Silver linings before the Storm
What Cult Issues? I’m Healed! Entry #5 …
This blog is for and about real cult survivors. In Trump ‘cult’ure though, that might mean all of us.
THIS IS LIFE, lived full-on. Zooming solo down a two-lane highway, into a clean, tropical breeze. The motorbike I’m driving is attached to a rattling cart. I can transport everything from jungle greens to water buffalo calves, if I wanted to.
It is spring in Southeast Asia. The rice paddies glow like emeralds. There’s a rainbow. No, really.
Then a small bug lands in my mouth.
“Protein,” my farm host Hans said brightly, like an annoying dad, when I was on back of a motorcycle with him last time.
My unwanted protein is too far back in my throat to spit out. I swallow it and enjoy the ride.
Going with the flow, accepting what happens, including bug meals, I’m learning, is the path to freedom. And as I am about to be reminded, synchronicity — where things happen in a natural flow, as if by magic — is one of the clues along the way, that you are on that path.
IT TURNS OUT that Plai, the beautiful woman who visited the permaculture farm I live on , is some kind of superstar entrepreneur, with her own resort. Her own home is a two-story, white stone villa, with teal shutters and giant wooden doors.
When I rattle into the white-gravel driveway in my farmer’s cart, she’s teaching yoga in front of sparkling saltwater pool waterfalls to a man with wavy, silver-hair from The Netherlands, who looks like a Lord of the Rings elf. So I tiptoe by and go in the organic, vegan restaurant.
Another man who looks like a model greets me, glowing with health and height, lean muscles and cut cheekbones.
Why is everyone so good-looking? I can’t take much more of this! Actually, I can. Forever.
“Hi, I’m Caspar,” says the young man, in a Russian accent. His tan feet are bare and he’s wearing royal-blue Japanese-style harem pants. He seems nervous, like he’s straining to appear professional. “Shall I show you around?”
“Um, I don’t know,” I say. “I’m Heidi. Where are you from?”
“Estonia,” he says.
“Oh! I’ve been there!” I say, eagerly. “Tallin.”
“That’s my city!” he says, warming to me.
“Aitah!” I say, which is ‘thank you,’ the only word I know.
“Aite,” he corrects me, pronouncing the end with a soft e.
“I got a little high before I came here,” I volunteer. “I’m just kind of excited to see all this. This is super luxury!”
Caspar smiles, delighted that I not only am I not another western guest with a list of demands and complaints, but that I might know where to get weed. He offers me a fresh coconut with a bendy straw, and our friendship begins.
BY THE END OF my first visit to Plai’s resort, I have discovered Caspar is an aspiring filmmaker, has a drone, and is willing to film me for the documentary I’m making back in the states. Ah, synchronicity. You’re looking good right now.
Caspar, twenty-seven, six foot three, face like one of those guys with no shirt and an open fur coat on a giant billboard in New York, is one of those frat-boy types, a former gym rat and serial ladies man. Then he watched a bunch of conspiracy videos on YouTube. He quit cigarettes, went vegan, and moved to Southeast Asia, in a bid to be a better person and ‘wake up.’ I marvel again at the varieties of ‘how I got here’s’ I hear from everyone I meet. Caspar, it becomes clear, truly has a child’s beautiful and insightful, honest and clear, if naïve, heart of gold.
Over the next few days, I end up with the most epic footage imaginable.
BACK AT THE resort, I grow closer with Plai and learn that Caspar is the man she’s so hung up on. He’d mentioned to me that he doesn’t believe in marriage but I can’t bring myself to tell Ploy this. In the past I would have, girl-code, but when she talks abouthim I can see already that, deep down, she knows this. It is for her to admit to herself, in her time.
I bat away mosquitoes and a fair amount of envy that all the men I find attractive are circling her like these bugs now. At the same time, she looks so beautiful and vulnerable in a white eyelet lace top and wraparound sarong I kind of want to hug her. I suggest we get behind some netted doors and have a glass of wine.
Inside the organic restaurant’s lounge area, we end up in close conversation with two other women and begin speaking easily, naturally, of the very topics I came here to work through. Self-love, and bitterness.
Alice is young, French, married, still squeals when her phone buzzes with a call from her husband. Her ‘come to Thailand moment’ was when she realized, in her wild desire to have a child, an addiction to the trap of ‘a perfect life.’ She began challenging her ideals, quit her financier job and now runs a successful tea company out of Singapore. She’s considering adoption. Her personal jewel, her talisman, if you will, is ‘freedom’ and she keeps repeating the word, like a treasure, to me, the more emphatically, as she learns more about my own story of struggle with bitterness and determination to write my cult-memoir.
Stella, is a Venezuelan model, because of course. She has powerful energy, the venerable, expansive kind that broadcasts her, even while seated, as a mover and shaker. She moved to Thailand after civil war in her country, and talks of the nonprofit she is forming for the disenfranchised.
Both Stella and Alice are here now, as part of an all-woman’s entrepreneurial network, for a ‘goddess week.’ They add me to a secret Facebook group for “Chiang Mai Nomad Girls,” and I feel like I just got a ticket to Burning Man, only real life.
Plai brings me a dish of black rice grown on her own farm. It has the heft and consistency of tiny pieces of buttery steak. It might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten, but then she brings me Khao Soy, a northern Thailand yellow curry with potato, noodles and mushrooms, and I decide that’s best, but that’s before I had the sweet potato in coconut cream dessert.
LITERALLY EVERYTHING I came here to tackle within myself comes up in the conversation with Plai, Alice and Stella that night. We talk of bitterness, non-attachment, their own difficult family stories, the strengths they’ve found within, the freedom that has been each of our own biggest lessons.
I’ve been more locked to my identity as a family member and a big sister than I’d realized. Without the ‘but I love my family and do anything for them, no matter how much they abuse me’ identity, what will I present to the world? I thought I was fairly independent already, but I’m realizing I’ve been scared to be seen as ‘just me.’ I’m beginning to realize how good feeling free feels. I’m starting to accept that I have no choice, for now, but to totally detach from my family upon returning. Our current dynamic is perpetually toxic, and helping no one.
My new friends encourage me to continue to walk my own path and to accept that it is not my family I can help with my work, like I once thought. They remind me to watch as synchronistic events continue to unfold, that that is a reminder that one is on the right path, and that that path, my book, can and will help the ones who seek it.
We marvel at the vortex of Chiang Mai, this place that seems to draw likeminded souls from around the world.
“Come back,” Ploy invites me. “There’s a new yoga retreat starting tomorrow. You can just drop in. We’ll be doing the herbal steam sauna on Saturday.”
Heaven.
And then, because God, and jokes, and more lessons, always more lessons, of course, the sky falls. Next entry.
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