2 Keluchod 

THE SMELL OF JASMINE was heavy as they approached the little cabin. It sat on the river’s edge not more than 500 yards from Teddy’s. Ziggy swore he saw an alligator as they approached the cabin, but he knew he was mistaken so he said nothing to Kono. The boy had called his cousin a gringet … Armun, he said, was a half-breed. Her father, Tom, was a gringo and her mother, Kono’s aunt Luz Clara (Clear Light), was a Machi, the spiritual leader of the Mapuche in this area. “She danced like the wind,” Kono had said.

The door opened. He hoped he had not said it out loud, but he was afraid he had. (By the giggles coming from Kono standing beside him, he was almost sure he had.) “Oh My God, Wow,” was what he had hoped he had only been thinking. Armun smiled … and he felt as if he was standing at the doorstep of his favorite childhood playmate, the one he always fantasized about, the little girl he did everything with and whom he trusted completely with all his deepest secrets. But this was no little girl … this was heaven on earth. This was what his father must have meant when he talked of his mother: “When I first met your mother, my heart stopped. I knew at that moment that nothing on earth could keep me from being with her forever. That was the day we moved in together because, thank God, your mother felt it too, even more than I did.”

            “Hello, Kono, who is your friend?”

            “This is Thiggy.” (They spoke in English.) “He is a gringo like you. Papa ask me to bring him here to meet you.”

            The young man was surprised at how well Kono spoke English.

            “Come in I’ve just put on some tea.”

            Armun’s voice penetrated Ziggy’s soul. She was a creature of light. He felt his highest joy just standing in her presence.

“Tea is for girls and gringos. My friends are waiting to go swimming, I have to go,” and turned to run.

“Kono,” she said with firmness. He stopped in his tracks. “Where’s my kiss?”

Kono looked like he was about to be tortured. (Ziggy just wanted to take his place.) After giving and receiving his peck on the cheek, he scurried off.

            “Would you like some tea Thiggy?”

            He could not correct her. Stepping inside he felt he had just slipped on a pair of heavily tinted sunglasses. The house was ablaze in orange from the sun reflecting through the orange window panes surrounding the very modern-looking French doors which opened to a plant-filled patio out back. The color also came from the simple furnishings throughout the cabin. The orange he saw warmed him.

            Armun headed for the kitchen and all he could do was shake his head as he admired her from behind. It was clear she worked out or danced or did something athletic to have a body as hot-looking and strong as this.

            “Like a flower waiting to bloom, like a light bulb in a darkened room, I’m just sitting here waiting for you to turn me on.” He now heard his favorite artist, Nora Jones, singing a song that had a habit of sticking in his head called “Turn Me On,” which was playing on the small CD player sitting beside the couch―not that Ziggy wasn’t feeling enough sexual energy already. “This just couldn’t get any better,” he thought, and then it did. Armun, turning quickly, caught him looking at what she considered to be her best asset.

            “Would you like to dance?”

            He smiled … there was nothing he wanted more. In his arms he could almost feel her heart beating, smell her sensuality, feel his own blood racing through his veins. He had never been so turned on in his life, yet this was somehow different, he did not know how, and then she said it:

            “I’ve been waiting my whole life to feel this, my mother always talked about it but I thought it was just talk. I feel funny for saying this but I don’t ever want to stop feeling you.”

            Their embrace tightened.  She sang along as they slow danced … “Like a desert waiting for the rain, like a schoolgirl waiting for the spring, I’m just sitting here waiting for you to come on home and turn me on.”

            It could have been hours they danced. He lost track of time. Outside it grew dark but inside her light kept him warm. She lit what seemed like hundreds of orange candles. His father used to say when asked, “What do you do for a living?” “I’m a candlestick maker.” He burned so many candles that as a young boy, Ziggy had become a candle stick maker’s apprentice as he and his father turned out colored candles in the little shed they had in back of their cabin.

            They talked about her father, Tom, an American who came to Chile after a premonition that thousands were going to die in an Oriental war, a foretelling of Vietnam. Ziggy then told Armun of a premonition his father had experienced just before he left home―that he saw thousands dying in a holy war waged on North American soil.  He saw a mass exodus as millions and millions fled south to avoid the death and destruction. (From what they had seen in Costa Rica it had already begun. Eighty thousand gringos were living there by 2005 and this was 2007. There were definitely more Americans on the streets of nearby Pucon. Ziggy hoped they did not do to Chile what he had seen done to Costa Rica.

            Armun continued, saying Tom had come after Ruka Pallin, in his anger over the cutting of the old Araucaria trees had dropped the “Corral De Aqua” from its towering height of ninety feet, to it’s current height of thirty feet in a great earthquake. It was said that Ruka Pallin lived in the volcano and he controlled all natural disasters. They said he kept his horse at the Corral and when the wind blew through the canyon, you could see his horse’s tail dancing in the 250-meter waterfall that fell from the cliffs above the Corral. Her eyes grew intense as she talked on, telling how locals said the roar before the quake was so loud from the water falling into the Corral that you could not hear yourself if you were within 100 yards.” She talked about the week she and her father had been camping at the base and how the roar stayed with her for days after leaving.

            Armun’s father had played a big part in the stopping of the cutting of the old growths. He waged a one-man war on the logging industry, and in time the Mapuche warriors joined him because their respect for Luz Clara, whom he married, helped bond them. She talked about the suspicion the Mapuche have for foreigners, dating back to the Spanish occupation. At first the Spanish said they were there to help, and then the killing started and the warriors took up arms to defend their people.

            Ziggy told her about his father’s organization, called H.E.A.L. (Heal Earth And Life), and when he began doing business people called him “Johnny Apple Seed.” Armun gave him a look indicating he should tell her the story later. His father’s mission in life, he quickly said, was to put a billion trees back on the planet. When she talked about her mother and her dancing, he thought about how much their families were alike and then how different they were. Looking at her in the candlelight, he saw his mother, his sister, and his wife. He felt like maybe, in other lifetimes, she had been all of these. She proudly said she was just finishing her masters degree in native dance and her courses in body-massage at the University in Santiago. Quietly she took his hand, looked into his eyes and softly told him that tomorrow she must take a bus to Santiago for her finals, and though she would love for him to come with her because she didn’t ever want to leave him, my spirit guide, “Ko” (Water), keeps telling her to “let him continue his quest to meet Ruka Pallin at the ‘Corral De Aqua’ … he will find answers there to help you both.”

She began preparing tea and removed a bright orange cloth from a jar on the counter and poured its golden contents a teapot. When they finished their small ceremony, she joyfully removed his shirt and pushed him to the floor. Her hands moved over his body and, as if guided by God, her skillful fingers released all his stress points and healed his tired body. Though aroused, he felt …

She whispered in his ear, finishing his thoughts: “I feel tonight that we have our whole life time for making love. But now, I just want to give you pleasure.” And it certainly was pleasure, this caressing of his body. She gave him pleasure as she danced for him, she nourished him as she cooked for him and fed him. He had never had so much pleasure at one time in one night. He was so happy. He knew it would continue when she returned from the university. As for him, Geronimo, too, had told him, that he must finish his journey to the Corral alone. His future was uncertain, but he felt he could handle anything with her now at his side. Little did he know how much he would be tested by that conviction.

            They slept in each other’s arms and in the morning she cooked for him and they said their goodbyes. They planned to meet at the bus station in town on her return. She said she would stop by her good friend Eloy’s, to let him know he (Ziggy) was fine, still headed for the Corral and it might take a night or two more. She asked him to stop just up river at her mother’s friend’s little yellow house to pick up some special herbs from Florencia. At last they kissed and when she looked up at him, she whispered, “I will carry you in my heart I will breathe you every morning in my meditations. I will always love you.”

            He felt “home.”

            As he walked north, Ziggy could not stop smiling. He thought of something his father had told him, as he was leaving―“Every once in a great while, God opens the door into your life and you get a glimpse of your future and what might lie ahead. Two roads you will see there, one filled with happiness and contentment and the other with chaos. It’s not an easy choice to step through the obstacles to happiness―the fears of your unworthiness surround you.  However, if you believe in yourself and trust your decisions in life, when you step through that door, God rewards you for being so bold as to believe in your ability to manifest all the great things you desire. At the moment you step through, He gives them all to you.”

            Ziggy thanked God and he thanked his father―because when he moved to Chile, for the first time in his short, short life, he had found the courage to shove that door open and step through.

 Next lesson  Chod-Yellow Chakra