Book 1:7 Tangiers3

Ixltan

Huichol Peyote ceremony bead art 

A Magic Spell for a Far Journey:

Four words crystallize the spirit in the space of energy.

In the sixth month white snow is suddenly seen to fly.

At the third watch the sun’s disc sends out blinding rays.

In the water blows the wind of the Gentle.

Wandering in heaven, one eats the spirit-energy of the Receptive.

And the still deeper secret of the secret:

The land that is nowhere, that is the true home...

The Secret of the Golden Flower

Tom called me in for a hookah and mint tea interlude. I’d had the odd toke of joints in my travels. Hadn’t had much of an effect before. Nothing since getting pregnant tho, because I had to keep a clear head to take care of my baby. I went through the motions, but this was definitely not any drug experience I’d had before. This was the yellow Tangiers hashish, a quantum leap beyond any soft kif hit. I was in such a mental mess it didn’t occur to me to question what Tom was passing to me, his radiant eyes so full of love (er…drugs). As the THC took hold I retreated deeply into myself and returned to the balcony to sort the good from the bad, the seeds from the trash in the mix.

Sifting took care of a lot of it.  I watched the dust siftings drift off the balcony and out, lifting on airs, sinking, then suddenly blasted away.  That is death, I thought.  You drift out, lift and soar and soar and fly and are suddenly dematerialised into a zillion atoms, scattered electrical returns to the rest of the throbbing biosphere.  Whoosh !  Then there was the wind.  A seemingly random force to be reckoned with.   If I didn’t pay attention I was in danger of losing the lot.  That made me sit up.  Some driftings landed on ledges below, or settled along drain lines.   Others, in a discrete cloudlet, kept wafting out to disintegration. 

Seeds and stony grounds from the old myths of the Bible - put it where it will do the best or let it be blown by the wind to random chance fates.   Actively intervene to determine fate through your action. Help it grow or let it rot, or watch it go to its own fate.   Every thought cannot grow into a major concept.   Some are just the trash, the unfortunate, the also-rans.  Born of one source, but not all succeed in replicating themselves or growing and realising the seed potential to be that plant.  Many seeds are produced, but only a few will grow to be seedlings. Fewer still to be that forest tree producing that crop of seeds, year after year. Let them go, unimportant. Focus on what is useful.  My mind started running away and the thoughts tumbled one after another as I struggled to maintain some sequential order in my thinking. Quality of thought.  The best information.  Quality in, quality out.  Only the first-hand experience tells you the truth.   I was quickly shifting from sifting and sorting to mining the rock face for diamonds. How could one determine the truth if one was not living truthfully. Speaking the truth not coloring one’s words with opinions and conjecture.  But how could anyone know what truth is if the person was speaking from a mind conditioned by lies fed to them since birth.  Who was this me, this person, this I. Subjectivity. Objectivity. I seemed to be swinging from one state to another.

The effects of the hashish and kif mixture in the hookah was unlocking the secrets of my mind’s workings.  Fascinated I observed myself thinking.  Wondered if I could change my thinking, wondered what I would change it to if I could.  It had to be right.  It was natural.  It was a special substance, like putting a supercharged octane in a racing car after first breaking it in with vin ordinaire.  Subjectivity. Objectivity….I needed to get above this vacillating mind-set. I needed to be free of this mind lock. My mind responded slowly to the new charge, synaptic responses went into overdrive, locating never-before-used networks….. then ……WHOOSH...I was IN!  Surfing the cosmos.  In the Enchanted Realm of the Insighted Vision. Everything was so beautiful. Colors resonating & vibrating. Patterns revealed in the simplest of things. Sounds had a scintillating new clarity, the playful wind was singing to me. My hands suddenly were mysterious and wonderful appendages, were they really mine?

I looked below at the coolies hauling crates, pushing carts, unloading the ships.  They looked like ants.  Clumping.  Having little discussions.  Dispersing and following each other in little trains or going out of frame.  It was deeply absorbing.  Like having the toy landscape like one I once devised in the dirt beside our old house with my little brothers to play with their Dinky toy cars on, but just out of reach.  Memories of my childhood came flooding in, filling me with waves of warm emotions for my parents and brothers. I felt them surround and embrace me and I sent them back my deepest love.

But I could not touch my family any more than I could take that distant midget car down the tiny road, brrm, brrm... I was not super-human.  I had to watch that car go without my driving force while my mind tried to divine what the occupants were doing, and why.  

I could not.  The possibilities were too immense.  I was fantasising.  My mind started to boggle...diversity...immensity....eternity.....limitations….I could feel my brain exploding and suddenly ….pop!…I was back in the here and now on this precarious perch. I felt rattled. Vulnerable. Above it was sometimes a scary place.  Time to retreat, inside, back to safety and solid walls, friends. From the room I could hear delicate music. I needed to dance, to stretch, to let my energies flow and my love fill the universe.  So I hurriedly finished the task of sorting the rice and returned to the group.

I was met with a scene of Tom playing Sven’s sitar, Sven in the kitchen cooking bread and Ute preparing vegetables.   A deep silence beyond the music.   I danced, swirling around the room and singing, making Om sounds through a huge range of mouth shapes and tongue positions, expressions and keys.  Playing with the ball in yin and yang balances. The others seemed to come out of their trance and soon the energy in the room was jumping and we all started talking at once.  Tom put the instrument down and made us a pitcher of watermelon juice. Feeling energised again, back to my normal happy unfettered self,  I cooked the rice and made gomasio while Ute laid a low table, decorating it with flowers.  Hungry now,  we all sat around on the cushions admiring the scrumptious feast before us. Salads, raw vegetables, hummus, rice, gomasio, khobs, figs, honey, nuts, watermelon. We linked hands and gave thanks for all who had been involved in bringing this gift of food to our table.       

After the delicious meal we all had another round of the hookah lying back sated on the cushions watching gulls swooping past the filigree windows like pieces of shattered mirror fragments.  Then Sven showed us what can be done with a sitar in the hands of a real musician. Ute was teaching herself beading and brought out beaded treasures she’d collected in the Tangiers soukh and her own work to show me. I immediately fell in love with the art and we sat quietly sharing the beauty in the colours and patterns as she showed me how to weave simple bead bracelets.  Tom surprised me by bringing a bag of colored embroidery threads and tiny sticks from his basket and he showed us both how to create God's Eyes, sacred symbols of the Huichol people of the  Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental. Made by weaving colored threads around a cross of 2 sticks, the God's eye is symbolic of the power of seeing and understanding the unknown and unknowable, the Mystery. The four points represent earth, air, fire and water, the elemental processes. The colors used also have deep significance.  When hung up in a room they are said to bring a long healthy, happy life.

God's Eyes

We sat busy making these for an hour, weaving the colors and attaching beads to them. We hung them up in the sea-facing doorway to catch the sunrise rays where they flicked and twirled in the breeze. Ute attached tiny bells to one and it lent a simple delicate "ting" to the background noise of wind and the distant waves below. For me making the God's Eyes had been a rewarding and calming happy task. Easy to do, a portable beautiful craft. So I made a mental note to find the sellers of beads and embroidery threads before I left the city.

There was a banging on the entrance door up the passageway so being nearest I flitted up & opened it to be met by yet another beautiful hippy guy in Indian cottons. Long blond hair & soft gingery beard, laughing eyes. He was all hung about with musical instruments: a long (flute?) case on his back, a colorful fluoro Guatemalan blanket and baskets of ethnic flutes on his shoulders, one hand carrying a guitar case, the other hugging a large African gourd drum. No doubt he’d come to the right place! Grinning widely he squashed sideways past me, his gear bumping awkwardly down the passageway as he almost fell into the room and the arms of the very ecstatic Ute & Sven who greeted as a long-lost friend.

And so I met Arlo. I would encounter Arlo time and again over the next years in the most unexpected places, the bazaar in Istanbul, a mud hut village in the Iranian desert, a caravanserai in Herat, an ancient Maharajah’s palace in Rajasthan, Kathmandu (of which much more later), even a full-moon party in Mullumbimby in my own beautiful home Rainbow Region, back in Oz, some ten years later.  Arlo definitely got around and moved in ways I could only think of as amazing. He had a touch of magic about him, a wizard and a genius.

Arlo was (is?) an Americano ethnomusicologist and saxophonist on a 2-year sabbatical from a city symphony orchestra in U.S.A. He had been living mostly with tribal nomads and in remote villages collecting ancient traditional music and portable instruments. In the last few months he had traveled from Central America up to the Monterey Pop Festival in California where Sven and Ute had met him. He’d landed in Tangiers just a few days ago. His plan was to locate a camel train in southern Morocco, cross central Sahara into the Sudan, sail up the Nile into Egypt before heading for Mesopotamia and thence overland to India & Nepal. After that maybe if he had time it would be down into south-east Asia, island-hop thru Indonesia and eventually the reach the desert people on the Australian west coast. 

As he unpacked his impressive collection of wooden flutes and passed them around he told us stories of people and places that simply boggled me. Especially when he told us about the Mexican Huichol people where he’d been privileged to share in the sacred peyote ceremony . 

Peyote cactus in

We looked at the God's Eyes dancing in the breezy doorway and were blown away by the synchronicity of what we'd been doing as Arlo told us this story.  We marveled at the workmanship of the intensely colored beaded flute case he showed us that they had made for his large silver flute.

Arlo and Tom hit it off immediately. I looked at them as they went thru the “pleased to meet” rituals of the Brothers of the Road. Seemingly on first impression, they were doppelgangers. But they were like more opposite sides of the same coin. In appearance they were physiologically similar and they were dressed much the same, both spouting  the same Peace and Love messages in Americano hippytok – hey man, so cool, wow, amazing, far-out & so on.  But Arlo was an owl. A serious guy. A suave product of New York wealth. An academic, grounded, poised and well-contained in his body language and not particularly out to charm or entice, but with a quiet power that conveyed that here was a mature man with something worth listening to.  Tom was a feather, a will-o-the-wisp fly-away street-wise kid who used his whole body energetically, dancing like a Brolga on his toes, arms flailing, hands gesturing, while his mouth worked overtime to charm and fascinate his audience.

To top it all, Arlo had acid. Yes, Arlo was a game–changer. He changed my life, big-time, with his little blue Owsley acid pill. Alice found the Looking Glass and stepped straight through, surrounded by beauty, love and like-minds sharing an uncomplicated afternoon’s celebration of the Joy of Life. I let my pain and despair slip away and immersed myself in the moment.

With Arlo on a large silver concert flute, Sven on sitar, Tom on the African drum, Ute and I softly stroked  the  strings of sitar and oud and sang the words of an ancient song Arlo had brought with him from the Huichol ceremony:

The ancient oud, my favorite stringed instrument.

 Listen my children we are the ones, the path is clear, the danger is gone

Káuyumari will guide us only he knows the way, Light your candles, the gods have come

They were people, yet they were gods, Follow the eagle, see where she goes

From there they come, and the path unfolds, so then the example is set, we must follow along.

Look to the sky, to our Father above, we are all his children, dance to the song.

As the Ancient Ones knew, the time has come, the nieríka is opening, 

and we pass on to the sun.

Sven was so pleased with the first run-through he decided to get it down on tape and we developed it into a 10-minute event around the theme, all impromptu, just bouncing off each other in “the zone”, using our voices as instruments for extra fx.

 So the afternoon passed with music, dancing, singing and lots more kif smoking until the light outside the filigree windows turned indigo with the evening star forming a very strong symbolic statement with the water-bearer’s waxing sickle new moon as we planet voyagers swung into the Age of Aquarius.  It was the evening of January 31st, 1968.

 The Mahgrib call came wafting faintly on the evening breeze as we joined in meditation, bringing to a beautiful close a day that lives in my mind as one of the jewels of my memory. From the Me-Ta Loving Kindness breath regulating exercise we explored the ancient Secret of the Golden Flower method I was trialling:  centering and finding self-awareness - the centre in the midst of the conditions.  Circulation of the Light.  Transcendence.  The opening of the third eye. Bringing to unity with It All - soul and self, nature and life in the concept of Tao, of Ch’i. Feeling the energy flow as we contemplated the concepts of One People. One Planet. One Life. One Truth. All-embracing. Indivisible. OM AH HUM.

As we all stood quietly in the last light of dusk looking out over the Straits Ute brought us glasses filling each one from a glass pitcher with clear water. I held mine up and marveled at this amazing substance. This water. Life. I drank and felt reborn. It had been my first acid trip and if I’d planned it I could not have come up with a better way to have done it. What a day! Ixltan. The past had closed behind me and the way ahead was opening, beckoning, whispering “come to me, come to me”  ........O yes, I was on my way.

Tom & I looked at each other wordlessly; we needed to be alone, together, in our own beautiful space. We said our goodbyes, giving Sven & Ute big hugs as we left. With footsteps so light we were almost dancing, arms around each other, we wove our way back through the dark narrow lanes to our riad. Never had I felt such an electric magnetic need to be so close to another being. On the cushions under the stars we became one, holding each other close, enraptured.

Somewhere in the early hours I found myself awake, needing to think. I rolled away from the soundly sleeping Tom and quietly putting a few things in a soft cloth shoulder bag I left the riad, clad in soft-soled espadrilles and my amazing new burnoose cloak, the hood pulled up concealing my hair and upper face.  I explored the narrow curving steep alleys of the Kasbah and Medina, anonymous, walking swiftly in a state of exhilaration, feeling safe and secretive.  

Softly treading mysterious ancient paths

 I let myself get lost and proved I could find my way back into known territory, several times. Eventually I found a tea shop opening as the first light streaked the sky and enjoyed a mint tea, watching other cloaked figures scurrying past outside from a seat by the door. An unladen camel shuffled and lurched through the ally, surreally majestic and aloof. I had with me a new drawing book I'd bought in Spain and started a drawing.  This below is the result. My 1st drawing of the hundreds that followed over the next years. This naive inept sketch survived because I sent it back to Mama with my diaries from Formentera and London.

Ixtlan

I became so absorbed in my work the time just flew and I jerked into alertness around 7 a.m., realising I should get back before Tom woke & worried where I was. 

As I made my way back through the now busy alleys I felt light and happy, ready to move on and fulfill my dreams of finding Atlantis - walking with a donkey and finding good surfable waves along the coast. I felt changed and something inside said there was no going back now. Ah yes, Ixtlan!

Next  Blog #8… The road to Marrakesh. February 1968.

Book 1:6 - Tangiers2

A Meeting of Minds

Cafe Hafa today - a very different clientele

Café Hafa. I was in a chaotic mental state, one minute happy to be free, the next gripped by a torture of guilt and pain – how could I have left my baby with a violent brute? Would he hurt her too? The idea was driving me to madness. Tom sensed my neediness, reassured me, and gave me focus again. We enjoyed a simple fruit and yoghurt breakfast on our magical patio, lying back in the early sun on the cushions looking out over the Straits. It was Heaven. I really didn’t want to leave, but he convinced me and took me back to the Cliff Cafe Hafa where he’d arranged for me to meet Ute and Sven, the cool Swedish couple he’d been with the day before at the 1,001 Nights cafe.  It was a meeting of minds and we instantly all jelled. I felt we were all family. They were a very spiritual couple with feral knowing eyes.     Part of a Majorca-based band they had been touring and had been in California for the Monterey Pop Festival and Haight Ashbury for the Summer of Love.  I had just been in London for the British version of the ascent of Flower Power.

We had much to share:  beautiful feelings, the crazy behavior, the decadence, the inspiring music, radical ideas, and the hope inherent in it all. What was happening in our generation then was a complete lift-off from anything so far experienced. I wondered what it all meant – would it survive or be quashed by a fascist swing back to the conservative values of the past. I felt at last I was among people I could identify with; people who were concerned with the directions belief systems and lifeways were driving our human culture. People who thought in global, world, planet concepts and tried to make it all a better experience by living the truth they saw was a better way. I told them of the Conference of Dialectics and the inspiring ideas that had been shared there by speakers now viewed as legends of 60’s thinking and they told me of Esalen and the human potential and Earth planet-focused workshops they’d enjoyed there. We were all into Allan Watts and the emergence of yoga, meditation and other Eastern spiritual happening as the so-called Age of Aquarius manifested. 

For Tom all this was the confirmation of his convictions.  This was the New Age and he was its prophet, the traveling messenger with the Word. He was nearly jumping out of his skin with eyes on fire, hands expressive, arms whirling, as he dominated the conversation with his inspired rave: Brothers and sisters of the Way. We are All One. Consumerism is a sickness. Capitalism is destroying us. End wars. Embrace the Truth. And all the inspiring and crazy talk he’d rolled into a well-practiced (as I later found out) spiel that resonated in so many minds at that time, disillusioned seekers of a better way looking to heal a world gone wrong.. It was so easy to say Yes, Yes, to so much of what he was spouting. Something had to change and we were going to change it. We would spread the word as we traveled. People were listening. Something was happening Mr Brown! This miracle of life we all shared was not going to be lived in mindless drudgery, squandering resources, supporting the rich, feeding wars. We would bring peace and love, sharing and caring, equal rights for all regardless of race, creed, status, sex. There would be no violence, greed, pain in our Beautiful Rainbow Utopia. Ah yes, Tom had a Dream. Maybe he was mad but, if so, he wasn’t alone. It was a psychosis shared by many then and it felt good to me. The question was: how would this Islamic culture react to Brother Toma,  now morphed into Abdullah, Servant of the Prophet,  preaching to them?

We had so much to talk about and as Tom pointed out, little time, as we hadn’t explored Tangiers and our plan was to leave for Marrakesh next day. But we all felt we wanted to spend the rest of today together so we could relax and share on deeper levels. Despite my inner chaos, I had hoped to see something of Tangiers away from the Kasbah, but these beautiful people had captured me and I hadn’t felt such a rapport with anyone since London.

It was coming up to lunch time. Macrobiotics was our instant common link, unheard of in these local restaurants.  So they invited us to their rooms nearby, not far from the riad where we were staying, to prepare a feast for four, food prepared to our own liking. Whole, fresh and mostly raw.

I instantly loved their apartment. Similar to ours, but theirs was on a year’s lease so it was much more lived-in and personalised. Part of a riad set in the ramparts on the high point of the Kasbah that rise from the harbor port cliffs, quite close to the café. We entered via in a nondescript old door in a row of doorways set in a long wall. From street level stone steps led down through a low cave-like passageway that seemed to fall off the cliff as I could see water beyond. But then we went right and through another arched door and down again into a breath-taking long room with several levels and alcoves – white walls with ornate zellij mosaic tile features in niches & alcoves, Berber floor carpets and silk shawls draped over the long divan along one wall.  Filigree brass pendant lanterns suspended from ceiling chains.  A pile of silky cushions.  Polished brass and silver trays, a hookah.  A  mezzanine bedroom above behind a low carved wooden balustrade through which I could see several beds - floor mattresses with opulent covers and all hung with nets and curtains. 

Very similar to Ute & Sven's mezzanine bedroom

A basic tiny kitchen up 3 steps overlooked the room. Along the opposite wall bright light streamed in from several filigreed windows that framed blue of sky and water beyond.  I walked to a door where wafting cream silk curtains moved in gentle airs and filtered the late morning glare of sun reflecting off the Straits beyond. Outside was a miniscule cantilevered balcony suspended above a vertigo-inducing drop down the old stone walls to rocks and the port way below.  What a view!

 Sven explained that they were in a band based in Deya, Majorca.  Their music more New Age experimental than mainstream, a fusion of nature and eastern with lots of ethnic instruments.  They shared the apartment with the other band members, French, German and Danish guys, some of whom were due to arrive in a few days for creative recording sessions to capture the new material influenced by recent travels since they last performed together in the States.  Sven said he felt like an over-ripe fruit about to burst with seeds. Moog, slide and sitar were his thing, while Ute played lute, sitar, oud and other ethnic strings and was the main vocalist for the group, although some of the others sang too.

Ute & I were in our best - free flowing embroidered caftans, while Sven & Tom were both in Indian white flowing cottons.  We were almost matching pairs.  Except my caftan was white and Ute’s a more elaborate embroidered gold.  Both of us had waist length hair. I was a tanned dark-haired woman with a blond man and she a fair blond woman with a dark-haired man. It was a meeting of the hippy royals. Oh what a joke eh? I was hardly feeling royal and have never been one for airs & graces. But we shared a philosophy of  simple living and high thinking, not to the point of bread and water on an earth floor exactly, as this pad was Boho luxury. Ute and Sven were warm, reserved and very self-contained as a couple.   Tom and I were still in our early days and rather less together.   

Mint Tea

Tom immediately mulled the kif while Ute and Sven made a small charcoal fire and boiled up mint tea.  

 Brown rice and toasted sesame and salad and khobs all to be prepared.   
I was happy to be busy doing all this but waves of pain of missing my baby kept washing thru me. Despite the company and the amazing apartment suddenly I wasn’t feeling sociable at all, all knotted inside, needing my solitude again.  So I opted for sitting with the sesame seed & brown rice sorting trays on the tiny latticed balcony perched dizzily above the sheer fifty foot drop.  Below was the harbor, seagulls cruised at eye level and across the water was the way we had come. 

The sesame seed had to be separated into prime and ordinary and the rocks removed.   Then the ordinary seed was toasted and ground and mixed with salt and served as a condiment called gomasio.  The prime was reserved for sprinkling whole on the bread and vegetables or mixed with the brown rice.   This was a quiet task well suited to my mind-state.  It had all been so full-on.  A week of go-go-go through the most extreme of scene-changes.   The enormity of my actions was sinking in and I confronted the reality, tried to assess the consequences. Underlying my facade I was benumbed.  The reality of what had been done to me bit deeply. I was having flashbacks of being slammed against a wall, punched senseless. My baby standing in her bed, her arms stretched out to me crying…Mama..Mama.............. I was spiraling into dissociation.

Next……Tangiers 3. Arlo takes me to Ixtlan.