It started as an itch.
Just a small red bump on my leg —
easy to ignore in the jungle.
Mosquito? Spider?
Didn’t think much of it.
Until it didn’t go away.
Until it started growing.
Then another appeared.
And another.
Then the skin began to open.
Literally — peeling back,
like something was trying to eat its way out of me.
Leishmaniasis.
They call it “Papalomoia” out there.
A flesh-eating parasite passed by sandflies.
Tiny insects —
deadly precision.
Within weeks, I had fourteen lesions.
Open wounds.
Not rashes. Not sores.
Holes.
Elle had them too.
And both of our daughters.
My baby girls.
We were sleeping in the jungle,
bathing in spring water,
eating fruit from the trees —
and our bodies were rotting from the inside out.
And suddenly, the jungle that had nurtured us
turned quiet.
Not cruel —
but still.
Like it was watching.
There were no hospitals.
No help.
And even if there were —
Western medicine had no real answers. Their answer was a violent injection that worked akin to chemo: setting off a grenade in the body that blasts everything, in the hope of blasting the parasite.
So we returned to South Africa.
Broken.
Infected.
Scared.
And then came the year of healing.
Every day:
Cleaning wounds.
Bandaging babies.
Watching my daughters wince in pain.
Watching Elle hold herself together.
Watching my own flesh dissolve.
It was excruciating —
physically, yes — but also spiritually.
I had already shed my ego.
Now I was shedding my skin.
Literally.
The parasite didn’t just eat at my body —
it etched itself into my story.
We healed with what we had.
High-dose vitamin C infusions.
Ozone therapy.
Cannabis medicine — both topical and internal.
Nature became nurse.
And slowly…
painfully…
the holes began to close.
But not without leaving their mark.
The scars are still there.
Fourteen of them.
Some people collect tattoos.
I carry these.
In Costa Rica, the local tribes say that when the jungle scars you like this,
it means you belong to it.
That you’ve become one with it.
If that’s true…
then I am jungle-born.
This was the final disintegration.
Not in the mind.
Not in the identity.
But in the body.
After that,
there was nothing left to strip away.
The fire had done its work.
Now…
it was time to rebuild.
Chapter 9: The Jungle Dream
Once the groundwork was laid — the inner structure, the system, the solitude — it became clear: I didn’t want to just live in the world. I wanted to live with it. The cities never felt like home. The grids, the noise, the bills-for-breath system. What I needed was land. [...]| Play | Cover | Release Label |
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