I find it hard to believe that Nature produced this man.

There’s nothing natural about him.

He’s one of those souls that bubbles up from the cosmic cauldron of Creation every eon or so, a being that defies its environment to the point where it seems he was forged not of this Earth, but somewhere in the Great Beyond by God and his minions to march into Babylon from the bush and usher in a divine skullfucking of the establishment and its excesses.

The man defies all Western logic and his words would leave all but the wisest Zenmasters scratching their heads at the nebula of contradictions that loosely hold together his existence. Without them, the profound singularity of the Truth he brings would tear the fabric of space time, rendering Reality as we know it to a faint mist of gamma particles and tears flashing in some event horizon around a massive black hole that was once the epicenter of our solar system. He must be Tathagata, or a Prophet of the Ragnarok, because there are no alternative explanations for him, regardless of what school of logic you adhere to.

He certainly doesn’t belong to this time, or any other. Quoting Bob Marley, the Bible, and George Bush Sr. in a single sentence, he treks through the bush spreading the Gospel of anti-corporate environmentalism through nutraceutical agriculture and community-based agroprocessing/ ecotourism ventures focusing on natural medicines while extolling the virtues of herbal research and youth intervention for the continued protection and low-impact development of the Rio Pedro Watershed. He is the Prophet. The Scourge of Babylon.

He can’t sit still. His eyes flash wildly when he speaks. He mumbles and sings to himself during meetings and bursts into polemic orations during presentations. He swears the cures for Alzheimer’s, Autism, Hypertension, AIDS, MS, Cancer, Hair Loss, Influenza, Malaria, Herpes, Gingivitis, Leukemia, Downs Syndrome, and Diabetes are all growing in the hills of St. Catherine, but the insidious pharmaceutical conglomerates and bauxite miners are covering it all up. He has devoted his life and his sanity to uplifting the community, bringing forth utopian unity, but he trusts no one and treats his plans like some kind of backwoods Manhattan Project.

His personality is a glorious Mobius strip of contradiction. He rants about the idleness of his countrymen while laying back and rolling his 4th spliff of the morning. Over cups of white rum he boasts of how he gave up drinking, but not for “medicinal” purposes. He’s a development worker’s nightmare: Stubborn, strong, and way too smart, he isn’t interested in anything that deviates from his dreams, especially if it means sharing them with members of the community; nest of rabid vipers that they are, or at least that’s what he perceives them to be.

He knows all the tricks. Compromise is just another word for Slavery. We shall fight on alone, never ceasing!… unless it rains… then we’ll take the month off.

And yet, I admired him, as Sancho Panza admired Don Quixote. The senseless futility of his methods and the vaulted Valhalla of his visions makes me wish he gets what he’s searching for. I know it’s the wrong place to be, but his madness is so inspiring that I find myself giving serious thought as to where the International Medicinal Plant Research Center will be located and how many Cray supercomputers will be needed to run the gene sequencer.

Stashed beneath the layers of madness, and beyond the web of paranoia lies some great Truth that cannot be conveyed through mere words or even actions, but solely through the energies of a well-tuned mind. He’s a wily old goat, and he knows nothing but the dream and the fight.