Ixltan
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| 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...
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.
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| 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 .
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| 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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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