The Jade Emperor calls upon you for leadership. Overcome barriers, fuse ambitions with virtue. Employ power with honor and wisdom. Move forward with unstoppable momentum.
The Tao. Ruler of Heaven and Hell
These long months of silence were spent facing inevitable things. More so than ever before, I find the sentimental lessons I was required to learn flowing back into my consciousness. I wanted to share those lessons with you, but struggle to find relevance that one can use. Never the less, here is the continuation of my journey sewn into a small, but important part of my experience.
***
Anne led our safari along the narrow path I had earlier used to find the village; she walked slowly with a heavy load of supplies. Pete walked as close to her as possible, his woven basket of tools clanked together like chimes horribly out of tune. I watched his mouth from the back of the column, filling Anne with soothing advice, which she ignored with a smile and occasional nod.
The villagers carried more supplies and tools. In the back with me were diminutive men, their reed cages containing several small ducks, chickens, and two piglets squealing the whole way like a child with a loaded diaper and hungry as hell. I carried more tools, wire, and nails, to construct what I thought would be a primitive shelter where we would do mortal combat with the elements and insects.
I was wrong; about everything. Pete turned out to be a sincere confidant to Anne and a good friend to me. His role as a sneaky assassin never materialized. Anne was not a government botanist here to entrap me in my subterfuge. She was a remarkable person in every way and after many months in the jungle, she was a goddess to me. Pete was infatuated with her, but needed to protect his ego with care. He always tried to lead our little threesome in the jungle and Anne allowed him every indulgence except sex, which Pete could not understand. She nurtured her errant knight with food, kindness, and gentle but bloody effective persuasion.
After several months we had a run with some kind of flu. First Anne went down and delirious with fever, she still managed to lead me into the jungle to harvest several plants. She crushed up the plants and added them in a bowl with boiling water and then with a scarf over her head, she leaned over the steam and breathed in the vapor. She went back to work the next day even though I could see the pain in her eyes. She finally allowed me to give her some meds to ease her pain. She continued with her herbal remedies and was soon good as new, then I got sick. Rinse – repeat.
When Pete got sick, he refused to let it hold him back and continued to work hard in the camp until he passed out and fell into the small pond we made and nearly drowned. He also hit his head on the rocks and had a nasty gash on his forehead. I was able to fish him out and get him breathing on his own again. While he was out with fever, I sewed up his forehead and bandaged it. What took him out was the advanced pneumonia and the cut getting infected. Anne pretty much saved him with her natural approach but it wasn’t enough. Pete was dying.
I bound Pete to my back with his legs and arms bound around me like one would carry a large animal out of the woods. Anne went with me to help. We hiked all day in the heat, and I was getting heat stroke, which made me ornery and more determined to get Pete out to a hospital. Anne wet rags and kept them on our heads, we drank from our meager canteens, ate dried plums for energy and trudged on. When we got to the main path that led to the village, a young man came by with a bicycle built to carry loads of goods from the mountains down to the market in the valley. He was headed home after making his deliveries.
This guy never asked any questions. Anne begged him to take Pete down to the medical clinic and he took one look at Pete and agreed. We tied Pete up on the rack in a sitting position with his arms bound around the seat post and off they went back down the mountain on the other side. I never forget how Pete’s head fell back and rolled, his eyes firmly up and only the bloodshot white of his eyes showing. I had tears in my eyes, Anne hugged me and we both cried as our companion disappeared down the trail. We never saw him again.
It was just Anne and I now. The two of us had a peaceful nature and we continued our work, building the camp into a full service way station that would serve others long after we were gone. Anne would stay at the camp and tend the gardens and animals. We had arrived at self sufficiency through Ann’s vast knowledge of building infrastructure, growing food, and animal husbandry. Having grown up on family farms in Florida, Anne’s world made a lot of sense to me.
Once a day, usually when things were most active in the valley, I would go to my observation post and watch how things unfolded below. The valley was an immense rubber farm up the river as far as I could see and I could see a lot. Directly below was the market where everyone came to sell whatever they had available to sale. Nothing appeared to be unusual and I began to focus more on Anne’s success at farming.
I took notes on how she built the beds for vegetables, created lattice fences to keep out all her little raiders, and created hedges with flowers and ornamentals that repelled bugs, and ground up plants that made an excellent ground cover and also discouraged underground pests that like roots in their diet. This became the real news in this survey for Western investment. We created a little paradise cottage that looked like a master’s class in zen gardening.
The first three months established an enclosed house of bamboo and woven palm fronds that was completely enclosed, wind and water proof, and could have the upper half of the exterior walls opened to allow ventilation. We built a water cistern, shelters for our animals, and used an old generator powered by a paddle wheel turned by the water flow from a spillway. We had lights in the hut and could run other water pumps and a small homemade silage grinder. Our toilet was a good ole Western style outhouse far enough away to avoid any unpleasantness.
The two dams we built to create a small pond in the stream next to the hut was the hardest work and took the longest. We caught fish and put them in the pond and the ducks spent a large part of their day quacking around in the water. The construction never ended. There was always something to build and something to repair but it wasn’t stressful work.
We tended the gardens and fed the animals daily establishing a routine for everything living and flowing in our domain. Anne brought back two dogs and two cats and the animal kingdom in our paradise in the mountains stayed pretty active. The pigs and dogs thought they were cousins and got along great. The cats pretended to hunt them all down and pounced on the animals regularly and also got their asses beat by their prey pretty regularly too. I noticed animals love to play but if someone wants to stop, they tend to make their point in a dramatic way. Anne loved them all.
Looking back, I remember we built everything with reclaimed used parts and hand-made building materials from local resources. We generally required almost no resupply once we were in total production. This was not what I thought we would be doing. Anne had arrived the first day with a plan, and we all got to work clearing the land and digging out the clay bank next to the stream. She had a vision from day one, and her concept evolved each day as she saw the progress and what needed to be done next.
She kept everything in her head and her only expression of leadership was to gain our confidence that she knew what she was doing and we could trust her. Eventually I was her only farm hand but she never approached me from a position of superiority or authority. Her leadership style was to talk very little and let us see where we could be most productive by pitching in to help or going off to collect bamboo while the others wove the stripped down pieces into a fibrous rope or what ever final product was needed.
Ann’s compassion was genuine, and her gentle nature hid a supreme intellect. It can get uncomfortably cold during the rainy season, so we slept together to stay warm. The intimacy of human contact and our playful nature allowed for many hours of thriving in each other’s company. The boundaries of social norms and cultures drifted away in our private world. We created a culture that bonded us together stronger than family or marriage. It was a bond of survival, a necessity held together with a balance of mental, physical, and spiritual intimacy that transcended anything we had ever known.
We went back to the village once and the women all gathered around and felt her stomach and clucked in disapproval. Anne’s embarrassment was evident and then they all stared at me like I had farted during tribal counsel. I later found out that they assumed we were going to live as a family and raise children. They wanted the children now and I was running behind in their schedule for Tribal growth. Now my face was red.
Anne and I knew I wasn’t staying and she was abandoned once, she could not bare being abandoned again. We had an agreement that we would live today and there would be no plans for a future. It was a lesson in releasing expectations and never feeling disappointment or regret. There is more, much more, and I’ll be back to tell you.
Hyperion Sky 
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