I Need Help

I took a night bus to Cadiz where a stain glass explorer named C. Colon sailed west dear Nina searching for gold, importing greed and converting heathen slaves with persecution and misery.

It was difficult raising funds from a skeptical king and queen intent on expanding their empire.

My inner child, poet and literary outlaw spent six days in the San Francisco Hotel establishing geographical bearings enjoying bistro tapas, meat, cheese, bread, fruit and veggies from the central market or Mercado. It was a 30-year flashback after the kissing the army goodbye when I passed through carrying a pack Jack.

I walked into the tourism office off De Dios Plaza. I got to the point with in and out dialogue.

“I need help.”

Three little English words said everything.

Patricia helped me make some calls. After settling in with a Romani family I visited her to say thanks. She said, “You know, we get a lot of people in our office, all nationalities looking for something and while most of them are nice some are really terrible.”

“I understand. Kind ones are a blessing. I’ve met some disconnected neurotic people on life’s road. Too many are rude and not sensitive to diverse cultures. Others fall into two distinct groups. The whiners and the complainers.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “that’s a good one. The reason I decided to help you was the way you just came in and said, ‘I need help.’ It was refreshing.”

“I’m fortunate,” I said, “seeing the challenges. My limited Spanish wouldn’t help me find a room. That’s why I came to see you.”

“It was the way you did it,” said Patricia.

“A three-year child taught me those three little words. I really appreciated your help. I’ll be back.”

My room with meals for thirty days was $500.

Amelia was an overweight diabetic who ate extremely fast, her husband Jesus resembled Ichabod Crane and son Janus, 20, was a mental case. He studied engineering in school and lay around the flat watching soccer on television with the volume at full blast or playing computer games.

His father hustled cheap scarves along chipped yellow walls outside the Mercado across from his local bar where Amelia nursed her daily wine.

Another resident was Dortmund, a gay German flight attendant for ABC airline working the South American circuit. He had a room for a month studying Spanish with a private teacher from 9-12.

“It’s great being here, no one knows where I am and I like it like that. Nothing to do but study.” He carried a cell phone. One day we met in an Internet cafe. “Hi Dortmund. How’s it going?”

“Great. I’m on-line with a guy in Germany. This is a great chat room. We’re talking about getting together when my studies are finished.”

Dortmund spent a lot of time chatting with guys on-line and looking at his mobile. The city was a relaxed place for his midnight encounters as bars and cafes spilled fictional people into romance novels. He was overjoyed. Spanish was a language of lust. Exotic perfume. Forbidden fruit hung heavy and ripe for the picking.

My Cadiz room was small, noisy and perfect for completing a sentence. My life sentence was a metaphor savoring my time on Earth. Living on the edge has the advantage of being sharper there.

There is no there there.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

A writer in Burma.

Tangiers to Cadiz

After doing my work at ground zero for two months in Morocco I leaped on a ferry from Tangiers to Algeciras, Spain.

An American woman from a lonely-hearts club tour group in Scottsdale, Arizona said hello.

“Hi, my name is Jean.”

“Hi, I’m Timothy Grasshopper. Nice to meet you.”

She opened a small book of quicksilver questions about life as a nomad, how it worked, how one survived. She gave me a multiple-choice exam to satisfy her curiosity.

“How does it work?”

“How does what work? The universe?”

“Moving around like this. Do you get scared?”

“No. I pay attention. I avoid choke points on the street. I trust my instincts. I see everyone before they see me. I am a ghost in exile. Invisible.”

“I was petrified in Tangiers. We were hustled by every child in the city.”

“They’re hungry. There’s huge poverty in Morocco. Fear of hunger and starvation and loneliness is a daily reality. One person supports thirteen. The majority makes less than $1.00 a day.”

“Yes I suppose so but I hope not. This is my first time away from the states. Some of my friends were afraid to leave after 9/11. They stayed in Arizona and Boston.”

“The media sells fear after 9/11. It’s a snake eating its tail if you know what I mean. What goes around comes around. Hello karma. Why did you leave?”

“My husband died a few years ago and I just sat around and then some friends got me interested in social activities. They told me about this tour, you know, stay in a Spanish coastal resort and see the sights with a day trip to Morocco. Then they stayed home after 9/11. Afraid to get on a plane.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your husband. Grief is part of the process. Letting go. Were you married long?”

“Twenty years. We were high school sweethearts.”

“Did you travel much?”

“Only around the states.”

“That’s a good beginning. I hitched around the states in high school and survived a year in Nam. Then I explored Europe, the Middle East, China, and Tibet. It’s evolving like a dream. One life, no plan, many adventures.”

“That’s really exciting. I wish I had the nerve to do something like that, just get up and go. This has been really good for me, it’s opened my eyes to a lot of things.”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks. We adapt, evolve and adjust. What have you learned?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Things like handling my luggage, realizing I brought way too much stuff. Stuff I don’t need, things I could have left behind. But of course I didn’t know any better. Seeing other people and their expectations, their attitudes being American. How many are loud and boring, childish really, like they’re in some foreign amusement park, how they give the impression of being rich, rude and stupid. The way some of them treated the Moroccans was just terrible. Everyone has their bias and prejudices.”

“Welcome to the freak show. I’ve observed kindness and stupidity. There are way too many idiotic crass tourists on the loose. No sensitivity or tolerance. Others are kind and polite. A day trip is only a fragment isn’t it?”

“I didn’t know any better. It’s part of the package. I’d love to come back on my own or with a friend someday.”

“Morocco is amazing. Hospitality. If you return I suggest you travel south into the Atlas Mountains and west to the coast. Get away from cities. Stay with people in villages.”

“Yes,” she said seeing a blue sea. “It’d be nice to go further.”

“Travel is the real education. Experiences are teachers. It’s essential to slow down and see with new eyes. We see through our eyes not with our eyes. Sit down in one place for a long time. Engage your senses.”

“Yes, I feel a little better now. Where are you going?”

“I left the states September 1st for six months. I’m going to Cadiz for a month, sit down, write and explore. Satisfy food, shelter and unconscious creative needs.”

“How exciting. What will you write about?”

“Experiences in Morocco and beyond. I was there on 9/11. Two months absorbing diverse realities. Using humor and satire with imagination and truth I will write about governments and media creating fear to advance their dystopian goals of social and psychological Control and greed ...

 ... I’ll write about illusions of fear and suffering as characters discuss how propaganda manipulates people. How humans face personal and collective desire, anger, ignorance, adventure and surprise on their quest for individuation. We are all connected on emotional and intellectual levels of awareness. Cadiz is the oldest city in Europe ...

 ... After a month I will live in an isolated mountain pueblo for the winter. My discipline is 1,000 words a day or two hours of revision. Polishing is the party. Next spring I’ll return to Tacoma, build a tree house, plant roses, caress thorns and write a book. I have a gonzo attitude. Be a master journalist with the eye of a photographer and the balls of an actor.”

“That must be exciting. They tell us every day where we’re going, what we’re going to see, where we’re going to eat, what time the bus leaves, where we will sleep, and who knows what. It’s a bit too much.”

“Hey, it’s your first time out. Think of it as a test run seeing how a tour package works. What you like and don’t like. You can use your experience to plan new independent adventures.”

“Yes, I like the idea and potential of being independent.”

“It’s a test with compensations. You are a free spirit in a free world.”

“Yes I am. I’ve always wanted to go to Greece.”

“Good for you. You’ll make it.”

“I’ll research it when I get home. You’ve been a big help. Nice meeting you.”

“Be well. Forget the words and cherish the ideas.”

She joined her group wearing nametags for a photograph with the sea sparkling blue and green foaming white.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Juke

My Cadiz, Spain experience sang of Juke, an African word meaning wicked or disorderly in one language.

It also meant a building without walls in the Congo. For American Blacks it took on sexual connotations and a type of dance.

It may have also described jute - a rough fiber made from the stems of a tropical Old World plant used for making twine, rope, or woven into matting - fields and jute workers visiting makeshift bars. Juke joints were bars with dance floors and back rooms for gambling and brothels. Shake your moneymaker.

Your Mask Eats Your Face

To juke was to lead a wandering life, have intercourse. To go in, jam and poke. Whorehouses. From the 1930’s on Delta blues players played juke joints, passing the music from generation to generation. Juke boxes were invented in 1927.

Nothin’ but the blues, everybody’s talking ‘cause talk is cheap.

Hard field work prisons, slavery, life, death, love, loss, leaving and living the blues with a feeling.

It was nothing but the blues talking.

While living, singing, and playing harp blues in the key of C, I trimmed long fingernails down to the quick brown fox jumped over the fence. WYSIWYG. Small slivers of enamel snow spiraled into air floating to cobblestones.

It was a clear truth after three days in the Sierras on narrow Roman passages, chopping and climbing in ancient forests removed from civilization’s discontent.

People moved fast and furious in Cadiz. I sensed their malcontent maladjusted wild crazy freedom from being closeted, closed in, no sky, no air, stoned frustrations manipulating mainstream desires down ways and means with cause and effect in the big city.

It was all a relative reality in the absolute reality and most of my relatives were dead.

Their grounded headstones decorated with names, ages, epitaphs collected dust living with memory.

Weaving A Life (V2)

Cadiz Construction

Satisfying a sublime unexplainable scientific artistic impulse, a curious human exploring Earth loved existing in a perpetual twilight zone of repairs, renovations, chisels, hammers, stone facades and dire classical solemn faced people stirring languages into new creations. 

“It has something to do with his dream,” said Omar. “Process now, product later. Hunting and gathering instincts.”

Cadiz hammer music and gypsy serenades welcomed dawn. One-eyed men roared around industrial revolutionary spirals without a building permit.

“Sound check!” yelled a construction worker waving his tools staring at stoned glazed edges. His partner hammered down morning light easier than breathing. Young boys started 50cc engines. Echoing through cold canyons machines sang like obnoxious chain saws in a forest of buildings.

A sad blond Spanish woman off to make a living juggled guilt, purple books, black purse and a white cigarette. She looked down at her stoned path, a reminder of Roman civilization.

After tearing it up to implant pipes in front of the Cathedral San Francisco, men used a thin string plumb line tied to granite stones to create an intricate stone design. One man dug dirt, another ran a portable cement mixer and another hammered stone edges to achieve the perfect geometric floral pattern.

People at a nearby cafe sat surrounded by fragmented noise. Pigeons filled the air. Pedestrians negotiated rubble. A beggar rested on church steps waiting for charitable parishioners. He had just enough energy left in his thin frame to hold out his hand. The only thing he owned was an empty stomach.

A nervous brown robed Franciscan monk in a Moorish doorway fingering his rosary watched the men slave. Sunlight glistened off a balcony along Rue Cepeda.

The streets were named for saints, explorers and shy women in their destitute languishing remedy of hope. Hope died last.

Sunday light blessings reflected off religious icons in Catholic pews. Trinity angels emerged from shadows melting into flower markets where fishmongers mixed langoustine snails, sliced escargot tourism and Super Tour buses dropped utensils on their heads.

Bowing to market forces on Sunday everyone went to church. They fed bread wafers to their immaculately dressed children. They prepared heirs to meet and greet strangers and relatives in narrow cobblestone streets with sweets for my pretty.

Soiled spoiled children escaped small cramped Spanish flats on narrow slick tiled stairs. Descended from Berber bloodlines they groaned out their childbirth, childhood, a-dolt futures where 10-12% would finish higher degrees.

A minimum return on investment (ROI) strategies in Andalucía, the poorest Spanish province raised interest rates. They were targeted for an infusion of future cash from the European Union along with austerity measures and general strikes.

To greet the mean old street citizens passed through patios filled with copious plants and entrances tiled with Moorish quasi-crystalline tiled designs. They came and went with precise regularity, discipline, stability, structure, and unwavering self control.

They escaped microscopic interior spaces strolling on esplanades and through parks lined with statues of heroes on horseback challenging blue skies with glistening sabers, marble busts, effigies and fountains of boys holding iron fish spouting water.

Off shore, oil tanker ships, military destroyers, container ships full of imported and exported goods, small sailboats, and luxury liners with gleaming white lights bow to aft sailing for Lisbon plied waves.

Waves washed the shore every day. Every morning sun-blocked retired well greased women set up camp on the Cadiz beach, playing bingo, knitting red yarn with quick fingers. Their husbands in bathing suits, clasped hands behind backs walked through surf discussing weighty matters of church and state.

A handicapped swimmer left her crutch in the sand and waded into blue water like a crab.

Old fishermen with long poles threaded small shrimp on hooks before casting from high stonewalls. Lovers in shaded bliss played with cell phones while petting each other out of passionate boredom.

In the countryside a laborer earned 5,000 pesetas a day thrashing trees. Olives fell toward mechanized presses. Virgin oil was the best. Spanish courtship took years if you desired the really good stuff, requiring the fine art of romantic seduction.

Citizens finished their tiled stair-master workout and faced the door. It was a heavy dark brown in two sections. The ground floor was originally for storage, an old warehouse. Depending on the century it was easier to throw hot oil down on Arabic or Christian invaders from a balcony.

A woman pulled her weight open and faced the crooked 3,000 year-old street hearing stones sing historical reference.

Little Wing, a word weaver stood in the shade of the Cadiz Conservatory of Music captivated by a violin, a cello, a piano and a young girl’s melancholy voice.

She was surrounded by musical, flying notes inside the roaring silence.

Silence is the loudest noise.

Invisible musicians played keys and strings. A voice punctuating air wrapped itself around solid gray stones edging liquid. It was all tonal vibration frequencies.

Wing was transformed.

Her neighbor mopped small stone paths, raised her red tool and dumped long universal string theories into dirty water as life’s stew simmered on her eternal stove. She squeezed it out.

Her white apron covered a black dress. Her black hair was pulled back in a skintight bun. She was eighty. She mopped the stone path every day of her life.

Omar the blind, watching from his temporary home was in transit, hanging out in space. He paid meticulous attention to people’s values, attitudes, beliefs, faces and intimate behavior.

He studied their honest soled solid souled shoes.

Worn heel edges indicated external and internal posture.

Weaving A Life (V1)

A Century is Nothing

Celebration Day

Zahara, Andalucia, Spain

After I turned the key in room twelve leaving a hostel in Ronda I passed a dim corridor. A dark shadow entered a room down the hall. I remembered seeing her at Relax eating a large salad.

We’d spoken about the size of the tomatoes and she’d laughed saying it was too much food.

I stopped, stepped back looking down the hall. We recognized each other, laughing and talking like deranged idiots. We filled in the blanks.

 "What are you doing here?" I said.

"I’m checking in to save money. What are you doing here?"

"I’m checking out to save money. Let’s go enjoy sun, coffee and conversation."

We went to an outdoor cafe. She carried day old food in a plastic bag.

Monica was from Sydney and had traveled to London, Paris, Lisbon, Granada and now Ronda. She’d never been away from home and friends before. She didn’t like London and got out. She had relatives in Rome.

“I had to live with their rules," she said. Hard. Her epiphany occurred in Nice, France. “That’s when it hit me, all the loneliness, all the insecurities came piling out. I hit bottom.”

Her moment of truth hit her like a ton of bricks.

“I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. I was in chaos. I started sitting meditations.”

She made her breakthrough and it changed her life. She became free to move. It was about her expectations. She’d suffered enough, made enough wrong turns, listened to others’ advice about how to survive.

She discovered compassion and meditation saved her. She moved forward with an open heart-mind.

We sat near the Plaza de Socorro as people streamed to church, markets, shops, and met friends. She opened a can of garbanzo beans. We broke bread.

“A spoken language on the planet dies every two weeks.”

"Really?"

“Ethnologists estimate there are 6,912 living spoken tongues left on Earth. Here’s something you may find interesting. Omar a blind man in Morocco I met just after 9/11 gave me his book of stories, A Century is Nothing.”

“May I touch, see, smell, taste and hear it?”

I pulled it from an Eagle feather pack, handed it to her and entered the cafe for coffee. She opened it and read.

“There are multiple narrators in this journey. One narrator wrote on mirrors, another carved on 26,000 year-old Paleolithic cave walls and Little Wing weaved magic cloth. A change of context changes experience.

“On the loom of time the three fates did their work weaving the word ‘context’ from Latin. “Con” means 'with or together' and 'texere' means to weave. A change in context is an essential and active process. Weavers direct thoughts, emotions and actions as a kairos shuttle passes through openings in the time-space continuum. The loom binds or connects the weaver’s ability and power to speak.

“A nomad finished an extensive tragic-comic jazz poem opus in August 2001 heat and wandered away from the Pacific Northwest. On September 1st he flew from Seattle to Casablanca under a full moon dancing its reflection on waves. Fate, chance and timing.”

I returned. "Did you read about Natasha?"

“I don’t believe so,” she said. “Is she a Now or a Later in your tale? This looks fascinating,” handing him the blind book.

"It’s not my tale. I’m a conduit. Omar’s a beautiful man and dear friend. He has Baraka, supernatural blessing powers. I’ll give his prescient tale a deeper look-see when I return to the Sierras and share it with Little Wing, a weaver on the loom of Time. To question your answer, Natasha arrives later."

Monica resembled Ingrid Bergman, a star in the universe. I made an image of her because I was a rangefinder with excellent optics, good depth of field and focused manually.

We met friends at Relax, a vegetarian restaurant. Susan a lively blond dancer from North Beach studied Spanish. Simon and Christian, open-minded German guys were setting up a travel expedition company. Jon was their creative Spanish genius interpreter.

Jon’s English father was an author who’d written books about the white pueblos in Andalucía. He’d written about hardship, trying to fit into the system and make a living by buying, working and eking out an existence on a campo farm in the late ‘50’s before it became fashionable. Politics mixed with luck and perseverance. Now he was retired on his campo near Ronda and painted oils.

At a lavish Christmas dinner for fifty friends and relatives he gave Omar solid advice.

“Get out of the way and let your characters tell the story.”

Simon worked for the German police for eight years. He got tired of picking up body parts along the Autobahn in freezing cold weather. He switched to infiltrating gangs doing undercover drug busts for a couple of years. Knowing he’d be killed if his cover was blown he quit and moved to Spain.

Simon told two short stories.

“I am a millionaire. Everyday I have a beautiful view.”

“There was a poor man in South America. For forty years he slaved away digging for gold in distant mountains far from home. Everyone in his village said he was crazy. One day he found a lot of gold and exchanged it for money. He bought some rope. He tied the rope around his waist, tied the money to the other end and ran through the village dragging it behind him. Everyone said he was crazy. ‘Why?'

“He said, ‘for forty years I’ve been chasing money and now money is chasing me.’”

Everyone drove to Grazalema below the Penon Grande Mountain where I lived with Little Wing, a weaver. She was in the mountain collecting herbs.

Declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, Sierra de Grazalema Natural Park was located in the north east of the province of Cadiz northwest of Malaga, at an altitude ranging from 250 to 1,654 meters above sea level. A Special Protection Zone for Birds, the park covered 51,695 hectares of ecological importance in the south of the peninsula.

It had the highest rainfall in the Iberian Peninsula, with an annual average over 2,000 liters per square meter. It was the most important western massif of the Subbetica range.

It was an old Roman village of 2,300 people. An isolated white pueblo with narrow cobblestone streets filled with suspicious conservative kind, simple people who’d been shut away from the ‘modern’ world forever.

My small white habitat for humanity was old, cold and intimate. When I wasn’t scribbling notes in my Moleskine, climbing back in time and loving a beautiful seer woman weaving on her loom of Time, I admired leaves turning green to yellow and brown dancing through air in silence.

In the patio were lemon and orange trees. Christian juggled three lemons. We met Antonio and Sophia from Seville. Antonio sold discount sofas for a furniture company, loved Formula One racing and Sophia was the queen of video sales. We drove into the national park for fresh air and views of mountains and valleys.

We ended up at the old abandoned Arabic Zahara Castle. Castillo de Zahara sat on a pinnacle above land and artificial lakes. Founded by Romans, Muslims took it over in the 8th century and it fell to a Castilian prince in 1407. It was recaptured in a night raid in 1481 by Abu-al-Hasan from Granada and was home for anarchists in the 19th century.

Someone said George Harrison died the day before. We remembered My Sweet Lord and hummed, ‘I look at the world and know it is turning while my guitar silently weeps.’

We sat inside vast plains, mountains ranges and sky.

“Anyone seeing the sky here would understand where Picasso got his colors,” Christian said.

We were in the Spanish province of light. Luz - land of light. A sharp sunset painted orange horizons. The sun bounced blue and green rays off El Torreon at 1654 meters, the highest mountain in Andalusia. We were mesmerized by beauty.

We climbed steep jagged stone paths skirting Roman baths through history’s past into history’s future. We held hands inside pitch-black stone passageways toward the top of the tower.

It was a kid’s day.

A full moon showed a sliver of itself over mist hills and valleys in the east. It exploded up, a perfect white orb surrounded by purple, orange and blue light.

We were in the perfect place at the perfect time. A history of Romans, Moors, and Christians, as lakes stretched along the valley. Water reflected moonlight.

“Before meditation the moon is the moon and the water is the water. During meditation the mountain is not the mountain and the water is not the water," said a Zen monk.

“True,” said Omar. “We were in a dream of light. Colors flashed across the sky. Shooting stars came out to play. Mountains shimmered in the moonlight. The lakes were mind mirrors.”

“In an improvisational acting class they had us do this when we made a mistake,” Sherri said. She arched her back, threw her arms into air and screamed, “I SUCK,” and relaxed. Everyone laughed seeing her intention in an instant. ZAP. Clearing the way with heart.

Driving past lakes reflecting blue and silver moonlight Sherri said, “You know this would be a perfect night to be able to fly. To make love in the sky.”

“Yes," I said. “We’d make love flying upside down doing acrobatic turns in space while connected.”

“Yes,” she said. “If the earth were a marble and dropped into the lake we could swim to the surface.”

“Yes, and burst free and fly, glide over the mountains and plains end to end forever.”

“Yes. Just for one night.”

“Yes. Only during the full moon we’d have the freedom to fly all night long.”

Our universe was Yes.

We listened to Portuguese Fado singers sing sad songs about fate and love as headlights created shadows. Moonlight dancing on lakes illuminated jagged gray dolomite mountains in a black sky full of shooting stars. Our collective energy made it a day and night we’d remember forever.  

We were shooting stars.

Weaving A Life (V1)