Natasha from Kiev

At the beginning of September 2001, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Youseif, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months.

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5 year old son. Her name was Natasha and she was tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They’d met at the university in Kiev and he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son.

He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home.

Natasha had heard about her new home but had never seen it. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family for the first time and live their life.

She did not speak Arabic. Her cheap red, white and blue Russian plastic baggage was falling apart at the seams. Her son was a terror and pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself.

With them was an American writer going to Morocco for six months. He had finished a book in the summer about a woman who spoke every language and he was jumping through a window into new adventures.

We all spoke the same language as night fell around the roar of planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere.

We were buried at gate 54D, miles from bright gleaming duty free shops full of perfume, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, gleaming diamond rings and watches, customs, clothing stores and business.

Passengers carried plastic bags saying, “Buy and Fly.”

It was midnight when we landed in Casablanca and walked through a towering hall full of intricate inlaid mosaic tiles and a waterfall. Framed images of smiling kings watched us. Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited.

Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through green ‘nothing to declare’ zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her life on a cart and she disappeared into the throng with her son. I watched her husband’s family approach her. It was his father, mother, brother-in-law and an older woman dressed in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug, speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy.

I focused on the old couple as they slowly walked away and imagined they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their connection to their son.

Natasha, an alien in their world, an aberration, would be relegated to a new life. She moved into their world with a Ukranian passport, speaking unknown languages where she would be welcomed on one hand and relegated to a life in a new reality serving her new family.

She was going to be many things to them and they would manifest their loss on her. She would carry the water and gather wood. She would carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and connections. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a polluted city of 5 million.

They were descended from Berbers. Their culture had a passion to touch a world outside their ability to perceive the reality.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his life. It was his dark eyed nomadic destiny.

While his wife was trapped in the airport he was with his girlfriend and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

I whispered this story to Natasha but she found it hard to believe.

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.

Fat and Happy

On September 1, 2001 he was wedged next to the window of a puddle jumper flying over the Cascade mountains. Next to him were an overweight happy couple in economy anticipating their future first class flight to London out of Georgia. Days before people on, from and inside cells placed long distance calls from the edge of caves.

“We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends,” said the wife, “and then,” her husband chimed in, “we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food.”

She wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh and their combined girth was sweet consumption. They exceeded their weight limit. The scales of justice were balanced in their favor as they spilled wealth.

“What do you do for a living?” her husband asked.

“My friends call me Mr. Point. I work for The Department of Wandering Ghosts Ink. 24/7,” he said with a straight face. He was a survivor, Vietnam 1969.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he laughed. “Yes, I am a mercenary of love, an unemployed fortune teller if you must really know. You might remember me from the Academy of Pain and Anger Management if you have a need to know. The more you know the less you need. If your top secret security clearances are valid.

“I’m heading to North Africa to meet my female nomad lover and various strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the extraordinary rendition program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer terrorism suspects to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fictious companies.

“If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they start boiling them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap music 24 hours a day to drive them crazy. Stale bread and rancid water. A grisly business, but hey, it’s a paycheck.

“We also set up off shore accounts for clandestine agencies, or fronts if you will. We collect raw opium in Afghanistan, process it in Asian labs so street addicts get their fix. Along the way we collect internal organs to sell in Hong Kong. The market is diversifying. Pick em’ up and lay em’ down. No women or kids. We have to draw the line somewhere, eh?

“Business has never been better. Ain’t nothin but the blues baby.”

They cut him off after this truth.

His one-way air ticket to Morocco and Spain; another village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic realities and fewer intrusions on his sanity.

The KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, principle. Just leaving was a wise decision as it turned out. Speaking of hiss-tree.

“Beyond, beyond the great beyond,” he’d whispered to someone when they asked him where was he was going and why he did what he did with the who, when and howdy doody yankee doodle dandy stick a feather in your cap crap paradigms.

Leaving Casablanca

Slanting light wrapped its arms around someone gathering raw unfiltered and uncensored material on their journey.

Light cut the sky, severing the white village, stone paths, Moorish brown doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

As a Wandering Ghost he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on both sides of their extended faces while shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. Your exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with this hesitancy, this delay, this boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses and delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa. They craved freshly cut sweet smelling green boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with dust.

They taxied down the runway as rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds thunderheads formed a white billowing future, all air and water,
an infinite dream machine.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward Seattle and heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis he wrote to Imane in Marrakech, the Red City.

“Dear Imane, - Faith in Arabic - my dearest friend in another earth orbit time zone, a Heart Space. Imagine meeting you on a train just by chance. We trust our instincts to experience the truth.

“I am flying over ice fields, Canadian white with blue water cracks, down below stretching to the northern horizon. We are above the clouds whispering winter’s knowing. Spring will find white ice melting.

“We are above frozen rivers looking for strength inside it all to flow.

“Orange and jasmine fragrances in a Marrakech courtyard welcome your eyes surrounding you with sensual delight. I am trapped inside a metal container above frozen white water. I need to jump into the cold water and scrub off old airport noise, dust, sound, people pushing their lives toward inarguable conclusions.

“Yes, I will jump down onto white ice floating to meet you on the other side of a reality where sand lies shimmering beneath the blue sky and a warrior’s life is strong.

“Spring is coming, you see small tight winter trees waiting to explode in Holland, such a pity, such a tragedy waiting to happen, this season shift as if someone put 2 and 2 together in some grand equation.

“Billy in the Spanish Sierras is 3 weeks older than before he was born which doesn’t have anything to do with this memory yet contains everything because he is a lovely boy and calm. He saved their relationship you know; Mo, the desperate English woman who cheated on her English husband after producing two lovely daughters in Graz, an old Roman village in Andalusia. She took up with Pedro, and yes, Billy’s conception and birth saved them forever.

“I will always remember watching Pedro, an old hippie turned anarchist turned leather worker, one morning when we shared breakfast. We were in his old white stone home along the back ridge of narrow tight Roman cobblestone streets below Penon Grande mountains.

“We enjoyed toast, cheese, olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. Pedro gently sliced red skin and spread each tomato seed on his brown bread.”

A defining moment. Each seed itself a small world of life and future. So small yet so significant. We never wasted anything. We weren’t poor mind you just paying attention to the details.

“Back to us. Our Marrakech train conversations were the magic of being still, hurtling past abandoned mud homes, villages where women ride donkeys miles to wells looking for blue water, children without education tend flocks, men hammer their sharp knives through mint tea while laughing with the sky.

“As we sat in Jemma space watching black hooded cobras dance you were beautiful with a fine laughter and our time together was sweeter than the smell of jasmine in the afternoon and now I see ice cracking into blue water falling from the blue sky and winter sleeps below us.

“Just as the Sahara sand blows south for the winter, ice retreats north to it’s spring and it’s austere, nothing at all, a blank white, perhaps like a huge, gigantic white blank page in an old black sketch book with a broken spine spilling watercolors, stories, poems, releasing old visions of butterflies in micro fauna extremes.

“I survived these adventures and I ramble onward and tell you now when I am in the air it’s good to be moving like standing still in the frozen river of dreams. We are a cloud of blue water dancing with white ice seeing this amazing world of ours. Specific images from these moments.

“To be precise when I grow a little weary of all the moving, all the standing silent inside the language of silence white clear and slow the smell of jasmine in the garden penetrates my heart.

“I would like to rest my head and heart there just now, just for the smell of knowing red dust, water bells, chimes, singing birds, oranges, lemons, your laughing eyes again and this is enough.”

Crow Forest

Returning to the United States of Advertising (USA) after centuries on the ground he sat down in a Crow cabin on 8,000 year old Kalapuya Indian ceremonial ground. He had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter.

He lived inside shifting forest tides, buried beneath stoic 150 foot tall Douglas firs waving in wind, with a Fischer stove and the chopping. He worked in a room bathed in light.

The blade, edge, swinging weight, slicing through old growth, tree time rings; ferns, moss, rain, falling ladders, outhouse and the Afghan girl’s piercing green eyed image from 1984 on his wall.

Her eyes followed him everywhere.

Where he sat down spinning out his tales of control and approval ratings weaving spider webs on a loom of time. Where he rearranged mirrors to reflect everything.

He carried Omar’s palimpsest through the forest. It was a bird song, thrill immediate spring music, owls, ravens, crows, vultures circling on thermals, wild deer, ancient wisdom, shamanic visions of clarity insight and wisdom. The book gathered and collected bark leaves. A fabric of moss singing to him.

He established his refuge from the storm with simplicity, serenity and sanctuary. He lived on the edge finding shelter inside a bird’s song. He trimmed cuticles into air seeing them spiral into spring. It snowed flowers.

He looked deep into the forest of the mysterious manuscript. It was true and filled with sensory details.

He connected his narrative with Omar’s animal skins; tales, adventures, trials, tribulations, dreams, nightmares, conversations, explorations, discoveries and boredom mixed with excitement, wonder, suffering and healing energies.

People wondered and wandered, chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes. They saw through their eyes not with their eyes.

“I am an old dialect of Kalapuya tribes. I respect the 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 believed 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. 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 along 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 their 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 spread 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 the 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 ax 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 and hot sun and four seasons. I am yellow, purple, red, blue, 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.

“Respect and dignity with mindfulness.”