Honeymoon: Ready for any Eventuality. 10 April 2017

´We are going to have such a good time!´ through the skype screen he brims over with joy. We are imagining how it is to actually be together, to be able to touch, to be able to not have to find wifi to be able to talk, to be able to eat together, sing together, and other things together. ´Wow...´

Meanwhile Fabian is in a moment of transition, like so many I have gone through, like so many he has gone through. We are veterans of moving lives, of sudden changes, of creating changing in the field of our own realities, riding waves of the everchanging. Which is why, suddenly, I feel enormously grateful to years of experience of travelling and being able to survive under often extreme conditions: the honeymoon.

After a little more than a week of fantastic shows, eating out and loving each other in Buenos Aires, the moment arrived for The Transition. Months before Fabian had decided to make the jump and move from the Capital to the countryside and begin a new life - closer to nature, living under the expansion of wider skies, connecting once again with the stars, tracking the phrases of the moon, feeling the warm, green blanket of being surrounded by trees, reconnecting – at last - with Essence. Which is exactly what has happened - but in a way so dramatic that neither of us really fully expected it.

One night the sunset was so bright we really thought there was a forest fire.

Welcome to the house in the countryside, just beside Mercedes town. It is a 20 minute car ride down a dirt high way...never before have I seen a dirt road so wide...it would be enough for four or five lanes of traffic. A car passes every half an hour, or less. The little neighbourhood road to the country home where we are living, is grass, like driving on a lawn. Quite beautiful.

There is a canvass swimming pool that we managed to get into on the first day, wonderful cold feeling of being alive in the middle of a hot sunny day and given our full motivation to enjoy ourselves I used a lot of self-control to ignore the hundred or so bees from the neighbour´s honey production outfit that were buzzing over the water. It was the next day I started to feel a little more reticient after a sting that took four days for my hand to return to normal dimensions. Of course, we both concluded laughing, making light of the situation, that it was actually a gift since the sting was actually activating a meridian line cleansing an energy line through my body. And maybe so. It was later - when we discovered that a neighbour had been rushed to hospital after a bee sting in his throat and would have died apparently if he had arrived five minutes later - that we stopped using the swimming pool.

We discovered within a week that the lawn B roads are much easier to drive on when the rains come, which they have. The main five-laner road becomes, under the effect of rain, a mudbath churned by the occasional passing tractor...I would estimate it in places to be 30 centimetres deep, and when a car gets stuck and revs its wheels into the ever deepening hole (as happened in the car we were in) estimations to the possible depth of mud exponentially increase. But being in love, we laughed in the rain, pushing the car out of the continually occurring predicaments while singing Waltzing Matilda. 

We managed to turn the car around, and our friends found a four by four to pull them back to safety to gratefully make their way home to Buenos Aires as we continued back to our love nest with our thumb with front and rear traction coming to us like an angel descending from the sky. Another sign that we are on the right path in our love story.

Road impossible to walk on and keep shoes to feet

I have to commend Fabian for maintaining a depth of character, of a consistent fibre of being able to look on the bright side of things, with only a slight wobble one lazy afternoon at the sudden impossibility unfolding as possible that we had ran out of yerba mate (it was quickly overcome, spare yerba (traditional Argentinian infusion drink) was found lurking in a rusted tin box). While Fabian quickly recovered from his fear of not being able to drink mate back into a world of pure honeymoon, things for me were beginning to tarnish around the edges.

Fabian kept up the illusion of the love nest for a heroic number of days, while I began to wonder if it were me being pathetic, unreasonable or just plain mad. The tension between imagined worlds collided about a week in, at 4 in the morning, where having been bitten by a league of mosquitos rioting on English flesh without yet the antibodies to avoid pyramid red lumps of agony, and sleeping in a bed that I didn´t feel one hundred percent comfortable, and having survived without a single word of complaint during the first days within our new home - I broke. ´What is the matter my amor?´ Fabian asks surprised, filled with innocence. I hold back from screaming.

´I am on the edge of my level of tolerance´ I say, as spiritually as possible.

Next day Fabian, a man able to rise to the challenge of finding solutions, manages to get to Mercedes and buy, not a mosquito net, but a whole reel of beautiful material from a fabric shop closing down. He comes back, triumphant, still holding onto the illusion of perfection, and begins to create with branches originally destined for our parilla (bar-b-que with wood) a resemblance of a four poster which seemed to stay up straight only due to the friction between us working together to create our own little haven. Heroically on both sides we manage to not have an out and out slanging match, and satisfy ourselves with only a small parlay of somewhat measured wording.

But once inside this four poster luxury, our joint imaginative creative minds become filled with images of five star hotels, of Venentian boats, 1001 Arabian Nights, in short: pure luxury...an oasis within disaster.

Disaster? You may ask, you´ve not talked about disaster? No...we hadn´t...at all.

We didn´t seem to have the energy do even do so as we both struggled under the stress of individual survival. In the safety of our classy material, sedated by the smooth fabric, I manage to admit that the conditions under which we are living has turned my state from one of falling in love to one of sheer survival and how to escape. He hears. He defends. I feel like the son in Benigni´s ´Life is Wonderful´, having to suckle on the idea that the world is all fine as it collapses around us. But I am not a child, I can see for myself and I cannot keep the cotton over my eyes any longer. I get tired listening to him being so positive, so loving, so adoring. Flying on the broken wings of such pathetic positivity, seeing him leap mindlessly over the face of the sheer facts of reality, is shaking me up, scaring me, making me wonder who this man is, what kind of life can he offer, it is all an illusion of his mind? I feel myself crashing against such outrageous pretense reinforced with the steel of not accepting what is actually going on.

I basically say that I want out.

He basically says he wants in.

We struggle out of bed, me wiping tear stains from my cheeks, and prepare breakfast in the dirty kitchen to take out to the ramshakle garage, where the rain leaks through the tin roof less than in the inside of the house. As we sit down heavily onto our newly dried plastic chairs, forks in hand, ready to eat our eggs, it is a relief to be out of the dark house. 

As we do we slump in synchronicity, feeling the upcoming delight of eating we look into each other’s eyes and a volcanic bubble of laughter explodes between us both. It is hilarious. Here we are huddled against the rain, besides a run-down house in the middle of nowhere, unable to get out as all the ´roads´ around us turn into progressively stickier vortexes of mud and dark matter, here we are sat under corrugated sheets of metal, listening to cacophonies of raindrops as if everything were in perfect order.

Eros comes back.

The rain ceases for the day, and we simply enjoy ourselves, laughing, talking, explaining where we are at, with honesty, taking ownership of our emotions, no blame, no guilt, just how we feel. We dig deep into who we are, find that so much is about what we are thinking and not actually perceiving. Deep sharing. Present versus fears. Expecting outcomes based on past experiences rather than just being where we are and accepting it, unable to enjoying where we are. Fabian shares a saying of his from Tagore, ´If the violation is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.´ Suddenly everything comes back to life.

Then a delicious roast lunch, wine, another bottle, relaxing, laughing until, ending up back in our love nest we can begin to accept where we are, both within our created reality of love that is oozing out from within the silky walls of our four poster - and what is happening outside where it is dark and grim and damp. The ashes of the deceased grandfather in the varnished wooden box placed by the plastic flowers and the Virgen of Lujan, look on, with an encouraging smile, maybe, or perhaps a rueful smile, patiently wanting us out.

In the comfort of our self made cube of alternate reality, we were suddenly able to be honest with each other, with ourselves.

For me it was the toilet that would not drain after having done a morning discharge that made me start to feel shitty in this place. The day the car got stuck in the mud the water table rose so far that after throwing the bucket of water down the toilet (please don´t be silly and imagine there was a flush system in operation), there was no place for the water in the cesspit to go. It was like that for a day. 

You may say that was an exaggerated response of mine, but it takes a while to get used to the idea that on the way to the toilet at night each night, I manage to kill one or two cockroaches - as if that were a normal nightly sport. Last night I trophied seven - the present record. Or that the moths that have colonised in the roof (the flapping of wings kept Fabian awake more than me) seemed to have kamikaze missions in the middle of the night, not to bring down the twin towers, but by aiming for our faces would bring down our psyches.

Previous reparations made cunnily to the bedroom roof (to keep out rain)

But then there is always the day time, easier no? Of course, and when it is not raining, the beauty of the eucalyptus trees and the lawns that are really roads and the setting sun, and the village dogs are sheer beauty: nourishment for the soul. But it doesn´t cover up that I have had to cover over two or three places where the village dogs did not recognise private property of our lawn and where Fabian wondering around the garden searching for traces of wifi was in danger of stepping into.

I mean you get used to being dirty, to having everything you touch be dusty, dirty, of the body cringing into a kitchen that looks more like an animal stall. I think I can cope thanks to the years of experience of travelling, in Nepal, in Blackpool, of remembering previous times in Argentina, of practicing with the power of Vipassana meditation practice how not to over exaggerate the cold of cold showers. I thank my creative powers of imagination as I find a new way to wee standing up over the toilet bowl so as to not have to sit on the seat.

Sometimes we forget to turn off the water pump. The first time it happened I heard a LOT of water on a tin roof. I look up and see the water tank on the roof copiously over flowing...so run into the house, to the switch, and hear on the way sounds of a room being flooded.

What more can go wrong as we adapt every other hour to resolve situations with the merest of resources, tools or knowledge? And yet somehow we do. Eating, making love, surviving, laughing, storytelling, killing cockroaches, building up antibodies to the complicated constellation patterns of mosquitos bites that swell less and less on my legs.

There´s no drinking water, Fabian goes without an utterance into the rain to fill up the plastic bottle from the hose (the only drinking water for some unexplained reason), in my heart I thank him, he forgets to turn off the pump, the room that we don´t use gets flooded again, I turn off the pump, he comes in from finding wifi and tells me that I have a new message, and we high five our teammanship. All is still well.

But it was in our love cube of a four poster in la suite presidencial, fully imbibing of our five star experience when we broke down, without falling apart, into the laughter of fully accepting our present physical, psychological and amorous situation, as Fabian described our luxury experience with the addition of cascades as a natural feature down the bedroom wall itself as we listened to the music created only for us of rain collecting in ever increasing drops into the battered pans we had left on the floor...

The amazing creation of a Love Cube by A. Fabian Marcovich 

There is something quite deep going on. What is it? We have created our own reality on top of reality within the five fabric sides of our cube of love, and as long as I don´t smell too hard the damp that smells like a dog in the rain, that arises in waves from the old mattress that we are lying on. With the correct concentration I can actually, really, FOR REAL, imagine that we are in a place of great comfort.

But what is more amazing, for him as much as for me, that within this tumble down house of horrors, where is it difficult to stay clean for more than fifteen minutes, where I have been reduced to enjoying the street dogs licking my bare skin (even permitting in one rare moment of pure acceptance, on my face??!!) where the full fear of the harshness of nature is ever present, we are able, honestly and truly, to enjoy ourselves, to feel as if we are actually privileged, feel ourselves being showered by blessings.

Just eating is amazing.
Just feeling comfortable for a while, is amazing.
Just being together and smiling into each other´s eyes, is a miracle.

The beautiful grass roads, Negrita the dog, holding hands walking into the sunset.

For suddenly all veils are stripped away. In the conditions in which we are living there is no other option but to admit: we are together because we want to be - because no one in their right mind would stay here for any other reason. There is no doubt that we are not attracted to the other for money (because there isn´t any) for a luxury of living (because frankly we have hit rock bottom) for contacts (we are completely alone) for opportunities (isolated without road access), for any reason at all that could radiate from our egos...our egos under any other circumstance would be screaming to get out, not to get in.

And in the middle of all this, like a lotus rising out of manure, we are both somehow, so far from the marketed civilised idea of a honeymoon, so far away from any illusion of photoshopped self images, so far from the matrixed world, as we live in the bare bones of a broken down reality, we are miraculously staying open, staying open to what is, staying open to each other, staying open to love.

And suddenly everything that is happening to us, inside and out, is a miracle of a gift. How else could we have got here, so deeply, so innocently, so full of love?