After Mount Olympus, I did another hike in that area and after some days of the mountain life, I felt like heading to the ocean again. On the way to the beach, I washed my clothes at a self-service laundry and maybe that’s where everything started to go crazy.
When I was living at the beach for one day, everything seemed to be fine. I got some mosquito stitches or bites but it did not feel like something extraordinary. The next day I started to count these bites and when I reached a count of 30 I got irritated, but not worried. The next day I counted about 80 of them and that was the point where I started thinking and getting worried. The stitches started to hurt and itch more and more and it was a real challenge to not try to scratch them out of my skin. Meditation got very interesting and challenging, by the way.
My first try to dissolve this insect situation was moving to another beach. I thought that maybe only on the one beach these insects were so strong. The crazy thing about this is, that I never found a mosquito or insect that I thought would do stitches/ bites like I got. I researched and learned a lot about mosquitos, fleas, bed bugs, and all the other friendly insects but still, I did not manage to identify one of them around me.
The next day on the next beach I counted 100 stitches on just one side of one of my forearms. I stopped counting at about 300 in total!
At that point, I got desperate and afraid of what was going on. My mind felt to be in between something. Somehow undecided or in doubt. I tried to escape the insects by moving on a mountain, but it did not help. I set up my hammock in Rosinante to have a safe place to sleep, but it did not help. Sleeping got more and more difficult, by the way, which made me more and more sensitive to everything. I searched for traces of the animals that were stinging me. Once I found one that looked like a flea but it was just a fly. All of this made me feel so desperate. It was painful in a physical and psychological way. It was occupying me. There was nothing else anymore. I was suffering.
And then I decided to go all in into this situation. It felt like accepting it but not in a passive way. I consider myself a pacifist and friend of nature but at this point, all of this stepped back. Still, I did not know what kind of insect was trying to eat me and so I just did everything I had learned during my research.
I did:
- get a mosquito lamp
- get a vacuum cleaner and was vacuuming Rosinante two times a day
- get different mosquito and insect sprays
and organic stuff like lemongrass and neem oil and used them several times a day (actually, I did not find pure neem oil and so I used dog and cat shampoo with neem oil) - wash all the clothes I had used again and all the covers, sleeping bag, etc.
- put all my other clothes into the burning sunlight at least for a day
- put my sleeping bag etc. into the burning sunlight every day
- get different ointments and stuff like that to ease the itching
- put on Rosinante’s heater to cook whatever was eating me inside of her
A few minutes after I put my stuff in the washing machine and turned it on, I felt kind of relieved. It was crazy. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just a mental reaction because I started to deal with the situation and that spread some hope inside of me. But to me, it felt more like a connection between the hundreds of bites/ stitches on my body and something that was feeding them broke. No matter what it meant for the insects that had been eating me, it felt very uplifting to me.
After I did all this, the number of bites did not increase anymore and the situation eased more and more. My mind relaxed with every hour. I think, that it is true what all the mindfulness and spiritual people are saying: you can deal with everything in a healthy, not stressful way. I learned a lot about this during that time.
And as I was sitting in Rosinante, feeling the relief, the calmness, the chill after the desperation I suddenly heard how a car revved up and blasted across the beach. When it passed by, I saw how two guys tried to reanimate a man lying on the bed of a pickup.
Witnessing this attempt to rescue a human life let me feel so small. It’s indescribable.