Hope Marries Exile

Hope had free choice. She married Exile at the Cathedral of Dreams. They ran through meadows, olive orchards and summited Spanish mountains above the Mediterranean.

“There’s a big world out there,” she said to Exile.

“Yes and that’s only the top of it,” he said. “Shall we share an orange?”

“Yes,” said Hope smiling at real and imaginary worlds past the event horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”

Hope birthed a girl named Patience. Raising Patience was life’s little test for Hope and Exile. Patience gave them the test first and lessons later.

Exile was a lone wolf and Patience tested his love. She tested his stability, honesty, trust and way of creating worlds inside worlds melding swirling atoms of experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker. Patience admired this.

Personality tests revealed their character traits and imperfections. With empathy and gratitude Patience tested Exile’s ability to act and let go. She gave him desire, anger, and ignorance and he created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. Patience cherished this jewel in the lotus.

Hope was relieved seeing Exile content in this context.

“No one dies. Their spirit evolves,“ said Exile as they chopped and carried wood.

“True,” said Hope. “Patience lives forever. Magic protects her. I felt it before she was born. She was a stream of light floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” said Exile. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will master her Jinn spirit energies becoming a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe. Stream splinters sang twilight. Exile chopped. Hope carried. A yellow moon rose through orange-blue streaks above the Sierras.

“He went to the cemetario today,” said Hope.

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider. Visiting spirit sources.”

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they fly with the full moon.”

Hope and Exile danced in their nets of light. Their floating spirits were free of substance. Free spirits in a free world left temporal bodies floating down to the Rio Guadalete River.

River said, “I wake you up. You follow me and reach pools. Pools are your quiet mind in deep meditation. Deep pools reflect absolute emptiness. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero. You: nature, water, stones, vegetation, trees, animal skulls, blue sky, and sound ...

My music is water. It is soft. It is all you know. You are centered pure and simple. It is all you need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to accept responsibility for his life and death ...

You memorize my silent sound and carry it in you. It is light and portable. It multiplies its flowing vibration by streaming. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, wildness, purity unimpeded. Amplification of clear water is short immediate direct and with you forever. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby ...

I wake you up. You pay attention. Your spirit flies away and I know you are safe, blessed by my pulse and flow becoming river. Feel the energies. My magic spirit is strong. It flows through your life adventure. I sustain you. My stream is never ending, never beginning. It is the stream of life. Absorbed into the flow you are still. As above, so below.”

Exile and Hope combined their blood with water. The water rushing from dark gray Sierra Mountains through dolomite paths was clear, cold and delicious.

Gathering flowers they savored fresh turned soil, olive and cork trees, pine, evergreen, Pinsapar Fir and trees without a name.

Trees pointed at stars. “Look there,” they said, gesturing thin branches toward sky diamonds, “there, there we are.” Trees identified pulsating white stars.

“Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” sang another, “there we are.”

“And there, and there, everywhere.”

Moonbeam winds heard stars whisper magic star tale secrets of star trails dancing in a vast silent vacuum. Hope and Exile manifested light.

ART - A Memoir

Author Page

Lao kids carry worlds on their back.

The Girl on the Train

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.

Her bare feet grip small pebbles as root structures dance with her toes.

Her grounded shadow prowls toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields as her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought.

She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats waiting for restless time to deliver them to the Red City.

Her history remembers potentates inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building adobe fortresses and writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur’an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where illusions of controlling time is their passion to be prompt and responsible citizens.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with wild brown hair tied back with straw or flower stems surrounding her with fragrances.

Inside rolling hills cut by wet canyons she is surrounded by orange blossom aroma in yellow and green fields. Her black eyes absorb ephemeral cloud thoughts in sky mind. Her open heart feels her breath ripple her long shadow.

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than an eagle soaring above the Atlas Mountains.

She smells the Berber fire heating tea for a festival. A shaman dances in a goatskin cape and skull below stars.

It is cold. Flaming shooting stars leap into her eyes. Her nomadic clan plays flutes and drums. She sways with the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving through soil, dancing through fields.

Red and yellow fire invites stars to her dance.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Kalapuya

The Kalapuya, a Pacific Northwest tribe speaking Penutian numbered 3,000 in 1780. They believed in nature guardian spirits and vision quests. Their shamans, amp a lak ya taught them how seeking, discovering and following one’s spirit or dream power and singing their song was essential in their community.

An ancestor shared a dream story.

“I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. I share a story of our people living here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In forests, rivers and mountains all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

“I am grateful to welcome you here. You walked many paths of love to reach me. Some are narrow and smooth in places, wide and rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, balance, weakness and strength. I hear your heart beating as our ancestor pounds ceremonial drums. I feel the surging force of your breath fly through this forest. Wind accepts your breath. I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch and hear. I am the oak, fir and pine in your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent hearing trees nudge each other, ‘Look, one has returned.’”

“I love the way you absorb the song of a brown thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet-throated song you hear without listening. Two night owls sing. Their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

“I am the warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you remove before connecting axe edge with wood. You carry me through this forest. Your flame creates the fire of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the forest scent in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.

“I am cold rain and wet snow and hot sun and four seasons. I am the yellow, purple, red, blue, and orange flower from brown earth. I am an old dialect of Kalapuya tribes. I respect spirit energies. I hear with my eyes and see with my ears. I understand your love for the spirit power guardian.

“I am your ancestor speaking 300 languages from our long history. Now only 150 dialects remain. Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.

“I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility.”

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Annapurna Range, Nepal

Tranquility

Sandman flow waves
Flat line horizon
Tattoo queries with That Song in Sin City

Dancing orange sunset light
Collapsing blue waving rhythm
Flow

New water sparkles light waves/particles
Sparrow wing free flight wing seashell

Gauguin’s primitive visions - imagination

A shudder passed through his body tingling every nerve cell.
It was predicted by a long deep slow meditative breath

this inhalation staring at blue green gray waves

emanating from a flat purple horizon line.

Every afternoon is the same after four winds dance waves

Glitter, details, flow, tranquility, Wushu focus

Wind dances waves. Turbulent music.

Chinese visitors hide under umbrellas

gripping wrists walk the shore staring blindly at white Europeans on sun beds sucking beverages.

Dazed and confused by everything

shrouded women wear gaily painted floppy hats, sunglasses,

face masks devour their faces, shawls, long sleeved gloves and blind terror.

Self easy foam at the mouth.

The sea waved. Two white jet skis danced twirled and exploded over waves as wind pushed water.

A Khmer woman balances a large bamboo platter on head.

Light reflects bananas, mangoes yellow pineapples.

A man with a tray of sunglasses walks past with visual acuity.

In cheap mass-produced red and white soft-soled squash shoes

Tourists abandon exposure to ultra violet radioactive light

running into hard fast shade. Safe at last.

“Protect my fair skin,” they sang saving face,

a fear greater than death. Shrill echoes.

Grow Your Soul - Prose & Poems from Laos & Cambodia

Taos

Other looked on with pure heart awareness. A woman named Raven (Corvus Corex) shared a talk story.

One day I returned to the Taos Pueblo. It was over 100.

Dry dusty silent heat.

“Find something that speaks to you,” said a Tiwa Native American woman.

I walked past their cemetery where 150 women and children died when the church was burned during a Hispanic and Pueblo revolt in Taos after the American occupation in 1846 by U.S. forces. Wooden crosses scarred by sun, heat and dust stood in haphazard rows on brown ground. Plastic flowers. Names of children and elders chiseled in wood. A black and white rosary draped on a small cross marked a burial ground.

“Due to shortage of space we bury the new dead on top of the old dead,” said the Tiwa woman.

Hard soil. Wooden crosses stood at angles in the heat. White black and brown crosses faded in sun. Names, ages, children, parents, flowers, and rosaries slept inside a small adobe wall. The old bell collected dust in the burned out charred remains of the church steeple.

The screams of the trapped women and children echoed as the attackers poured their modern civilization of guns and religion into the church. One moment it was quiet and then you heard children screaming and there was no place for them to go, no chance.

“We left it that way,” the Tiwa girl said to pale faced visitors standing silent seeing. She disappeared, a vapor of spirit, a reminder of where they were and how they’d come to this place in the dust below sacred mountains and sky.

Of all the pueblos in New Mexico the Taos Pueblo has the most magic, the deepest significance. Power. It sits on hundreds of thousands of acres, all sacred Indian ground, sacred forested mountains, with sacred rivers and lakes. Adobe brown buildings stand stacked on top of each other to the sky. Blue doors. Wooden ladders. Red chilies hang in the sun. It is a hieroglyphic of habitats of ancient homes, fortress and sacred living space.

A young brown eyed Tiwa woman explained their life; language, the small adobe cooking kilns for baking breads and pies, how they mixed straw and mud forming adobe buildings, maintained dwellings and the number of people living on the pueblo and those on connected reservations.

“A matriarchal society. No women sit on the fifty member tribal council. Tiwa is the language on the Pueblo and a pure oral transmission. Nothing is written down. Sacred words. Tiwa means - wee-who,” she said.

“It means when you give, expect nothing in return. When you give you open that corridor of energy for yourself and your kind or your people, your vibrations, and it is filled with goodness. Great powers or awareness are within it so that it descends upon you and places in you whatever that gift is that you’re supposed to get. That’s what giving does. It awakens placement. It brings down clarity. We are people from the Source - the center of the circle of light. The No-Form creates the form. In the Tiwa language there are no nouns or pronouns. Things have no distinct concrete existence. Everything is in motion and seen in it’s relationship to other motions.

“The power is not in words but in sounds made in saying and pronouncing words. Each of us is a ceremony, a vibration of All-That-Is. We are the vast self.”

Inside a pueblo room, a woman called Sunflower painted intricate black and white spider web designs on her pots. Her gift streamed in and out weaving geometric colors. Her brush dipped into black ink, her left hand inside the pot turned it as she etched a black line. Diamonds, circles, rectangles, a sun eye, and sun god danced black on white.

I wandered across a small stream flowing from sacred mountains. It carried water to nourish the pueblo. Healing liquid. Water flowed during the 4th year of a ten-year drought.

I visited with men and women selling turquoise, beads, arrows, water, silver bracelets, postcards, drums, pottery, sharing stories. A man and his drums made from animal skins. Beadwork. Blue sky stones.

A brown dog slept in the dust of midday sun. Crude serviceable wooden ladders extended from earth to adobe roofs to clear blue sky. Indian women sat talking under Ramada lattice poled roofs. They waited for tourists asking new questions about old things hoping to sell their work.

A tired woman from Miami and three kids passed. Blond kids wearing floppy khaki hats carried water bottles. Having the time of their lives they shuffled boots in dirt studying ants. They’d never been this far west before.

A Tiwa man told his story about hunting. Furs and pelts hung on his hitching post walls. It was cool inside his place.

He wore a t-shirt of an American flag wrapped around an Indian on horseback shooting a buffalo, “Hunting, The American Way.”

“Yes,” said his long dark face and sad eyes, “I took my boys, when they were young enough, up into the mountains, the sacred mountains here and taught them how to hunt.”

They hunted bear, cougar, rabbit, fox and elk.

“A bear. How do you kill a bear?”

“In the lung. When they charge you hold your ground. One arrow in the lung. It stops them immediately.”

“Do they fight you, do they run?”

“No, they do not fight you. They stop. They die.”

An elk head with many points looked down from his wall. Fur huge brown eyes.

“And the elk?” 

“One arrow brought him down,” he said, pointing to his kill.

“How close did you get?”

“Ten feet. We tracked him for three days. We studied him well. I taught all my boys the art, the skill of the hunt. We started early that day, it was day three, we camped we tracked him for three days. We knew where he grazed, where he went for water, where he slept.”

The elk was big and eyed silent. No startled look. Black nose for smelling down wind, up wind, all the sacred mountain winds. Ten point antlers streaked with brown maturity.

“How did your boys do?”

“They learned well. I started them young. We all do but not everyone here learns as early as my boys. I learned from my father and he learned from his father. We took our packhorses left the pueblo and moved into the mountains, high in the mountains. We camped by the rivers and tracked their prints, their habits their patterns. Three days was all it took.”

“It’s the simplicity of it all. It’s the spirit of the animal isn’t it? You know their energy.”

“You become one with the animal. You become the animal.”

His bow and arrows hung on the white wall. Rock flints. Sharpened points.

“Then what happened?”

“On the day of the kill we were up before dawn. We broke camp. We moved to the river. The elk came down to drink and didn’t smell us. We were in the rushes, hidden. We were ten feet away. One arrow,” he said, pointing to the elk on his wall, “there, in the neck. He fell fast. We used everything.”

“My boys learned well. I have three of them and now they are grown and my work here is done.”

Weaving A Life (V4)