Tag: health

Nearly starving after eating the junkies, city life, and romantic ego love (October 2022)

On the last day of Artha’s and my trip to the south of Bulgaria, I had my first encounter with the junkie fruit. These are small, plum-like fruits and they were growing everywhere. What made them a real junkie fruit for me, is that their taste and color were varying all the way. On one tree, they tasted like plums, on another like apricot, on another like peach, and so on. It never stopped. We tried all of them! It was super delicious and like the best candy on earth. Maybe I just ate a little too much of them. Maybe something like fifty too much…

On our last night in the mountains, I started vomiting and having diarrhea. I felt so weak so fast like I had never before. I tried to rest and recover but it did not help. I felt weaker and weaker. We had to go back to Varna because Artha’s brother was about to arrive in Bulgaria after a long time and so Artha drove Rosinante. In Varna, I went to Artha’s flat because I felt so weak and the vomiting and shitting just did not stop. After two days I felt so weak like I did never before. All my body openings were throwing out the juice and/ or the skin of the junkie fruits. I could not eat or drink and on the fourth day, I felt like fading away. Artha and I thought about at which point I should go to a hospital. I’ve been pretty skinny all my life. At that point, I looked like a starving person. All my tendons, muscles, and bones were visible through my skin.

Right at the point where I thought, I could not go any further, my body started to recover. Not all the water I was drinking went straight out of me again. I was so grateful for this. One of the first things I ate, was potato smash. I’ve never been a big fan of it, but that experience let me start loving it. After some days, I felt very much better and although I never had rejected to that ill, I learnt to appreciate it. It felt like a deep and healthy cleaning.

The next five weeks, I spent in Varna and the big beach Artha and I found when we were traveling. Starting this more stationary life was crazy. Artha and I had the time of our lives while on our small journey. Then the junkie fruit incident happened and had a huge impact on my health situation and of course, it had an impact on her as well. At the same time, we moved into the city and lived together in her flat and her brother arrived in Bulgaria after a long time. Artha was thinking about starting to travel or doing something else for a long time. A lot of things were changing and coming together. Like all the time, everything was changing.

For me, this new life felt good. I loved the time I spent with Artha, her friends, and her family and I enjoyed the time on my own in the city. I did a lot of music and got myself a midi pad controller for finger drumming. Varna was a beautiful city with a big beach and a big park right next to the beach between the city and the beach.

We went to a crazy techno party, to different beaches around Varna, visited a couple of restaurants, had beautiful walks along the sea and in the park, and just lived the city life. I started to get used to it and was thinking about getting an BMX to jump and manual around the city.

It felt good to me. But still, the city life was very different from the life in nature during my traveling. Although I was living partly in Varna and partly on that big beach in nature, I felt like I was missing nature. I think at that point I was not sure about it, but as I’m writing this, I’m very sure. I felt torn apart. On the one hand, there was Artha, our love, the city life, and on the other was what was calling me from deep, deep inside of me: living in nature and traveling.

Back in October, a part of me did not want to admit that I still was feeling this calling of nature and traveling. But more the life in nature than the traveling. My love for Artha was so strong that I felt like I would do a lot just to be close to her. And this love, which made me feel like this, was not the unconditional, but the romantic ego love. The romantic ego love that does not like changes. The one that wants to stick with what feeds her. The one that wants to be satisfied by another person. It let me feel complete but at a cost. This love was coming up with all sorts of thoughts and dreams: maybe Artha and I could travel together, maybe we could spend the winter together in the mountains, maybe we could do just something together. Forever. At the same time, I was feeling and thinking this, I felt this strong connection and unconditional love for her as well. It was like a multi-dimensional love.

And then there was the triggering between Artha and me…

Dealing with over 300 insects bites/ stitches (June 2022)

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.