If I’m tardy it’s because I don’t know how to convey the amount of shit that hit the fan. Trust that a lot did. That the juiciest parts will come some day in paperback. The life affairs sketched in this post refer to mid-August till September end.

Monthly Moods will now drop at midnight on the first of each month.

Because of such beauty, many mystics connect the Sea Urchin with the Virginal Goddess and fertility. The water’s current grant refreshed youth, and healing, especially for one’s soul. The Sea Urchin’s spines represent a strong spirit and wisdom…

—whatismyspiritanimal.com

The crow is a symbol of metamorphosis or change. More importantly, it alludes to a shift in one’s spiritual or emotional well-being.

—ipublishing.co.in

Bird poop signifies abundance, vitality, and good health.

It is associated with the natural balance of life. In other words, it refers to the natural cycle of life and death that begins with food and ends with poop.

…a bird pooping on your head is seen as the very pinnacle of good fortune. A bird is seen to transfer the prosperity of the food it eats through its poop unto you.

—birdsphere.com

Monthly Mood: Is This A Cosmic Joke

The sole aim of Sri Lanka against the 2022 odds (national shortage of petroleum, power cuts, economic crisis, political instability) was to be able to catch a green wave. Sick of failed attempts here and there over the years, I gave myself a whole season to get achieve that.

The goal was reached on my first try so I guess it’s safe to say that summer was a roaring success.

In August I sample a new surf spot and spend three hours paddling out of the way of the others and catch 0.3 of a wave.

I get home and receive pics of a three-page letter written in a too-familiar scrawl. Hair and clothes still damp and salty, I read the words and am floored for four hours.

I can basically kiss the openness, inner peace, and emotional stability I worked two months to build up, goodfuckingbye.

An overnight girls trip back to that new surf point is arranged. While the idea is to be in the water for the grapefruit-colored sunrise, I find myself stuck on the way, smacking my surfboard to scare a gang of dogs off a puppy.

The older dogs are set on annihilating the small being. They growl at me and distance from the pup. I proceed a dozen meters towards the beach, and look back only to see the puppy getting thrashed like a rag doll in the jaws of the main aggressor.

I dash back on my urchin-injured toes and return to my surfboard smack technique, this time hollering “HELP” on repeat into the 5am darkness. The floofy victim limps towards the bushes, gasping, unable to hold up its head, eyes half-shut.

Tense minutes pass and Asia, being Asia, has a man in a longyi bicycling by, pausing to see if he can help. Could he possibly return the dog to the grocery store down the road?

Yes, of course he can. He meanders over to the bush of someone’s front yard, rips off a fistful of blooming boughs, and uses this as a makeshift glove to extract the limp body from the floor and move it to his bike basket, leaving behind a trail of fuchsia and yellow petals.

How I love the Sri Lankan heart.

Considering it a case closed with a puppy rescued from death, I get to the beach and with profuse effort, get myself sloppily onto no more than three baby baby waves, I can’t recall exact details. I head home and as I near our accommodation (the rooms above the grocery shop) my throat is thirsty, my eyes throb from solar glare. A couple of crows flap up from a grassy patch out front.

It was the puppy they were all over, eyeballs already gouged.

What IS with me and the gore and glory of the animal kingdom on this teardrop island?

We figure that this puppy had been led away from its territory, much to our exasperation. Its sibling survived; I’d passed her fleeing back to the store, whimpering, before I found the epicenter of the violence.

Playing with strays can = more pain and less love.

Somewhere in those weeks you ask “would you like to meet” and I ask “are you out of your mind?”

I receive an 18-page letter that ruins my life.

I complete my second Goenka-led Vipassana course. After 10 days of noble silence and 100 hours of sitting my hips (senseless), 20 fresh vegan meals which showcase the Sri Lankan cuisine better than anything else I encountered, listening to peacocks clomp across the roof of the meditation hall and shriek your physical being into levitation, meditating to monkey invasions and cows moo-ing across the property at each other, bathing under four frogs suctioned to the shower head, breaking my vow to not take any life when I am way too late in discovering the amphibian in my door hinge already shaped like the hinge…………

I sip my first post-vipassana coffee in Sigirya and hike up Pidurangala.

To reach Dhamma Anuradha, I had been squished between a dirty window, a French beach boy, and an addict on his way back from his Colombo heroine run. As the clock struck midnight an arm from the sardine-packed aisle reached over us to find balance. The dark limb was decorated with a row of evenly spaced, thin knife welts from elbow to wrist.

A third male kept talking to my travel companion about my face and age etc., until J gave up and said we were married. This didn’t stop the fellow’s remarks. It was when J’s sun-bleached curls were getting repeatedly tugged by unwelcome fingers that I broke my stony silence and faced the perv.

“Hey. Leave us alone. Stop talking to us. Now.” My voice shook.

I got the most bobbly head bobble in the history of mankind along with “Okay, sorry, sorry” as he threw up his hands, before disappearing into the mass of bodies standing in the aisle, never to be seen again.

…there are two ways of being unhappy. not getting what you want is one. getting what you want is the other.

—eckhart tolle, a new earth

aniche.

—buddha

What can I say about September except that it’s a rollercoaster of tears, lots of eating (not related to tears would have eaten the same stuff anyway), the many pages I scribble back to you, lots of aquatic face plants if I’m not on a 7’6, and moments of blissful trance when I look up at the trees and sky?

I guess there was that 7pm ass-clap. The one that I thought was a dog bumping into me before it clicked and had me screaming FUCK YOU YOU MOTHER FUCKER down the street, sprinting and chucking my leash at a pair of giggling boys accelerating their motorbike.

When my friends and I go to Hummus Bay an hour later for dinner, one staff member informs us that he was about to come running over to my foul mouth and serve some justice to those scrawny beach boys.

The offender is lucky I didn’t see his face and that I soon left Arugam Bay to hole up in a bed and breakfast in Ella and discover what lamprais is. I am lucky I didn’t see his face because who wants to stop the middle of their day to ask an asshole why he did that? What would he do if someone did that to his mother or sister?

I cross parts of Sri Lanka, the whole of India, and parts of Nepal in 60 hours give or take.

My welcome in Kathmandu is two mosquito bites in the heart of a serious dengue (incurable, recurring symptoms, occasionally fatal) outbreak.

Classic.

I flee that shithole and after a day of painstaking festival-season traffic, touch down at long last in my favorite abode in Asia. Huge desk by Asian standards. Chairs. Great mattress. Hotshowerwifi. Panoramic Lake Fewa view. Spacious shared kitchen with four burners on the stove. Under $4 nightly, $90 monthly.

kook files from july received in august, urchin kiss of the century (three spines one toe).

when you’re forever alone! midday bay swims, love my neighbor, how to buy carrot cake for neighbors in style.

everybody tries it once
those who don’t just have to put it down
you paddle out turn around and raise
and baby that’s all there is to the coastline craze

—the beach boys

her hands and arms were seaweed, surfing waves made by hips.

—gregory david roberts, the mountain shadow

some iconic august writing

day 1648

12 august 2022

arugam bay, sri lanka

lassoed lizard

was the best part of my day when a morrocan called me stephanie in the water because i look exactly like a hawaiian stephanie he knew?

or was it when i finished my post by noon and went for affordable avo juice instead of wallet-breaking beverages? or my ice cream mic?

the moon rising over lavender across from an orange setting sun?

was it when i walked a lizard on a leash?

or the silver fishie the size of my nail that landed and flopped around on my surfboard for five seconds?

or when that morning juice and sun glare on seawater hit?

the swaying hem of my pants on my calves as they walked me to the cafe or the millions of cushions to drown in once i got there?

when lindsay wiped crumbs of crow shit off my neck or the crow shit itself?

fresh outta the oven and into my hair?

day 1649

13 august 2022

arugam bay, sri lanka

what’s worse, bird poo on your washed and sun-dried organic cotton pad

or you wash and sun-dry a cute curd pot to hold your eggs in your room but a dog pisses in it with impeccable aim?

i love making multi-day batch vegan mylks and making bliss balls with the pulp! ahh!

i need 2 filter my south asian stories involving animals b/c they r getting 2 graphic for ppl who haven’t spent yrs on end in india

day 1656

20 august 2022

arugam bay, sri lanka

i am currently watching a tree across my backyard blow in the wind as a peacock tries to stay balanced on its branch. the way it’s going makes the peacock look overdue for a diet.

i look between my legs and consider myself the chaffing world champion but i also figure that i’m not even close

suns out buns out honey

acing my rapid antigen for my meditation course which no one ever checked.

 

fish truck blaring a jingle about how fish is good for you, leash tan, $8 bed and breakfast with a waterfall view.

dog on nine arches bridge, train on nine arches bridge.

calories cooked:

calories chased:

stoplight color bananas, avocado juice welcome drink

canned catfish toastie made by the mom of fellow train passengers

eating cold, bus station rottis out of sinhalese homework taped together into a paper bag

wine wednesday at the lotus lounge

obsessions:

dion
pb&j toasties
moringa coconut lattes
bliss balls
roasted walnuts
letters
crying
vilvam tea
fucidin cream
coconut oil bulletproof coffee
intermittent fasting
my verano 🍓 playlist
7’6 hardboard
6’8 nsp funboard
hot summer ocean swims
homemade vegan pumpkin spice lattes
grinding my own coffee beans
carrot cake
just-caught yellowfin tuna
dhamma anuradha
anapanna
vipassana
rice
sri lankan vegetarian sides
sri lankan herbal teas
meditating in all white
goenka morning chants
sterile hotel rooms
my rose-pink mozzie net
chilean merlot + ryan gosling
yellow-fronted barbets
ella public clinic (close to the train station)
lumprais
avocado
kaffi colombo
chicken cheese kottu
william finnegan
pink dragonfruit
pitaya smoothie bowls
red bananas
coconut kithul
zesta fat burn tea
chocolate ice cream
egg hoppers
butterfly pea tea
finding a chunk of urchin spine lodged in your toenail bed in the middle of your vipassana course weeks after the urchin kiss

rumi of the summer:

my mind, my head, you are
synapse within synapse within
reasonable, measured synapses.

body, you are wonders set within wonders,
threaded through by other wonders.

my heart, your desire hides within
a longing within a deep core of love.

soul, your joy lives within yourself,
within another joy within the whole,
which is also a great joy.

bird of the month: yellow-fronted barbet

a petite, fleeting beauty that startled my visual comprehension and made me very, very glad i kept trudging my 1.25-kilo pandemic binoculars all around sri lanka (after lugging them up and down india and to a 5,400m altitude in nepal), till the very last day. a species new to my eyes and endemic to the island.

book: barbarian days by william finnegan

Previous Monthly Mood: Starting To Fall

Explore my full archive of Sri Lanka and Monthly Moods.

Learn more about this round-the-world solo trip.