Rayn

I pulled up outside the backpackers, parking on the pavement in order to reach the buzzer on the gate without having to get out of the car.

“It’s Jaqui, come to collect Vivian, can you tell her I’m here please?”

“No problem.” came a voice over the intercom.

I waited in the car. Vivian came out a few minutes later with her shoes, towel and rucksack bundled in her arms. I couldn’t help laughing.

We were on the way to a workshop sponsored by a national magazine where I was to give Reiki sessions and a yoga demonstration, while she was going to do astrology readings and tarot. I had trained to teach yoga many years earlier at the Sivananda School in Johannesburg before moving to Durban. Vivian, a petite woman with shoulder length ginger hair, in her early 50’s, was born here, on the East Coast of South Africa, but had spent many years in the States; therefore she approached the car speaking in her Californian accent.

“Hi Babes, do you know a photocopy shop anywhere, I haven’t done my flyers.” A crumpled up piece of paper was thrust in front of my face.

I smiled at the paraphernalia in her arms and the dishelved manner in which she was getting into the car; a sock fell on the pavement, along with one of her gold and silver evening sandals. She was barefooted.

“We haven’t got time to run around for a photocopy shop now.” I said rather curtly. I was rushing as it was to get to the venue on time, allowing my neurotic behaviour to surface, and to top it all, it was pouring with rain. “Perhaps we can do it at the hotel.” I continued more hopefully.

Viv proceeded to throw her feet onto the dashboard to put on her shoes.

“Are they the same shoes that the dog chewed?” I remarked smiling and biting my lip. “Yes they are, look! Here are the marks.” She said, trying to do up her shoes around the ankle.

“I’m still pissed off about it. My best shoes!”

“Why do you need the towel?” I ventured, imagining the day ahead to be spent inside talking to people while the rain poured outside.

“I thought we might jump in the ocean after the workshop.” She said smiling at me. I turned to grimace at her. “In the rain?” I said haughtily.

Vivian had been staying at the backpackers since breezing into town a few weeks earlier from Cape Town. We had connected through my friend Nicci who owns and runs a local esoteric bookstore. Viv had gone there to network. A flautist, yoga and pilates teacher, astrologer and psychic, Vivian has lived her entire life from moment to moment.

She tells me that even when her kids were young she was living the gypsy life and going with the flow. I am not sure she has ever seriously had a home or ‘normal’ life.

We got to the hotel and floundered in. She inevitably took the place by storm with a queue for her table all afternoon, while I watched on from my Reiki area in amazement at the ability she had of being totally herself, and therefore accepted with open arms, while us lesser mortals were making an effort.

I had been given a number of readings by her over the previous days and, in return had given her many of my sessions of body alignment, kineseology and reiki healing. “You are a world class healer.” she would say, pumping up my ego very happily.

In her readings of astrology and tarot she said that my old way of living was coming to an end and that it was time for me to move on, trust and live more spontaneously. For someone who was used to controlling life, that was hard news to swallow.

In this way, doing swaps for healings and readings we grew to know each other very well in a very short time. I even ended up in the ocean. I love the sea, but was scared of the huge waves here in Durban, being the Indian Ocean, not to mention the sharks, I took to the rock pools in preference. Viv would dive right in, while I pottered around on the edge jumping big waves or screaming. I had decided that I didn’t want to dis-connected from my higher self, Source, or whatever makes us tick on a deeper level. I was tired of flailing around struggling to make my life work. Viv came into my life at the most opportune moment showing me my control behaviour based on fear, and the way to let go and live perfectly. Or so I thought.

Of course, we have free will, and are allowed to control all we like, but if we effectively want to get things done without struggle, we have to let go. It is our choice. I know that freedom comes from within, and I know that as within so without, so why am I finding it so hard?

It is, in fact, much harder to sit still, and easier in some ways to run around in circles pretending to be getting things sorted out.

So, when Viv and I took our healing work to the seminar being held at one of the luxury hotels on the beach front that day, we realised that it is all too easy to feel impoverished when one is living in one’s shoes, with no real home. Old patterns popped into Viv’s reality when we went for coffee in the reception area. “I fancy a bit of luxury in my old age.” She suddenly said looking around the hotel, I’ve spent my life in the backs of cars and vans or hostels and communities.”

“Well, I’ve always wanted it, but never managed to get it.” I replied. “Although I didn’t spend my life in a community or van, it wasn’t luxury. I always seemed to be struggling to get enough to pay the rent and that.”

“I never did want luxury, I think that’s why I didn’t get it. It’s too much the system you see.” She replied.

“Yes, but that alternative thinking was and is still just another attitude of mind.” I said. “Isn’t it, in itself a bit lineal, why must we be poor to be alternative? Surely we are past that.”

“Well, we didn’t want to buy-in to the system, banks, authority figures, pensions, that sort of stuff.”

“No, but we didn’t actually buck the system either, we just opted out. We forgot that we are the system, all being one; we can create whatever we want and have it all. We were cutting off our noses to spite our faces. In the more spiritual picture, there’s no difference. My Mum always said that I could just as well fall in love with a rich man and a poor one.” I said pensively, Viv laughed. “I was horrified by my mother sometimes. I continued. “But she’s got some good points as I get older!” Viv smiled again.

We drank our coffee in silence. Both of us were quietly pondering the possibility of attracting some serious abundance into our lives. I was wondering why Viviane was in a backpackers, if she was able to live in the spontaneous Now, attracting what she wants according to her Universal law then why had she not chosen the Royal Hotel?

Aristotle said that Infinity is a lack of limitation. The Infinity symbol is depicted by a sideways 8. My astrological number is an 8. I always felt that we were all here, on this planet, to overcome our limitations and evolve, by noticing and hopefully changing our beliefs about self and our lives, these thoughts usually lie within constructed behaviour patterns, which we are apparently now able to change just by asking for the required help from somewhere inside. Certainly easier said than done, I think.

I had a notion of this when I was little, but like most of us, let it go fallow, while I took up the good old struggle. I hated just about everything, my mother put it down to the fact that I was born on a Wednesday. Wednesday’s child is full of woe.

Back In our second week of friendship, Viv had complained of a lower back problem, which I had worked on, but also suggested that she visit a network chiropractor I knew, and had been seeing for some time. Since she had no car in Durban, I took her in mine, along with my daughter Sinead, then in her twenties.

“What is the difference between a ‘straight’ and a ‘freak’? enquired Sinead with some tongue in cheek, leaning over from the middle of the back seat. She had been listening to our conversation, which was about our youth and how we seemed to dislike ‘straight guys’ back then.

“A straight is a person who thinks and acts according to the expected normality, which is that they live inside the system of having a job, pension, mortgage etc.” replied Viv, turning to face Sinead.

“They believe in the system and buy in to it, that sort of thing” she continued.

“Nowadays it means the difference between being gay or not” replied Sinead flatly.

We laughed and I said “I remember when I went out with my friend Deidre in Brighton years ago, we used to have fun assessing the boys with scores from 1-10 depending on if they were a straight or a freak. An F 10 was the highest score to us. meaning a freak 10.” I smiled while my mind was caste back in time. “Of course we didn’t rule out the Straights with a score of 10!” I added smirking.

“How did you know the difference?” asked Sinead.

“By the bell bottomed trousers and hair.” I said casting a smile at Viv.

“Isn’t that compartmentalising people and sort of missing the point of the alternative mindset that it means to be a freak, according to you?” enquired Sinead smirking.

“Absolutely.” I replied flatly. “But we were only seventeen or so, and were totally buying in to being hippies, listening to the music and wearing the fashions, like any other kid nowadays does.” In fact,” I continued, sticking my jaw into the air. “I was too young to really be part of that era, mores the pity, as I was a frustrated twelve year old at the height of it all, in the 60’s. When the famous Isle of Wight festival was on, I wanted to go, but I didn’t have an older brother to take me and my sister was a straight!” Viv looked at me with pity.

“I know, you told me loads of times already.” sighed Sinead with indignation.

“So are you a freak?” said Sinead after a short pause, smiling at Viv with a hint of sarcasm.

“Of course, I live by Universal Law, I believe that I am connected and given all that I need.”

I found my eyebrows lifting, as I wondered on the truth of that statement.

The spinal adjustment in Network is not like an ordinary adjustment with a Chiropractor, it is non invasive and allows the energy within the body to adjust itself with a little help. As it happened on that particular day the doctor had brought in her little dog that was running around in the reception area. I had never seen the dog before, or since for that matter, this was an unusual event. When we came out of the adjustment room Viv found that the little dog had been chewing on the end of her new gold and white shoes. She was very upset and told the receptionist in no uncertain terms how she felt. I was embarrassed and upset, as I had been attending here for some time, and was known to the centre and the reception staff quite well, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I wished Viv would shut up and pay. I was, as usual, taking the load and the responsibility.

I was thrown back in time to an incident that had happened to my shoes many years before, but much worse.

Henry had eaten the whole end off my shoe; I was left with one altogether toeless shoe. This was back in England some 25 years earlier when I had gone to visit my friend Lindsay, her husband, Nick and their dog Henry, who was a golden haired spaniel partial to a shoe. Lindsay and I had been drinking our wine deeply in conversation; we hadn’t noticed Henry under the chair. I never wear shoes indoors and find it hard to keep them on in public as well, restaurants, the office or anywhere where a shoe is expected you will find mine stashed under my chair. Lindsay was horrified at Henry’s naughty behaviour, mine, too were new shoes!

Lindsay and I had met about a year before the shoe chewing incident on Brighton train station when Sinead was three; we were waiting for the train back to Seaford, a little village near to Brighton, where I was living at the time, before emigrating to South Africa.

“She seems to be enjoying that.” Said a blond woman with an Egyptian nose, watching me trying to wipe my daughters dress, which had ice cream all down the front dripping from a cornet.

“Yes she does, doesn’t she.” I looked up to see the person who would turn out to be my life long friend and delightful new sister. We soon decided that I was some sort of Egyptian Princess. We used to laugh about it often when she cooked for me or made me a new dress. I am a useless cook and seamstress. I think I am endowed with generally being in another world, my mother was totally of the opinion that I don’t live on this planet.

Those were happy years, when Sinead was small and Lindsay and I used to go to the pub or to her house for a meal. The only thing that marred it for me was that I was carrying heavy guilt after leaving Sinead’s father, Patrick, and Lindsay, after a divorce, was still unable to have children with her new husband.

Our friendship flourished and as a few years passed. I met and married my husband and Lindsay made a fabulous cake for the wedding. I was about 25 and Sinead was 6 when Pete, my husband got a job in South Africa. The leaving wasn’t easy.

“If you don’t like it.” said Lindsay peering at my beer with a smattering of tears. “You can come back, at least it’s a trip, I wouldn’t mind a trip to Africa.” She said, trying to cheer me up, while the removal company took away my belongings back at the house.

I was to miss my home terribly, probably too many lives spent in the forests and hedgerows of medieval England had dented my soul.

Nowadays I travel back and forth often to see Mum and Lindsay and other friends, enjoying the Seaford head and South downs where the seagulls nest. Luckily for me, Lindsay still lives there, and that is home. Pete and I divorced a year later, he was only meant to get me here, I know that now.

“Where are you now?” asked Sinead watching me back at the reception area of the chiropractors.

“Miles and years away.” I replied, looking up at her.

It occurred to me, back home, that I am not Viv, nor is she me, but I thought it would be fun and exciting to be in her shoes, which for Viv it may well be. I wanted to put a bag on my back, and see where it took me. My life was boring and I fancied a bit of a change. I also had a nagging notion that if I wasn’t able to don the backpack in a haze of smoke, I was somehow not a good enough freak.

To just be me, with my idiosyncrasies and limitations just wouldn’t do at all! Until I came up with a stark start of realisation that I could have my home, insecurities and everything else I needed or fancied, or hadn’t quite managed to clear, without judgement. After all, I take my hat off to Viviane for being able to live on the edge.

But who’s making the rules as to where the edge actually is?

I had to stop trying to be someone else, even a cool someone else.

According to Aristotle, happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with perfect virtue.

I understand Aristotle to mean that happiness is the souls’ journey through life, a state of being, rather than a goal in itself. This is also true of Yogic teaching, where the journey is the important part, not the destination. If we are completely in the moment, we are on our joyous journey and probably quite content.

Aristotle goes on to say that a person is happy basically when they find their own path, and as we know, there are many paths up the mountain.

He called this personal path the “Golden Mean” the mean seems to be the place you individually feel right for you. An easy way to understand this would be through the example of food.

If a thin man eats the same amount of food as a fat man, he is likely to make himself sick, therefore he is not following his own Golden Mean.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, which I read as part of my yoga training, Ajuna, the disciple, is taught that it is foolish to compare oneself with another, as each is different and on his/her own path.

I have been teaching yoga from the double garage at the end of the driveway to my house for about ten years now. Durban being the rather a humid place it is and my venue only able to hold about ten people uncomfortably, amid the mosquitos, lizards and spiders who slink around the ceiling, but the class enjoy themselves and we have had a lot of fun over the years. I met Colleen, a tall well-built woman, then in her 40’s, when she came to my yoga class, she lived down the road and drove an old fiat that she had to climb through the back to get into, since many attempted thefts had left the door locks broken and she hadn’t the insurance or the money to fix them.

Gary had decided to join a few weeks earlier. The local hairdresser, his salon is still the hub of the grapevine in the area. Gary was and still is a gorgeous, gregarious plump gay man in his 40’s with admirable hair colours and piercings. One in particular, near his eyebrow, protruded across the edge of his face and jutted straight out. I felt it my duty to warn him of doing the yoga with it in, I told him; ’Gary, you might well stick yourself to the mat!” which met with raucous laughter in the class.

It didn’t take long for Colleen a strong woman with a husky voice and Gary to fall out. One evening the class were lying down doing a stretching exercise, raising their arms over their heads and pointing their toes. With the space constraints, I told the front row, jokingly, to tickle the back row’s feet. Colleen was in front of Gary; she started to reach for Gary’s feet while stating rather loudly, “Must I really tickle those large smelly feet!”

Gary was not amused. He took offence, got up, gathered his belongings and left the garage, much to the dismay of everyone there, myself included.

I had no idea what to do, I wasn’t sure why he had left, and wondered, with my insecure nature if it was something I had said! I couldn’t leave the other nine people halfway through the class to run after Gary in the street, so I had to let him go and continue. Of course a post mortem on the subject went on after the class, with Colleen being convinced it was her fault and that she would not return to class.

I phoned Gary later that evening and confirmed that it was indeed Coll’s reference to his feet that had upset him.

Some years have gone by now and Colleen has moved to Scotland, while Gary is still down the road in his salon, he now ironically loves his regular reflexology treatments and has since made friends with Colleen.

I miss Coll, she was a very interesting, strong person who taught me how to live in this wild- west type environment.

One day Colleen and I went on a picnic, we drove out of the city, into the countryside to enjoy the mountains and a lake. It was hot, as usual and we were sitting under some trees in the shade enjoying a glass of wine when I suggested that we might swim. “That’s not a good idea.” said Coll “There might be bilharzias in the water.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“A bilharzia larvae or maggot lives on a snail, especially at the water’s edge in some areas. They can get into your body through a wound or an orifice and cause a serious illness called bilharzia, which attacks the liver and other organs.” Colleen explained, and then added in jest. “We could always jump the bilharzia though, they are usually only to be found at the water’s edge.”

“Are you mad!?” was the shocked response from this English maiden. “I’m not jumping any bilharzia in this life.” I retorted returning to my wine glass.

Coll laughed and the metaphor stuck. ‘Jumping the bilharzia’ became our way of saying that we were going to take a leap of faith into the unknown or a Quantum leap if you like. Quantum says that everything is happening at once, all time relative and simultaneous. Quantum comes from the word Quanta, in Latin, which means, how much. Quantum is taken nowadays to mean the smallest leap or step it takes to go beyond the illusion, veil or Maya. In actual fact, from this point of view, there is no leap. We are already there, if our perceptions would just know it.