One Lhasa Morning

We take a side street to the Barkhor - everything is in cold frozen shade as life stirs. People are bundled against the freezing air, their faces hidden by white medical masks or wool scarves. Only their dark eyes exist. Khampa meat men dump severed glazed eyed yak heads on old stone, long horns; women prepare yellow butter blocks, chunks of glistening fat.

We slow down. Each step is a breath. As before, in other planetary places we savor the beginning of a new day in scenes of becoming - cold, isolated, strange, mysterious reality. The street blends into the circuit. We enter the main square.

Two large chorten furnaces are breathing fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings - throw sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. Merit.

We join the flow, shuffling along. We feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The vast self vibration of frequencies in the flow. His “restless” wandering ghost spirit feels the peace and serenity inside the flow.

The sky fills with clear light. As above, so below. Prayer flags lining roofs sing in the wind as incense smoke curls away. The shuffling pilgrims create a ceaseless wave - the sound of muted consistent steps, clicking of prayer beads, a gentle hum of turning prayer prayer wheels, murmurs of mantras from lips. Everything is clear and focused on offering, sacrifice, gaining merit in the collective unconscious. Our river flows.

Dawn light blesses western snow capped mountains with a pink glow.

A black-faced half-naked boy throws himself down and out on his hands and knees prostrating the length of his skinny skeleton. He wears slabs of wood on his hands and an old brown apron. He edges forward, pulling himself along, rises, gestures to the sky, hands together, down along his skin out and down to the ground scrapping away flesh edging forward inside shuffling pilgrims.

His eyes are on fire!
We complete one circuit after another, circling the Jokhang. More light, more people ascending into the square - handfuls of juniper feed roaring flames, Crack! Hiss! Burn! Back to Dust!
You will walk through the fire.
We do this practice every day.

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?

Writers On Steroids

“Ok,” I said to the Senate Committee investigating Writers On Steroids in Room 2143 of the grand facade off Bluejay Way. They stared at me with jaundiced eyes. They shuffled paper. An old tottering fool of a Grand Inquisitor pounded his gavel. I remembered him from the McCarthy Era and feared the worst.

“You are accused of taking steroids to enhance your writing performance. We have evidence from editors, hacks and wan-ta-na-bees that you and perhaps thousands of your ilk slaving away like drones in the dungeons of mediocrity, dreams, illusions and journalistic heaven on word machines have boosted your word output through the use of banned, I repeat, banned substances. Say it isn’t so, say it’s all a lie, a misconception, hearsay. What say you?”

I took a drink of pure spring water from mysterious unfiltered Alaskan lakes. A naked trout started dancing on the table in front of me and I laughed. “Ha, you're joking aren't you?” I stuttered, spitting water all over the microphone. It shorted out and I was forced to use my voice minus amplification.

“Of course I sue steroids, why, in fact, in truth of fact and fiction I sear the meat on your grill with my defamatory remarks. The pills are beautiful and come in a variety of colors, like rainbows. They open doors of perception with wonder, shock and awe. I have irrefutable evidence that your committee grooved the approval of these pharmaceutical delights thanks to the huge financial contribution by multinational drug companies to keep you in office. It's well known this country, let alone sports “heroes” have been programmed to ingest chemicals.”

I jumped on the table with the naked trout and started yelling. “We are ALL filled with chemicals you idiots. It's the American way of life. It's the new mantra, Run, Read, Write with Greater Efficiency and Prose the Poem with diligence and fortitude using Elements of Style. It’s the style baby, the demolition charge under your hat, Jack.”

“Order, order,” yelled a bailiff approaching me with caution, mace and industrial strength handcuffs. “Down boy!”

They shackled me. The Grand Inquisitor handed down my sentence. It had a noun, verb and object.
“Take the prisoner to Cuba and give him an orange jump suit. Interrogate him and deprive him of his writes.”

I screamed in anguish as they dragged me past a pharmacy filled with promise, hope and salvation. “You haven’t heard the last word from me. Where’s my trout?”