smoky new year stuck in traffic, or vomiting into a toilet. People writing lists about getting rich, getting skinny, getting laid and going skydiving…. people wanting to be new again.

New Year’s Eve in Ecuador is a time for calling up the bad spirits, dark energies, and the nasty and the mean to celebrate, satiate and honour them so that good folk might live in peace and prosperity. The people in each village make puppets of bad sorts, shamed neighbours, thieves and no-goods to burn in the main square, on the steps of the church, at midnight to purge bad mojo and symbolise new beginnings.

This year at least half of the puppets to be burnt in Vilcabamba were effigies of gringos. Which the expats shrewdly ignored. There was still a sense of tragedy and gloom about the place after the failure of the world to end on December 21st, and the non-appearance of sexy intergalactic reptilians on which so many folk had based their online guru-status.

I had a pedicure, spent the afternoon in the hammock, exchanged Christmas gifts with Scott then went to town to see the crowds and receive my punishment.

To cut a long, repetitive and traumatic story short, let’s just say that the woman who left home in 2012 was not the woman who woke up in a room bespangled by shards of exploded glass, still echoing with the violence of a splintered door, twisted metal and the threats of her would-be rapist still curling and writhing about the white-washed walls of her little adobe bedroom.

This woman was tired. This woman was breathing shallow. She was wearing the clothes from the night before, flecks of glass in her hair, and a swollen tongue that would take no water.

She was the kind of woman now who would never again be Friends with a man who used a picture of a wolf as his facebook portrait. One who knows about certain mysteries; why women don’t scream when a violent man accosts them, why negotiating with a man who wants to rape you can make things much worse, why it’s hard to call the police and what it feels like to be helpless and tortured, assaulted, intimidated, threatened and screamed at knowing that your pain is an aphrodisiac to the Wooluf at your window.

In my own case, the rapist did not get in. He smashed my window with a rock which he placed against the panes he intended to shatter next, if I refused to let him in. “You choose,” he said, “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. It’s your choice. You have 30 seconds.”

“You need to be taught the consequences,” he said. “There are consequences for women like you. There is no escape. Open the fucking door!”

Boom! Boom! Boom! The wolfman kicked the heavy door again and again. My teeth chilled as the wood splintered, I felt the adobe shudder but I never moved once. I never spoke. I never begged. I never argued or cried or screamed. I did not curse this man or appease him. I did not try to appeal to his better nature, I did not threaten him with a knife.

I faced him for almost five hours. I heard every word and watched every movement. I was a witnessing being with an invisible body, but I did not shrink an inch. I eased out of my self gently, and hovered beside my own form like a shadow. I became my eyes, witnessing. I became an electrical storm. I became a listening thing, receiving words like boulders which smashed strange glasses inside me, and kept coming from midnight until 4.30am. “Liar. Slut. Bitch. Fucking Bitch! I’m going to teach you about men. I’m going to teach you about life.”

I saw the man who would teach me, and I saw myself too… a small, unborn girl in the white uterus of an adobe dome. I saw my little dog, Honey, strangely quiet in her genius. She never left my side.  I saw my altar in the moonlight-lit womb, every tiny detail of the balsa angel, her hands at prayer, the scuffs from her rides in my suitcase, the curve of her shoulders; the little Thai buddha candleholder I had unwrapped just hours before, her mirrored skirt picking up flashes of the wolfman’s torch and turning them into a tiny galaxy of stars in her lap; my clothes, hanging limp there without me, and a photograph of my three nephews in a tree, blonde boys to be one day blue-eyed men.

A stillness of superb radiance fell upon me. I felt the heaviness of my frail body, sweating for its survival, and the lightness of my witnessing self, riding on the gently overlapping tide of my breath. I felt again my love for a high school sweetheart, I felt the trust I had for my jungle healer with his deadly plant smoothies, I felt gratitude for my editor, my Aboriginal teacher, my best friends and lover… all men. All Good Men. All men I have struggled with in many ways, and who have shown me great respect and patience, even as I tested them. Who know the difference between power and violence.

“Where I come from we rape women like you, we teach them that lesson. How do you want it? The hard way? You Stupid Bitch! LET ME IN!”

The wolfman huffed and the wolfman puffed. He smoked endless chains of cheap cigarettes. He made phone calls to his brother throughout the night. He dared me to call the police. Call the police? How does one call the police in Vilcabamba? What is the emergency code for Ecuador? How will anybody find me in this remote little house in the forest?

I called Scott. He snuck down the rubbled streets out of town, over the rickety bridge, down along the river, over boulders and through the wilderness to hide in the darkness and watch over me.

He sent me a text, “I am here”.

The wolfman prowled the house, pushing every window, forcing every lock. He shone a light on me and rapped his ring against the window to force me to look him in the eye. That one eye that he used, a dead blue orb in a sagging hammock of greying flesh.

The wolfman and the American. What would happen? The wolf, despite his opinion of himself, is a weak man. He has injured legs, a sick liver, hepatitis. But as everybody knows it is precisely the sick that are the most dangerous… injured bears, starving sharks, short men etc.

I texted to Scott not to hit him. Not to hurt him. Why would I do that? Why do women do that? Is it because they secretly want this? Because they get off on the attention of men? Because there’s a power kick in this much unexploded ammunition?

When a friend, a man, asked me later why I didn’t just stab the guy, I was horrified to think of it. Could I live with being the victim of a rape thwarted only by a cheap metal lock that somehow managed to hold despite the twist and thunder? Could I live with the image of my own hand thrusting a knife into another? What about those eyes? If pain brought that chill blue to life I doubt I’d ever recover from the terror.

In the end Scott took him away. The Wolf was a pussy in his hands. He practically purred, then said it would be so much easier if the two of them smashed in the door, then they could rape me together.

What a drama! What a scene! But the most important part is still to come…

I spent two days afraid to leave the house in case the Wolf should see me in town and hurt me, in case the Wolf should get inside while I was out and lay in wait to ‘teach me’. When I did go in I asked four women for help. The first was an acquaintance, she said, “Well, in this town, because of how you write, people will no doubt say that you deserved it.”

The second, a friend of the Wolf’s family, she said, “AHo! I don’t want to get involved. Be careful. Think it through, you don’t want to damage the family business. Tell the police, but don’t tell me, I want to stay out of big stories.”

The third, the Wolf’s private counselor and healer, she held up her hand and said, “I don’t want to be involved. There are two sides to every story.” I pressed her about it, saying that since she was his ‘shaman’, she might also be his enabler, and she said, “If there’s any more trouble I’ll report him myself, I’ve been through this too.” And then she walked away. I heard later that she said I was “an angry type.”

The fourth spoke to Scott about it. She wanted all the details. She was asking for the facts. When she was satisfied she looked serious, because she is all about empowering women, and said, “Well, the way she dresses has been noticed.”

That really pissed me off!

In the end I decided to just let it go. A week later a tourist was raped in the street not far from my house. She did not report and when word got around the local women thought it ‘would be fun’ to learn self defence. The best form of which, they were told by the local American martial arts dude, was ‘to gauge out a man’s eyes with their fingers’, but better still, they said on facebook, was to carry a knife or a gun.

My landlord took $100 from the Wolf to repair the house, but only replaced the window and kept the rest for himself. The Wolf threatened me for 7 days by text but then wanted to be lovers. He said I had been an inspiring influence in his life but that I didn’t know a thing about men.

A Sticky End

Pitter  patter …  pitter    patter… a pit-pat-pitter splat …a blat splat ting! The smoky Andean twilight of the second last day of the world is giddy with raindrops. They hurl in sideways from a ghostly-white dusk and drum their little bodies, fat with Amazon, upon the domed roof of my new adobe home.

These orbs of ancient water, every one, has spun in from a journey that saw them gasped out of that wide, wounded river on great ladders of quivering brightness. Or sucked from the skin of an indigenous whore, perhaps, working the soy plantations, or the wood factories, or the sad, bitter plankwood streets of the slums of the Amazon, where crop after crop of genetically engineered dreams are sucked out of indian bodies and used to fill the pockets of our Great Industrialists with tiddlywinks.

Every raindrop exploding tonight was once to be found lounging in a swampy riverbed, surfing the scudding foam of the Amazon in surge, or slow dancing the edge of a hand-honed paddle, dipped quietly into the Rio Napo, say, by a child on his way to harvest reeds or lotus root or coca cola at dawn… the watery edge of the quiet blade glistening in a way it has not quite shone for all the unfathomable history of paddles, dipped and risen, dipped and risen in this way since the first time a man moved his arms through air and water.. .because the kaleidoscope composed by every drop of water in the Amazon, these days, is slightly tinged by oil, by mercury, or by the blood of those who live there…

No doubt the miracle of nature’s engineering has scrubbed clean each droplet of evidence of this treachery after sucking them up into clouds, drifting them about the heavens in the shapes of little ducks, baby elephants, goblins (and other forms to delight stoners on lovely grasslands here and there), then whipping them across the Andes, dribbling them down the fronds of tender ferns, pushing them off cliffs, and through dark places in the great forest of volcanoes, to then glisten for brief moments among the fanged ranges that separate the little town of Vilcabamba from the great mosaics of the jungle. These little raindrops, sitting politely tonight in the folds of marigolds about my garden, secreted like love letters in the nesting petals of an apricot rose, resting like diamond navels in the belly of a fat lettuce, or playing a jungle fandango on this handmade house could all be dressed up and polished for the final arc in this mortal coil if the World Ends on Friday.

In case you missed it, bodgy interpreters of the Mayan Calendar, various ‘channels’, with their cholesterol issues and their daggy tracksuits, ‘visionaries’, with their boxed cd-sets and world tours, alien ambassadors disguised as surprisingly unattractive homo sapiens and backyard scientists who have been tinkering dangerously with Schrödinger’s cat have been shouting for a long while now that forces are colliding toward Armageddon. And that Armageddon is this Friday, the 21^st of December. No rainchecks.

Here in Vilcabamba the loud clashing preaching about fifth dimensional transcendence, alien assaults, rescues co-ordinated by fleets of hot Pleiadian vortex-riders in zip-front jumpsuits, storm troopers, bombs, earthquakes and all manner of bother has gone weirdly quiet of late. There is an eerie calm in the plaza. The Doomsayers are not to be heard on the streets, but whisper, huddled over their burritos at Roots Cafe, bickering about The End and scalping canned fish. The lovely waiter there polishes glasses and whispers to me, “but aren’t they going to be embarrassed by Sunday?”

I tell him that I have a prophecy:  Sunday will be a bad day for the burrito-trade, come hell or highwater.

Walking the cobbles of our pueblo today I was reminded of the kind of frigid peace after a fart in an elevator. Or the pregnant hush after all the party guests stampede from the building while you remain frozen, staring at the smoking fairy lights. Is it the calm of shame, or the calm of a half-abandoned Titanic?

Word has it that a good deal of folk have already made for their bunkers. Over the last decade or so, uncounted numbers of Americans, mostly, have built underground survival chambers all over these valleys, and stocked them with food and guns and presumably porn and gold as well. It’s easy to find out online, what one needs to survive The End of the World… and here in remote southern Ecuador there has been a virile trade in all the goodies the survivalists need to both outlast The Horror, and build their  Utopias when the ash and corpses and little green men have passed.

Crossbows, rifles, cacao supplies, powdered spirulina, fancy blenders, yoga mats, hand-cranked laptops and vast quantities of tinned tuna have been traded on the local facebook page, where folk have been clamouring for End of the World dental packages and going on and on about ‘calling in the light’ while the grids are still active.

From Australia yesterday I was sent online wisdom from several sources about how to ‘transition’ this Friday. Given that it’s Friday there already as I post this now, I am wondering if fleets of disembodied Australasians, buzzing about in their fifth-dimensional non-dualified lightbodies might be clogging up the ether already, broadcasting transcendental messages from beyond the redundant material world.

Before copping Armageddon in the Antipodes, helpful souls there had advised me to prepare for “the most important time in history, when Source light will illuminate us all and open our hearts, connecting us with the cosmic web of light and love”. They said it was a tricky time and “a lot of us have experienced a feeling of giving up, wondering where our connection with God, angelic beings and helpers are – a feeling of abandonment. A sense of knowing nothing…” They said “multiple gateways are opening wider, veils are being lifted” and that it is absolutely vital today to “vision your future in its absolute power”, while “releasing your garbage” and being grateful for everything you have.

They advise that it is ESSENTIAL today to make an image of your own death, your coffin covered with sand, and then of your new self (in a presumably more fashionable body, pre-arranged according to the above paragraph through careful visualisation of yourself in ‘absolute power’) floating down the birth canal into a new world.

They finish off with a menu of helpful ways to get a better vision, and more power and love, including psychic readings ($50/30mins) and Reiki ($80/hr) by phone, skype or esp.

I have already been warned that not everybody will make it. On Friday, I am advised, the rug underneath the World As We Know It will be dragged out from beneath us and given a fiercesome shake by a benevolent, arbitrating, world-ordering force that has had enough of the bloody shambles we’ve been making of it. T

he rug shaking will signify the onset of three days of darkness, a magnetic warp in the planet’s biorhythm, a pole shift, sudden slippage of the surface of the Earth, possible appearance of the new Messiah, Future Buddha or Grandpa Smurf in mass hallucinations with the sad news that not everybody has been good enough to make it to Christmas. There will be bliss for the ‘chosen ones’ and lots of wailing and soggy carpets all ‘round.

During this time those not eligible for the shift will perish.

Serves ‘em right, say the End of Worlders. This planet’s just not big enough any more those brothers, sisters, bankers, drillers, gossips and moaners who have failed thus far to become Translucent, or Magnificent, or Radiant and Alive, Raw, powered by Superfoods,  baptised by the anal absolution of frequent colonics.. or at least able to pull off a handstand outside a popular tourist destination and post it on facebook.

Those others, however, who have been shopping at Lululemon and iherb, subscribing to sites like www.silentfurnace.com and been ‘saved’ by wise entrepreneurial souls who you can trust with your creditcard online, or following closely the advice of sages like David Ike, and clearing all aliens and lizards out of their cupboards (imagine his own surprise, when after more than a decade as a whistle-blower of the alien-conspiracy he discovered this year that his own wife was a covert reptile from outerspace!), or stuffing their steel-enforced basements with survival gear, or fondling new pistols and saying to themselves that it is their duty to protect their wives and children against all enemies… and that enemies, in the End Days includes anybody hungry or scared or lost or singed and hounded by bloodthirsty cretins from outerspace. Anybody who might need help or shelter or food or a green smoothie is a dangerous enemy now that The End has arrived.

George Orwell could have just as easily set 1984 in a rural hamlet in remote South America, as in a bomb-racked London, it turns out.

So… Vilcabamba enjoys a wonky kinda peace at the end of this week, and Honey and I have decided that our own approach to the imminent ‘cleansing’ or cataclysmic embarrassment of those who have bought into the Armageddon story will be to wait it out in the hammock.

Though not technically an ideal environ for surviving holocaust, flood, thunderbolts or the ricocheting arrows fired by hysterical Americans who didn’t read the instructions with their band new $25 mailorder crossbows, we have found that the hammock is reliable and non-toxic repellent of most forms of bullshit, and an excellent vantage point for witnessing all sorts of intergalactic dramas… the birth of butterflies, fall of twigs, cascades of pollen from the wattle and bloodthirsty rampages of various flying things that hunt the human life-force and are not afraid of citronella.

We have agreed that it always wise to take out the garbage, and walked a bag of it into town through the lovely floral wilderness in which we await our fate. But have decided that we’d rather make pancakes than envision our own graves. We are grateful for every moment we are able to enjoy the humble pleasure of a gently swinging hammock, under a treefull of singing birds, and for the miracle of raindrops, which remind us that this is, afterall, a self-cleansing universe.

Evilcabamba Diary 1

It’s difficult to say, really, who ruined everything.

I mean, where the rot really set in.

Of course, there was that whole thing with the Spanish, and there has been that whole thing with the USA and its calculated plundering of the islands and continents sequentially, but I doubt that even these horrendous incursions, betrayals and greed-fests at the cost of the Simple Good People of the Quiet Earth were as diabolical as what you can witness right now, every day, in places like Vilcabamba.

In the very beginning, it was alcoholics and nature-lovers who settled in these little hamlets around the world. Looking for peace and quiet to set about their passions. Then it was property speculators, then online millionaires who’d made a killing with cacao beans and poisonous lies like Adyar Clarity, and were desperate not to have a single penny of their unworthy fortunes be wasted on American taxes, inflation and an unstable dollar.

These gross new rich ran like rats to developing nations where they could not only ‘roid up their fortunes on cheap living, but further propagate their lies about health, prospering from selling it in packets.

It’s a mystery to me, given that raw foodies, in general, are among the most wretched-looking specimens of humanity you can find outside of an actual war or drought zone. And they’re typically moody, elitist, prone to violent outburst and extremely, pathologically, ruthlessly greedy. I just love hearing Matt Monarch, for example, compared to a surfer.. it makes me almost wet my pants, given that, in real life here in Vilcabamba, where he lives in a luxury gated villa tended by maids and gardeners, (without any neighbours because he recently either evicted or betrayed them all) this battery-hen of a self-appointed guru on spirituality and health, looks like he could barely lift a whole carrot, let alone a surfboard!

I’d love for an actual surfer to turn up in this town, or a nice, decent ordinary man who has made his own way in the world and knows how to hammer a nail, flip a burger and get on with living life instead of just squeezing every last dram of a dollar out of it. The ones who aren’t on the make are hopeless megalomaniacs, in general, who are never seen to be chatting with the locals, or walking or riding in the hills.. so what the hell are they doing here, really?

These health-industry folk have more impact than you’d think. They’ve infested the planet from Ecuador to Ko Samui, trading in weight loss, NLP, berries, ibogane, plant magic, Tantra.. whatever they can flog for at least a %1000 profit, and gain a cult following with as well. They are succeeding, not so much because they are clever, but because they have huge lists for online marketing, and the feeble trust of thousands of lost souls. And because they are ruthless about combining their online forces, then shafting each other for the spoils.. that’s you Matt Monarch, and you, David Wolfe, and you… Kacper. Yes, you.

People like Matt Monarch, and the health ranger dude, while yelling and screaming fit to curdle their own livers about the evils of fluoride, or pharmaceuticals, or the food industry, made Fortunes, deliberately, out of selling alternatives they invented out of thin air to the people they had frightened.

In one case, Kacper Postawski, who lets it be known he made his millions (but not how it was from some kind of online book about tomatoes, and then skimming the fat off the notorious trade of a toxic potion called Adya Clarity, touted as the most important healing tonic in the world, and then found to be horrendously toxic and dangerous)…. boasts continually in this microscopic little town about how grotesquely rich he is. He lures the crusading American pilgrims into his lair with promises of financial gifts, spends a good deal of his time warning folks about the corruption and fraud of the ruling elite, the evils of hostile aliens harvesting human energy for their dastardly plots, and fishing for healing products he can promote to his list, then letting the big fat no care, no responsibility dollars tick over. Kacper is famous for being hit on the shin by a reversing taxi here in town this summer, and claiming to have died and been illuminated, selling his great wisdom at http://www.silentfurnace.com

Between deaths, marketing adventures and all this bullshit, he  rents a mansion in town for $3,000 a month, when the going rate for luxury accommodation is $500 – $800 at most. He is busy ‘positioning himself’ as an enlightened guru who will guide you out of despair and suffering at the end of the world this December, for a price of about $400 online.

More than one person has commented here that if Kacper were able to find it in himself to rent a house at even half that flatulent and narcissistic price in Ecuador, he could use the rest of the money to actually change real people’s lives – the people who live next door to him, for example, who earn less than $180 a month working 10-hour days for the gringos as maids and builders and electricians. Or the artisan family here whose baby died a month ago because the hospital would not admit them for care because they appeared to be unable to foot the bill.

Whatever. These people are not the only ones exploiting the benefits of this undeveloped hamlet, stuffing it up forever, and destroying the community that has existed in it for generations, but is invisible to the inflamed gringos, mainly.

Baby boomers afeared of the dread loneliness and isolation of retired life in the West are here, drinking their money and spying openly on the pretty girls. Divorcees with bad botox and cash dollar are here, looking to install themselves as Queens of the Domain, helping all the poor Ecuadorians, and showing them the light of Feminism and organic broccoli and the delights and joy of an entrepreneurial life… completely, hopelessly, pathetically oblivious to the delicate threads of the culture they are unpicking with their inspirational leadership.

Ex-US Marines are here, with their rage and their cheques, aging hippies, with their half-baked ideas, gun freaks who hide away in the hills with their trembling fists and their shiny new weapons, advertising on facebook the sale of cheap crossbows, and how they are the real heroes of our times, who will shoot to kill if they face any kind of trouble on their land, in Ecuador. Hellllloooooo?

There are all kinds of losers, basically, who see it as a place to make BIG cash dollar on land, build private empires where they can be emperors in their synthetic drawstring pants, hide from a potential war while creating their own mini one, which they can launch from their luxury villas and private bunkers, all stocked up with the 38 items you must horde before the End of the World… and lifestylers who can’t afford (or don’t get invited) to the best parties on Maui.

The others hide away in the hills. You don’t see more than 80% of the rest of the gringo population of this valley, which is estimated to be about 1,500 people. They hide. And I don’t blame them.

Recent disturbances in the Middle Class security blanket, especially in the USA (and likely, actually, because of the USA) have caused what appears to me to be the most heinous act of colonisation since the Conquistadors, and a more ruthless, stupid, dominating, insidious force for destruction of peace and culture in the world I doubt you could convince me of.

Americans, once mocked for their myopic view of the planet, and failure to explore except for franchise opportunities, have recently been applying for passports at a rate ten times higher than any other time in their history. Americans are leaving. In droves. It’s a mass migration. No kidding.

The New Vilcabambanites, overwhelmingly American (in every way) can, much to their disdain, be pretty easily type-cast. Even their compatriots, Americans who sniffed out Vilcabamba as a potential new homeland (by surfing online, and not by doing any actual bothersome traveling, unfortunately, because that would surely have weeded more than half of them out), then snorted fiercely before stomping back to Cuenca, classify the American Vilcabimbos in two ways, as I was told at a party recently by a woman from Florida; “they are either disgusting hippies in those horrendous long skirts, with filthy hair, or useless acid-victims on government pensions looking to be top of the dung heap”.

That’s simplifying things, but it will do.

You can see, outside the Vilcabamba Juice Bar, any day of the week (except closing day, Monday, when the town falls into a depression and settles into facebook disputes and de-friending frenzies to bide the excruciating time) an excellent cross-section of the folks who broadcast that they are here in a brave crusade to create a New Reality on Earth in these sad and changing times, building visions of a New Age, striving for love and peace and purity, and risking all to build true community, despite the corporate greedheads and all those dreadful other people who have made such a mess of it.

When they’re not spouting off their enamel-corroding rhetoric, they’re usually involved in vicious little spats concerning popularity or money, or obsessively proving to themselves that even at 60ish, being fat and ugly and gross and loud, they can still pull a woman, any woman, if they can let it be known that they own real estate.

On regular occasions you might see an actual fight. Or a hissy fit. In such cases, even if the aggressor is an ex-Marine on a government pension attacking a hapless writer with a small orphaned dog in her arms, you can be confident that none of the courageous world-changers will do a thing about it, they will not leave their detoxifying superfood smoothies unattended for a moment.

Instead, they will say that communication drums installed nearby are messing with their ‘frequencies’ and making them agitated. In Vilcabamba, if you are a bitch, or abusive, or mean-spirited or fat, cowardly and alcoholic, you can blame it happily on these drums, or on aliens, or on the government. That is considered perfectly normal.

Or, they might be colouring in an A4 advertisement to place on the noticeboard, saying how they are manifesting their dream house.

Here in the remote Andean wilds of Ecuador, dream houses ain’t what they used to be. As the Middle Class colonisers sweep in with their Trust Funds in swaddling, terrified that their free rides should dwindle in any way should there be trouble in America, and other hordes on counterfeit pensions from the States and Canada, and raw food millionaires, with their grey skin and their evil empires swelling and farting and sucking the helpless into their vortexes of fear and privilege, dream houses have become quite specific.

According to one hand drawn ad, placed by a recent arrival feathering her nest here after so much fun in the Hawaii real estate scramble, a dream house in Ecuador (still among one of the world’s poorest nations) should have a full size bath with 24/7 hot water, fully equipped kitchen, cathedral ceilings, wooden floors, landscaped gardens, water features, domestic help (no more than $2.50ph, thanks) and sweeping views in all directions, with absolute privacy essential!

Meanwhile, to the hedonistic gringo world-changers, the impact of all of this on the actual people who built this town are largely invisible. Unless they can build an NGO on their backs.

Not long ago a local farmer killed himself in the valley. His death may or may not have been part of this story, but it is a fact that all over the world, even in Australia and the States, farmers are killing themselves because of the massive, terminal upheavals in land ownership and crop fashions.

In South American entire tribes are threatening to be the instigators of their own extinction through mass suicides, rather than let Big Oil and the World Bank destroy them less visibly as they chunder up their land and all the rites, wonders, meaning, belonging and legends that live within it.

Those of us in less united cultures feel these devastations alone, without counsel, and the death of every farmer by his own hand because of poverty, development or forced cultural atrophy should be seen as a crime against all of our rights to cultivate a life and a spiritual home on the Earth,our Mother, our birthplace, our home…. and the enemy is just as likely to be a dream house hunter as a bloody oil company! get with it!!!

In Bali, rice farmers have started suiciding at an alarming rate as the wine bars and the luxury villas go in, and sustainable lifestyles of the Earth carers go out.

So, this farmer in Vilcabamba died, and I was fascinated to note that his story, which I don’t think even included his name, was used by a foreign permaculturalist living here as evidence against the use of pesticides. He had, apparently died by drinking a half cup of chemicals, and this was, she wrote, concrete evidence of the dangers of non-organic farming.

Which is a bit like saying, when the Uwa tribe threaten to commit mass genocide by jumping from their own sacred waterfall before they are exterminated by oil development contaminating their land, that this is clear evidence of the dangers of having sacred waterfalls.

Which is a bit like saying, hey! those bad guys in the media and the government and the military, in engineering and science and medicine have messed the whole world up with their cunning, evil plots, there might be a war on… it’s not safe in the States.

So let’s all move to Vilcabamba and start a better community by eradicating or just ignoring the one that’s already in place, and putting me at the head, (because I’ve got the cash for the land) and lets allow everybody whose white, or cashed up, or useful for our purposes to just do their own thing, no matter who they bully or betray, ’cause they’ve all got their pensions and they are all worthy aspects of the divine, and you know, let’s make sure we have guns as well, and bunkers, in case any ‘bad guys’ come after us… the Ecuadorians are unpredictable, you know…

The heavy bee

The purple flower
fits exactly
the heavy bee

whose little body,
swerving like a drunkard
on a string
can yet land,
in exactly the right way to please her.

He opens her slightly,
she shakes her head
then quits her pouting.

A gasp;
she quivers.

The bee drives on
and, fully embraced
in the throat of those petals
delights her with his tongue,
awash with honey.

The Goddess of Cauliflower Soup

A recipe for Disaster.

Oh, this was a great blog! An incredible, witty, passionate and inspirational blog. It was My Best Blog Ever. But I accidentally deleted the whole thing fooling around on WordPress and it is lost forever.

Oh, woe!

I have been grieving for three solid hours over the loss of the caffeine-inspired brilliance of this morning’s musings in a dried out Vilcabamba. And it was upon taking stock of my accomplishments in this grief, that I began to wonder if it is not indeed time for me to launch a website selling tickets to myself.

In previous years (more than I care to tell), sudden loss, grief, frustration or careless acts of stupidity would usually result in the following actions:

1. smoking

2. panicked fury and a wild zest for life oriented toward finding an object to smoke, if one was not readily available.

3. sulking

4. having a shower, in order to sulk more vibrantly

5. overwhelming sense of futility and hopelessness

6. morbid fascination for old works of Depeche Mode and Lloyd Cole

7. more smoking

The whole show would culminate with what would amount to a kind of introverted glee as my cells and juices would note that the day was fading, the sun had reached a certain pitch, the daylight was softening – and I could have a nice little drinky poo, in which to drown out the failure or the frustration of the day, all that existential agony, and the futility which had me by the neck, and switch to modern rock.

A quick catalogue of today’s achievements, despite the terminal loss of my work, has inspired me no end. Perhaps five years on the road, and all that yoga has really made a difference… perhaps I’m doing it.. look mum!  no hands!!

Upon immediate loss of work:

- ground teeth and did obsessive clicking about through past pages in desperate hope of relocating my writing

- quivers in heart region, slight headache and exasperation at farting dog

- washed yoga pants in bucket

- folded sheets (including fitted one – always a tricky business)

- toasted croissant in frying pan.

- read brilliant introduction to A. Lowen’s The Language of the Body, and began to wonder when psychiatry will seriously meet yoga and finally become useful.

- about half an hour of obsessive internet activity

- wondered about Freud. He did so well, despite his terrible sexual fixations.

- learnt how to make real Saag paneer (spinach curry) online – not the boring, fake basic recipe you get by being a lazy recipe surfer… but the actual Indian one.

- soaked the ‘darks’ in two buckets and swept the floor (with an actual broom)

I am extremely excited about making Saag Paneer for dinner tonight because in this life, without a fridge (!) yes, sisters!!! it is of vital importance that one should feel like eating what one bought at the market yesterday, otherwise one will be tossing it directly into the compost before 10am tomorrow.

For the first few weeks here I felt very sorry indeed for myself that I should be 42 and living in a house without a fridge. Even if it is in Ecuador. With views over the sacred valley of the Incas. And even though, laid out upon the grounds on which I walk, every day, are actual Inca trails. And even when I am possibly surveyed by aliens, who are very interested in the folk of Vilcabamba -according to err, the folk of Vilcabamba. Even with all this potential magic and wonderment, I still felt like I was coming to a very sticky end, without a fridge.

Anyhow, yes. I was beginning to have fears for my future, and regrets about my past, even, That I should end up fridgeless here. It was all about shame.

The lack of hot water (and a rose for the shower) did not wound me as mortally. I thought myself quite heroic, actually, concerning life without running hot water. In the beginning, it was a simple matter of time. The new gas system and all the tubes and whatnot are sitting right here, ready for installation, promising that I might be rained upon by hot water any minute, so I was very brave about not having hot water. I had a bucket. And a blue plastic cup. And a kettle – it would have to do. The gardener made a big show of how he was going to fix up the pipes to the gas thingo “manyana”… he’s been “manyana-ing” for three weeks now, this is the Ecuador way, apparently.

But these three weeks of bathing in a bucket have taught me precious things. I know now, for example, that it takes exactly three kettles-full of almost boiling water to fill the bucket to 3/4. The rest I top up with cold water from the bathroom, meaning I don’t have to carry a huge weight of water, and the resulting bucketful of gorgeous warm and clean wild spring water will be the perfect temperature, and the perfect amount to bathe a 5 foot 2″ blonde of medium build.

In the beginning I stared at the bucket and sent it little psychic emails of superiority and blame. “I am better than you, bucket!” I would snipe.

“You! Bucket! Know your limits!” I would snear.

I would fantasise about Bali.. oh, the hot water in Bali! And the lavish baths and showers and pools and ocean. Oh, the flower bath at Cantik! Oh, lovely gushing hot and beautiful Bali hot water.. even though it does, in the end, make your hair fall out.

But gradually, slowly, gracefully, even – my view changed. My attitude softened. The bucket called out to me: “remember me”. It invited me, “remember me. We used to play together.”

A bucket, in childhood, is one of those great marvels of engineering – the wellspring of play. A bucket, once upon a time, to me, would have been Nirvana for abultions. Without even knowing it, without deciding, I got over myself. I made friends with my fate. I borrowed A Year in Provence from the library. I got into the flow.

Into the bucket I put a rose-full of petals, a drop or two of fragrant oil and now that I’m really getting the ritual going, when I’m done with the bathwater, in goes the little $1 puppy I found at the library.

It’s a good life, with a bucket for a bath.

But without a fridge, one must be even more spiritually-oriented and clear of resistance and projections. One must be present, clear-headed and disciplined in one’s fancies.

ie – one must learn to like what one has. Now.

Last night I triumphed spectacularly.

My bounty from the Vilcabamba market included:

- a bunch of spinach

- large head of cauliflower

- bag of fresh red beans

- potatoes

- parsley

- 4 croissants

- a kilo of strawberries

and hunks of carcass for the dogs. Which adds up to about $10.

The collected life-span of these items, in this climate, is two days ABSOLUTE MAX!

In order to avoid the scattergun approach to consuming one’s bounty known as a stir-fry, I decided to divide the cache into two groups: white and green. Last night, being full moon and all, was dedicated to White. Guided by cosmic forces and necessity I made a recipe that’s just too good to go unrecorded.

The full moon being a matter of great importance to the conspiracy theorists and End of Worlders here in Vilcabamba (they’re always saying how this full moon is even more significant than the last one, and how the stars are acting weird, and Venus is dropping her panties and Uranus should be ashamed of himself, the way he carries on…) I was wondering what would come over me as the ripened orb swelled up her cheeks and sailed above the cottage.

She made friends of mine cry. There were sobs on the phone. She made friends of mine dance. They shook their nipples and their stinky socks around the fire pit at Breiky’s Bar. She saw the dashing Italian man’s dog bite his face so he would need 50 stitches and fail to invite me over for mushroom risotto. There was wild love making in some quarters. And flying ants as well.

But in my little nook here on the blue planet what the moon made for me was a recipe.

Moon Soup 

I medium potato, diced

2 mugs full of roughly chopped cauliflower

1 small white onion, sliced

1 tsp corriander powder

1/2 tsp cumin

1 tbs grated ginger

1/2 tsp tumeric

1 medium garlic clove

2 tbs live oil

1 knob of butter

Fry everything together in olive oil and butter, using 2 tbs of water to create steam and prevent burning. Once the spices start smelling lovely, add water – about 2 cups, cover and simmer for about half an hour or until the potato is tender.

Add 1/2 cup of milk

1 tbs coconut oil

A good dash of vodka.

A squeeze of lime

and blend.

Yum!

Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with a dash of olive oil, light squeeze of lemon and sprinkle of salt on top.