Before Hurricane Mitch, in 1999, there was a tranquil, placid sea in front of the Garifuna fishing village of Miami. It was possible to walk hundreds of meters on a sand bar extending far into the ocean.
Then everything changed.
There is now a roaring, hungry sea that sometimes comes right into the village's thatched, earthen huts. Sometimes it comes right into the cabanas, right into the people's beds. The beach is still strewn with the twisted, post apocalypse wreckage of mangrove trees.
During the last full moon and new moon there were extraordinary tides. On the night of the new moon the Lagoon of the Micos (monkeys) suddenly closed denying all the big outboard motor launches the sea.
The last time this had happened was three years ago. The lagoon also had closed during a new moon tide, and then had stayed closed for three months. But this time a persisting northeast wind blew open a new entrance into the laguna, four days latter.
It is not as if you have to live in Miami, Honduras to experience the wonder world. It covers the earth if you are only seeking it, and are able to see.
There is no need to romanticize or sentimentalize this place. The human condition here is like the human condition everywhere.
Here people are in close physial proximity to oeanic mysteries, voodoo mysteries. But when given half a chance they will try to deny these mysteries. But here in the Bahia de Tela these mysteries will not be denied. The hurricanes and the flood tides come. Voodoo mysteries will surround and pervade the human condition.
It is more difficult to deny life when it is more difficult to deny death. It is more difficult to deny the reality of the wonder world.
The bites of the sand flies have not driven me crazy - at least more crazy than usual - but they did produce these pus filled eruptions in my flesh again - white heads we used to call them during acned adolescence.
At first it did not seem to be a problem. Just my immune system doing what it is suppose to do - white blood cells fighting the good fight against infection, then dying and rising to the surface of the skin.
But then the infection started winning the microscopic war.
I have walked the entire Bahia de Tela from Punta Sal to the city of Tela, at least a 20 mile stretch of beach where you can walk miles and miles without seeing anyone else. Every other day I walk to Tornabe, a Garifuna village which has electricity and internet, at least four miles away.
I walk for the meditation of the walk. I walk to contemplate the roaring ocean, the ever changing beach, the jungle covered mountains. I forage for ripe coconuts. I walk to see if there are any responses to my stranded castaway e-mail messages in their virtual space bottles.
Then I was hobbled by a rapidly spreading infection in my right leg. It was a horrifying, dramatic pulsation of death.
Dr. Javier Carrion, the doctor in the pueblo of Copan Ruinas who removed the biggest fucking worm he had ever seen from my head, had given me about 10 days of antibiotics. But I did not take the pills because I knew I did not need them, then. I knew I needed them for the new pus and blood erupting volcanoes in my leg.
Just as quickly as the infection had spread - it retreated, then disappeared. A dramatic pulsation of the life force.
In the theories of relativity Einstein saw that space and time are not the rigid containers of reality but are intimate, supple, pliant players in the great becoming of the universe.
Qabala teaches that the body does not have to be the rigid, suffocating container of the mysterious, intermittent, Aleph, life/death energy. This is the original revelation of the mysterious cosmic light in the human. It is Rabbi Yeshua's (aka Jesus) revelation that is spoken of in the newly revealed Gospel of Judas.
In the posture of the acceptance of the mystery as a mystery, and the facing and embracing of the mystery there are the quantum possibilities that the body can be an intimate, supple, pliant player with the mysterious intermittent Aleph life/death pulsating energy in the great becoming of the quantum possibilities of humanity to be.
This is the nature of the wonder world.