Book 2 #1: Epiphany

The I of the Universe

Fountain the Generalife of the La Alhambra

We left Africa, Tom and I, and made our way back along the Spanish coast, headed for

Biarritz where our French writer friend Phillipe Beaumont, from the trip the Spanish Sahara, had offered us his hospitality at his studio retreat out in the countryside of Bergerac. 

First stop was Granada.  The magnificent Alhambra, the ancient Moorish Red Castle (Kalat al hamra, Arabic), perched like an acropolis overlooking the city, cast it's magnetic spell, drawing me to it as if in a trance..  I passed many gypsies on the road up to the castle, feeling, in my Moroccan clothes, as one of them, but they gave me nods and dark, furtive looks in return for my bon dia. So I let them be and watched them carefully.  That velvet darkness in those midnight eyes was too sinister.  I felt like prey, estrangero, not comarade.  It was a gauntlet to walk but I was so high in my anticipation of what lay ahead I paid them little heed.

 

Ah ! The Alhambra !  Just the thought of that day fizzes the synapses.

I wandered the exquisite halls, sorbing it all in wonder. 

                                                                        Swirling hair, long white caftan,   barefoot dancing with my flute.                                                                                                                        Fey spirit spinning around the Court of the Fishpond, the Court of the Lions.                                                                                Fey.  Fey.

Something curious started happening to me.  It was as if the LSD I had had in Morocco was revisiting, maybe it was.  The walls came alive. 

I was reading a code as I danced to my flute scrying the filigree arabesques of stone lacework and geometric mosaics.

In one chamber, I later found to be the Chamber of the Two Sisters,  I looked up at the most breathtaking stalactite cupola above me, an intricate maze of traceries that dissolved and resolved into ever challenging patterns. 

 

It was an effect similar to looking at psychedelic computer fractal graphics of the most exquisite intricacy and delicacy. 

As one would explore the detail of a dragonfly’s wing, here the flower of Moorish culture opened above me, a zillion petaled lotus of the infinitesimal kind. It worked on my sensitive mind-state.

Suddenly something was revealed.  Magic was at work.  Suddenly what I was looking at was not just pretty decorative scroll work, but a mathematical code.  The key to the universe. The experience with the beads in Marrakesh had been the preparation and this was the initiation.  The imprinting.

I stopped dancing and focused. Consciously gazing intently at what I was seeing. Letting it speak.  Whatever part of me was reading the code seemed to be channeled from some superbeing. 

I was the vehicle, but I was also the recipient of the knowledge being taken through my eyes by this other intelligence.  Pure psychedelia.  What LSD is all about.   The other world within our reality.  Opening another door of perception.

“Look into the glass onion”.

From that moment I was no longer just a crazy flipped out Ozzie chick on a foreign jaunt.  The insanity of total sanity.   So real. So right.  I was Ayesha.  I was She.  Superego.  I was the carrier of a recipe for the salvation of our kind.  There it was, written in the patterns for all who had the eyes to see.  The secret code of Arabic mathematics.  Allah illah illaha allahah.  There is one divine unity. Superglue.

If ever my aura was golden light it was now.

As I stood scrying, reading, sorbing, grokking,  a group of about fifteen little girls floated in to my view.  Dove-like in white communion dresses, they swirled and settled in the pavilion, twittering sweetly, eyes big, curious, shepherded by two nuns.  I must have been emanating an aura of some kind because they all paused and looked at me.  One of them consulted with a nun and then came running over to me and presented me with a large orange. 

I held the fruit, the golden harvest of the earth, lost in this orange orb in its simple elegant perfection, smelling its citrus tang.  I looked back up at the cupola and down at the perfect fruit and into the luminous electric black mirror eyes of the little girl which suddenly multiplied into a pantheon of fathomless black velvet Spanish eyes as all the other little girls now crowded closer around me, all reaching softly to touch me and murmuring, as if from some long distance, like little angels singing some gentle diaphanous web of love around me.  A single super-organism with a thousand eyes, each a reflection of infinity, the whole emanating love, sweetness, innocence. Caressing me,  lifting me, carrying me into their gentle velvet midnight where my soul received some immortal balm.

Returning to my bodily reality I felt blessed.  Honored.  Exalted.  These were beautiful children, so innocent, locked in their sleep of youth, being fed all sorts of fairy stories to keep them from the real truth. 
 

Cupola of Chamber of the Two Sisters

  I indicated the exquisite cupola ceiling above and in my scrambled Spanish I said:

 “ Tan hermosa, escrita por Dios a través de nuestras manos"



They all laughed, I had it hopelessly garbled no doubt, probably reinforcing their appraisal of me as a crazy foreigner. 

But the innocents, wide-eyed, non-judgemental, spiritually ablaze, nodded and replied, “Si, si’ senorita, esta muy bueno”. 

Then they started asking me who I was and where I came from, but I danced off, holding the orange as some precious jeweled ball, tossing it and catching it, while I sang - deep Moorish, Arabic, Iberian, gypsy songs, twirling and spinning dervishlike, all the time letting the walls speak.   The shy nuns rounded up their sweet flock and swept them away and I was left alone again, an orange in my hand, the secret code revealed  and a curious sense of having experienced something quite beyond expectation or belief. 

The exciting acoustics inspired my voice workouts.  Rich, deep sounds swelling  reverberating around the cupolas above, echoing through the arched corridors. 
 

   
My mother’s gift, the voice, rang through, pure, true and I felt her deep love enfold me.

I lifted my head and swirling, dancing, singing the song of my uplifted heart I ran and twirled through the magnificent gardens, splashing in the fountains, pausing by the mirrored pools. Letting it all flow, free. 

 A song of wordless sounds, using my voice as an instrument.  Releasing ancient resonances from within, singing in tongues.  

 A song celebrating life’s wonder, recognizing beauty, harmony, love.  Unselfconsciously.  Mad some would say.  Liberated is perhaps a better word. Unfettered by convention, unseen by anyone, only myself, set free. 

 It was a glorious experience.

Eventually Tom came wandering along, playing his flute Panishly, flirtatiously.  

He twirled me around and led me to a seat looking across the city among the fine columns and stone traceries and we sat together closely touching in silent communion for hours until the palace keepers asked us to go as darkness came. 

I didn’t try to explain what I had experienced to him.  For some reason I felt he knew it already, that in fact he was the magic force at work.  Such then was the strength of the power he had on me that I even attributed the magic happening to me as originating from his mind and will. He had become my Svengali. 

Hitching, Tom took me through Barcelona, past the place where I should have caught the ferry to Formentera and my child, and on into France.  Inside something began freezing, but we kept on.  I felt as if I had lost my willpower, he was leading me like a child, or an idiot woman.   I felt that I was an instrument of some curious energy stream working through me, leading me on, to what ?

North now to Biarritz where we stayed for a week while Tom painted a mural in an underground disco called “Hell”, where the decor was all red and waiters dressed as devils. Where the surf was stupendous and the Scene was multinational cool kids all high as and full of wow man out-there epic waves - surfer travelers tales - Goa, Bell's Beach (wow man you been THERE!) Bali, Sunset, all the surf hot spots, the next dream ride.

We bunked down in disco-owner Willi’s airy studio apartment on the disco's upstairs roof where a fruit bat lived on a stand under a giant poster of a mad magician with pointed teeth in evening dress plunging a stake into a naked woman’s heart.  It disgusted me.  In Willie’s bedroom a filigree shade over a lava lamp threw weird pulsing patterns over the black satin walls, bed-cover, sheets and pillows.  The bed was suspended from ceiling on silky ropes with tassels  The ceiling above it was a mirror. Above the deer antlered ebony bedhead was a lime green fluoro poster of a female alien’s head with moiré light emanating from her third eye. 

A huge six foot high ebony Dodo glared from a dark corner.He had a thing for Dodo's. 

They lurked in unexpected places, even a tiny one in the bathroom cabinet.

The whole scene I found very unsettling, the glorification of the dark side.  The best thing that happened there, for me,  was that the fruit bat flew away on the full moon. 

 I threw my burnoose over the big black Dodo. It spooked me.

 Willie was a photographer and took many photos of us both, a couple of which have survived the years. 

     
One of me against the poster of the alien with the third eye,  another with Tom, him hogging the frame, me peeping around him, says it all

 I sent my accumulated notebooks and memorabilia home to Australia when I needed to lighten my load. Many didn’t make it, but these old photos have.

In Biarritz I became very dislocated.  Willie’s studio and the disco below didn’t help. I left Tom to his work and wandered alone along the clifftops and beaches, sorbing the surf. Memories of that distant Australian pristine surfing lifestyle shot through my deeply locked crazed mind like crystal rays.  Sometimes I felt euphoric, in a state of inner revelation and awareness, in which my super ego flew and I would dance and sing like a loon in dawns and sunrises, surfing the huge grey combers, letting my spirit soar with the seabirds along the waves.  But other times I was in wild madness, with all sorts of dislocated images terrifying me, sending me into deep depression.  Then I would feel as if I had lost it, that all the striving to enlightenment and awareness was some trap to enslave me to some weird super being I could never escape, some energy that would eat my soul and trap me in eternal perdition, like the Bruegel view of purgatory.  One disgusting image was of a field of hideous coarse gross heavy footballer-types writhing in an orgy, caressing their chubby erections with long tails which I saw were coming from suppurating anuses,  bloodied with pus from bulbous broken hemorrhoids.  As I watched their collective crocadillian eyes all turned to me, focusing on me, yellow and evil, full of a lust that made me shudder and retch. 

From this I devised a scale of grey from innocence to debauchery.   Alice and the White Rabbit were my innocent images at the white end of the scale and these Bruegellian orgies of male deviates were the dark, evil end.   I wondered how much worse it could get.

All my being seemed directed to preserving the beauty and love of a world gone wrong, horribly wrong, through the vile practices of deviates controlled by debauched lusts as shown to me by these foul images, from which I cringed, begging my mind to release me, back to that simple Alice before she went through the mirror.  But it was too late.  There was no going back.  She, who would save the world, had first to know what it was that ailed the world.  The pictures were not pretty.   All the devil imagery back at the discotheque worked to reinforce what seemed to be a trip into hell itself, so I shunned the studio, wandering, sleeping where I happened to be when I felt sleepy, on park benches, on the sand at the foot of cliffs, on the grass on the clifftops, in people’s gardens.  Time became irrelevant. 

I met an old face.  Albie, a surfer from Noosa, turned film maker. We met beyond the break waiting for a big one.  Later, on the beach, he told me of his trip to Hawaii and California following the surfing competitions.   It seemed he lived in another world. 

A world of freedom and clean waves, golden beaches and beautiful babes.  When had I lost it, that crystal aquamarine vision ?

He was living in a group house on the cliffs and asked me back.   About fifteen or so long-haired sun-brown nubile beautiful people, mostly surfers of many nationalities, were lazing around on batik cushions under a psychedelic tie-dyed parachute draped from the ceiling, passing the mouthpiece from a large hookah around.  It was all so cool.  Soft Ravi Shankar sitar infusions, incense wafting, crystals gently spiraling in vagrant airs catching late sunset rays, throwing rainbow spectra randomly across long gleaming silken tresses and the nut-brown silken bodies in tropical silken sarongs. “Hey, man.  Hey, lady.  Too much.  Far out.  Cool.”   Then I saw they were all tripping. 

Catherine, a large Swedish woman with the body of the Venus of Dusseldorf, sampaku eyes and golden hair swishing past her bum leaned in conspiratorially.  “Have a trip”.   It was an invitation from a goddess.

“Owsley,”   said the lithe Japanese Hawaiian surfer lying with his head in her lap.  The knowing eyes.  The music subtly changed from sitar to Vivaldi’s Concerto pour Deux Mandolins et Flutes.   My eye was caught by the afternoon light bringing to life a fantastic gold foil relief wall sculpture of a graceful nymph with the sun on her left, as my mind wafted into fantasies,  surfing the slow delicate flute.Peace and Love.

I wondered if our species would survive the onslaught of the mind-blaster music pumping through the discos, deafening, benumbing.  How much more beautiful was this elegant flute with the mandolins.  I heard a click in my head, then became emotional and reached to embrace the pyknic goddess: “you are my mother”  I sighed, wanting to be enfolded, seeking sanctuary, to be wrapped eternally in her great bosom.  Then I recovered and backed away, feeling the judgement of the cool eyes, her revulsion at my display.  One didn’t.  It wasn’t “cool”.   The wind suddenly came in the room in a gust, blowing out the candles that had been lit as the last of the day drained away.   It was a sign.

“ You are satanaku",  hissed Catherine, recoiling.   I was damned.  The royal court had judged me unfit.  My worst nightmares were confirmed.

I fled out into the late twilight and wandered the cliffs in a ferment of fantasies.  I was a reject.  Second-rate.  Uncool.  I was the submarine eye watching the play of life through reeds and seaweed.  I was seeking the Black Sun via the lapis lazuli.  The gamut of disjunctive gleanings from the occult crowded in:  the Fool, the Hanged Man, the Burning Castle. Tantra and the magic of the red school.  Swastikas - firewheels.  The wheel of life.   Macrobiotics.  Satanaku. Aliens.  An entire separate race among us with super powers and a third eye.  I was their creature, some pet in the spaceship control room.  “Let her stay, she’s harmless”  I hear them thought-projecting to each other.  I, the alien on my own planet.  They the hive-masters,  harvesters of human essences.   Fattening us all to their needs.  I am their creature,  I have a chip in my head, they can read me, follow me, control me, anytime, anywhere.   “It’s that little number 43287659 of the model Betaplus from S3- she’s cute - thinks she can see us, give her another dose of mindblokka and let her loose again - see what she does this time”.   A phantasmagoria of future projections - where are we going - who are we - what is this thing called life ? ... Meaningless strings of unknowable code....   xxyy   ###   **^---\\\  >> oo x ~~~~ `` === click click......interspersed with profound moments of extreme enlightenment in which I had the philosopher’s stone, had alchemised the dross and found nirvana.

All night I wandered, the chaos of thoughts entangled maddening me, locked in subjective image assimilation overdose.

In the early morning in the dark just before the dawn, wandering the streets totally out of my mind, I saw an apparition.  A white vehicle like an armored moon buggy, with a yellow revolving light on it, spewing a yellow powder out over all, manned by figures completely covered in helmeted white space suits. DDT.  Revolting.   They poisoned the streets at night.  I began to see the poisoned world, the pollution, the infiltrated poisoned food.  Smog.  Filthy cities.  Death of all the small creatures so that we might thrive.

My mind turned from the phantasmagoria of my inner spiritual world to the real world, the real environment.  In this I experienced a strong sense of externalization, a rooting of self and consciousness in the present moment, here and now.  I saw how I could be either inside or outside.  Subjective, objective.  Introspective or externalizing.  It was almost like a muscle in my head, an ability to open or close some inner mechanism. 

A switch that went click.  A worry in itself. Was I a droid?  I practiced for a while and realized I had had glimmerings of this ability for some time, but that this was the actual coming to that awareness.  Now I was in control.  Then I began thinking through the channels of what exactly we were on this planet.  Why we seemed to be an aberration in evolution, in that we were fouling our own nest.  It did not fit in the view of human beings as God’s children.  Why didn’t we “fit” ?  Surely we are part of the Divine Plan ?  The logical extension to that line of questioning was that such reasoning was all part of the brainwashing, the implanting, the images of a cultural mythology that had been in place since priests ruled minds with religion, politicians with ideologies.   I actively was separating from the brainwashing of my culture where the ego attached its deeper meaning and higher thoughts to that Platonic spiritual world in which the soul was not of this world, but was immortal passing through to other worlds through this body and time.  It was not a comfortable experience as I dragged myself from a vision of a single ultimate absolute Truth to a relative Truth which included all beings living in an single objective reality.  I was being initiated into an elite group with planetary awareness which saw beyond that other power elite group with the supposed divine right to rule the lesser mortals of a place called “the world”.

I became focused, no longer tortured, now alert,  conscious that I had a greater task than my own small private hell to encompass and understand.   Here was the Big Picture starting to unfold.  A sense of exhilaration, similar to having reached the peak of a high mountain and seeing an immense view unfold before you, beckoning you on to yet another far horizon and offering a clarity, a sanity, an understanding that this was at last the right way, that the struggles were over, for now.

At last my brain detached from emotional self-examination, from the pain of being separated from my child, and began that voyage that led me eventually to become the ecologist I am today.  It was the extension of the thinking that had been awakened in Morocco by Jean Bissett when he showed me the flints in the desert, combined with my innate sense of freedom and surfer's love of our planet.  Here and now in Biarritz in the freaky yellow fog of this poisonous surreal cart of death I saw we were killing the earth with chemicals in a mindless attempt to sanitize our city environments. I suddenly saw civilization, as we lived it, as a toxic function of our species. It was not the way of nature. I naively reasoned human civilization  was an alien implant. Or so my questing mind saw then. A possible Truth that begged to be tested. Find this answer and get the clue to the next part of the puzzle. Who are we? What is this thing called Life? What can we believe? Mythos. Logos. Truth. I felt I was locked in Ali Baba's cave surrounded by precious gems, each one a possible truth. Only one could release me to freedom. But which one was the Absolute Real Truth? How did I find a way to choose?

I was not able to maintain this as a constant state, but this was one of the major moments of those kinds of realizations.  It was many years before I was able to say I had finally overcome dark side, the pain, the emotional hell.

When I finally returned to Willie’s studio it was mid-morning.  I showered and sat naked by the open window in a cool zephyr on a silk cushion,  meditating.   I took myself into the calm harmonic center of my being and released myself from purgatory, cleansing my mind.  Aware of what I had experienced but not wishing to enter those thought fields again.  I took myself into no-mind.  After some lifetimes, drifting , thoughtless, carefree,  I emerged renewed.  My snake had shed its skin.  I understood the price of knowledge now.  The dark side would always be there.  My task was to maintain my freedom from it, or be damned to witness its foulness, to be tortured in hell.

Among people we met in Biarritz were members of the Basque Ballet who entranced me.  Exquisite artists, beautiful, graceful, intelligent and worldly.  When they found we were going north to Paris  they offered us space to stay in their Paris apartment.  

But first we hitched to Bergerac, to the small hamlet of La Veysierre, where Phillipe Beaumont had a studio retreat near his mother’s farmhouse.  The ride out of Biarritz was a small Renault, driven by a lanky son of France, smoking Gitanes, playing the car radio loudly and singing along in a gravel voice while smiling at us genially.  There was a back seat speaker behind me.  Paranoia returned with “Windmills of my Mind” and Donovan’s “Love is the Season of the Witch”.  The forces were still out to get me. I was the witch, being punished, burned at some stake of my fantasy hell and I was plunged again into speechless torment behind my mask of “cool”.  I was going further & further away from my baby and getting more anxiety-ridden by the day.

Again I was plunged into mental ferment, madness. Everything was threatening.  The universe was conspiring against me.  I had committed the ultimate crime of abandoning my child and I would pay the price of eternal torture. Listen to the music, babe, you are being tormented by us, we are everywhere and today you are ours to play with and you will be awake and feeling every barb, every pain we inflict.  No way out, no sweet slipping into unconsciousness, no sleep of the dead.  Alive we eat you, except irony of ironies, it is you who eat yourself.  We have penetrated your last sanctuary and here we turn you against yourself while we watch and laugh like Roman emperors.  Release the monsters of horror for our sport.  This music is being played for you kiddo,” two rabbits running in a ditch, love is the season of the witch”.  You are the witch, bitch, our toy, our plaything.

Every loaded word plucked my gut strings and wrung out my screaming heart.  God’s wrack. No woman escapes this vile torturer you are being delivered to, you will be locked up forever. Tom became some hippie pirate gangster who had kidnapped me and was going to sell me to Phillipe Beaumont’s mother.  The car driver was some old acquaintance of Tom, part of the network of female slavers and I was in the pipeline to hell.  I was in a secret country controlled by a psychic mafia.  No-one came here unless they were the creatures of the Joker from Hell, the boss of this anti-Eden.  Every road sign had a mysterious code of messages, haunting me, echoing down the reference grids and webs of my neural nets and finding no resting place. 

“On a wagon bound for market, there’s a calf with a mournful eye.”  Joany Baez singing another song mocking me.  I couldn’t hear the rescue bit where the swallow flies free in the sky for the pounding of the blood in my ears.  I was bad blood.  I was the wrong seed.  I would be punished in hell and this was the beginning of eternal slavery for having failed to be that good mother who never leaves her baby, who fights the father tooth and nail to retain her child rather than be the submissive, permissive martyr to the cause of love.  I had failed to recognize the real game.  The game is not the love of the man, the mate, it is the possession of the child, the blood, the genes.  The male is the invader who would steal the jewels of my womb and I, fool, innocent, thought he came to love. But life is no game you stupid girlthing. Click, click, went my head.  Pathetic creature, you thought you could tame your invader, thought you could create a fantasy in his brain of the two as the one and the three as the one when the baby arrived.  That the best part.  They roared with laughter and I was reduced to cringing shame, blood squirting through my eyeballs as I realized that goddess was in their vile crew and  I was shattered in a million fragments as the laughter of Venus penetrated my mirror of wishful thinking and that whore went tripping with Pan making the fool of me.  You see, we make you ours, your mind is not your own any more. I was the ridiculous toy of the Joker as that cruel god sat on its throne of lost souls and peeled itself another grape -  my head - fed on my brains with garish delight - you are my natural prey.  Born to be my victim.   Submit,  you piece of hippy shit, you stupid woman who thinks she can use her pathetic powers to change the world.  We rule, we are the ones who inherit, you fool, my fool. We inherit your soul, but first we send you mad. Click, click, hear it, that’s us, doing it, to you, by remote.  The gods were laughing, laughing.  And I had believed. I had believed in love, in a better way, in the power of my heart to prevail. I  lost all grip on reality. Despite my strong revelatory experience in Biarritz I was as fragile as ever. 

I needed to be in a quiet place, undisturbed, to clear my mind and rest, away from city people and habits.  At first it was very hard. Phillipe's mother was part of the plot.  She was another witch, to whom I had been delivered, so she could enslave me and teach me the ways of the Joker’s realm.  At night I could hear them outside, breathing heavily, waiting to harvest me when I was ready to be sacrificed.  I would lie frozen with fear as their footsteps came nearer, then there was a sinister scratching on the walls.  My clothes hanging on their pegs would suddenly fill out with the bodies of the other dead souls who had gone before me.   The studio hut became a fattening cell and tomorrow I would meet the fate of the goose I had seen being stuffed for foie gras  the day before.  The firelight threw up hideous faces on the wall and when I looked into the fire it was a landscape of hell, full of roasting victims, attesting to the power of these mocking forces and their evil intent.  Let us show you the movie of your future, they hissed and crackled and the burning logs suddenly exploded showering sparks, burning me in a synchronous exhibition of their power over my mind.  Click went my head again.  Why wouldn’t my switch work for me....

I summonsed my deepest strengths and threw out these horrors.  Then, like magic, came the messengers of good.  The angels sang, the sunbeams of the new day infused my shattered soul with surging relief and I pulled my battered carcass ashore from the slimey clutches of what would drag me into eternal perdition and lay exhausted on the shores of love once again.  My savior stroked me, loved me, took me for walks in the woods and showed me the beauty and made me part of it all again.  Gone was the pain, gone the delusions, gone the negative images of madness and into my mind came again Venus, the goddess restored to her shell throne and we danced and sang for freedom and joy.   After the troughs, the peaks.  I was not stable, but I was able to see that madness would eat me alive if I let it and I clung to positive upward thinking and drew images of hope and peace and joy.   As I drew my mind worked back through what I had experienced, I saw cause and effect and knew I could, and would defeat the demons within and unite my higher self with my will to win through to that ultimate truth that would bring the understanding I so desperately sought in my quest for my holy grail.

Notebook July 1968.    La Veyssiere, près de Bergerac and a return to reality.  Some pressures still in my head and I wonder if Paris is really the trap.  Willie,  the Biarritz batman,  said I wouldn’t get past Khatmandu.  Man, as if that matters - peace is within and I go east.  But first to Norway and Lapland.  Here the scenes: Tom took all the acid, I threw away the kif.  Ho hum.  Now eating, eating. So much.  I must have gained a lot.   I was 50 kg in Biarritz and thin.  Here I felt the spirits very strongly - and the stupidity of the negative imagination making every placement of every object a strange omen.  From Biarritz it was all red and white roses and the problem of which was the right rose.  Red Queen.  A tied-up fox.  Then the flute in the woods and along came the Hell’s Angels, right on time..  Lost “Secret of the Golden Flower” and my black book on the way.  Omens.   Well, so now they’re gone and that’s that.  I am left with “The Prophet” (Gahil Gibrahn) and my orange folder of exercise books.  Felt the farmer was going to turn my spirit into ether or a goose or a dog on the 9th January with the full moon.   Beautiful living.  Fires good.  Making love a lot.  Tom drawing a lot and sunshine for last five days.  Madelaine featured in my rehabilitation.  Tom on acid growing in the rain transfixed by an orange dhalia amongst the potatoes - but why couldn’t he wait just a day until I had the balance going a bit better.  Really juvenile, impatient.  Dreams every night and early morning plots.  Things come back in the mornings.  Catherine telling me I was Satanaku on acid is the worst part - trepanation in Tibet - something to look forward to - don’t the French like me being telepathic - why will they want to get me - the eating has much to do with it I feel - the thinner I am the more the vibrations come.  Male female.  Atlantis again.  Have I inherited ?

Slept on Madelaine’s lawn under the moon felt like this was it, this was where my soul would be taken and I had come through the pipeline to a village where they transposed souls from lost stupid girls from Maroc who had to pay the price of abandoning their children across into dogs, cats, geese, cows, peacocks. rabbits - the first visit to the farm and the mayor threw out lettuce leaves and I thought he had read my mind about rabbits - he was feeding the one I would be put into that night, under the moon, locked forever in the body of a rabbit to be one day eaten by the fat mayor.  I hope one day to look back on this and laugh and perhaps feel wiser, but right now who can really be sure. The dreams keep coming featuring Algy in red and blonde - he really looked great on acid.  Then I remember that acid scene and she definitely did say I was Satanaku and the lights went out and I flipped out and called  big blonde Swedish Catherine my mother, everyone digging it, except me, who cringed in shame at exposing myself so to ridicule and fled.  Here Madelaine says the head pressures and clicks are physical from thinking too much - too much blood in the capillaries - makes them expand.

I must learn to think in balance, not to put other people on my trip and to further life with beautiful creations and gentle and simple living.  Haiku.  Macrobiotics.  Yoga.  Aikido.  Meditation through “Secret of the Golden Flower” centering.  Biodynamic plants. Isometrics.  Music.  Watercolours.

After a week my mind became more stable and I became very calm, at peace within, enjoying the company of Madelaine, Philippe’s mother, not a vaudevillian witch but a real class act.  She made pâtés with goose liver and mushrooms, a delectable sought-after gourmet item she sold to the Ritz in Paris, among other high-class and very pricey clientele.  I learned the art of chopping onions, garlic, the best herbs, milking, the right way to harvest vegetables, when fruit were right to eat, how to clean snails for the table and how to judge a beast for the eating.   It was Madelaine was who improved my bread making and introduced me to the fundamentals of making cheese.  In the evenings around the fire after the day’s work around the cottage we would take out the threads and jewels and create tapestries and God’s eyes.   I learned the rudiments of spinning and weaving. 

The crone witch transformed to the goddess who nourished me body and soul.  My mind transformed from a controlled slave to a worthy free woman devoted to gaining wisdom and skills.  The seeds were laid for the growth that would come later, all through my life.  I put on weight and bloomed again. The macrobiotic diet and drugs had made me very thin, almost gaunt.  There’s a clue for the worried mother seeking signs of drug ingestion in her wayward daughter hell-bent on fleeing the nest environment.   The arts of the goddess extend to alchemy, chemistry and medicine.  My soul healed and soared again. I began to shape up a vision of the coming Golden People. People of the future shaped by the right diet and mind-state, people who were in harmony with nature, fine strong people filled with compassion and love.  Clever people who saw life on the planet in real terms, unclouded by religion, superstition and mythology.  My version of the super-race.  I started to write it all down and became very intent in observing results of different food combinations on my body and mind-state, using food as medicine.   I was almost sorry when Philippe arrived and we decided we would all travel up to Paris together in his old Kombi. 

It was July 1968.