Baraka

Somebody released mad dogs and they ran howling at the crescent moon. They needed shots. Their remission hung over a small part of the world like a bad smell. It seeped into the water supply, the after taste was bitter and it did not go down well at all.

There was a run on thrift shops singing, “Goodwill to Zenmen and peace on earth.”

Death masks sold out. Humans addicted to chaos and distractions dressed themselves in clothing called Hope, the greatest evil. Torn and patched in places it needed a stronger thread. Someone suggested improving immigration standards, fingerprinting every human on the planet, bard wire and eye scan IT which were rejected with derision and contempt by human rights organizations.

There wasn’t enough wire to go around the tree of life. They’d have to call the exterminator to clean up the mess. They collected carried and exchanged heavy change.

“Get your FEAR here,” yelled unemployed people of all nationalities. “One size fits all.”

People flapped their sugarless gums at unemployed dentists while flapjacks sizzled on the grill. The heat was on. They cooked with expensive imported natural gas.

Advertising promoted: Free Fear For All - Buy 2 and Get 1 - Not Free For All.

It was fear and ignorance. The big “F” in the law of averages. Statistical studies created its own metamorphosis.

FEAR - Face Everything And Recover or Fuck Everything And Run Away.

“The fear beast is big, rambunctious, hungry and never sleeps,” Omar said. “It does not recognize rational intellectual dissertations. It demands more energy. It creates and morphs into manifestations of it’s well defined beginning. It exists in the hearts and minds of the people. The fruit is bitter and destined for export markets with no restrictions on trade barriers.”

Little Nino joined them on the story train. “Imaginary barriers went up toward children flying kites in Central Asian mountain villages at the edge of refugee camps where they received food, shelter, education and medical care.”

“Then what happened?” Point asked.

“Circumstances beyond their control, beyond their comprehension compelled them to spend days and nights watching television, tuning into cable news bulletins and meeting their strange transparent neighbors flying star flags and kites from roofs before subtle frequencies permeated their consciousness. Their daily priorities shifted in the drama of life. Trick or treat played on every corner before a spring war ran through inner city projects. It was the inevitable catastrophic event.

"The towers of Babel and world order monetary power disintegrated. Artificial time collapsed. We are in The Law Of Real Time now. This reality created the fear that people experienced. It’s been well marketed by governments after the fact," said Little Nino.

“The irony was not lost on Point surveying the Rue De Castaella in Cadiz,” Omar said. “He memorized 3,000 years of history for his friends.”

“He sent them gifts,” said Nino. “Mirrors. Mirrors, many blank, others displaying terror faces, words written backwards, images of people, places and things and a box named Pandora. Pandora became one of their favorite things by Coltrane. They never knew, from one exploration to the next what they’d find in the small packages he sent from the way.”

“One thing they knew,” Omar reflected, “was how they communicated via telepathy. They experienced an exotic flow of spirit energies bathing them in a crystal light. They slowed down. They cultivated a diamond in their mind. Baraka and silence.”

“Such a fascinating story,” said Nino. “Could it be true?”

A Century Is Nothing

Character

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” said a kid with a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute in Zurich.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s another cool thing he said." ‘I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice. You can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly or you can unravel the weaving back to the mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with honesty and courage.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” said Rose.

“I can read and write,” said the children. "We also love drawing, singing and dancing.”

“Reading and writing is power. Dance is life. Perfect. Let’s go together,” said Rose.

Downstairs at Sacred Heart a translucent mother saw her grief reflected in Beauty’s mirror. “This is my worst nightmare,” whispered her heart-mind.

Rose said, “Afraid to face the truth adults run away. They run away carrying their fear like a heavy bag of bricks. They are afraid to see the beauty, strength and dignity of Death and letting go.”

“Why?” said mother.

“They stay away because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing. The child’s spirit is pure energy. They have the strength to let go. Adults find Death a scary thing so they run away.”

“I see,” said a gardener trimming thorns below a tree house. “I know Death’s beauty and wisdom. Metaphors and mortality exist with initial memories. Memories are figments of our imagination. I am a dreamer in nature, bigger than the universe, in never-never-cuckoo land. I am a witness collecting evidence that tells no lies. The deeper you go the deeper the bliss.”

“I live with suffering,” said Rose. “I am a pain sponge.”

The gardener said, “I administer thorn pain. I ask strangers if they desire suffering and awareness. I distribute thorns to the needy greedy. I am very busy. Demand is high. My thorn supply is infinite. I am authorized to administer inoculations in life’s weaving process. Weavers prick themselves in the process of creativity. Their blood is part of the dye.”

“Fascinating,” Rose said. “Your silver tongue doesn’t fool me. You’ve seduced and satisfied more emotionally starved women with your tongue than you can recall. I inhale suffering and exhale love. We are all Death deferred. Be grateful.”

“To know Death one has to live. To live one has to die,” said the gardener. “I meditate on the process of death. I remember the future.”

Rose’s departure created a vacuum.

The trapped mother realized her ice reality. Concise crying crystals reflected clarity. Suffering from fate and free will she danced in flames seeking her SAVE key.

Hearing a child say, “I need help,” she received a blessing.

A child whispered, “The ending is the middle.”

“The middle is the beginning,” said a child. “You can start the story anywhere.”

“We are all orphans sooner or later,” said Rose. “We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.”

Death and the gravedigger agreed. “Everyone comes to us.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

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)

Martha Ann

After Nam I spent a month with my family, did the DOD School and went to Germany to finish my military time.

My sister, Martha Ann, 13, developed a cold that winter. My father wrote letters about her condition. Her energy dropped. She became weak. He took her to doctors for a diagnosis.

She had a rare form of AML leukemia and started chemotherapy. She needed bone marrow transplants in her short future. The prognosis was maybe five years for a complete remission.

She prospered in school and Girl Scouts with a positive mental attitude.

Neighbors had horses and she formed a loving relationship with them.

Her long blond hair flies in wind. She embodies a strong discipline in the saddle. Her back is straight. Approaching a jump over an abyss, fear is defeated by her courage.

She leaves the stable leading a Palomino. She wears tall black boots, riding pants, and a stiff white shirt buttoned at her frail neck. Only I know she is sick and dying. It is our secret. She smiles at me.

She whispers magic words and you know by the animal’s response they love and trust each other. She rides in green pastures under a bright blue sky. Her face is serene.

Her sickness was a long slow meandering journey. She maintained her optimism, smiling, laughing, and doing excellent in school. She knew she was sick. She was a warrior girl child.

Horses gave her freedom and passion. She rode every day after school. Weekends were cleaning, grooming, laughing and loving her relationships.

She had a clear spirit. No fear.

Her pain was a sickness leaving her fragile body.

Doctors tried every experimental drug on the market. Drugs made her long blond hair fall out. She wore a wig. She tolerated inane questions and insinuative cruel bullying from classmates. She maintained her dignity and integrity.

“Dad, what happens when they run out of experimental drugs?” she asked at dinner. He had no answer.

The broken-hearted man brought his daughter home from Children’s Hospital in Denver for her last Christmas. She enjoyed snow, a warm fire, magic tree, cats, presents and love.

Her heart gave out three days after Christmas, 1972.

I received the expected phone call at the Kassel Field Station.

“Martha is gone,” said my father’s cracking voice.

“What happened?”

“I went to the hospital on my lunch hour and she was lying there and she looked so beautiful yet so weak and she said, ‘Dad, hold me, I’m going to faint,’ and I did and then her heart stopped. It just wore her out.”

I cried, “I’m so sorry dad. I’ll get a flight out.”

“You will always remember her as a happy little girl.”

Angels and peace welcomed Martha Ann.

She never saw fourteen of anything. She never went to high school or college, fell in love, worked, lived, laughed, traveled, explored future worlds or experienced a longer life with her vibrant trembling spirit.

Her existence was all wrapped up in one tight package with an expiration date.

Cold winter was her refuge and now.

Her childlike joy and spirit energies soared away from her labyrinth. She evolved on her path of light, love, and perfection. No longer a human on a spiritual path she was a spiritual being on a human path.

On her brief sojourn before crossing time’s river she demonstrated tolerance, integrity, kindness, tranquility, dignity, empathy and truth.

Martha Ann validated her authenticity. She hurled her thunderbolt.

ART

Burma

Magic Story

The tribe dreamed. Wood became ash. Their fire dream consumed itself. Sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peace.

She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses. A morning breeze delivered rose petals at her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard at 16,000 feet feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle.

Her essence was joy, gratitude, truth and compassion. Pure being.

The world of appearances was heavy, grasping, suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision with pure luminous light.

People seeking to know their future with wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity.

She kept her own counsel. Others would discover their own way through their personal labyrinth.

Gathering flames she lit a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She lived in 26,000 year-old paintings.

She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage into the spirit world of ancestors.

She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light.

Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness. Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self.

Fire became her driver. Sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine ate energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

“Yes," said Omar, “Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies. People communicate with music and dance.

“I am a character in my own story,” said Omar, “a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.”

“Wonderful," said Jamie. “I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?”

“Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow.”

“Yeah," said a kid. “This Zen tale may be too much for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear.”

“Ain’t that truth? What is the sound of one hand laughing?”

Someone in the tribe asked Other to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways.

Omar wrote it down and translated it into unspoken languages.

Weaving A Life (V1)