This place, these circumstances are a further refinement of the ideal Jamaica that I refered to on the Guatamala Garifuna/pirate coast and in the last chapter of 'The Jah D.E.P.' It is the Jamaica of the true re-imbursement day. There is a much better focus on this ideal, alternative Jamaica then there was on the Garifuna Coast of Guatamala.
The Garifuna here are stately Africans, dignified free people, joyously speaking an African language, who never abided in slavery. They intermarried and interconnected with the indigenous American mystery, while maintaining the indigenous African mystery.
This coast is the far southeastern edge of the Mayab. The Garifuna intermarried and interconnected with the Caribs, the first persistent, polarized resistence encountered by Columbus. They have more gradually intermarried, interconnected with the Mayan peoples. Some Mayan words are used. But Mayan languages are not spoken here.
The sea and the beach are not tranquil or placid. The sea always roars. The beach is always changing. When the hurricana comes, everything changes.
Hurricane Mitch came through seven years ago. Over 30,000 people died in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatamala. There are no buildings over seven years old on this coast.
An important personal change that has occured since the Guatamala coast is I no longer have worms eating into my head, into my left shoulder. But as always there is much enthomology (the science of insects) in my travels.
There are an abundance of miniscule sand flies who have patterned my new dark brown skin with their bites.
When I arrived I asked the natives if it is possible for a human to better cope with them, to develop some resistance, some philosophy with time. I was told with time they drive ya fucking insane.
But I am coping - no more insane than usual.
The raucous, expansive fishing family I'm living with are beginning to adopt me. I am invited to iguana hunts and to help with the fishing.
All the coconut trees are dying. The stubs of dead trees are everywhere. Virtually every living tree shows signs of the sickness. Some say the government is conspiring to poison and kill the coconut trees. Some say a miraculous resistent tree has arisen in another alternate, ideal Jamaica.
There is no electricity, no luz, in this thatched hut pueblo of Miami, where I live. Some say there is something about this place that does not like electricity, that wires corrode and fail here.
Here is a place suffused, permeated with oceanic mysteries, voodoo mysteries, Rastafarian Gnostic mysteries, mysteries of dark women. During Voodoo ceremonies young women who love and are loved by the ocean will run screaming into the roaring surf to disappear for three days and then as mysteriously reappear - unscathed, their clothes, their persons fresh and clean.
There is no lack of business-as-usual (bau) here. During Semanya Santa the dark tide rose and came even here. There were clouds of noxious fumes from all terrain vehicles, the generators that are used to make the electricity to play the pop music. There was the drunken craziness.
But here is experience that supports and enriches life, that gives more life in life - experience that gives access to the wonder world that covers the earth - if you are only able to see.
We car-key chimpanzees, we modern humans, can not go backwards. We exited that garden long ago when we began this great adventure of consciousness.
Those doing their wild people, shaman act are living a lie, a lie to the world, a lie to themselves.
But in this great adventure of consciousness the wonder world is always accessible if we can integrate the experience of the indigenous, the experience of the shamanistic world with all our other experience.
Access to this experience of the wonder world begins with the seeking. This experience must be sought with no expectations except that everything about this wonder world will be a surprise.
It is a process of discovering the reality of this wonder world.
And it is a process of possessing this world of wonder which reason cannot fathom.
Most fail to recognize the invitation, or reject the invitation because it contradicts, goes against their second-hand authority, their narcissism. By observing others I learn the lessons of the invitation.
To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau - through God's cheap economy I have become rich - niggah rich.
My hermano, my life-time friend Cliff Hamill, Western Unionized enough for me to pay my bill.
I don't have enough left over to go anywhere. But there is no where else I want to go.
I body surf the waves, meditate upon the infinite realms of possibility in the quantum stuff, in the quantum waves of which the universe is composed, and serenade the sunsets with my harmonica.
I am still a stranded castaway. But I have become a citizen of the wonderworld of the Bahia de Tela, Honduras.