#travel

Could Life’s True Calling Be Life Itself?

#adventure, #alternative lifestyle, #Brazil, adventure, Brazil, Latin America, Lifestyle, natural philosophy, South America

Fretting the whole weekend about this and that, I found myself facing down that age-old question: do each of us have a true life’s calling? If so, what is mine? And while I’m on the subject, is there an upper age bracket beyond which the only calling you’re ever going to get is from the archangel Gabriel to notify you the Big Man is tapping his sandalled feet impatiently at the pearly gates?

I’m 51. Does that place me in that liminal space between youthful optimism and senescent dread? And anyway, aren’t callings for the ocularly able, who tend to be young and sharp enough to hear their future purpose drop like a pin before their quivering feet? Not like we mid-lifers, lugs clogged with 50 years of bullshit curdled with earwax. Ask any self-respecting 60-something and they’ll tell you that by the seventh decade of life a man’s true calling is the bathroom, given that the old bladder is becoming compromised by the ever-expanding prostate tucked under it.

Callings schmallings! You’re never too old to grow bold. In Scotland, never too auld to grow bald. History is littered with stories of now-forgotten legends who reinvented themselves while their contemporaries were busy nursing their grandchildren while their sons were dying on a foreign field for some megalomaniacal noble, and their daughters had already bled out in a dead pool of childbirth.

I am unreliably informed that 50 is the new 40, 40 is the new 30, and anything under that age is not worth exalting because for that you’d need to qualify as either Gen-Zedder or New-Millennial, and we all know that their idea of a true calling will trend anytime soon on Instagram. Likes are callings in and of themselves. The sooner we tiresome analogues realise that callings happen online, the better.

My hippocampus doing backward spooling all the way to the source of my weekend existential nail-biting, i found myself back in 1990 lamenting my choice of first undergraduate degree. Back then, the 60’s still reverberated through our Liberal Arts and Social Sciences curriculum with a modicum of respectability long eclipsed by today’s neurotic climate of S.T.E.M.. Don’t knock a good acronym when it makes POTUS declare one SNAFU too many. If you ain’t on board with coding, computational mathematics and the suffocating empirics of big data, you’re not worth the paper you are written on (or not, as paper is so 20th century). Back then, you didn’t have to be a loser with a capital L emblazoned across your forehead. Aspiring to become rounded in one’s repository of knowledge – a generalist as opposed to a specialist – was seen as, if not quite a conduit to becoming an all-round more complete human being, and therefore of the highest utilitarian value, then more or less acceptable. The trouble was, for us generalists the whole notion of a singular calling in life was kind of postponed indefinitely. Some felt the epiphany of true calling a few years later, while the rest of us went into teaching.

But I digress. I entered the weekend gnawing fingernails and bemoaning the absence of a true calling. (Or perhaps bemoaning my lack of perseverance. Some years before, I did find my calling but couldn’t stick at it long enough to monetise it because I was so distracted with serial callings, usually taking off on a big adventure somewhere in the world.) But where there’s a foreground of sorrow and self-pity, there’s also a background of various hues. Some either 1) reassuringly familiar or 2) depressingly familiar; others either 3) shockingly unfamiliar or 4) spectacularly unfamiliar. Was this trip a 4 in the making? So, there we were, motoring out of Säo Paulo en route to the Costa Verde (Green Coast), on Säo Paulo’s Litoral Norte.

The voyage starts in the dense concrete undergrowth of inner-city Säo Paulo. Being the world’s 4th largest metropolis and spilling forth outward in a haphazard forest of 20-storey tower blocks, barred street frontages, impromptu favelas, and shacks for the destitute erected in the central reservations of multi-lane highways choked with cars, it’s impossible to know where the inner city ends and the outer suburbs begin. First the unwary foreigner must escape a road system designed by 1960s civil engineers who, judging by the asphalt layout, were tripping on wachuma and ayahuasca over their draughtsman boards.

South America’s biggest urban sprawl is indeed a nightmare from which to escape but, once free of its insane hold, the surrounding countryside is a joy to behold. And on that ribbonous Rio highway that meets with the road that runs up and over the Serra of the Atlantic rainforest and down to the green and sumptuous coast of Säo Paulo state, my life’s calling started to take a weird and wonderful form. The rolling hills and fat, old Capricorn sun going down. The termite hills erupting on steep, grassy knolls like molehills from another dimension. The music. The light. The prospect of new horizons. Old memories to rekindle from the last visit to Brazil; new memories to forge.

And on that road through that cloud forest – roadsigns of capybaras, sloths and vipers reminding reckless drivers that the world is still hiding mystery and magic – that opened onto panoramas of steaming paradise it struck me like a lightning bolt from one of Brazil’s epic summer electrical storms: maybe my life’s true calling is life itself. Real living has nothing to do with science. It’s art all that way.

end.

Socorro Answers a Cry for Help.

#Brazil, Brazil, Säo Paulo, Socorro, South America, Travel, travelogue

Made ancient by granitic bedrock jutting through in megalithic outcrops, while at the same time made new by the accelerated growth rate of vegetation rampaging over every sod of this Capricorn earth, the topography takes a sideways glance at normality. It’s a split personality of rural France and equatorial South America: piebald cows grazing upland pastures that border dense strips of Atlantic rainforest. Nobbled hilltops, a punk mohican of Atlantic rainforest on one flank, scalped green on the other. If ever Gondwana had an affair with Occitanie, the hills around Socorro is where the child was raised.

There’s nothing quite like a great view to soothe frayed nerves. We left the madhouse of Säo Paulo later than expected on Friday. Wanting to escape the quantum chaos of Friday rush hour traffic, instead the invisible threads that bind millions to the city’s ailing physiology – with its high cholesterol and hypertension – took us into its sickly hold. A passing thunderstorm brought rain not in drops but in globules. Five minutes of deluge had the streets funnelling a torrent of water. As the afternoon wore on, I feared being held hostage to fortune in what would be a million-man race out of the city before dark. And so it went. Swerving hither and thither, we dodged four-wheel bullet after four-wheel bullet in our haste to pull off a spectacular jailbreak. And we almost made it the 25-odd miles to the city limits without incident. That is, until some inconsiderate arsehole (cuzaö in Portuguese – my new favourite, adopted insult) decided to cut us up by swerving violently off the middle lane to reach the exit (saída) and clipping the flank of our car which was motoring along on the inside lane.

Bang! Time stopped momentarily while fate decided whether to flip the car onto its roof and under the 18 wheels of a trundling road train, or to spare us with a mere metallic slap. Fate chose the latter. Stopped in the central reservation of a 6-lane highway from hell, cars flew past us as we remonstrated with the intransigent old fool, who blamed us for being in the slow lane, and therefore causing considerable inconvenience to his plans to make a sudden and spectacularly boneheaded exit off the expressway. ‘Sua culpa’ I said, which maddened him all the more. Meanwhile, I could see the red mist come down on my girlfriend. The offending driver refused to exchange insurance details, stating he didn’t bother buying any for his €15,000 car. Having given up trying to make him see reason, he fled. Karine snapped at the injustice, and an emotional catharsis ensued. Despairing, she insisted on going home. I said no way, so took the wheel and tried to make a dignified escape into the thickly-forested mountains at the natural delimitation of this red giant of a town.

Catharses often end in a profound sense of inner peace. And so it was with Karine. I placed a reassuring hand on hers, and reminded her that we were uninjured and the car, while pranged, was driving well enough. And best of all, we had escaped Säo Paulo’s potent clutches and were now under a tranquil blanket of night in rural Brazil.

We made Socorro by 9pm. The surrounding hills were just about discernible as an inky staircase climbing into the unsullied night. The town, now just a cluster of lamplight in the saddle of a distant valley, looked inviting in a way that only a boy from the provinces could understand. Our little love shack was waiting for us along the Rio de Peixe (Fish River) tourist valley, off the asphalt and down a red oxide dirt track. Old derelict outhouses that once served the Fazenda Fartura loomed in the shadow. Other than weak porch light from the few farm dwellings dotted around the meadows and beside lone arboreal survivors from a disappearing world of giants, we arrived to nought but bliss, and the sound of Earth spinning soundlessly through the void.