Passionfruitcowgirl

Pitter  patter …  pitter    patter… a pit-pat-pitter splat …a blat splat ting! The smoky Andean twilight of the second last day of the world is giddy with raindrops. They hurl in sideways from a ghostly-white dusk and drum their little bodies, fat with Amazon, upon the domed roof of my new adobe home.

These orbs of ancient water, every one, has spun in from a journey that saw them gasped out of that wide, wounded river on great ladders of quivering brightness. Or sucked from the skin of an indigenous whore, perhaps, working the soy plantations, or the wood factories, or the sad, bitter plankwood streets of the slums of the Amazon, where crop after crop of genetically engineered dreams are sucked out of indian bodies and used to fill the pockets of our Great Industrialists with tiddlywinks.

Every raindrop exploding tonight was once to be found lounging in a swampy riverbed, surfing the scudding foam of the Amazon in surge, or slow dancing the edge of a hand-honed paddle, dipped quietly into the Rio Napo, say, by a child on his way to harvest reeds or lotus root or coca cola at dawn… the watery edge of the quiet blade glistening in a way it has not quite shone for all the unfathomable history of paddles, dipped and risen, dipped and risen in this way since the first time a man moved his arms through air and water.. .because the kaleidoscope composed by every drop of water in the Amazon, these days, is slightly tinged by oil, by mercury, or by the blood of those who live there…

No doubt the miracle of nature’s engineering has scrubbed clean each droplet of evidence of this treachery after sucking them up into clouds, drifting them about the heavens in the shapes of little ducks, baby elephants, goblins (and other forms to delight stoners on lovely grasslands here and there), then whipping them across the Andes, dribbling them down the fronds of tender ferns, pushing them off cliffs, and through dark places in the great forest of volcanoes, to then glisten for brief moments among the fanged ranges that separate the little town of Vilcabamba from the great mosaics of the jungle. These little raindrops, sitting politely tonight in the folds of marigolds about my garden, secreted like love letters in the nesting petals of an apricot rose, resting like diamond navels in the belly of a fat lettuce, or playing a jungle fandango on this handmade house could all be dressed up and polished for the final arc in this mortal coil if the World Ends on Friday.

In case you missed it, bodgy interpreters of the Mayan Calendar, various ‘channels’, with their cholesterol issues and their daggy tracksuits, ‘visionaries’, with their boxed cd-sets and world tours, alien ambassadors disguised as surprisingly unattractive homo sapiens and backyard scientists who have been tinkering dangerously with Schrödinger’s cat have been shouting for a long while now that forces are colliding toward Armageddon. And that Armageddon is this Friday, the 21^st of December. No rainchecks.

Here in Vilcabamba the loud clashing preaching about fifth dimensional transcendence, alien assaults, rescues co-ordinated by fleets of hot Pleiadian vortex-riders in zip-front jumpsuits, storm troopers, bombs, earthquakes and all manner of bother has gone weirdly quiet of late. There is an eerie calm in the plaza. The Doomsayers are not to be heard on the streets, but whisper, huddled over their burritos at Roots Cafe, bickering about The End and scalping canned fish. The lovely waiter there polishes glasses and whispers to me, “but aren’t they going to be embarrassed by Sunday?”

I tell him that I have a prophecy:  Sunday will be a bad day for the burrito-trade, come hell or highwater.

Walking the cobbles of our pueblo today I was reminded of the kind of frigid peace after a fart in an elevator. Or the pregnant hush after all the party guests stampede from the building while you remain frozen, staring at the smoking fairy lights. Is it the calm of shame, or the calm of a half-abandoned Titanic?

Word has it that a good deal of folk have already made for their bunkers. Over the last decade or so, uncounted numbers of Americans, mostly, have built underground survival chambers all over these valleys, and stocked them with food and guns and presumably porn and gold as well. It’s easy to find out online, what one needs to survive The End of the World… and here in remote southern Ecuador there has been a virile trade in all the goodies the survivalists need to both outlast The Horror, and build their  Utopias when the ash and corpses and little green men have passed.

Crossbows, rifles, cacao supplies, powdered spirulina, fancy blenders, yoga mats, hand-cranked laptops and vast quantities of tinned tuna have been traded on the local facebook page, where folk have been clamouring for End of the World dental packages and going on and on about ‘calling in the light’ while the grids are still active.

From Australia yesterday I was sent online wisdom from several sources about how to ‘transition’ this Friday. Given that it’s Friday there already as I post this now, I am wondering if fleets of disembodied Australasians, buzzing about in their fifth-dimensional non-dualified lightbodies might be clogging up the ether already, broadcasting transcendental messages from beyond the redundant material world.

Before copping Armageddon in the Antipodes, helpful souls there had advised me to prepare for “the most important time in history, when Source light will illuminate us all and open our hearts, connecting us with the cosmic web of light and love”. They said it was a tricky time and “a lot of us have experienced a feeling of giving up, wondering where our connection with God, angelic beings and helpers are – a feeling of abandonment. A sense of knowing nothing…” They said “multiple gateways are opening wider, veils are being lifted” and that it is absolutely vital today to “vision your future in its absolute power”, while “releasing your garbage” and being grateful for everything you have.

They advise that it is ESSENTIAL today to make an image of your own death, your coffin covered with sand, and then of your new self (in a presumably more fashionable body, pre-arranged according to the above paragraph through careful visualisation of yourself in ‘absolute power’) floating down the birth canal into a new world.

They finish off with a menu of helpful ways to get a better vision, and more power and love, including psychic readings ($50/30mins) and Reiki ($80/hr) by phone, skype or esp.

I have already been warned that not everybody will make it. On Friday, I am advised, the rug underneath the World As We Know It will be dragged out from beneath us and given a fiercesome shake by a benevolent, arbitrating, world-ordering force that has had enough of the bloody shambles we’ve been making of it. T

he rug shaking will signify the onset of three days of darkness, a magnetic warp in the planet’s biorhythm, a pole shift, sudden slippage of the surface of the Earth, possible appearance of the new Messiah, Future Buddha or Grandpa Smurf in mass hallucinations with the sad news that not everybody has been good enough to make it to Christmas. There will be bliss for the ‘chosen ones’ and lots of wailing and soggy carpets all ‘round.

During this time those not eligible for the shift will perish.

Serves ‘em right, say the End of Worlders. This planet’s just not big enough any more those brothers, sisters, bankers, drillers, gossips and moaners who have failed thus far to become Translucent, or Magnificent, or Radiant and Alive, Raw, powered by Superfoods,  baptised by the anal absolution of frequent colonics.. or at least able to pull off a handstand outside a popular tourist destination and post it on facebook.

Those others, however, who have been shopping at Lululemon and iherb, subscribing to sites like www.silentfurnace.com and been ‘saved’ by wise entrepreneurial souls who you can trust with your creditcard online, or following closely the advice of sages like David Ike, and clearing all aliens and lizards out of their cupboards (imagine his own surprise, when after more than a decade as a whistle-blower of the alien-conspiracy he discovered this year that his own wife was a covert reptile from outerspace!), or stuffing their steel-enforced basements with survival gear, or fondling new pistols and saying to themselves that it is their duty to protect their wives and children against all enemies… and that enemies, in the End Days includes anybody hungry or scared or lost or singed and hounded by bloodthirsty cretins from outerspace. Anybody who might need help or shelter or food or a green smoothie is a dangerous enemy now that The End has arrived.

George Orwell could have just as easily set 1984 in a rural hamlet in remote South America, as in a bomb-racked London, it turns out.

So… Vilcabamba enjoys a wonky kinda peace at the end of this week, and Honey and I have decided that our own approach to the imminent ‘cleansing’ or cataclysmic embarrassment of those who have bought into the Armageddon story will be to wait it out in the hammock.

Though not technically an ideal environ for surviving holocaust, flood, thunderbolts or the ricocheting arrows fired by hysterical Americans who didn’t read the instructions with their band new $25 mailorder crossbows, we have found that the hammock is reliable and non-toxic repellent of most forms of bullshit, and an excellent vantage point for witnessing all sorts of intergalactic dramas… the birth of butterflies, fall of twigs, cascades of pollen from the wattle and bloodthirsty rampages of various flying things that hunt the human life-force and are not afraid of citronella.

We have agreed that it always wise to take out the garbage, and walked a bag of it into town through the lovely floral wilderness in which we await our fate. But have decided that we’d rather make pancakes than envision our own graves. We are grateful for every moment we are able to enjoy the humble pleasure of a gently swinging hammock, under a treefull of singing birds, and for the miracle of raindrops, which remind us that this is, afterall, a self-cleansing universe.