Written by Greg Paul
What a crazy few days! (3/6/15)
We moved into our new house 3 day ago and it’s been quite a ride… the house is somewhat of a fixer-upper, but then everything in Aguano is a fixer-upper, and relatively speaking it’s a palace. Nonetheless it needs a good deal of love (and a great deal of hard work) before it is fit to serve as a suitable place for giving birth (and we’ve only 12 days to go until Emma’s due date). The house also could not be more ideally situated – sitting in a quiet neighbourhood, some 30m from the river bank where a large white sand beach opens up during the summer months.
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| View from the front porch | A veggie garden in waiting |
But not everything about this place is rosey… in fact far from it…
It would be fair to say that we did not move into this house with vacant possession. This house was/is about as possessed as they come… The two backrooms (which are newly built) feel very nice but they belie the energy of the main part of the house, and the main part of the house was where we had chosen to make a bed.
When we first moved in, we all knew that something wasn’t right, but we figured that the walls were just retaining the energy of their former occupier which would quickly dissipate once we made the place our own. But we were wrong, and it wasn’t long before we began to find out just how wrong we were… On the first night I awoke at about 1.30am to Maia screaming and choking… something was wrong. I had no idea what time it was – is it midnight; is it 3am? So up I got to check the time on the computer which was sitting on the floor by the bed just outside of the mosquito net… there was an over bearing sense of oppression, and I knew immediately that there was something standing behind me. No sooner did I sense this, and immediately an image flashed in my head – I couldn’t tell you what the image was – I simply can’t remember it clearly enough to describe it… but it wasn’t in the least bit pleasant. I have to say that this was the very first time in over four years that I have felt anything which could be closely approximated to fear. So true to my lifelong mantra (and the advice I give everyone who ever appears to be clearly afraid of something), I rode out to meet the fear… at about 2.30am (when Maia has settled a little) I got up and sat in the corner of the main room (the main house is one big room with a partition in the middle – the smaller half where we had chosen to sleep, the larger half slated as the living room), with the light of a small torch projecting against the wall, and just sat and relaxed. The air was thick – like nothing you could ever imagine without experiencing it for yourself, and the entire time I was there (about half an hour) it was a case of simply being present in the experience of living a waking nightmare…
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| The bedroom and living room by day | |
When Maia awoke in the morning (long after I have been up and working away) the first words out of her mouth are “Mama, there’s a barong in the house and we need to get rid of it” (Barong is the Balinese word for “bad spirit”). Emma says yes, of course, we’ll send him away – knowing that something wasn’t quite right but not having been nearly so affected by it as Maia and I.
So by the second night we had set up Maia’s bed next to ours – both beds nested under the one mosquito net. By the time the middle of the night came (the so-called witching hour – between 12 and 4) the thickness of the atmosphere was palpable. Maia rolled over into our bed and was red hot – we’ve had some baby fevers in the past (106 degrees) and so had a measure for this, and Maia’s temperature was higher than it had ever been before. As I lay comforting her, there are again images being planted in my mind, this time of a non-hominid demon – goldish in colour with curled horns and large black eyes… This was a fucked up situation – what do you do when you know that your baby is running a life-threateningly high temperature and you have no frame of reference for whether she’s safer where she is or somewhere else (there being nowhere else that she can lie and be comfortable)? When I did finally get up (at 5am), Maia’s temperature had pretty much returned to normal and I had retired to the kitchen for what felt like a well-earned cup of coffee, when Emma heard a thud… she thought it might have been someone at the door but realising it wasn’t, and being half-asleep, she thought nothing more of it… A little later, I saw the big padlock for the front door lying on the floor, in the corner of the room, under a chair. I asked Emma and Mar whether either of them left it there. Mar, with absolute certainty, stated that she had left it on the corner of the table (where we all agreed to leave it) when she removed it the night before – what had apparently happened was that a 1lb padlock was hurled over 4m by whatever it was that we were sharing the space with. Anyway, after the second night we were given by Jamil a shit load of crystal salt, lots of cleansing herbs, which we very intentionally placed in all corners of the room.
The house by dawn
As I write now, I am surrounded by large lumps of salt and the aroma of some very pungent natural herbs and we’re settling in to our forth night here. It’s about 10pm and I’m in the main room (which was the centre of dark activity) feeling very relaxed – it doesn’t seem like whatever it is that was here has gone completely, but its potency does seem to have abated – the more we sing and dance and paint and laugh, the more it seems to fall away.
In my first blog post I alluded to the high energy of Aguano Muyuna and how such an environment will inevitably draw out our own latent shadows like poison from a wound – I guess I just got to eat my own words! But as always we remain wide open to whatever life has to offer – love, fear and everything in between…
Anyway, give me a week or so and I’ll let you know what we’ve done with the place…
Originally posted @ New Earth Community
