Practice

So I have been doing my Qi Kung practice for over a year now. Every morning for 15 minutes. This is the longest and best devotion i have given to a practice yet; and the rewards are overwhelming and obvious and completely worth the effort of the routine. And the kicker, is that I don't even know the whole cycle yet.
The particular set of exercises I am working with is called the 18 Lohan Hands. I learned 8 of them before leaving Gainesville, from the best sifu I've yet worked with, Anthony. I was sorry to have to leave in the middle of the set, but it hasn't stopped me from gaining a benefit; although I am now feeling somewhat lopsided or not well-rounded so I am thinking it is time to find a way to learn the rest of the set.

A couple of weeks ago I added a simple meditation to my routine in the mornings, shooting for 15 minutes of motionless. I experimented with different postures - doing the Qi Kung Tree posture, relaxed standing, chair sitting, etc. - but ended up back at the sitting zazen pose on two pillows. After feeling ease in the posture for 15 I started experimenting with the most suspension of motionlessness I could find, even to the point of not blinking, but that proved to be too much twitching motion. So I settled into closed eyes or half-open resting lids with relaxed blinking. The ease of settling into no-moving comes quickly for me as I relax into a Chi-breathing state of mind so that my breath is the bellows for all movement in my fleshbag.

From that I have proceeded to grow the sitting meditation into a full half hour. Thus far my favorite way of monitoring the time (since I have decided to not have a clock in my bedroom) is to listen to Fahrenheit Fair Enough, by Telephone Tel Aviv. I listen to it 4 times plus one verse to get to 30. Its a beautiful, melodic instrumental that also sounds as if it is reorganizing something mechanical, or squarish, in the background; perfect cleaning routine for the Mindlab.

Prana

There's something about waking up drunk at 11am, feeling a bout of panic and to alleviate it scribbling out a rent check and mailing it to a town two states away.  I am going to go do a headstand to Moby's 'Ambient.'

So that headstand turned into an hour and a half of yoga.  Had to switch from Moby to Art of Noise (Moments in Love is a secret place that only few know about).  The yoga was a payoff for all the years i've been working with my body to keep it bodying...it was the single greatest session of yoga i've ever done.  My psoas muscles released opening my hips and relaxing my pelvis.  I can't put into words how this makes me feel, its like receiving a new body, the sensation of the inner pelvis stretched apart what might not even be measurable in milllimeters and the consequences of my legs turning inwarder is so strengthening/releiving/releasing/refreshing that I walked around the house like David Bowie for half an hour rolling my femur balls in the hip sockets and feeling my pelvis work in symmetrical halves instead of as a fixed unit.  The sensation of my frontal groin bone being moveable is both eerie, for its sudden differentness, and like coming home.  

I laid in corpse pose for ten minutes, listening to Moments in Love again, breathing into my now-opener skeleton and the muscles all twisted around it.  Having received a most spectacular massage two days ago all my muslces were primed for this session of stretching.  The connection made obvious between the deepness into the core of my body and the awesome massage (i'll gladly recommend her if you ask me) has me pining for regular yoga instructed practice and more massages!  Also I can't help but notice this occurred on a day after a night of a good deal of alcohol, lets be honest, and how it acted like a dye put in the body sending toxic flashes where it was most concentrated, in those deep tight recesses, and that instigated me to want to move my consciousness deeper and deeper into my sensation, like scratching an itch.  

Having come out on the other side i'm in a post-elation downer, but am gonna keep moving towards the Stereolaboratory being constructed in the Variety Playhouse tonight.  This could make it into the Book of the Greatest of Days.

Mindlab is more than just experimental, its about results!

Just achieved a phenomenal feat of dexterity, and have blown my own mind in the process. After a deep 45minute Qi Kung session, i sat and started juggling to Dead Can Dance's - Into the Labryinth. I juggled the 3 yellow 'have a nice day' smiley-faced balls we got in Mindo, for 11 minutes. [End seriousness.]

Experiences in Buoyancy

The first time in the last decade found me floating freely in the ocean. I still don't float even with the salinity contributing its buoyancy beneath and along my spindly fleshings. I have to wave my legs along the currents, and arms when the swells come for my head. This unsettles me because I picture the afternoon sun and shade splattered across the sea, catching the lights as glitter on its rippled waters, scattering shine all around my silhouetted wafting - lazy along the swells. Even if I don't look tasty, sharks will often take a bite of something, and their amazing in-mouth receptors can analyze the basic nutriment content to determine whether it is worth eating before they even swallow it; hence many people get bit and survive because the sharks don't like what they taste. But it doesn't stop them from tasting.

The sharks never leave the rider's head.

Rising and dropping with the swellings breaking into waves somewhere behind my head direction releases my mind from its grasp on the sharks its inviviating, from the motions to keep my face in the air, lets go of the sunburn, saltburn and burning deep in the heart. Into these spaces wash the full sensation of buoyancy, and here not my heartlove, but the part of the body where it can touch the breeze and love the autumn chill, rises and falls into love with this deep sensation. The mind folds around closing the eyes, releasing that kind of hold on the world. Release.

I've held with many things over the life thus far: hands have held books - first true touch of love - and the eyes held in thrall of such mystery of words handed them to the heart and imagination. I've held music with my ears and my soul; it was my first contact with god and why i'm in this thing deep. I've not been able to set down things such as desire, facts, money, dreams and love all to different ends. So here i am asking the sea to hold me for the subtle thrill of floatingish. The oceanwater laps into my ears whispering of whence the blood of mine came and where i will return it to when its done with me.


Speaking of Blackness, we've tried the Mindfold in the sea, and the waves laughed it off our faces no matter our techniques; also it held saltwater in the eyepockets and that stings (so I am thinking to get a pair of goggles and painting them black).


El Capitan and I are now playing with the waves. Diving into body surfing or diving into the oncoming waves. It makes no difference as we are tossed about no matter which direction we flow. We refine a game which I will refer to as Dancing Foundation, and El Capitan calls Wave Bashing, and so go the techniques, where you must set one foot into the sand -- such a step for me to take thinking of all the creepy crawlies who undoubtedly drift on the fringes of land and sea above, surely a crab will think my foot appetizing -- and the rest of the body is free to move as wanted, but that one foot must stay in that place (pivoting is allowed). We stand on the edge of the invisible chain that jerks back on the waves, causing them to break and tumble over our miniscularity.

In the face of an oncoming wall of water I hear El Capitan holler to charge his ball of energy against the inevitable and as the wave tumbles me around my pivot foot but I hold my toehold in the sand and he's yelling the same when we can get our heads back out of the water, I breathe in the fresh air and the realization there is no way I could have experienced the expansion i've incorporealated in this Ecuadorian Escapade without being guided by a Rogue Therapist (stay tuned for variations on this theme).

Thank you El Capitan for your parts in this!

Piscean

...Beach of Canoa












[As I sit to write all this in my journal, I have put on this George Harrison album, Brainwashed, which I have never tasted, the first song has hooked me:
"If you don't know where you are going
Any road'll take you there"]

I headed into the ocean with my backpack and shirt and sunscreen underneath and stood for ten mental minutes at least, bandanna'd and all; allowing the motions of all other beachgoers to wash away from me as the waters waved across my ankles, slipping the sand out from under the feet and my heels sank into the sand much quicker than the fronts of my feet as I gave my time and legs to the sea. It lapped across my decisive steadfastness, sampled my flesh and footmind; things were whetted and wetted and like sinking into the sand, my mind sinks into my inclinations and past -- into my depths.

[As I am writing this in my journal, George Harrison is singing
"I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul
I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul

And I’ll be swimming until I can find those waters
That’s the one unbounded ocean of bliss
That’s flowing through your parents, sons and daughters
But still an easy thing for us to miss

Sometimes my life it feels like fiction
Some of the days it’s really quite serene
I’m a living proof of all life’s contradictions
One half’s going where the other half’s just been

I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul
I’m a Pisces fish and the river runs through my soul"]

The Ocean wants me Today, Mr. Waits.

I strip down to my swimmies, stow my pack and wade into the shallows. This is the smoothest beach i've been to, so few shells and rocks and things to confound my feet into feeling the old fears; feet, the awarest part of the Piscean body (Pisces signs: Sun, rising, Mercury and Venus...sorry I was late being born mom, but I had to time it right!) I dig deep into the stillness in my depths and see that under the crashing craziness of the uppermost ocean is a deep stillness I can feel with my feet. I lift them from the seabed with bouyancy and armstrokes. I speed the swimming as a wave comes at my face, and I dive down into the realm of Neptune's mysteries. Coming back up beyind the wave shows me an oceanfull of them. I start catching them with my body, kicking quickly to grab something beyond hold -- to be grabbed by the velocities of the waters caught up in the wave -- and am churned and flipped. My bouyancy acting as insitgator of lost upness. Not even the Mindfolding i've done has prepared me for this type of unseeing.

I have swallowed water many times, but this time was to the chagrin of my lungs and I had to take a breather from holding my breath. But, even with a stomach of salty waters I re-commit to riding The Waves with El Capitan coming into the water late in his latest shorts concoction of sewing the legs of his pants up underrolledneath. We fought the waves by standing strong and even punching palmfulls of energyballs into overhead crashing waters that could crush us at wrong angles. We body-surfed the flows, and many times I had to duck out early as I was too far up the crest of the wave for fear of going over with the foam, into the crashings. But this fear is a real, rational fear that I am kinesthetically determining in the moment; not the fear i've been carrying over the last 10 years or so...that of the Deeps as exhibited by me quavering at just the idea of frolicking in rivers and lakes even, let alone Mother Ocean, anywhere I could not see my feet, is the best way I can calssify it; imagining the beasties and creepy crawlie feelings to be snakes, nibbling animals and the most marvelous of all, Sharks. This was the way I both pushed away my Piscean nature and feared for its existence against the jaws of the deep.

I am floating on my back, laughing as a child- receiving flashes of my life's pleasures and committing a re-orientation of mind via this delicious Buoyancy, my body's disengaging from the gravity, even if ever so slightly and the power of the ocean's waves, goodness and my o my...
I have Rode the Shark into the deep beyond. My path is clear (not determined, but open), my self is reunified, my mind has folded and Grace is salty and floats me with immense swells where the sky opens up and drops away suddenly, and I shudder and sometimes there is a crash and I may get upended with sand in my caw; but I am healing in tune to the pulsings of the worldflow.

I felt little difference as the change occurred within me, because it wasn't an immediate flip of a switch, but the culmination of times spent, most recently with El Capitan Rogue Therapizing me into Mindfolding the falls of Mindo, the waves, the spent slick surfaces of bubbles finally making their energies' way to the shore of this beautiful town, to wash my feet, my piscean pleasure and pain of fear of the Ocean's deeps. My deeps getting released from the dam behind which i've trapped some of the more powerful methods of living I could incorporealate. The change completes into my soul. So the simple act of bringing this all into focus with the every of my senses brought my soul back to me. I find surprise in how recognizable this integration feels.


["You've got me between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" comes on David's ipod. George Harrison is in the room with me. This is beyond me. Even I am at awe at this concretization of thoughticles; and Teilhard de Chardin laughs from the corner of the Noosphere]


When we got back to David sitting by the coconut cart where they will hack a coconut to just the right spot where a straw can be stuck into the milkhole, 50 centavos for the freshest and most nutritious drink on earth, El Capitan saw he had missed a phone call on his cell so he needs to get his computer to the internet.

Later, at a beachfront 'staurant just behind the ramadas, my face burns, though the rest of me seems to have absorbed the sunblock properly. El Capitan is servicing a client in the States from an internet cafe just down the road from this beach. I am staring at this magnificent ocean that I have walked along a thousand times as a thousand different people, and here it is the same ocean as Always.

My's elf & mind & soul all folded together today.

We met in the waters of the Ecuadorian pacific and put the past behind me. For so long now i've proclaimed my greatest fear to be Sharks and the devils of the deep blue sea; in fact many times i've said it is my Only Fear.
So if i've broken through this fear...will others rush in to fill me?
Am I washed free of fear?
Is my acceptance of the world's deep an increase of the complexity of integration into the psychic matrix of Being nearering my soul to the centrality of eternal Love and heartRending bliss through the immersion in the fires of my own fear?
Will this meta-fear, into which I've poured all my urgings away-from-harm, burst open as a pinata and scatter all the little fearlings of my soul into the world again?

I care not as I am with the Sea again.


[a note on the usage of the word Psyche (and its derivatives such as Psychic or other words I makeupify using it as the root)
"The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends."--CG Jung
"The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality. . . . Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'"--CG Jung
Just so you know I'm not talking about mind-reading...more like Mindfulliving]

Manta in the Morning

[Insert gratuitous awesome photo of self El Capitan took in Quito at the International Phenomenon called Shooters.]

El Capitan and I are on the bus to Bahia waiting for it to leave the gate. We've been here for 1/2 hour between buses and i'm strung out from riding the sharkbus all night without even knowing we had gotten on it.

It all started at the Quito station when I was concerned my big bag would not make it into the luggage storage so I kept pestering the employees for to stow my luggage. It was finally time and as retribution for me being a worried gringo making their midnight shift that much more buggy, they had me carry my own bag from where they had set it down earlier and stow it myself. Fine, so long as it is on the same bus as I am.

We all clamored on the bus and organized into assigned seats. El Capitan is saying "this is the nicest bus i've been on in Ecuador, i feel funny," as he is maneuvering his carry-on bag so the juice in one mesh pocket and the vodka in the other side's mesh pocket won't slide out over the 9 hour ride. I got the window this time, and since we are driving all night, its not for the scenery, but to lean up against while sleeping; we try the seats reclining and they lie almost completely flat, so sleeping appears it will be much easier to achieve than i had first feared.
[I am in a place called the Surf Shack, where i can get both coffee & whiskey and internet along with breakfast. There are a couple townies working the place, cooking my sausage and eggs, and smoking and singing with the Beatles; one gringo just walked in with a waterproof ipod and grabbed his surf board that was sitting against the wall behind me. Almost unplugged my laptop with one of the fins. He turned to apologize and saw my face below the bandanna and realized that I was pretty easygoing. His smile turned to a laugh as he saw the half-finished whiskey shot yet to be poured into the coffee. Pretty neat town. Let's get back on the bus...]

I get to situating ipod, in the left pocket, thread the phones under the warming shirt and up to the ear holes, bandanna off-gulp-because the knot presses into the back of my head so i can't lay back, Mindfold onto the forehead, 2.5mg of Melatonin sublingual under the tongue and curl up El Capitan's sweater into a tube to be my neck pillow so the head doesn't roll with every bump and turn, I slip my earplugs into my right pocket, next to the change purse, for ease of access if the ipod doesn't work its minimagic.

Selecting the pre-made Chill playlist of Eno's smoothest, The Habibiyya, Moby's Ambient and the like, I find that the most relaxing of these sounds have no way to drown out the roar of the bus engine which, even though these windows don't open, roars and rumbles into my ears past the phones and garbling the fragile ambient musics of my favorites. So I crank up the volume, which is a paradox to the floaty sounds drifting among my ears.

This is working for the first short while until we pass the city toll booth and exit Quito, where the television comes on and without lifting my fold I determine it is some sort of Knight Riderish action flick that contains untold thrilling car chase scenes judging by the routine tire squeals and minimal dialogue I can't make out, or truly, don't want to pay any attention to; focusing the slivers of my mind that are still awake towards the magic album "If Man but Knew" which I have moved onto infinite looping. The mideastern acoustic has enough waves of sound to pierce thru the surrounding rumbles enough to make it followable thru the night's churning sonic juttings from the beast's engine, brakes and televised inanity. I settle into the slow groove they are digging out of the communal psyche's malleable thoughtstuff; I let my eyes weigh heavier and heavier.

But the action flick is stunning me at intermittent blasts and I am forced to turn the tunes up again. El Capitan is back from trying to take the empty pair of seats behind us when we stop outside of town for the last batch of riders. So we're back to bumping elbows and knees. I can tell we leave the paved road when the bus - heavier than my last mental image of God - is hopping along the riveted road as if we were on the moguled slopes of the Andes, not the muddy roads. Its all downhill from Quito's 9500' to the port city. The momentum behind us makes the curves around the mountain sides full with gravitation. With the switchbacks hidden from us riders by the driver's cabwall, the movements occur as sudden jerks and we are all swaying in our varieties of sleep. I am teetering with a feather's smoothness on the edge of dreamdom so i don't want to tense to fight the convoluted spirals we take around these mountainsides. I suggest to the mind awake that we are on a roller coaster and letting my body go limp around the center of my being is the interest gathered from all the Chi work i've invested into me.

The melatonin is kicking in and my brain thinks my brain is telling my brain its time for my brain's thoughtwaves to settle into sleep sinking synchronization into the spaces of time being taken to arrive each swerve of the bus at its condition of physicality, the feelings become less and thicker, slower. Adjusting the ipod brought a second trickle of sense into curve with the bus' swervature helping to line mind with the body's predicament.

Walking the line between waking and sleep for 7 clock hours means i have been absorbing the Habibiyya's one album something like ten times through. A fleeting connection between this notion and the time mother walked in on her teenage son lying asleepish on his bedroom floor with White Rabbit on repeat, and her illustrating confusion at my preferences and my confusion from being roused by the outside world from my inner respite merged into that oddness where one can't follow another into Life -- swings the line i'm walking like a tightrope into awareness. Sensations come rushing in to fill the higher crest of brainwareness amplitude with swimming, swaying sensations, but overall the total darkness held deeper sway. Changing from The Habibiyya to Songs of Green Pheasant (as introduced to me by the Illuminated Mar-Mar), though it lasted only a single listen through after the sweet sublimation of drone of the lasting night that Man almost Knew settled the curves into the brain's creases. I needed an album that was entrancing enough to drift sleep along this rocky road but sharp enough to cut through the myriad of busship noises as we rolled thru the moon's night. The answer came from the Deep Forest. First of the glorious albums of my musical youth. My original Morpheus.

Awakening in a foreign town after an entire night of off-road bussing up and down the Andes just short of the ocean was one of the least noticeable most extreme experiences i've had.

Las Cascadas

(Yáll will have to forgive me, this computer is not fast enough to upload the mentioned videos here...i´ll get to it soon, but here are some photos to hold you over)


Rogue Cascadas Therapy
Mostly I want to let these videos speak for themselves. But the backstory is that we came upon the waterfalls when a few other sets of folks were already there. These videos were taken in the lower, smaller falls where the forces in the water were still extreme enough to pull you around. And what you can't see is that the riverbed went from golf ball sized stones that supported your weight to a fine sand that your foot would sink to the ankle making movement into the swirl that much harder. [video me] Now what you have just witnessed was more than just the first ever Mindfolding of Mindo's Las Cascadas, but you actually took part in a bit of Rogue Therapy, whether intending to or not, because I was facing a subset of my biggest fear ever: Sharks, and the subset being, things-that-touch-your-feet-when-they-are-underwater-and-i-can't-see-them-anymore. But in its own way, the Mindfold made facing my fear easier, because trying to walk through a whirlpool to touch a waterfall when you can't see anything makes the whole experience enormous and easily fearable so i didn't focus on the minor more irrational fear, I had to wade through the big fear.


El Capitan makes it look easy...[video]
We played in the bottom pool for a bit, waiting for the groups up there to disperse. Then we cimbed this rope up a rock about 20 ft at an enormous incline. I used mostly my arms as I couldn't trust my feet with the slipperiness of the thin layer of moss that grew in the waterfall's spray area. Once we got up to the pool of the major falls, pictures became useless because the falls had actually carved out a chamber over the aeons, and to get to them took two freeswinging cable bridges to get across the whitewater between the two falls. Then we had to strip down to our swimsuits and leave the backpack (and camera) to traverse the narrow channel where the river had let itself out of the enormous cylinder its waterfall is pouring through. The waterlevel went from ankle deep to swimming in moments. We had to work for every stroke forward, and the sound got so that we had to yell next to each other. The air was filled with water, the most pregnant cloud, almost unbreathable as the foam churned feet over the water. We sidestepped the frontal foamage and worked around to a nook that took climbing up slimy rocks, not even thick moss could withstand the constant barrage in here, to sit in the crevice; egg-shaped and 15 feet tall it must have been caused by a waterfall of floodwaters 50 times the fall's current size. It was exactly the type of nook Golum[sp?] would talk to himself in. I tried to swim from the side into the waterfall, but got to shivering uncontrolably from all this time in the cold waters and I didn't trust my strength once I got into the outer waves of foamy waters. But El Capitan went back to my bag with me and took my Mindfold and went until he was swimming and put it on and then swam into the churning of the waterfall. "I imagined myself in a galactic vortex where time was sped up to the point that stars were going thru their life cycles in moments. I was wading thru the fabric of time and space and the closer I got to the central black hole, the more violent the churning of space all around me." Spoken like a true mindfolder.

Las Cascadas were mesmerizing and we wished we didn't have to go, but the last run of the Tarabita was at 4 and we didn't want to miss it and get stranded. We did the hike back up and it started raining. I bundled into my rain jacket which became immeasurably useful going out into the open sky in the middle of the Cloud Forest and speeding thru the open sky at 15 mph and the rain is coming in sheets. A miracle of physics allowed me hunching over in a ball with my back to the direction we were going effectively shielded my legs from any rain at all and me, my backpack and pants stayed 95% dry. This proved more important since we were going to wait with the Tarabita drivers to give us a ride down the mountain. But it ended up that the drivers believed not everyone had come back by 4. We waited for 45 minutes until the drivers gave up on waiting and shut the thing down. We headed down just hoping the fellows had made it back across and the drivers had just not recalled.


Shark Surfing
As we were in the back of the truck, heading down the potholefull road, in the Cloud Forest's not-really-rain it quickly became hard to hold onto the roll bar in the back of the truck; and doubly so when the Mindfold came out. The Seer had to call out branches of overhanging trees to duck from as well as just having to hold on at every bump you can't see to predict. We decided to move past the Mindfold quickly and into a branch of Shark Riding that we came to call Surfing the Shark. In a full standing position we let our hands hover an inch from the roll bar so that we could grab it at any moment but other than our feet, didn't touch the truck. Rolling at about 15 mph we could do this for a good thirty seconds at a time until we hit a turn that was too tight, or a hole too big, so that we would grab the roll bar and steady. After a bit of this we started working with our central Chi energy in ball form spinning it like a gyroscope to keep in constant, flux of balance with the rolling truck. Speed, rain, washed clean in a waterfall and Minfoldsplorations of the day got us in the high-sped giddiness where we were yelling about the spinning ball of Chi invisible but tangible in our hands and hollering like on a rollercoaster, until we heard laughing behind us and we turned to see another truck full of folks watching our antics of balancing and losing it and laughing uncontrolably. The Cloud Forest had descended upon us all.

Tuesday

Last night I left El Capitan's favorite barro, Shooters, after just the second drink of the day. Felt weird, hazy and weak but not sleepy tired and my digestion will not stop bubbling away all this took me home early. Fearing the worst i took the roundabout way to the hostel so i could both avoid the dangerous night streets and get myself some Bismutol.

The store clerk said something too fast thru the iron gate the transaction was taking place between. "Two dolares somethingsomething" So I held out my hand full of change and she took five 50 centavo pieces and gave me the pink bottle and a few pennies.

The currency here is the US$ all bills are the exact same as the stateside, but you can only break $20's in American-catering or very large establishments, wish I had known that before I came down! Oh and casinos are glad to take your 20's. The coinage is a mix of the US and Ecuadorian, though they are the same size and weight and would work in either country's vending machines.

So I got back to the room and am feeling much better the Bismutol remains unopened and I am asleep by 1am. I sleep thru 11am thanks to the Mindfold and earplugs. I hopped out of bed with a mind full of "Super Trooper" by ABBA, and a body moving nowhere that speed. I play the song on my ipod as I fall into my Qi Gung routine. El Capitan is hunched over his swarm of cables, drives and computerations. My routine consists of slow, intentional movements accompanied by a deep breathing. As I was moving through the postures I found the breath lacking as if i was breathing empty air. I had to tone it down and finished off the set with a refreshed body and woozy head.

I pack my day bag for a trek around the New Town section of Quito but that additional moving around completely took my body by surprise and I started getting the spotty, flashy light flickering seen in the eyes and felt in the head like a mix of brain cotton and unexpected levitation.

So I lay down. I let El Capitan go towards internetting and I take to breathing. Breathing. Deep and long and counting from Zero to One hundred and back down in Espanol. This took a long time so that I caught my breath. The nausea faded and my head settled back into my neck.

I must have trundled along the edge of conscious passing out for a good 20 minutes but came out in the end. Fascinating feeling if not for the slight suffocation I had to breathe past. So it looks like I'm going to need to be aware to breathe more over the next few days.

All this is so very weird because I have walked miles around Quito and never felt out of breath.

The best news of the day (beyond Super Trooper in my mente) is that I am still hungry and everythings coming out alright. I have a water filter (REI) that is actually a ceramic filter with holes smaller than parasites (I hope). I have filtered a few batches of tap water with it and that's been fine. But I do shower and brush teeth with it straight which i feel is a good first step into assimilating whatever organisms might be foreign to me in the water, because once we venture out of the city the water quality will only get worse.