Surrender to the present post.
Bonjour. I am Frida. This is where I write about anxiety, art, trying to make art, anxiety associated with trying to make art, and other highly marketable stuff like that.
I mean I was gonna post about post Camino blues and challenges etc etc but I’m sorry these spiritual Halloween costumes are too good. Also please note how I thought they were laughing WITH me until… Ibiza.
All genius from the very well-named Healing From Healing.
On my last day in Spain, I’m awoken at 5am by a thunderstorm of biblical proportions. The rain outside my window isn’t even coming down. It’s coming around, one second going this way, the next somewhere completely different. Roaring winds. Claps of thunder. Lightning exposing the imposing silhouette of the monastic tower opposite (oh yeah this is basically a monk school, btw) every few seconds.
In weather like this, there is no way they’re letting flights take off. I have two separate Ryanair bookings. One to London, then one from London to Stockholm. Four hours in-between. Good luck with that, I tell myself and fall back asleep.
But the skies clear. When I return to this realm of consciousness, the sun is even peaking out from the still-heavy clouds, however shyly. I eat some buffet breakfast. Say goodbye to some pilgrims who don’t really know me, but who knew Waffles. And then I go to the airport.
Everything goes well. I stuff half my belongings into my pockets and hide a fanny pack with all my heavies underneath my brother in law’s size XXL fleece, then casually join the NO PRIORITY – ONE BAG ONLY queue at Gate B14. I look like a box. No two ways about it.
But the smiling Spanish ground crew let me onboard, no questions asked, saving me the £69,99 at-gate, last-minute, sucker-punch fee that Ryanair has been threatening me with in every interaction we’ve had since I booked my flight. They even let on people with two bags! Like so many times on this trip, it turns out I could’ve just chilled. Been a chill pilgrim. Chillgrim.
No. No new blog. It over.
We all still have to wear masks on flights from Spain, which is just as well, cause I’m pretty sure I’m getting ill. I pop another ibuprofen and try to cough quieter, incurring judgmental looks from my fellow cabin-dwellers. Fair enough. Thankfully I have a window seat, so I put on my headphones and am beautifully ushered out of Spain by one of the most beautiful songs in the world: Recado da Mãe Divina by Chandra Lacombe, not a Spanish singer, but Brazilian Portuguese. Oh, well. Galician is close enough.
With its tinkly, hopeful magic (I can tell apart guitar and piano, on a good day, and that’s about it for my instrumental discernment) it’s the perfect accompaniment to the plane leaving the tarmac, flying above the cathedral and into the sky.
Oh, take-offs. Despegada in Spanish; to peel off, to become unstuck. Leaving and going in the same whoosh. How I love not being still.
About a half hour before landing, the cabin crew excitedly announce the “most generous moment of the flight, ladies and gentlemen” – the Ryanair scratch cards! Trust me, I’ve never even noticed the Ryanair scratch cards before. Are they new? Someone once told me “lotteries are an unofficial tax on the poor” and I’ve never really been able to forget that, but then also, I’ve never had such a clear vision of exactly what I’d do with CARS & THOUSANDS OF EUROS IN CASH PRIZES before. So, I reasonably reason, if manifestation is at all a thing, this would be a grand moment for it to reveal itself to me as such.
And so I buy one, since, believe it or not, nobody has given me $11,000 to become a legal acid-peddler yet, even though I suggested exactly this over twenty-four hours ago.
No matter. Opting for the just-as-realistic Plan B, I hand two euro coins to the ever-smiling, gel-haired Ryanair flight attendant. JK. Ryanair, like Sweden, only takes card. Tip, tap, scratch.
Here’s a photo of everything being possible.
And here’s a photo of destiny saying Sorry, no win but also saying I’ve won “entry” to the €1Million event draw? I mean, that would also do. It’s in February, apparently. And as we all know I’m not going to shaman school until Year 2, anyway.
One fact I love about Genghis Khan is that, for all his brutality, he was known as a pretty lax enforcer of his own spiritual views on the territories he conquered. Certainly in comparison to later players such as, oh I don’t know, The Catholic Church? (Sorry, Father Ernesto.) Basically, ol’ GK had his own suspicions about how God liked to be worshipped, but he also knew that he couldn’t be 100% sure. Pretty progressive, really, for a megalomaniacal mass-murderer. Further, like most nicer oppressors / high school teachers, he didn’t believe in points taken off for wrong answers. So the way he saw it, it was just smarts to have the citizens of his territories pray to a bunch of different deities. Much like having a diversified investment portfolio, I’m sure he presciently mused, this would make it more likely that he get at least some return. And so he let his people pray. Celestial insurance, it’s been called.
Similarly, I suppose there’s no harm in shooting a little extra cosmic energy in the way of this scratch card. Maybe it’s time for a vision board?
I don’t expect much from Day 43. It’s the day after all of our Day in Santiago, Waffles is flying to Brussels, Fizzy Mucus and Lil’ Trump need to change hostels again. I don’t think anyone else is left in town. My plan is pretty much breakfast and read in bed, an idea the skies seem to support by heaping down water on us.
But of course. Camino Magic works until you board your plane, I think. At breakfast we run into six other pilgrims we know, among them the Polish model I met in San Sebastián, at my lowest point, and who’s been popping up in various places ever since. Always smiling, always inviting people, always wanting to make connections. Calling her the Polish model even feels reductive, in the same way I often felt reduced when I was younger, to the colour of my hair or the length of my legs. My nationality, of course. That Bikini Team must’ve really got around.
So in honour of her many talents and a sisterhood we all need to help build, I hereby rename her the Arty Badass Outdoor-Sleeping, Sailboat-Sailing, People-Connecting Camino Queen. Keep smiling, sister.
We chat Ibiza for a bit, and then Fizzy Mucus and Lil’ Trump show up to play. Yay! It’s been a terribly lonely ten hours since I last saw them, at a local dive bar the night before, where a sweaty and enthusiastic man banged out first a series of rock n’roll classics (Sweet Caroline, Suspicious Minds) and then what can rightly be described as an idiosyncratic blend of Spanish-language hits (La Cucaracha, Bésame mucho, Feliz Navidad).
Lil’ Trump wants the churros I’ve been taunting her with since Lugo, so Badass Outdoor Queen (for short) recommends a place called Café Paradiso. It turns out to be a long and narrow, mirror-lined room with marble ceilings and table tops, dark green wood fittings and servers in white shirts. Absolutely perfect for a rainy day.
We order churros and coffees and play a digital version of We Are Not Really Strangers, a brilliant question game I own physically so feel okay about playing on this messy third-party website, too. But you should buy it. Really. It’s amazing.
Also, I learnt how to hyperlink from the WordPress App. Applause, please.
There are two levels of intensity to choose your questions from. We go in easy with some dainty Level 1 numbers like “What character would I play in a movie?” and “What subjects do you think I was best at in school?”
Lil’ Trump gets the question “What do you think my strength is?” from me, and says that she thinks I’m good at making friends. Connecting people. That I seem to become a natural part of a group very quickly, and that she was really surprised to hear about that whole not-welcome-in-the-world malarkey I felt back in ancient, pre-Guemes times.
Well, strengths are born out of fears so this isn’t really all that strange. My fears of rejection have probably made me overly gregarious. Still, I get so moved by this that I tell them about the experiment I decided to try out after I’d walked past that stupid pilgrim’s bench I wanted to sit on, the one that made me realise I needed TOO MUCH welcoming to feel welcome. And would therefore exhaust people and act all defensively.
“So I just decided,” I say with great seriousness and vulnerability, “to pretend like everyone I met wanted to hang out with me.”
A beautiful moment of silence ensues. At the end of which Fizzy Mucus says, “And you’re still pretending.”
10/10 burn. Our friendship has now been consummated.
After we’ve stopped laughing (them) and crying (me), one of us dares a Level 2. It’s quite a jump.
But it’s all good. In fact, it’s the perfect way to end seven weeks of intense hanging out in various formations. We stay in the cafe for hours. The rain pours down. The other guests change over, once, twice, three times.
Finally, it’s time for Waffles to go to the airport. It’s sad, of course, but we all know it’s time and also that the bonds we have formed will last beyond our time in Spain. And I feel like the Camino has been ending for so many days now that I kind of just want to get it over and done with. Farewell hugs, draconian Ryanair luggage policies, sanity-challenging Stansted stopovers. Come at me. I want my ayahuasca horse therapy centre on Ibiza already.
Oh right, I have a plan. A five-year one, at that. Thank you, Marianne Cantwell, author of How to Be a Free-Range Human, for teaching me that portfolio careers are a thing and that weaknesses can be flipped into strengths. It literally took about twenty pages and one exercise, and this plan just poured out of me. Thank you, British half of CanBrit for recommending the book to me. And thank you, Spain, for reminding me I want to live in you, just in a smaller part of you, far out in the Balearic sea.
I think accountability is good, and also, maybe you want to join me? So here goes.
Five-year goal: My own retreat centre on Ibiza that uses plant medicine and horse therapy to help women who’ve suffered sexual trauma. Or everyone. Details are invited to present themselves as we go. As my actual retreat owner / mega-talented writer / meditation whizz soul sister Joey Hulin aka Horizon Inspired (please come work with me) likes to say:
”100% intention, 100% surrender.” Joey Hulin (kind of)
(Ok so I just checked with her and apparently it was one of her teachers who said it, but she repeats it a lot, so a small tweak will have to do. Joey says it a lot about meditation journeys, but it also works for ayahuasca journeys, on-foot-through-Spain journeys, imaginary future five-year journeys, seeing-giraffes-in-coffee journeys, and basically anything else you’ll ever do. It’s great to have an idea of what you want, but don’t forget to pay attention to what’s actually presenting itself to you, too.)
Year 1: Move to Ibiza, work as a teacher and as a translator / helper at other people’s medicine ceremonies. Learn the vibe of the island. See what it needs. Get to know people. Save money and get a driver’s license. Until then, drive a Honda? Write the ayahuasca camp novel. And other things, if they can make money. Such as an article about the Amazonian dieta, and a guide on how to travel the world with barely any money. Translate websites for cash. Books if anyone will let me. And, of course: keep believing in impossible ambitious budgets for my time, energy and money.
Year 2: Same, but start (ideally psychedelic) coach training. Such as this dreamy 13-month Psychedelic Practitioner Core Training Certification Program from the Synthesis Institute. Come on! They’re called Synthesis! If you’ve got a spare $11,000 and are looking for a goodwill boost / tax break today, feel free to dump the cash on me here.
Man, these hyperlinks won’t know what hit’em.
Or only $9,497 if paid in full by October 20th!
Meanwhile, I’ll keep helping at other people’s ceremonies, and writing.
Year 3: Start working as a psychedelic integration coach. And write.
Year 4: Start moving towards working as a psychedelic guide, if the previous years have shown this is something I might be able to do. It might not. Though I’ve been involved in medicine ceremonies for going on eight years now and speak the language used in so many of them and have read books and taken courses… there is still a big fear of the space-holding. Or maybe it’s not fear. Maybe it’s appropriate respect. Either way, being a guide – or facilitator, ceremony leader; what many people probably think of as a “shaman” – doesn’t feel like something you can just choose to do. It feels more like something that ought to choose you.
And I don’t feel like it has, or at least it hasn’t yet. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll grow into it, maybe not. Until then I’m happy to be just my own medicine woman, because that I do feel like I am, even though I have lots left to learn of course. But I’m getting there. Thanks, PictureThis. Still not the sponsors of this blog. Though I’m open to talking. Gosh didn’t realise this was gonna be GIMME THE MONEY DAY, but, as Waffles would say, there you go. 100% intention, 100% surrender. Quoting all my faves (and their teachers) on GTM Day.
So anyway I’ll explore that. Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing the slightly less intimidating coaching, while also writing, and building what I guess would be most appropriately described as a “brand.” Brr. Got a bit of an anti-capitalist shiver there. We will see. Money’s needed innit. Gosh this really is GTM Day.
Year 5: Be somehow rich (and famous?) enough to take all this knowledge and form my own retreat centre, where I will have happy horses living in natural herds on hilly terrain with lots of grass and fun. Invite everyone I love to come work with me. Host beautiful healing retreats that are good for guests and practitioners and horses. Maybe I’ll be a ceremony facilitator myself, or maybe I’ll just create a space where others can do their magic. Either way I’ll grow vegetables. Have a cat. Or two. Plus a dog. And a sweat lodge. Definitely, have a sweat lodge.
That’s doable, no? To quote yet another great philosopher (ok, Kanye; but 2007 Kanye):
“Shoot for the stars, so if you fall you land on a cloud.” Kanye West
Because of course, this might never happen. Or some of it might happen, but not in Ibiza, or not with horses, or maybe I’ll suddenly feel that I no longer get all these kicks from writing and stop. We will see. 100% intention, 100% surrender. But it feels like a future I want, and seven weeks ago, I didn’t want anything. So let’s fucking go.