It's All A Myth!

“Its all a myth!” a wheelchair woman screamed rolling herself out of anger and fear Shadows into blazing Denver fried egg sunlight on Broadway passing Hispanic family sitting on suitcases in brief shade, joining thousands of devout Tibetan pilgrims singing praying laughing on dusty roads leading to Lhasa, throwing rocks at ravens at sky crystals making prostrations.

She rolled her chair past itinerant land locked terra-cotta warriors crashed on bags at Beijing and Shanghai train station crossroads at invisible terminal destinations.

She rolled past Elmore James standing at the crossroads treated like a slave sliding callused fingers on metal frets in selfless agony trading his soul to the devil, passing Balinese wood carvers etching delicate faces, jungle painters creating butterfly corporate murals, passing villagers harvesting rice in green highlands, passing outlawed Irish tinkers wandering village to village pounding pans, passing homeless people sleeping on a mattress in usa alleys facing the wall.

Passing naked evangelist on downtown street corner wailing wall forecasting human lust past devil myth propaganda nature’s unrestrained power, as unconscious forces internalize/externalize projecting guilty feelings on others the snake phallus symbol delights for envy, for quicksilver messenger service cycles spoke passing tanned cellular talkers waiting for bus to financial heaven, passing her white haired aunt in a nursing home painting her last vision, passing Ashiakawa loom weavers creating wool seasons, passing Himalayan sherpas brewing tea at 17,000 feet for expeditions paying hard currency to totalitarian emperors suffering altitude sickness, high blood pressure rolling past 31 flavors dining out making quick money honey living on plastic, riding scarred ranges in 4×4 drive where cockroaches ride roller blades devouring land, leftover 'develop-meants' hearing mutants scream "where is the water for God's sake? we paid for our thirst!"

Yes, she rolled past her only son, a soldier, waiting for NAM dustoff toward SF/CO and exile, state side rejection no sympathy for the devil - baby killers writing final letters home abbreviated napalm fire fight survival instincts remembering the horror etched on a screaming eagle black granite

wall 493 feet long rising from the ground to a height of 10.1 feet bending at the center at exactly a 125.12 degree angle - holding 58,235 NAMES as chopper blades reverberate - cut air, cut down stiff stale wind bloodstream vanities dive around jungle artifacts, lifting veils of cautious surrender.

Rolled past Arabic nomads exchanging goats/camels for pearls as oil desert-ed sand slowly envelops silk encrusted carpets passing refugees floating Asian marriage seas discovering family geological strata broken Chinese shipwrecks shifting divorce paradigms passing itinerant independent traveling hermits freezing eye/brain/muscles inside parabola boundaries extending imagination's independent practice - freeing unknown potentials squeezing, blinking eye blinded shutters B&W documentation art/reality/illusions of women in whirling 3rd world poverty wearing exploitation's cloth wrapped in solitude as economic fate breaks malnourished rocks along everlasting lonesome highway passages blasting, building capitalistic roads living in river reed hovels.

And she was gathering speed rolling her Greater Wheel passing university perspiration business mergers evaporating celestial horizontal degrees as hemispheric tropic of cancer eats bran for break down fast rivers flowing native tribal dialogues tongues speaking sky earth water fire languages of crow raven coyote ancient turtle islands mark of the king tattoo sailing water’s prison islands surrounded confounded by blue eyed Europeans full of commercial disease inventing, discovering cultural annihilation assimilation accommodation regaining indigenous cost - profit - past patience solitude-nature-silence just sitting - the doing nothing poem - storytelling, a vein in earth sky water pulse blood lava flows among dzongs chants flags sacrificing herself hard black wheels dancing Tao circles rolling herself past myth and maya into blazing wisdom free from bardo breath.

poet as language worker

Semi-truck roars through Lafayette Happy Valley
Spilling Cascade paper products on word winds

Rolls of newspaper headlines
Boxes of books and periodicals
Sheets of carefully scented toilet paper
Packages of 401K forms
2000 year old papyrus calendars for RA
Lists of pending to-dos
Bill of sale requirements
Deeds and lease agreements
Birth and death announcements

Shredded highly classified Top Secret
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
internal memo circulars
circus posters

Poetry books among books
spilling their lives
dangerous words
orchestra sheet music
directing a playwright’s
dialogue
character driven conflict

Plato
entertains grotto ghetto children
whispering laughing dancing in parchment leaves

eating the shadow of their dreams

Taos Pueblo Life Lessons

He went to the Taos Pueblo. It was hot. Over 100.
Dry, dusty, silent heat. He’d been here before and it called him back.

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

We walked past their cemetery where 150 women and children died when the church was burned by U.S. American soldiers during a Hispanic and Pueblo revolt in Taos after the American occupation in 1846. 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 they bury the new dead on top of the old dead. Hard soil. White black and brown crosses faded in sun. Names, ages, children, parents, flowers, rosaries inside low adobe walls. The old bell in the burned out charred remains of the church steeple. A grim reminder.

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’s voices and there was no place for them to go, no chance of life.

“We left it that way,” a Tiwa girl said to us standing silent just seeing. Then she was gone, a vapor of spirit, a silent reminder of where we were and how we’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 hanging from walls in the sun. It is a hieroglyphic of habitats. The ancient homes 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 to form 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 decends upon you and places in you whatever that gift is that your 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 existance. 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 named Sunflower painted intricate black and white spider web designs on her pots. Her gift streamed in an 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 dancing black on white.

We wandered across a small stream running down from sacred mountains. A stream carrying water to nourish the pueblo. Healing liquid. Water flowed during the 4th year of a 10 year drought.

We visited with men and women in their small shops selling turquoise, beads, arrows, water, silver bracelets, postcards, drums, pottery and stories. A man and his drums made from animal skins. Bead work. Blue stones the color of the sky.

A brown dog slept in the dust of mid-day sun. Crude serviceable wooden ladders extended from earth to adobe roofs to clear blue sky. Indian women sat under ramada lattice poled roofs talking with friends. They waited for tourists, waited to answer questions hoping to sell their work.

A woman from Miami and her three kids passed. Her blond kids carried water bottles and wore floppy khaki hats. Kids having the time of their lives shuffled their boots in the dirt studying ants. They’d never been this far west before. Their mother was tired. They kept her going.

We met a Tiwa man and listened to his story about hunting. Furs and pelts hung on his hitching post. 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,” it said.

“Yes,” said the man with a 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,” we said. “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 on us from his wall. “And the elk?”
The fur, the neck, huge brown eyes - “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 on the wall 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 pack horses and left the pueblo and moved into the mountains, high in the mountains. We camped by a rivers and tracked their prints, their habits, their patterns. Three days was all it took.”
“It’s the simplicity of it all,” we said. “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.”

Bedouin Woman Takes The Leftovers

He said goodbye to the barber, nodded to the man with silver hair in his chair getting a trim, reconnected with wisdom and daily affirmations passing an old man smoking his Cuban cigar in a shaft of sunlight.

Well heeled fashionable Cadiz women with and without their children in wheeled prams shoveling sweets into their mouths paraded past going to the Iglesia de San Juan de Dios with it’s splendid wide inlaid stones, lined with palms, flanked by cafes with ‘Novelty’ metal chairs holding tired tourists and relaxed natives smoking, drinking coffee, talking in multiple tongues, eating soft hot pastries, studying creased paper maps filled with diagrams of historical reference with their foreign furrowed brows watching humanity find their way in the world.

White shirted waiters scurried from table to table. They placed their orders with women behind counters wearing white laboratory technician coats. The lone plaza resident, a tall black bearded madman with untied tennis shoes roamed the perimeter looking for someone to hustle, looking for Charity’s leftovers.

A crude hand painted sign around his neck read, "I am a gypsy. Our people came here in the 9th century and we're not going away."

He remembered the Bedouin woman covered in black who hovered near him in Marrakech when he had chicken, rice, bread and water on a side street. He sat away from chickens turning on gas fired circles. He was always living on the edge of somewhere else in the world and understood her motivation. Hunger.

She approached him with her hand out. “May you have blessings.”
He answered in Arabic. “May you be well with a long life. I’ll leave food for you.”

She waited across the street trapped between parked cars watching through slits in fabric. Her eyes were the world. He watched her watch people eating. She was calm and silent. Wild cats roamed their malnourished skeletons around eaters’ feet staying away from a waiter’s swift shoe. She watched and waited.

He fed abstract scraps to cats. They fought over bones in the dust hissing and dragging bones to shelter. The Red City was full of dust as caravans full of salt, gold and slaves moved north across the Sahara.

Feeding cats became a ritual in Morocco for him. A passion for the hungry animals. They were all in the same fix, roaming, lost, looking, trying to survive in desperate circumstances. They were everywhere.

He didn’t eat everything. He left the table to pay and she closed in. Her blackness swooped like a dream across the pavement. They were a team. His going off to pay meant the waiter couldn’t clear the table because he had to figure the charges. She was free to collect everything.

Like magic she produced a plastic bag from under her black robe, picked up the plate and dumped everything inside; bones, meat, rice, tomatoes. The works.

She was fast and efficient. She glided away and took up her position across the street in shadows.

He paid and walked past her. They locked eyes. He was naked, she was covered in her belief. Her invisible clear eyes flashed a brief recognition and he nodded. She smiled under her veil. Their relationship of mutual respect ignored verbal language.

Push My Green Button Honey

-Push my green button to verify your selection, he laughed.
-You mean the green tree on your forehead?
-Yes, that’s the one. Go ahead. No fear. Push it.

She reached up touching the green evergreen tree with her right index finger. It was the symbol of the letter “A” in the middle of the word Grazalema on his black knit cap.
He felt her finger but her touch was too light to do any good to take her anywhere.
-No, go ahead and push it.

Her olive eyes were scared.
-I don’t know if I want to do this.
-You’ll never know unless you try. Be brave. Give the tree a solid shift.
-Ok here goes, pressing with renewed energy. Magic from the tree entered her and she disappeared.
He knew where she was, raised his finger, touched the woven tree thread and vanished.
Marsha was standing on cobblestones in the Plaza de Espana staring up at the Grand Penon dolomite mountains when I arrived. Her smile encompassed blue sky and she hugged me.

-What a great hug he said. -Welcome to Graz. He breathed clear air.

-Wow, she said, dancing in a circle. -Look at this place!

It felt sublime being back in Sierra de la Grazalema. The old Roman village hadn’t changed. Penon trees were decorated with streaming white icicle lights, dull pink and white edges of the municipal government buildings below the white round clock face looked fresh, metal cafe chairs were stacked next to a faded white chef billboard sign, heavy Moorish wooden Catholic church doors with hand shaped Arabic brass knockers were locked, battered brown maple leaves floated along the street, children played soccer in the open plaza between bolted green benches, widows in perpetual black scurried from shops to their white homes pausing to chat with friends, groups of unemployed Andalusian men mumbling in low tones stood near stone potable water faucets spitting water in weak winter sunlight, sparrows flitted to balconies for crumbs and eagle vultures drifted in high thermals.

-Shall we have a look around? he said.
-Sure, why not.
-Where would you like to go?