11. of March, Nyepi, Balinese New Year
Vakaleidoskop ponovo radi!
I have spent the last two years of my life impossibly possessed, obsessed and profoundly happy. Meaning, I published nothing. My body was/is too full of life, both its shadows and light, that I had to honor it and live through it. Više đuska manje spika. No chat, only earthquake. No talk just kiss.
The gruesome hurt of loss of innocence
Once I reached full adulthood, let’s say after the age of 26, and as years passed by, I have almost made peace with the idea that my deeply joyous self was gone. I have done all I could, therapy and stuff, but I had to fight all the time to stay happy. A battle for happiness, a battle for peace and deep inner joy is a paradox itself. And since I had it all – wonderful friends, family, pets, job, my own home, boyfriend, money, hobbies, talents – my anx and state of overwhelm and loneliness was followed by a sense of guilt. And I learned over and over – being clever won’t get me too far.
Anyhow, my adult 3D life has been good to me.
Then, in an unexpected turn of events, the dark forces were called in to push me into the deepest underground of my soul I have ever resided in. I was, in a certain way, in the hub of violence, or abuse, I don’t even know what to call it but it was a porous experience for my own identity and sense of self value.
To get out of that state, I had to build a ridiculous amount of self compassion, forgiveness and love towards all that is, including myself and the dark forces, only to reach the other end with a conclusion that the darkness in and outside of us wants nothing but belonging. As I wandered around the terraces of my consciousness, I started to open the doors of which existence I only suspected of.
Sad nema nazad.
I reached the point of no return.
Your naked truth is a currency of connection
My sensitivity and receptiveness to the world only grew stronger, but with all the practice, paved with the choices I made, anxiety and overwhelm have alchemized themselves into pure power and acceptance. I still see and feel everything, sometimes I think the whole universe is moving inside of me, and sometimes I have no control over it, but I can let it be. I have found my way to enjoy it or speak to it, fully transforming into a lizard – the language of flowers, waves of the past I’ve never lived in, other people’s hurt, the space between somebody’s face and the screen of their phone – all filled with God, all filled with me as well as you. What I labeled as a diagnosis before, I can freely label as a gift.
Of course, changing my environment and moving from a busy city to nature – a soft, feminine, lush and calm space that this island is has helped tremendously. I feel the most vaki as I have since I was 5 years old. And once you are in the truth, all the illusions lose their functions and so they can rest – the illusion of separation, the illusion of death, the illusion of anything that is not love and total unity that transcends the concepts of time and space. Since there is so little resistance left, I can’t help but love and be loved by everyone and everything.
On this journey, I have involuntarily shed so much – emotionally and physically, removing any last doubts that our minds and bodies aren’t one and the same. I lost half of my hair, body weight, and all my skin like a snake after a mysterious skin issue. After a layer of pain, reappeared from underneath all fresh and beautiful.
My non existing time and space compass has gotten even worse though, but it’s ok. The language of the people I live among now, Bahasa, doesn’t even recognize different tenses – the same one is used for past, present and future. Very appropriate and harmonious.
As my body started to disappear in a way, I noticed a total disjunction of my being’s particles in the nighttime, as if my already vivid dreams are taking a step further down into the depths of my subconsciousness or further away from this dimension right here.
Giving yourself away to the nature
In the night I dissolve and give my body away: I can see control melting into the nothingness, I let myself be devoured, I give my flesh to worms and ants, I see beautiful, white bones glowing in the moonlight. Just before dawn my consciousness comes back like a ghost and I see my cells gathering again, building organs, muscles, skin that has never been touched before, memories that could and could not be mine.
I rediscover the ability to move my body, built for so much pleasure. I sit in my bed for a moment, I hear my heart and the jungle in all its aliveness, calling me to come outside and experience so much pleasure. As I walk down the soles of my feet are sending sparks up through my legs, the glimpse of the day that awaits. I find a snake in the shower, a frog in the sink, a cat in my chair, dragonflies floating above the table. I find myself in all of them and I just tell them, and all the cells and bacteria in my body, you are safe. This is our home.
I can feel them throwing a party inside: it comes to me in the waves of excitement. I tell the lizard how much I love that we share the same home and the same reality, he tells me :“Vaki, your reality is always identical to your heart and that’s just how it is. To je jednostavno tako.”
Words of unwisdom
At some point of this impossible elevation everything mundane seemed banal and absurd, including language – so I stopped writing as well. I felt like my need to describe and explain robs the sensation of its essence, its tao, its sacred, merciful and loving nature. This feeling is above logic, above all the anthologies of human knowledge, and at the same time rooted deep inside every single one of us, connecting us like a fungi network that keeps us communicating with each other at all times without words.
However! Here we are – and here I am writing in English. That is simply how my brain works now. Sometimes I worry that I might not be smart, eloquent or funny in English. The truth about living abroad is that linguistically you get kind of stupid. My Serbian got much worse but my English didn’t get better. However I find it more embarrassing forgetting words as I speak my own language than having such a limited vocabulary in a foreign one.
I committed to writing every day, for a full year. This is day 66, I mean, 300 to go štae to za nas. This urge came from a period when I was feeling down and numb. I experienced too many changes in a very brief time and my body just refused to cooperate. Stuck in a freeze response for a while, I intuitively started to write again, slowly clearing the cloud I was in. And so I wondered – am I training myself to create only when I’m sad? Probably. Am I, implicitly, subconsciously creating 3d experiences that will lead me to despair, loneliness, isolation – so that I would enter the state of creation? Surely.
Well, no to that. I keep trying to make that quantum jump by proving myself wrong and writing it down even when I’m zero smart and zero wise and all I got to say is “I saw a big pigeon today.”
And here we go!
Welcome to the little oasis that this corner of the internet grows into. I will share these little episodes as I did back in 2020, throughout another life on another island (Forest diaries, Šumski dnevnici).
Sometimes doubts take me over and I think, why would I even share all of this. But, throughout the years it has been proven over and over again that miracles happen when you do show a part of your soul. Whatever I wrote and shared has reached the ones who were searching for it, opening a portal to a deeper understanding or, I dare to say – God between us.
Saputnici!
With love, mucho amor, ljubav, cinta, and nothing else,
Vanja
