Kiss the Sunset Pig by Laurie Gough

Author:Laurie Gough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

Chapter 12

My sister and I have two different versions of that Jamaica trip: she saw it as her dangerous brush with the Third World, her near-death experience, her insight into how reckless her little sister is, while I saw it as the trip that contained the trip of a lifetime. Since that January night on the Jamaican beach all those years ago, I’ve never looked at the world in the same way, always knowing somewhere at the very back of my mind that everyday reality is just a drop in the ocean of all there is, and if I really want to see more of my world, I have to hit a stop button, go into slow motion, and start looking around. Although it’s always astonishing what I find that way, it’s never quite the same as under the influence of those hallucinogenic plants. I do believe that Rastafarian man was right when he said those plants are here for a purpose.

Other than a wild drug trip, my Jamaica vacation was another of my youthful epic journeys where I found myself in direct contact with human happiness, like that night walking back along the road after Melba had danced in the bar. I was good at finding that back then. Is it just easier to find in your twenties?

I’m hoping to find it again in California.

I saw the world through a child’s eyes after eating that ganja cake but, strangely, this is also the way I often see the world while travelling, just not to that extreme. When you travel your senses are fully open like a child’s, especially when everything you come across is brand new, demanding all your focused attention. Time slows down, stretches, as everything takes on an added clarity, a depth, with colours brighter and landscapes more vivid. This is how things seemed to me that night in Jamaica, but many times I’ve felt something close to this unaided by hallucinogens: in the desert of Morocco; in the Sumatran jungle, floating over the coral reef in Fiji, times where I was fully immersed in a single moment, where the whole universe seemed to be contained in a single place, and I was taking it all in. These moments have seemed timeless, richer and more vibrant than routine moments in daily life, and always contain a contented knowledge that life is sublime. They’ve also stirred something inside me that seems oddly familiar, something I must have felt a long time ago. I’m just not sure when.

I’m travelling at this moment so should be taking it all in, these new surroundings, but this is a little difficult to do driving through the suburbs. Actually, as I drive around Fort Collins on the way to my sister’s place, I can’t help thinking of the future, of California. I wonder if my love of California is like a drug-induced vision. Will I wake up one morning after a few years of living there and think that the greens aren’t so

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