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.

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.