Book 1:3 Barcelona to Gibraltar

As we journeyed along the Spanish coast from Barcelona to Gibraltar we passed from one bizarre setting to another, always warmly welcomed.  I’d categorise most of these people as the “International Set”. For the first time in my life I experienced the unique social scenes of wealthy foreigners at play and enjoyed the hospitality of a diversity of non-typical Spanish. All were Tom’s friends from past travels and all were worlds away from anything I’d previously experienced.  Our generous hosts usually drove us to the next large town and we made even more friends from the random lifts we got hitching south and west following the coast towards Africa.  Travelling with my husband was never like this. Tom’s spontaneity & lightness of spirit just gave us wings, opened doors.

I won’t be going into the mundane details of this first week on the road, as we have yet to get to my long walks. I can only give you quick snaps, keyhole views of some of our encounters. You’ll have to fill in the colours, the flavours of Spain and the Spanish culture and imagine how two strangers were coming closer as they travelled. The spaces in the postcards I’m giving you here were of course full of little daily necessities, like eating delicious new foods, washing in ever-stranger situations, dealing with weather, language, navigating cities, getting visas and all the business of moving across a new landscape.  It wasn’t like today where you can turn on TV or surf the net and be instantly shown almost any place on the planet.  All this was new, unknown. 

Compounding this, my personal dose of culture shock, know I was also not fully “with it”, externally calm, seemingly in control, but in a state of remove. Inwardly I was dealing with being the battered wife and bereft mother, being ripped apart by a torture of guilt, shame, betrayal, in a state of shattered deep confusion.   Only Tom kept me focussed, safe and reassured that I was doing what had to be done to survive.  I had to find the Truth and each of the social settings we entered as guests opened my eyes to yet another truth about the way things are, the way people lived and the main glue that kept their lives intact, or otherwise.  I felt like an alien anthropologist, a visitor from some other-world civilisation studying human behaviours on Planet Earth. My life might be breaking apart but I was determined my Phoenix would rise.

Our first stop close to Barcelona was an eccentric artist’s bizarre waterfront studio mansion on the Costa Brava, with geodesic domes and eggs in the garden and a tower to meditate in while looking out over the cliffs and coves across the Mediterranean.  The artist himself was away, but we were welcomed by his model and mistress-companion, a rather wild (to me then) Rumanian woman called Petra, who served us zarzuella, a hot and spicy seafood feast, full of confronting marine beasts with hard horny carapaces and claws.  We slept on a pile of cushions in the tower while Petra danced below in the surrealistic garden around the pool, naked in the moonlight, singing rich Rusky folk songs in her rich contralto……. . Ah, Chichonya.......I fell asleep dreaming of my Russian mother, remembering how she sang this song as she danced with me as a tiny tot.  And woke in tears. Tom sensed my distress and reached across, pulling me close, holding me in an empathic warm comforting hug that eased away my pain and we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

In a finca near Valencia we bedded down in the cold sad family home of Juan, a lonely bullfighter who had fallen from grace.  His mother, a senile ancient crone, all decked in black finery overtopped by the traditional mantilla, shuffled from room to room muttering and testing the antique mahogany furniture for dust, ringing a bell loudly to summon an equally ancient maid when she found any.  Our host drank cognac incessantly, morbidly.  But he brightened up when Tom shared a joint with him and he showed us his clever bullfighting moves as Tom played the cheeky teasing bull.  Lithe and proud, dancing.  The heels of his boots clicking on the tiled floor. Flamenco rhythms.  Midnight velvet eyes, flashing electric shafts in the spluttering candlelight with each pass of his swirling cape.  The drama, the passion.  I was enthralled, despite my revulsion for bullfighting.  But the whole place had a darkness that seemed to echo in the soul of the mother and her troubled son. However the hospitality was generous and we were pampered like royalty.

That night our bedroom was ultimate luxury. I slept high on a platform in a canopied four poster on a feather-down mattress under crisp embroidered white sheets.  Tom had a single sleigh bed in an alcove which must have been used by a servant. Beyond the terrace doors a pergola provided a stage for dramatic dancing shadows in the strong winds which drove scudding clouds across the moon.

In Alicante  we happened upon another of Tom’s chance acquaintances, Milo, as we sat enjoying a late lunch of bread and cheese on sunny steps in the Old Town. He invited us back to his place and I was more than astonished as, in the twilight gloaming, we wandered in to a gypsy camp outside the city, He led us through a warren of tents to one with a luxurious silken tassel and jewel hung interior, where dark people in bright clothes reclined in opulence around a hookah.  A magnificent hawk-featured dark stallion of a man in skin-tight black velvet pants and a jewelled satin bolero over his otherwise bare beautiful brown hairy torso played sensual flamenco in a corner, his hooded eyes flashing me invitations.  A richly throaty-voiced gypsy queen, her generous curves clad in velvets and satins, accompanied him in a moaning humming wail, soto dolce, as she snuggled down on the cushions beside me, her heavy scents invading my space, as she let me play with her little velvet bag of precious gems - diamonds and rubies, sapphires and pearls.  Or were they just glass tat?  No matter, to me they were faery stones full of sparkle and magic, just as her glittering eyes, close to mine, seemed afire with charged mysteries and spells.

I fell asleep on the cushions listening to flamenco guitar, watching the firelight flickering in the dark eyes. It was dark when Tom softly tickled my nose and woke me, whispering that Milo was leaving to visit his brothers near Granada and we had a lift if we wanted. I wanted. In a comfy old battered Chevy Yank tank with Milo in the front passenger seat and a stern old man driving, Tom & I in back with 2 chickens and a goat, it was off inland into the dawn-touched mountains, lurching and swaying over dubious dusty roads, stopping here for food and drink, there for rests to enjoy a view.

Late in the day they dropped near us near Granada outside some stone pillared gates of a large spread. After emotional farewells they drove on.  An amiable old large wolf hound ambled out to greet us followed by a posse of noisy kids riding small horses bareback.  Next we were hauled,  baskets and all, up behind them on the horses and I held very tightly to the teen rider as we cantered across a field to the main villa, a large rambling stone pile set in a green valley surrounded by low dry hills.

Here we spent a couple of very happy relaxed days in good company. I felt a lot of my pain lifting away. It was the sort of happy environment I had hoped my own life might become.

Our hosts were a family of Chilean artists.  A happy colourful group of people who spoke six languages all at the same time. Worldly, gregarious, imaginative.  A huge extended family of four generations.  They all resonated love and I felt it to my core. The children were adored and pampered and entertained us all with their wild energies. The affection was physical and everyone openly emotional, touching, kissing, and hugging. Babies were passed around to whoever had a free hand and old people were included in often raucous discussions on any subject that happened to be being sorted, from milking goats to the state of the economy. At least while I was observing. They loved horses and had large stables at the rear of the villa.   Dinner brought them all together around a Rabelaisian feast on a thirty foot table under a grape arbour.  They all talked incessantly, calling to Tom and me to answer in loud crazy Spanglish.

Afterwards we all played music and danced. The older kids practised magic tricks and gave us a mini circus show with acrobatics and disappearing acts, some of which were less than perfect, giving us all huge laughs.  I felt myself opening, felt my love flow, my pain dissipating like poison draining & being replaced by the life elixir as I twirled and clapped and laughed for the first time since I couldn’t remember when. Tom played his harmonica and drums.  I found a mandolin and did my best at keeping up with the rhythms. I had once again found my sense of fun. But I also found a deeper yearning choking me every time I heard a baby cry and knew no matter how I might be enjoying the moment, my own baby held me tight, the unbreakable bond of mother-love. I would keep going, but she would never leave me.

The last stop in Spain was a cliff-perched fortress of a villa outside Marbella on the Costa del Sol with wealthy Manhattan hippy queens.  At the gate we were met by large sinister spade-cat minders, their black shining bare chests under black leather vests hung about with big silver crosses, their arms tattooed with dragons and skulls, eyes impenetrable behind blackout glasses. Dobermans roamed the grounds. We were collected by a zippy golf cart that swiftly dropped us outside the main front doors where our host, Anton, resplendent in a flowing purple silky caftan, came out to embrace his long-lost Brother Thoma and welcomed us both in the mi casa su casa style.

It was such a scene! We lounged back in an almost clinical all-white ultra-modern cool cavern of a room, under high-vaulted ceilings, reclining on huge white deep cushions, looking out into the blinding sun across a tiled terrace over the city to the bay below, waited on by slim nip-arsed Arab houseboys dressed in white with bright Mexican sashes and red Arabic tarbushes on their heads. Our Soho Boho hosts snorted white powders and were so bloody cool, man. 

Anton, was a suave fifty year old dress design mogul with an international clientele, given to the aforesaid shrieking orange or purple silk caftans with lots of rings and silver chains hung with precious stones. He was sensual, warm, open and relaxed, into yoga and eastern mysticism. A likeable generous host who welcomed me into his home, making sure I was comfortable and refreshed.   

Unlike his lover, Precious,  a peroxide crew-cut French-Vietnamese android in painted-on leather pants with lace cut-out insets,   gold glitter eye shadow on his/her cat’s eyes, sardonic thin lips a slash of black lipstick. His little fingernail, gold varnished, was two inches long. The ring-hung hands were claws.  Diamond studs in his nose and penis-head (or so he boasted).  

I remember the cold creepy fear I felt from this creature every time those patronising predatory lidded eyes passed over me, but I returned the look with my mask of gentle sweetness and hoped he wouldn’t come closer.  He was the master of the sneer, the veiled insult, the cruel put-down and made a hissing noise followed by a cruel harsh laugh when he passed me, always too close, threateningly.   His older companion controlled him like a panther on a lead. “Now dharlink, behave.  Be nice to my guests sweetie.  Come and share some candy with daddy”.   They were junkies.  High shit.  Their world was name-dropping of the rich and famous, acquiring ever more opulent symbols of decadence - jewels, cars, art, people.   And white powders to snort, smoke or spike into their veins.

Lunch was served on the terrace under a Tibetan tent canopy on the tiles spread with Mexican rugs. We were about 10 in all, cross legged on cushions as we helped ourselves from a ginormous platter of Middle Eastern type dishes it took 4 men to carry in. hommus, pilaf, tabouli, stuffed vegetables, kebabs, olives, pitta bread and so on.  Huge jugs of pomegranate and orange juice. The platter was taken away by the servants and coffee brought while we stretched out on huge body cushions enjoying the view. I went exploring inside, looking for the bathroom and finding inner rooms where even more people I hadn’t yet met were hanging out, mostly stoned it seemed.

A psychedelic op-art Jimmy Hendrix, a Dali and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn on the walls.  Dylan, the Stones and Cream on the mile high speakers filling the space with a wall of sound. A giant mirror ball throwing patterns of shattered light in giddy flashes across all.  The mating phlegm of fluorescent foetal succubae globules in the gulping lava lamp in one corner.   I looked around the spaced out lounge lizards on the cushions, posed, unmoving and mute, living statues.  Android creatures in exotic maquillage and peacock plumage.   Black leather skin-tight trousers and white pirate silk shirts.   Velvet leopard-print flares.  Full-length Afghan embroidered fur coats.  Elaborate silk caftans. Oriental opulence mixed with pop art, Black Panthers and the rock and roll culture, while Wall Street market prices chattered away on a ticker machine in a small phone room with a large safe.  Ferraris, Jaguars and other pretty toys in the garage. A sixty-foot yacht stood at the ready in the bay crewed by pretty boys who served champagne cocktails and brandy Alexanders at dusk on the canopied aft deck. Midnight moonlit Jacuzzi frolicking on the terrace. Cocaine and Crystal.  

I would never have gained entry to such a high camp ménage if it hadn’t been for Tom.  Met Anton in a disco last time he came through, he said. He wanted to stay a few days as there were hints of a yacht trip next day and maybe they could drop us across the water somewhere on the Moroccan coast. But, despite a warm feeling for Anton,  I was so repulsed by the rest of what I was seeing in the guests and their behaviours, all I wanted was to be gone. Behind the glitz and glamour was an evil corrupt lifestyle. This was not simple living and high thinking but stood for all that seemed wrong in our world I thought.  And I couldn’t cope with Precious. Tom said I was being square. No doubt, I was. I had run against a limit to my tolerance. The walls that protected my Wonderland. This was not a place I would bring my child into if I could help it. That seemed to be the yardstick I was judging these pocket worlds with as we moved towards my dreams of  Atlantis. Where was the love, the goodness, the human kindness?

Anton was the shining exception to my judgemental stance. He must have sensed my feelings because in the late afternoon he put an arm around me and said “ I need a drive – let’s go babe”. So,  in a pink Thunderbird, with Tom & Precious squashed in the small back seats with Lola, a snooty blonde Afghan pooch sporting a diamond collar sitting royally between them, we roared away in a memorably exhilarating exit from this pocket world of chaotic opulence down the coastal highway to Gibraltar.

That night we crossed the straits into Africa. The Big Adventure had begun.

Book 1:2 - Formentera to Barcelona

What would make a young loving wife and mother rise at two a.m. and kiss her twenty months old baby child goodbye, not knowing if she would ever hold this treasure, this one beautiful thing in her life, ever again?  To venture away from a foreign island to even more foreign and unknown lands, far, far from home?  I don’t know how I did it, but I did.  Looking back the ice still clutches my heart.  A battered wife, I was in a state of reactive psychosis - a sleepwalker in a cold hell.  Leaving my child where she would be secure, knowing I could not defend her in my confused abused state.  Nor would I ever divide our family by snatching her from her father.  It was Solomon’s Sword.  I was the dummy mummy.  Fooled by a system I could not combat. I needed space to think. So did he, but I had to leave to give it to him. Given his past behaviour I had no guarantee our marriage would survive, but it was a gamble I had to take. I was not going to live with the lies and brutality another minute. I had to find the Love and the Reason and Meaning of It All.

  

Yes, after leaving my husband and baby girl on Formentera, in the cold two a.m. morning after my twenty-eighth birthday, my heart suspended in some cryogenic force field to be revived by the kiss of love when I returned – or so I had then so vainly hoped, I walked out of that remote Spanish island finca into the blackness of deepest night, stumbling along the rough dusty track to the waiting bus from La Mola to the port of La Savina to catch the early ferry across to the nearby island of Ibiza. In the pre-dawn hours I wandered the empty sleeping streets of the Ibiza port, wondering what I was doing, numb and distraught. Then almost sleep-walking, I boarded the dawn ferry to Barcelona on the Spanish mainland. 

Which was where suddenly life upended on me and my path and destination became clear.

  

Because on that Barcelona bound ferry was Tom.  Osiris. Satya Pal.  Brother Thomas.  Abdullah.  He took a different name to suit the religion of whatever cultural situation he found himself in.  He was presently in Brother Thoma mode, to suit the Spanish Christianity. We were instantly attracted to each other. A cosmic magnetism that endured and except for a few hours here and there, we didn’t leave each other’s side for the next 18 months, sharing many adventures as we walked in Morocco then across half the planet all the way to India. 

Tom was, he said, the motherless son of a wealthy Californian/Swedish father. He had run away from home at twelve and split, as he put it, to Maui in Hawaii where, as a surfie gremlin, he  survived by begging off tourists until he was sixteen.  Then he made his way to Sweden in search of his ancestors where he lived as a student in Malmo, the university town.  In his  twenties he flew to India where he spent some months studying in ashrams and became a pilgrim of “The Way”.

  

Now 25, he was the vision of a Nordic prince.  At over 6 ft he was a standout in any crowd, striding along with a fast direct gait as if he owned the world, tall lean and proud, shoulders back, long shining gold blonde hair swinging,  drawing the eyes while at the same time as his eyes saw far over the heads of other mere shorter mortals able to avoid potential dangers while finding the best route to his destination. Those far-seeing dancing eyes were such a sky blue I felt I could swim in them and from his laughing mouth a deep manly voice seemed to embrace the word Love in nearly every sentence.  He looked so healthy, so clean, in light Indian white flowing cotton long shirt and loose pyjama pants. Across one shoulder hung a cream Ghandi Khadi-cloth hand spun blanket and a set of small Indian Tabla drums.  The other supported an Ibizencan basket containing all his worldly possessions with, and I suppose what clinched his creds for me, a surfer’s hand-board protruding.  Only a dedicated surfer would carry a hand-board among life’s necessities. He had just arrived back in Europe, was on his way to Morocco to surf, but wanted to return to India to live as a sadhu.

I was immediately charmed by his ethos, his air of freedom, of being a real traveller and a surfer and by his intense fast-talking spiel, preaching the religion of Freedom and Love and Universal Truth for all.  Was I a sucker? Let’s just call it vulnerability. Love at first sight for us both ! 

As I later came to realise he was a hippy preacher man like Johnny Appleseed, spreading the seeds of the New Age doctrines as he travelled across the planet, giving him an open sesame to so many receptive doors at a time when great change was shifting values. Religions had not delivered and the empty voids needed filling with Love, with renewed Hope and Joy. As I also later found, people everywhere got confirmation of their inner need to be validated in this new creed he spread to anyone who would listen. In shops, bus queues, street corners, in parks, to drivers we got lifts from, even the police who would come to check him out – it was what he did, what he said. His M.O, his credo, his magic carpet ride through all strata of societies, reaching all classes & creeds. Many found him simply a harmless curiosity and invited him home to show the wife and kids. But almost without exception when he left he had given them the gift of a new way of thinking to ponder, even if they were not convinced or converted.

But when I first met him, as we stood at the ferry rail watching in fascination the magical light show as the strobing first rays of the rising sun reflected fire from windows on  the receding pink and gold glowing island of Ibiza, I had no idea who or what he was.  I only knew he was a fascinating guy going, like me, to Morocco.  I wasn’t fazed by his wild life story - it seemed to me that if that was what had happened to him it was just him coping with his world, just as I was trying to cope with mine.  I simply had no idea. But as we got closer his positive philosophy and warm affectionate presence lifted me out of what could have been a terminal depression and gave my soul wings. I could relate to everything he said. Yes, we are Love. Everything is natural. By giving Love we get back Love. Children of the Great Mother/Father, each of us a vehicle of Joy if we let Love into our hearts. We are all One.  And so on.  Well I do chuckle at all that now. But then as an ideology it had legs and we were walking, fast and free.

I had a destination a quest.  In my crazy twisted head I had a wild notion that somewhere in Morocco, perhaps in the Atlas Mountains, I could find lost Atlantis, or some feeling of Atlantis. It represented that advanced Utopian spiritual super race I felt we were all once part of. I was such a dreamer!  More practically, I had heard of legendary good surfing on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. 

My dreams had been fuelled by reading the stories of gutsy British gentlewomen like Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark - adventurous women who walked the Pyrenees, lived in isolated Iranian harems, married chiefs on Melanesian islands, explored Mesopotamia by camel or lived with nomadic Bedouin.  I decided I would  buy a donkey to carry my gear and walk the Atlas mountains to see for myself what the myths and legends of Atlantis, supposedly once part of northwest Africa, felt like in real time experience.   

All this fell into place in my mind as I wandered the pre-dawn streets of Ibiza, waiting to catch the ferry connection to Barcelona. If I was going to have time out from my marriage I was determined it was not going to be sitting in a bar in Barcelona crying into my vino.  I was sure my little baby daughter would tame the beste sauvage and bring my husband to see the reality of my dream as one family and the need to cherish each other.  He just needed time to relocate that dream of love we once shared.   We were a long way from home and our clean surfing lifestyle.  London had twisted us both beyond recognition.  The changes that more than two years of travelling had brought about in each of us needed to be looked at.  To me the marriage was intact, but needed real glue.  Time out would make him see the error of his ways and what real values should be for a father and husband.  Or so I deludedly thought as I locked onto this fey companion of the road fate had dealt me and battled with my inner demons. 

The idea of Atlantis needed to be put to the test.  I needed to know the Truth. To start from a core of real testable Truth starting with our origins I needed to differentiate between mythos and logos.  It seemed I was destined to do this thing.  Of course I knew very little about evolution, then. Having left school at 15 due to the family’s need for my income, my knowledge base was pathetic, riddled with romantic nonsense that needed sorting.  The opportunity, the means, the reason and the right companion all came together on the Ibiza ferry as if by divine intent or magic and I did not look back.  I was on the road.  Sucked into a magnetic energy, a common dream scenario that has enmeshed many before and since.  Legends of the road to Morocco, of Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs,  Jack Keruac,  Allan Ginsberg.  Existentialist poets who came to inhale the ethos and the kif.  But with my own magical supernatural overlay.  It did not occur to me that these other writers were sometimes seen as degenerate reactionaries - paedophiles, Nancy Boys and junkies.  I only heard the call of the intellect, not the lusts of base flesh or the whining seductions of chemical annihilation.  With my need to make a better world I would follow the Pied Piper to Hell and back if I thought it would give us the Truth

I also thought that in Morocco I could find a quiet retreat near the surf  where I could practise my yoga, meditation and macrobiotic diet to make a better me without the sneering brutal husband who saw my interests in Jung, Eliade, Zen and Tibetan teachings as “mystic bullshit”, some heretic betrayal of all that it meant to be a “real Australian”.  That was one part of my dream, to find the truth in those ways of thinking.  The other involved my screaming inner desire to expatiate my energies in surfing big waves. So I got out my map and, tracing a possible route, I put it to Tom that together we could walk on quest for Atlantis and good surf where the Atlas Mountains fall into the Atlantic. We could purchase a donkey to carry our bags so we could walk free, starting out from Essouira walking south along the Barbary coast towards Agadir. 

Being a Californian surfer, Tom liked the idea.  And he liked me.  He liked me a lot and took very good care of me as we journeyed down the coast of Spain and into Morocco via Tangiers and Marrakech.  He seemed to know a lot of people in places we stopped.  Years of working the trade routes.  It just didn’t occur to me that this fey hippie godling was any kind of operator. I was delighted that he had made so many friends in his previous travels through this region. I was so trusting, under his spell, captured by his caring attention in my shredded mental state, the grief biting deep, the guilt and pain torturing me to madness and psychotic episodes.   I retreated into an inner cocoon world, barely noticing the passing Spanish scenery, but finding myself suddenly in another of Tom’s friends’ pocket worlds when we came to rest each night.

The kif we shared helped.  The soul medicine of the bereaved.  The virgin princess had no idea that it was all illegal and fraught with horrific penalties. But then  Alice had yet to step through the Looking Glass.

LONG WALK TO THE TRUTH 

BOOK 1 - MOROCCO 1968

1.

PREAMBLE

I wake up and gaze around me.  Above, the undercarriage of the bus. To the side, desert, barren mountains, endlessness...ness...ness.   Except for this cube of cubicles, a surreal box construct rising out of the desert sands like an implant. A human nest.  All locked in their structure for the night.  I visualise what I can of the normal human behaviour inside the little boxes within the big box. The evening meal, family relationships of all kinds.  Kids, mothers-in-law, grandparents,  men lording it over their little harems. Sex.  What would their sex be like?  Conducted like a surgical procedure under sheets, making no sound as everyone around would hear every breath ?  I curl back into the blanket with Tom and seduce him awake, enjoying our animal lust, our naked bodies gleaming purple-blue, like wet steel, in the desert moonlight,  the fire in our eyes burning, burning, as we feed eachother the best love we know how, licking and sucking, sharing juices with more appetite than I ever had for sweet food or drink.  Intoxicated with our love, drenched in sweat, wild for eachother, two crazies on the road to India. Like two butterflies in a bottle, wild expressions of freedom enclosed by the occupied territory of people seemingly locked into cultural repression and slavery.

What fairy tale is this head in the petrei dish dreaming ?  But, wait, there’s more !  Can it be the same story, same heroine, same planet ?

Riding side-saddle behind the sheikh on his white stallion she felt like a prize captive wild princess being taken to be sold in the soukh.  The horse picked its way along the narrow piste, sure-footed, untroubled by her extra weight. The track rose higher and higher winding into the mountains taking them inland from the coast, the immense grey Atlantic Ocean disappearing as they entered a narrow gorge.  She felt the danger, the mystery, closing in as the canyon walls narrowed and the little horse surged on and on and up into the magic of the Grand Atlas. 

Her companion turned and smiled reassuringly, his handsome face amused. Yes, he had a prize.  He was taking the strange woman from the country he had never heard of nor known even existed to the monthly market and he knew she was either stupid or very brave to risk the adventure with him.  He felt flattered by the trust she showed.  And she in turn felt flattered that he chose to escort her on such an adventure.  In her heart she felt no peril.  His wives were a happy lot and she felt his role as a family man precluded any weirdness on his part.

Way back down the piste her companion Tom, Abdullah, crazy son of God, the mad hippy dope freak, followed on Maya. The little donkey was labouring heavily up the steep stoney slope. Tom had turned his ankle the day before and couldn’t walk and was riding the donkey for the first time on all their travels. He was in a foul mood. Most unholy she thought, smiling sardonically as they left him far behind , moving steadily and swiftly now, the little canyon opening into a wider valley and the piste rising ever higher into the arid mountains.

At the top of a rise they halted and dismounted, stretching, looking out over the view.  The ocean was visible again but now a long way off, a distant ribbon of surly jade far below.  Mountain after mountain stretched to the north and the south.  To the east before them another rose like a wall. A small mud baked kasbah perched on a nearby hilltop, silent as if deserted, red in the morning sun.   An eagle spiralled up, up, soaring out of the valley below.

The sounds of a delicate flute,  citrus tang - a boy beneath an umbrella shaped tree full of goats, surreal fruit relentlessly eating every leaf.  She pulled her flute from her bag and played along with him.  The tune picked up as he caught her messages, blending the Berber rhythms with her polyglot of travellers’ argot.

The sheikh watched her as he sprawled luxuriously amongst the rocks in

his white robes, as if on silken cushions, the amused smile, ever so faintly cynical she thought,  never leaving his hooded darkly-kohled eyes. The little stallion nibbled at a rare patch of weed beside the path catching its’ wind.  Soon they were off again, the horse lunging forcefully as they mounted ever higher up the track.  She felt exhilarated.  Never had she thought she would be doing this.  It was a fantastic dream. She ran her hands over the horse’s rump, letting the stiff sweating hairs and churning muscles beneath his skin speak through her fingers - this was no dream.

Within the hour they arrived at the soukh.  A  sheltered glen under a grove of stunted trees beside a tiny rill.  A cluster of tents.  Robed men haggling.  The women squatting in a separate group of colourful rags around baskets of produce. They dismounted in a circle of curious eyes.  The sheikh replied softly to several queries, obviously about the strange woman he had brought , but she couldn’t understand the Berber dialect.  He indicated that he had business and would meet with her later so she wandered alone, wrapped in her burnouse, looking at the beads and trinkets of the women who seemed very disinterested in her business.  I’m too strange for them to cope, she thought.  She tried to barter but lost interest.  It was not a tourist market but she had seen these wares before and wasn’t tempted.  She just wanted to make contact and see what value they put on the things they were selling.  Eventually she bought a few bracelets for the sheikh’s small daughter and  some vegetables and pulses, then made her way to the tea tent where the men were gathered.  She sat amongst them in a dark corner on cushions, sharing the pipe and sipping sweet mint tea. They seem to accept her. She put  this down to the fact that the men had more freedom to travel around and she was probably not an alien creature to them as she was to the women who rarely left their local areas. 

But it was all generalisation - supposition based on little information. Her  musings changed tack.   Who knows what really goes on in these societies, she thought.  She couldn’t even work out her own culture, let alone this dance of life in slow time.  So much is unknown, unknowable.  We move in as anthropologists to study evolution and human behaviour, cataloguing the data, drawing lines between points.  Analysing, making arbitrary deductions. Judgements. But when it comes down to the reality of everyday life the lines become blurred.  Can life be fixed design ?  On this Barbary Coast random elements are a part of the picture.  An evolutionary melting pot. But pull back focus, there is a larger picture.  From seeming complexity emerges implicate order.

After some time Tom arrived.  Not amused.  Resenting her easy journey while he had had to suffer the indignity of riding the donkey. 

She laughed at him. “Here, come and have some tea and a smoke and relax.  Cool it. Get with the scene man. Stop your fussing !”

She let him lean on her and helped him to hobble into the tea tent, feeling his tensions seething away as he sorbed her reassuring presence. 

Sometimes he was such a fractious little boy.  After the smoke he was back to his old self and she watched bemused as he tried to interest a cluster of men in God’s Eyes, thinking how this was such a bizarre version of idea diffusion. The induction of Hopi Indian magic mushroom cult symbols into the Islamic Berber culture through this opportunistic hippy acid freak beggar.  Would they trance dance and find their lion souls, their wolf spirits ?

Where is he now  I wonder.  Last I  heard of Tom he was in Simla and he had thrown out all my drawings, my visual diaries of our precious pilgrimage  years, and let them flutter away over the snow.  The way he lived he is probably dead now.  Crazy person.  Prophet of the New Age,  High Priest of the Magical Kingdom of the Insighted Vision. Osiris to my Isis.   Living the romantic dreams overlaid with the delusions of sensory alteration of  THC, STP, DMT, LSD....  I wonder if he made it through.  I barely have, but here I am, permission of the universe, writing it all out now, some forty-five years later.  I wonder if he would know me if we passed in the street, or I him.

I guess we didn’t believe in each other enough.  After all it was all so weird, so new.  No maps for the territory we were covering in our search for Truth, for Meaning.  The damaged lives we sought to explain and rectify drove us on, looking past maya, past mythos, past previous human experience, to the workings of  the planet, the biosphere and the universe.  Unbinding our conditioned minds.  Refusing to accept what we heard, what we were being told we had to believe.  Seeking the Truth for ourselves.  Taking our thinking up out of the dross of the mundane, higher, higher,   Blind instinct our only guide leading us ever on. Relentlessly.   Until we came, or at least I have come, to the source, the water of life, the biosphere, evolution, the cosmos.  To an understanding of It All, as much as can be so far explained by science and reason and logic and the workings of the mind fettered by religion, politics, social bindings, mythologies.  Then putting all these things into the Big Picture and understanding how IT All came to be and our place in IT.

And still illusion and delusion mock me as I write. Can I,  do I,  really know it yet?  Will I ever ?  Can one ever be free of the information environment we live in, of the self who interprets it, of the peer pressure to conform or be cast out ? 

“ No way!”. the Cosmic Joker laughs, “ This is the Tao of Physics.  This is the displaced particle, the time warp,  the Unknowable and the Unknown.   
“The Tao that can be put into words is not the Everlasting Tao.” 

 IT is completely linguistically indescribable, says Brett’s Alchemy. Beyond Infinity and Eternity. That Big Picture is not for tiny humans, who swarm on this little ball of life like a smear of bacteria in the immensity of a universe which we now suspect may be just one dimension, one reality in a landscape of infinite possibilities.  It is a scenario so enormous, complex and unknowable that we can only postulate a metaphor of the wall, and the hole in the wall, or the crack in space, or the tear in the fabric of reality, to explain what could be beyond our imagination or ability to experience. 

The room,  the wallpaper and the 4th wall. The 11th Dimension.

Only change is certain.  And who knows what form that can take in a universe of seemingly infinite possibility, but even that is only our limited viewpoint.   Perhaps a mind that can encompass all the workings of what seems a complex universe within which our little biosphere and human culture is a predictable knowable thing can see that possibility is not only finite, but simply a range of events, of which only one will fit to circumstance.  But watch out for the “meant-to-be’s” !

God playing dice in places we can’t even imagine, says Stephen Hawkings  as if he discovered it.  The displaced particle, says the Dalai Lama. Tao. Om. God. Allah.  We have always had to wrap it up in a single package which comes unstuck as soon as we try to get a handle on it.

“But I have an instinct....”   and off she goes dancing away from the mainstream and into the wild, her eyes alight with some rebellious mystic fire and a certain feral ability to witness key events of our time, sometimes by “chance”.  “There is no chance !” roars back the Professor of Ecology.  I wonder how he explains my sixth sense, my precognitive powers, my ability to sense happenings half a planet away ?  Everything is natural, how can it be otherwise ?

This is a journey to The Truth.  My Truth, Your Truth, Our Truth.  Relative Truth and Absolute Truth.  All our secrets are the same. Point of View is the operative.

Events took place along my route like beads on a rosary - crystal, jade, emerald, lapis lazuli, coral, amber, ruby, sapphire, gold, silver, onyx.  

The Goddess’s beads are the jewels of this life experience.  Then I found an iron bead, a lead bead, a forest seed.   

Black cockatoos flying back to the mountain, shrieking under an ominous sky, can also read: rain expected. Nothing bad about that !

Hello, What's This All About?

 

Compilation of snapshots of me at various life stages.

 To see a World in a Grain of Sand...
And  Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour.

Benoit Mandelbrot

I am Anu,  an Australian woman, now in my 70's.  The story I will tell on this blog is from when I was 28-31 years old, a young woman in the prime of life.  

 

I wrote this story in the early 1990's and apart from a few minor adjustments it is basically ready to go here.  I had huge reservations about publishing it then, unwilling to sacrifice trees for paper to serve my ego. This blog is my way of getting some of my story out without using precious resources. I like the idea of it living on in The Cloud, long after I'm gone. Something for posterity for others to ponder in some unknowable future.

My first posts will be called Book 1 which is the prelude to Book 2 - the story of my long walk from Morocco to India in search of the Truth.

Book 1 starts on the Spanish Balearac island of Formentera at the start of 1968 and tells of my journey down into Morocco, walking with a donkey along the coast south of Essouira. Interspersed are flashbacks to my previous life: leaving Australia in 1965, travelling by ship, then overland from Genoa to Greece and on by ship across the Aegean to the Greek island of Kastellorizo in the Dodecanese, east of Rhodos. After living there some months I travelled back across Europe to England, settling in Devon for some 8 months then moving on to London for a year or so before deciding to live in an isolated finca on Formentera in the hope of fulfilling my dreams of being a writer. But then everything changes, as you will read.


Book 2 starts in the monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona in Spain and details my long walk across Europe & Mesopatamia to India and my life in India. My pilgrimage seeking the Truth.  What I found and how I eventually came to understand the Nature of IT All and our/my place in IT.

Everything I write here is what actually happened, unembellished. My words reflect the way I thought, perceived and expressed myself at the time of the experiences. Times have changed and so have I, along with most of my thinking. I look back and laugh at my abysmal ignorance and naivity.  Laugh with me, or cry as I sometimes do too.

I will post my words in short digestable grabs but with no predictable regularity. If you want to get my latest I suggest you Follow this blog.

Book 1 starts in my next post.