As if the glittering turquoise water, the cliche sponge corals decorated with multicolored fishes and the friendly turtles that would take you for a ride while you held to their shells, was not enough, I raised my head and surveyed the distant backdrop of the picture perfect caribbean postcard where I found myself floating, and I recognized a faraway hillside embedded with non other than my cacti friends.
Scrap the snorkelling, I’m going bush.
So I took off, bucket in hand, accross a sandy beach, then onto a swampy lagoon that led to the base of a rocky windswept hillside.
Up I went, on the slow, deliberate ascent in search of my prickly allies.
Any rare occasion in which I get to enjoy my own company in exclusivity is a gift in itself, but to savour it on this uninhabited, paradisiacal island, blessed with the abundance of tunera treasure was just beyond perfection.
This time there was no elder to guide the ritual, no ancestral contraption to aid the harvest.
I was it,
with my ten fingers
and my unsophisticated bucket.
At the first bush I got an instinctual urge to bow down in admiration and gratitude to the perfect round shiny juicy grean ‘leafs’ speckled with heavenly dragon eggs of a colour beyond any language.
Not red or pink, nor purple nor magenta, nor crimson or bordeaux.
Nothing that could be flattened into a mere arrangement of letters.
If god exists, she is this colour.
I took a deep breath, as to make sure all the pieces of my awareness were in place and I got close to the bush, like an ancient martial art choreography, reaching out with my bare arms, fingers placed with reverence on the soft skin of the fruit, between its watchful prickles, feet grounding me firmly on the stoney earth.
Every motion executed with full presence, as the slightest lapse invited immediate, thorn-laden reprimand.
There I was, the tuno taichi dancer communing with All That Is while her bucket gets filled up, one magic egg at a time.
By the time I picked my way back down the hillside, I felt as though I’d returned from some sacred monastic retreat, albeit a rather spiky one.
Back on the boat, sun-kissed and triumphantly dusty, I set upon my harvest.
The fruits were divine: sweet, slippery, gloriously alive, as though each one contained a wink from whatever goddess paints their impossible colour.
The next morning, as we prepared to depart my little island of enlightenment, Tara’s engine showed signs of reluctance, a cacophony of strange sounds that didn’t feel quite right.
Then, in a fit of mechanical rebellion, it refused to obey either forward or reverse and eventually the poor thing merely shuddered, sighed, and finally gave up altogether.
And so we remained, lingering in enforced serenity with my dwindling bucket of treasures, and an island that clearly insisted on one last unplanned chapter.
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