Celebration Day in Ronda & Zahara

It started when he turned the key in the lock of room 12 leaving a cheap hostel in Ronda, Spain late one morning.

He walked past the corridor and spotted a dark shadow of someone entering a room down the hall. He took one more step and remembered seeing her before, down at Relax eating a large salad. He had spoken with her about the size of the tomatoes and she laughed saying it was too much food.

He stopped, took one step back and looked down the hall. They recognized each other and started laughing and talking like deranged idiots. They were filling in the blanks. He was checking out and she was checking in. Saving money.

They went to a cafe. She carried day old food in plastic bag.

Mona was from Sydney, moved through London, Paris, Lisbon, Granada and now Ronda. She had 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, she said, “all the loneliness, all the insecurities came piling out. I hit bottom.” This was her moment of truth. It hit her like a ton of bricks.
“I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. I started doing sitting meditations. I was in chaos.”

She made her breakthrough. She said it changed her life. She was free to move. It was about expectations. She had suffered enough, made enough wrong turns, listened to other’s bad advice about how to live and survive. She figured out only her compassion and acceptance would save her.

She moved forward with an open heart and mind.

We sat in a cafe near the Plaza de Socorro talking. She opened a can of garbanzo beans and they broke bread.

He told her about his journey, how a language dies on the planet every two weeks, about his narrator writing on mirrors, weaving magic cloth, how he finished the monster novel in August heat, threw it out and wandered away. How he jumped through a window flying across an eastern ocean under a full moon shining on waves. Beyond, beyond the great beyond.

She looked like Ingrid Bergman. A star in the universe. It puzzled him as he tried to be definitive about the resemblance. He made an image of her.

They met friends at Relax. Susan, a lively blond from North Beach studying Spanish, a dancer, a swimmer. John and Christ, friendly open minded German guys setting up their travel expedition company in Ronda.

John told them two stories, “I am a millionaire. Everyday I have a beautiful view.”

“There was a man in South America who worked and dug for gold for 40 years. Then he found some gold and exchanged it for money. He tied the money to a rope and ran through the village. Everyone said, ‘What are you doing?’ He told them, “for 40 years I have been chasing money and now money is chasing me.”

They drove to the old Roman village of Grazalema where the writer lived. It was a intimate white pueblo two room place with an enclosed patio holding 20 plants. Where he fed sparrows day old bread from the upstairs balcony overlooking the valley and mountains. Where he watched Egyptian vultures with 8’ wing span circle on high thermals.

Where he watched leaves change from green to yellow to brown and fall through air in their silence. Watching them lose their energy and return their strength to the soil and tree. They were free to fall through air and light.

In the patio was a lemon tree. Christ took three lemons and juggled. They met Jose and Silvia from Seville. We drove high into the national park stopping to walk and breath the clear air past mountains, valleys to the Mediterranean. Pure light.

We ended up at Zahara. The old abandoned tower sat on a pinnacle high above land, fields and artificial lakes. Zahara was founded by Muslims in the 8th century and fell to a Castilian prince in 1407. It was recaptured in a night raid in 1481 by Abu-al-Hasan from Granada and was the home of anarchists in the 19th century.

Somebody said George Harrison died the day before. We remembered ‘My Sweet Lord’. Somebody hummed, “I look at the world and it keeps turning. I look at you all while my guitar silently weeps.” We sat quietly inside vast plains, mountains ranges and sky.

Christ said anyone seeing the sky here would understand where Picasso got his colors. We were in the Spanish province of light. Sharp orange light painted the horizon from west to east as the sun bounced blue and green rays off El Torreon at 1654 meters, the highest mountain in Andalucia.

We climbed steep stone paths past old Roman baths past into futures. We held each other’s hands and coats inside pitch black stone step passageways toward the top of the tower.

It was magic, a kid’s day. The full moon showed a sliver of itself over mist hills and valleys to the east. Then it exploded up! It was a perfect white orb surrounded by purple, orange and blue.

We celebrated the impact being in the perfect place at the perfect time. History of Romans, Moors, Christians. Lakes stretched along the valley.

Lakes 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.

We were in a dream of light. Colors flashed across the sky, shooting starts came out to play. Mountains shimmered in the moonlight. The lakes were mirrors in our mind.

“In an improvisational acting class they had us do this when we made a mistake,” Susan said from the top of the tower.

She arched her back, threw her arms up and out into air and screamed, “I SUCK,” and relaxed. We laughed and understood her and the motivation in an instant. ZAP! Clearing the way with heart.

“This is the day of my dreams,” the writer said.
We took the low road back to the pueblo along lakes full of blue and silver moon light.

Susan said, “You know this would be perfect night to be able to fly. To make love in the sky.”
“Yes,” said the writer, “we could make love flying upside down then do 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,” he said, “and burst free and fly, glide over the mountains and plains forever”

“Yes,” she said, “just for one night.”
“Yes,” he said, “during the full moon we’d have the freedom to fly all night long.”
Their universe was yes.

They listened to sad Fado Portuguese singers as headlights shattered shadows. Moonlight danced on the water illuminating jagged gray dolomite mountains into the black sky full of shooting stars. We were all shooting stars.

Detergent Molecules

On Christmas night I met this strange animated very tall scientist at Relax. It was in the Spanish town of Ronda, the home of bullfighting in the country.

Alex was a physicist working with molecular structures in Liverpool. He created simulated computer programs for a detergent company. His task was to see how and which molecules were attracted to dirt and which ones liked water.

It was as simple as that, his work. He was paid to have fun.

“Every couple of years I shift around,” Alex said in his drunken state of mind. “Well this looks interesting, I say to myself. I’ll try this for a couple of years.”

His height over the world was frightening, at first. His companion, another physicist from Germany was silent night.

I listened. My work was writer, storyteller, a hunter gather of material. The Art of Hanging Out.

High talkative Alex said, when he knew the truth, “Well then I’ll give you something for your book,” and he did.

“I am from Canada, my family is from Hungry, I spent six years in Athens, Georgia, then in Germany and now I am in England. The cord connecting me to my past has been cut, severed. I am just floating around having fun. Yes, I just end up in these most fascinating places having fun. I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing two or three years from now. I just ended up in a place doing my scientific work and they pay me. It’s amazing! I think I am becoming less left-brained over time. I will tell you something that happened to me recently. I discovered music. I discovered the drums. I found out when you play the drums you cannot be analytical about it, you have to be the drum.”

He shouted in Relax. The place was packed and we were at the end of the bar. Spanish language competed with English, pounding music, laughter and colliding glasses in celebrations.

He was in the spotlight. He was letting it all out. He was drinking and free. He and his silent friend were on a three week holiday. His friend had driven down from Frankfurt and they met in Barcelona. Now they were in Andalucia and hoped to go to Morocco.

He was anxious. “My friend’s passport expires in six months and we don’t know if they will let him in. We want to go in at Cueta, travel to Fez, Meknez, spend new year’s eve in Marrakech, then go over the Atlas mountains, swing through the Sahara and back north.”

“What happens if you can’t get in?”

He laughed from a great height and threw out massive hands, the hands of a scientist with well manicured nails.

“Then we’ll just go where we feel like it, following old roads, seeing where they go, like we did today through white villages named Benacoz and Arcos. We have no plans other than trying to get into Morocco. Neither of us have been there. We don’t know it.”

“I know it. I was there on 9/11 for two months before coming here.”

“Really?” Alex shouted, combining a question with an exclamation that echoed through festivities. “What is it like? I really want to know.”

“It’s a strange fascinating place. It will be a shock for you and your friend for a couple of days and then you will get used to the rhythm of the place, how to handle the hustlers, how to see in the light. Eight hours seems like 24.”

“Really?” he shouted towering over his listener.

“Yes. Really. You will find a new world of experience there. The people are kind and very hospitable. It may be overwhelming.”

“I will tell them I am from Canada, even though I spent six years in Georgia. It took me six years to figure out how the Americans think, and it was very strange. They live in their own little world. They don’t see out. I would talk them and the frequency passed right through their transparent selves.”

“I know what you mean,” I said rolling a cigarette. “I’ve been out of the country since September 1st. I jumped through a window.”

“Really!” was Alex’s favorite word. He ordered another beer. He was a tall brilliant kid in a new world. His excitement at this realization was absurd, revealing, scary, funny and entirely full of repressed energy. He grabbed his space as people poured past them to reach bathrooms.

He poured out his words. “Wow,” he said looking around Relax. “This is really amazing. Why is this place so interesting and so full of people?”

“There’s an excellent Spanish language course at Mondragon Palace. Students from all over the world come here for intensive 3-4 month classes. The city dates back to Roman and Moorish times, the weather is good year round, and the social scene is nonstop. Plenty of recreational drugs are available. For medicinal purposes only, of course. It’s a good place for people to be.”

Alex laughed. “Well I’d be interested in the medicinal properties of course. Do you live here?”

“No, I live, write and climb in a mountain pueblo 25 kilometers from here in the Sierras. It’s called Grazalema. The Romans established a village there on their way to Seville. Their name for the village was Lacilbula. I’m down for a couple of days to see friends for the holidays.”

“Really? I never heard of it. We drove around today to a lot of places, just following the road. It was really great. This is a wonderful place.” He looked over all the Spanish women and men talking and drinking at tables along orange walls in candlelight.

“Hey, he said, “I’ll give you something for your book. Then I’ll be in it.”

“Ok."

“You won’t believe it but I work with a multinational company, in one of their labs in Liverpool. I use computer programs to create and analyze various molecules in their detergent.”

“Detergent?”

“Detergent. This is how it works. Some molecules are attracted to dirt. They adhere to it, they seek it out. Others like water. So, I assemble all these various atoms and molecules and see what they do. I introduce them to the materials and see how they react.”

“Fascinating.”

“Yes, and I get paid to have fun. They pay me to create these experiments.”

“So, it’s really like you are an artist using the computer to create a canvas, a painting of these molecules.”

“Exactly!” Alex yelled from his height, his enthusiasm blasting over the hip hop rap bass beat. “You can put that in your book.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Readers may find your work interesting. I used to work in an area where there was a nuclear reactor and I knew a lot of physicists there. They were working on nuclear questions, some on hydrogen fuel cells for alternative energy sources. I’ve never met a physicist working with detergent.”

“Yeah it’s pretty cool. And now we’re here. Did you know,” he said, “that the world is made up of 98% helium and hydrogen? Well, the remaining particles of atoms, a very small part, is life and then inside these atoms a very small part of that is intelligence. The rest of the pyramid is garbage.” He laughed long and loud.

“The amazing thing is how many people don’t know it or get it. The natural law is for things to get messy. That’s why people clean, to rearrange the molecules in some form of order. They think they are in control of it. They are afraid of the change. Things happen which are outside their control or plans of the creator. It expands the evolutionary process.”

“So,” I said. “The world constructed of stories includes atoms. Interesting. I took a statistics class once, and while I wasn’t very good in statistics I learned one thing from the teacher.”

“What’s that?”

“Any individual or system will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate and sustain itself.”

“That’s it!” Alex yelled. “That’s a pure definition of how the world works. That’s the exact answer.”

You Will Jump Through A Window

Dionce, a healer friend in Phoenix rising from 9/11 psychic ashes, talked about shifts, frequencies and vibrations.

History said they manifested themselves one year well before a month in the Fall from supremacy on a myopic vision emergency frequency. Before emergency calls on hot lines melted through tribal retributions.

“A little premonition can be a dangerous thing,” he said. She sighed over long distance. He prepared to fly into exile come autumn when leaves departed their structure. Does the tree feel sadness when it loses leaves?

She well understood his intentions and motivations. His nomadic instincts called.
“You will jump through the window,” she said during a summer’s conversation.

“My work here is going well. I’ll complete the first draft by August 2001, then it will be time to go and renew the spirit. To pay attention, get back on the road. To go back in time. I leave September 1.”

“How is it going?”

“I’m blessed to be working on it. It’s coming together. It’s edgy, daring and insightful. It’s a weapon of mass destruction. It may not appeal to mainstream agents, publishers and a general readership due to its fragmentary nonlinear nature. I feel I’m working on some intricate puzzle and jumping through windows without leaving the ground. Some belief windows are desperate for a good cleaning.” They laughed.

“Puzzles are revealing,” she said.

“It’s like the Navajo or Tibetans creating their sand mandala. Through their daily practice they achieve a vision, their clarity allows them to manifest their intuition. When they are finished creating their work manifesting their internal vision of peace and nonviolence, they sweep up the colored grains of sand and release material in water or air. It’s a healing process of non-attachment. Impermanence. A gift.”

He read some to her.

“It’s all about the mysteries,” she said. “Will you send me some?”
“Sure. I’ll get some chapters printed up and off to you.”

She shared a story about three men in the desert who discovered the secret of the mysteries in the Cabbala.

“They had three choices. One walked away in peace, one died and one went mad.”

“Maybe that’s my fate.”

They discussed various moral ambiguities through their characters.

“To travel is better than to arrive because you are always here,” he said.

“Who is it that is dragging this corpse around?” she asked him.

“All time is now and all space is here.”

“Yes. Time is history and space is geography.”
“Be well.”
They rang off.

They’d exchanged the laughter and wisdom of a child’s voice inside living history. This was only part of the experience and he hadn’t written much about it because he had been living it day in and day out. One character lived it, another character felt fortunate to just get it down and try to make sense of it later.

He decided that everyone he’d met, known and loved would be fair game in this tale. If they didn’t like it, fair enough, it wasn’t nothing but the blues. The blues are life’s way of talking.

Art of the Knives

September 1, 2001. Before sleeping dragons woke up in Truth Or Consequences to have a little fun at the poor human’s expense.

One thing he witnessed with clarity on the transatlantic flight was how a Spanish woman sitting across and up a row manipulated her knife to carve an apple. She used her thumb to measure thin red skin and gently worked the blade down the fruit near her thumb while maintaining slight pressure.

She was delicate and firm with the sharp tool. He’d observe many people using knives and he always remembered the Spanish woman’s fingers and blade.

On warm afternoons as winter sun sang past the Grand Penon dolomite mountains in the Sierras an old Spanish man labored up the hill on his cane with his brown and white terrier toward the gazebo. The gazebo overlooked Lacilbula.

“Ola,” exchanging pleasantries. The man pulled a folding blade and a pear wrapped in a white paper napkin from his brown sweater pocket.

He had the same precision as the woman on the plane. When he finished slicing a piece he kept it on the edge and ate off steel. Slice by slice. Done, he tossed the core to his barking mongrel, wiped off the blade, folded it, returned it to his pocket, took his cane, walked over to the potable water stone fountain, removed his upper teeth, washed them and put them back in his mouth.

The village butcher named Garcia had the art. Grazalema families butchering a pig on a plywood slab in their garage had it. A cafe barman displayed it with his long thin blade slicing thin strips of ham off a pig’s bone wedged between wood supports.

Friends had it butchering rams in Casablanca for Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice. The feast, a major Muslim holiday, commemorated the Qur’an’s account of God allowing the patriarch Ibraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son Ishmael. It was sacrifice with a capital S. Ibraham dreamed he wanted to kill his son and God said, “No. I will send you a ram,” and this was their tradition.

Three rams were slaughtered, one for each married man in the family. The rams spent their last night in the wood factory attached to the warren of rooms constituting the family home in an industrial section of town.

They started at nine a.m., after a breakfast of crepes and tea. Ahmed, Tofer, Saad and their father secured wooden beams and ropes above the red and gray tiled floor.

They held the ram down and sliced it’s throat. Breath and blood flowed across checkerboard tile. It fought for it’s life, kicking and screaming. The head was severed and thrown to the side. They cut a hole in a back leg near a tendon and bone, ran a rope through it and hoisted the carcass into the air.

The wool coat was sliced off and thrown on a ladder where it dried in the sun. It’d be collected by a man pushing his rolling cart through the neighborhood and made into a prayer rug. The body was inflated with an air compressor to make skinning easier. Blood flowed over tiles.

Rex, the German shepherd drank his fill.

Sharp knives. They re-sharpened blades in the shop and worked fat off the skin of the poorest animal. Internal organs tumbled into plastic tubs. A wife carried them upstairs to the team of women preparing meals. Men washed the interior cavity with hot water.

Liver skewered with fat was grilled over red hot coals and served with tea, hot bread and olives at noon. Everyone gathered at a long shaded table under pink and red boginvillas flowers and clear blue sky.

At 3 p.m. they ate the stomach with lemon, olives and fresh hot bread. Fruit and water. Larger sections of the ram were dismembered with a band saw, placed in plastic bags and frozen. A third would be given to the poor.

Across the street itinerant men cooked rams heads on a makeshift grill and hacked off the horns.

Rare people say they experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition is called synaesthesia.

The sound you hear is the smell of a ram’s head crying. The music of embers, wool and glazed eye calm. The edge you touch is the blade releasing blood, the feeling you see is the poorest skin, white intestines, black liver on red coals. A single piece of charcoal welcomes the skull, horns curve from blue sky into dark eyed knife slashing flesh.

All families made the sacrifice. Sacrifice, community, family energies within the spirit world and human hospitality. The feast lasted three days.

The art of the knives.

Sidi Ifni, Morocco II

In an endless hazy future full of rocky hills, black shrouded women balancing large ceramic brown jugs rode side saddle on donkeys plodding miles to a shallow well inside circular stones.

The two lane road ran 40 kilometers south to Sidi Ifni, an old Spanish enclave on cliffs over the Atlantic.

Sidi Ifni, with 15,000 people, existed on rolling hills above the sea. In a lush valley beneath old Moorish castles stood two cinder block construction enterprises, wadi oasis palms, gardens and tributaries running to the sea.

He watched thin men sift sand and gravel through wire screens and run belching machines pressing out bricks. Another man driving a tractor hauled them to waiting trucks.

Belonging to Spain until 1969, the faded town’s facades suffered from emptiness, wind and water. Sharp white cubist building block homes lay scattered on hills breaking light and lines. It was an old art deco town full of dead decayed deserted buildings from an elegant forgotten history. Rumor had it that European expats were buying holiday apartments for $2-10 grand.

He found a room in a cheap hotel overlooking the Atlantic and rested for three days.

Mosque masters in Sidi Ifni called five times a day. Trick or treat. Sleep deprivation became the norm. Late to bed and early to rise makes a man crazy.

He walked on the beach with an unemployed internet worker from North Carolina. Bill had never been out of the states before. He was shocked and fascinated by Morocco.

“The poverty levels are really amazing,” he said.

“You get used to economic realities, touts and price gouging. It’s a poor cheap country. The people are kind and very hospitable.”

“Fez was amazing, then I got sick for three days in Meknez. Had to rest.”

“It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth. Why did you pick Morocco?”

“My partner, Sam, a world traveler, had it in mind and then we were laid off. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I had three weeks to get it together; shots, pack and stuff. It was pretty crazy but I made it.”

Sam was a savvy cynical travel expert. He told people he was Australian, just in case. A well rehearsed diversion after 9/11.

“The Greek islands are cheap, specifically Santorini,” Sam said one night over a bad meal of fish and rice in the hotel restaurant. “Thailand and Laos are good bargains as well.”

The deserted beach at Sidi Ifni stretched for miles. Renegade surfers relishing excellent conditions camped to the north.

They walked along wild waves talking about writing down their experience and the vagaries of publishing.

“North Carolina is somewhere over there,” Bill said, pointing west. “Imagine that. I’ve never been away from home before.”

“You either get used to it or get back where you feel comfortable.”

They shared stories about writing habits, goals and efforts to get material published.

“You need a hook, a marketing platform, be willing to fail, rejections are part of the process, murder your darlings, overcome the fear of making it perfect and be passionate about your work. We’ve learned this through trial and error.”

“Publishing is a business. Consider these numbers. The bottom line for an agent is, can they make 15% on your book? A hard back book retails for $25. The author makes $3 per copy. It all goes to publishing marketing budgets. The shelf life of a book is maybe 6 months, tops.”

“I see. Yes,” said Bill, “the pitfalls, the joy of creating, writing for yourself and not worrying about the market. Keeping it real.”

“Yes. What’s real? Give your characters desire and conflict in the first five pages. Take them on some kind of journey with wants, obstacles, resolutions and character arc. It’s about contrasts and using all your senses. Have fun with it. Nobody in 200 years will want to read it.”

“Well, knowing that takes the pressure off."

“No fear. Finally, make your query letters human, don’t kill your query in the synopsis, reduce the synopsis to a single sentence for your pitch and establish your marketing platform.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it a shot when I get back.”

“My pleasure. Just publishing stuff I’ve learned. Enjoying your trip?”

“Yes, it’s been very interesting. I rode a camel out into the dunes south of Zamora. It was really the only thing I wanted to do on the trip.”

“He paid way too much,” Sam said. “They ripped him off. He went out at 4 p.m. They rode for an hour, camped overnight, had breakfast and returned to the hotel. It’s strictly for tourists. He could have found something cheaper.”

“It was really cold out there,” Bill said. “I couldn’t sleep and stayed awake almost all night. The stars were amazing! They were so close I just stayed awake staring at them until dawn.”

It was a place of clarity, insight and understanding for him.

Bill and Sam were nervous about returning to the states coping with terrorist siege mentalities. Their days in an old Moorish civilization were numbered as they faced the unknown. They had to get their stuff out of storage when they returned and find new jobs.

In their country of birth people loved storage facilities and, over history, had accumulated tons of stuff and needed a place for it because it was precious to them.

They were attached to it. They birthed it, married it, raised it and buried it in caves of their desire.

They had to put it someplace else because their palatial homes, caves, hovels and shopping carts were filled to the brim. They consigned it to cement storage facility rooms hidden behind a maze of security gates, security fences, and secure padlocked doors in run down industrial zones trapped in the bowels of cities showing their age where it collected dust.

Later, when he rested in The Red City he remembered the fine print about packing light. He surveyed his stuff.

He was ready, willing, able and well prepared for invasions and grounded special forces with the latest killing technology.

Exploring general theories of relativity he’d assembled his Zone II medical kit, dehydration packets, emergency space blanket, 20 year old Swiss climbing boots, Swiss army knife, short-wave radio, R-11 telephone jack, energy adapters, battery charger and a zip drive for backups.

He carried phrase books, geographical maps, a water purifier, modems, lip balm, chopsticks, dental and mental floss, sarong, harmonica, immunization record, watercolors, a resume containing 50 summers, ink cartridges, journals, a warm heart and cool mind.

“Pack everything and then cut it in half” was the admonition.

His reality was carry on. Reality was overrated.