with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole circumference in about an
hour. It’s located almost exactly on the equator, and so there’s a changelessness about its
daily cycles. The sun comes up on one side of the island at about 6:30 in the morning and
goes down on the other side at around 6:30 PM, every day of the year. The place is inhabited
by a small handful of Muslim fishermen and their families. There is no spot on this island from
which you cannot hear the ocean. There are no motorized vehicles here. Electricity comes
from a generator, and for only a few hours in the evenings. It’s the quietest place I’ve ever
been.
Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at
sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my emo-
tions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused
by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring
attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own
mantras (I’m a failure... I’m lonely... I’m a failure... I’m lonely.. .) and we become monu-
ments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of
words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating man-
tras.
It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I’d stopped talking, I found that I
was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech—brain, throat, chest,
back of the neck—vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I’d stopped making
sounds. My head shimmied in a reverb of words, the way an indoor swimming pool seems to
echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergartners have left for the day.
It took a surprisingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall away, for the whirling
noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days.
Then everything started coming up. In that state of silence, there was room now for
everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in detox,
convulsing with the poison of what emerged. I cried a lot. I prayed a lot. It was difficult and it
was terrifying, but this much I knew—I never didn’t want to be there, and I never wished that
anyone were there with me. I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone.
The only other tourists on the island were a handful of couples having romantic vacations.
(Gili Meno is far too pretty and far too remote a place for anyone but a crazy person to come
visit solo.) I watched these couples and felt some envy for their romances, but knew, “This is
not your time for companionship, Liz. You have a different task here.” I kept away from every-
one. People on the island left me alone. I think I threw off a spooky vibe. I had not been well
all year. You can’t lose that much sleep and that much weight and cry so hard for so long
without starting to look like a psychotic. So nobody talked to me.
nora
(Nora)
#1