I am not on vacation, and there is a scorpion in the bathroom. He clings to the rough-plastered blue wall over the doorway, his tiny rose-gray abdomen curling to a swollen, alarming point. I walk through the threshold and imagine him dropping down onto me. It is too late and I’m too tired to bother wrangling him onto a piece of cardboard or into an empty glass, racing for the nearest window and tipping him out into the night.
For many minutes, I watch him from my own perch on the toilet-with-no-seat, both of us unmoving. At last, I tell him he’s welcome to stay as long as he likes—to enjoy any mosquitos he finds—but he must stay out of the bedroom. I clearly state my boundary and go out, shutting the metal door behind me. Arranging myself under the cascade of bug net pouring over the bed, I go to sleep without a second thought. When I awaken, he is gone.
I have gone somewhere hot and cheap in rural Central America. Somewhere I can afford to rent a small cold-water apartment with a hammock and the rare puff of breeze. My concrete block room (that would never meet any building codes, however creatively interpreted,) overlooks a ragged yard framed with banana plants, several leonine papayas, and a single squat coco palm. A flock of chickens work their way around the edge, scratching at leaf litter beneath philodendron and bromeliad. Shaggy Hooker’s sugar palms and acid-bleached magenta bougainvillea embrace awkwardly in the far corner. The neighbor’s heavily pregnant dog, teats hanging near the ground, wanders through every few hours, patrolling the property despite the 105-degree heat and her burdened state. Out front the highway grumbles then roars, jake-brakes juddering over the squaw and shrill of countless birds.
The noise and heat and light—frenetic scents and sounds—I can keep nothing out. This is a place where the environment is one’s truest lover. I sweat. Luxuriantly, constantly, perpetually unsure if the tickle down the back of my thigh is fluid or insect. I learned mighty quick to string my pantry goods up in a bag from the rafters to keep the mice from eating into the lentils, the tomatoes, the packets of marshmallow cookies. I spend an evening teaching the neighbor’s adolescent cat how to stalk mice. When he finally catches one—having no idea what to do with it—lets it loose to scutter along the wall and out into the night.
I am in constant energetic communication with everything: with the scorpions, with the feral cats dropping through my open windows at dawn, with the geckos swarming the walls, and the fat cockroaches as they click along the curve of the PVC spigot in my open-air kitchen. I speak to them all. I am even attempting to learn the language of green, of the jungle as it slowly but unceasingly rises through the limestone bedrock. When it rains, a small lake forms in the middle of the kitchen. How cool the water feels on my bare feet.
I find I welcome the blasting heat like stepping into an oven each time I go out. The roads choked with roaring vehicles, the bubbling whine of motorbikes. Packs of baying dogs untethered and approaching aggressively. The cheery buenos días from the toothless fellow, his leg in a cast, who lives under a half collapsed palapa—a traditional open-air palm frond shelter—just down the road. Trash so thick on the ground the plants can scarcely grow up around it all. I welcome swimming unawares with crocodiles in the nearby lagoon and singing aloud in my deep rasp even when I know others are listening. I welcome the spiny prickle of pineapple crowns, scrubbing my clothes by hand in a bucket, the perpetually blistered soles, and I’m delighting in—cherishing—the three-dimensional puddle palaces of cool shade cast by the tropical almond trees in the pounding doldrums of the afternoon. This is what my unvarnished reality looks like.
It’s peculiar, living out of a suitcase on the edge of an unimaginable abyss—for I have no path and no net. I’m feeling my way forward one precarious, gritty day at a time. Collapse, both environmental and that of our collective civilization, is nearly upon us whether we choose to admit it to ourselves yet or not—and the reality of ‘no net’ looms on the horizon for the entire world. There is no salvation coming. We will be going into the thick of it ... and soon. This, however, is not an admission of hopelessness. It is the inexorable call to return to the grace of reality.
Courage can be found in the acceptance that modern civilization has profoundly ravaged us all. My small reclamation is to become a fully embodied feminist in the Now, to taste the strange leaf, to marvel at how brown I am becoming, to grin at the marvelous permutations of human creativity and heart, to let loose all my flags into the sky’s mouth. What else is there for meaning to cling to? It takes an enormous amount of emotional energy to continue to watch and write and fully witness our species burning: this is my wild, open-hearted testimony of the rippling consequences of our death-culture. I inhale infinite exaltation, exhale glittering grief. It is all—each and every moment—heartbreakingly exquisite.
Like many women who came before me, I write. I read the feminists. I read everything. The words tend the raw and tumultuous parts of me and create space for the tendriling, awestruck woman I’m becoming. As Ariel Levy wrote in her forward to Intercourse regarding Andrea Dworkin’s time in Greece, “the dazzling beauty and utter foreignness of Dworkin’s surroundings seemed to free her. In a place where one is literally a stranger, there can be an ecstatic sense of liberation from wondering why one has always felt so strange in what is supposed to be home” (Levy, p. xvii.1) The words pour out something tremulous, and my dis-placement becomes a novel vantage point: ever-shifting, perilous, throbbing with the marvels which emerge from my strangeness in these strange places. I feel free.
Continuing to live embedded in the patriarchal hall of horrors, remaining on the hellish conveyor belt of another dead-eyed job in another dead-eyed town, side-hustling my way toward a capitalistic technohumanist nightmare of Unreality was only going to destroy me. No. It was destroying me. My body is branded with a constellation of painful syndromes and symptoms evidencing this—our culture’s wrongness leaves its marks on us all. Venturing out onto this tightrope and fully seeing all that we are losing was my only option.
Some think this journey of mine must entail days of lounging on far-flung tropical beaches—sweating mai tai in hand—the luxury of infinite time to myself, my day-to-day brimming with indolence, exciting excursions ... that I’m on vacation from ‘real life.’ My reality couldn’t be any farther from this wistful grass-is-greener imagining.
This is me surviving.
I’m equipped with many years of comprehensive experience traveling the world, a pour-over coffee dripper, my nearly empty wallet. Together with my laptop, my searing-singing poet-mind, and the rage-weeping contents of my pulped heart, I am relearning how to speak my own long-lost language.
Crucially, nearly two years ago now, I fled a long-term abusive relationship that was destroying me. It has taken a long time to find the confidence to say this publicly—ashamed that I shook and started for months—that for months afterwards, I continued to live in terror of making mistakes and taking up space, of eating in public, ever cagey about sharing the sordid, sadistic details of those years enmeshed with a controlling, porn-addicted man 30 years my senior.
While I’ve escaped every trap set for me roughly intact, the less visible scars from countless evasions and several eras of almost unbelievable trauma had constricted me into living out a reactionary story where patriarchal power continued to dominate me. My mind and muscles were pill-bugging into a progressively tighter clench. Living like that—denying myself the dignity I’d readily extend to nearly any other person and creature—was excruciating. Rejecting the Story of Male Domination must not be only an intellectual exercise. And so, I finally bolted.
It’s funny actually, how things that prevent other people from doing what I’m doing are the very same things that might have allowed me to take another path. Had I a house of my own, a steady job, pets, kids, the caretaking of loved ones—that gracious snarl of logistics and the sweet ties of stuff and connections and place—I might have attempted one more go at a semi-expected life.
But the central reason for this wandering—post-domestic-and-financial-abuse—is that I couldn’t afford the ever-climbing rents in the States. The housing assistance grant for women fleeing domestic violence that I’d qualified for was temporarily paused, and then unceremoniously canceled. I’ve been crashing with family, couch surfing with generous friends, taking volunteer work in exchange for room and board, or dipping into my rapidly evaporating escape savings for these short-term cold-water rentals since then. What being place-less has taught me is that my first and only home has always been my body no matter where I find myself on this sweet planet.
I may no longer have pets or a garden or forest to belong to, but tender-eyed hounds, bedraggled kittens, languid sunning iguanas, scraggly, piebald chickens, and great-tailed grackles screaming from every tree abound in this brutal barrio on the edge of a vast mangrove swamp. Always above, massive turkey vultures turn in the air currents. I belong to them now. The plants murmur, rustle-sing, speak to me of their medicine. They share the wisdom of spiritual rootedness in the body—tell me the story of how, once upon a time they learned to live off of light. The plants and the animals don’t care I am halfway to becoming a ghost. We touch and in a single instant, we both become rooted into the Now, breathing in raw, rapturous attention to the miraculous gifts of the Other.
I have no sweetheart, no children, but incredibly neither do I have debt. I walk everywhere I need to go, barring a rare bus or flight to move longer distances, and I am walking this disintegrating knife-edge writing down into myself, calling myself out of everything, in this voice I dragged out from the rich, rotting compost heap of the world, for as long as my meager accounts will allow.
My wish is that by sharing my writing with you—these stories of an unconventional life (as well as interviews from the lives of other women like me who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting on this journey, travelogue place-essays, poems, feminist musings, recordings, essays on trauma, art, mythology, herbalism, philosophy, transhumanism, even some sensational, humorous writings, and more)—that your heart may be bolstered, that the yields from my peripatetic re-membering encourage and inspire you to reach for your own version of the authentic, embodied self that your spirit yearns for. We don’t know what is coming, but I wish to spin and weave with you and to lend my courage—this shining blade I’ve been hammered into—to those who would find it of use.
Welcome to my path—wandering, homeless at the end of the world, breathing deeply in The Now and peering deeper still into our collective insanity. I am a harbinger, welcoming this ‘the infernal inferno of our collective incineration,’ while hunting for the grace in the gloaming, and for the ever-beating heart of our feminist consciousness.
I am writing for me, for you, for us. This is not a vacation.
—Dworkin, Andrea, and Ariel Levy. Intercourse. Basicbooks, 2007.
Good Gaia, dear one. This, you, are glorious. May you be well, safe, and evermore your-fine-self.
I'm so glad you hit publish.