“Boy am I glad you answered, Minerva. I was just about to send the firemen over to break down the door of your apartment.”
“You could just climb up the fire escape and come in through the window.”
“I know, but I get nervous I’ll find you with your head in the oven like Sylvia Plath. You’ve been in such a bad mood, lately.”
“Wow. That’s either an over-exaggeration or an understatement. I guess I better start practicing mood control."
I just couldn’t get off the sofa. It was the first one I’d actually owned in my life and as I mentioned before, I was forty. I even slept on it because I didn’t have a bed yet, just a blow-up mattress on the floor in the “bedroom,” whose quotation marks reproached me every time I said the word. My life was pathetic, especially to a twenty-two year old who had her whole future before her. I wasn’t sure why Zoe wanted to hang out with me so much, especially since I hadn’t said yes once to one of her invitations. I just thought most art was either bullshit or disheartening and had enough of both in my life. I even told Zoe what I thought, but she was convinced she was going to convert me into a hipster.
“You just need to loosen up and stop taking everything so seriously,” she informed me.
“But that’s what all these so-called artists do!” I protested.
“See, you have more in common than you thought!”
“Minerva,” she declaimed in her most inspirational oratory tone, “Goddess of Wisdom, I summon you to my side tonight to walk through the sacred fire of Delphi where our futures shall be revealed!”
“I think you’re confusing me with the Pythia, Zoe,” I replied. “She’s a snake goddess. I’m the goddess of wisdom, not some crazy oracle. Owls, not snakes. Hoot, hoot.”
“Sssssorry,” she hissed back. “I just work in a coffee shop,” our favorite inside joke. It came in handy whenever a customer tried to cross the line and ask us what we were going to do when we graduated. When Zoe said it, it was still cute because she had just graduated, although her RISD degree in textiles hadn’t exactly attracted job recruiters to her door. Still, she was a pixie and people were willing to excuse her impertinence. I just got bad tips and indignant looks. It was impossible to be cute at forty, although Zoe assured me I was “ageless,” without saying what we both knew, ageless was another way of saying I could look any age at all. I’ll let you be the guess of which end of the spectrum I fall on.Whatever else could be said of me, I did not look ironic. More like tragic. I had black hair and skin that was so pale it didn’t tan, even though I’d spent my whole life so far in the sun without sunscreen. I was so pale people sometimes called me Snow White and hummed Someday My Prince Will Come when I got that glazed look on my face which made me seem like I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying. (I wasn’t) Zoe and I were a regular Magic Kingdom because she looked a lot like Minnie Mouse. Of course she was going for the look, which clearly worked for her. Cute got you a lot farther in than life than tragic.
She wore short little skirts, hand-painted with polka dots and cat-eyed glasses, though she drew the line at ears, which were only for special occasions like sushi dinners and karaoke. Zoe was Chinese, but for some reason she wouldn’t explain, was obsessed with Japanese culture. “I keep telling my parents I must have had a past life as a samurai,” she confided in me the first time I met her, “but they insist I’m just trying to rebel. I tell them it’s about time somebody in our family did. They say quiet, you’ll kill your grandmother, but I figure if she survived Chairman Mao, she’ll survive me. Don’t you think so? I mean, she was a part of a real tragedy. What she went through puts Sylvia Plath’s misery to shame. Sylvia should have been embarrassed to kill herself. What’s a little psychological abuse? Nobody tried to actually kill her.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t say that was a bad thing.”
I hadn’t felt tragic all these years, just slightly unglued. It was like gravity didn’t have the same affect on me that it had on the rest of humanity. I told myself I had gypsy blood, which was a great way to seduce guys to go upstairs with me and get it on in garishly lit bathrooms at parties of people I didn’t know. This pretty much guaranteed that nobody I seduced was going to stick around, which was fine with me. I preferred to travel alone, which meant I wasn’t a real gypsy because they never left the tribe and those shaggy ponies that pulled their carts from town to town. In my solitude, I was more like a pilgrim on a quest, although I had no idea what I was looking for because I had no destination.
What was tragic was the gander I got of myself in the polished chrome reflection of the espresso machine as I steamed and foamed milk for the unapologetically exuberant and youthful students who stumbled down Wickenden each morning before heading off to class. My face was no longer thin, it was gaunt, and worse than that, I had wrinkles. You can call them crow’s feet or smile lines, but after awhile it becomes undeniable: I was old. Fortunately Zoe took orders and rang people up most of the time, so our tips were still pretty good. Providence was a cheap city, but it was still hard to make a decent living getting people high on sugar and foam. I should have been a bartender, but that would have meant going out at night, which as I’d begun to mention, was a problem. Plus, I kind of had a “history” with alcohol I was trying to rewrite, so working in a bar didn’t seem like the greatest life plan at the moment.
“Well then—hoot!” Zoe laughed into the phone. “Don’t you at least want to know the future?”
“Not really.”
“Oh, come on!”
“When you get to be my age you’ll understand why it’s best not to know.”
“That’s your excuse for not having any fun!”
“You call milling around while a bunch of horny, sexist guidos check us out fun? I told you. I’m over being objectified by the male gaze. I just don’t want to deal with that shit anymore.”
“Are you sure you didn’t secretly go to college?” I had spent long hours explaining feminist literary theory to her. She found it hard to believe that I actually read Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan without being forced to.
“Remember, you went to art school. They’re not supposed to teach you anything useful. That’s what artists are for—to be useless.”
“Somebody’s gotta do it."
"Why’s that again? I can’t seem to remember anything these days. Must be because I don’t use my brain in any useful ways.”
“Yeah, deconstructing everything that comes out of my mouth definitely isn’t useful.”
“Especially since you don’t give a shit about the male gaze. I wish I’d been born a lesbian and never internalized these stupid cultural expectations in the first place. You’re lucky.”
“Shhhh, don’t say that out loud, my parents might hear you.”
“You still haven’t come out to them yet?”
“Nope. They think Cally is my ‘roommate.’”
“You’re going to have to tell them eventually. Do you really want to live with the pressure of them not knowing? What happens when you get married and have those raisinheads you’re always sentimentalizing?”
“Raisinheads?”
“Because they look so shriveled up and wrinkled when they come out.”
“You’re so cynical! Kids are cute!”
“You obviously didn’t baby sit much growing up. Once you change your first 100 diapers you’ll realize they’re nothing but little, squirming tubes of poop and puke. Are you just not going to invite them to the wedding?”
“Well, considering we still live in a barbaric society where gay marriage isn’t legal I don’t have to worry too much, do I?”
“Yeah, but that’s going to change soon.”
“May wonders never cease. Do I detect a note of optimism in your voice? This calls for a celebration. Waterfire here we come!”
Zoe may have joked, but her parents had scrimped and saved for years to send her to the college of her choice and were none too thrilled with her decision to be a textile designer. I knew the pressure to please them had to affect her because she kept giving them hope by telling them she was going to audition soon for Project Runway.
"They love Heidi Klum,” she told me. “She so tall,” my mother say, “So blonde. Why you not marry blonde American, Zongying?” Zongying was her real name, which, in that great American tradition, had been butchered by the Ellis Island of grade school. Zoe made fun of her mom, but Zongying was dutiful, calling three times a week at the assigned time after her mother’s mah jong tournament, before her father’s evening stroll around the block in the suburb of Detroit where they’d finally bought their dream house after years of living in an inner city apartment.
“One of these days I’ll do the right thing and make her proud of me,” I actually heard her say once beneath the sound of steaming milk. “I wonder why they left China in the first place? Life would have been so much easier. My sister never would have heard The White Stripes and shaved her head and bought me that first dildo. Did I ever tell you it was a rabbit? The ears rub on your clit while you fuck yourself with the body.”“Too much information, Zongying.”“Sorry. I forgot you’re still a virgin. If we’d stayed in China my sister and I could have saved our poverty-stricken parents by becoming Wal-Mart factory slaves because we wouldn’t have known any better. They couldn’t be disappointed in us then.”
“What’s your sister up to these days?"
"She’s a junkie in San Francisco.”
“Are you serious?”
“No,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed her.“I wonder if they wish we’d never been born?” she continued. I thought of my own parents probably sitting down to eat dinner in front of Charlie Gibson right now. Once I’d left home they’d stopped eating at the table, which I didn’t miss at all the couple of times a year I visited them, except for Christmas, which was an ordeal I approached with the enthusiasm of a soldier being sent to the front lines. Christmas was a minefield where we all lost a limb every year. Sometimes an eye or an ear, too. It was a wonder we were still walking and talking, but maybe that’s how it goes if you just deny your wounds.
“Minnie, come out with me,” she pleaded. “It’s Waterfire tonight. The fires are really bright and sometimes people light sparklers, and there are even fire-eaters and hot guys spinning poi, not that I care cuz I’m a lesbian thank goddess, which is probably why I don’t care about the stupid male gaze you’re always blathering on about.”
“Not always!”
“Well, just sometimes, but you’re always staying in your apartment when you could be out having a good time meeting someone.”
“I don’t want to meet someone.”
“Whatever. Everybody wants to meet someone. I don’t care what you say. I’m making you get out of that apartment tonight. I mean there’s going to be a special demonstration of Moonwalkers in remembrance of Michael Jackson. How could you miss that? Don’t you want to see people walk on the moon?”
Like probably everyone else on the planet, I was aware that Michael Jackson had died a month ago. Even though I didn’t have a TV I still knew an amazing amount about pop culture from working at Chaos, where pop culture was ironic, therefore cool.
“I can’t stand Michael Jackson.”
“Oh, come on,” she pleaded. “How can you hate Michael?”
“You didn’t have to listen to him in the 80s. I mean “Beat It,” and that stupid “Thriller” video that was on MTV all the time. Anybody cool was into Duran Duran back then.”
“Uh—I find that hard to believe, Minerva.”
“Well, ok, anybody cool in my lame town.” Zoe had been lucky because she had an older sister who was a lesbian first and started a punk rock band. She even gave her her first dildo when she turned “sweet” sixteen. She’d been into The White Stripes, an actually cool band, before anyone outside Detroit knew who they were, which, by the way, was another line I’d heard used countless times to convey hipster credibility. You know. “I saw them back when they played so and so dive before they sold out and got famous.”It was always cooler to be into someone before they hit it big. Anyway, the point of this diatribe is to let you know that even though I hadn’t been a Michael Jackson fan in the 1980s, my love for Duran Duran’s “Reflex” and “Rio” was a clear indicator that I wasn’t ever cool.
“Oh, come on. I know you cried when you first heard ‘We Are the World.’ You told me that one time I managed to drag you out and get you drunk.”
“Is that that song where Bob Dylan lowers himself to singing in the same song with Kenny Loggins?”I had told her that. It was the last time I’d been out of the apartment past dark. Bad idea. I’d been so scared I couldn’t resist the shots of Patron the bartender kept pouring, laughing when I howled at the worm right before I swallowed it. Later that night, fucking me up against the mirror behind the bar, he panted in my ear, loca, loca, as my reflection shattered in my fingers.
“We are the World. We Are the Children,” she sang. Loca, Loca. I had to forget or I would be crazy. I had to be crazy to forget. I won’t tell you how the limp worm tasted on my tongue. You either know, or you don’t. Zoe definitely didn’t know. Listen to her, trying to lure me out of the oven, convinced I was as possessed by my demons as Sylvia Plath. If I wasn’t half convinced myself, I’d take it as a compliment.“What’s the next line, Minerva? If you tell me, I’ll let you wear my polka dot skirt.”
“I don’t want to,” I whined.
“Speak up. I no understand English so good.”
“It’s time to make a better world, so let’s start living?” I grumbled. Emphasis on question mark, spoken, not sung. I would have referenced James Bond, but I had a feeling twenty-two year old art school lesbians didn’t know or care squat about martinis or Moonraker.
"Giviiiiinnnng. Not liviiinnnng. One mo time Missy!”
“Can’t you get in trouble with your people for making fun of them like that?”
“What? Speak up! I no understand English so good. We meet on dark side of moon, right?”
That was a definite wrong if I had anything to say about it, which it seemed I didn’t. Zoe sang like a little kid who doesn’t know and couldn’t care less how bad she sounded. “There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives. It’s time to make a better world…”
I couldn’t resist. She was just so damn cute. I opened my mouth and my vocal chords expanded to swallow the rising moon as it came up over the horizon on Narragansett Bay which I couldn’t see from my window—the bay that is—the moon could stalk me anywhere without my knowledge. I expected to die at every moment, which might have been why I let the words pour from my mouth.
"Just you and me!"
Yes, I sang. And I actually felt that exclamation point as it exploded between my lips like the worm I’d said I’d forgotten a month ago.
“Ok, Goddess Minerva. Pick you right up. Wait for me on the street. I can be in Fox Point in ten minutes.”
Monday, October 26, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Moonwalker, Chapter 4
“Minerva?”
“Yes, Mom,” I droned. I knew I should have been more polite but I just didn’t have it in me to hear another lecture about how I needed to get down to Mr. Sleep and check out the mattress and box-spring sale that was about to end soon.
“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped sleeping on a futon on the floor?” she asked just about every time we talked on the phone.
“Those sales are always just about to end,” I muttered. I sounded sullen even to myself.
“I just thought you might like to get a comfortable night’s sleep for once,” she said, close to tears.
Shit, I’m an asshole, I thought--my standard reply to myself. My mom knew I had trouble sleeping. I didn’t bother telling her it was the moon that kept me awake. She’d just try to convince my to take Prozac like when I told her that Block Island was going to be flooded by a tsunami and everyone there was going to drown. I’d dreamed it one night when I had actually managed to sleep, so I knew it was true. That was the basic difference between us in a nutshell. I loved that phrase. Whenever I saw it I saw a world just like ours inside a walnut waiting for the right person to crack it open and realize it was just as real as this one right here where I was about to get in another pointless argument with my mother.
“I just want you to be happy. I don’t know what to do.” That’s how all our conversations ended.
“Neither do I,” is how I usually ended the conversation, but today I said, “Mom, I bought a sofa. I’m sleeping a lot better, I promise. It’s really not that bad here.” Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t sleeping and I hated Providence, where I’d finally decided to “settle down,” mostly because I was too depressed to get another job now that the island coffeehouse where I’d worked for the past ten years had been sold to a rabble of Del’s lemonade slurping semi-mobsters who only hired people in “the family.” I wasn’t sure if that meant actual relations, or people in the mob, but wasn’t about to stick around and find out. It may have only been a coffeehouse, but the Providence mob was notorious, at least in reputation. Nobody I asked could tell me anything the mobsters actually did besides go to strip clubs like The Foxy Lady and eat rare steaks and raw oysters on Federal Hill, but if they were anything like the mobsters on TV I thought it was best not to get tangled up with them, even as a peon. Also, I had my standards. I only worked for Bohemians whose focus was on the atmosphere, not the money, though I was always the first one to count the tip jar. I just made sure I looked really casual while doing it and not desperate to pay my rent which was the actual truth. Actually, it was true that I’d bought a sofa, so I wasn’t totally lying to my mother.
I felt bad for my parents. I always had. I remember being a kid and wondering what they’d done to get stuck with me. I may have looked like a typical four year old, but there was something as ancient and patient about my little face upturned to the clouds which cast a shadow on my forehead in the only photo I’ve kept from my childhood. Some kind of unexplainable, earned wrinkles like the ones around the eyes of a Galapagos turtle waiting in the crater of an extinct volcano for Darwin to make it to the top and claim its wisdom as his own without a protest, or even an attempt to defend myself by crawling away to hide behind a stone. Maybe I just wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t remember. All I know is that when I look at that photo I saw two things--that girl knew things I don’t know now and needed to remember, and that I don’t in even the most remote way feel connected to her at all. I could be looking at some other kid or a baby orangutan, who was probably a lot cuter.
Something had slipped under my shell and sliced it right off, leaving my tenderness exposed. I lay there on Darwin’s ship, flipped on my back, legs wiggling in the salt air on that voyage into the unknown. My tears fell upside down toward the sky, even though they appeared to obey the laws of gravity in which water falls to nourish life on the ground.
So here I a, at 40, trying to settle down, still arguing with my mother about stupid little things that represent the gigantic disappointment I’ve turned out to be, still with no clue who I am and why I’ve been dropped on this planet, wishing I’d be transported off to one where there is no gravity and we are weightless, hovering above the surface without a care in the world. That's the world I want to live in. I bet that's where I’d be able to find myself.
It certainly isn't in the boxes my mom insisted I finally get out of her basement. The one time I opened them I had no recollection of having lettered in field hockey or of winning an Easter Bunny coloring contest sponsored by a toy store in third grade, of starring in a play as King Pythias in fifth, and I had definitely blanked out going to the prom dressed in a silver lamé puff-sleeved gown like an 80s Cinderella.
I definitely didn’t want to remember having sex with my boyfriend in a white tuxedo who posed with his hands on my waist like he owned me, which he did. I did whatever he wanted, fueled by cases of Piels Light and fuzzy navels. He thought it was him I couldn’t resist, but I knew it was the Peachtree Schnapps. I had to tell myself this, or I wouldn’t have survived the dead zone of degradation that spawned me, an eighteen year old existentialist already expert at sliding off a barstool.
Now, looking at the one memory of my childhood I wanted to hold onto—that photo—I see another story. The shadow between my brows that branded me as a seeker, that part of me that couldn’t be caught in time but shifted across my skin which hadn’t yet freckled after years of unprotected sun exposure. The shadow that told the world I would never be satisfied to settle down. The mark of the beast, I laughed to myself when I saw it. I’d been branded from the very beginning.
Not with anything as obvious as the devil’s 666, not with anything harsh or ugly, nothing demonic or even bold like so many of the tattoos my generation had etched into their skin to mark their identities in the world, I bore the weight of wings, both heavy and delicate, traced in light between my eyebrows, rising just above my unfocused eyes, tilted toward the clouds.
I don’t know if I was unaware of the camera or running toward it. All I can see is my longing to take flight and the belief that it was possible.
That’s what I need right now. I need to know if I can fly above the banal mess I’ve made of my life and get away from it all. I have a feeling if I don't, I'm going to wither away into dust the old lady in the apartment below me will sweep up and dump out the window.
And I need you to help me. Help me remember who I am and why I ended up in this apartment in Providence, Rhode Island with the blinds down. I’m inviting you to look into the eyes of my soul etched on my forehead along with sunspots and two lines between my brows. I’m saying look, here’s a butterfly just emerged from its silk cocoon, flapping its wet wings as the light streams down through the gaps in the green glow of the leaves it ate as a caterpillar, before it had wrapped itself in darkness without knowing it would be able to find its way back out.
My eyes, still unfocused sometimes, still shine green as those long-lost leaves. And they know a thing or two about jungles, which surprises me, since I’ve never been south of the equator. How did I learn how to wait in a tree through the day’s heat until the tiny deer whose back legs are longer than its front steps down to the river? How did I learn to puncture its brain with one bite so it died without knowing what I’d done? How did I know where to bury its body so no one else would find it, and to fall asleep in a tree afterwards, letting brilliant, blue butterflies land on my black fur? Who painted eyes on my wings, turning me into a waking dreamer?
In that photo, I am reaching toward a light I don’t remember. What I do remember was the shadow my daisy-clad body cast on the clover behind me, caught in time by the camera. I wish I could remember who snapped that photo so I could ask if that butterfly had been invisible or waiting all these years for me to find it.
If I ever found that person--when, I corrected myself, lying on my couch with the blinds pulled tight against the moon--I would ask for the reason beyond the reason--what broke the light? Where did the flowers go?
“Yes, Mom,” I droned. I knew I should have been more polite but I just didn’t have it in me to hear another lecture about how I needed to get down to Mr. Sleep and check out the mattress and box-spring sale that was about to end soon.
“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped sleeping on a futon on the floor?” she asked just about every time we talked on the phone.
“Those sales are always just about to end,” I muttered. I sounded sullen even to myself.
“I just thought you might like to get a comfortable night’s sleep for once,” she said, close to tears.
Shit, I’m an asshole, I thought--my standard reply to myself. My mom knew I had trouble sleeping. I didn’t bother telling her it was the moon that kept me awake. She’d just try to convince my to take Prozac like when I told her that Block Island was going to be flooded by a tsunami and everyone there was going to drown. I’d dreamed it one night when I had actually managed to sleep, so I knew it was true. That was the basic difference between us in a nutshell. I loved that phrase. Whenever I saw it I saw a world just like ours inside a walnut waiting for the right person to crack it open and realize it was just as real as this one right here where I was about to get in another pointless argument with my mother.
“I just want you to be happy. I don’t know what to do.” That’s how all our conversations ended.
“Neither do I,” is how I usually ended the conversation, but today I said, “Mom, I bought a sofa. I’m sleeping a lot better, I promise. It’s really not that bad here.” Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t sleeping and I hated Providence, where I’d finally decided to “settle down,” mostly because I was too depressed to get another job now that the island coffeehouse where I’d worked for the past ten years had been sold to a rabble of Del’s lemonade slurping semi-mobsters who only hired people in “the family.” I wasn’t sure if that meant actual relations, or people in the mob, but wasn’t about to stick around and find out. It may have only been a coffeehouse, but the Providence mob was notorious, at least in reputation. Nobody I asked could tell me anything the mobsters actually did besides go to strip clubs like The Foxy Lady and eat rare steaks and raw oysters on Federal Hill, but if they were anything like the mobsters on TV I thought it was best not to get tangled up with them, even as a peon. Also, I had my standards. I only worked for Bohemians whose focus was on the atmosphere, not the money, though I was always the first one to count the tip jar. I just made sure I looked really casual while doing it and not desperate to pay my rent which was the actual truth. Actually, it was true that I’d bought a sofa, so I wasn’t totally lying to my mother.
I felt bad for my parents. I always had. I remember being a kid and wondering what they’d done to get stuck with me. I may have looked like a typical four year old, but there was something as ancient and patient about my little face upturned to the clouds which cast a shadow on my forehead in the only photo I’ve kept from my childhood. Some kind of unexplainable, earned wrinkles like the ones around the eyes of a Galapagos turtle waiting in the crater of an extinct volcano for Darwin to make it to the top and claim its wisdom as his own without a protest, or even an attempt to defend myself by crawling away to hide behind a stone. Maybe I just wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t remember. All I know is that when I look at that photo I saw two things--that girl knew things I don’t know now and needed to remember, and that I don’t in even the most remote way feel connected to her at all. I could be looking at some other kid or a baby orangutan, who was probably a lot cuter.
Something had slipped under my shell and sliced it right off, leaving my tenderness exposed. I lay there on Darwin’s ship, flipped on my back, legs wiggling in the salt air on that voyage into the unknown. My tears fell upside down toward the sky, even though they appeared to obey the laws of gravity in which water falls to nourish life on the ground.
So here I a, at 40, trying to settle down, still arguing with my mother about stupid little things that represent the gigantic disappointment I’ve turned out to be, still with no clue who I am and why I’ve been dropped on this planet, wishing I’d be transported off to one where there is no gravity and we are weightless, hovering above the surface without a care in the world. That's the world I want to live in. I bet that's where I’d be able to find myself.
It certainly isn't in the boxes my mom insisted I finally get out of her basement. The one time I opened them I had no recollection of having lettered in field hockey or of winning an Easter Bunny coloring contest sponsored by a toy store in third grade, of starring in a play as King Pythias in fifth, and I had definitely blanked out going to the prom dressed in a silver lamé puff-sleeved gown like an 80s Cinderella.
I definitely didn’t want to remember having sex with my boyfriend in a white tuxedo who posed with his hands on my waist like he owned me, which he did. I did whatever he wanted, fueled by cases of Piels Light and fuzzy navels. He thought it was him I couldn’t resist, but I knew it was the Peachtree Schnapps. I had to tell myself this, or I wouldn’t have survived the dead zone of degradation that spawned me, an eighteen year old existentialist already expert at sliding off a barstool.
Now, looking at the one memory of my childhood I wanted to hold onto—that photo—I see another story. The shadow between my brows that branded me as a seeker, that part of me that couldn’t be caught in time but shifted across my skin which hadn’t yet freckled after years of unprotected sun exposure. The shadow that told the world I would never be satisfied to settle down. The mark of the beast, I laughed to myself when I saw it. I’d been branded from the very beginning.
Not with anything as obvious as the devil’s 666, not with anything harsh or ugly, nothing demonic or even bold like so many of the tattoos my generation had etched into their skin to mark their identities in the world, I bore the weight of wings, both heavy and delicate, traced in light between my eyebrows, rising just above my unfocused eyes, tilted toward the clouds.
I don’t know if I was unaware of the camera or running toward it. All I can see is my longing to take flight and the belief that it was possible.
That’s what I need right now. I need to know if I can fly above the banal mess I’ve made of my life and get away from it all. I have a feeling if I don't, I'm going to wither away into dust the old lady in the apartment below me will sweep up and dump out the window.
And I need you to help me. Help me remember who I am and why I ended up in this apartment in Providence, Rhode Island with the blinds down. I’m inviting you to look into the eyes of my soul etched on my forehead along with sunspots and two lines between my brows. I’m saying look, here’s a butterfly just emerged from its silk cocoon, flapping its wet wings as the light streams down through the gaps in the green glow of the leaves it ate as a caterpillar, before it had wrapped itself in darkness without knowing it would be able to find its way back out.
My eyes, still unfocused sometimes, still shine green as those long-lost leaves. And they know a thing or two about jungles, which surprises me, since I’ve never been south of the equator. How did I learn how to wait in a tree through the day’s heat until the tiny deer whose back legs are longer than its front steps down to the river? How did I learn to puncture its brain with one bite so it died without knowing what I’d done? How did I know where to bury its body so no one else would find it, and to fall asleep in a tree afterwards, letting brilliant, blue butterflies land on my black fur? Who painted eyes on my wings, turning me into a waking dreamer?
In that photo, I am reaching toward a light I don’t remember. What I do remember was the shadow my daisy-clad body cast on the clover behind me, caught in time by the camera. I wish I could remember who snapped that photo so I could ask if that butterfly had been invisible or waiting all these years for me to find it.
If I ever found that person--when, I corrected myself, lying on my couch with the blinds pulled tight against the moon--I would ask for the reason beyond the reason--what broke the light? Where did the flowers go?
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Moonwalker, Chapter 3
That uphill ride was good for my imagination. I found it was much easier on the thighs and lungs if I let my mind drift somewhere else. Pedaling downhill was another matter. To begin with, I didn’t pedal, I just coasted, sometimes with my feet off to the sides, other times no-handed. Downhill was when the daredevil side of me came out. Zoe was always amazed when I arrived in one piece. She was usually waiting for me on the porch to let her in because she only lived a block away and actually liked getting up before the sun rose.
“Hello? Earth to Minerva. You’re supposed to be in charge here, remember,” she said to me.
“The creamers are empty again and you forgot to tell me to fill them.”
“Oh, sorry, right.” I came out of my reverie much faster than I wanted to into the jangle of jazz and caffeinated nerves that was Café Chaos, to face a bemused customer, although he may have actually been annoyed that the creamers were yet again empty. Bemused may have been an optimistic assessment on my part, but my expertise at avoidance put him at ease as I filled the creamers myself. I still hadn’t gotten used to being a manager after years of being a peon, but somehow when I’d applied for this lastest in a long string of coffeehouse jobs I’d ended up an authority figure. Granted, my staff consisted of one wholeheartedly bemused twenty-two year old art-school graduate named Zoe, but it was still quite a step up according to some people’s standards, namely my parents who where thrilled at how I was rising up in the world. I’d worked in coffeehouses so long we weren’t called baristas when I started out, we were counter help. Even though I thought the new title was pretentious I didn’t mind since baristas got way more tips.
“Uh, Zoe, can you brew some more Monsoon Malabar?” I told her. Some of the new names were absurd, too, but I had to admit it was more fun than just saying boring old Colombian all day long, although I’m sure Colombians aren’t boring at all. I’d actually heard it was a great country to visit these days now that the crime rate was somewhat down, although I had met a guy who’d told me he’d been stabbed in the back by guerillas with a machete when he was hiking in the jungle. But he’d survived and had the time of his life when he finally made it to Cartagena. Showed me the photos on his digital camera. The glare of the white sand hurt my eyes so much I had to stay out of the sun for a couple of days, which was unusual for me. I’d spent my whole life trying to avoid bad weather, migrating from north to south with the seasons like a brightly colored bird.
“Yes, boss,” Zoe said. Not only was she wholeheartedly bemused, she was wholeheartedly ironic, like most of her generation. She was Y to my X. We Generation X-ers had missed out on the bemused part, which I was kind of mad about. I think I would have had a lot easier time if I’d been able to laugh at myself and this entire, ridiculous world. I secretly thought she should be my boss because I could tell I had a lot to learn from her, but the owner had been thrilled when an “adult” had applied for the job. Those quotation marks around “adult” are ironic because even though I’m forty years old, I’m far from grown up. Just ask my mother and father or anyone else who’s watched me flounder through life for the past twenty years.
“You go back to daydreaming. That’s more important than any old monsoon.” Zoe and I had quickly developed a rapport based on obscure associations that nobody else understood unless they’d worked in a twenty-first century coffeehouse.
“Right, good job,” I told her. “I trust you.” That was saying a lot for me. I didn’t trust many people. I drifted back into that bubble where for one whole summer the neighbors’ son and I, separated by age, but somehow closer than anyone else on our oak-shaded block, stretched out on our twin beds listening to green acorns drop, suspended in the sadness spun by those two weary songs he played over and over again on his record player, lifting up the needle with the one finger he had the energy to move.
I thought he was an old man, but he was probably all of nineteen, which now that I’m 40 seems absurdly young. How could he have known all that he did at that age? Or maybe, like me, he was born knowing and had to forget it all.
At the end of the summer he disappeared with my childhood. To everyone else I still looked like a four year old kid running barefoot through clover in my daisy-print party dress, playing red light, green light with the other kids on the front lawns of the neighborhood. I came into bed when my parents called me even though it was still light out. I let them tuck me into bed and kiss me good night, but under the covers where I listened to the crickets chirp and then go suddenly silent, watching the moon move across the empty walls of my room, my childhood was gone. I don’t know how to explain it. One day I was dancing in the sun, the next I was hiding in the shadows, lost on the dark side of the moon.
“Where do you go when you get that look on your face?” Zoe asked me as we took out the trash just before we went home.
“Nowhere,” I answered. I’d been lost so long, I didn’t want to be found.
“Hello? Earth to Minerva. You’re supposed to be in charge here, remember,” she said to me.
“The creamers are empty again and you forgot to tell me to fill them.”
“Oh, sorry, right.” I came out of my reverie much faster than I wanted to into the jangle of jazz and caffeinated nerves that was Café Chaos, to face a bemused customer, although he may have actually been annoyed that the creamers were yet again empty. Bemused may have been an optimistic assessment on my part, but my expertise at avoidance put him at ease as I filled the creamers myself. I still hadn’t gotten used to being a manager after years of being a peon, but somehow when I’d applied for this lastest in a long string of coffeehouse jobs I’d ended up an authority figure. Granted, my staff consisted of one wholeheartedly bemused twenty-two year old art-school graduate named Zoe, but it was still quite a step up according to some people’s standards, namely my parents who where thrilled at how I was rising up in the world. I’d worked in coffeehouses so long we weren’t called baristas when I started out, we were counter help. Even though I thought the new title was pretentious I didn’t mind since baristas got way more tips.
“Uh, Zoe, can you brew some more Monsoon Malabar?” I told her. Some of the new names were absurd, too, but I had to admit it was more fun than just saying boring old Colombian all day long, although I’m sure Colombians aren’t boring at all. I’d actually heard it was a great country to visit these days now that the crime rate was somewhat down, although I had met a guy who’d told me he’d been stabbed in the back by guerillas with a machete when he was hiking in the jungle. But he’d survived and had the time of his life when he finally made it to Cartagena. Showed me the photos on his digital camera. The glare of the white sand hurt my eyes so much I had to stay out of the sun for a couple of days, which was unusual for me. I’d spent my whole life trying to avoid bad weather, migrating from north to south with the seasons like a brightly colored bird.
“Yes, boss,” Zoe said. Not only was she wholeheartedly bemused, she was wholeheartedly ironic, like most of her generation. She was Y to my X. We Generation X-ers had missed out on the bemused part, which I was kind of mad about. I think I would have had a lot easier time if I’d been able to laugh at myself and this entire, ridiculous world. I secretly thought she should be my boss because I could tell I had a lot to learn from her, but the owner had been thrilled when an “adult” had applied for the job. Those quotation marks around “adult” are ironic because even though I’m forty years old, I’m far from grown up. Just ask my mother and father or anyone else who’s watched me flounder through life for the past twenty years.
“You go back to daydreaming. That’s more important than any old monsoon.” Zoe and I had quickly developed a rapport based on obscure associations that nobody else understood unless they’d worked in a twenty-first century coffeehouse.
“Right, good job,” I told her. “I trust you.” That was saying a lot for me. I didn’t trust many people. I drifted back into that bubble where for one whole summer the neighbors’ son and I, separated by age, but somehow closer than anyone else on our oak-shaded block, stretched out on our twin beds listening to green acorns drop, suspended in the sadness spun by those two weary songs he played over and over again on his record player, lifting up the needle with the one finger he had the energy to move.
I thought he was an old man, but he was probably all of nineteen, which now that I’m 40 seems absurdly young. How could he have known all that he did at that age? Or maybe, like me, he was born knowing and had to forget it all.
At the end of the summer he disappeared with my childhood. To everyone else I still looked like a four year old kid running barefoot through clover in my daisy-print party dress, playing red light, green light with the other kids on the front lawns of the neighborhood. I came into bed when my parents called me even though it was still light out. I let them tuck me into bed and kiss me good night, but under the covers where I listened to the crickets chirp and then go suddenly silent, watching the moon move across the empty walls of my room, my childhood was gone. I don’t know how to explain it. One day I was dancing in the sun, the next I was hiding in the shadows, lost on the dark side of the moon.
“Where do you go when you get that look on your face?” Zoe asked me as we took out the trash just before we went home.
“Nowhere,” I answered. I’d been lost so long, I didn’t want to be found.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Moonwalker, Chapter 2
“We didn’t study Vietnam in school. Pretty much all I know is from Life magazine. That picture of the girl on fire running down a dirt road—you must have seen it?”
One of our favorite customers had just left the café, although he wasn’t exactly a paying one. He was bi-polar and basically homeless, smelled to high-heaven like b.o., wet wool, (why did homeless people wear wool in summer? I just couldn’t fathom how they could stand their own smell, let alone how I felt about it) and dread locks, which could smell kind of alluring on hot Rasta-guys, or even hippies who sometimes bathed, or at least doused themselves with patchouli. He sat in the corner all day most days, at the same table, and I let Zoe give him free coffee.
“He’s a Vietnam vet,” she told me. “We should give him free coffee.”
“Did he tell you that?” I’d never heard him speak.
“No. But it’s obvious.” I
wasn’t sure how it was obvious, but I felt sorry for the guy and let him drink free all day. Better here than a bar, I thought. Besides, he had a habit of rearing up like a fire-breathing dragon whenever anyone really snippety approached the counter, someone who you knew was going to hassle us for the attention, those types that viewed anyone who served them as someone they could dump their thwarted anger on. Anyway, Zoe had got me to thinking about Vietnam, which led to my asking her if she knew that picture from Life.
“Never seen it,” she answered, throwing back her thirteenth espresso shot of the day. She always shot for thirteen because that was her lucky number. I wasn’t supposed to let her have more than three a day, but I wasn’t very good at bossing anyone around.
“I keep forgetting you’re only twenty-two, probably because I can’t handle that we have the same job.”
“You’re my boss.”
"When’s the last time I bossed you around?”
“How old are you again?”
“Forty.”
“Whoa.”
“Exactly. It’s a pretty famous picture. Are you sure you haven’t see it? Just what do they teach you these days in school?”
“I wouldn’t know. I went to art school.”
That was Zoe’s stock excuse for just about everything. I’d only known her a month but I’d heard her use it at least once a day since we’d started working together. It was kind of frustrating, but I had to admit useful. I kept meaning to come up with a stock answer myself for why I was a 40 year old barista, so I wouldn’t seem so sullen whenever someone asked me what I was going to do with my life like serving coffee wasn’t doing something. Since when did you become so concerned with the deeper meaning of life, I wanted to say to them with a sneer. Do you realize that coffee you’re drinking was probably harvested by a child slave and that cup you’re going to throw away when you walk out of here is burying our planet? We supposedly only served organic fair-trade, but I had my suspicions. I didn’t trust anybody. There was no excuse for the disposable cups. The owner kept saying he was going to get biodegradable ones, but I don’t see what difference it would make. It was too late. The world was choking and even if somebody figured out how to the Heimlich maneuver on Planet Earth, we’d just end up polluting space with all the junk we’ve consumed and thrown away.
“My parents were in Vietnam. They met there. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a doctor. Pretty crazy, right? My mom got pregnant with me right after they got married so she could get out of the Army. They made you quit back then when you were pregnant. In the good old, sexist days. Way better than now. Now they make women shoot people in Iraq.”
“I don’t think they make them.”
“Well, let them then. What a way to prove yourself.”
“Come on, those girls are defending our country!”
“No comment.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Do you want us all to be communists?”
“Wasn’t that your government’s plan? That girl in the photo looks a lot like you, you know.” Zoe was Chinese, not Vietnamese, but I thought this would get her attention, loop her back into our storytelling, the only real pleasure I found in working in a coffeehouse. She drifted off easily due to her habit of looking at herself in mirrors she didn’t even pretend to hide. “Look at me. I’m so cute,” she liked to tell herself. My insult didn’t work. She had her earphones in and was on her way out the door.
“Bye,” she said, too loud because she couldn’t hear herself. I flipped the lights off and locked the door, stepping out onto the uneven cobbles of Wickenden Street where I’d locked my bike to a lamppost. Somebody was going to steal it one of these days—I only had a cheap lock that could be snipped with wire cutters, but so far, so good. Nobody would want my bike anyway. It was a clunker—a beach cruiser from my former life covered in stickers from all the bands I’d seen when I was younger and thought it was fun to ride home drunk at three in the morning. Pedaling it uphill to my apartment in Fox Point was brutal.
Despite how little I knew, the war was the shadow I played in as a child, even though it looked like I was just counting clovers under the rhododendron in front of our raised ranch house. My ears pricked up a like a dog’s anytime I heard the word “Vietnam” on the radio, or on the TV, which I was only allowed to watch if I’d cleaned my plate like a good girl of Shake ‘n Bake or Hamburger Helper. An only child enamored with the large Brady Bunch, I developed a hearty appetite for the artificial, and though they thought I was too young to be affected by the images on the CBS Evening News, I knew that when Walter Cronkite came on each night to announce the latest body count, that there was something seriously amok in the world.
And when our next door neighbors’ son came home from “overseas,” not to come out of his bedroom for the rest of my childhood, I knew my parents had secrets they weren’t telling me, secrets that must have been so terrible there wasn’t a manual on how to tell them. Not even the authority figures could figure it out.
My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house. They couldn’t hear his record player like I could through my open window, so they never understood why my favorite songs were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and “One Tin Soldier.”
I’ve retained this taste for melancholy melodies to this day and I still will only listen to music on a record player. I scour thrift shop bins for songs about the moon that I play all night, hoping I’ll figure out what it wants from me so I can finally sleep. I’ve never forgotten those hours when the space between me and the neighbors’ son was filled with lost flowers and a tin soldier riding away from hope. I leaned on the windowsill, looking to his window where the white gauze curtains never moved, even when it was windy. I wished he would open them and look back and tell me we were going to find the flowers, but when he finally did I took my wish back.
His face was so gaunt and pale I thought it was a skeleton at first. He had ripped the curtains off. It lay on the ground beneath his window like an empty ghost. The only prayer I knew was “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” but I knew that wasn’t enough to keep me from the truth I saw in his eyes, ice-blue like a wolf’s, shadowed by black lashes and bruised by an exhaustion that couldn’t be relieved by sleep.
I wouldn’t understand what I saw until I was much older. Snakes and chains, young girls burning; bodies facedown in mud, fertile with organ-blood and brains. A world without singing or music of any kind, shocked into silence, afraid of the sound of its own heartbeat.
Eyes wide open, seeing everything I wasn’t supposed to see. This is what “Vietnam” meant. No wonder my parents kept silent. So did I. I became afraid of the sound of my own heartbeat. I might have disappeared from the world right then if it wasn’t for him. I don’t know why he did it, knowing what he knew—how the stories really ended, but he opened his mouth and a song poured out. It was a song that could be seen, not heard. I saw the notes become images of children clustered around the feet of a storyteller in a village where all the houses were made from gingerbread like in a fairy tale—a beautiful woman whose hair flowed free like a hippie’s to her waist. She wore bells on her ankles, feather earrings, and her long skirts brushed the ground.
She sang:
Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
“Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.
I didn’t learn any of this in school, I wanted to tell Zoe, but she was already out of sight. She and her girlfriend only lived a block away and said the neighborhood was great. “All our friends from college still live here.” I didn’t have any friends from college, or any from anywhere else really, and I didn’t know my neighbors, who I don’t think wanted to know me. I lived on a block that was so quiet it felt like everyone was hiding from snipers or vampires, although it was probably the police. There were a lot of pit bulls and four-in-the-morning screams followed by silence, that was unnerving, to say the least. I even heard a gunshot last week, but didn’t tell anybody, especially my mother who was so happy I’d finally signed a year-long lease.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day,
On the bloody morning after…
One tin soldier rides away.
There had been a soldier next door, but no kings or mountains in my suburban neighborhood, or treasure I was aware of, which didn’t stop me from wondering if there was one buried in the swamp behind our house; and there wasn’t a valley filled with greedy people, just normal Americans trying to make a living. It was just a street of raised ranches in the Connecticut woods, still quiet enough the other side hadn’t yet been developed. I wasn’t allowed to play there, and I didn’t. I was a good girl.
One of our favorite customers had just left the café, although he wasn’t exactly a paying one. He was bi-polar and basically homeless, smelled to high-heaven like b.o., wet wool, (why did homeless people wear wool in summer? I just couldn’t fathom how they could stand their own smell, let alone how I felt about it) and dread locks, which could smell kind of alluring on hot Rasta-guys, or even hippies who sometimes bathed, or at least doused themselves with patchouli. He sat in the corner all day most days, at the same table, and I let Zoe give him free coffee.
“He’s a Vietnam vet,” she told me. “We should give him free coffee.”
“Did he tell you that?” I’d never heard him speak.
“No. But it’s obvious.” I
wasn’t sure how it was obvious, but I felt sorry for the guy and let him drink free all day. Better here than a bar, I thought. Besides, he had a habit of rearing up like a fire-breathing dragon whenever anyone really snippety approached the counter, someone who you knew was going to hassle us for the attention, those types that viewed anyone who served them as someone they could dump their thwarted anger on. Anyway, Zoe had got me to thinking about Vietnam, which led to my asking her if she knew that picture from Life.
“Never seen it,” she answered, throwing back her thirteenth espresso shot of the day. She always shot for thirteen because that was her lucky number. I wasn’t supposed to let her have more than three a day, but I wasn’t very good at bossing anyone around.
“I keep forgetting you’re only twenty-two, probably because I can’t handle that we have the same job.”
“You’re my boss.”
"When’s the last time I bossed you around?”
“How old are you again?”
“Forty.”
“Whoa.”
“Exactly. It’s a pretty famous picture. Are you sure you haven’t see it? Just what do they teach you these days in school?”
“I wouldn’t know. I went to art school.”
That was Zoe’s stock excuse for just about everything. I’d only known her a month but I’d heard her use it at least once a day since we’d started working together. It was kind of frustrating, but I had to admit useful. I kept meaning to come up with a stock answer myself for why I was a 40 year old barista, so I wouldn’t seem so sullen whenever someone asked me what I was going to do with my life like serving coffee wasn’t doing something. Since when did you become so concerned with the deeper meaning of life, I wanted to say to them with a sneer. Do you realize that coffee you’re drinking was probably harvested by a child slave and that cup you’re going to throw away when you walk out of here is burying our planet? We supposedly only served organic fair-trade, but I had my suspicions. I didn’t trust anybody. There was no excuse for the disposable cups. The owner kept saying he was going to get biodegradable ones, but I don’t see what difference it would make. It was too late. The world was choking and even if somebody figured out how to the Heimlich maneuver on Planet Earth, we’d just end up polluting space with all the junk we’ve consumed and thrown away.
“My parents were in Vietnam. They met there. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a doctor. Pretty crazy, right? My mom got pregnant with me right after they got married so she could get out of the Army. They made you quit back then when you were pregnant. In the good old, sexist days. Way better than now. Now they make women shoot people in Iraq.”
“I don’t think they make them.”
“Well, let them then. What a way to prove yourself.”
“Come on, those girls are defending our country!”
“No comment.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Do you want us all to be communists?”
“Wasn’t that your government’s plan? That girl in the photo looks a lot like you, you know.” Zoe was Chinese, not Vietnamese, but I thought this would get her attention, loop her back into our storytelling, the only real pleasure I found in working in a coffeehouse. She drifted off easily due to her habit of looking at herself in mirrors she didn’t even pretend to hide. “Look at me. I’m so cute,” she liked to tell herself. My insult didn’t work. She had her earphones in and was on her way out the door.
“Bye,” she said, too loud because she couldn’t hear herself. I flipped the lights off and locked the door, stepping out onto the uneven cobbles of Wickenden Street where I’d locked my bike to a lamppost. Somebody was going to steal it one of these days—I only had a cheap lock that could be snipped with wire cutters, but so far, so good. Nobody would want my bike anyway. It was a clunker—a beach cruiser from my former life covered in stickers from all the bands I’d seen when I was younger and thought it was fun to ride home drunk at three in the morning. Pedaling it uphill to my apartment in Fox Point was brutal.
Despite how little I knew, the war was the shadow I played in as a child, even though it looked like I was just counting clovers under the rhododendron in front of our raised ranch house. My ears pricked up a like a dog’s anytime I heard the word “Vietnam” on the radio, or on the TV, which I was only allowed to watch if I’d cleaned my plate like a good girl of Shake ‘n Bake or Hamburger Helper. An only child enamored with the large Brady Bunch, I developed a hearty appetite for the artificial, and though they thought I was too young to be affected by the images on the CBS Evening News, I knew that when Walter Cronkite came on each night to announce the latest body count, that there was something seriously amok in the world.
And when our next door neighbors’ son came home from “overseas,” not to come out of his bedroom for the rest of my childhood, I knew my parents had secrets they weren’t telling me, secrets that must have been so terrible there wasn’t a manual on how to tell them. Not even the authority figures could figure it out.
My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house. They couldn’t hear his record player like I could through my open window, so they never understood why my favorite songs were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and “One Tin Soldier.”
I’ve retained this taste for melancholy melodies to this day and I still will only listen to music on a record player. I scour thrift shop bins for songs about the moon that I play all night, hoping I’ll figure out what it wants from me so I can finally sleep. I’ve never forgotten those hours when the space between me and the neighbors’ son was filled with lost flowers and a tin soldier riding away from hope. I leaned on the windowsill, looking to his window where the white gauze curtains never moved, even when it was windy. I wished he would open them and look back and tell me we were going to find the flowers, but when he finally did I took my wish back.
His face was so gaunt and pale I thought it was a skeleton at first. He had ripped the curtains off. It lay on the ground beneath his window like an empty ghost. The only prayer I knew was “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” but I knew that wasn’t enough to keep me from the truth I saw in his eyes, ice-blue like a wolf’s, shadowed by black lashes and bruised by an exhaustion that couldn’t be relieved by sleep.
I wouldn’t understand what I saw until I was much older. Snakes and chains, young girls burning; bodies facedown in mud, fertile with organ-blood and brains. A world without singing or music of any kind, shocked into silence, afraid of the sound of its own heartbeat.
Eyes wide open, seeing everything I wasn’t supposed to see. This is what “Vietnam” meant. No wonder my parents kept silent. So did I. I became afraid of the sound of my own heartbeat. I might have disappeared from the world right then if it wasn’t for him. I don’t know why he did it, knowing what he knew—how the stories really ended, but he opened his mouth and a song poured out. It was a song that could be seen, not heard. I saw the notes become images of children clustered around the feet of a storyteller in a village where all the houses were made from gingerbread like in a fairy tale—a beautiful woman whose hair flowed free like a hippie’s to her waist. She wore bells on her ankles, feather earrings, and her long skirts brushed the ground.
She sang:
Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
“Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.
I didn’t learn any of this in school, I wanted to tell Zoe, but she was already out of sight. She and her girlfriend only lived a block away and said the neighborhood was great. “All our friends from college still live here.” I didn’t have any friends from college, or any from anywhere else really, and I didn’t know my neighbors, who I don’t think wanted to know me. I lived on a block that was so quiet it felt like everyone was hiding from snipers or vampires, although it was probably the police. There were a lot of pit bulls and four-in-the-morning screams followed by silence, that was unnerving, to say the least. I even heard a gunshot last week, but didn’t tell anybody, especially my mother who was so happy I’d finally signed a year-long lease.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day,
On the bloody morning after…
One tin soldier rides away.
There had been a soldier next door, but no kings or mountains in my suburban neighborhood, or treasure I was aware of, which didn’t stop me from wondering if there was one buried in the swamp behind our house; and there wasn’t a valley filled with greedy people, just normal Americans trying to make a living. It was just a street of raised ranches in the Connecticut woods, still quiet enough the other side hadn’t yet been developed. I wasn’t allowed to play there, and I didn’t. I was a good girl.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Moonwalker, Chapter One
I can’t say when it was I started to follow butterflies--if there was an actual moment when I was entranced by the promises of broken flowers and fractured light. I can’t pinpoint when I was seduced by pollen and mirrors, or when I became hungry for the golden promises I glimpsed in still water to be fulfilled. I do know I was afraid of the moon from the very beginning.
This is how my mother tells the story:
Each month, as the moon swelled, I cried in my crib in the room down the long hall where I’d been banished from her breast after one month. Nobody breastfed back then except hippies and my mom was definitely not a hippie, even though she sang along with the Mamas and the Papas on the radio. She was in the Army and didn’t know that Bob Dylan was the voice of her generation until I told her, and I’m pretty sure she’s never smoked pot, although I’ve never asked because then she’d feel free to ask if I had. Even so, I’m aware that I could have chosen the less emotionally charged word wean instead of banish, which conjures up images of orphan girls expiring on snow-covered stoops like the poor Little Match Girl. Well, at least it does for me, but my imagination might be more fanciful than yours, although I prefer to see it as more mythically attuned because that makes me seem special instead of paranoid and damaged.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always searched for the meaning behind the meaning. I haven’t found it yet, which could account for my lifelong depression which everyone else I know has medicated or explained away with therapy. Call me crazy, but I know it’s more than just a chemical imbalance that’s caused me to sleep through a good two-thirds of my life, instead of the usual half of the rest of the population. Then again, I don’t see sleep as the proverbial waste of time you always hear people saying it is, because sleep is when we dream, and in dreams I pace the top of a tor in a swan-feather cloak that catches the breath of the moon that lifts me off the dense earth to soar on currents of starlight that I know will carry me to the truth—the reason beyond the reason that has called to me even before I was born.
Of course I always come crashing back down because like everyone else on earth, I have to breathe. The one therapist I saw (I was forced to go in high school when I got caught crawling up the front stairs drunk) said I must be afraid of death, but I knew it was life I feared. I didn’t tell her this, because I was afraid of her, too. She said I had “mothering” issues, which might be attributed to the fact that I wasn’t breastfed. She actually told me that one month was probably worse then no boob at all, because at least if I hadn’t had it I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. This didn’t come close to satisfying my curiosity to know the reason beyond the reason. I took her prescription for Prozac and never filled it. When she called to ask why I hadn’t kept my appointment I didn’t answer because I was in bed and didn’t plan to get out for at least a month.
Really, it was strange she breastfed me for even that one month. It was even stranger that I remembered. I even remembered how she cried as much as I did because her breasts ached and overflowed. I asked her why once--why she stopped--and she said because that’s what everyone did back then. I never asked her why she started, which was the really interesting question.
My mother was a southern belle who’d grown up in the segregated south who’d entered the Army after high school and served in Vietnam, although she didn’t talk about this phase of her life. She’d go on for hours about her favorite childhood dog that ran away and was never heard from again, about how she and her friends dressed up like Beatniks and had a party that scandalized the neighborhood, about the time Robert Mitchum came to town to film a movie and hit on her BFF who was only fourteen years old, about how her mother used to make her father flip over rocks and shoot the imaginary snakes she were sure were lurking there—you know—the usual stuff which makes up a life, stories we tell over and over until they become the myths that define us. Most of us don’t realize the gods and goddesses are no different than us. They don’t want to look too deeply into why they blasted a village off a mountaintop with a bolt of lightning or sank a flotilla of ships with a tidal wave. Not to say my mom killed anyone in Vietnam. She was a nurse. She was supposed to heal people who’d almost been killed. I’m sure some of them died, but she didn’t talk about the bullet holes or amputations. She liked to start the day with Good Morning America and a bowl of Honey-Nut Cheerios.
The only thing I knew about her time in the Army was what I could glean from the photo hanging on the den wall of my dad swearing her in. She’s wearing her white nurse’s uniform with those starched white caps nurses used to wear that made them seem both more risqué and more professional than today’s nurses dressed in floral print scrubs and crocs. You can clearly see what my dad is thinking as he administers the oath.
Within a month they were married and she was pregnant with me a few months later. Her only reference to the war that carried them overseas to the mythic jungles of Vietnam was, “Those were turbulent times. We made decisions that may have seemed a little rash.” I always wondered if I was one of those rash decisions, but didn’t have the heart to ask. I was here, that’s all that mattered, but I couldn’t forget the sound of her crying as her breasts overflowed.
I remembered. I swear I did. I remembered my mother wriggling out from under my father’s arm and running down the hall to my room. There she found me, pinned on my back by the moon, pierced by white light, slashed to the bone.
She picked me up and unbuttoned her nightgown, cradled my head with her hand as I latched on to her nipple, even though she wasn’t supposed to. I still remember the taste of that milk, sticky and sour on my cracked lips. I still remember the moment my mother’s breast became the whole world. I forgot the months of weeping as I lost myself in suckles and murmurs, eyes wide open to the glow. I emptied one breast, then the other as my mother finally got some rest too, nodding off as the moon sunk beneath the earth’s horizon and the sun rose to trace the outline of her cheekbones, and the shadows which had gathered there as she’d listened to me weep. I remember this. I bet if you try, you can remember things like this, too.
We went through whole lifetimes together, watched the sun cast shadows on our surface as we waned in the sky which didn’t seem so empty any more, played with the rabbit and the man who lived there who passed his time holding up mirrors so the stars could see how beautiful they were.
We accepted we were half of what we once were; then a quarter, then a crescent, then a sliver of ourselves, until finally there was nothing to us. We couldn’t even reflect the sun anymore. It was a relief to let go of mirrors.
And then, the mirror broke, shattering the peace between us, ripping us back into the instruction manual which said I was supposed to be weaned before I could walk so that I could grow up to be strong and independent like the astronauts who that very night—July 20, 1969--walked on the moon.
This is how my mother tells the story:
Each month, as the moon swelled, I cried in my crib in the room down the long hall where I’d been banished from her breast after one month. Nobody breastfed back then except hippies and my mom was definitely not a hippie, even though she sang along with the Mamas and the Papas on the radio. She was in the Army and didn’t know that Bob Dylan was the voice of her generation until I told her, and I’m pretty sure she’s never smoked pot, although I’ve never asked because then she’d feel free to ask if I had. Even so, I’m aware that I could have chosen the less emotionally charged word wean instead of banish, which conjures up images of orphan girls expiring on snow-covered stoops like the poor Little Match Girl. Well, at least it does for me, but my imagination might be more fanciful than yours, although I prefer to see it as more mythically attuned because that makes me seem special instead of paranoid and damaged.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always searched for the meaning behind the meaning. I haven’t found it yet, which could account for my lifelong depression which everyone else I know has medicated or explained away with therapy. Call me crazy, but I know it’s more than just a chemical imbalance that’s caused me to sleep through a good two-thirds of my life, instead of the usual half of the rest of the population. Then again, I don’t see sleep as the proverbial waste of time you always hear people saying it is, because sleep is when we dream, and in dreams I pace the top of a tor in a swan-feather cloak that catches the breath of the moon that lifts me off the dense earth to soar on currents of starlight that I know will carry me to the truth—the reason beyond the reason that has called to me even before I was born.
Of course I always come crashing back down because like everyone else on earth, I have to breathe. The one therapist I saw (I was forced to go in high school when I got caught crawling up the front stairs drunk) said I must be afraid of death, but I knew it was life I feared. I didn’t tell her this, because I was afraid of her, too. She said I had “mothering” issues, which might be attributed to the fact that I wasn’t breastfed. She actually told me that one month was probably worse then no boob at all, because at least if I hadn’t had it I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. This didn’t come close to satisfying my curiosity to know the reason beyond the reason. I took her prescription for Prozac and never filled it. When she called to ask why I hadn’t kept my appointment I didn’t answer because I was in bed and didn’t plan to get out for at least a month.
Really, it was strange she breastfed me for even that one month. It was even stranger that I remembered. I even remembered how she cried as much as I did because her breasts ached and overflowed. I asked her why once--why she stopped--and she said because that’s what everyone did back then. I never asked her why she started, which was the really interesting question.
My mother was a southern belle who’d grown up in the segregated south who’d entered the Army after high school and served in Vietnam, although she didn’t talk about this phase of her life. She’d go on for hours about her favorite childhood dog that ran away and was never heard from again, about how she and her friends dressed up like Beatniks and had a party that scandalized the neighborhood, about the time Robert Mitchum came to town to film a movie and hit on her BFF who was only fourteen years old, about how her mother used to make her father flip over rocks and shoot the imaginary snakes she were sure were lurking there—you know—the usual stuff which makes up a life, stories we tell over and over until they become the myths that define us. Most of us don’t realize the gods and goddesses are no different than us. They don’t want to look too deeply into why they blasted a village off a mountaintop with a bolt of lightning or sank a flotilla of ships with a tidal wave. Not to say my mom killed anyone in Vietnam. She was a nurse. She was supposed to heal people who’d almost been killed. I’m sure some of them died, but she didn’t talk about the bullet holes or amputations. She liked to start the day with Good Morning America and a bowl of Honey-Nut Cheerios.
The only thing I knew about her time in the Army was what I could glean from the photo hanging on the den wall of my dad swearing her in. She’s wearing her white nurse’s uniform with those starched white caps nurses used to wear that made them seem both more risqué and more professional than today’s nurses dressed in floral print scrubs and crocs. You can clearly see what my dad is thinking as he administers the oath.
Within a month they were married and she was pregnant with me a few months later. Her only reference to the war that carried them overseas to the mythic jungles of Vietnam was, “Those were turbulent times. We made decisions that may have seemed a little rash.” I always wondered if I was one of those rash decisions, but didn’t have the heart to ask. I was here, that’s all that mattered, but I couldn’t forget the sound of her crying as her breasts overflowed.
I remembered. I swear I did. I remembered my mother wriggling out from under my father’s arm and running down the hall to my room. There she found me, pinned on my back by the moon, pierced by white light, slashed to the bone.
She picked me up and unbuttoned her nightgown, cradled my head with her hand as I latched on to her nipple, even though she wasn’t supposed to. I still remember the taste of that milk, sticky and sour on my cracked lips. I still remember the moment my mother’s breast became the whole world. I forgot the months of weeping as I lost myself in suckles and murmurs, eyes wide open to the glow. I emptied one breast, then the other as my mother finally got some rest too, nodding off as the moon sunk beneath the earth’s horizon and the sun rose to trace the outline of her cheekbones, and the shadows which had gathered there as she’d listened to me weep. I remember this. I bet if you try, you can remember things like this, too.
We went through whole lifetimes together, watched the sun cast shadows on our surface as we waned in the sky which didn’t seem so empty any more, played with the rabbit and the man who lived there who passed his time holding up mirrors so the stars could see how beautiful they were.
We accepted we were half of what we once were; then a quarter, then a crescent, then a sliver of ourselves, until finally there was nothing to us. We couldn’t even reflect the sun anymore. It was a relief to let go of mirrors.
And then, the mirror broke, shattering the peace between us, ripping us back into the instruction manual which said I was supposed to be weaned before I could walk so that I could grow up to be strong and independent like the astronauts who that very night—July 20, 1969--walked on the moon.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Riding the Vision
Why do I feel like I have to wait till I have something really important to write here? Is it perhaps, due to the public nature of the blog format? Is it because I feel like I should only write when I have something important enough for public consumption? But isn't that the whole point of a blog? To share information and thoughts with the public? Or at least your friends who are interested or pretend they're interested to "follow" you?
These are rather neurotic thoughts and not really what I want to express in the world. However, I think it's sometimes necessary to move through these thoughts to get to the truth on the other side of them. The truth is always much quieter than these loud thoughts which take up so much space in our minds until we release them. Quieter even if they are really loud, like ocean storm waves. A friend who I sent some poems to recently gave me what I consider the ultimate compliment. She told me that I had bypassed the intellect in my new poems. I felt such a sense of accomplishment because, now, looking back at the poems in my last book, Apocalypse Diary, what I don't like about them is the voice--how chatty and brittle it sounds. I know it sounds that way because I was brittle, and that chattiness was a defense, a pose that the reader was supposed to move beyond....and some of the poems do go there (the ones no one ever comments on. The strange poems dealing with past life memories from soul retrievals!). I suppose this voice bothers me so much because it is no longer my voice. Like all humans I have an ego to help me forget the part of myself that is divine, and that ego wants to be "truly" seen, not mistaken for someone else! I guess I just feel so close to everything I create that I assume everyone else will assume that the poems are me--which they were, but since that's not the case I am neurotically worrying that anyone who actually comes across the book now will think I am still that brittle, wounded voice.
My point here as I prattle, is that sometimes you need to move through the intellect in order to get to what really wants to be said. Not what you want to say.....although sometimes the two intersect and that is when the most beauty is released into the world like the hatching of a bouquet of blue morpho butterflies. Truth and Beauty are abstract, best known in images. What are your images of truth? Of beauty? How does your voice want to be known in this world?
I may have begun writing this blog thinking I had nothing important to say, but as always happens when I surrender myself to words, my voice (the song beyond words) manages to rise up through the cracks in my intellect and entwine itself around the beams of my house, pushing its way out the windows and growing up and over to cover the roof with a soft, green canopy of vines and moss that is the perfect nest for butterflies and birds. I lay in my room in CT, still recovering from this illness and listen to the birds and wonder if butterflies in their cocoons can hear them. What's more important than that? Tell me. I really want to know. I suspect your answers will involve moments where trees whisper to you, where peaches moan in pleasure just before you take a bite, where you walk into the ocean at dusk and welcome the rising moon into your body.
It may be a crescent moon, it may be full, but it's always a reflection of the light within us all.
I want to finish by saying how excited I am about my new manuscript The Secret Language. I look forward to sharing the poems with you when it's finished, which is still a secret to me. I don't have a plan for anything these days, let alone for how to manage and control poetry! I was advised by a wise sage f a teacher last year (Fran Quinn for those of you who know him), that I was riding a wild horse of a vision and the best thing I could do was stop worrying and just hold on! The poems would take care of themselves if I could do that.
Well, the thing about riding a vision that I've discovered, is that you can't predict how long the ride is going to be. The trip may just be a few hours, but the way it plays out in your life afterwards is impossible to predict. I am referring to both psychedelic trips here and to the experiences in your life that just happen without ingesting psychotropics, which is pretty much all the time once you cross a certain threshold.
This can be a good thing, or a scary thing, depending how you roll with it. i had no idea my experiences with ayahuasca in Peru two winter ago would still be affecting me so deeply, but I can clearly see now that this past winter on Hawaii was a deepening of the vision I received in Peru. Madame Pele, goddess who destroys in order to create, tore through my body. I know that this illness is a gift from her that will completely purge me of all the negative (wounded) emotions that have stopped me from sharing my full radiance in this lifetime--if I can ride it all the way out. Right now it is a fine line between medicine and faith for me. I feel like the medications are stopping me from fully surrendering to the faith that I am the authority of my body and all I create, but I'm afraid, for numerous reasons, both physical and social, to stop taking them. I'll admit, now that I've come close, I don't actually want to die now. I'd like to keep it at a metaphorical stage--a beautiful image of a deep indigo butterfly disintegrating into a sky big enough to contain the silent song of its wings.
What is your song? Where are you flying?
These are rather neurotic thoughts and not really what I want to express in the world. However, I think it's sometimes necessary to move through these thoughts to get to the truth on the other side of them. The truth is always much quieter than these loud thoughts which take up so much space in our minds until we release them. Quieter even if they are really loud, like ocean storm waves. A friend who I sent some poems to recently gave me what I consider the ultimate compliment. She told me that I had bypassed the intellect in my new poems. I felt such a sense of accomplishment because, now, looking back at the poems in my last book, Apocalypse Diary, what I don't like about them is the voice--how chatty and brittle it sounds. I know it sounds that way because I was brittle, and that chattiness was a defense, a pose that the reader was supposed to move beyond....and some of the poems do go there (the ones no one ever comments on. The strange poems dealing with past life memories from soul retrievals!). I suppose this voice bothers me so much because it is no longer my voice. Like all humans I have an ego to help me forget the part of myself that is divine, and that ego wants to be "truly" seen, not mistaken for someone else! I guess I just feel so close to everything I create that I assume everyone else will assume that the poems are me--which they were, but since that's not the case I am neurotically worrying that anyone who actually comes across the book now will think I am still that brittle, wounded voice.
My point here as I prattle, is that sometimes you need to move through the intellect in order to get to what really wants to be said. Not what you want to say.....although sometimes the two intersect and that is when the most beauty is released into the world like the hatching of a bouquet of blue morpho butterflies. Truth and Beauty are abstract, best known in images. What are your images of truth? Of beauty? How does your voice want to be known in this world?
I may have begun writing this blog thinking I had nothing important to say, but as always happens when I surrender myself to words, my voice (the song beyond words) manages to rise up through the cracks in my intellect and entwine itself around the beams of my house, pushing its way out the windows and growing up and over to cover the roof with a soft, green canopy of vines and moss that is the perfect nest for butterflies and birds. I lay in my room in CT, still recovering from this illness and listen to the birds and wonder if butterflies in their cocoons can hear them. What's more important than that? Tell me. I really want to know. I suspect your answers will involve moments where trees whisper to you, where peaches moan in pleasure just before you take a bite, where you walk into the ocean at dusk and welcome the rising moon into your body.
It may be a crescent moon, it may be full, but it's always a reflection of the light within us all.
I want to finish by saying how excited I am about my new manuscript The Secret Language. I look forward to sharing the poems with you when it's finished, which is still a secret to me. I don't have a plan for anything these days, let alone for how to manage and control poetry! I was advised by a wise sage f a teacher last year (Fran Quinn for those of you who know him), that I was riding a wild horse of a vision and the best thing I could do was stop worrying and just hold on! The poems would take care of themselves if I could do that.
Well, the thing about riding a vision that I've discovered, is that you can't predict how long the ride is going to be. The trip may just be a few hours, but the way it plays out in your life afterwards is impossible to predict. I am referring to both psychedelic trips here and to the experiences in your life that just happen without ingesting psychotropics, which is pretty much all the time once you cross a certain threshold.
This can be a good thing, or a scary thing, depending how you roll with it. i had no idea my experiences with ayahuasca in Peru two winter ago would still be affecting me so deeply, but I can clearly see now that this past winter on Hawaii was a deepening of the vision I received in Peru. Madame Pele, goddess who destroys in order to create, tore through my body. I know that this illness is a gift from her that will completely purge me of all the negative (wounded) emotions that have stopped me from sharing my full radiance in this lifetime--if I can ride it all the way out. Right now it is a fine line between medicine and faith for me. I feel like the medications are stopping me from fully surrendering to the faith that I am the authority of my body and all I create, but I'm afraid, for numerous reasons, both physical and social, to stop taking them. I'll admit, now that I've come close, I don't actually want to die now. I'd like to keep it at a metaphorical stage--a beautiful image of a deep indigo butterfly disintegrating into a sky big enough to contain the silent song of its wings.
What is your song? Where are you flying?
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Descent to the Underworld
One of the greatest teachers in my life has been the island of Hawaii, the largest of the seven in the archipelago, and the only one with a volcano that is still active. Right now as I write new land is being created near Kalapana where liquid fire from the earth’s core is flowing into the ocean whose cool touch soothes and sculpts it into a landscape that mirrors the chop and heave of a stormy sea. Though this land looks like water, anyone who has walked into a lava field knows that, unlike water, which gives way when we fall into it, here there is no mercy. This is raw land, razor-sharp, not yet worn down by wind and wave erosion, and the mind, if one is open to this land, becomes equally sharp, manifesting its intentions with the same focused flow as that lava who will not be stopped from reaching the ocean.
And so I find myself again here on Hawaii after fifteen years, not expecting to be on this particular island, since I swore to myself that I would stay on Maui this time--but Maui—who could complain about Maui? Maui--was too soft and mellow and a little moldy from all the rain that made the flowers grow, as well as covered in a far more substantial swathe of concrete than when I was last there. So my abhorrence of Walmart and Costco combined with my fear I would molder, caused me to flee Maui within a week of arriving, flying over to the Big Island, secretly acknowledging that it was the reason I came here. It had been calling me back, and I had answered. I was afraid, but I had to go.
Fifteen years ago I wandered around this island as a hitchhiker taking rides from random strangers and ending up wherever there cars wanted to go. I had a vague and secret intention of finding a story—something I could write about, not believing that my suburban Connecticut upbringing, a fairly tame sojourn in Paris as an au pair (although the hedonistic month in Greece I tacked on at the end of that sojourn was certainly fertile territory), and four years of college where I read so many books I ended up with a major and a minor in English Literature before abandoning my one attempt at a real job (college professor) by dropping out of grad school before the semester even started because I realized I wanted to be a poet, was enough to write about, or at least nothing special. I had no concept of my inner landscape because I had no feeling for it. Without going back to the source of it here, I can only say, in short, that I was completely numb, though I had a flare for drama that made me seem I felt more than everyone else.
This numbness, an inability to feel, is a spiritual disease that has become a cultural epidemic manifesting in the form of addictions of all kinds, physical, mental and emotional. In my mind, addiction is a substitute for ritual. The soul must be fed and the spirits must be acknowledged, maintaining our connection to the earth’s cycles as our own. Since the Industrial Age, these connections have been severed, although the desecration of the feminine aspect of ourselves occurred long before that, somewhere around the time that written civilization arose around 5,000 years ago. If we don’t feed it, the starved soul, craving sustenance in the form of reverence for the gift of life in a human body, and devotion to our own inner growth, begins to devour us in a desperate attempt to make us notice it. Addiction becomes a substitute for ritual. Instead of feeding our souls and the unseen with prayers or offerings of tobacco, we are driven compulsively to alcohol and a host of other mind-numbing drugs: to sex, food, violence, television; and the mental addictions that keep us trapped in cycles of thinking that manifest in an endless feedback of negative experiences which convince us we are not in control of our lives. Addictions are emotional as well, such as addiction to romance/love, which keeps us seeking over and over for someone to fill the holes in our sad and tired bodies that we can only satisfy with acceptance, gratitude, and self-love.
My journey to these realizations began on Hawaii. Fifteen years ago, thumbing my way towards a story, however passively I was going about it, I encountered a force in this land that was far more powerful than anything I had ever experienced before. One of my rides brought me in a circuitous manner to Waipi’o Valley, the mystical home of many Hawaiian kings and warriors, where people still talked of beings like the Night Marchers and the menehune as if they were real. I was enchanted by this place where people talked about mythical beings in their everyday conversation and resolved to go live down in the valley, which was only inhabited by a few taro farmers who mostly drove the mile back up the one-lane road after work. I would have the whole place to myself.
In about two days I had a Hawaiian boyfriend through whom I slipped into local culture, an invitation not readily extended to many haoles (white-skinned people with no breath, no mana, or spiritual force). I have written about our story at length other places, and continue to do so as I am more able, year after year, to express what I went through in that valley, so I will not elaborate on it too much here. Through him, I witnessed firsthand the degradation of spirit and culture that has occurred to the Hawaiians as a result of the loss of sovereignty experienced when they were annexed by a cabal of businessmen backed by the U. S. Congress who turned the guns of their warships on Queen Liliuokalani’s palace. The Queen, rather than seeing her people die, surrendered, though the loss of spirit had been well under way for the century before as the whalers and missionaries streamed toward the island with their different, but equally exploitive visions.
However, this is not a tirade about victims or a call for political sovereignty for the Hawaiian people. It is a call for anyone reading these words to accept that each one of us is responsible for the reality we create as individuals and as a collective force. What mystics have always said has now been proven by scientists, providing us with the proof necessary to convince a materialist world that we are creatures of spirit first. Our physical realities are created by our thoughts, and most importantly our feelings. If this seems impossible to accept consider that many--maybe most of these feelings are unconscious and that we are unaware of them--all the more reason to focus our attention on them so as to create from a place of clarity in order to receive our heart’s desire and reveal our path of service in this lifetime.
But there is also something else at work here—the soul’s desire, which is often at odds with what the ego wants. The soul, our link to the divine, must annihilate the ego, the part of us that has forgotten it is divine. In our materialist paradigm, it is logical that this annihilation will occur at the material level—that we will be stripped of our possessions, beaten or abused, struck with cancer, or by lightning, lose our loved ones in mindless, wasted deaths through war.
These are difficult ideas to accept if one is in an abusive situation, but in my case, it was just this that led me to an awareness—through many years of suffering after the actual experiences occurred—that I wrote myself into a story where I was physically, sexually, emotionally and mentally abused; in which I allowed myself to be degraded and violated my own belief in the sanctity and goodness of life in ways I never would have thought were possible, or that I was capable of.
In a culture stripped of ritual, the most important one being that of initiation, my soul guided me to do it on my own. Viewed from my current perspective, I think I couldn’t have chosen any wiser. Waipi’o Valley is literally known as the gateway to the Underworld in Hawaiian tradition. In the safe container of conscious community, facilitated by elders who have been through the process, the descent into the underworld, while dangerous, and very often painful, is one from which most initiates return. In our time, many do not. They are lost, like many I have known, to heroin or alcohol, dying on bus station floors or alone in apartments with the shades drawn on closed windows. I, too, came close.
Our parents usher into this world, but it is up to us to rebirth ourselves as fully embodied souls who take on the role of maintaining the links between the spirit and material world that create healthy communities of people who abide by the Hawaiian principle of pono, of integrity; who want to live in balance with all of creation and make decisions based on the greater good of all our relations: animal, mineral, plant, here on earth, and with our star families beyond it.
In this time of massive transition on our planet, as the old paradigms of control collapse, we each have the opportunity to become sovereign, in control of our own boundaries, conscious co-creators of a collective vision founded on reverence for life, and devotion to the soul’s path growth toward full realization of its divine origin. To this day I am amazed I survived my unconscious descent into the underworld, and that I made it through the many years after where I numbed the pain of that time with alcohol, food, drugs, and many other mental and emotional addictions like depression, vacating from the present moment, and co-dependency. Over time, as I became aware that I was going through a process of initiation on my own, I was able to let go of my addictions, which, is far easier than these simple words sound. The years of self-abuse, then recovery and healing after my descent in Waipi’o were in many ways more difficult than the original trauma I experienced in the depths of the valley.
It is my hope that those of us who went and survived these traumatic self-initiations will speak out now and share their experience and wisdom with those on the brink of descent into their own underworlds. Not to stop anyone from descending, for this terrifying descent is a necessary part of the journey to becoming a fully embodied human, but to provide markers, breadcrumbs on the path, say, for little lost birds in need of a sustenance so they can keep flying.
And so I find myself again here on Hawaii after fifteen years, not expecting to be on this particular island, since I swore to myself that I would stay on Maui this time--but Maui—who could complain about Maui? Maui--was too soft and mellow and a little moldy from all the rain that made the flowers grow, as well as covered in a far more substantial swathe of concrete than when I was last there. So my abhorrence of Walmart and Costco combined with my fear I would molder, caused me to flee Maui within a week of arriving, flying over to the Big Island, secretly acknowledging that it was the reason I came here. It had been calling me back, and I had answered. I was afraid, but I had to go.
Fifteen years ago I wandered around this island as a hitchhiker taking rides from random strangers and ending up wherever there cars wanted to go. I had a vague and secret intention of finding a story—something I could write about, not believing that my suburban Connecticut upbringing, a fairly tame sojourn in Paris as an au pair (although the hedonistic month in Greece I tacked on at the end of that sojourn was certainly fertile territory), and four years of college where I read so many books I ended up with a major and a minor in English Literature before abandoning my one attempt at a real job (college professor) by dropping out of grad school before the semester even started because I realized I wanted to be a poet, was enough to write about, or at least nothing special. I had no concept of my inner landscape because I had no feeling for it. Without going back to the source of it here, I can only say, in short, that I was completely numb, though I had a flare for drama that made me seem I felt more than everyone else.
This numbness, an inability to feel, is a spiritual disease that has become a cultural epidemic manifesting in the form of addictions of all kinds, physical, mental and emotional. In my mind, addiction is a substitute for ritual. The soul must be fed and the spirits must be acknowledged, maintaining our connection to the earth’s cycles as our own. Since the Industrial Age, these connections have been severed, although the desecration of the feminine aspect of ourselves occurred long before that, somewhere around the time that written civilization arose around 5,000 years ago. If we don’t feed it, the starved soul, craving sustenance in the form of reverence for the gift of life in a human body, and devotion to our own inner growth, begins to devour us in a desperate attempt to make us notice it. Addiction becomes a substitute for ritual. Instead of feeding our souls and the unseen with prayers or offerings of tobacco, we are driven compulsively to alcohol and a host of other mind-numbing drugs: to sex, food, violence, television; and the mental addictions that keep us trapped in cycles of thinking that manifest in an endless feedback of negative experiences which convince us we are not in control of our lives. Addictions are emotional as well, such as addiction to romance/love, which keeps us seeking over and over for someone to fill the holes in our sad and tired bodies that we can only satisfy with acceptance, gratitude, and self-love.
My journey to these realizations began on Hawaii. Fifteen years ago, thumbing my way towards a story, however passively I was going about it, I encountered a force in this land that was far more powerful than anything I had ever experienced before. One of my rides brought me in a circuitous manner to Waipi’o Valley, the mystical home of many Hawaiian kings and warriors, where people still talked of beings like the Night Marchers and the menehune as if they were real. I was enchanted by this place where people talked about mythical beings in their everyday conversation and resolved to go live down in the valley, which was only inhabited by a few taro farmers who mostly drove the mile back up the one-lane road after work. I would have the whole place to myself.
In about two days I had a Hawaiian boyfriend through whom I slipped into local culture, an invitation not readily extended to many haoles (white-skinned people with no breath, no mana, or spiritual force). I have written about our story at length other places, and continue to do so as I am more able, year after year, to express what I went through in that valley, so I will not elaborate on it too much here. Through him, I witnessed firsthand the degradation of spirit and culture that has occurred to the Hawaiians as a result of the loss of sovereignty experienced when they were annexed by a cabal of businessmen backed by the U. S. Congress who turned the guns of their warships on Queen Liliuokalani’s palace. The Queen, rather than seeing her people die, surrendered, though the loss of spirit had been well under way for the century before as the whalers and missionaries streamed toward the island with their different, but equally exploitive visions.
However, this is not a tirade about victims or a call for political sovereignty for the Hawaiian people. It is a call for anyone reading these words to accept that each one of us is responsible for the reality we create as individuals and as a collective force. What mystics have always said has now been proven by scientists, providing us with the proof necessary to convince a materialist world that we are creatures of spirit first. Our physical realities are created by our thoughts, and most importantly our feelings. If this seems impossible to accept consider that many--maybe most of these feelings are unconscious and that we are unaware of them--all the more reason to focus our attention on them so as to create from a place of clarity in order to receive our heart’s desire and reveal our path of service in this lifetime.
But there is also something else at work here—the soul’s desire, which is often at odds with what the ego wants. The soul, our link to the divine, must annihilate the ego, the part of us that has forgotten it is divine. In our materialist paradigm, it is logical that this annihilation will occur at the material level—that we will be stripped of our possessions, beaten or abused, struck with cancer, or by lightning, lose our loved ones in mindless, wasted deaths through war.
These are difficult ideas to accept if one is in an abusive situation, but in my case, it was just this that led me to an awareness—through many years of suffering after the actual experiences occurred—that I wrote myself into a story where I was physically, sexually, emotionally and mentally abused; in which I allowed myself to be degraded and violated my own belief in the sanctity and goodness of life in ways I never would have thought were possible, or that I was capable of.
In a culture stripped of ritual, the most important one being that of initiation, my soul guided me to do it on my own. Viewed from my current perspective, I think I couldn’t have chosen any wiser. Waipi’o Valley is literally known as the gateway to the Underworld in Hawaiian tradition. In the safe container of conscious community, facilitated by elders who have been through the process, the descent into the underworld, while dangerous, and very often painful, is one from which most initiates return. In our time, many do not. They are lost, like many I have known, to heroin or alcohol, dying on bus station floors or alone in apartments with the shades drawn on closed windows. I, too, came close.
Our parents usher into this world, but it is up to us to rebirth ourselves as fully embodied souls who take on the role of maintaining the links between the spirit and material world that create healthy communities of people who abide by the Hawaiian principle of pono, of integrity; who want to live in balance with all of creation and make decisions based on the greater good of all our relations: animal, mineral, plant, here on earth, and with our star families beyond it.
In this time of massive transition on our planet, as the old paradigms of control collapse, we each have the opportunity to become sovereign, in control of our own boundaries, conscious co-creators of a collective vision founded on reverence for life, and devotion to the soul’s path growth toward full realization of its divine origin. To this day I am amazed I survived my unconscious descent into the underworld, and that I made it through the many years after where I numbed the pain of that time with alcohol, food, drugs, and many other mental and emotional addictions like depression, vacating from the present moment, and co-dependency. Over time, as I became aware that I was going through a process of initiation on my own, I was able to let go of my addictions, which, is far easier than these simple words sound. The years of self-abuse, then recovery and healing after my descent in Waipi’o were in many ways more difficult than the original trauma I experienced in the depths of the valley.
It is my hope that those of us who went and survived these traumatic self-initiations will speak out now and share their experience and wisdom with those on the brink of descent into their own underworlds. Not to stop anyone from descending, for this terrifying descent is a necessary part of the journey to becoming a fully embodied human, but to provide markers, breadcrumbs on the path, say, for little lost birds in need of a sustenance so they can keep flying.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Haven't written here in over a year. I feel like I'm writing to myself.....maybe I am and I could just act naturally and share my secret self. Here on the Big Island on the lovely Hualalai, in a house in the trees, land sloping toward the ocean where the dolphins hunt all night, and they will swim in to Kealakeakua Bay in a few hours as the sun comes over the ridge and warms the mountainside. And I will roll down the hill to meet them. That's about all I have to say. Life is simple here, or maybe it's just beyond words like this.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Sea Change, A Journal of Reflections and Waves
Full fathom five, thy father lies,
of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding dong, Hark! Now it hear them.
Ding dong, bell.
William Shakespeare, of course, sung by Ariel, I believe, in The Tempest, one of my favorite of his plays. For those of you who know the quote well, I'm aware that the punctuation is a bit off. Perfectly functioning keyboards are a bit of a rare commodity in Peru. This one doesn't do anything but type arrows when you try to use the upper symbols on the keys.
In any case, I can correct them when I return home next week to the States! Hurray! The exclamation point works at least!
I had the idea last spring to start a journal called Sea Change, A Journal of Reflections and Waves that would focus on the subject of change on Block Island. I want to include all aspects of change, both the good and the bad. How it affects our life and how we want to affect change on both a personal and collective level. For me, specifically, I see this as an opportunity to focus our intention on our ability to create the world we want through our emotions, on both a personal and political level. I am interested, as Martin Prechtel puts it, in awakening the indigenous soul of Block Island. You may remember the Manifest Manisees Manifesto I created last winter. Some of you were in the beautiful ceremony with me at Jill Helterline's house last Lammas....Groundhog Day.....where we spoke our wishes for the island aloud as if they had already come true. In case you want to review it, or to read it for the first time, go into the archives on this blog for Feb. 2007. It can be read there. And if you have anything you would like me to consider adding, please leave your suggestions in the comments or write me personally at jenlighty@hotmail.com.
Why Sea Change....
Well, obviously, we live on an island and are surrounded by the sea. There are few places on the island where you can't hear it, unless the wind is very still, which happens rarely. We sleep to the sound of the sea. We don't need lullabies, or we are haunted by the sound, kept awake, confused by our dreams. I want the journal to be a call to clarity. A place where we examine the different reflections that death takes in our lives, and a place where we envision reflections we would like to see. We live in a paradoxical time, participants in a dying culture that is also coming vibrantly to life. My recent experiences with ayahuasca have helped me to actually go through the process of death. It was both terrifying and beautiful, peaceful and full of contentment, a quality I find is missing so often in contemporary life. To be content with change.
And what does Shakespeare have to do with all this....
In this little song from The Tempest, Ferdinand's father is dead. The father is associated with the patriarchy, a system controlled by men based on domination of the feminine earth which scholars say has governed most of our planet for the past 6,000 years or so, I believe, replacing the matriarchal cultures, which some other scholars say, was more peaceful and egalitarian. This is misplaced thinking in my mind which continues to place the blame for our current ecological crisis on someone other than ourselves.....each of us is responsible for what we have created through our emotional bodies, whether we be in a male or female body. Truth be told, my teacher Maria opened my eyes to this erroneous and accusative way of thinking, turning my whole thought process around when she informed me that all of acts of creation are female. All acts of creation include the atomic bomb and chemical weapons. It is time to look within ourselves and heal the schism between the male and female which has caused us to project our unresolved anger onto a world that is patiently serving our needs.
I don't believe the world is in crisis. Dead eyes become pearls and bones become coral, which is a living organism, filled with thousands of miniscule polyps sharing space like a colony of undersea bees, working together to sustain life in all its wondrous mystery, rich and strange. And sea nymphs, of course, are notorious for their ability to seduce. That great explorer Ulysses survived them only by strapping himself to the mast so he wouldn't throw himself into their arms when he sailed past on his way home to Ithaka.
It is time though, perhaps, to throw ourselves into their song. To let ourselves die and be reborn as naturally as waves breaking on a shore who are pulled back into life by a force they can't see, something beyond eyes, something hidden but fully known the way a pearl inside an oyster is sure of its own beauty.
See Change. It didn't even occur to me until after I'd come up with the name for the magazine. So obvious it slipped by me, through the song of my unconscious to my fingers who began typing, letting the ideas come in clear currents that will take us home when it is time for us to get there. It doesn't matter when, really. That bell that's always tolling isn't doesn't have to be marking time past, or time remaining. It could be the siren's have decided against drowning, or maybe they want to teach us to breathe underwater, to bring the darkness into the light and let them play, rolling on the surface like otters.
What do you see......
of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding dong, Hark! Now it hear them.
Ding dong, bell.
William Shakespeare, of course, sung by Ariel, I believe, in The Tempest, one of my favorite of his plays. For those of you who know the quote well, I'm aware that the punctuation is a bit off. Perfectly functioning keyboards are a bit of a rare commodity in Peru. This one doesn't do anything but type arrows when you try to use the upper symbols on the keys.
In any case, I can correct them when I return home next week to the States! Hurray! The exclamation point works at least!
I had the idea last spring to start a journal called Sea Change, A Journal of Reflections and Waves that would focus on the subject of change on Block Island. I want to include all aspects of change, both the good and the bad. How it affects our life and how we want to affect change on both a personal and collective level. For me, specifically, I see this as an opportunity to focus our intention on our ability to create the world we want through our emotions, on both a personal and political level. I am interested, as Martin Prechtel puts it, in awakening the indigenous soul of Block Island. You may remember the Manifest Manisees Manifesto I created last winter. Some of you were in the beautiful ceremony with me at Jill Helterline's house last Lammas....Groundhog Day.....where we spoke our wishes for the island aloud as if they had already come true. In case you want to review it, or to read it for the first time, go into the archives on this blog for Feb. 2007. It can be read there. And if you have anything you would like me to consider adding, please leave your suggestions in the comments or write me personally at jenlighty@hotmail.com.
Why Sea Change....
Well, obviously, we live on an island and are surrounded by the sea. There are few places on the island where you can't hear it, unless the wind is very still, which happens rarely. We sleep to the sound of the sea. We don't need lullabies, or we are haunted by the sound, kept awake, confused by our dreams. I want the journal to be a call to clarity. A place where we examine the different reflections that death takes in our lives, and a place where we envision reflections we would like to see. We live in a paradoxical time, participants in a dying culture that is also coming vibrantly to life. My recent experiences with ayahuasca have helped me to actually go through the process of death. It was both terrifying and beautiful, peaceful and full of contentment, a quality I find is missing so often in contemporary life. To be content with change.
And what does Shakespeare have to do with all this....
In this little song from The Tempest, Ferdinand's father is dead. The father is associated with the patriarchy, a system controlled by men based on domination of the feminine earth which scholars say has governed most of our planet for the past 6,000 years or so, I believe, replacing the matriarchal cultures, which some other scholars say, was more peaceful and egalitarian. This is misplaced thinking in my mind which continues to place the blame for our current ecological crisis on someone other than ourselves.....each of us is responsible for what we have created through our emotional bodies, whether we be in a male or female body. Truth be told, my teacher Maria opened my eyes to this erroneous and accusative way of thinking, turning my whole thought process around when she informed me that all of acts of creation are female. All acts of creation include the atomic bomb and chemical weapons. It is time to look within ourselves and heal the schism between the male and female which has caused us to project our unresolved anger onto a world that is patiently serving our needs.
I don't believe the world is in crisis. Dead eyes become pearls and bones become coral, which is a living organism, filled with thousands of miniscule polyps sharing space like a colony of undersea bees, working together to sustain life in all its wondrous mystery, rich and strange. And sea nymphs, of course, are notorious for their ability to seduce. That great explorer Ulysses survived them only by strapping himself to the mast so he wouldn't throw himself into their arms when he sailed past on his way home to Ithaka.
It is time though, perhaps, to throw ourselves into their song. To let ourselves die and be reborn as naturally as waves breaking on a shore who are pulled back into life by a force they can't see, something beyond eyes, something hidden but fully known the way a pearl inside an oyster is sure of its own beauty.
See Change. It didn't even occur to me until after I'd come up with the name for the magazine. So obvious it slipped by me, through the song of my unconscious to my fingers who began typing, letting the ideas come in clear currents that will take us home when it is time for us to get there. It doesn't matter when, really. That bell that's always tolling isn't doesn't have to be marking time past, or time remaining. It could be the siren's have decided against drowning, or maybe they want to teach us to breathe underwater, to bring the darkness into the light and let them play, rolling on the surface like otters.
What do you see......
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Southern Cross
Wherever I go in this country I keep meeting people who tell me (or imply) they know more than me, like the woman this morning who told me the poverty here doesn´t bother her because the poor, like all of us, are choosing their own reality.
I feel you stirring within me, the rage that wants to lash out and tell her she´s full of shit and I don´t believe for a second she´s as disconnected as she claims to be.
Also, I am tired of people telling me I must become more unattached and that I should ¨do¨more ceremony, as if surrendering was as easy as taking a pill or a drink, or a weekend course on shamanic healing taught by a wrinkled old man who wants all of your money, and I understand that I am attracting the old women who keep following me around asking for money, like the one the other day who followed me halfway up the mountain I wanted to walk alone because she knew I would give her money just to get rid of her.
I just want to be seen by these women and by the cabdriver who keeps trying to sell me condor feathers I suspect are fake. I haven´t seen one condor in this country. How can there be so many feathers for sale? They are either not from condors, or the vendors are killing the giant birds to get them, because I know, as a feather collector, that there are just not that many giant feathers lying around on the ground waiting for cabdrivers to walk by.
I suspect vultures in every sense of the word, surviving off the dead, though there´s nothing wrong with that, or with killing to eat. It´s the deception I object to. I want someone to tell me the truth in this country. Then I get angry at myself for attracting all these negative experiences and want to smack the smug new agers who tell me that is what I am doing.
One thing I am good at is feeling. I feel the judgment coming at me. It is not a projection of my own feelings, although it is a reflection...I feel what people are thinking and it hurts me. I have also been attracting people who say hurtful things to me in a passive aggressive way. Like it´s funny to tease me about how sensitive I am.
I know my reactions are my own and are what I need to grow from right now, that I need to learn how to respond instead of react, but right now I am lost in the hurt and don´t know how to get out of it. Part of my personality is to admit my weaknesses in conversation. I think I genuinely want to talk with people, but I keep attracting people who judge me when I do this, so there must be something I am missing here. Maybe it is just that I, who admit my weakness, am stronger than I think.
I don´t want to ask my feelings to leave me alone, but would like to transform them into something a little more serene.
I could resolve all this with some fakery. Call in a condor to drop his feather´s at my fet, but I want you, right now, to see me. How ugly I am in the middle of all this beauty. Green mountains and fertile clouds seeding the fields of maize.
I feel you stirring within me, the rage that wants to lash out and tell her she´s full of shit and I don´t believe for a second she´s as disconnected as she claims to be.
Also, I am tired of people telling me I must become more unattached and that I should ¨do¨more ceremony, as if surrendering was as easy as taking a pill or a drink, or a weekend course on shamanic healing taught by a wrinkled old man who wants all of your money, and I understand that I am attracting the old women who keep following me around asking for money, like the one the other day who followed me halfway up the mountain I wanted to walk alone because she knew I would give her money just to get rid of her.
I just want to be seen by these women and by the cabdriver who keeps trying to sell me condor feathers I suspect are fake. I haven´t seen one condor in this country. How can there be so many feathers for sale? They are either not from condors, or the vendors are killing the giant birds to get them, because I know, as a feather collector, that there are just not that many giant feathers lying around on the ground waiting for cabdrivers to walk by.
I suspect vultures in every sense of the word, surviving off the dead, though there´s nothing wrong with that, or with killing to eat. It´s the deception I object to. I want someone to tell me the truth in this country. Then I get angry at myself for attracting all these negative experiences and want to smack the smug new agers who tell me that is what I am doing.
One thing I am good at is feeling. I feel the judgment coming at me. It is not a projection of my own feelings, although it is a reflection...I feel what people are thinking and it hurts me. I have also been attracting people who say hurtful things to me in a passive aggressive way. Like it´s funny to tease me about how sensitive I am.
I know my reactions are my own and are what I need to grow from right now, that I need to learn how to respond instead of react, but right now I am lost in the hurt and don´t know how to get out of it. Part of my personality is to admit my weaknesses in conversation. I think I genuinely want to talk with people, but I keep attracting people who judge me when I do this, so there must be something I am missing here. Maybe it is just that I, who admit my weakness, am stronger than I think.
I don´t want to ask my feelings to leave me alone, but would like to transform them into something a little more serene.
I could resolve all this with some fakery. Call in a condor to drop his feather´s at my fet, but I want you, right now, to see me. How ugly I am in the middle of all this beauty. Green mountains and fertile clouds seeding the fields of maize.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Medicine Poem
This is the beginnings of a poem I wrote after my first ayahuasca ceremony on New Year´s Eve. I thank the plant for the insights it gave me and offer my words back to it in gratitude for the beauty and knowledge it shared with me.
Medicine Poem
In the round room
with our backs to the red adobe walls
we prayed to our own darkness,
flowers torn apart by fear
and the losses caused by the lies we´d been told
and all the betrayals necessary
on the path
to becoming whole.
Gunshots cracked above us
like blessings from the king of lightning
on the earth below
who held its breath and wondered
if our prayers would be enough
to keep the darkness between stars
turning.
It was New Year´s Eve,
most of the world stumbled
under fire
in celebration
but the dogs knew the bombs
weren´t far away
barking as the sun flamed
in the black sky
and then collapsed in a fan of colors
that tickled their closed eyes
when they fell to the ground who shook
with fear at our blindness
unable to understand why we wanted
to give our eyes away.
And the fire fueled itself
with shattered eardrums and severed fingers
while the water waited to see
how we wanted it to fall
ready to answer our prayers with drought
or drowning
flowing toward open mouths
with all the answers
and more questions to keep us spinning away
from the sound
then toward it
so close to God
we forgot ourselves
rushing past our ears
like waterfalls.
My death happened
without my knowing
the shape of my life arcing like a rainbow
between two black holes
a raindrop held by a leaf
that breaks as it falls
crushing butterflies and demons
with their own blindness
reborn on the other side
equal and unknown.
A leaf falls, releasing the song held
in a raindrop
and a woman gives herself away because she knows
she is always full
and the silence after is as gentle as an old doe
at dusk
who bends to drink at a mudhole
torn apart by love
immersed in the dark between stars
greeting the wolves.
Medicine Poem
In the round room
with our backs to the red adobe walls
we prayed to our own darkness,
flowers torn apart by fear
and the losses caused by the lies we´d been told
and all the betrayals necessary
on the path
to becoming whole.
Gunshots cracked above us
like blessings from the king of lightning
on the earth below
who held its breath and wondered
if our prayers would be enough
to keep the darkness between stars
turning.
It was New Year´s Eve,
most of the world stumbled
under fire
in celebration
but the dogs knew the bombs
weren´t far away
barking as the sun flamed
in the black sky
and then collapsed in a fan of colors
that tickled their closed eyes
when they fell to the ground who shook
with fear at our blindness
unable to understand why we wanted
to give our eyes away.
And the fire fueled itself
with shattered eardrums and severed fingers
while the water waited to see
how we wanted it to fall
ready to answer our prayers with drought
or drowning
flowing toward open mouths
with all the answers
and more questions to keep us spinning away
from the sound
then toward it
so close to God
we forgot ourselves
rushing past our ears
like waterfalls.
My death happened
without my knowing
the shape of my life arcing like a rainbow
between two black holes
a raindrop held by a leaf
that breaks as it falls
crushing butterflies and demons
with their own blindness
reborn on the other side
equal and unknown.
A leaf falls, releasing the song held
in a raindrop
and a woman gives herself away because she knows
she is always full
and the silence after is as gentle as an old doe
at dusk
who bends to drink at a mudhole
torn apart by love
immersed in the dark between stars
greeting the wolves.
Tsegihi ( Navajo Cantinela Noche)
This is my translation of the Navajo Night Chant, recited in the ceremony of the same name of the Dine´. I translated it for my new friends who live at Alonso´s. They are very interested in the prophecy of the eagle and the condor and in North American indigenous culture.
If the phrasing seems awkward, it is because I followed the phrasing in the translation from Navajo to English by N. Scott Momaday. If anyone who knows Spanish better than I catches any glaring errors, please let me know! And last, but certainly not least, Walk in Beauty, as the Dine´say.
Casa hecho del aurora,
Casa hecho de la luz velada,
Casa hecho de la nube oscura,
Casa hecho de la lluvia masculino,
Casa hecho de la neblina oscura,
Casa hecho de la lluvia femenina,
Casa hecho del polen,
Casa hecho de los saltamontes,
La nube oscura es a la puerta.
La trocha irse de este nuba oscura.
El relampago zigzg se levanta alta le sobre.
¡Dios masculino!
Una ofrenda de tuyo yo hecho.
Yo prepare´una fuma para ti.
Restaura mis piedes para mi.
Restaura mi cuerpo para mi.
Restaura mi mente para mi.
Restaura mi voz para mi.
Este dia mismo saca el hechizo de tuyo para mi.
El hechizo de tuyo se aparta para mi.
Tu le sace´ para mi;
Lejas se fue.
Con la felicidad, yo recubro.
Con la felicidad mi interior se pone fresco.
Con la felicidad yo se voy.
Mi interior sentiendo fresco, puedo caminar.
No mas largo doloroso, puedo caminar.
Imerpemeable al dolor, puedo caminar.
Con los sentimientos animados, puedo caminar.
Asi´le ser hace mucho tiempo, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con las nubes oscuras abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con los aguaceros abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con las plantas abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, puedo caminar.
Asi´le ser hace mucho tiempo, puedo caminar.
Puede ser hermoso delante de mi.
Puede ser hermoso detras de mi.
Puede ser hermoso abajo de mi.
Tal vez es hermoso sobre mi.
Tal vez is hermoso por todos lados de mi.
En la belleza se termine´.
If the phrasing seems awkward, it is because I followed the phrasing in the translation from Navajo to English by N. Scott Momaday. If anyone who knows Spanish better than I catches any glaring errors, please let me know! And last, but certainly not least, Walk in Beauty, as the Dine´say.
Casa hecho del aurora,
Casa hecho de la luz velada,
Casa hecho de la nube oscura,
Casa hecho de la lluvia masculino,
Casa hecho de la neblina oscura,
Casa hecho de la lluvia femenina,
Casa hecho del polen,
Casa hecho de los saltamontes,
La nube oscura es a la puerta.
La trocha irse de este nuba oscura.
El relampago zigzg se levanta alta le sobre.
¡Dios masculino!
Una ofrenda de tuyo yo hecho.
Yo prepare´una fuma para ti.
Restaura mis piedes para mi.
Restaura mi cuerpo para mi.
Restaura mi mente para mi.
Restaura mi voz para mi.
Este dia mismo saca el hechizo de tuyo para mi.
El hechizo de tuyo se aparta para mi.
Tu le sace´ para mi;
Lejas se fue.
Con la felicidad, yo recubro.
Con la felicidad mi interior se pone fresco.
Con la felicidad yo se voy.
Mi interior sentiendo fresco, puedo caminar.
No mas largo doloroso, puedo caminar.
Imerpemeable al dolor, puedo caminar.
Con los sentimientos animados, puedo caminar.
Asi´le ser hace mucho tiempo, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con las nubes oscuras abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con los aguaceros abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con las plantas abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, puedo caminar.
Asi´le ser hace mucho tiempo, puedo caminar.
Puede ser hermoso delante de mi.
Puede ser hermoso detras de mi.
Puede ser hermoso abajo de mi.
Tal vez es hermoso sobre mi.
Tal vez is hermoso por todos lados de mi.
En la belleza se termine´.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Sea Squad South America
To my esteemed fellow members of Sea Squad, and future members, I am pleased to report from Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. The lake it truly immense, and when on it, seems like an ocean, complete with rolling waves, although no tides or surf breaking on its shores.
I am currently writing from Puno, the largest city on the lake, which is the home city of BI honorary member Aymar Ccopocatty. Aymar, being from North America a well, is highly aware of the pollution problem that is developing here and is documenting the algae blooms due to nitrogen overload close to Puno, caused by dumping raw sewage into the lake, on film. He is doing his best to educate his people about this problem, but reports that it is frustrating because the people don´t really have a concept of pollution yet. I am happy to report that the pollution only seems to be in Puno. After a two day excursion on the lake, I can report nothing but pristine water and thriving cultures on the islands I visited.
Becky Hogan and I set forth from Puno with an international motley crew on a boat that looked like the one from Gilligan´s island. Our goal, Amantani, the island of the magenta, bell-shaped Kantuta flower, 15 miles out from Puno. First, however, we made a stop at one of the legendary islands of the Uros, a pre-Inka people who escaped into the totora reeds when the Inkas came to conquer the area. Eventually they began to build rafts to survive on, and the rafts became islands. Today there are still many people living on these floating islands with a unique language and culture. Many of them subsist on tourism, so it was a bit depressing to visit because there were many requests for money, but some are anchored deeper into the reeds and do not receive visitors. The totora reed, like our native cattail used by the Manisses and other New England tribes, supplies them with many building materials, including reed houses and boats. We took a ride in a reed boat which was quite stable, although some of my fellow passengers seemed a bit nervous that we were going to tip. All the island children jumped on the boats with us and entertained us enthusiastically with songs in Aymara, Quechua, Spanish, English, French, German and Japanese! They passed around their hats after, of course, but I was happy to give them a couple of sols. Our guide mistakenly told us that one of Sea Squad´s heroes, Thor Heyerdahl, learned how to make reed boats from the Uros, but I didn´t correct him, not wanting to appear to be a know it all in front of the very attractive and hip Uruguayans. Heyerdahl did learn the technique from some legendary Aymara boat builders from the lake, however, and proceeded to sail them on the Ra Expedition which began in Egypt, I think, and went on to Asia? Any Sea Squad members know? Our guide also informed us, correctly, that another Sea Squad hero, Jacques Cousteau, discovered the worlds´ largest frogs when he explored the lake.
I wasn´t lucky enough to see any frogs, but I was lucky enough to spend two nights on the stunning island of Amantani. While there I was privileged to dine on one of the four native species of fish remaining in the lake. The other 32 have been wiped out due to the introduction of trout and kingfish. The fist looked like silverfish and were fried whole, which means they had eyes to look at us. I didn´t mind the eyes so much, but Hogues did. I, however, was not so keen on the taste. The remaining fish were quickly scooped into napkins and carried down to the lake as an offering to Neptune. Hopefully the seagulls had a party. We were staying with a local family and felt it would be an insult not to eat the fish, especially because our host was so proud to serve them up.
Amantani was an inspiration in so many ways, and we on Block Island could learn much from the way tourism operates there. The island is about the same size as BI, but has no cars. Everyone walks up the very steep stone pathways, often carrying heavy loads, to work in the terraced fields of potatoes, corn, beans, and quinoa. The island operates communally. A 5 sol ($1.50) fee is collected from all tourists which is distributed equally among the 4,000 residents, and tourists are rotated among the families on an equal basis so everyone gets a little income, although I think in Peruvian terms it is probably not so little. Of all the rural places I have seen so far, Amantani has the highest quality of life. All the houses were large in Peruvian terms, with tin, not thatched roofs, and had beautiful gardens and bright green outhouses out back. Also, the town had a windmill and many houses had solar panels for electricity. With no cars, no dogs (and their wastes), no internet, and no phones, Amantani is the most peaceful place I have ever been. Becky and I hiked up to the two highest points on the island, Pachamama and Pachatata, where there are shrines to mother and father earth, and also circumnavigated the island during our stay. I know that I will treasure those two days there for the rest of my life and feel so lucky to be sending this report to my fellow members. See you in a couple of months when the water is warming up and the stripers are starting to run!
Whitewave
I am currently writing from Puno, the largest city on the lake, which is the home city of BI honorary member Aymar Ccopocatty. Aymar, being from North America a well, is highly aware of the pollution problem that is developing here and is documenting the algae blooms due to nitrogen overload close to Puno, caused by dumping raw sewage into the lake, on film. He is doing his best to educate his people about this problem, but reports that it is frustrating because the people don´t really have a concept of pollution yet. I am happy to report that the pollution only seems to be in Puno. After a two day excursion on the lake, I can report nothing but pristine water and thriving cultures on the islands I visited.
Becky Hogan and I set forth from Puno with an international motley crew on a boat that looked like the one from Gilligan´s island. Our goal, Amantani, the island of the magenta, bell-shaped Kantuta flower, 15 miles out from Puno. First, however, we made a stop at one of the legendary islands of the Uros, a pre-Inka people who escaped into the totora reeds when the Inkas came to conquer the area. Eventually they began to build rafts to survive on, and the rafts became islands. Today there are still many people living on these floating islands with a unique language and culture. Many of them subsist on tourism, so it was a bit depressing to visit because there were many requests for money, but some are anchored deeper into the reeds and do not receive visitors. The totora reed, like our native cattail used by the Manisses and other New England tribes, supplies them with many building materials, including reed houses and boats. We took a ride in a reed boat which was quite stable, although some of my fellow passengers seemed a bit nervous that we were going to tip. All the island children jumped on the boats with us and entertained us enthusiastically with songs in Aymara, Quechua, Spanish, English, French, German and Japanese! They passed around their hats after, of course, but I was happy to give them a couple of sols. Our guide mistakenly told us that one of Sea Squad´s heroes, Thor Heyerdahl, learned how to make reed boats from the Uros, but I didn´t correct him, not wanting to appear to be a know it all in front of the very attractive and hip Uruguayans. Heyerdahl did learn the technique from some legendary Aymara boat builders from the lake, however, and proceeded to sail them on the Ra Expedition which began in Egypt, I think, and went on to Asia? Any Sea Squad members know? Our guide also informed us, correctly, that another Sea Squad hero, Jacques Cousteau, discovered the worlds´ largest frogs when he explored the lake.
I wasn´t lucky enough to see any frogs, but I was lucky enough to spend two nights on the stunning island of Amantani. While there I was privileged to dine on one of the four native species of fish remaining in the lake. The other 32 have been wiped out due to the introduction of trout and kingfish. The fist looked like silverfish and were fried whole, which means they had eyes to look at us. I didn´t mind the eyes so much, but Hogues did. I, however, was not so keen on the taste. The remaining fish were quickly scooped into napkins and carried down to the lake as an offering to Neptune. Hopefully the seagulls had a party. We were staying with a local family and felt it would be an insult not to eat the fish, especially because our host was so proud to serve them up.
Amantani was an inspiration in so many ways, and we on Block Island could learn much from the way tourism operates there. The island is about the same size as BI, but has no cars. Everyone walks up the very steep stone pathways, often carrying heavy loads, to work in the terraced fields of potatoes, corn, beans, and quinoa. The island operates communally. A 5 sol ($1.50) fee is collected from all tourists which is distributed equally among the 4,000 residents, and tourists are rotated among the families on an equal basis so everyone gets a little income, although I think in Peruvian terms it is probably not so little. Of all the rural places I have seen so far, Amantani has the highest quality of life. All the houses were large in Peruvian terms, with tin, not thatched roofs, and had beautiful gardens and bright green outhouses out back. Also, the town had a windmill and many houses had solar panels for electricity. With no cars, no dogs (and their wastes), no internet, and no phones, Amantani is the most peaceful place I have ever been. Becky and I hiked up to the two highest points on the island, Pachamama and Pachatata, where there are shrines to mother and father earth, and also circumnavigated the island during our stay. I know that I will treasure those two days there for the rest of my life and feel so lucky to be sending this report to my fellow members. See you in a couple of months when the water is warming up and the stripers are starting to run!
Whitewave
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
On the Bus
Riding the bus is quite an experience in Peru. Becky and I decided to leave the Cusco-Sacred Valley area for Lake Titicaca a couple of days ago. We decided to take a tourist bus because it would be more comfortable than the local bus, but somehow in the confusion at the station in Cusco, ended up on a local bus. Local bus means dirty. Local bus means you can´t go to the bathroom for 6 hours or so. Local bus means lumpy seats. And strangest of all, local bus means anyone who wants to sell something can jump on the bus at anytime and do so.
The first was a teenage boy who played a scallop shell like a washboard and sang some songs for us. He then walked up and down the aisle holding out his shell for money. Next stop he got off and on came a very clean and well dressed young man who proceeded to stand in the middle of the aisle halfway down the bus and address us passengers with great powers of elocution about the problems of alcohol abuse in Peru, and of how important it was to talk to your children, explaining that many parents never talked to their children because they worked so hard, and encouraging them to talk for just 15 minutes a day. I thought he was a Bible thumper, but he never really got too into Jesus into the converation, although it turned out one of the things he was trying to sell was mini Bibles, good for using when you needed something to talk to your children about. He also had a cd and booklet for kids with educational material in them and a book of ideas on how to make money. The very quiet and polite man next to me bought all of his stuff (10 soles, about 3 dollards) and I looked over his shoulder at the kids´book, which looked quite good and interesting. It made me remember how my friend in Lima told me that Peruvian schools were really bad, so maybe material like this is really needed. For awhile I thought the schools were so bad the kids were never in them until I realized they are on summer vacation now!
All kinds of food vendors jump on the bus when it stops, selling bread, empanadas, choclo with queso (corn on the cob with hunks of cheese), and sometimes popcorn. They yell out the name of what they are saying over and over as several of them push up and down the aisle, riding for awhile and then jumping off at the next town. I had seen a lot of sellers like this riding the bus in the Sacred Valley, but had not yet encountered a woman carrying an entire roast pig onto the bus until this trip. She and her friend, who looked to be about 20, got on the bus in the most obscure town, way out in the middle of nowhere with the pig which they proceeded to hack into pieces with a cleaver and sell to hungry passengers along with potatoes. They were also selling apple juice in plastic pags, but I couldn´t figure out how to drink it without spilling it all over myself! In any case, more liquid was not a good idea since going to the bathroom was out of the question.
Last, but certainly not least, was the very well dressed, very clean, very handsome young man who got onto the bus (wearing a tie!) and proceeded to address us about the nutritive benefits of maca, an Andean plant that has caught on big as a supplement in the US. I think Becky and I might have been the only people on the bus who knew what he was talking about, which was one of the points he made. I was very impressed with the way he spoke and with his political awareness of how important it was for the people from his culture to know what treasures they had, and to use them for themselves. I thought it was interesting that he had to explain the medical conditions he was explaining the plant was good for, like osteoporosis, and gave him a lot of credit for jumping on that bus trying to sell his maca powder. I was thrilled to buy some since I have been under the weather, but he didn´t seem to sell as much as the Bible guy.
Finally, we were approached by Oligario who was touting hostels on the bus. I hate to say that I´ve become wary of people trying to sell me stuff, but I have, so I was kind of discounting him until he pulled out a pamphlet for a really nice looking hotel and told us we could have a special deal. It seems like my aloofness payed off. He thought I was trying to bargain! When we got to Puno he found us a cab and escorted us to the hotel, which is quite nice . We are paying ten dollars each for a room in the US that would cost about one hundred. Puno, while rundown, and lacking the colonial charm of Cusco, is interesting to walk around in, cheaper, and filled with very friendly people. I think most tourists spend only a brief time here before jumping off somewhere else, so we have the city to ourselves as far as gringas go.
Off to the island of Amantani tomorrow for two days, then back to Puno for the Festival of the Virgin of Candelaria, one of the biggest of the year!
The first was a teenage boy who played a scallop shell like a washboard and sang some songs for us. He then walked up and down the aisle holding out his shell for money. Next stop he got off and on came a very clean and well dressed young man who proceeded to stand in the middle of the aisle halfway down the bus and address us passengers with great powers of elocution about the problems of alcohol abuse in Peru, and of how important it was to talk to your children, explaining that many parents never talked to their children because they worked so hard, and encouraging them to talk for just 15 minutes a day. I thought he was a Bible thumper, but he never really got too into Jesus into the converation, although it turned out one of the things he was trying to sell was mini Bibles, good for using when you needed something to talk to your children about. He also had a cd and booklet for kids with educational material in them and a book of ideas on how to make money. The very quiet and polite man next to me bought all of his stuff (10 soles, about 3 dollards) and I looked over his shoulder at the kids´book, which looked quite good and interesting. It made me remember how my friend in Lima told me that Peruvian schools were really bad, so maybe material like this is really needed. For awhile I thought the schools were so bad the kids were never in them until I realized they are on summer vacation now!
All kinds of food vendors jump on the bus when it stops, selling bread, empanadas, choclo with queso (corn on the cob with hunks of cheese), and sometimes popcorn. They yell out the name of what they are saying over and over as several of them push up and down the aisle, riding for awhile and then jumping off at the next town. I had seen a lot of sellers like this riding the bus in the Sacred Valley, but had not yet encountered a woman carrying an entire roast pig onto the bus until this trip. She and her friend, who looked to be about 20, got on the bus in the most obscure town, way out in the middle of nowhere with the pig which they proceeded to hack into pieces with a cleaver and sell to hungry passengers along with potatoes. They were also selling apple juice in plastic pags, but I couldn´t figure out how to drink it without spilling it all over myself! In any case, more liquid was not a good idea since going to the bathroom was out of the question.
Last, but certainly not least, was the very well dressed, very clean, very handsome young man who got onto the bus (wearing a tie!) and proceeded to address us about the nutritive benefits of maca, an Andean plant that has caught on big as a supplement in the US. I think Becky and I might have been the only people on the bus who knew what he was talking about, which was one of the points he made. I was very impressed with the way he spoke and with his political awareness of how important it was for the people from his culture to know what treasures they had, and to use them for themselves. I thought it was interesting that he had to explain the medical conditions he was explaining the plant was good for, like osteoporosis, and gave him a lot of credit for jumping on that bus trying to sell his maca powder. I was thrilled to buy some since I have been under the weather, but he didn´t seem to sell as much as the Bible guy.
Finally, we were approached by Oligario who was touting hostels on the bus. I hate to say that I´ve become wary of people trying to sell me stuff, but I have, so I was kind of discounting him until he pulled out a pamphlet for a really nice looking hotel and told us we could have a special deal. It seems like my aloofness payed off. He thought I was trying to bargain! When we got to Puno he found us a cab and escorted us to the hotel, which is quite nice . We are paying ten dollars each for a room in the US that would cost about one hundred. Puno, while rundown, and lacking the colonial charm of Cusco, is interesting to walk around in, cheaper, and filled with very friendly people. I think most tourists spend only a brief time here before jumping off somewhere else, so we have the city to ourselves as far as gringas go.
Off to the island of Amantani tomorrow for two days, then back to Puno for the Festival of the Virgin of Candelaria, one of the biggest of the year!
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Feeling the Silence
I drank ayahuasca again last Sunday in a very beautiful ceremony. I was much more prepared mentally for the experience, although I was still scared before the ceremony began. Alonso, the ayahuascero, said he is always scared before every ceremony, which makes sense, and which makes me respect him even more. At this point I can say which makes me love him even more. He is such a beautiful being who lives from his heart, who sees from the eyes of his heart and from what I have experienced, acts from his heart.
A friend of mine from Block Island came to the ceremony with me, as well as two other people I have met here. It was small this time, only the four of us, three apprentices of Alonso´s, a man from Taray, Alonso and his wife, and their one year old son. Before I went I wrote down the things I wanted ayahuasca to help me with, although I was prepared to experience whatever I needed to experience, since one of my intentions was to surrender to the divine I AM presence inside me, which sees beyond the needs of my ego to what my soul wants for me to grow into a deeper being.
One by one we knelt before Alonso and drank, then walked back to our seats on the ground in the same round room as the last time. Alonso began to play his music, which is so sublime. I settled into the ground and breathed and let my mind relax as the music washed over and through me. I could sense the medicine moving through my body, and then after about an hour it started to affect my consciousness. It is hard to describe what I saw, or at least what the ayahuasca dimension looked like, but if you have ever seen ayahuasca art with its geometric patterns and swirls and colors, then you can get a good idea of what I was seeing. However, the feeling of being in contact with beings from another dimension, very powerful, benevolent beings, divine entities, was more powerful to me than the way things looked, up until a certain point when I felt one of these beings "operating" on my third eye, one of the things I requested. This was not painful or scary, I just felt pressure in my forehead and knew that this being was helping me and I thanked it. From that point on I remembered that my friend Aymar told me that once you become experienced with the medicine it is possible to direct the journey, so I continued to ask the entities to assist me. All of the things I asked for were addressed as best as the plant could do at that point for me. One of the particularly painful things I asked to be released from was not resolved as fully as I wanted it to be, but the message I got from the ayahuasca was that the result I wanted was what my ego wanted, not what my heart wanted, or what my soul knew was the truth, so that I was going to have to continue to accept this condition and learn to open my heart despite the pain that it causes, and it is true, I know, that pain is one of the most powerful ways to learn about love, that I was being given an opportunity to fully accept all the ways that love can live within us without the attachments we so often insist on as conditions or definitions of what love is. All these messages came through me in images and feelings, very beautiful feelings of love. I was crying silently almost the whole ceremony at the beauty of what I was experiencing and at the love radiating from Alonso´s music, and from the others in the room. I had a powerful vision of Jesus Christ, and then a vision of myself with him in a past life. I also had a vision of a North American Indian man dancing who I knew was my husband in a past life. I asked to see myself with him, but looking back, I think I didn´t because I was looking for myself how I look now, not how I did when I was with him. I had many visions of animals, and also an incredible energetic transference from the earth in which I received energy streaming up into my first chakra.
The medicine also worked on us as a group as a whole, bringing up a social issue that is difficult for me. I was feeling uncomfortable and responsible for the people who I brought with me, which was also the case the first ceremony. Both times I actually only asked one person to accompany me, and the others just sort of came along, although I told them to call Alonso to make sure it was ok they came. Anyway, one of the conditions of participating in the ceremony is that you cannot leave until it is officially over. While we were still in the dark, someone came in with a flashlight and went up to Alonso, who stopped playing his music and came over to me and said that one of the people who came with me not exactly invited was leaving because their was something wrong. Alonso´s son had discovered him and came into tell his father. Alonso asked me to accompany him outside to talk to him. Needless to say, this was very disrupting to the energy of the group, both because the circle was broken, and also because the lights were lit at this point. I walked over to the house with Alonso, amazed I could and asked this person what was wrong, if he was ok. His answers were terse and fairly rude. Out of respect for his experience I do not want to reveal them here. Alonso asked him to come in for just an hour more. We told him we were worried about him and I asked him to come sit next to me and try to sleep, suggestions that were not met well. Finally Alonso told him that he had made a commitment and needed to come back in, which he did. I was able to walk back in and recenter myself as Alonso continued to play, and to my surprise, I realized that no one in the room was holding me responsible for this person´s behaviour. Alonso asked me to go because I spoke English and because he thought I would want to help my friend, which I did, even though he rejected my help. So he came back, although he left after about 20 minutes, before the ceremony was over. The rest of us continued on listening to the beautiful music by candle and firelight now, meeting each others´eyes and hugging each other until Alonso closed the circle and people drifted home to sleep, although I slept there on the ground again. I think what happened to this person was that the ayahuasca, which he had drank many times before, worked on his dark side and brought it out into the light, maybe in a way that he didn´t expect, because it sounds like his medicine ceremonies in the past were more hallucinatory in nature. I think this is a testament to the power and purity of Alonso´s use of the medicine, however. The disruptor was angry because he wasn´t tripping hard enough, which I think might have actually been the medicine he needed to bring him into a state where his dark side came out and he had an opportunity to integrate it within the ceremony in a way that he might not have expected.
In the end, it is surrender that is required, and surrendering to the heart, as I¨m sure many of you know, can be very painful, because our wounds must be faced, and felt again sometimes. I feel so grateful and blessed by the beings that helped me in the ceremony and for all the humans in the room with me, and grateful for having the strength to go back for another ceremony.
Many of you who read this appeared to me in the ceremony, everyone shining and in a state of love and grace, and I prayed for all of you and for the earth who allows us to walk on her belly, and for my Uncle, who has crossed over into the stars, too. I saw his face so clearly as he was in life and felt his peace and contentment with wherever he is. I thank all of you for journeying with me and look forward to deepening our connections as we all grow into what we need to be.
A friend of mine from Block Island came to the ceremony with me, as well as two other people I have met here. It was small this time, only the four of us, three apprentices of Alonso´s, a man from Taray, Alonso and his wife, and their one year old son. Before I went I wrote down the things I wanted ayahuasca to help me with, although I was prepared to experience whatever I needed to experience, since one of my intentions was to surrender to the divine I AM presence inside me, which sees beyond the needs of my ego to what my soul wants for me to grow into a deeper being.
One by one we knelt before Alonso and drank, then walked back to our seats on the ground in the same round room as the last time. Alonso began to play his music, which is so sublime. I settled into the ground and breathed and let my mind relax as the music washed over and through me. I could sense the medicine moving through my body, and then after about an hour it started to affect my consciousness. It is hard to describe what I saw, or at least what the ayahuasca dimension looked like, but if you have ever seen ayahuasca art with its geometric patterns and swirls and colors, then you can get a good idea of what I was seeing. However, the feeling of being in contact with beings from another dimension, very powerful, benevolent beings, divine entities, was more powerful to me than the way things looked, up until a certain point when I felt one of these beings "operating" on my third eye, one of the things I requested. This was not painful or scary, I just felt pressure in my forehead and knew that this being was helping me and I thanked it. From that point on I remembered that my friend Aymar told me that once you become experienced with the medicine it is possible to direct the journey, so I continued to ask the entities to assist me. All of the things I asked for were addressed as best as the plant could do at that point for me. One of the particularly painful things I asked to be released from was not resolved as fully as I wanted it to be, but the message I got from the ayahuasca was that the result I wanted was what my ego wanted, not what my heart wanted, or what my soul knew was the truth, so that I was going to have to continue to accept this condition and learn to open my heart despite the pain that it causes, and it is true, I know, that pain is one of the most powerful ways to learn about love, that I was being given an opportunity to fully accept all the ways that love can live within us without the attachments we so often insist on as conditions or definitions of what love is. All these messages came through me in images and feelings, very beautiful feelings of love. I was crying silently almost the whole ceremony at the beauty of what I was experiencing and at the love radiating from Alonso´s music, and from the others in the room. I had a powerful vision of Jesus Christ, and then a vision of myself with him in a past life. I also had a vision of a North American Indian man dancing who I knew was my husband in a past life. I asked to see myself with him, but looking back, I think I didn´t because I was looking for myself how I look now, not how I did when I was with him. I had many visions of animals, and also an incredible energetic transference from the earth in which I received energy streaming up into my first chakra.
The medicine also worked on us as a group as a whole, bringing up a social issue that is difficult for me. I was feeling uncomfortable and responsible for the people who I brought with me, which was also the case the first ceremony. Both times I actually only asked one person to accompany me, and the others just sort of came along, although I told them to call Alonso to make sure it was ok they came. Anyway, one of the conditions of participating in the ceremony is that you cannot leave until it is officially over. While we were still in the dark, someone came in with a flashlight and went up to Alonso, who stopped playing his music and came over to me and said that one of the people who came with me not exactly invited was leaving because their was something wrong. Alonso´s son had discovered him and came into tell his father. Alonso asked me to accompany him outside to talk to him. Needless to say, this was very disrupting to the energy of the group, both because the circle was broken, and also because the lights were lit at this point. I walked over to the house with Alonso, amazed I could and asked this person what was wrong, if he was ok. His answers were terse and fairly rude. Out of respect for his experience I do not want to reveal them here. Alonso asked him to come in for just an hour more. We told him we were worried about him and I asked him to come sit next to me and try to sleep, suggestions that were not met well. Finally Alonso told him that he had made a commitment and needed to come back in, which he did. I was able to walk back in and recenter myself as Alonso continued to play, and to my surprise, I realized that no one in the room was holding me responsible for this person´s behaviour. Alonso asked me to go because I spoke English and because he thought I would want to help my friend, which I did, even though he rejected my help. So he came back, although he left after about 20 minutes, before the ceremony was over. The rest of us continued on listening to the beautiful music by candle and firelight now, meeting each others´eyes and hugging each other until Alonso closed the circle and people drifted home to sleep, although I slept there on the ground again. I think what happened to this person was that the ayahuasca, which he had drank many times before, worked on his dark side and brought it out into the light, maybe in a way that he didn´t expect, because it sounds like his medicine ceremonies in the past were more hallucinatory in nature. I think this is a testament to the power and purity of Alonso´s use of the medicine, however. The disruptor was angry because he wasn´t tripping hard enough, which I think might have actually been the medicine he needed to bring him into a state where his dark side came out and he had an opportunity to integrate it within the ceremony in a way that he might not have expected.
In the end, it is surrender that is required, and surrendering to the heart, as I¨m sure many of you know, can be very painful, because our wounds must be faced, and felt again sometimes. I feel so grateful and blessed by the beings that helped me in the ceremony and for all the humans in the room with me, and grateful for having the strength to go back for another ceremony.
Many of you who read this appeared to me in the ceremony, everyone shining and in a state of love and grace, and I prayed for all of you and for the earth who allows us to walk on her belly, and for my Uncle, who has crossed over into the stars, too. I saw his face so clearly as he was in life and felt his peace and contentment with wherever he is. I thank all of you for journeying with me and look forward to deepening our connections as we all grow into what we need to be.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Las Turistas
I´ve been a bit of a tourist lately. A friend from Block Island has arrived in Pisac and we´ve been touring the Sacred Valley sites, which is good since I was getting in a bit of a rut here in Pisac. Paz y Luz is great, but it is hard for me to get in a creative flow living around people--my issue--I know that if I really want to create then I will raise my fear and move myself to a place where I can get in the flow that writing requires. I have been considering my willingness to live in this repressed state, wondering what it is inside me that is willing to tolerate the very uncomfortable feelings that arise when I don´t create. Is it that I don´t believe in myself enough? Could it be that I am scared of where my creativity will take me? The rut is safe. It is an easy place to be. Could it also be a message that a part of me is still willing to sacrifice myself for others by being too accomodating to their needs? Probably it is all of these things and definitely I should get out of my head and just be for awhile....
Which is why it is good to have Becky here, as she motivated me to change my scenery and shift my mood. We went to Cusco last week, in the car with Gray and Eva. There aren´t a lot of priate cars here, mostly buses and taxis, so it was fun to drive around in a big American SUV. Cusco is an international cultural tourism oasis, which means it can either be fun or horrible, depending on how you choose to see it. My first time in the city I was enchanted by the way it looked, but horrified by the hardsell to the tourists. Everything from fingerpuppets to massages. The second time, with three friends, I like the city more. We ran errands for Paz y Luz and bought cheap bootleg cds an ate Indian food and walked up to San Blas to eat dark chocolate--hard to find here as all the Peruvians seem to eat is milk chocolate.
A couple of days later Becky and I traveled down the valley to Ollayantaytambo, a very quaint town off the carretera that is still built on its Inka foundations. Becky toured the ruins which required a ticket, while I, who had alreay been there, walked around the quiet streets of the town, different from Pisac, which is all adobe or concrete and built by the Spanish as a grid. On the far side of the town, opposite the main ruins, I noticed a little sign pointing up to a path that ascened up toward another set of ruins, which I followed and had to myself high above the town. I sat on the ramparts and watched the people below and the waterfall pouring through the town towared the Rio Urabamba and felt quite content and impressed with myself for climbing up there, although I am finding the altitude much easier to handle.
Afterwards Becky and I met and had lunch at The Two Hearts Cafe, run by a 76 English woman who arrived in Peru with two suitcases and hasn´t left. She runs the cafe as a charity to help indigenous women and children in the area. She runs a kindergarten and a health program, which seems to be sorely needed. According to doctors who recently visited the school, all of the children were malnourished and all had parasites due to drinking infected water, and many of the women had severe gynecological problems. I have particularly felt the difficulty of the womens´s lives here. For all the talk about Pachamama here (mother earth), the women are treated like work animals and seem exhausted and from what I can see, not very happy, although this of course, is my perception and not necessarily true. The talk of Pachamama is definitely for the tourists sake and not embodied in the daily life of the people who I have seen, which is also evidenced in the lack of respect for the earth seen everywhere in the form of garbage in the rivers and sewage emptied into the sacred river. Becky witnessed a dead dog being thrown in the river the earth the other day.
I am aware that we from the ¨civilized¨nations have infected this culture with this disease, but this does not mean that we cannot all be held accountable for choosing a different way of relating to the earth. The infected and the spreader of the disease are in a relationship together, much the same as an alcoholic and a co-dependent. We all work together to create our individual realities an collective lives with every choice we make. Perhaps our task as the infector is to show(not tell) the infected how to live in harmony, thus spreading a new way to live, while at the same time learning from those we have infected, cocreating through the intellect and the heart, as the prophecy of the eagle and condor says we must do to reestablish harmony on earth.
The pain of the women was really brought home hard to us yesterday as we drove down from the Inka ruins of Moray, on the rolling mustard yellow plains above Urubamba. Once again in the giant SUV, we stopped to pick up an old Indian woman who flagged us down for a ride. In obvious pain, she was on her way to Urubamba below to have her last tooth pulled. She could barely speak Spanish, just Quechua, and when she showed us her tooth to explain what was wrong she started crying. Her pain and exhausting was overwhelming in the backseat with Becky and me. She was so tiny in her skirts and bowler hat, her face etched deep with wrinkles. Her whole presence just hurt so much. She kept wiping her eyes with the hem of her skirt an when Becky offered her a sip from her water bottle she very carefully wiped her mouth on her skirt first. We dropped her off halfway down with a Qyechua woman who said she would get her down to Urubamba as we were going on the salt mines at Salinas, but after that it was hard to enjoy anything, and I was having a hard time being in that big car with a bunch of chattering, well meaning people...I don´t know if it is that I am too sensitive, but I just kept sinking and sinking and not wanting to be anywhere, letting the past affect the present, but maybe I was being called so strongly to change my present reality that I could not, and should not have resisted this feelings-
Which sums up how I am feeling in general after being a self-indulgent tourist for a few days. If I am going to be here as a privileged person, at least materially, I have to work, to follow the call of my heart with discipline, whatever that call may be. I thought this meant I had to volunteer at an orphanage, or some such thing, but really when I feel my heart the call is to write, even if no one reads what I am writing. It is my call, the way to open my heart to be of greater service, and I feel such gratitue that I am in a position to be able to follow this calling, a feeling magnified by seeing how most of the women live in this country. Who knows what goes unexpressed in the lives of the women, and the men, in this country? I know from Peruko how hard it is to be different, how hard it was for him to follow the call of his soul to be an artist in a survival culture, and I admire him even more seeing where he came from.
So there are mountains to climb and rivers to praise, and there is work to do on the physical and spiritual planes. Both are vital if we want to live in harmony.
Which is why it is good to have Becky here, as she motivated me to change my scenery and shift my mood. We went to Cusco last week, in the car with Gray and Eva. There aren´t a lot of priate cars here, mostly buses and taxis, so it was fun to drive around in a big American SUV. Cusco is an international cultural tourism oasis, which means it can either be fun or horrible, depending on how you choose to see it. My first time in the city I was enchanted by the way it looked, but horrified by the hardsell to the tourists. Everything from fingerpuppets to massages. The second time, with three friends, I like the city more. We ran errands for Paz y Luz and bought cheap bootleg cds an ate Indian food and walked up to San Blas to eat dark chocolate--hard to find here as all the Peruvians seem to eat is milk chocolate.
A couple of days later Becky and I traveled down the valley to Ollayantaytambo, a very quaint town off the carretera that is still built on its Inka foundations. Becky toured the ruins which required a ticket, while I, who had alreay been there, walked around the quiet streets of the town, different from Pisac, which is all adobe or concrete and built by the Spanish as a grid. On the far side of the town, opposite the main ruins, I noticed a little sign pointing up to a path that ascened up toward another set of ruins, which I followed and had to myself high above the town. I sat on the ramparts and watched the people below and the waterfall pouring through the town towared the Rio Urabamba and felt quite content and impressed with myself for climbing up there, although I am finding the altitude much easier to handle.
Afterwards Becky and I met and had lunch at The Two Hearts Cafe, run by a 76 English woman who arrived in Peru with two suitcases and hasn´t left. She runs the cafe as a charity to help indigenous women and children in the area. She runs a kindergarten and a health program, which seems to be sorely needed. According to doctors who recently visited the school, all of the children were malnourished and all had parasites due to drinking infected water, and many of the women had severe gynecological problems. I have particularly felt the difficulty of the womens´s lives here. For all the talk about Pachamama here (mother earth), the women are treated like work animals and seem exhausted and from what I can see, not very happy, although this of course, is my perception and not necessarily true. The talk of Pachamama is definitely for the tourists sake and not embodied in the daily life of the people who I have seen, which is also evidenced in the lack of respect for the earth seen everywhere in the form of garbage in the rivers and sewage emptied into the sacred river. Becky witnessed a dead dog being thrown in the river the earth the other day.
I am aware that we from the ¨civilized¨nations have infected this culture with this disease, but this does not mean that we cannot all be held accountable for choosing a different way of relating to the earth. The infected and the spreader of the disease are in a relationship together, much the same as an alcoholic and a co-dependent. We all work together to create our individual realities an collective lives with every choice we make. Perhaps our task as the infector is to show(not tell) the infected how to live in harmony, thus spreading a new way to live, while at the same time learning from those we have infected, cocreating through the intellect and the heart, as the prophecy of the eagle and condor says we must do to reestablish harmony on earth.
The pain of the women was really brought home hard to us yesterday as we drove down from the Inka ruins of Moray, on the rolling mustard yellow plains above Urubamba. Once again in the giant SUV, we stopped to pick up an old Indian woman who flagged us down for a ride. In obvious pain, she was on her way to Urubamba below to have her last tooth pulled. She could barely speak Spanish, just Quechua, and when she showed us her tooth to explain what was wrong she started crying. Her pain and exhausting was overwhelming in the backseat with Becky and me. She was so tiny in her skirts and bowler hat, her face etched deep with wrinkles. Her whole presence just hurt so much. She kept wiping her eyes with the hem of her skirt an when Becky offered her a sip from her water bottle she very carefully wiped her mouth on her skirt first. We dropped her off halfway down with a Qyechua woman who said she would get her down to Urubamba as we were going on the salt mines at Salinas, but after that it was hard to enjoy anything, and I was having a hard time being in that big car with a bunch of chattering, well meaning people...I don´t know if it is that I am too sensitive, but I just kept sinking and sinking and not wanting to be anywhere, letting the past affect the present, but maybe I was being called so strongly to change my present reality that I could not, and should not have resisted this feelings-
Which sums up how I am feeling in general after being a self-indulgent tourist for a few days. If I am going to be here as a privileged person, at least materially, I have to work, to follow the call of my heart with discipline, whatever that call may be. I thought this meant I had to volunteer at an orphanage, or some such thing, but really when I feel my heart the call is to write, even if no one reads what I am writing. It is my call, the way to open my heart to be of greater service, and I feel such gratitue that I am in a position to be able to follow this calling, a feeling magnified by seeing how most of the women live in this country. Who knows what goes unexpressed in the lives of the women, and the men, in this country? I know from Peruko how hard it is to be different, how hard it was for him to follow the call of his soul to be an artist in a survival culture, and I admire him even more seeing where he came from.
So there are mountains to climb and rivers to praise, and there is work to do on the physical and spiritual planes. Both are vital if we want to live in harmony.
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