Book 1 #20 Out of Africa

Ochre City 

Axis mundi

The Bissets were finally returning to Marrakesh and asked us to go back with them.  

 I saw the adventure here was over.  

 The absence of my child was destroying me.  

 Tortured nightmares became intolerable. 

 What was he doing to her? 

 I began to seriously regret my romantic notions of leaving her with him.   

Back to Marrakesh we went, to live in fine style in the Bisset’s palatial mansion, where Tom painted and sold his works and earned us enough money to return to Europe.

Marrakesh had not finished with us yet. 

Living with the Bissets in the highly civilized rhiad-inspired modern mansion in the French Quarter was too good to leave. We had enjoyed their company in Tamri, camping out with all that entailed; then the expedition to Tafaya along the Saharan Atlantic Coast. That was another side of them as a group unit, becoming an efficient team of Leader, cook, navigators, scouts, troubadours, mechanic, and crazy kids as passengers. We all had a defined role. Mine? Cook’s assistant. Muscle when ensablé, fireside troubadour entertainer. General dogsbody. I was not just baggage.

I borrowed one of the family bicycles and took myself off exploring the city at every opportunity. I especially liked rising in the pre-dawn to cruise the markets or go out for miles beyond the walled oasis city to watch the sun rising over the snowy peaks of the High Atlas,  infusing the ochre city with glowing pinks and gold. 

Then cycle back in the morning cool to ride through the uncrowded souk in the stripy light and shade alleys, 

an effect created by the slatted awnings over the lanes. 

Very disco to ride under, traveling fast, like blinking on/off/on/off. 

Find an early coffee maker’s stall and sit discretely anonymous

 watching the normal life flow of the heart of this wonderful city.

Or to roam the King’s Gardens. Find extraordinary mosques, 

shrines, palaces.

Spend hours in wonder 

taking in the geometric tile patterns 

                                 on fountains, walls, floors.

I found the gardens. Among many, retreats of delight and wonder, I found the Jardin Majorelle.  So inspiring. That cobalt infused my being, so intense. I have carried something cobalt with me ever since; a bead, a truque, a thread of wool.


 Usually by nine or ten in the morning I’d return to the Bissets for the typical French breakfast of croissants & cafe au lait where the late risers were just emerging still tousle headed & bleary. That was when I’d retreat into the yoga room with early-riser Jeanne, her daughters and often Jean, for good sessions and meditation, if there was time.

I loved spending time with Jeanne who taught me so much about diet and yoga. Jean captured my mind. There he lives as a magnetic beautiful man who enjoyed his role as teacher. He would take me to his study and fill my head with his gleanings. His special research was the Prehistory of civilization. When we had been down in the Sahara he would wander off up the dry wadis for hours, sometimes alone, but mostly with his children. I tagged along too. He looked for prehistoric evidence and often returned from these sorties with a bagful of flints, old bone, stone tools, arrowheads. All exposed by the floods that whooshed through the wadis after rain. Around the fire at night he would examine his finds, sorting them, telling us all his theories about their origins, expanding into timelines and cultures of this ancient land. It all had me enthralled. I’d always wanted to be an archaeologist and he was my first mentor. It would be decades before my dream was actualized. Here in his study I could fill in the gaps of what little I’d understood so far. Most of his books were in French but I was a quick study and could basically understand the charts diagrams maps & other illustrations.

 I loved going through his stone artifacts collections and letting my hands and fingers absorb their inherent intelligence. He also had terra cotta and bronze statuary from ancient cultures.

 Facsimiles of the Venus of Dusseldorf, plaster slabs of cave art with bisons and hunters. Rice paper copies of Chinese and Tibetan and Sanskrit sutra texts. Buddha thangkas..And so much more.

Looking back I now see how each of these objects later played huge roles in my life.

It was an  Ali Baba's cave for me. Sometimes at siesta I would just curl up on his couch with one of his books and fall asleep, my head full of visions of Stonehenge, Çatal Hüyük;, Harappa, Olmecs.

The bookshelf shelf of works on comparative religions, myths, legends, drew me.

I discovered the ideas of Mircea Eliade. Axis mundi. I wanted to find some evidence of Atlantis. Real tangible hard evidence. But apart from unproven myths associated with some ruins in Morocco on the north coast, and the explosion of Santorini, it seems it was just that.  A myth. I still liked toying with the idea of it. 

Madame Blavatsky's translation of the Stanzas of Dzyan had its' place here too..

What stirred Nothingness to become Something?  Time was Not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.


Among the Sanskrit teachings  I came across the concept of kalpas, eons of time in which we grew, flourished, decayed and died, to return on the next turn of the Big Wheel. 
 Atlantis could fit in there, I pondered,  but the fossil record time line proved otherwise. Science knocked those notions right out of the ball park. Didn't stop me enjoying the fantasy, examining the pieces of the jigsaw, patch working a crazy pattern for an insupportable scenario in which our human civilizations had evolved from a galaxy far far away, cycling through many kalpas. Atlantis fitted in there; a myth carried through time as a warning, to which we never pay heed. According to the Sanskrit teachings we are now entering the 4th or maha-kalpa, an apocalypse of fire, water and wind. Let us reflect on that now as we cast minds back over our catastrophic devastating 2018 experiences. The ship of Fools with the Uber Fool at the helm.

Meanwhile back in Marrakesh fifty years ago, Tom was honing his preacher skills. In the evening after siesta I’d ride over to the Jamaa el F’na and find him all prophetic in his long white robes, enthralling bewildered groups of tourists and tribal visitors from Ghana or wherever, preaching his Dieu et Humanite raves. Brothers Sisters, We are all One. This is the Start of the New Age of Aquarius.  Share the Love. He would pass out little gifts of God’s Eyes and his preacher’s handbills, written out the previous kif-filled night, full of his naive pentel pen drawings &  philosophy. Then he would play his little tabla drums and I would accompany him with flute and dance, calling on other young women to twirl with me to the music. Some did, usually uninhibited hippy crazies, free as birds in foreign lands. But also young tribal men and women who just couldn’t resists, probably missing what was their normal as they navigated strange new cultures. I also vividly remember a tubby Texan strung about with cameras in a Hawaiian shirt doing a jig with us one night, watched by his little Lady Bird who looked like she wanted to just evaporate in sheer embarrassment that her Fred could do this to her. One for the family album ma’am!

Days passed, then it became obvious it could become weeks if we didn’t take stock. I had it in my mind to visit Fez. I had heard of the ancient library there where the saved books were taken after the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, Maybe I would find clues there to validate my wafty hypotheses.

After a few weeks we left our friends, with regrets, and set out to the north, via Rabat, Fez and Cuerta. A parting gift from Jean to me was his book I’d been studying: Mircea Eliade’s Images and Symbols. His axis mundi was to influence the huge leap of faith we were about to undertake.

My mind was slipping away.  I lived in a fantasy world.  In Fez I met a Danish man who taught me the Me-Ta Loving Kindness meditation.  Breath in love, breath out kindness.  Me on the in-breath, Love, Ta on the out-breath, Kindness. Compassion for all life. A perfect fit for Tom's We are All One.  I sat in a loft over a musical instrument maker’s shop locked into my meditations, rarely going out into this amazing city, totally absorbed in my inner conflict, reading Eliade, writing my Little Ayesha story. Channeling the Spirit of Atlantis and the Guardians of the Universe. What!!! Yes I had lost it. I had transcended to another plane of consciousness.

Eventually I received a message in that crazed head of mine that we were to go to the to the Arctic Circle, to Lapland, where the Chief Disciple of Buddha (who ?) sat looking out into the Center of the Universe.  Somehow it was part of our quest.  It was the message from the Spirit of Atlantis. There we would find The Answer.  To exactly what I don’t know.   
Quel folie !  I was so psychotic, feeding a fantasia creation. My reality had become a mixture of world myths, astrology, macrobiotics and drug narcosis, now overlaid with a huge construct of the axis mundi.  A ridiculous potage of charlatan nonsense in which I channelled other-worldly spirits, Guardians of the Universe. And so on.

Tom too enthusiastically shared a lot of this mirage construct. I was his seer, his muse, his connection to other dimensions.  “Far out !” was his memorable comment, vigorously embracing the new vision, his eyes like windmills as he processed it all through the drug haze oh his 3^rd pipe of the day.

So, compass set to the Center of the Universe, sails full of the winds of Karma, Eliade & the I Ching in our baskets, we set off from Fez on a course out of Africa and across Europe; passing through many countries, cultures and adventures as we homed in on this crazy mirage destination; the central axis for all future orientation? 

There ALL would be revealed. 

 Talk about dreams of Unknown Khadath ! 

We had to test this Truth.

Down the Yellow Brick Road we went. 
 Towards the Arctic Circle.

But here the story goes awry.  
 Fate showed its' hand. A lay down misere.

 Here belief gets suspended 
to the point where I still wonder

about the forces of chaos and butterflies farting 

making hurricanes happen in Rio.... and all that.

Thus ends Book 1. 

A donkey walk down the Atlantic coast of Morocco. 1968

Book 2 

 covers the next years, walking from Spain to India, with a few side tracks along the way. 

Yes, it is written, but whether I survive long enough to polish it up to Blog?

....stay tuned.