Mother! I Made an Omelette of Our Eggs For My Birthday: A Cordial Invitation to the Family Feast

My dear friends, my beloved companions on this journey of life in these pivotal times prophesied by the seers! These are times of grave danger and great necessity of spiritual rebirth, healing and revival. Feeling rather blessed to be alive and kicking, I have cooked up a treat in a way of celebrating myself (and the rest of the world by extension) that I am bursting to share with you… It's a family omelette, dedicated primarily to my mother. I must admit that our relationship has deteriorated completely since the start of my Chuachakicaspi dieta some six months ago, but it was bound to happen one way or another since the gap in understanding between us has become an unbridgeable precipice over the years. I'm sure I'm not the only one in this sinking generational breakdown boat, and the theme of reaching out to one's mother is universal. Biological bonds are insignificant in comparison to bonds of friendship and of spirit, and I was lucky to be wanted, much loved and cared for as a child. I'd like to re-establish a genuine connection of trust and loving understanding, and although it takes two of us to dance, I can only do my part and trust the universe that the blessings will follow.

During the writing of the following dedication cum culinary delight, I had certain realizations but decided to leave it intact as it unfurled and progressed to preserve the authentic momentum behind it. As always, it is highly intimate material and not for fainthearted. It is a pledge for healing on soul level and will be beneficial to anyone who is on a healing journey of their own, trying to resolve their traumas and give healing to their family and their loved ones for no man is an island. An ego is, and it will not go without a fight.

Light a candle, open your heart and breathe deep. Walk the medicine path with me. Celebrate me as I celebrate you, Mother, for I'd very much like to re-establish genuine connection of trust and loving understanding with my mentor, my caretaker and my best friend of my childhood and my youth. I’m afraid it will require a surgery for the pain is profound and I ask for forgiveness as it will, no doubt, hurt quite a bit.

PART I

How does it feel to cut a chunk of your heart out and bury it under unliftable weight of condemnation towards your own progeny? What unforgivable sin has been committed by your one and only to warrant indefinite banishment and bitterness on behalf of your noble persona basking in the glory of righteousness? Do you wish you never gave me birth?

You've nailed me nice and tight in a coffin of stifling silence, not a draft of news coming through from your end, not a single motion of communication. It's not too different from being dead: just buried alive, that's all… to think of it, being dead is a contradiction in terms for ‘being’ implies existing and death is the termination of being, the absence of life, at least as far as inhabiting flesh goes.

As months go by, I start to wonder if you think of me sometime. Perhaps the gutters on the roof need a clean from old leaves turning into compost clogging up the flow of rainwater, or your firewood needs splitting to warm the house against the winter's chill… or maybe your toilet needs emptying from accumulated excrement and sawdust. I did it pre-emptively before you had a chance to ask me of the favour to shovel pungent goodness around fruit trees to feed the figs, feijoas, mandarins. Perhaps you think of me walking past my studio where my printed canvas art and Indian rags adorn the walls, and my polished didge stands waiting in the corner for a good puff of fresh air to summon forth its resonance and spirit? And then you remind yourself of your injury you suffered, suppressing memories of all the wholesome and joyous times we shared in the past, the smiles and the hugs and triumphs of accomplishments of building a wee paradise on the land, raising gardens and cranking fire baths to watch the sunsets with a glass of sweet homemade raspberry wine; planting trees, carting trailer loads of limestone to lay the paths with; just caring tenderly for each other through thick and thin, giving support and encouragement to face trials and tribulations and reaching out for peace and prosperity, both material and spiritual, in the wake of ordeals… as you do.

Mom, I have inherited your spirit of adventure that opened doors to mysteries in magic lands and brought me joys of exploration I've read about in books recounting heroic sagas as a kid, which resonated vividly and palpably in my imagination and to my great surprise I find myself now living in one of them, scribbling my testimony swaying in a hammock in a virgin Peruvian jungle with mysterious healing hot springs outside my door, dieting visionary master plants and communicating with plant spirits that rejuvenate me both physically and spiritually while legendary superior maestros oversee my rebirth in energy realms of infinite Light.

One can go through millions of biological births and reincarnations, never realizing one’s true potential of enlightenment, forever suffering from the blunt, short-sighted ignorance of the ego, choosing mind and its reactionary mechanisms instead of liberation and electing to sit on a sidewalk in favour of embodying the living flame of spirit. Your blood that's running in my veins is a fickle connection compared to more subtle energies and vibrations arising in affectionate friendship and shared understanding human beings are capable of. To close the door on this faculty is a suicide, for this is the door to the Eternal. I trust that mystics are right in declaring man to be a bridge between animal and God, that all that is pure and worthy and enduring belongs to the Divine Kingdom, and that ascent up to heaven is arduous.

This lifetime is a precious opportunity not to be wasted on misery and condemnation, and the reason we condemn is because we are not capable of forgiving ourselves. We don't have capacity to forgive others unless we cultivate love and forgiveness in ourselves first. Mother, I've been waiting for you to thaw out and lift my exile-from-bosom status so I can communicate to you on a heart-to-heart level, but I feel it's not going to happen anytime soon and I can’t help but think about an awful waste of precious opportunities for sharing and growing together because I treasure you as a friend who looked after me since the tender age when I drooled on my napkin over soft-boiled eggs, crawled around the floor in my diapers and cried my eyes out over broken toys. I recall winter nights watching soft snowflakes dancing in the yellow light of street lamps swaying in the gusts of wind, whistling on the other side of double-glazed windows, diligently sealed in early autumn with strips of paper dunked in gelatine and glued over cotton-stuffed cracks and you reading me and my brother bedtime stories of Brother's Grim inevitably followed by a hug and a kiss to conclude a happy ending. The summer stays at our state-side dacha with mushroom-hunting excursions, picking wild berries and stoking tin-lined fireplace dressed with garlands of drying socks, hats, and sliced boletus that smelled of rich compost, are well within the reach of tender recollections. Skiing in winter under the stars, building snow castles and having snowball fights, damming up creeks on the beach an hour’s walk from our house that warranted a picnic with apples and sandwiches packed in rucksacks, swimming in deep forest lakes with silky tea-coloured water and launching sailing boats carved by pocket knife of pine bark with paper sails, listening to the story of Hobbit, ‘There And Back’, on a late-night train to town, dozing off on lacquered wooden planks of the carriage seat. I could easily fill pages with bullet-pointed entries of treasured experiences from the grand adventure of life two souls shared in the intimacy of a living heart which is now frozen like a chunk of home-kill meat in a deep freezer.

‘Health’, ‘holiness’, and ‘whole’ all come from the same root. One cannot stash one's heart away and carry on living in vibrant health and high spirit. Without wholesomeness there is neither health nor holiness, nor peace, for that matter. No rapture, nor awe, nor prayer. No bliss, nor meditation. Gratification, yes. Only a simulacrum, a substitute to the real thing: an illusion. No matter how much a painting of a feast makes one salivate with anticipation of nourishment, neither one's thirst nor hunger will ever be satisfied by looking at the painted image. In your heart you loved me dearly, for I felt the warmth and was nourished by it. By closing your heart to me, you closed it to the rest of the world, Mother. Heart is one, heart is whole, heart is holy. Without its beating palpitations, no blood flows in your veins. No cellular waste is removed, no regeneration happens. You stay where you are, on your soft couch with a bowl of snacks, watching censored for mass-consumption news, trimmed and manicured by the authorized agency of vested interest, gobbling up endless short-on-street episodes filled with phony characters played by equally lost actors getting paid to perpetuate what has neither soul, nor heart, nor substance. The best excuse you can master for wasting thus your precious lifetime is that it gives you a break, keeps you distracted from your brain. Which is, of course, restless, since you never had entered meditation profoundly. If you did, I wouldn't be pointing out the obvious.

Meditation is the ultimate rest and relaxation into your heart. It is the highest peak dressed in majestic mantle of sparkling brilliance overlooking dancing landscape down below stretching all the way to the horizon where you can sit in utter silence for hours, watching fractal wisps of vapours unfurling in perfect progressions of Julia sets endlessly above your head.

You've translated author's books into Russian, whirled like a true dervish with a Sufi master whom you loved and adored, and now both are quarantined and discarded as irrelevant. Now you are your own master of wine and cheese cracker buffet of social popularity variety, aren't you? Where people must be nice to make it through the door and don't threaten you with gifts and offerings you have no capacity to neither recompense nor reciprocate because it means opening your heart to include a stranger. In particular, I am referring to Rachel turning up on your doorsteps in my absence, freshly fallen in love, with organic cake of her making and an offer of lending a hand for the sake of lending a hand in good-old communal fashion which socialism failed to uphold; living in posh climate of a decadent English colony it’s easy to settle for dealing-and-wheeling, rub-my-back-I’ll-rub-yours and no-such-thing-as-free-lunch convenience of relating to friends and strangers. I am well too familiar with a Band-Aid of social etiquette slapped on top of a deep wound that will never heal without good airing and cleansing and some medicinal herbs prepared by the hand of a healer who knows what he is doing because he has healed himself in the first place.

The pain of airing the stagnant site and letting medicine to penetrate the wound is too much for one to suffer without trust that the initial flush of raw sensations of searing naked flame destroying the bacteria is a prerequisite of forthcoming healing, an unavoidable part of treatment.

Speaking of searing pain, meditation lies beyond both pain and pleasure. One is a witness, aloof and unaffected, beyond both; whence lies salvation. I am compelled to transmit the flame not because I am callous, not because I am vengeful (contrary to what your logic would suggest at this point, mom), but because I love you a great deal and I want to see you make it to the sunlit Himalayan peaks of conscious awareness, the land of Buddhas.

I am indebted to you for bringing me out of Russia with a crippling climate of hate and agony and anguish. It hasn't been easy on you growing up in a country that claimed its freedom in a single set of violent rebuke against tyrannical monarchy, establishing equally tyrannical dictatorship of soulless communism baptized in blood that spilled and soaked its red flag hoisted above the ruins of magnificent architecture and churches to proclaim its impotent rage that eventually eroded both the economy and the spirit of a nation from inside out causing consequent implosion and collapse of Soviet Union some seventy years later in the wake of the Great Revolution. Equal pay and equal opportunities to stagnate and get depressed; censorship of speech and artistic expression; propaganda on every corner and no freedom to speak of.

No wonder people drowned themselves in alcohol, drinking seven litres of vodka a month on average throughout the country. My father’s young brother died of alcoholism in his early thirties, his liver giving out. I never knew neither of them; my father was found hung to death, dangling in the noose with his hands tied behind his back when I was four. And he was just a painter who couldn't resist speaking his mind on odd occasions. I must have inherited his trait genetically, as I have next to no recollections of him.

All I remember is being sick for extended periods of time as a kid and fighting with foul-smelling nanny of Mongolian descent shoving soft-boiled eggs into my unaccepting mouth while my mom was away working three jobs around the clock, having separated from her fourth husband, well-known underground poet after their two-year marriage stint. I remember sitting in the kitchen as a kid while our room was searched by a bunch of KGB agents looking for proof of treason and confiscating voluminous stacks of scribblings and carbon-copied poetry. I was too young to understand neither the intrusion of long-faced men nor the poetic verse nor draw the parallel between rhyming few words together and spending long years of state-sponsored vacation in Siberia doing hard labour for the joy of being born in People's Republic of Freedom and Solidarity. Had my stepdad not been so fortunate as to have his father as high-ranking general, he'd surely be dispatched to a labour camp for political dissidents, regardless of the fact that he was dragging his legs behind him having been paralyzed below his waist since the age of seventeen when he was dunked and held in ice-cold bath to lower his forty-degree fever, as a result of which he suffered permanent nerve damage in his spinal cord, effectively severing the connection of his legs from his brain.

Mom met my stepdad typing carbon copies of his poetry for underground distribution and sharing through a publishing system called ‘Samizdat’, which stands for self-publishing and means a lot of night-vigil hours behind the typewriter for its unpaid but highly enthusiastic staff recruited from friends and families. After a year of typing, mom asked stepdad if he was going to propose to her, and he did. My brother was born soon, which did not diminish a steady stream of night visitors to discuss most essential topics of spiritual rebellion, artistic expression and endeavour of a man's soul, all fuelled by chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee till early hours of the morning. Which left marital bed somewhat vacant, I imagine, for at the first opportunity upon regaining her independence my mother got herself a gun in a holster strapped to her hip as she carted hefty bags of state-owned cash in armoured truck with bulletproof windows between back door entrances of unidentified offices strategically located in the butt ends of narrow alleys with barely enough clearances on both sides to squeeze the vehicle through in reverse gear, a skill which took quite a few smashed rear-view mirrors to acquire; mother had to pay for those out of her salary, of course.

In retrospect, one could surmise that going backwards is not a viable option. As far as living goes, there is only one direction in time: towards the grave. It is, therefore, a good idea to be prepared ahead for the inevitable and live your present moment in such a way that it does not inspire regrets. It is best to be blatantly honest and open to the four elements to receive their blessings for the journey ahead, acknowledging one's roots, one's fire, one's inspiration and one’s capacity to flow and change and transcend - for there is no other worthy pursuit apart from attaining noble alchemical gold of the soul.

A soul comes into this world in innocence and purity only to be corrupted by well-wishing parents, teachers, preachers and any half-baked ego searching to dominate and self-seed in a manner most resembling that of a virus. Just about every child raised in a civilized world, so-called, gets crippled psychologically at a very tender age and very few people are capable of regaining their innocence and their wide-open heart. A heart that knows no boundaries, no limits and does not choosingly discriminate between its objects of affection, similarly to a bird singing away in the morning praising new dawn or a flower perfuming the air with its fragrance, regardless who happens to imbibe it, be it a man, a woman, an insect, or nobody at all.

True love is un-objectified sharing of one's essence.

Mother, you tell me you weren't loved and accepted as a child for your own mother desired a boy, not a girl. Lacking love, you compensated by eating food in access. Which is what happens when children are not breastfed enough for in the act of sucking on the mother’s breast child receives mother’s vital energy and failing to be nurtured thus one develops what is referred to as ‘oral fixation’ which can either manifest as overeating, smoking, drinking, chewing gum, talking in excess and generally occupying one’s mouth. Majority, if not all mental and emotional problems in adults can be traced back to their childhood development that was either stunted or blocked from following its natural course.

You’ve told more than on a single occasion, Mother, how you became enchanted with sea, its open horizon standing for all that is pure and uncorrupted, only for your heart to be trampled upon by my grandma once again, who shamed your sea-faring passion as unworthy of a lady that must not be hanging out with dirty sailors. So you married a scuba diving instructor. But of course! That's to be expected of a rebel and everyone is a rebel that I know of in some shape or form. It's just a matter of time spent with somebody intimately that's needed to find out. Everyone I know is stubborn. Everyone will push back. Everyone, just about, will react. It requires a great deal of presence and awareness in order not to react. Otherwise, mechanisms are set in motion by a press of a button. You belted Serafim for vaping in a school bus. Let me tell you why. You belted him because you lack capacity to forgive yourself.

Self-love starts with self-acceptance, which in turn is impossible without self-forgiveness. It's not your fault. None of it is. Your dog dying of cancer isn't your fault either, although you blame me for accusing you of it. Lana was what you made it: a pet. I hate seeing pets, to tell the truth. Apart from being sad, it's degrading to the animal's spirit. When the spirit is not honoured, the body falls ill and sickness follows. An animal in the wild rarely suffers migraines, asthma, bronchitis, prostate cancer, breast cancer, bipolar disease, dementia, Parkinson's and the rest of the wide and growing daily ever more sinister and inexplicable selection of ailments plaguing civilized, domesticated and cultured humanity, a fact which eloquently testifies to our lack of alignment with nature and banishment of the spirit.

Any sampling of popular culture from the media broadcast will supply ample verification of just how shallow and utterly confused is a man in regards to the notion of spirituality, which has very little to do with reciting Biblical verses and burning candles and incense sticks in front of a framed picture of a blue man with an elephant's head. To honour one's spirit, be it a man's, a woman's, a boy's or a dog's, set them free. Don't grip them too tight with control and commandments.

Who are you to lash out on a boy for experimenting with his body? It is his body, not yours, to begin with. What difference does it make if he tries now what is sold behind the counter to any adult? Maturity has little to do with number of calendar days lapsed since one's birthday. Maturity is first and foremost related to one's experiences of life, its depth and profoundness. To respect a man's or an animal's spirit is to respect your own spirit. If you deny your own spirit, your own freedom, you shall deny other man's spirit and other man’s freedom likewise. If you judge and punish yourself internally, you shall judge and punish those around you, your family, your loved ones, your friends. This is why your friendship became mostly superficial since you came to New Zealand, a subject to shallow criteria and rules of social etiquette and asinine morality. Being righteous stems from being unable to accept and forgive oneself. The fact that you are looking after two boys doesn't give you a right to judge and condemn them when they fail to act upon an arbitrary set of rules you impose on them in a way of negotiating their dwelling residence in your kingdom. Or shall I say, queendom? One has no rights in Nature intrinsically; rights are manufactured in social apparatus for the sake of handling masses like one handles sheep.

I understand all too well where you are coming from because I lapse in the same bouts of anger and same explosions of violence as you do, having absorbed this painful manner of reacting to situations that trigger anger as a learnt response. Old wounds in need of healing are thus exposed. We are not much different.

Back in school I was made to fight in graffitied bathrooms with other boys, throwing punches and rolling on the urine-stained floor, kicking and snarling, choking and being choked in a death lock until blood was drawn. My front teeth got knocked out in broad daylight by a bunch of older boys who wanted my arcade tokens which I earned collecting empties on the beach for nearly a month so I wouldn't part with them at any cost, my front teeth included. I watched my uncle mashed into unconscious pub by a bunch of drunken young fellas on the front porch of his own house while my auntie screamed, cried and pleaded until the hooligans finally sobered up from the dismal sight of their own doing and took off.

When my stepdad died from lung cancer, barely striking his fifties, I talked to Olga Borisovna, his latest wife slash literary critic (a marriage for the love of poetry nonetheless)… she looked at me for a long moment, a visiting apparition from the world of privileged know-nothings, feel-good-for-no-good-reason people and said, "I don't want yours or anyone else's friendship because it hurts too much to lose those you love. Nothing personal, Platon". Same thing in the aftermath of my grandma’s passing away, my auntie asks me if I know what her idea of happiness is. I wait for her to tell me. "It is to be sitting next to Borya (my uncle) in a speeding car with my grandma on the back seat and my uncle at the wheel and smash head on in the oncoming truck so the three of us can die in the same instant." She truly drove home in one sentence the idea of Russian happiness.

Coming out of a mouth of most intelligent, sensitive human being, an accomplished painter and graphical artist with hundreds of lithographic prints exhibited in old galleries all over St. Petersburg and adorning glossy pages of poetry volumes by golden age masters of the verse, a well-educated migrant to the countryside filled with legends and ruins of old, Staraya Ladoga, a birthplace of tribal union that took place over a millennia ago which spawned and nourished Russian folklore and spirit, living in old-fashioned log house and carting her water from a holy spring a mile away to fill a samovar lit three times a day to pour steaming cups of best export-quality black tea Georgia has on offer to go with her blueberry pies baked overnight in a Russian oven big enough to accommodate a person sleeping on top where I did pass a few heated nights in feverish delirium having fallen sick while visiting my uncle and auntie whom I hold very dear to my heart… it was my auntie boiling me herbs and bringing me medicinal tea, laughing and telling jokes and going up in tobacco smoke my uncle and aunt were so fond of.

It took three heart attacks for my uncle to kick the bucket, which he did in dignified fashion corresponding to his state of illumination and his brilliant aura, for he lived his life like a flaming torch with his heart wide open, perpetually teasing everyone around him, which you could neither appreciate nor reciprocate, Mother, and therefore found intolerable, inwardly considering yourself superior for my uncle expressed his irreligious soul-denying anathema of down-to-earth, eat-me-worms-when-I'm-dead and that's-all-there-is-to-it in his infamously shameless and challenging fashion whenever the subject of soul's purpose or meaning of life was raised and his statements made uncomfortable and confronted any esoteric or new-age notion of transcendence that was not backed up by actual experience of enlightenment, liberation and bliss.

He had more light around his crown than a temple’s worth of your half-baked yogis and doped up on semolina cakes Hare Krishnas in orange robes thumbing through their prayer bead necklaces to keep the trance going, halfway gone and in need of a good whack with something rather more heftier than your average Zen stick to wake them up to the reality of living in the world while not being of it. A vastly different premise from the guise of religious devotional worship, I hate to say, for all my life of bhajans and colourful saris.

An insult at the end of the day is only an insult if the person being insulted has no ground to stand on. A slightest breeze will pull such person out of balance, make them shake, stagger, get upset, resentful, vengeful and sarcastic because their investment is unsubstantiated, ungrounded, bound to topple like a house of cards.

Mother, I know all too well how to get upset and stay upset and vengeful, not just against one person, against the whole world and all the humanity put together. This is exactly how I felt standing on the roof of a thirteen-story apartment building with night-time panorama of fabulous Auckland city and its neon-lit Sky Tower syringe poking into the heavenly firmament, two-page suicide note in my pocket concisely explaining my feelings towards what I perceived was essentially meaningless existence; this, having previously been frequenting Pelican Club brothel every single night for over a week of my allocated army leave from 2nd-1st Infantry Battalion stationed in Christchurch and having spent all my three-month allowance on prostitutes who were, admittedly, just working girls, gave me a sense of perspective that eventually led me to that lethal ledge and made me feel like a second-to-none failure, paraphrasing my regiment’s motto. For clarity’s sake it's worth mentioning I lost my virginity to a hooker at the age of twenty-two, which is not exactly what one would call ‘falling in love’ as happens in the natural flow of tantric attraction. I paid for sex and couldn’t wait till it was over as once my hostess dropped her clothes she lost major part of her charms with them. This was why I joined the band of killers for hire in the first place, backed up by a New Zealand government, on my free volition, inspired by Oliver Stone's motion picture classic with a single ambition to get myself a flesh wound and a kill to validate my otherwise meaningless, confused existence of an adolescent man.

Failing to jump off the rooftop made me more bitter and cynical than ever. Quitting the regiment, I went to the WINZ office that insisted I take short literacy course combined with WinWord skills required to compile my resume, which I composed in due format, selling myself to a prospective employer as a killer for hire skilled in setting up embassies, blowing up anti-personnel mines, handling machine guns and bazookas with accuracy and efficiency to inflict heavy damage and handy skills of slicing unsuspecting throats in the dark. I would accept no job that would neglect my highly professional qualifications, of course. My case officer took a single look at the resume and signed my weekly government-sponsored allowance to never come and bother them again.

I recall striding around K Road for a few months afterwards in my army-issue grey cloak with a sawn-off shotgun hanging underneath on a strap, contemplating chances of successful bank heist against a prospect of spending my next dozen years in prison. More than that, I've taped myself on video with aforementioned shotgun barrel stuck into my mouth as a Merry Christmas greeting for my grandma, sliced and diced with random scenes from my meanderings around town with no plan or purpose, and dutifully sent the tape back to Russia packaged as an experimental film noir project as by that time I was getting religiously stoned with my newfound flatmates and a fountain of inspiration burst forth with creativity on my end.

To lift oneself out of the dark pit of suffering, anguish, and depression by the hair isn't easy. It's arduous and sometimes impossible. It's the hardest challenge one comes across to transform oneself and transmute negativity into brilliant light. Yet without the depth of suffering there is no heights of bliss and ecstasy, either. The amplitude of motion gives range to a swinging pendulum; I have drunk of anguish a full cup in this lifetime and swung back to appreciate the preciousness of existence. Don't bury me alive, Mother. I know you love me a great deal. I know you think of me. I am where I am doing what I'm doing largely as a result of following your journey.

You read me The Hobbit’s tale, There and Back. You took me skiing in the night. You took me visiting underground artists' studios in St. Petersburg, quiet and raving madmen in splattered with paint overalls and unruly hairdos that remind me of Doc from Back To The Future film by Robert Zemeckis serving cups of tea and biscuits from a jar to a visiting boy. You put me onto Carlos Castaneda and planted seeds of magic adventures I'm finding myself now living, having arrived to Ixtlan of my own. You introduced me to Osho and Zahira and brought me to New Zealand that opened the rest of the world for me. I've imbibed the best you offered and I never had a chance to thank you properly for carrying me as a child and nourishing me throughout the years because I had not the capacity for gratitude before as I do now.

Hear me out, if you can, and forgive me for I am neither perfect nor correct in everything I say and do. What matters, however, is recognition of spirit. It takes courage and intelligence to acknowledge the truth. Words are hollow unless received by a beating heart that supplies their meaning. That screaming message you left directing me to perish and get lost in most unequivocal way was the last communication from your end and left in its wake an abrupt precipice with no hint of a possible crossing, completely man-made and utterly void of understanding. Just pure, unrefined agony. You punish me exactly the same way my grandmother treated your dad, Andrei Platonovich, for his lapse of fidelity. I remember his appearances at New Year family gatherings and birthday celebrations: it was a joyous homecoming for as long as it took to make greetings and by the time the first champagne bottle was opened with proverbial cork hitting the ceiling, my grandma could not help letting out bitter-tasting remarks to the in the address of my granddad regarding his exile-from-bosom status until he had to slip his coat on long before the cake was due and depart quietly to wherever he lived. You strived to get away as far as possible from your not-entirely-happy childhood and my slightly dictatorial grandmother, her being a Scorpio and all, only to find yourself on the other side of the world some twenty years down the road glued to the couch in front of the telly, exposing yourself to brainwashing media broadcasts and watching asinine soap operas that have neither beginning nor end nor any meaning in between, exactly like my grandma did. You most probably treat the boys to the good helping of morality regarding their functioning in a family unit, of which I am now a surgically removed appendix.

PART II

Me and Rachel took medicine last night and I realized a few things in the light of the unfinished letter I've been composing.

Firstly, I must ask your forgiveness for telling you that Lana's illness had a lot to do with the way you treated her as a dog's owner. If somebody told me I was responsible for Katya's death from cancer in the wake of her passing, it would be shattering for me, for I loved her a great deal and did everything I possibly could to save her. It wasn't my fault that I had not the capacity to take her through the massive healing process she required. In saying so, I was guilty of giving in to several fiery explosions in times of heated arguments, which contributed a great deal to her illness.

This was the first thing that occurred to me after she died in my hands, grasping for her last breath and unable to take it. There were no last words, no expressed reconciliation before parting ways. She was too weak to speak for over a month prior to me waking up in the middle of the night summoned by a stifled cry for help coming out of her raspy throat. I blew into her mouth, shook her and called her name to no avail as her spirit left the ragdoll bag of bones limp and vacant in my clutches. You were there the following morning, mom, helping change her clothes and clean up the mess.

I was sleepwalking through a disastrous dream that pushed aside reality and established its macabre dominion in its place, inescapable and final like a steel gate of a prison cell shut behind one’s back, leaving one in the dark. I had no more excuses, no side exits or routes of escape, ploughing through the sticky business of swapping ice bags around a frozen corpse of my beloved wife (ironically, the marriage institution I never for a second took seriously claimed my willing signature to facilitate Katya's immigration to New Zealand and supplied me with possession of a wife), making phone calls to funeral parlours regarding exact protocol and costs involved in disposing of a dead body in an officially approved way, and machining macrocarpa planks for nailing a casket together which we lined with silk on the third day and filled with flowers and pictures of our happiest days of small and big adventures up and down the country. Katya's boys became my boys and now your boys, mom.

I don't feel guilty for running away from my responsibility of looking after them, for I am planning to be by their side one day in full strength with a rascally smile on my face and a sparkle of joy in my eyes that will fuel many more adventures to come. I want to come back to a welcoming family feast and open embrace of forgiveness, acceptance and celebration.

I love Aotearoa, its magnificent nature, its purity and spirit, its creative force and art, its craft of mavericks who dwell in hidden corners scattered from coast to coast and a web of magic that connects them, the music festivals, the tribal gatherings of rainbow warriors, their parents, their beloveds and their kids. My landing pad to access all this goodness has always been your little paradise in Kaipara mudflats with stunning postcard view of English picturesque, hear the bleaching sheep and throat-singing turkeys, a paradise I've considered mine as well on the merit of cow-dung shovelling efforts made over the years, nail-banging skills and the sweat off my brow.

Without your whole heart welcome, however, my promised return will be significantly delayed if not indefinitely postponed, for I do not fancy coming back to the frozen kingdom of stifled bitterness and resentment. I prefer a chaotic but alive and warm climate of a third-world country, namely Peru, where albeit locals consider me a foreign import of a gringo, they still open their doors and treat me as a family at the end of the day for having preserved their trust in the universe in spite of all their strife.

It's destitute poverty all around here, but human interactions come with a great deal of compassion and feeling for each other, unlike in more privileged economically but spiritually impoverished countries of the Western world, which we treat as the only world there is, ignorantly unaware of our inadequacies as human beings stemming from our spiritual fallacy. Nature in our world view is for the taking indiscriminately, which has led to a surge of natural disasters, so-called, exponentially increasing in the recent decades that are man-made and a direct consequence of being ignorantly disconnected from cycles of life. I love New Zealand, but I'm also acutely aware of its phony, consumerist culture and downright fascist policies permeating nomenclature of governing structures and trickling down to impregnate every clerk and every shop attendant's consciousness with dutiful denunciation of their human nature, thereby becoming a soulless extension of the Big Brother. It's hard to get away from the feeling of being watched in New Zealand once you start breaking No Free Parking, No Fires and Access Denied rules, which are only a start to a long list of inane commandments pertaining to what one should and should not put in their body and what does and does not constitute a religious sacrament, a list generously supplied with prison sentencing for the benefit of those who decide to disagree. I sincerely hope that this is going to change one day.

Until then, I shall remain a renegade in need of a safe harbour to dock my spaceship, and I ain't coming alone, either. No, ma'am, I haven't picked up any hitchhikers from Alfa Centauri; there is no Pleiadians or, god forbid, Martians on my ship. I'm talking about Rachel, my sole companion and my Jedi Warrior Princess, whom I encouraged to disembark so many times I lost count, and therefore I'm certain it will be two of us, wedded and welded by renakilla herself, the plant spirit of a mighty powerful strangling vine that takes over its host and welds its root system into organic labyrinth at its base. For this feat of super-connectivity renakilla is highly praised among curanderos who use its bark for mending bones. I love Rachel dearly; we passed through many trials and tribulations (I refer you to Dhammapada Diaries of Battling Warrior Princess Cuddlepants & Her Prancing Pony blog entry at this point for a sample of what it took us to reconcile our tantric embrace that saw us skedaddle down many a slope to a score of reverberant war cries… I tell you, we’ve been shortcutting allocated by you four years of testing the strength of love connection and we are still here, in full conscious presence and sporting wide knowing smiles, cracking up laughing, because it’s one of the most therapeutic remedies in the shamanic arsenal and also because we simply can’t help it but laugh out loud at the futile struggle of the ego in the face of out spiritual destiny). Rachel and I are a team with formidable range of anecdotes bagged up along the way and one day we sure hope to unload a fair share of laughs behind a dinner table. We can seat on a carpet, knowing your distaste for furniture, it doesn’t matter. As long as there’s heart space that’s open wide to receive us, that’s all that matters.

I am rather conscious, Mother, that we don’t speak the same language and it’s been this way for quite a few years now. It’s never late, however. It may be difficult, but not impossible.

I was fifteen when you first introduced me to Osho’s books translated by you into Russian at the time; now I know he has written none of over two hundred volumes published under his name. He spoke. Listening to him it is absolutely clear that was comes out of his mouth is a spiritual transmission expressed through beating heart by proxy of dancing flame of intelligence that has come to life through the enlightening experience of knowing one’s true essence, an experience that erases boundaries of ego by uniting one with the rest of Creation. It takes a great deal of internal pressure to ignite the flame of Spirit. The question, however, is whether or not one can afford to remain a dormant potential, leading semi-automated existence in a simulacrum of tepid happiness, a passing phenomenon immediately followed by sadness and indifference like a delicate patch of blue sky disappearing behind grey clouds. Joy is eternal and as such is not affected by emotional weather. Joy is known to those who have tasted eternity of spirit within themselves; unless you open your heart to include everyone in your love and embody your devotional name, Divine Love, your flaming spirit will remain a flickering candle that gives not enough warmth to heat up your living room, let alone warming more ample spaces that could surely do with some divine love to brighten up faces of visiting guests.

Love knows no considerations, Mother. It doesn’t calculate. It doesn’t impose conditions. Love is a jump of heart. A jump into joy of reunion. Music and poetry follow love like a shadow. Work gains meaning. Energy comes flowing in like a generous stream after a rain, cascading down a mountain gorge, full of strength and vitality. And a homecoming feast, of course, is high on the menu.

Open your heart, treasures await the courageous explorer of inner dimensions. I know this because I am rich. I feel it with every palpitation, every expansion of my chest, like a pharaoh enjoying his golden chariot and fine horses racing with the wind on a sunny day at the low tide that makes for a smooth ride (I'm thinking of West Coast beaches, of course, in this regard where Dargaville rednecks hoon around in their four-wheel drives with a pair of fishing rods sticking out of the window and a few cold ones packed in a beer box on the back seat).

Everybody is born enlightened. Everybody is a Buddha to begin with.

It takes, however, everything you got and then some to claim one's Buddhahood. It takes all your courage, all your strength, all your intelligence to unearth your essence and polish the rough diamond.

Dig deep. Don't lose courage. Be patient.

Some friends have asked me to write a book as a passing commentary on my blog that’s been getting out of hand… well, here it is. Do you like it? It has neither pages nor hardcover. It’s writ in blood, love and tears. It's been precipitating in my guts. I've been pregnant with these words without knowing and now they're overflowing the vessel ripe and poignant. It took many deaths and fatalities to liberate this flow which makes it sacred. One must honour the spirit with due respect to receive the blessing of regeneration and renewal; all these experiences are given to us by existence to wake us up so we can transcend ourselves, transmute our pain, transmute our suffering and negativity through the engine of our heart into love, acceptance and bliss.

It is the true essence of Alchemical Gold and Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life, expounded by mystics of all ages.

It is hard, the hardest challenge one can face, but not impossible. And would you have it any other way? If enlightenment could be served on a silver plate, how much would it be worth? It would be worthless. This is why one can't find enlightened man in broad daylight with fire, paraphrasing Russian proverb. They are too far and few in between. They have no ambition to be seen, to be published or praised. Even if you are looking at one by some random luck, you can't see him. It takes clear vision to see the shimmering aura, it takes a sage to know a sage. And in the absence of vision one keeps staggering blindly into obstacles and walls of judgment, getting trapped in guilt and remorse, blaming others and trying to change one's circumstances in place of changing oneself. And at the end of the day that is all one can do, work on oneself, purify one's perception.

When you do, light and images appear true in full colour and illumination, sparkling and vibrant. It takes some work to get back to purity and reclaim your innocence, Mother. Your birth-given name means “of the light”, "shining", "luminescent", "pure", "blessed", "holy". It comes from the Sanskrit word Shweta. You changed it after you came upon books of Osho, reading which you realized, you told me at the time, that he knew you better than you knew yourself. You wrote to Puna to accept sannyasa and was given another devotional name, which my uncle humorously conjugated into diminutive affectionate forms of Devochka and Devushka that parodied distinctly Georgian pronunciation and were indeed a hilarious pun for their corresponding meaning was that of a ‘small girl’ and a ‘young woman’. I giggled along obviously, but could see how painfully you reacted every time, having insisted that your family, at least those who could be swayed, were calling you by your sannyasi name and nothing else. You saw callousness in my uncle's light-hearted humour, who had more grounding and wits about him than any sannyasi friends of yours I had known and whom I never heard using diminutive subjugation of your devotional name to address you and such subjugation is as inescapable as eating borscht and holding a teaspoon with a large thumb if you happen to live in Russia. You know it and do it automatically (a Russian spy perfectly versed in speaking foreign language and trained in every way to pass for the German or American is detected by his thumb habitually holding a teaspoon in his cup of tea; an insignificant mistake, a minute lapse of conscious awareness will cost one his life in the business of assuming false identity).

Speaking of changing identities, effectively you divorced your birth-given name to get away from your past, which is the meaning and purpose of taking up sannyasa, but in doing so you failed to embrace and cultivate the very essence of divine love for which your devotional name stands for. Divine Love would not be harmed by light-hearted teasing of my uncle, of that I'm sure as I'm sure of bright orb hanging in the sky I'm squinting at on a sunshiny day.

Meditation first and foremost is about being a witness, remaining aloof and unaffected regardless what words are spoken to you. It is only when you are disengaged from your centre of cool calmness and witnessing can you get hurt and get enraged by someone else's rhetoric, regardless how provoking it might be. To truly receive and benefit from relating with another human being, one must remain detached from emotions. I'm doing my part because I feel the calling to transmit; nobody else has capacity to speak to you the way I do, Mother, because I am in the unique position of knowing you intimately having been present by your side over my entire lifetime. Admittedly taking off on my own tangent, but nonetheless returning consistently like your prodigal boomerang.

I am, in fact, your best friend and your worst enemy, depending on whether you are open or closed to me. One can only be hard when one has great compassion and understanding; I trust you can greatly benefit from hearing what I got to say. Look at it in a detached zensunni way and be liberated from the past. The wounds must be open and cleansed to heal properly. It is painful to undergo the spiritual surgery only as long as one chooses narrow limitation of one’s ego.

The way you speak of my grandmother has much resentment in it for I never heard you say one good thing about her and there must be lots of good things because she loved you. She crippled you, too, denying your spirit, but she loved you in a capacity that she had at the time. I know her heart: it is beating in your chest and in mine. The difference is that I had capacity to receive her spirit when she died and you didn't at the time, perhaps the time is now? Perhaps it is still to come. It is just a question of being open.

Try to recall the best and the brightest days, the gifts of tenderness, the kisses. Try to give her a better goodbye, rather than dispatching her with a sound slap on the side of her head that left her deaf in one ear for the remaining few years that were left of her life. I know she had pushed your every button, but you're not a machine to react unconsciously. You ain’t a table lamp or a toaster to go on and off whenever a button is pushed. Being unconscious of your essence, divine and eternal, makes you a machine and it would be awfully sad to wake up to this fact a moment prior to dying. You’d have to plough through infinite regret on your next reincarnation for the lost opportunity to embody your spirit in this lifetime, mom.

Everybody, just about, can see how gentle and innocent and full of magic your spirit is. I'm truly sorry for the pain you suffered from others and pain I caused you without knowing better when I had no capacity to transform and transmute energies. I've learned a great deal in this healing business already and I'm just at the beginning, super excited about living a life. I don't feel mature at all, in fact. I feel like a boy. I'm catching up on being a rascal, pulling strings and hearing them bells going off as Rachel giggles along to my goofy jokes and laughs contagiously for we are indeed giving birth to ourselves and life is just beginning!

It's the most terribly exciting time to inhabit this planet. Humanity is fully equipped and capable of destroying itself or evolving super consciousness; we have capacity to do both and this is resolved not by politicians in high office, it's resolved on the ground between you and me. It's a family business. It's a private, individual affair.

The reason I'm making this message publicly available is twofold: firstly, family is not limited to blood and genetics alone. Family is a community that supports and nurtures its members. Secondly, everyone is in the same boat, to a larger or lesser degree. Everyone is reaching for the Light and struggling for a breath of fresh air at one point or another, and everybody that I know has got a mom. My mom happens to be a fire-puffing dragon and a Great Wall of China but that's just a shy façade she puts on to avoid the kisses and hugs that are long overdue, for a trust her capacity to transform and embrace her true essence, that of Light and Divine Love.

You are probably scratching your head at this point, my friend, wondering if there is going to be an ending to this confessional outpour? Well, that makes the two of us. It has been such a long time of not being able to reach my mother that it feels like eternity has collapsed since we talked heart to heart. It feels like we've been orbiting the same planetary body but never crossing trajectories for long enough to exchange but banal practicalities, trivia and gossip. Besides, conversations in person lack intimacy of writing letters because the mind is occupied to large degree with making up arguments and answers instead of hearing what is being said; at the end of the day we only hear what we have capacity to hear and without meditation such capacity remains undeveloped. One’s ability to remain empty, in other words, corresponds to one's capacity to receive.

This is why a great book is worth revisiting: one discovers new meaning, new richness, not because the book has changed but because one's capacity to absorb has grown. Same words, different eyes.

More transparent is one's vision, more colourful and rich are the tones, more precise are the lines and more significant is the picture being painted. Meditation is pure awareness; meditation is transparency, not tinting the prism of perception with one's ego. You can't learn it. A mantra can be given, but not the awareness itself.

Osho used to say that meditation is a knack. It is, in fact, non-doing. Mind is not required altogether as mind is a problem-solver and there is no problem to solve. If mind had thumbs, it would be twiddling them and looking bored to death asking are we there yet, are we there yet?

It is one of the most trickiest things to employ language in order to go beyond the language itself and the best stuff happens to be on the other side of linguistic encoding, for better or worse. The real juice is found when one drops the acquired knowledge of the ego. But ego is all we know. Hence, the fear of losing it and becoming no-thing. Anything is better than nothing… right?

It takes huge amount of internal pressure to transcend one's ego. One does it out of sheer pain, desperation and suffering inherent in being limited by self-identification with one's body, one’s habits, one’s history of life experiences. And when it happens, when one has gone through all the screaming agony of catharsis, when one has emptied all pent-up frustration, resentment and blame, when one’s ambition and hopes lay shattered and futile and one’s eyes have been cleansed by a spring flood of tears in this hopeless and therefore genuinely real act of surrender to what is, thinking stops and one is thrown into one's beating heart and palpitations of blood throbbing throughout the body. A sense of calmness and peace and transparency settles and pervades one's perception, and one is surprised how effortless was a transition between being trapped in one's thoughts and being set free as a bird with the whole sky as one's home.

Meditation is healing on all levels, and more than anything it heals one's soul. The body follows soon, as there is no mind in between to interfere and distort the movement of spirit. Vital energy starts flowing, restoring the body on cellular level.

Cancer after this day has not been neither explained nor understood by medical science for medical science denies existence of the soul. A dog being extension of its owner’s energetic field senses and responds to changes and fluctuations of its owner’s state of well-being. What happened to Lana is not your fault, Mother, but it reflects your state of wellness - or rather, the lack of wellness. When my brother passed away at the age of seventeen, after spending a week in a coma. You have suffered tremendously from the loss; death being a natural cause of living and being born, the reason one suffers at the loss of a loved one is primarily because one regrets and has remorse of having acted or having not taken actions in accordance with inner motion of one's heart. Read this again, if you don’t feel your heart beating close to the surface, mom. And take a deep breath. My brother was ditched by my grandma who accused him of stealing silver spoons to buy friends as school as he obviously lacked friends at home. Abandoned by his father who was incapable of looking after him (and you weren't there for him, either) he ended up in a boarding school for troubled youth. He was twelve at the time. After several months of being ‘corrected’ he was never the same as the beatings and bullying of other boys have crippled him. His eyes darted around, he was scowling and avoiding one's gaze like a timid animal held in captivity.

The sadness of what had transpired made all three of you guilty and all three of you suffered as a consequence when his spirit took off before its time before you had a chance to reconcile and make up for negligence. It is the toughest lesson which I also had to go through with Katya. When she passed away I was asking myself and the Universe as to why it came to pass? The complete answer, I knew, would take the rest of my life to arrive. One part of it, however, which I needed to know, was that she has made the ultimate sacrifice of herself so that I may live in my truth because she loved me so. She had a spirit of fire; she was not afraid of dying and I don’t know too many people who wouldn’t plead on their knees for their lives for all they’re worth when looking down the dark precipice of non-existence. She hadn’t been exactly wanted as a kid, either. Waiting till midnight hours by the door of her apartment flat for her drunk parents to come home after she’d forgotten her door keys does not exactly make up for a happy way schooling age. When father, a professor of literature and history himself, took to drinking in earnest, Katya warned him she was going to set the apartment on fire next time he got drunk. Which he did, naturally. He got the cat by the scruff of his neck and staggered out the door, giving his generous consent for a jolly arson; without thinking twice, Katya set the flat on fire and went back to bed to join her mom who was happily unconscious of the forthcoming incineration. Neighbours called fire brigade and she spent next two months scrubbing black soot off the ceilings with the help of her fellow students. Katya’s love had real fire; she was capable of self-sacrifice.

There is only one way to alleviate existential pain of a loss of beloved: to honour their spirit by purifying one's heart, one’s mind and soul by stopping to make compromises, by living one's Truth, by being a flame of consciousness and letting impurities burn and fall away. Then and then only life has meaning. Your actions become aligned with your spirit, your words have power, your vision gains depth and rich palette of colours, your brushstrokes become precise and intuitive, your poetry flows, your food nourishes your body and is appreciated by those you serve. Hence the celebration of homecoming to spirit, the only kind of prodigal return worth singing about.

The rest is a simulacrum, a faint echo of the original joy and exaltation. Yield to the spirit and weight will drop off your back (and off your waist, too, Mother) for after all the fasting you've done it is clear as day to me that what you're carrying is an armour of protection; once you relax into your heart, once you love starts flowing freely, there will be no need for the armour of distrust and suspicion. Yield and be healed! Have faith. I sound like Jesus at this point but don't be misled for I'm still your son and my conception was, I believe, fairly carnal.

Here I am, in the flesh borrowed for a ride, sweating it out in a jungle where monkey wind roams the treetops and where wild things are, dieting plants under vigilant guidance of Maestro Cesar and his brother Ander who are taking me and Rachel through the kind of cleansing one can only hope to survive. We are training to be healers and one must heal oneself first and foremost to be of any help to others. And as far as challenges go, healing family is the toughest.

I was resigned to wait indefinitely to hear from you, if I had to. I don't know if you will receive this communication or not, but I trust the universe that compels me to write it. All my heart, all my intelligence and all my prayer is in it. Will it be enough to reach you? To claim back the innocence of Divine Love? I don't know. Unless you cry me a river, unless your vision is cleansed by warm outpour of tears, I won't have reached you.

Drop your Great Wall of China once and for all, there is no life inside the fortress of cold stone, no matter how dignified and prideful it may look. It is nothing but the opposite: fear of being alive, of being part and parcel of the flux of existence ever-changing, ever-revolving.

Last time we've been staying in Pucallpa, Don Felipe passed away. His departure was coming like a derailed locomotive in slow motion. Some days he was following his spiralling-down trajectory, looking appropriately pale and gone, other days he stopped in his tracks and reversed the inevitable, it seemed. He had liver cancer. An amazing curandero, purest of hearts, wise and filled with humility for the work of healing was done by the spirit, and his task was not to be in the way. Moreover, he raised Maynas kids as his own, Ander was especially attached to him, being a sensitive one.

What happened was that Don Felipe did not allow himself to be treated neither by Cesar nor by anyone else. He wouldn't even let me and Rachel give him a massage, apply aloe vera, or clean his room, for that matter, where he slept in his clothes on a bed with no bed sheets and the rest of the room looking like the aftermath of Rogan Thompson's dress rehearsals in Birdman with scattered shamanic apparel in place of the trashed in the fit of off-scene rage theatrical makeup. One of Don Felipe’s daughters from previous marriage has been messing with his head to such an extent he didn't know whom to trust in the end and opted out of troubling himself living. All his extended family gathered around his mosquitero stretched above his mattress where he spent his last weeks on a floor of what could only be referred to as a garage, looking a lot like a noble Inca king transported from half a millennia ago, a flock of Shipibo women in fine embroidery attending to a visiting dignitary around the clock. Too little too late. Don Felipe spent better part of his curandero’s career patching up people's lives, healing internal wounds no surgical scalpel was fine enough to operate on, and battling brujos with their poison darts and curses, being always there to hear you out, lend a shamanic hand, and lighten up your heart of pressing burden. He always sang to the kids, Egor and Seraphim, without me ever asking. He never got paid for any of it, either. Cesar was paying the bills and putting food on a table. What more could an old curandero ask for? Just to be in service of the spirit doing spirit’s work is a more than sufficient blessing in itself, he’d say.

The feeling that one gets from helping a man out and channelling the healing fills one with joy and blissful contentment. Last time Felipe went to work in Mexico he was attacked by several brujos and fell sick upon his return to Pucallpa. Two months of next to no food chiselled his features out and made him poke new holes in his belt to stop his pants from falling down. He had a spark in his eyes, though, that grew more intense and apparent and remained with him until his last hour. I and Rachel visited Don Felipe a day before he passed away and he was fully present to receive us, sitting up straight like an old yogi with that undeniable aura of a mystic who exists in both worlds at the same time and sees with absolute transparency right down to your soul. I reminded him how I woke up in his bed one day, having come asking for help in the middle of the night when medicine kicked in for me super strong after the ceremony and I was being taken all the way back to the infancy and the rebirth for which I was not ready, my heart pounding erratically in my chest, wanting to jump out and everything melting, oozing and overflowing boundaries between objects, shapes, spaces. It's easy to panic when your mind is melting down and the world wraps on itself, bending space-time continuum like wet clay in the hands of a mad porter without slightest regard for one's sanity. It's easy to lose your nerve squinting at the blazing smelting pot and the spinning vortex of Infinite Light pulling you in like a piece of flotsam with no home-bound trajectory insight, for once you pass the point of no return you have to go through it, whatever parallel universes awaiting, and no guarantee of donuts, smokes or a cappuccino on arrival, either. For all you know their donuts might be square and their only approved use for coffee beans are enemas. In any case, when it comes to losing one's mind presence of a maestro is a prerequisite, unless you are willing to risk being stuck in David Jones' locker for the possible eternity to come, picking peanuts out of Jack Sparrow's dreadlocks and licking your index finger to feel the breeze in the absence of wind. And this is how I and Rachel, who wouldn't be left behind, ended up in bed with Don Felipe, having come asking for help. Old man told me he had no medicine effect and, seeing that I ain't moving an inch, started to sopla agua florida while I praised his strength of spirit which would surely supply all the help I needed. And indeed I was back in no time at all, reality stable enough to kick back and my heart no longer pounding.

I thanked Felipe for taking care of me all that night and asked him to continue transmitting his knowledge to me spiritually, should he choose to leave his vessel and take rest because I'd be dead tired in his place, living in stricken by poverty and milked for all its worth Peruvian Amazon in the heart of industrial web of Pucallpa, pumping dry the rainforest and its people of their living juices, falling trees that stood long before conquistadors disembarked on Peruvian soil with great Pope's blessing to rape and pillage, wrecking lives, crippling spirits, propagating confusion, upsetting the balance between man and nature in a name of profit that benefits some oil magnate or a corporate oligarch in developed world so-called that has lost and exhausted its own treasures long time ago.

I did not unpack all of the above for Don Felipe, there was no need. Having been to Spain and Mexico, having walked up Mayan pyramids and great cathedrals of Madrid, having witnessed prosperity and material comforts that we take for granted, Felipe had something to compare open-sewer trash-palace ambience of his hometown with no hope of a clean-up or improvement in sight, for the simple reason that all the profits are ripped by overseas investors and Peru is but a colony and a nation of slaves brainwashed into believing to the contrary, staking sweat of their hard earnest effort on a poker game of ‘healthy competition’ rigged to and fro by a slew hand of their overlords behind the scenes. Once you see it, you can't un-see it.

Don Felipe was dead the following day. He arrived in Irapai in a casket with a look-in window, elegantly elaborated with golden trimmings running along its perimeter. God knows what it has cost, for I for once was not asked to contribute. I gave my financial assistance to a living man, a few hundred bucks here and there to buy medicine and food, but I bet his funeral cost way more than his life presence to maintain, and the bitter irony of it all was the fact that the cure was at hand: an extraction of turmeric juice at a meagre price of six soles a kilo, which Cesar was giving him in a dieta until Felipe locked up altogether. Looking at him lying in his fancy casket, suited for the grand occasion of being viewed by friends and family for the last time I was taken by surprise at how young and healthy old man appeared after all tension has dissipated. He seemed no more than being in his late fifties, a smooth-skinned and peaceful, dignified face, fit for at least twenty more years of singing Icaros and being celebrated and highly sought-after curandero rock-star. He would be blasting away for twenty minutes non-stop in rapid-fire fashion, word after word, channelling the goodies as if reciting committed-to-memory biblical verse when in fact he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth till he opened it in divine inspiration; the heavy energies and maleficent spirits in due course halted in their tracks, performed a bow-turn and fled back to whatever brujo has sent them with their tail between the legs.

I sat with Rachel behind Caesar and Fidelia in their car when poll bearers performed three farewell nods of the casket to the house, both maestro-curanderos shaking with sobs of a sudden outpour of tears that made us embrace them from the back seat in a beer-hug of compassion. Their pain of losing Don Felipe was made so much bitterer by having had the means to heal him and having been unable to do so, largely due to rampant jealousy and pitiful family feuds among those who should have had Don Felipe's back.

Healing the family is the toughest challenge curandero can face. Cesar has saved many lives of patients carried into maloka on a stretcher and consequently walking out a week later on their own two feet. I've been a witness to that. Cesar has been fighting in the front lines of healing less privileged for over two decades that can only be compared to field hospitals in a war conflict, which is exactly what is happening on a planetary scale. A man is at war with his mortal nemesis, his unconscious ego, corrupted by greed, ambition, false pride and calculated justification of its actions that benefit no living being, no animal, no plant and take away instead of adding to the grandeur and beauty of god-blessed Creation.

Being unable to save one's mentor, one's friend and one's spiritual father, which Don Felipe was to Cesar, is a heavy blow to a curandero. I can only look up to my maestro in awe, but even he failed because it takes all willingness and intelligence on the part of the suffering, sick and dying to take steady steps on their way to healing.

After my uncle passed away, my auntie couldn't cope with his departure and every time I rang her she would tell me all she wished for was instant death, preferably quick and painless. In response to my inquiry how she met her New Year, some ten months after she buried her beloved, she sent me a picture of my uncle's snow-laden grave and a video recording of fireworks going off in the background to a tragic opera soundtrack she played through a small speaker as she panned cellphone’s camera back and forth with not a soul in sight. My dear auntie was spending her quality time hanging out by herself at her husband’s resting place in the graveyard. She researched a dozen sure-fire ways of offing herself and came to a conclusion that she needed some assistance. Did I know anyone to lend her a hand? Anything cheerful I had to say to her was laughed at and discarded halfway through the sentence. Trying to reach her was like throwing offerings into a bottomless well. Not even an echo, let alone a splash, was coming back. She hissed and bit me every time like a wild cat trapped in a corner and discouraged me in every way possible.

Few days prior to holding the ceremony that shed light on what needed to be said in the second part of this letter, I had a dream. I was back in my grandma's apartment. She was cooking in a half-emptied kitchen. Nothing special, no feast, just a dutiful snack to fill the stomach. Rather unlike her, as my grandma likes to cook a lot. A new supermarket was being opened across the street, spacious and also empty. I walked down and took a bus, finding myself in the company of my friend Eden, exported from

Aotearoa for some inexplicable reason. All other passengers emptied out on the following stop, having reached the end of the bus route, leaving two of us on the back seat. The driver didn't seem to notice our presence and headed uphill along a narrow gravel road, which was rather odd since St. Petersburg is built on flat ground and there ain't no hills to climb for miles around, but I didn't question it at the time of dreaming. Arriving to the top, the driver got off, having obviously forgotten to put the handbrake on, and the bus started running back, picking up speed. I judged my chances and jumped out, landing on both feet safely and only then remembered about Eden. Miraculously, I managed to catch up with the rolling vehicle and climbed back in, yelling for my friend to disembark, least he gets crushed at the bottom of the hill. Yeah, yeah, I know, give me a minute, will you? came back his reply. He was packing his gear in no hurry, somewhat annoyed at the inconvenience of having to interrupt his leisurely study of some esoteric text he is always researching to pass time between exploring ancestral caves and showering himself in inaccessible waterfalls of Glacier Country.

The first part of the dream came back to me during the ceremony when Rachel was giving me agua florida treatment while I knelt in front of her in full trance. I boiled the medicine beforehand and my usual shot-glass turned out to be extra strong. Dredging up dark episodes of my family life and reconnecting with my mother brought really strong energies and horrific insight to the surface. I saw my grandmother alone and without purpose squandering later years of her life after three of us left for New Zealand… me, my little brother and my mom. My grandma's life became meaningless after we left. I never felt this black sadness before, it never occurred to me to imagine what it would be like for my grandma. No one to cook for, no boy’s socks to mend, no one to wait for coming back after school, no doorbell to answer.

And if there is someone at the door, it ain't one of your grandkids. Kids are gone to tropical paradise with their mother, to another planet out of reach and out of sight. All my grandma’s got was three empty rooms and a pantry full of treats and shortbreads going stale in the absence of sweet-tooth thieves raiding it in broad daylight and a permanently ringing ear as a bonus. Mother, have you asked forgiveness for whacking grandma on the side of her head? I bet you didn't. If you did, you'd have warmth of understanding and compassion whenever a subject of my grandma was raised in place of your habitual resentment. If you did ask forgiveness, you'd be transformed. But you can't forgive her because you can't forgive yourself. If you found strength and laid your heart bare, reconciliation would follow as truly as melting of snow in spring.

These are natural laws. The frozen hardness retreats before the flood of warm tears. Perhaps you were never genuinely loved by grandma as I most certainly was. I don't know how it was for you, I wasn't there. I was fortunate to be adored by my grandma, unlike my little brother who needed too much love and nobody could provide enough for him at the end of the day. He was too cute. He was too affectionate, nauseatingly sweet, refusing to grow out of his cuteness. Born of a crippled father that was paralyzed below his waist, a poet persecuted for rhyming provocative verse with impeccably odd cadence that fell out of step with the factory press of state-approved propaganda manufactured by mediocre minds for wide consumption of working-class masses; my brother was too tender a life-form to survive intact in cold climate of our hometown overcast two hundred eighty days out of a year on average. He should have been born in Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, anywhere else but in Russia. He needed the sun, the radiance.

As Rachel massaged my back, I sang to the spirit of agua florida, asking to guide Rachel's hands. As her fingers worked up their way to my neck, deeper layers emerged, liberating energies I didn't suspect were residing there. There was some heavy stuff around my neck choking my breath, and in the next instant my father's death from forced regulation jumped out at me with screaming desperation of a life taken by force in all its utter cruelty. I was too small at the time to comprehend such ending.

Deeper still lay the shock of having been born with umbilical cord wrapped three times around my neck, blue in the face from lack of air. I could neither breathe fully nor express myself easily as a kid, stuttering malevolently at school whenever answer was required of me, standing in front of the class and getting choked by expectant silence. If I liked a girl, I could never confess my affection to her, which led to feeling of inadequacy and mounted inner pressure and urgency to resolve biological agenda of procreation in not altogether wholesome fashion, whereby I had acquired a habit of compulsive masturbation. Apart from being wasteful, a fleeting instance of blissful release from the hormonal bonds was followed by hollow emptiness that inexorably led to future desperation and depression, getting deeper and darker as years progressed. My suicidal tendency was directly related to being unable to express myself and to connect thereby with others, especially the opposite sex.

It didn't end there, however. The energy of violent oppression remained residing deep in my unconscious, and it lashed out whenever I was provoked. I remember choking my brother with a pillow to stifle his hysterical laughter when we were teenagers. He just kept laughing as I pinned him down to bed, straddling him, and since he'd bite my hands, I used a pillow. I let him go once I realized he'd been silent for a good minute. As luck would have it, I didn't have enough strength to choke him to death in my blind anger. Much later on, I nearly did choke Alana, my first girlfriend, some ten years after moving to New Zealand. She had flaming red hair and equally fiery mix of Irish, Maori and Sicilian blood in her veins that fuelled her rebellious adventures, some less sensible than others. Two of us spent quality time in close quarters of a small hut on the West Coast where we purchased a block of land bordering on Kahurangi National Park on the money I single-handedly accrued selling ganja cultivated in the attic of a house I was renting in Auckland, and subsequently laundered by my sweetheart's dad, a shrewd businessman who wouldn't pitch a single cent of his own money in to help his daughter to build her paradise otherwise.

Our hut measured three and a half by four meters across and included our bedroom, kitchen, living room and vestibule all in one room with antique blue coal range in the middle which was selling point of the property as we both fell in love with the old fireplace. We went through the whole nine yards of love affair, including naked dances in the garden, and at one point arrived to the opposite side of the tender affection that saw me smashing Alana's aunt's elegant old-school wooden chairs and walking through the front door as if it wasn't there, shattering glass panes on my way out. And one winter day full of sunshine and idle, I woke up choking my red-headed sweetheart with my hands tight around her throat and her voice cords failing to utter a sound apart from unintelligible gurgling. The preceding episode of quarrelling and senseless arguing was fresh and clear in my memory, but it was more like watching oneself in a movie, acting compulsively according to a script written by a horror story writer. I couldn't believe how far I went. All my life I had contempt for wife beaters, and there I was doing exactly the same thing I condemned others for. A hypocrite. I went outside and sat in the garden looking over farm fields towards Radiant Range mountains, all the pristine nature as far as I can see, feeling desperately empty and done for, with the last ounce of self-respect gone. It wasn't my fault. I was simply transmitting my injury and pain to others without knowing it.

Here is a little secret for you. There is no evil people in the world, there is no Satan and no devil. Evil is a result of unnatural development in as much as tyrants and despot are produced by sick societies. There is a lot of people in need of healing, but nobody is born Adolf Hitler or Stalin. A child is a blank canvas. You can paint yourself a Genghis Khan or Mao Zedong, or you can paint Gautama Buddha and Lao Tzu, or Rembrandt, or Goethe, or Milton, Byron, Rumi, given enough tender bright colours in the palette and a few skilful brushstrokes there is every possibility of a masterpiece. Yet all the sensibility in the world is not enough when it comes to making conscious effort to rise above one's limitations and transcend one's ego, transmute one's pain into loving affection. We don't wake up until things get out of hand and somebody gets injured or deprived of life, either fast and furious or slowly and meticulously. We repeat what was done unto us by doing to others unconsciously exact same thing we suffered from, Mother. It's a chain. Whenever negativity and spiteful vengeance speaks through you, acts through you, you are not consciously aware of it. If you were, you would not do it. Simple as that.

It takes a master to scream consciously for the benefit of the one being screamed at, because there is no negativity in such a scream. There is no repercussions, either. It's not followed by banishment from master's embrace. A scream of a master is expression of energy in full awareness and is an act of love. If a master didn't care for the disciple, if a master wasn't involved, he'd never bother to waste his energy in such a way. Same with us, the more profound is our love for each other, the deeper is our affection, the deeper we are compromised by the lack of love and understanding. And what comes from the absence of love can be rather cruel and vengeful, and it's not going to disappear once and for all without meditation and cultivation of conscious awareness. No quick fix, no Band-Aid for the lack of being present in one’s centre, for the lack of knowing thyself. Inhale deep into your tummy, feel palpitations of your heart, the throbbing pulse of veins and music of the vessels filling internal rooms and concert halls with preludes, movements, overtures that outshine Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. Both the Eternal Paradise and Great Feast of homecoming are inside, waiting to be recognized. Come home in spirit and make peace with those who hurt you, alive or dead, by acknowledgement and forgiveness.

No one is born a Hitler. Especially make peace with those you feel your love has been betrayed by. One cannot be truly hurt by someone one didn't give their heart to. I remember perfectly well how loyal you were to Zahira, Mother. You moved mountains out of the way to make way for Sufi camps and received your beloved friend, mentor and master back in a day of barely cooping Soviet Union with its inane bureaucracy, complete and utter suppression of freedom and spirituality in any shape and form, and our eventual and miraculous escape to the Pacific mystery land of Aotearoa, a journey powered and made manifest by spirit that was nourished by your love to the Master. I know this much, and I don't know half of it. I was a college kid back then, while you whirled, locked arms with others in a circle of zikras, raved mad gibberish and danced away your anxieties and worries, took late-night vigils and sacrifices you made for the privilege of being by Zahira's side. And just the fact that you are not on the talking terms with her while living within literally a minute of walking distance to Zahira’s house indicates impasse that needs to be cleared in order for the energy to flow. I know beyond doubt that Zahira is enlightened enough to receive you any day of the week, same as she's open to sunshine and clouds, snow, rain and rainbows and meteorite showers. It doesn't matter what comes her way, long as it is a genuine phenomenon of heart and guts and not a calculating ego. You will know when time comes to pay your master a visit, and I hope it comes while her spirit still abides in her flesh. Which is a miracle it still does, if you ask me, given her prolonged bout with Parkinson's, her excruciating pain and continuous shaking that has been going on for close to ten years now.

It is tremendously healing to be able to communicate and talk through the problems in person as long as the meeting is sponsored generously by warmth of the heart. In fact, there is no other way to communicate, and I know that you had huge blazing oven of hearty warmth going at all times for Zahira, Mother. Summon it back and go talk to her, warmed in the afterglow of your old love. That's the key to your healing, mom. That's the key to dropping your weight and fixing your broken back. This is the prerequisite for getting well and shapely. No diets will help otherwise.

You know it well enough by now, having cleansed and fasted a great deal. Your physical state is a reflection of your mental emotional state, and your pain-body is huge, mom. Without going deep and opening all the wounds to airing, nothing will change. It's not the superficial stuff that can be resolved by taking a few herbs, having a colon cleanse and eating salads only for a few weeks. It will make your skin look good, for sure, but not affect the deep angst and resentment which are lying in wait for the next opportunity to wreak damage in your life and life of your loved ones. I could continue talking on and on, for indeed I feel like I've been unable to reach you a great many years in the capacity of a close friend, a companion in the great adventure of life, and there is so much to say, now that I am writing, finally, what I wanted to communicate a long time. I'm not going to continue for the fear of becoming an inseparable part of my jungle hammock; I'd like to recount, however, the end of the ceremony I've been mentioning earlier on.

Me and Rachel were climbing up our new steps cut into steep hill from hot springs to our house, set with pieces of hand-split timber to stop clay steps from crumbling. I was looking at live conveyor belts of ants illuminated by the light of my headtorch, carrying chunks of leaves and chips up to their hidden ant palace excavated inside the hill, and telling Rachel of my idea to film the climb during the day with appropriately narrated birthday greeting to Egor, taking him step by step on a wee journey of our life in Cachiyacu as a preview of his very possible future adventure destination, for this place is indeed a paradise on earth worth revisiting. At the top of the staircase, as a conclusion, I wanted to place Egor's present, an illustration to the Zen Buddhist story I drew and Rachel painted beautifully in which a young disciple is hiding behind a tree holding a stick, intending to ambush his master with a hearty whack to reimburse his lot of beatings received during training. Laughing merrily, I nearly walked into a snake coiled on the path below our house. Involuntary, I screamed out loud, but the snake didn't move an inch. Over two meters in length, yellow-orange body with beautiful ornamental designs in black that turned metallic-blue silver, an incredibly powerful presence that wakes you up better than a cold shower. These creatures are designed to hunt and their speed of movement is lethally fast, no match for their prey.

We went round the other side, closed the door behind and smudged ourselves with Palo Santo, followed by smoking a cigar of pure tobacco that grounded the energy. These spirits come in the form of animals in your dieta, a great honour and a good sign, indeed. Death can come at any moment was the message of the serpent spirit.

Cherish every breath, every heartbeat by feeling well and at peace with what is because every experience is given to us for a reason and the reason is discovering our essence, what remains after form is dissolved. I can smell a homecoming feast cooking, my friends, and you are all cordially invited to this family omelette. I did break some eggs as the saying goes, in the spirit of Easter and overall resurrection of loving affection in my immediate family, what's left of it, and beyond.

Actually, come to think of it, my family has been growing a fair bit over the last few years and connections have been strengthening to accommodate forthcoming fruit of spiritual abundance. The harvest of loving affection, shared wisdom and vision has already begun. I have full support and welcoming of the Maynas family with Maestro Caesar on behalf of Rao Cano Shobo, House of Healing in Pucallpa, and Almasifuen family of Mama Dina, Gerardo, Jack and the rest of some seventeen brothers and sisters and their children working with medicine in different parts of the jungle. I’m welcome any a time in Santuario Huishtin run by Enrique Paredes, who has been accommodating me and Rachel in a genuine paradise of mystical Cachiyacu for the love of having us around in the last year and a half. I got Enrique Mandura's family waiting at the foot of legendary Ausangate Mountain with arms outstretched wide open.

And closer to home, there is Andrew Bryenton's indefinitely open invitation for landing at his intergalactic pad and Brendan O’Dwyer’s castle on a hill transported all the way to Karamea from Ireland by industrious leprechauns that traded a few stones for a pint of beer on the way and it requires a wee leap of imagination to see the battle walls, drawbridge, moat and heraldic flag flapping above on a staff, but I assure you it's all there.

I'll comfortably crash the gates of a dozen places expecting nothing less but a welcoming feast and I trust this number to grow exponentially as I begin to celebrate myself. For the first time since my adolescence, I feel like throwing a party to honour my birthday. For the first time I feel empowered to acknowledge my journey and share the spaciousness and the resonance of my inner temple and invite you to partake of the hearty omelette I've made for the occasion.

I'd like to thank all the people who said and transmitted their love, strength and positive vibrations to me during all these years, who cultivated and encouraged my potential as a soul, as a spirit and as a man, who forgave me my mistakes and shortcomings and continued sharing their transmissions and their support.

I thank my mother who has moved mountains and shifted equal amounts of generational karma by her power of will, her courage and her vision, reaching out for purity and light, jumping forward into unknown. I salute you, mom, as a true champion f my heart! You gave me the impetus and the momentum to follow my journey in the first place and I'd be nowhere without acknowledging your role, your love and your presence. I'd never want any other mother, in fact. I am in love with your spirit, always was and always will be. I've been very lucky in the grandma department, likewise, and without honouring my grandma's spirit full to the brim with loving affection, this celebratory banquet would not be complete, talking of many gatherings filled with music, singing and laughter and amazing table spreads which have not been equalled or surpassed ever since I left for New Zealand. Rest in peace, Galina Nikolayevna.

I'm indebted and utmost grateful to Zahira, my Zen Sufi master, a wild whirling dervish with equally wild blond locks of hair and crystal-clear gaze transporting one beyond and back, my spiritual mother, a hippie, a rebel, a free spirit and one of the best friends I ever had.

I bow down to Katya’s spirit for the greatest teaching and greatest gift of her love and her life that left me no other path to follow but walking in my truth to honour her living memory. Rest in peace, you are forever in my heart.

I thank Cesar Soimetsa for transmitting ancestral knowledge and opening the mysterious world of visionary plans to me, trusting me to uphold the responsibility and triumph over my unconscious acts, thoughts and emotions.

I am ultimately grateful to my beloved Rachel for sticking it out through thick and thin to follow your heart against all odds, for trusting the universe and walking the medicine path side by side with me, dancing and singing. Much love to you, my Jedi Warrior Princess Cuddlepants and your Prancing Pony!

I will always cherish the memory of Viktor Borisovich Krivurin, my step-dad, most gentle soul and one of the greatest poets I’ve read, a man of brightest intelligence and insight who has transmitted to me his wisdom in soft-spoken delivery of his spellbinding voice which never left me, reverberating and echoing through time. Ljovka, my little brother, rest in peace, the lucky one. May your soul find a favourable rebirth and return to Earth, for there is much to look forward to beyond the tender age of seventeen. I am forty-six (imagine that!) and I feel my life has just begun. Only now do I have the freedom and conscious awareness to choose my path, to respond instead of reacting, to dance naked and sing my song out loud, praising Universe and Creation. I wish you were here in the flesh, little brother, to rejoice in the triumphs.

Boris Grigoryevich, my epic uncle, you've been nothing short of a legend in my books and the books of many others by proxy of your never waning vitality and humour. An admirable pain-in-the-arse, you managed to encourage me even when dealing out criticism, inspired me to honour the earth I am working on by the sweat of my brow and crack jokes instead of applying First Aid whenever I bruised or cut myself. Rest in peace!

Last but not least I must not forget the kids, Egor and Serafim for all the light, charm and joy your presence brought me. As far as teaching goers, I learned a great deal from you and can't wait to see you guys again and bathe in your vibrant fountain of energy.

Besides, a third of June happens to be Egor's birthday, same as mine, for we were born on the same day, thirty years apart, and thus we are annually bound to throw a party in each other's honour. I don't place much, if any, significance on counting off calendar dates as one could be born any day of the year, any time, any place. I do, however, acknowledge change when I feel it, be it within myself or within the other. True birth and true maturity come in due time, not a second earlier or later, because they constitute a change in of state of being, same as water that turns to vapour at hundred degrees centigrade, not a fraction of a degree lower temperature. One needs all that heated pressure to let go and surrender the ego, the suffering, the agony and be born again as a soulful man. Until then one remains a potential, one speaks of the soul but not feels it, one boasts of possessing a spirit but neither embodies nor flies with it. One argues on behalf of the heart when one's heart is locked away in the trunk on the bottom of the ocean for safekeeping against occasional rapture. This won't do. This is the time of integration, of wholesomeness and holiness, of being one with the Spirit, being born as a Soul Eternal in conscious awareness and illumination.

I've had a couple of years of complete blind darkness as far as probing into future goes, not being able to feel continuation of life on this planet at all possible. Human life, that is. Such a pity, such a waste! A man is the highest point of evolution, an artefact of six-billion-year planetary-scale experiment and tremendous endeavour not to be matched by all scientific laboratories crammed together in one building and staffed with resident Einsteins, Edisons and Newtons working round the clock problem-solving mystical workings of the universe. Atomic bombs they can muster but it doesn't take that much intelligence to destroy in a flash of vengeance what took eons to create, nourish and evolve. The dumbest thing of all is destroying ourselves and that possibility has been hanging over us like a razor-sharp axe on a thin silver thread ever since the first mushroom-shaped cloud spawned in Jornada del Muerto desert (literally, ‘Route of the Dead Man’) in the aftermath of nuclear bomb testing some eighty-odd years ago. And there is Elon Musk busting to colonize Mars with unchecked ambition of an missionary ignorante holding up a volume of Popular Mechanics above his head instead of a Bible with a jet rocket engine up his ass for quick acceleration into orbit (as if higher planes could be achieved by clever gimmicks and multi-million-dollar budgets). Absurd is just one way of putting it; idiotic is much closer to the truth.

With great power comes great responsibility. This evolutionary experiment of which humanity is the fruit is well-contained on one average-size planetary ball hurtling through space vast and empty enough to confine the spread of human stupidity and arrogance from contaminating the rest of the galaxy, should those in power get an itch to export their terribly short-sighted vision to other worlds. Last thing the universe desires is re-enactment of Martian Chronicles with Texas-style diners scattered in red dust soil with half-crazed colonists staggering deliriously to and fro among the ruins of antique civilization whose spaceships have long sailed away, or Pandora's gung-ho takeover of a luminescent living jungle by a bunch of throat-cutting mercenaries hell-bent on unobtainium, may Mendeleev turn over in his grave, or, god-forbid, Lord Vader hissing orders through his samurai mask to arm Death Star to action (I credit my mother on this note for introducing me to Ray Bradbury's science fiction in the first place). The only stage for this nonsense, as much as I admire Jedi masters and anyone qualified to wield a lightsaber and levitate rocks with eyes closed or saddle up a flying lizard, for that matter, is a cinema screen. One doesn't need to burn rocket boosters for propulsion, risking to become a bunch of fireworks striving to breach upper atmosphere to explore the universe.

The entire universe is contained within each and every one of us, same as the essence of an entire ocean is contained within a drop of water. Dissolving the boundaries, a drop becomes the ocean; there is no other knowing apart from becoming one with what one wishes to know. There is no other knowing apart from communion. To know a tree, dissolve the boundary and be a conscious presence, a witness rooted deeply in the ground and bathing one's crown in the sun, swaying in the breeze.

The existential joy of communion with oneself and with nature is all the healing one needs. Yet before the energy can flow unencumbered, all deep-seated blockages must be removed and cleared out of the way. It is not a rocket science, anyone can see it. Have courage and look deep.

The very act of seeing one's mechanisms liberates one from compulsion to repeat the story of past generations and lifetimes of falling down into the same rut, perpetuating angst, suffering and pain. There is no luxury of postponing any more. World War III can wipe us all out and the majority of living species on Earth. Never before has technology been developed to such high extent as it is now. With present advances in scientific research, we are giving birth to bioengineering, nanotech, robotics and AI for the first time in human history. The planet is lit up at night with a glowing web of electricity as if it was overtaken by artificial organism that never stops feeding on natural resources, pushing sustainability beyond limits and causing massive disturbance of natural cycles that reflect on individual well-being in most destructive, detrimental way, in a manner only comparable to a virus, inviting a host of never-before-heard-of diseases and fatal conditions, which is nothing but a response of the host planet to a threatening explosion of arrogance and greed.

The direction must be changed: to keep going out of ourselves without knowing who we are is dangerous. And given that the average emotional age of man is no more than twelve years, handling anything more powerful than a spade or a shovel has dire consequences. As far as shovelling goes, it takes enough huffing and puffing digging oneself a hole to reflect upon the purpose of the exercise and hopefully avoid falling into it. Squeezing a trigger on automatic rifle, in comparison, requires flexing of one finger and does not allow a pause to ponder over who is standing in a line of sight. It could be your brother or your sister. Handling great amount of energy comes with great response-ability. There could have been much energy generated in Egyptian pyramids but never have atoms been split with efficiency of a nutcracker, never nuclear weapons been stockpiled sky-high, capable of destroying this paradise on Earth a thousand times over.

I am finishing this letter after a visit of Master Caesar with Fide and Victor who came to stay for four days with us in Cachiyacu and held three consecutive ceremonies to align our dieta and have a dunk in the sacred springs while at it. Rachel had a vivid dream on the second night of their visit. She dreamt she and I were standing on a beach, watching a giant wave swelling up. We dug our sticks into the sand, bracing up for the imminent impact and getting ready to be smashed up like two small toy soldiers by oncoming tsunami. Then we looked at each other and remembered that we are full of medicines, having dieted many plants, and laughed out loud for no tsunami, no matter how menacing and how huge, could harm us. Next night, after a hell of a turmoil in the ceremony, Rachel remembered her dream and I translated what she saw to Caesar. He laughed and stopped to correct me halfway through. ‘These are not walking sticks but golden staffs of protection I have transmitted to both of you. Whenever there is trouble brewing on the horizon don't be worried. Dig your staffs into the ground and the danger will pass without hurting you.’

I feel ready and invite you guys to celebrate life for all it has to offer, and it has everything to offer and more. Our imagination is utterly inadequate to paint the simple sketch of what's awaiting round the corner for those who take courage to live in the moment and breathe deeply into their stomachs. Mom, I love you very much. Celebrate me as I celebrate you and hug the kids for me while you are at it. Let's have a happy ending and a bright awakening in this lifetime, please! Turn off your telly for once and watch Secret Life of Walter Mitty with no breaks for commercial peddling and intrusion on privacy in your home. Treat yourself for my birthday to meditation, laughter and peace. You are my hero in the flesh and in spirit!