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

Morocco

Genius

Describes the guardian spirit of a person or place, a spirit linked to a person or place and a particular fate.

Genius is your unique singularity, the spirit that follows you from birth to death.

It was your fate, your singular destiny.

It couldn't be taught or identified to you by others.

It could only be recognized by you.

You would know it when you heard it, surrendered to it and it would take you where you were meant to go.

Listening to others obscures its voice.

Luna

Source Material

Way back when I smiled to the Irish women on a Donegal provincial bus.

I was heading for Tra-na-Rossen, an isolated northern youth hostel to work as the warden in dead winter.

I use yellow legal paper called Evidence. It’s perfect for this kind of adventure.

It collects source material because we, the royal I, remain open. We acknowledge we are from the source, in a sense, beyond sense data, we are a fundamental vibration, each of us possesses the innate capability to create and embrace Metta the loving kindness permeating throughmeridians, we tap into the source, we transmute through fields of energy, resolving, flowing from the source, the infinite vibrations of love. 

Many writers prefer using these yellow papers to capture their stories, characters, intention and motivation from scene to scene. It flows.

I write with a cloud pen nib on mirrors. Creating amnesia. The clouds should know me by now. It’s a strange mixture of life and death, so it is. 

I was on fire. I showed them a notebook. Yes, it’s tight, flat, hard rough paper parchment, badly stitched and while it is useful and shaking in laughter it is not quite as free as this evidence. Two more Moleskine are filled. One sits empty and blank. I am empty and blank.

The women stared in amazed silence. Asleep with eyes wide open. Stoned dolmens. 

*

In Vietnam Tran hobbles into the ancient citadel in Hue. Children tune violins, cellos, flutes and recorders in bomb craters and shadows of demolished brick walls. Humid sunlight filters through banana leaves. He relaxes against a crumbling wall hearing his melancholy music language. 

Storytellers re-calibrated their true compass bearing on a dirt road in a third world country thumbing open a useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary.

It spilled myths
creation stories
symbols
forms
sensations
perceptions
images
ideographs
pictographs
virus inoculations
musical interludes
sonatas
vibratos
journey notes
bleeding tomatoes
broken hearts
haiku
khata scarves
poetry and type-A negative blood donor manifests.

A Century is Nothing

Duende

She had duende, a fundamentally untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit.

It signified a charisma manifested by certain performers—flamenco dancers, bullfighters, elves, seers, weavers—overwhelming their audience with the feeling they were in the presence of a mystical power.

The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca produced the best brief description of duende: “Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel; but in that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

+

Little Wing followed a tribal trail from Cadiz to Grazalema, named Lacilbula by the Romans where, after weaving morning pages she returned to the Rio Guadalete River below the pueblo flowing from the Sierras to Cadiz.

The battle of Guadalete was fought on July 19, 711 when 7,000 Yemenis and Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visgoth King Roderic.

Rio needed cleaning. Thick autumn yellow, green and brown leaves trapped between rocks clogged river sections. Liquid backed up to mountains beneath fast gray storm clouds.

Using her walking stick, she clamored down a slippery slope and worked her way up the Rio clearing sticks, leaves and stones blocking the flow. There were green maple, silver aspen, brown oak leaves. Old black water logged decayed colors danced with fresh green and orange pigments.

She was the unimpeded flow. A child playing near water and rocks in her dream world.

Serene sweet water music.

Rocks, stepping stones.

Small pools and meditation zones. She felt peaceful.

Bird music darted up the canyon.

She cleared leaves past twilight, staggered up the muddy incline and faced the Rio in silent gratitude. She performed healing chants next to a bare Aspen tree.

She passed a crying Virgin Mary statue illuminated by melting red candles in a rocky crevice behind a locked gate.

Mary’s blood flowed over jagged gray dolomite stones flecked with green moss.

Little Wing collected a hemoglobin sample for weaving, crossed a stone bridge and returned home. She lit candles, started a fire, and relaxed in her chair enjoying a deep breath before bleeding words to dye loom fabric.

The loom was her instrument of transformation.

Wool was the hair of the sacrificial beast which women by a long and cultured tribal process, transformed into clothing.

Weaving skirts the sacred and the violent.

Her power at the loom was derided, dreaded and illuminating.

Transformed giving birth to symbolic language with new positive ends. Duende.

 A Century is Nothing

Mekong Blue - Women's Development Center, Stung Treng, Cambodia

Kayapuya

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 an ancestor speaking 300 languages from our history. Now only 150 dialects remain.

A hunting gathering people speaking Pentian, we numbered 3,000 in 1780. We believe in nature spirits, vision quests and guardian spirits.

Our shamans, called amp a lak ya taught us how seeking, finding and following one’s spirit or dream power and singing our song was essential in community.

I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. They are dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked many paths of love to reach me.

My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others.

I am the soil under your feet.

I feel your weight, your balance - your weakness and your strength.

I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pounded ceremonial drums.

I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest.

Wind accepts your breath.

I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch and hear.

I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spreading like dreams upon your outer landscape.

I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they say, “someone has returned.”

I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet-throated song you hear without listening.

At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time.

I am a spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light.

I am the rough fragile texture of bark you gently remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood.

You carry me through my forest. Your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.

I am the cold rain and wet snow, hot sun and four seasons.

I am yellow, purple, and red, blue, and orange flowers from brown earth.

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 with respect, dignity and mindfulness.