From Here To Ethernity

From Here To Ethernity

A personal essay

Watching Remarkably Bright Creatures the other day, I thought about how much I’ve changed. The film tells the story of an octopus bringing two people together, and I remembered how this blue-blooded, three-hearted, nine-brained creature – ancient, intelligent, cosmic – once ended up on my plate. I ate octopus guiltlessly. In fact, I used to make it myself. I can still smell the kitchen when I cooked it in the oven, simmered with red wine and potatoes turned pink, laced with rosemary, and served it to my dearest guests. It was always a delicacy.

Back in 2013, I wanted to impress my American crush Gina, and took her to my favorite Croatian island, Hvar. I pulled out a homemade business card out of my wallet and made a call.

“Hello?” a male voice answered.

“Berti?”

“Yes, who is calling?”

“Kitica. I ate at your restaurant with a group of friends last summer.”

“Oh yes, yes. How can I help you?”

“I have an American guest here, and I’d like to reserve a table for tomorrow night at eight. For four.”

“And for food?”

“Octopus, of course.”

Berti Tudor is one of the descendants of the people who once lived in Malo Grablje before a blight destroyed the vines in 1960s and emptied the village. The only one to return, Berti opened Stori Komin in his family house, serving only two dishes: grilled octopus or lamb, both under the lid. Stori Komin sat high in the mountains, among the ruins of Saint Theodore’s church, abandoned stone houses, the old school building, and the olive mill. The Adriatic spread out beyond a thick green foreground of pines, oaks, and olive trees. On a sultry night, right after roasting at Dubovica beach, we sat at a table all salty-skinned and famined. The juicy and tender octopus washed down with a bottle of Plavac Mali worked their magic.

The year before, at Stori Komin, the six of us ordered Berti’s grilled lamb, which in retrospect was both fantastic and horrifying. A lamb. If I had seen it running for its life before it ended up under the lid, I would have protected it with everything I had. But I closed my eyes. I’ve been closing them since childhood. My favorite food ever was veal tenderloin, medium-cooked, slightly charred on the outside, tender and pink in the middle. I used to chew each bite thirty-three times. Everything else I swallowed like a chameleon. So what happened? How did I, the world’s biggest carnivore with blood type B+, become a vegetarian?

It started with feeling like a fraud for half my life. There I was, adopting cats and dogs, volunteering, making creative campaigns for animal shelters and organizations, donating serious money, judging and reporting anyone who had a chained dog in their yard, yet eating animals. Not cats or dogs, but pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, lamb, and every sea creature on the table. If anyone asked me what my excuse was for eating everything but cats and dogs, I’d philosophize my way out of the conversation, or quote Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction, in the diner scene where they debate on what makes a “filthy animal”, and the possibility of eating a “charmin’ motherfuckin’ pig.”

Six years ago, when my life went to shit so it could rebuild itself into something healthy, wonderful, and mine, I started these self-loving rituals. I cleaned up heavy drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and finally sugar. I meditated every single day and built my body. I lost thirteen kilos I’d wanted to lose for decades, and I did everything I could to maintain a careful balance of mind, body, and soul. For probably five years, I saw no physical change, no proof. I felt better, my mind was clearer, my thoughts more positive, my nervous system calmer, but I looked pretty much the same, which was infuriating. I remember thinking: Fuck this. My life is so boring. Nothing has changed, except I’m no longer any fun. I don’t see the point of this transformation. I had so much more fun when I was drugged up, drunk, and hanging around junkies. At least I laughed. If this is all sobriety is, I want to go back to oblivion. I should get a gram of coke. Where’s that number? Do I even have it?

Above the line, below the line, word of mouth, coke never needed advertising. The industry was fast, creative, exciting, passionate, even wild, and I was curious and loyal to Camus, who told me to go too far if I wanted the truth. Testing the limits became my specialty until the system crashed and took me with it, like a broken elevator plunging twenty floors down.

Still, I persisted. The old version of me kept showing up to say hello: drunk, stoned, negative, cursing out the new version, boredom, only to slip quietly back into the past and let the new one emerge and stay: calm, centered, self-disciplined, grateful, resilient. The more I resisted and shoved her down, the larger her shadow became, until I finally accepted her as part of me on her way out. I developed compassion for her. How could I not? If that old self hadn’t gone too far, the new one would never have realized that old life had stopped being fun a long time ago. It was fake. A mask. Underneath was a woman terrified to show her true self, her vulnerability. A woman desperate to be loved properly. A woman who felt deeply unworthy of the love she craved. A woman who had closed her heart decades ago.

It took me six years to heal, and in those six years, I changed jobs. I went from ad exec, creative director to writer, poet, essayist. I left a fast-paced industry for a snail-slow one, and I still haven’t seen a cent for everything I’ve written and keep writing. And yet I feel this unexplainable lightness. I cannot wait to write, and learn the craft. But why am I telling you all this, and what does any of it have to do with eating habits?

I heard somewhere that “ego grows by addition, and the soul by subtraction,” and ever since then I’ve been trying to release everything I can. It started with my physical space, in the family house in Duće that I inherited and was preparing to sell. Twenty-two large garbage bags, three generations’ worth of hamster hoards. Mind, and everything it was carrying, was next, my worries, fears, doubts, scarcity thinking, but mostly other people’s unhealed trauma, and responsibility for their happiness. I believe I’ve been synchronizing with Mother Gaia, since she changed signs, and now we’re in the Age of Aquarius, my rising sign.

Astrologers can’t even agree on when the shift happened, and honestly, I’m not sure I care. Some say it was in the early ’60s, others point to 2011, and still others somewhere much earlier. I side with the more recent astrologers who mark the shift around December 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn met in Aquarius. But who knows. When I look back, what I see is the old earth-heavy world: plowing, labor, the Industrial Revolution, and the mindless consumption.

It brings to mind the Tatars, who hunted wildlife for survival, and rode for days with bloody meat under the saddle to soften it enough to eat, the times when even food was heavy, unchewable, undigestible. Kinda like the old me, and my 33 chews. Think accumulation: vinyl records, cassettes, compact discs, VHS tapes, huge early printers, hard drives, two or more cars per family, real estate as value. Overproducing, over consuming, drilling for oil. Using that oil to choke on plastics. That’s earth energy at its most burdened.

Slowly, technology replaced heavy machinery. Sleek silicon instead of iron, copper, and lead. Blue collar to white collar, even in agriculture. Drones are delivering pizzas, packages, and medical supplies in some places. Air. Today in Berlin, a friend of mine rents a car when he needs one, and a beautiful, new, sexy one too. Like those bikes. Public transportation is increasingly powered by renewable energy and improving globally, making car ownership old-fashioned, expensive, and, not least, polluting. We eat lighter foods, the easier-to-digest gifts of Mother Earth. We keep our important documents, photo albums, music, movies, and art in the cloud, even if that cloud sits in a server warehouse in the Sahara Desert. We don’t use pens anymore, we sign contracts digitally. We share rides, build communities, and create lighter hybrid business models. Hoarding vs. lightness. Manual work vs. intelligent systems. Hierarchy vs. equality. Secrecy vs. transparency. Slowness, density vs. speed, fluidity. Survival vs. surrender. Body vs. spirit. Fear vs. trust. Root chakra vs. crown chakra.

The next step is telepathic communication. No wires, wireless modems, or fancy little gadgets. But for that, all our hearts have to be open. We have to be courageous and let healing begin. Sit quietly in a room, be present, and go deep into the wounds of the past. Confront them. Cry them out. Empty that reservoir of sadness, then cry some more until everything that is not us leaves. Mother Gaia will gladly transmute it all, we just have to ask her, and we can do that while floating on the surface of the glittering sea, like I have in Trogir and Duće for a year. We can hug our favorite tree for five minutes a day. We can walk kilometers barefoot along a sandy, or rocky beach, and pull the healing electrons up from the earth. We can close our eyes in the shower and imagine the black water of heaviness leaving our body down the drain. We can stand in the rain and ask it to wash the negativity out of the mind. We can ask Reiki and work with that wonderful universal energy available to everyone, gentle as water. We can meditate and call on celestial beings from other dimensions to take it all away, even if we don’t know exactly what “it” is. They’ll know. They love us, and are here to help, but only if we ask.

Only when we open our hearts and stop hiding from one another will we be light and free again. That, to me, is the best part of the Age of Aquarius.

Which reminds me – I’ve got work to do. I’m off for another heart/brain coherence meditation with Gabriel Gonsalves, followed by Joe Dispenza’s Open Your Heart.

See you in the ether.