A Century is Nothing

By Timothy Leonard

A prescient Vietnam Veteran booked a flight to Morocco on 1 September 2001.

On 9/11 in the Sahara he met Omar, a blind Touareg writer in exile. They never took possession of that event.

They moved to Cadiz, Spain and later an isolated mountain pueblo where they wrote about the past, present and future. Themes included global economic terrorism, education, and healing energies.

World tribe stories inside stories incorporate diverse world cultures: Spain, Ireland, Tibet, Bali, Kuwait, Israel, Morocco, Bhutan, China and spiritual awareness with gratitude in this epic.

What is it called when you give everything away to receive everything?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Timothy Leonard
• Release date: Dec 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780988180147

Timothy Leonard

Vietnam veteran.University of Oregon graduate.Author and photojournalist.International TEFL teacher.Designer of mysterious projects.

Book preview

Book I

Chapter 1

He Switched To Full Automatic

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.

Among multiple characters in Omar’s tale are a protagonist, a deuterogamist, a butcher, a gravedigger, and a typist.

Shovels plow into archaeological deserts reflecting humor and curiosity in social intelligence. An archaeologist inside a tomb waving Diogenes’s lamp yells, Every bit we dig out tells a little more about the story. They unearth part of a story revealing customs and cultures.

A bird pressed her breast to a thorn to make herself sing.

There is an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.

I am the thorn and the bird. Wing, feather and air. My thorn is a claw, a sharp definitive talon for tearing meat from white bones. Satisfying my hunger along the Tao.

I am a cognitive psychoneurolinguist. My specialty is languages. Lost tongues.

Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities, according to Wade Davis, an anthropologist.

Wandering deep into the Tarim Basin along the Silk Road in Central Asia I was delighted to discover the Tocharian language and Afansievo culture dating back 4,000 years. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorations. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA, based on an Iranian dialect.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, once stated, Myths tell only of that which really happened.

History became legend and legend became myth.

What someone wanted to happen – MYTH – what actually happened.

Myths suggest that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth has been defined as truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories of religion based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths. They are in everywhere and nowhere.

The world is a sacred story. An ageless story. Young, middle aged, and very old stories. The never-ending story.

Ten thousand diamond dreams in death masks crash through consciousness into a place of clarity, insight and understanding. Mindfulness in the moment is truth.

If only it were true, said a sage.

He was dying. His eldest son fed him crushed ice on a silver spoon. They shared sweet spring grapes.

Delicious, said Richard.

Here, his son offered, take some ice. All there was is, was and will be.

I almost wish it were true, Richard said releasing his energy. He pulled grapes off a stem with thin bony fingers. He looked at his son.

You always were a dreamer.

Yes, father. I have no regrets or fears now. You do not need a compass in the land of dreams. I am learning to let you go across the river of time.

Yes, I whispered, always be a dreamer, smiling, acknowledging his wisdom, his final words sharing this vast irrevocable truth. Blue eyes, his heart-mind, how he said it’s almost true in his awareness and this is enough for me to believe him at the heart level.

His son inhaled suffering and exhaled healing.

In the kitchen he dumped ice cubes on fabric, folded it over and smashed it with a rusty crescent wrench from his father’s red toolbox.

He folded cloth over ice, rolled the wheel of life smashing ice into glittering diamonds.

Always keep a diamond in your mind, reflected his mirror.

A child's memory whispered, The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. I have no reason to despair because I am already there.

William Butler Yeats wrote, Dazzled by the embroidery.

Here’s some scientifically, artistically validated advice for you, gentle reader. The inside is the outside veiled in mystery. Consider the sub atomic particle level. If you know the position of something in space you cannot know its velocity. Heisenberg's principle. The law of uncertainty.

Levels inside levels. Stories inside stories. How the world works.

Dionce, a healer friend in Phoenix rising from 9/11 psychic ashes, mentioned Shifts, Frequencies, and Vibrations. History said they manifested themselves in 2001 well before the fall from supremacy on a myopic emergency frequency. Before emergency calls on hot lines melted through tribal retributions.

A little premonition can be a dangerous thing, Point said. She sighed over long distance knowing he’d fly away. Forever. He'd disappear into exile as seasons restructured energy fields.

She understood his intentions and motivations. His nomadic instincts called.

You will jump through a window, she said during a phone conversation.

My halcyon work is going well. I’ll complete the first draft by August 2001. It's time to renew the spirit. Pay attention. Get back on the road. Go back in time. I leave September 1st.

How is it going?

I’m blessed to be working on it with Omar, a blind seer. 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 general readers due to its fragmentary non-linear 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 daily practice they achieve a vision. Their clarity allows them to manifest their intuition. When they finish their creative 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 and sent off to you.

She shared a story about three men in the desert who discovered the secret of the mysteries in the Cabbala - meaning 'to receive or accept.'

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.

Here's a Chinese proverb for you: 'I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

It's all about paying attention.

Be well.

They rang off.

This was a small edge of the journey's thread and Dionce knew he hadn’t written everything because he'd been living it day in and day out.

Someone lived it, got it down if they were passionate and lucky and a narrator interpreted it later. And, if they - storytellers - were fortunate, like winning a huge lottery pay out or discovering a cure for cancer which, in meaning and consequence, would have far greater implications for humanity, they'd continue teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Asia after publishing and distributing ACIN to strangers and friends.

Omar and Mr. Point knew that everyone they'd met, known and loved would be fair game in their tale. If they didn’t like it, fair enough, it ain't nothing but the blues. If you want to play the blues, you gotta pay your dues. The blues are life’s way of talking.

Chapter 2

Leaving The States

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

We own a travel agency. We’re meeting friends, said the wife, an alcoholic, and then, her husband chimed in, we’re sailing down the Danube for a week, drinking good wine and enjoying the food. I’d like to go to Costa del Sol. I’ve heard the culture is wide open, if you know what I mean, rubbing his secret jewels and winking to the stranger.

His spouse wore enough jewelry to feed Bangladesh. Their combined girth was conspicuous 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. If your top-secret security clearances are valid. The more you know the less you need.

I’m heading to Morocco to meet my female nomad lover and extraneous fascinating strangers. Here’s a dirty little secret. One of our classified missions is the Extraordinary Rendition Program, allowing intelligence agencies to transfer suspected terrorists to various friendly foreign countries for interrogation and torture. We use Gulf Jet Stream jets based in South Carolina operating under fake companies.

The shadow of Little Wing, a weaver, passed them.

"If they don’t talk to us our friends start by removing their fingernails. If that method doesn’t get ‘em talking they boil them alive. We chain them to walls and play ear splitting rap or country music twenty-four 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 Chinese harvested internal organs and upright pianos 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 profit 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 promised another road, village, town, city, country and continent offered simple psychic potentials. 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, somewhere on the spinning rock 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.

*

In March 2002 after six months hunting and gathering raw material in Morocco and Andalucía, he waited in line at the Casablanca airport for a military man to stamp his passport. Two beautiful women received preferential treatment and a Moroccan man behind him remarked, I love this country but hate the system.

I know what you mean, Point said, remembering many countries where people felt this in their heart of hearts.

There are only two stories in the world, he said to the Moroccan as they carried their boarding cards through the terminal. A stranger arrives in town or a person goes on a journey.

Yes, said a blind man overhearing their conversation, we might add there are also stories about love between two people, stories about love between three people and stories about the struggle for power. Stories are about character’s wants, obstacles, actions, and resolution revealing emotion.

Are you a writer? asked Point.

Yes. I live in a Spanish cave far from here, said the blind man, smoothing old purple veined hands down his long blue cotton robe, where I carve symbolic art on stone walls. I created something there and gift it to you.

He reached into his robe and pulled out a twice-used parchment book known as a palimpsest from the 12th century when parchment was scraped and dried animal skins.

Here, he said, offering them to Point. They don’t do me much good as you can see. Perhaps you can use them for something.

Thank you very much. He accepted the bundle connected with fibers.

My name is Omar. Come and visit me. He disappeared into humanity. It was Baraka.

Chapter 3

The Papers

Well before sunrise on his last morning in Morocco, before seeing a sunburst orange ball on skylines toward Amsterdam, and flying west to Seattle, and east over the Cascades; before leaving Sad’s home in Casablanca, Point, who’d been up all night anticipating another Exit, took a gigantic shit over a hole in the ground before sweeping a sweet smelling kid’s sanitized paper wipe over his skinny little ass.

He poured water from an old green bottle into the holy plumbing system, waking the dead on their highway of life which was crowded with whiners, complainers and ghosts, before stumbling through darkness with Rex the German shepherd who lived in the family furniture factory, on his heels.

The toilet paper was crap in Spain. In Morocco it was nonexistent.

It felt good to blast yesterday out of his system. He knew all the bilingual time, challenges, and surprises had been worth it. It was a refreshing drink of water, a hard desperate invigorating breath during a climb for a clear perspective.

Chapter 4

Transit of Passage

Slanting dawn light wrapped its tentacles around an anonymous scribe gathering unfiltered and uncensored evidence. Light cut the sky severing white villages, crude broken stone paths, scarred Moorish brown doors, ageless idle men, shifty eyed one-armed merchants, and sad-eyed unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

The scribe traversed light, space, and time intervals near sixteen blue, yellow, and green starred mosaic vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on their cheeks, shaking hands to confirm an exile's dream vision flight.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with hesitancy, this delay, this boarding card question. Their visa stamp bled through indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses, and woven fabric 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, a chance visa. They craved freshly cut sweet smelling green tea to mix their life’s colors with dust.

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

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis Point 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 by chance. We trust our instincts.

"I fly over Canadian white ice fields with blue water cracks stretching to a northern horizon. I am above clouds whispering winter’s knowing. Spring will find white ice melting.

"I am above frozen rivers looking for strength inside the 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 nomadic noise, dust, sound, and humans 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 a blue sky and a warrior’s life is strong.

"Spring is coming. Small tight winter trees are preparing to explode in Holland, such a glorious tragedy, this seasonal shift as if someone put two and two together in some grand matrix equation.

"Billy in Grazalema is three 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 blessed Mojo, the English woman, after producing two lovely daughters in Graz, an old Roman village in Andalucía after she hooked up with Pedro, and yes, Billy’s conception and birth loved them forever.

"I remember watching Pedro, an old hippie turned anarchist turned leather worker turned father, one morning sharing 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 sliced red skin and spread each tomato seed on brown bread. A defining moment. Each seed was a small universe of future life. So small and significant. We never wasted anything. We weren’t poor mind you, only paying attention to the details.

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

"As we sat in Djemaa el Fna watching black hooded cobras dance you were beautiful with laughter and our time together was sweeter than the smell of jasmine in the afternoon and now ice cracks into blue water falling from blue sky and winter sleeps. As Sahara sand blows south for the winter, ice retreats north to it’s spring and it’s an austere blank white, like a 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 telling you now when I am in the air it’s good to be moving like standing still in the frozen river of dreams flowing beneath the surface. We are a cloud of blue water dancing with white ice seeing this amazing world of ours.

"To be precise when I grow a little weary of all the moving, all the standing still 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 now for the smell of knowing red dust, water bells, chimes, singing birds, fragrant oranges, lemons, and your laughing eyes again.

Chapter 5

Stateside Ground

I’m afraid you will have take your boots off, said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw Point’s scarred Swiss climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

Anything interesting happen while I was away? said Point.

You don’t know the half of it.

Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift ?

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.

Why not? said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, and seventy guns.

Look like things have really improved since I’ve been gone, she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. Now I feel really safe.

Point removed his boots and passed through detectors. Along the concourse he studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware! This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on your neighbors.

Report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Big Brother is watching.

He knew it’d come to this. He’d been far away, imagining this Brave New World with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Advertising (USA) after centuries on the ground he sat down in a 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’s edge, swinging, singing weight, sliced through old growth, tree time rings with ferns, moss, and rain. The Afghan girl’s piercing green eyed image from 1984 on his wall followed him everywhere.

He sat down spinning out his tales weaving spider webs on a loom of time. His mirrors reflected everything.

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

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 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 revealing tales, adventures, trials, tribulations, dreams, nightmares, conversations, explorations, discoveries and restlessness 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.

Grounded, he absorbed an ancient vision.

"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 spreading 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 axe 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 with respect and dignity and mindfulness.

Chapter 6

I Am Not From Here

Rumi, the Sufi poet said, The work is to open the heart, to seek the truth and the difficulty is being human.

What is the heart? How do we know the depth of silence in another person? How do we find the balance between sacrifice and suffering? The way of friendship is outside doctrines.

We have ecstatic grief for the human condition, said Rumi.

We are not from here, we are transcendent. A human being is a kind of conversation.

One day Point climbed through the center of Bali inside magical light past an extinct sacred volcano at Lake Batur carrying spare ammunition, a small portable machine, a map carved on narwhal bone, a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper, codices or painted books and texts on bark paper called Amate, and cactus fiber including animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

His hair caught fire. Gathering flames he lit a piece of bark for guidance. He mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm rich with antioxidants. He applied this to his skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

To become clay he created clay. He needed dust. He collected dust and minute grains of mica. Teams of gravediggers, weavers, butchers and typists explored rain forests, jagged mountains and impenetrable jungles collecting dust.

Hunters dived into, under and through massive Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth, snaking past abandoned Hanford nuclear plants where fifty-five million gallons of radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W. II slowly seeped 130 feet down into the ground toward water tables.

The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations and Department of Energy think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations and Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the chaos of their well ordered scientific communities.

Tribal survivors ate roots and plants garnished with entropy.

Survivors passed through civilizations seeking antiquities. They reported back with evidence sewn into their clothing to avoid detection at porous India-Tibetan borders. They severed small threads along hemlines, Chinese silk gowns and Japanese cotton kimonos. Their discoveries poured light rays into waterfalls rushing over Anasazi cliff dwellings into sage and pinion forests.

Survivors arrived at a mythopoeic part of their journey. They reflected on the unconscious residue of social, cultural, ethical and spiritual values.

They needed masks. They needed to understand the underlying mysteries inside death masks. They confronted the realm of spirit. They bought masks in open air markets on their pilgrimage. Masks signifying the dignity of their intention thwarted demons and ghosts. They became spirits dancing in light.

Everything was light in their shamanistic interior landscape. They let go of the ego, Ease-God-Out, detached from outcomes, eliminated the need for control or approval, trusted their spirit energies, and remained light about it.

Inside light with slow fingers and long thin ivory nails they turned clay into pots. Spinning spirals danced on a wheel of time. They finished throwing them, used them for tribal ceremonies and smashed delicate clay pots to earth. They exploded into the air creating volcanic ash coating everything in a fine dust. Point dug into the soil of his soul. He scattered raw turquoise stones on a trail of sacrificial tears, on a long march through seasons and countries.

Chapter 7

Tangiers to Cadiz

After eight weeks in Morocco immediately after 9/11 Point leaped onto a ferry across the Mediterranean from Tangiers to Algeciras. He met a blond American widow from a lonely hearts club tour group.

I have many questions for you, Jean said as seagulls played in blue wind.

Yes. That’s the answer to the first one. The one where you ask me if I am happy?

How did you know?

It’s obvious isn’t it. It’s the first question an American away from home for the first time in her life would ask a traveler. You’re either sitting in deep meditation or you’re moving.

Yes, I suppose it is.

What’s question number two?

Where are you going?

Cadiz. The oldest city in Europe. Going to sit down with my friend Omar and write. We’ve been gathering material. Doing the work.

Wow, that’s exciting. I’m lucky to get a letter written. Takes me forever and then I just lose my train of thought.

Instead of the train maybe you should consider walking. Take bus #11. It’s a magic bus.

Really? What’s bus #11 mean?

It means use your legs, it means walk, slow down, engage your senses. It’s how poor people get around in Morocco. How poor people anywhere get somewhere.

How romantic.

Depends on your perspective and interpretation. Poverty is not romantic. It’s a daily struggle. Slowing down allows you to observe everything in minute detail, befriend strangers, be anonymous. Like a wandering ghost or a memory. It’s the perfect way to discover your nature, test your spirit, contemplate your imaginary reflection in windows and live with pure intention.

Just by walking? What happens if I get attacked?

You worry too much. Worry is interest on a bill that will never come due. Your ego loves the circus of sensory entertainment. People suffer chronic health problems because they regret past failures and fear the future. Practice breathing and just sit. Practice being in the moment 10,000 times. Maybe you need to slow down, unless you love the fast lane. Most people don’t intend to harm you. Learn how to yell ‘FIRE’ in multiple languages if you need help.

Funny. Fire eh, never thought of that before.

Sure, people scatter and you escape.

Passing Gibraltar they entered a harbor as Jean poured her endless book of questions into his ears about life as a nomad, how it worked, how one survived on the road.

They said farewell. He didn’t have the heart to tell her about the suffering and joy she’d experience in life. He knew she’d find out for herself. They were all passing through.

One door opens and one door closes but the hallways can be a bitch, said Omar.

Chapter 8

Bus to Cadiz

He took a night bus to Cadiz, an ancient city of Neoclassical churches where stained glass baroque explorers named Colon sailed west, dear Nina, in search of gold importing their assimilated desire, converting heathen slaves into worlds of persecution and misery.

It was expensive raising funds from skeptical kings and queens expanding their empire. Rumor said Queen Isabella was convinced of Chris’s project over a game of chess. The queen became the most powerful piece in the game, hiss-story-ically speaking.

This explained why Cadiz women were draped in gold. Remnants from ages of reason, enlightenment and discovery. Ages of illumination, prosperity and knowing the unknown gifts of the Magi evolving from bronze to iron to gold. Alchemical reactions turned base metals into gold. Chains around wrists and necks sold by the gram were heavily displayed by Spanish patrons.

Butchers in Cadiz didn’t wear gold. Their hands gripped the sharpened edge of well honed Spanish knives paring off fat, cutting through layers of gristle.

A shop bell rang. A stranger paused in a doorway.

A steel mesh glove protected a butcher’s left hand holding meat. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through flesh and bone. The table was littered with blood. Women lined up to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs hung in windows as white quality funnel tags attached to hoofs collected fat.

Wild boar and stag heads stared down from walls next to color photos of local bullfighters. Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway posed with famous Ronda matadors. Red rivers painted capes as bull blood flowed down muscular necks.

Dancing along the devil’s whiplash big black hungry flies buzzed around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust. A dog’s ribs rolled over scraping grounded shade, begging for water. A drop in the ocean, is all H20 no matter how deep you dive. A wave washed the shore day by day. Stones sang.

The sausages sounded sweet, retaining a sharpness, inextricably swaying like dancers in a choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under a mass of weighted meat.

Manuel, the butcher stared through his jagged window of broken glass remembering the Spanish Civil War. His face was a mask of weary, solemn stillness. A quiet lying fury. His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, the expected surcharge on an empty stomach, a tax for services rendered as reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys, heard waves of German bombers over Guernica on April 26, 1937.

Beleaguered International Brigade freedom fighters held their own inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees Mountains spinning, standing grounded, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

Survivors fled to fields or huddled in shelters. They knew the best way to survive was to remain silent. Their town was reduced to rubble. Manuel was required to remember old Fascist propaganda - the spreading of information.

He is a fleischer, one who slaughters.

In order to eat and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, wine, and dancing after burials he was forced by economics to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, his vision, his hope, his dream and village identity. Everything else was stolen by dictators, thieves and Fascists. All he had was his dignity, integrity, and self-respect.

Time arrived short of sympathy, sentiment or condolences. He sharpened his short axe. Standing under the brutal Spanish sun he worked steel across a grindstone removing old edges. It was sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into the center of the red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner. He approached the bull and held out his hands lined with pulse rivers. The bull slowly emerged from the shade. Looking into the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul.

He sighed, clapped his hands together twice, bowed to the bull, as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority. He asked for forgiveness, for his act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck.

The bull froze and slumped, straining to escape the blade carving through weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, snapping final bones. Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered as a final breath exploded in red dust.

He clapped his hands again, severed the head and dragged the body to his shop. He cut it up. He hung the head in his broken window. For Sale.

His wife served portions to family and neighbors toasting his wisdom. They consumed his life’s work. Sharing is caring.

I witnessed this.

I was an accomplice. A witness. I could have stopped it. No, I thought, this is a lie. The truth is a lie. The truth is hidden inside the mystery. I couldn’t stop it. It was a Betrayal. I wanted to say something to save the bull but it was too hot for words. I was afraid. Language stuck in my throat. My voice was dry dust.

Which is greater, real pain or the premonition of pain, my youth wondered as Manuel’s silver blade melted down, shattering reflections into diamonds of glittering fragmented light. The quick and the dead.

I was on fire that day seeing Manuel and bull meet in death. Watching them dance inside my childhood, inside time’s compressed image as sweat escaped pores and rivers of stained glass mosaic memory collided with forgotten dreams. My worst nightmare turned into a clear reality.

I took ownership of laughter’s axe and accepted responsibility. I hung the reflection in my mirror. I retained intimate images of blood’s red river mixed with sweat from Manuel’s temple dancing, congealing in red soil creating tributaries and oceans in Spanish heat one irrevocable summer.

I passed through a memory as people in shadows discussed moral ambiguities in conspiratorial language. Their Castilian language was a gift from the Romans.

No language, no culture, Ahmed whispered in Arabic weeks earlier to Point sitting in the Sahara immediately after 9/11 emergency calls on heaven’s hotline. Point was so far removed from that attack on the world he never took possession of it.

Strange but true elements of fear, double-edged messages, disinformation, misinformation, bias, lies, half-truths, whispers, paranoia, and irrational transmissions were issued by government authorities in every language on Earth. Human brains overflowed with data. Therapeutic forms, in triplicate, were issued to the populace. The remote control device was kaput. Too many channels and distorted frequencies.

Omar scribbled immediate and long term implications in his Tifignagh language.

"The Berbers controlled the Iberian peninsula as a colony from Marrakech castles for 800 years. Fierce warriors, they resisted outside control maintaining their language and culture during Roman, Vandal and Arabic rule.

"Surviving along the Mediterranean meant controlling salt, textiles, gold, silver, copper, limestone, turquoise, red granite, alabaster, bananas, sugar cane, cotton, sorghum, ivory and timber.

Trade routes were filled with cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Phoenician alphabets, Chinese pictograms, Mesoamerican dances, Runic and Indus script, coins, wooden tally sticks recording the number of animals killed, religions, amber, animals, clothing, grains, horses, incense, olive oil, silk, spices, tin, wine, tortoise shells, and slaves. Commodities.

Manuel the butcher had seen a little of everything move through his small village. Trial and error. Cause and effect.

Omar desired to experience everything. He memorized The Art Of The Fugue by Bach. His thin hungry spirit fingers hummed down a necklace of threaded bone mala beads of catastrophic karmic actions near contemplative Gomchen mystic Tantric hermits north of Sera monastery outside Lhasa.

They sat chanting and praying in sight of Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess, Mount Everest, as butchers - the untouchables, flayed corpses before smashing bones for vultures to reincarnate spirit in the sky burial. Their remote burial sacrifice was off limits to tourists with multiple entry visas stamped by Chinese Public Security Bureau officials in Lhasa.

The frozen earth informed archeologists there’d be no future work here with their soft brushes.

Omar continued…"I absorbed Tibetan dialects by swallowing bone dust. Transmissions of spirit energies and renewal evolved with sadness, joy, beauty and truth. I sat observing, digging into their old stories, revealing truths, moving between what was and what is. I understood how journeys revealed childlike laughter and joy. Nature opened my third eye to see what will be. I am a Now not a Later. My mirrors are free of dust and illusions. I dissolved.

The Gomchen taught me how to meditate on the process of death. This was a big one. It centers a person fast. First thing in the morning, shaping my motivation with a new strength.

Sitting in a pure empty space, Point asked himself this question from Lawrence G. Boldt’s work, The Tao of Abundance. What is the motivation behind my desire to acquire ______ and the things that come with it?

I saw how my motivation and the effects were determined by my action and read from The Roots of Wisdom by Ming.

"Mountains and rivers and earth are already nothing but dust. Man, of course, is but dust within dust.

"Bodies made of blood and muscle will surely return to bubble and shadows. If the highest wisdom is not obtained, there will be no heart of understanding. All is vanity.

One ought to live a life of peace and quietude. What’s the point of unrelenting pursuit of external things?

The fleischer, archeologists, Omar and Point protected their illuminated rolling stoned spirit energies in new universes. They evolved with meaning, purpose, implication, consequence, and existential responsibility. Choices inside choices breathing deep.

Find a Room

A maverick, poet, and photographer in exile, Point completed six days in the San Francisco hostel enjoying bistro tapas, meat, cheese, bread, fruit, and vegetables from the central market or Mercado. He’d passed through here thirty years ago after ETS.

To find a room in Cadiz he applied an essential life lesson he’d learned from a three-year old in Tacoma when she said, I need help. They were practicing eye hand coordination, balance and harmony in tennis. She taught him a life lesson.

He said, I need help, in the tourism office off De Dios Plaza in Cadiz. Three women were working the desk. He got right to the point with efficient in-out dialogue. He’d learned this in the international hotel management business.

After finding a room he visited Patricia at the office and she said, You know, we get a lot of people in our office, all nationalities looking for something and while most of them are nice some are really terrible.

I know what you mean. I’ve met some wonderful weird people along the road. Some are pleasant, others can be rude and demanding, insensitive to the culture. Many fall into three distinct groups. The whiners, complainers and clowns. Not all the clowns are in the circus, said Point.

Yes. That’s a good one. The reason I decided to help you was the way you just came in and said, ‘I need help.’ It was refreshing.

I knew the difficulties I faced, learning some life lessons the hard way. I knew my elementary Spanish wouldn’t help me find a room. I’m not afraid to ask for help.

It was the way you did it.

His temporary habitat for a month was with a Gypsy family. A room ran $500 with full board. He had a writing space and the family received extra cash.

Amelia was an overweight diabetic who ate extremely fast, her unemployed husband Jasus resembled Ichabod Crane and son Jasus II, 20, was a mental case studying engineering in school, playing computer games and lying around their microscopic flat watching soccer on television with the volume on full blast.

His father survived by selling cheap scarves on a table along chipped battered yellow walls outside the market across from his local bar.

Another resident was Dortmund, a gay French flight attendant for an international airline working the South American circuit. He had a room in the apartment for a month while improving his Spanish with a private teacher. They talked from 9-12 every day.

One day in the kitchen he said, It’s great being here, no one knows where I am and I like it like that. Nothing to do but study. He carried a mobile.

This wasn’t true. They met one day in an internet cafe.

Hi Dortmund. How’s it going?

Great, I’m on-line with a boy in Germany. This is a great chat room. We’re talking about getting together when my studies are finished.

He spent a lot of time chatting with boys on-line in Cadiz and looking at his mobile. The city was perfect for encounters with young boys at night when bars and cafes spilled people into streets. He was very happy. Spanish was the language of love. It smelled like exotic perfume. Forbidden fruit hung heavy. Young and ripe for the picking.

The Cadiz room was small, noisy and tolerable for completing a sentence or two and gathering digital images for future creative projects.

His sentence, this sentence, was a metaphor for putting in his time somewhere in the world. He liked living on the edge. If he wasn’t living on the edge he was taking up too much space. He sharpened his senses there.

He’d put his time in Vietnam, Bali, China, Kuwait, Saipan, OZ, Ireland, Israel, Turkey, Japan, Bhutan, Tibet and then Morocco. Part and parcel of the grand adventure called life. As someone said, Live broadly, write boldly.

In Cadiz he wrote one true sentence. He murdered his darlings in their sleep with laughter’s axe when their day was down and done. He dispersed word garbage to wheeled curbside trash containers under the cover of darkness.

Spanish men in blue collector uniforms with yellow safety stripes rolled through at midnight. They were followed by men hosing down narrow cobblestone streets. Word flotsam flooded city grates.

An immigrant man selling liquid below his balcony sang, Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations. Everything must go. Going out of business sale.

Yellow street lights played on wrought iron balconies above an old man walking his creaky Labrador. Two intellectuals holding hands discussed economics. Medical students planned future operations. The local unemployment rate was 40%. Andalucía was the poorest province in Spain.

Sexually repressed women prowled their world studying cobblestones walking through loneliness looking for future lovers, husbands, and fathers of contraceptive free Catholic children. Lonely heart club ads filled newspapers.

Conjecture about possibilities filled the air with hope, the last evil thing to die. Young boys feeling scooter engine heat and a hot girlfriend’s arms around a waist escaped parental world.

An old couple took small steps toward futures. Small significant gestures of love and affection rained flowers.

In an upstairs flat with an open balcony on the world he and Omar wrote by a single desk lamp with Spanish jazz music providing rhythm for fingers. Music is the fuel.

He studied a map of the province.

After a month he was restless. He visited Patricia at the tourism office about new places. She pointed out coastal towns.

Villages really, full of Germans this time of year. It depends on what you want.

She highlighted areas north of Cadiz; Arcos de la Frontera and the small towns of Bornos, Villamartin, Prado del Ray. She pointed to a place named Grazalema.

This is a national park, one of the most extensive and well protected areas in Andalucía. The pueblo has a population of 2,300 people. There are 146 species of birds, tracts of Spanish fir and excellent climbing. It’s a beautiful area. One of my favorites, but it will be cold there this winter.

It sounds perfect.

Her broken English was better than his Spanish. Everyone talked in broken tongues. They hinged meaning through gesture and intellectual guesswork. They attached meaning to gestures, facial expressions, intonation, sound stress and vocal tone. They practiced phonetics looking for context and meaning. They stayed focused on task. English in, English out.

She took classes in the morning and did a three month practicum at the tourism agency from 5-8 p.m. She hated it.

My dream is to graduate and move to Germany and work in the travel business, Patricia said. Three years in Spain doing theory and practical work is a struggle for me.

Global orphans ate inherited soil. They washed it down with pure spring water from underground streams filled with diamond studded stardust streaming light. They absorbed unconscious energies with freedom and wisdom feeling sensations of unbearable lightness.

Chapter 9

Bhutan, a Monk’s Story

Spanish church bells buried in the Plaza de Dreams, a fictitious manifestation of reality, a conglomeration of his experience, tolled as people toiled. He didn’t steal a line or a title from Earnest about ringing bells. He paid his toll and crossed to the other side of paradise.

A wandering Chinese monk shared a talk story with Omar.

"One day in the Himalayas I hiked to a meditation hut above Taktsang, Tiger’s Nest, in Druk Yul overlooking the Paro valley laced with rice paddies, rhododendron, fir, spruce, hemlock and barley fields.

"Guru Padmasambhava or Guru Rimpoche (Precious Teacher) was the spiritual founder of the Nyingmapa old school of Himalayan Buddhism in 800 still taught in central Bhutan. Tantric Buddhism, the esoteric form of the Drukpa Kagyupa Buddhist School in Bhutan dates to 450. The state religion of Mahayana Buddhism or the Great Vehicle was established in the 8th century.

"According to legend, Rimpoche subdued many demons in Paro and central Bhutan. At one time he had two wives, an Indian and a Tibetan. He transformed his Indian wife into a tiger and flew to Taktsang Monastery in the 8th century.

"Tiger’s Nest is a series of small tight buildings built into the cliff. It is composed of intricate staircases, stone flagging, a small open air kitchen, balconies, rooms for sleeping, and meditation. I was welcomed by boys and monks who showed me a small meditation room filled with statues, offerings of rice, coins, fruits and vegetables.

"They showed me the cave where Rimpoche lived for three years. Three monks appointed by the chief abbot in Thimphu live here for three years for meditation study and are followed by novice monks in their spiritual meditations.

"Taktsang, destroyed by a fire in 1998, was rebuilt.

"I traveled east along the spine of the dragon climbing to 10,000 feet, dropping into valleys and climbing again. Distinct elevations consist of grasslands, crop lands, forests, hardwoods, coniferous forests, soft woods, alpine meadows, yak pastures, and glaciers. Barley, wheat and potatoes are spring and summer crops from 7,500-13,000’ with the tree line coming at 12,000-14,000' and coniferous replacing hardwoods above 8,000’.

"I passed West Bengal and Indian road gangs working at quarter mile intervals. They carry large rocks and crushing granite to repair and fill endless washouts. They live and work here for two or three years maintaining roads before being replaced by new workers from northern India. Their living situation is grim. Shelters are woven reeds, fortified with any materials they can find along the rivers. They carry their children on their backs as they work. Younger ones sleep along the road under torn black umbrellas.

"Ten thousand people live in the Bumthang area. Small shops and stores along the single main street serve as homes and business. Built of wood with small steel stoves and chimneys, the rooms are multipurpose; selling in front, eating and sleeping quarters in the rear. Merchandise includes thread, wool, fabric for weaving, canned goods, small toys, sweets, local spirits, spices, eggs, a limited supply of green vegetables, a few green apples, and soap.

"The architecture is Tibetan. Rectangular buildings are two-three stories high, a pitched roof with open space holding firewood and fodder. The middle floor is for storage of grains, seeds and foodstuffs. Upper floors are living quarters, broken into smaller rooms. The ground floor on a working farm is for the cattle. If not, there are windows at this level with a shop, storeroom, kitchen, and servant’s quarters.

"I arrived at a monastery in the foothills overlooking the town where 300-500 Bhutanese gathered to receive a blessing from a lama. Children and adults on timber slabs sat talking on a sun baked ground.

"Three monks blew long wood and silver jallee horns to chase evil spirits away. The lama, Nam Kha Nen Boo, is Khenbow, a reincarnation of a former monk known for his fortune telling power. He was seated and read