nothing bad ever happens here

“Nothing bad ever happens here” is a biography of exploration, of love, and spirituality.

The author really makes me appreciate the wonder of living life to the fullest, to embrace the world and your flowing emotions.

This is the first biography I’ve read in a long time, and I’ve been lucky enough to find such a beautiful narrative of traveling and feeling.

Here are a few extracts, to demonstrate why this book has touch me so deeply.

To this day, this is the most influential biography I’ve read.

Our house is the first on a new subdivision above a curve of beachside shacks. We are surrounded by farms, apricot orchards, paddocks and dams. Throughout the sixties and seventies, a new house is always being built, a new family moving in. Kerbs and bitumen arrive, washing lines and paling fences. Our neighbours are public servants, business people, stay-at-home mums, teachers, academics, architects and retirees. There is a small government primary school.
Both sets of grandparents live close by, as well as cousins from Dad’s side of the family. We children roam the farmland that is yet to become suburbia, building forts in sandy embankments, climbing the seaside cliffs, catching tadpoles in the dams, kicking the footy on the oval, playing beach cricket, swimming in the sea, exploring rock pools and riding our bikes everywhere like mad things. In winter we take cardboard and slide down the icy paddock behind the house. Only rarely does it snow, down there so close to the sea, and when it does we are awestruck.
There are neighbourhood barbecues, bonfires and fireworks, fancy-dress parties and dinners where the adults walk between homes for various courses, my mother’s laughter rippling on the night air. On hot days, Mum and her girlfriends lie on the beach, laughing and chatting, rolling their eyes at the habits of their husbands, while we children swim, play and listen. There are Boxing Day gatherings down the street where a television broadcasts the start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. Days later these yachts sail up our river to the finish line. We watch them from our house, taking turns at the telescope. We do not own a television. Books and games, music and friends, the radio and the outdoors are our entertainment.
My brothers and I, and children who live along the way, walk to school together, a kilometre and a half each way. No one locks their doors. We are welcome in everyone’s houses. We must be home by the time the streetlights come on.

Aleisha and I take a train, bus and then a ferry to the island of Koh Samui off the east coast of southern Thailand. We have heard it is beautiful and it doesn’t disappoint. Traditional wooden huts line the palm-fringed white beaches, and there are no cars; bicycles and the odd motorbike are the only vehicles on the sandy pathways that link the small villages.
By the time we arrive, I’m feeling sick again. We rent two beachside huts barely big enough to stand up in. I am shaking and sweating. My teeth are chattering and every joint in my body hurts. I lie down and disappear into a grey fug.
For the next few days, I drift in and out of consciousness, racked with pain. I sense Aleisha coming and going, bringing water, sponging my forehead. I wake one night to see two dark figures standing at the foot of my bed. I’m not sure who they are. One of them asks, ‘Do you think she’ll die?’
The other replies, ‘She might. Maybe.’

Two German men live beside my hut in a wide, balconied bungalow complete with elegant furniture and regular deliveries of tea, food and other beverages. They have lived on Koh Samui for more than a year. From their chaises longues, they consume heroin, melting it in teaspoons and inhaling it as if it were the most normal thing in the world to do. From time to time, other travellers drop by: French, German, Dutch and English. It is like a European movie set of young people delighting in their tropical good fortune.
‘If you are ever going to try it,’ one of the Germans says to me, ‘this is the place.’ He indicates the azure sea, the cloudless sky. ‘Here, it is so beautiful and the powder is pure. It is the one place in the world it is safe.’
I say yes.
“Heroin takes all the noise away, all the pictures. It takes away judgement, pain, blame and shame. As a girl who lost her brother, her grandfather and her family in the horrible wash-up of chance, I can sink into an oblivion deeper than any sleep. I can obliterate all feeling. I can obliterate myself. There are no messy teenage stories in that oblivion. There is no past or future.
The afternoons become a spoon of white powder, a flame, and a long inhalation before dropping down, down, down into the abyss. At some point, I decide I want to find the people I love, so I go looking for death.
I glimpse it at first down dark corridors in my mind, but I turn back. When I finally let go, on a sweet balmy day, I slip down a long tunnel like an eel in water. The door to death, I discover, is old and mounted in the wall of a cave. The paint is black and worn, the latch made of weathered brass. Of course, I am hallucinating, but I don’t know that then.
‘Hello, Death,’ I say. ‘If I knock, will you answer? “How easy it looks to be with you.’
The surface of the door is warm and dry. I feel the pull, the sweet release of letting everything go. I sense my body back in the hammock, but it is further and further away. Everything back up the tunnel is evaporating. Nothing matters. Ultimately nothing matters at all. Death is simply surrender. Death is freedom. All I have to do is push and the door will swing open. Then a tiny voice says, ‘No.’ It says, ‘Not this way. Not here. Go back. Go back. Not now.’
When I open my eyes, I am in the hammock. A warm breeze caresses my skin. Leaves are shifting on the palm trees, insect life is trilling and buzzing. In the distance I hear the sounds of people and domestic life. But, most of all, it is the light that welcomes me back. The golden light of the tropics swells about me. It is a symphony of a million colours catching on every surface – furniture, roof beams, jungle, ocean, sky, my arms. Glistening, sparkling, shimmering, reflecting, glowing.
‘Hello, world,’ I say.

All in all, we meditate for thirteen to sixteen hours a day. I have never been good at sitting cross-legged. My back aches, my hips ache, but in the sala I learn to move in and out of the pain. Some days are harder than others. Some hours are harder than others. Sometimes it is the pure focus of breath after breath just to remain sitting among my companions, meditating in silence or chanting in unison. Sometimes the pain is a focusing tool, like the breath.
Being in silence day after day is humbling, disorientating, liberating, demanding, hard and sometimes very emotional. We move about with respect and distance as we share our daily rituals. We rarely make eye contact with one another. Waves of loneliness, frustration, serenity, grief, shame, happiness, boredom, fatigue, yearning, bewilderment and love wash through me. Emotions are like winds on the lake, the Buddhists say. You are the lake, peaceful and quiet. The winds come and go, ruffling the surface. They are erratic and temporary. The winds are not you. You are the lake.
I learn the impossibility of trying to use my brain to achieve a result in meditation. I learn the impossibility of trying to use my brain to achieve a result in meditation. I learn the downward spiral of expectation, the uselessness of force and will, the yearning for connection with some greater force, the waiting for some sign that any of this means anything. I learn to surrender in minute increments, day after day, forcing my energetic nature to settle, corralling my need for distraction, subduing my urge to run, dance, laugh and talk. The external world is turned inwards so that the expanse of the breath and the texture of the mind become vibrant. Everything slows.
At times I glimpse the paradox of time and space. I sense the illusion of past and future. I glimpse the expanse of a universe in which this planet is just one small outpost of life. I am a speck on that outpost. I feel my identity becoming porous and sometimes it evaporates altogether. Then I come back to the heat and the ringing forest, the irritation and limitations of a busy mind and a restless body.
I find that words become strange to hear and slow to come to my mind. Sitting among these robed people with their shaved heads, I think about becoming a nun. I think about donning the grey robes of a female devotee and living here in this forest forever. How tranquil it might be, all a monastic life offers – the simplicity of rituals and patterns, the gong, the garden, the forest, the flow of breath, the silence.

I dance through the days and I dream through the nights. In one dream I hold my head under a fountain in a village square and gulp water. In another I stick a straw into a hole, tapping a tributary beneath the teepee. In the morning I wake. I go to sweat and pray with the other women. The light returns and we dress for the dance. The sun dance chief leads us into the circle. The sun is behind the hill, behind the trees, and we wait for its warmth. The sun appears, rises, passes overhead. Round after round, song after song, prayer upon prayer, the world is golden, everything is golden, and then the day evaporates into twilight and is gone.
Each day, with each dance step, I pray for the trees. I pray for my island home. I pray for my family. I pray for Christopher and I miss him. I miss being with him to say goodnight.