Hammam

The author was in Morocco on 9/11.

Twice a week he left #187 and walked through dusty stone rubble past discarded plastic trash and small broken trees to the Moroccan hammam. The Turkish style public bath cost seventy cents.

The left side was for women, men on the right. He paid the shy girl behind her veil, went in, stripped to underwear, crammed his clothes in a plastic bag, handed it to a smiling toothless Moor, and got two buckets made of old tires remembering the suq alley in the Medina where boys cut the rubber, hammered, made and sold these buckets.

He pushed open a heavy wooden door. Three medium vaulted arched white tiled rooms receded with increasing degrees of heat and steam. Men reclined on heated tiled floors, collected cold or hot water from faucets in buckets, soaping and scrubbing themselves down.

Passing unrecognizable human forms he entered heat’s mist dream, walked through two rooms and found a space near a wall. He filled one bucket with scalding hot water and another with temperate liquid. He stretched out on his back absorbing heat and closed his eyes.

Heat penetrated his skin. It was a respite from the outside world, the chaos of poverty, begging, humor and hospitality. No one could see him, no one knew him. Feeling peace he rolled onto his side as heat blasted skin, muscles and bones.

Inside steam and water music sweating men slapped themselves on the broiling floor. He watched an old wiry man dissolving kinks bend a customer’s arms and legs into pretzel formations. The skinny bald man energetically worked wrists, elbows, shoulder joints to the point of snapping them off skeletons. He rolled patrons over, pummeling spinal chords, slapping backs while bending knee joints leaving men spread eagle on wet tiled floors. Content faces welcomed his attention.

Satisfied with the meditation, Point sat up, soaped and scrubbed layers off skin with a rough hand cloth. He rinsed oceans across inlaid tiles, walked out, retrieved his bag of clothing, covered himself with an ikat sarong slipping out of wet underwear into dry clothing. He gave the attendant a small tip. The old man smiled, shook his head, rolling his eyes. It wasn’t enough. He dropped more coins into brown frozen fingers.

“Shukran. M’a salama.”

He stepped into cool night air. The dusty path was filled with scooters, boys playing on abandoned rusty cars, scavengers probing piles of trash and mothers dragging black gown hems on the ground. Bright yellow slippers slapping earth flashed light in silt. Wandering children sang happy innocent songs.

A one-eyed beggar stumbled past looking for alms. Point gave him one thin coin and skirted an alley through debris for thick black coffee at a local cafe. Entering, he passed men watching 24-hour global terrorism catastrophes at full volume from a television propped on steel supports hanging from a ceiling.

“Ah, Ahab,” said the waiter, a smiling young man in a purple vest balancing a silver tray of cups and water glasses.

“Coffee?”

“Yes please, no sugar,” gesturing outside where empty tables littered cracked pavement. Dejected desperate shoeshine boys tapped wooden boxes. Their dark unemployed eyes inspected shoes of chronically idle men drinking coffee and endless glasses of tea. A hopeful boy wandered in and out of tables tapping his shoe box. Strong mint tea aroma filled the air.

At the bar a waiter cut mint tea leaves, crammed them into a silver plated kettle, dumped in a brick of sugar, closed the lid, raised the pot and poured a steady stream of light brown tea into a small purple embossed glass. Opening the lid he dumped the tea back into the pot and placed it on a table with glasses, spoons and sugar cubes.

A subtle red color extended across a high adobe wall. The Atlas mountain range wore white snow.

Women in billowing rainbow fabrics walked across the desert from clustered stone villages to take a local bus into the shimmering Red City or sit on broken cement stones along the road talking with friends enjoying their social hour in eternity.

Dusk and twilight married to procreate many children. More field hands, more child labor in dead end trades making less than a $1.00 a day. Many would walk to northern Morocco and, if lucky with money, slip across the Mediterranean into Spain. Some angry marginalized naive kids would join T cells in Madrid, or Hamburg and disappear in Europe. A select few would attend flight training school in Florida. Others became wealthy drug runners wheeling and dealing hash heaven in Amsterdam.

Women sat gossiping on cracked pavement surrounded by trash. People discarded their lives as they went through it like caterpillars morphing into exotic species. Attempts to plant a single tree inside a small block of dirt surrounded by cement had proved futile.

People had stripped off the branches and leaves leaving a sharp broken piece of wood sticking out of the ground. People wandered aimlessly or sat in dust. Unemployed men on haunches stared at the ground. A fruit seller with cardboard boxes of green grapes under a single bulb on a rolling cart waved at lazy flies.

A man in his wheelchair poured bottled water over a handful of grapes. Grapes of wrath. Water disappeared into dust around his wheels of life. He ate one grape at a time watching laughing boys weave past on broken bikes as rusty chains grasped crooked sprockets.

A bearded man struggled along the street collecting discarded pieces of cardboard in his recycled life. Cardboard was utilitarian - a cheap sidewalk seat, a foundation in rolling carts to keep stuff from falling out the bottom, sun hats, beds and doormats in front of shops after infrequent rain.

Shredded telephone wires dangled from the wall of a telephone business office cubicle as men with mobile phones punched in numbers and lined up to make calls on the single working phone.

Disconnected grease covered boys manipulated mammoth truck tires along broken sidewalks to their shop. Tools spilled into public paths. The area was alive as people relying on their survival instincts scrambled to make a living.

Off the main road people set up evening flea markets. Two men unloaded piles of shoes from the back of a car along a sidewalk. Location, location, location. One seller spread a bright blue tarp on the ground anchoring it with bricks. His partner arranged cheap dress and casual shoes for potential buyers. No ‘adidas berber’ shoes for these guys.

They fired up a propane lamp. Neighborhood people escaping small flats after a day of oppressive heat prowled the street with friends looking for a bargain or just plain looking.

A Century is Nothing

Future

Yassein from Morocco was one of my tennis students the summer of 2001. A hunting-gathering seed was planted in life’s little garden. I decided to take a six-month break in the fall.

“They love paper,” said curly-haired Yassein meaning corrupt authorities in North Africa. We sat in his Mediterranean diner. He poured fresh mint tea and said, “You can find enlightenment anywhere.”

I needed new psychic energies, frequencies and a shift in my literary life. He set me up. “You will find it easy to settle in. My mother is in Paris. She is nervous about the place. Here’s a paper. It’s for a six-month rental in Marrakesh and I’ll get her signature. My friend in Casablanca has the keys.”

He briefed local friends on the deal.

“How much are you paying Yassein for the apartment?” said the American insurance agent with a Moroccan wife. She practiced her English selling bras in a department store. Uplifting.

“We’ve agreed on two hundred a month depending on the condition of the place.” 

“Oh,” said his wife, “you’ll absolutely adore the place. We’ve been there many times.”

“Yes, my wife is very well connected. Her father used to be with the national police.” I smelled an interrogation. They showed me travel photos. In one he wore a dark blue suit and tie next to a naked camel.

In late August I gave Yassein’s girlfriend, Bashira, a Pakistani with two kids and one on the way, a check for two months. “Yassein’s in Morocco,” she said.

He’d gone home as a fake tour guide when in reality he was scrambling around paying off a Berber family to get out of an arranged marriage. His mother in Paris had set him up with a village girl.

While his relationship with Bashira helped, Yassein regretted wasting his time in the United States of Amnesia starting and stopping diners selling hummus. He regretted having a mother even though he loved her. She was a pain in the oasis.

Projecting her desire it was everything she wanted for her son. She was the mother of all arranged marriages. She had connections in a village.

“We can control more land now,” she’d told him. “She is a lovely girl. Her family is well off. They own many camels. The oasis is thriving.”

This was all well and good when she was sitting in her Paris flat remembering the Marrakesh cinderblock hovel. Where Yassein’s ancestors drank tea and plotted Spanish invasions. She was renovating the place for tourist dollars. Paris was a world away. He was her front man.

“You will marry this village girl,” his mother ordered. “It is our duty, your duty. Family first. You are my eldest, never married and now’s the time. Think of it as a tradeoff, an extension of our relationship. It is a connection to our heritage and our community. This is your destiny and honorable for us.”

He married the girl to please his mother. He didn’t like it. It was a gigantic hassle and complicated his life. He’d been in the states long enough to see new futures.

It was an arranged marriage and he was snared in family schemes and trapped by traditional expectations. How things were done in the desert. It was all about relationships and consolidating resources.

It took him a year to finalize his plan. He was a juggler in a circus routine and his mother cracked the whip.

He kept the Berber girl and her family on hold. He blamed time, lack of money, no visas, no tickets, no way he told them. Not now. Later. He loved the word later. It was a negotiating art form in a culture where a century is nothing.

They bought it. He knew they had no choice. Their daughter was married and that was that.

“Sit tight,” he said. “Let her take English classes or run around chasing invisible paperwork in the notoriously corrupt and inefficient system.” They didn’t understand the tight part. He simplified it for them.

“Be patient.”

A player and hustler, he was an expert at dragging it out. He planned a way to get out of it. He set it up and played his trump card. Money talks.

He returned in August and bought her family off to forget the whole thing. They took their daughter back using his cash to buy land and livestock. She resumed hauling water, collecting wood, cooking and cleaning. Her future was done, finished and finalized. She was as good as dead.

Yassein took care of the paperwork, greased palms, got on a plane, returned to Bashira and forgot the mess. He’d never liked these arranged marriages and knew it was all about deceit, lies and manipulation.

When his mother heard what happened she was furious. “You’ve disgraced our family,” she screamed on the phone. She was so mad she conjoined her French and Arabic polymorphic syllables in the City of Electricity. She fried on the grid.

“Somebody had to pay,” he said. He didn’t say she gave him a migraine. “There’s something wrong with the line mother. I’ll call you back.”

Bashira didn’t know the backstory. She played her role with Oscar potential. Yassein played her.

“I’ve always wanted to go there,” she said the week I left. “It’s Yassein’s ancestral home. I’ve dreamed being there, taking care of the place, meeting the people, settling into the flow, the rhythm of the land. Smelling the spices.”

Smelling a fascinating opportunity I jumped into the future.  

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Tall Tale

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 *

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer my delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames. I join my muse spirit in the Department Of Wandering Ghosts.

I sharpen rose thorns for my work. My muse, bless her heart, uses the thorns to make a comb. She weaves on the loom of Time. I feel sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. I pull my hand away with a thorn embedded in my finger. Old human flesh dissolves.

I’m filled with wild passion. A mind-expanding drug of wonder, delight and freedom increases my awareness of infinity without pushing me into psychosis. My power is a medicine, a sacred connection to Gaia after years of paying attention.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping a captured insect with thin microfilaments. The spider recycles her old web on the periphery hauling sustenance to the diamond center where it vibrates in a soft breeze. Does the spider intend to create the web to catch an insect? Does the flying insect intend to discover the web? Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to create and sit with meditative patience, another instinct is to take risks and move.

My serenity is not bought over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons cut from old magazines. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting Beauty in my heart. I experience myself as a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing my fear, doubt and uncertainty, shattering myth. Lightning bleeds off the charge. I am an unemployed fortune teller. I am the soft sand of sleep-dream calming a tortured heart.

Abracadabra!

My feminine muse hurls her lightning bolt even unto her death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a small short reprieve. Her tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

A Century is Nothing

Jung Institute

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” answered a kid with a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive at the future I must journey into the past. To attain the sanity of oneness with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed.’”

One year I spent three days at the Jung Institute of Psychoanalytical Study while hitching south toward the Mediterranean and Israel.

In June 1976, I slept on the lawn behind a stonewall at a biological institute on the outskirts of Zurich. Every morning women cleaning glass sang, Get up. Get up. I stashed my sleeping bag and backpack in a garden, walked to the Banhof for a roll and coffee and uphill to the Institute that opened at 11 a.m.

In a fine old brown stone residential castle with turrets and secret unconscious passages the institute offered classes and lectures on Jungian work. Professionals from around the world studied, attended seminars and completed their post-graduate education or audited classes for personal growth.

Between lectures, lawyers, theologians, teachers, philosophy majors and academics, some with a Ph.D. in Life, discussed Jungian thought.

The common thread was how their life, their quest for knowledge and greater insight into the human condition had led them through various disciplines and years of study to the institute. They said something totally incomprehensible was missing from their lives.

The truth is in the mystery.

The only book I pulled at random from a shelf in the Jung library was The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa.

One morning people crowded into a lecture room. Languages filled space waiting for a lecture on the “Symbolism of Fire.” I took a small hourglass out of my pack and turned it upside down. Sand flowed.

“Jung talked about the spiritus contra spiritum, a god of ecstatic vision,” said the speaker. “He talked about the need for ecstasy without the chaos and how the archetypal ecstasy was for a god and soul.”

“Is the female ego in charge of the animus?” said a man.

“Yes. The animus speaks of women with a deep connection. It is a force that can seize you.”

“Is that why there is pain and delight in human relationships?” said a woman.

“Yes. The collective unconscious is too big to live out our personality so we create outer projections saying ‘bear my anima for me.’ This creates the pain and suffering. When there is individuation there is a strong ego personality.”

“Can you please give us an example?”

“Well, war is like a falling in love experience. The shadow, the dark side exists with the bright side and is misunderstood. The shadow is projected in dreams. Veterans carry images of losing, darkness, violence, destruction and evil inside them.”

“What is the healing tendency?”

“One must find meaning. It requires self-honesty. One respects dreams and the unconscious. They play. Fantasy is good, dynamic play. It is about symbolic levels. The collective unconscious is manifested in all cultures. This is why Jung was attracted to Asian symbols. He believed they existed near the bottom of their unconscious in an instinctual life.”

“People in the western cultures are afraid of death. Why?”

“Old age is a value feeling. Unfortunately, in some cultures it is perceived as insulting. It is the archetype of the old fool. It is fuller than the wise man. We create meaning. The imagination is the reality of the psyche combined with pure play. We listen to the wisdom of the dream. Everything we do is from the heart.”

When I was Jung I was Freudened. Ha.

I attended a lecture on the symbolism of fire. Cosmic creation energy...fire or water first in Oriental thought, quality of energy and quantity of substance. Satori fire-power emanating life and consciousness. Fire is spirituality. Yogic symbolism. Applied in India the thunderbolt kills the enemy and brings rain.

Surya is reception and light. Dream analysis symbolism of passions. Negative burning fires of hell.

Dream interpretation changes psychic energy into new conscious arrangement.

Bohme, said ‘then your heart is a dark valley where the devil kindles the heat. Leads to forty questions of the soul.’ In yoga Indian texts the soul essence is energy consciousness. Fire consumes ignorance: source of fire in soul and spirit. The yogic fire meditation is with the noon sun, meditating on physical process, digestion, and identifies with sun and fire to reach experience. Tapas transform energy. Concentrated introversion consciousness.

A Tibetan fire mandala with five colorful flames is a spiritual place. Created as psychic energy with five elements through creation. Fires of transformation creates spiritual regeneration as catharsis. Solar and lung energy and integration through dream interpretation.

Tibetan Book of The Dead = freedom. Fire is a driver, sexual desires. Soft wood and hard wood together create energy. Psychological use of fire, inner psychic fire from the lowest chakra spine sleeping serpent rising, united through to ‘eat the fires of energy’ as the libido is a power of regeneration through consciousness.”

During the lecture a worn copy of the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination translated by Wilhelm fell out of my bag. A female lawyer preparing to unlock the unconscious motivations of incarcerated juveniles saw it.

“Ah,” she said in a German accent. “I see you are reading a great book.’”

“Stumbling through it. I am curious about it.”

“Interesting. Have you heard of Madame Chang?”

“No. Who is she?”

“She’s a Sinologist. She is an authority on the I Ching and gives consultations. She has her office near here. Perhaps you could visit with her.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

I called her up and made an appointment to see what would happen. I arrived at the house, went through the back gate, approached a door and rang a bell. I entered a foyer. I looked up through a long ornate spiral staircase. At the top stood a woman. I climbed and climbed. Madame Chang was slight with close cut brown hair, glasses, about fifty.

“Hello, I’m the fellow who called your secretary asking to see you.”  I offered my hand.

“Yes,” she said taking my hand momentarily and then dropped it. “I was expecting you. I am Miss Chang. Won’t you come in?” She gestured to the open door.

The room was narrow. Along the walls were shelves holding stacks of books. To the left was a table with old Chinese books. One was open to a map. She offered a chair in the middle of the room under a slanting roof. I took a seat and she sat opposite me where she could gaze out the small window into blue sky.

She didn’t say anything for a moment and then looked at me. I felt penetrated as a fraud. Her gray eyes were distant. My first impression after sitting down was that I was in way over my head, that I was after some arcane knowledge and she knew it. Madame Chang sat silent and never said anything forever. She just sat there and let me look around. I realized I was out of my depth.

“I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I am wasting your time.”

“Why did you come?”

I knew that her wisdom of the book was greater in scope than I’d ever begin to understand. Her vision was far away. I realized my small self.

“I’m not sure,” I blurted frightened by the sound of my voice. “It’s something about the I Ching about finding out the truth.”

“I usually give consultations to groups but am willing to meet with individuals. What is it you wish to know?”

“I came because someone said you could answer questions about the I Ching and I am curious about the book.”

“How many times have you thrown the coins?”

“Once. What should I do?”

“You should just study it. I would advise you to read the hexagrams and see the symbolism in the meanings of the text. See the intentions of the summary. It’s a very powerful book.”

I sat there looking at her and her books. It seemed like forever as my mind whirled around trying to come up with some semi-intelligent conversation. 

“It’s a long walk. Nothing more. It’s a long walk,” she said.

As if in a dream I got up and walked to the door.

“I usually accept contributions,” she said. I fumbled in my pocket, brought out a note and asked for half of it back in change. She returned the balance and showed me out.

“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate your seeing me.”

I descended the spiral staircase to the ground floor. When I looked up she was standing on the top looking down at me. We waved goodbye.

Out on the street I looked up at the window. It was impossible to see the crease in the roof. There was only sky. I walked down the street as if in hypnosis, bought an apple and sat on a stone sidewalk meditating on our meeting. I opened the Book of Changes to #25, Wu Wang, Innocence, The Unexpected. “The firm comes from without and becomes the ruler within.

“I like it,” said a listener. “Inner directed like Rumi. What else?”

“Well, here’s a cool thing Jung said. ‘I liken the formation of a character to weaving a garment. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. Then you have a choice: you can finish the garment, but it will always be botched and ugly, or you can unravel the weave right back to the first mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is sometimes scared and hostile. The analyst has to lend patience, honesty and courage.”

A Century is Nothing

Suicidal Clare

A cell phone played. Omar rummaged in his robes. A depressed suicidal woman named Clare in Washington State was on the Suicide Hot Line. It may as well have been shit out of luck S.O.L. He switched from Arabic to English.

“Yes?”

“I am trying to save my insecure relationship from jealousy.”

“Jealousy’s a disease. It eats people alive. What are you looking for?”

“I am looking for love and meaning. Can you help me?” She had all the questions.

“I am only an emissary between people. Between you and your dream.”

“It’s a nightmare. What’s going to happen to me?” 

“You’d best be prepared for armies of touts, hustlers, beggars, thieves and economically loveless destitute men. They will want to escort, guide, lead, and administer their opportunity,” he said.

“Will they be gracious or benevolent with their tricks, traps, deviations and detours offering fake potential to save me? Will their well formed greed based on my desire, an illness of imaginary needs plead for my attention deficit disorder?”

“Yes. Eight hours on the ground in Morocco will seem like twenty-four. You’ll become a character in your own low budget film. It will open in small art theaters. You’ll be all the characters in the comic tragedy.”

Listening to Omar, I imagined everything as the suicidal woman’s voice assaulted the blind man.

Clare was too poor to pay attention.

She was beat. Omar knew Clare would be an expendable extra in an independent film. If she didn’t get real smart real fast she’d be lost in the drama. She needed a new identity theory. She’d change her name to Clarification.

The story was complicated with many jump cuts.

I remembered Ann, a New York literary agent’s advice. “Keep the big themes in mind and give us strong narrative structure.”

“Why? It’s not linear or logical.”

“I can only represent you if your work has these ingredients. Publishers want books for a general readership. It’s a tough market now. 175,000 books were published in this country last year.”

“I’ve survived markets in many countries Ann. It’s a miracle I’m alive to tell the tale. Traditional publishing is all about marketing, branding, product, price and placement with a hook.”

“True. It’s too disjointed and sporadic as it stands. You need you to express more artistic and emotional beauty. I expected more from your time in Vietnam. I want to feel what you felt. I want you to expose your vulnerability. I want to detect patterns and opportunities.”

“Vietnam was FUBAR, Ann. like Iraq, like any conflict.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

“Oh, I see.”

“This is honest work Ann. Memoirs and stories are about hunger. Some are even about food. This is edgy gonzo shit. It blends creative nonfiction with memoir, travel writing, personal essay, literary journalism, social commentary, magical realism, and ethnology. I’ve asked myself, who or what has come alive? I’ve let it speak. I’m a conduit.”

“Tighten it up and send me your revisions. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this business. I need to make 15% off your genius because I’m the expert. What else are you working on?”

“At the moment I’m traveling with Omar, a blind Touareg Berber from Morocco who lives in a Spanish cave with a tribe of survivors after 9/11. He’s one hell of a storyteller and we’re sharing tales. He’s given me a stack of paper higher than Everest to read and revise. His daughter is a word-weaver of serious renown working on a new narrative structure in an isolated Spanish pueblo. Together we’ve weaved 180,000 words so far. It’s about levels of personal and spiritual awareness, emotional growth, 9/11 repercussions, terrorism, religion, cultural prejudice, and healing.”

“What’s your hook in fifty words?”

“How oral traditions, myths, and truths are passed in verbal form from generation to generation in a highly metaphorical way. Stories are primarily a comic vehicle for moral instruction or spiritual guidance. Tragic narratives have been overused since the Greeks and Europeans. A tribe’s customs and structure...healing, authenticity, awareness, alienation, loneliness, boredom...it’s just a fucking book for God’s sake ...sheets of paper inside two pieces of cardboard...we’re breaking up Ann. I can’t live with him and I can’t live without him, this blind muse of a seer. I’ll call you when I get back to the states of conspicuous consumption. To the states of amnesia.”

Meanwhile, Clare changed long distance carriers to get a better plan. She failed to plan and planned to fail. She whispered to Omar on a tenuous connection, “I played a willing manipulative victim. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted people who loved me to feel guilty and responsible for my suffering. My life is fear and ignorance. I collapsed inside my chaos, fear and grasping. I had to ask for help.”

“I see,” said Omar in a clear clairvoyant voice.

“I tried a walking meditation. It was really hard. I crawled. I walked. I tried to run. I collapsed into the quicksand of my neurosis. I wanted to fly like an eagle. My monkey mind went nuts. I slowed down sensing a new beginning inside me, inside my life. I walked on the curvature of the earth.”

“Marvelous. You have to break down before you break through.”

“I need to see you,” she said. “Where can I find you?”

“At Paleolithic caves south of Ronda.”

Before their connection died Clare related a quick story.

“There was a horrific accident.”

“What happened?”  Omar knew what he didn’t know.

God and Allah and the devil are in the details.

“Crazy men took planes and crashed them into city sky scrapers. The big apple.”

“I see.” He paused to hear more. It was a learning tool he picked up moving through the world’s worst nightmare manifesting historical fairy tales where Poverty and Wealth raised children named Expectations.

“Yes,” she said, “it was shocking.”

“Has the healing started?”

“Healers are working overtime. It’s going to take forever,” she stammered.

“Yes,” he said, “17,000 children in the world starve to death every day. Poverty is the real terrorism.”

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s just a thought.”

She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. Media masters in her right wing country had assembled their militant word/image arsenal and persuaded, cajoled, sold, exchanged, blasted, admonished, punished, harangued and scared them shitless, informing them how it affected their little world.

They ate fear like there was no tomorrow.

She was one weak sister. Being depressed and suicidal didn’t help. Friends, family and media convinced her the world was one huge scary place and she was a small expendable organism. Her habitat was on a well-exploited fault line. They sold her fear, healthy doubt and compassionate uncertainty in a nice neat little package. She consumed the whole enchilada.

“Omar and his friends knew many would remain in their complacent darkness,” said a veiled woman in the compartment.

They turned to her.

“It was very comfortable there. They would always live in shadows, oblivious to historical truths blinded by five senses, colors, sights, sounds, vibrations and frequencies. They were transparent h-saps. It went right through them. Clear through.”

“How do you know this?” said Omar.

“Their world is made of glass, their vision obscured by ignorance and compliant stupidity. They needed a large dose of painkillers and glass cleaner for their belief windows. Tears softened their pain. They wiped down the days of their demise,” she said looking out windows flashing their reflections. She had old deep wise eyes.

“How do you see this prophecy?” said Omar.

“My name is Rose. I am a seer. I was born in the dark of the moon. I remember the future.”

“Where do you come from and where are going?”

“I’m like you and your companion here. Passing through.”

 The three of us were very comfortable with the dark arts, shifts, universal frequencies and manifestations.

The Heart Sutra said, ‘emptiness was form and form was emptiness.’

A Century is Nothing