I hadn’t looked in the mirror for a long time, probably since I landed in Spain. “How long has it been? Two, three, four weeks now?" The outhouse was spacious and had plumbing, a gravity-fed hose down low buy the enamel antique squat-toilet drain. The sink also had a faucet with soap where I was standing by the door, a faded wool blanket serving as a curtain. Over the sound of the cold water, re-directed from the stream which flows year-round from the melted snow of the Sierra Nevadas, was the roar of the highway. Each engine grew louder until it rumbled over the bridge crossing the stream and then faded until the next motor vehicle came, harassing the quiet of Nature. Seeing the outside of my body was just as jarring, contradictory to how I was feeling inside, far more vast than my skin.
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“Oh, right. I cut off all my hair.” Running my wet fingers through the stubby mop, I found my face foreign, yet colorful and calm. My eyes looked out at mine, reminding me I am a traveling spirit who’s been given a home. “How can I still travel if I’m grounded here?” The esoteric thought slipped from my mind. After living under the surface for so long, even the petty act of looking in the mirror took on political connotations. The confusion in my blue eyes was widely discernible.
“I’ve never been very interested in politics,” I thought as I climbed up the steep dusty path overgrown by weeds on both sides. I picked and ate a few blackberries. Arriving at the top, the vista opened to the dry field below a bend in the highway, sort of like a grassy parking lot with no cars in sight. Looking around at the rustic hovels near the edges of the forest, I realized I’d been involved with it politics all my life. Below me to the left the stream continues under the highway, and on the other side dry clay footpaths enter the prickly Mediterranean woods, climbing northeast toward the mountains jutting comfortingly above the din of the road. More vegetation satisfied the urge for green nearer to the stream. The other lush focal points were around the shacks covered with plants which people watered.
The first building above the outhouse was a family residence. Curtains and potted plants enlivening the windows of the crumbling stone and mud ruin newly re-occupied. A newer and apparently active small barn had been erected beside that. The sudden whinny of a donkey escaped from inside, like careless laughter. To the right across the clearing, where the noise of the highway was less audible, , was the Cafe, up a little flight of what could be considered stairs, ten or twelve flat stones hastily laid into niches carved in the side of the mini-plateau. What looked like a restaurant from the road, because of the five or six tables surrounded by chairs, at closer glance was more like the terrace of someone’s home. Well-watered and tended plants encircled the stone patio in hundreds of simply glazed pots. The wide vending window of the venue, based around a shiny olive-wood slab bar top, opened into the merry kitchen beyond. The front of the restaurant, with the bar and the arched door adorned with beaded strings, was built of masonry and sterilized by the typical Andalusian white coat of lime. All the other walls of the shack were constructed of scavenged branches and re-purposed wood doors, nailed together and holding up well-stocked shelves of whole food in glass jars. Looking away from the terrace to the south, through the opening of the arched cement overpass, a curve of light revealed another sandy field beyond the road.
I returned to my seat, at the smallest table, and my bench, part of the low stone wall surrounding the terrace, housing the middle row of happy plants. Other flowers and herbs hung from the grape arbor overhead.
.......
Like awareness, I had entered my body on the breathe. The inner landscape is not fragmented like outside. While it is self-contained, all the elements of Nature can be observed in their wholeness. The rivers flow to the oceans and then evaporate into rain. The growth and death cycle of plants is evolved through the seed. The steadfast and quickening behavior of fire illuminates, and the endless, life-sustaining spaciousness of air is as personal as the self as it in everyone and everything. Since I had recently learned to relax into the weight of my flesh, I was at peace. Imagine a dormant naked figure, the Sleeper, surrounded by a dark night of stars, it’s body painted with light blue sky, mountains, hills, lakes, and flowers. What if it were enough to just float alone in the cosmos and eventually wake up to discover that one’s body is the whole earth. One’s spirit is limitless ideas? But no, I was longing for love, peering out of these eyes trying to recognize that somebody to share life with? Without venturing into this underworld, like a microbe inside a godlike organism, in search of the other, where I found myself, love could not exist. Down here bizarre encounters occur with wild frequency. Imaginary friends, diseased historical figures, parents, lovers, and foes combine, with every interaction altering each other. Everyone’s minds are broadcasted like images on a screen. Plants and animals can speak. I was shellshocked to have fallen into this wilderness so unprepared, and I was still getting used to it.
My coffee glass was almost empty when I sat down at the small round table. The last lukewarm sips tasted sweet, since I had converted to adding sugar recently. I entered the narrow kitchen. It’s pane-less windows on two sides looked out on the sparkling field and the woods behind. The side opening towards the gully gave into another workspace/storage area whose ceiling was a tarp. I had been doing the dishes at the Cafe in exchange for being able to sleep in the hay shed near the stream above the Cafe. Having only been there a few days, the village felt unfamiliar to me still, a feeling I had become pleasantly accustomed to. I poured a couple of shots, dark as ebony, from the large aluminum espresso maker which stood on one of the two gas burners of the camp stove. In a small blackened pot, I heated it over the small wood fire in the cov stove attached to the oven where most of the cooking took place.
“How had I come to call this home?” I was still in a daze. For the last several weeks I had been working on a large painting, which consumed my waking energy entirely. I had done it at the last place I stayed. There I had been taken in, with my backpack, and given a room of my own in a town nearby. My host, Miguel, and his partner and I rarely spoke, sharing the responsibilities of the house: shopping, cooking and cleaning. We flowed with the days like a team of well-trained astronauts who know so well what their task is there is no need to discuss it. When I finished the big painting, I felt like my work there was done. Miguel, who had invited me in off the street, never judged me and always treated me with trust and respect, sensed this, so he said, “let me introduce you to some friends of mine I think you’ll like.” That’s how I ended up here. Washing the dishes and getting my bearings was hard, mostly because of the pressure I put on myself. Before I was in bliss, thinking only of art. Now, knowing that life itself is the real masterpiece, the anticlimax was stressful. At Miguel’s I took walks every day in the Vega. Spiderwebs and succulent plants it the stony soil taught me the ways they are worthy of art. In the evenings, under the fig tree in Miguel’s garden, I understood people from the inside, wondering how their stories could become archetypes in the big mural. There is a certain freedom in just caring for others. God, had my identity managed even to use humility and faith as a way to garnish a sense of security?
Now the spiritual wave had passed. The honeymoon period was over. Allowing myself to be informed by everything around me had transgressed into worrying about the responsibility od knowing that my energy is constantly rippling out of me in all directions. But Miguel was right. This rural setting suited my state of mind better than the town. My heart was no longer pounding, and I needed to think again, time having sped up to its usual cantor. I had never been so inspired as I had been at Miguel’s. Realizing that we are being watched by all of creation deep in the core of our being, I responded to feeling called, balancing the edges of the earth with the tiniest vibrations inside of me. The aftermath was forgetting who I am. Forgetting is probably not the right word. Forgetting is the illusion that one must recall a thought from the past to feel ok right now. I’m just not so sure anymore.
I wish I could tell you who I am. I would like to relieve you of the burden of reading on without knowing my name, what I look like, how I make money etc... Believe me, I would answer if I could. Even my skeleton seems to change from moment to moment, realigning itself spontaneously depending on what thoughts run though my mind. The more I accept this constant change, the stronger I get. The stronger I get, the more sensitive I become. Exponentially I keep unraveling thus so that every little thing moves me. A pink wildflower splashes its joy into my shady grass. The blue teapot blinks so perfectly on the counter its entire trajectory to immortality is slowly conveyed in a flash. A singer’s voice changes me for life. A simple taste, such as chewing local almonds, makes me want to drop to my knees, give thanks and praise, with the ground pressing my forehead. To perceive taste, that flavor must already be a part of me. Everything is a miracle like this, parts of me revealing themselves bit by bit.
I found a bunch of odds and ends in the burn pile out back, bringing a stack of used papers and my coffee back out to the terrace. I had left my journal behind with Miguel, so all drawing and writing would be on scraps now. The journal had been full, and I wanted to move forward unfettered by prior associations. I had ditched my phone as well, turning it off and leaving it in a trash bin at the train station just before Miguel met me. In front of me on the tiny round table was a pile of newspaper pages, metallic wrappers without much writing on them, and a brown paper bag. Tearing the bag open horizontally, I used that as a base, collaging torn sections of the other leaflets using the goo on the burner of the gas stove from white rice cooked earlier to adhere them. I wished I had some cartridges left for my fountain pen.
People walked across the well-packed field which the Cafe overlooked every once in awhile. Some of them stopped in to say hi or barter something, cheese, garlic, homegrown chick peas. Lila, the other girl working there attended to them. My job was mostly later in the day cleaning up. I still hung around there most of the time, too shy to explore where all the light tan trails into the woods led. People were not my subject of art anymore. I wanted to observe how they lived in community.
.......
Two older men sat down at a table across the terrace from me, under the sweet curling jasmine. When Lila brought them both an espresso, the man with the graying black beard was listening perplex-idly while the shorter white haired man explained, “....eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex, and moving your body are not enough. There is one more thing.”
“Socializing. We need to relate to other people.”
“Well, now that is interesting. Good point. Is that necessary for survival though? Anyway, it’s not the thing I had in mind.”
“Yes. It’s necessary. You can only become your full self through relationship with others. The most interesting people are they who consider people very different from themselves as part of their close circle, to trust someone with different opinions to make important decisions.”
“You’re getting off-point. Pooping,” said the short man, “that’s the final thing you need. It’s indispensable!”
“Aw, come on! That’s the same as eating and drinking.”
The two men paused and sipped their coffee. The bearded shed the brown wool shawl that covered his shoulders. The sun was the perfect temperature for watering the plants, cool enough not to burn the leaves and warm enough for me to go barefoot and not mind splashing a bit of water on my legs. I used the hose, turned to a steady trickle. Little carved out stumps were makeshift pots. Others were in actual pottery vessels. Many geraniums grew where there was the most sun, as well as herbs that can bear the heat such as thyme, mint, rosemary, lemongrass, and basil. Others nestled their myriad shades of green in the shade of the grape vine. I completed the rounds, listening to the men converse, not neglecting to water the plants below the steps that go down to where kids often play soccer. The steps were shaky, as though someone had the idea to build them and without any planning just sweat it out in one day using whatever stones were laying around, which is fine. Everyone knows how to walk on shaky steps around here, even old people. You don’t have to be nimble. You just need to go slow.
“I insist that pooping is in a category of its own,” the white haired man interrupted my reverie of watching the busy couple next door load large pliable baskets of chestnuts onto their donkey.
“It’s part of digestion. What are you getting at with all of this?”
“I’m not just talking about the body. Thankfully it’s a given that it excretes food after we eat. The mind does not necessarily.”
“Oh. Hmmm, I see your point now.” The bearded man turned back to his friend more attentive now. “Did you become mentally constipated or something?” He joked. “Is that why you’re so keen on this topic?”
“You’re such an ass. Like you haven’t!”
Lila interrupted through the kitchen window. “Are you guys hungry?”
They looked at each other and immediately nodded. “Yes, please!”called the bearded man. Then he continued. “Before you knew me, I used to get into huge arguments with Yolanda about raising our kids. I kept telling her we needed to teach them the subjects we learned when we were young. She wanted to just let them play and do apprenticeships with craft people in the village.”
“I thought you guys were one of the first families who started the okupa.”
“We were. We had all three of our kids here. It had been over ten years since we left the path. We left during the ‘get it while you can’ days. Remember that?”
“Oh man! Of course. All everyone wanted was fun and security. I can’t believe I bought into that crap for so long.”
At that moment Lila came through the beaded strings in the doorway. She was wearing cut off jean shorts and a black lace tank top with a shredded boy’s t-shirt over it covering her breasts. Her layered hair was tied up messily in a rag, her pretty face slightly pocked with acne. She moved like a fox, her dainty bare feet touching the dewy ground toe first, her hips swinging loosely from side to side without spilling the fresh verbena teas all over the food on the tray. The men glanced up and cleared their espresso cups to the side. The bearded man asked, looking Lila directly in the eyes, “would you mind bringing us another round of coffee too, please, when you have time?”
“Sure. I’ll get it for you right now.” The girl gazed back at him trustingly. This was a respected man by all, and his wrinkled eyes were experienced and compassionate. She smiled evenly at the other man as well as she unloaded the basket of cornbread in front of him. Her lips were the texture of a moist salamander, the color of a kitten’s nose, and shaped like curled bacon. The short man solemnly thanked her, smiled his cheerful ugly grin and then looked back down at his breakfast, beginning to drool. “Mmmmm. Still warm,” he groaned. “So what were you saying about your kids?”
“Oh yeah. So, my wife and I would argue. Poor Yolanda. She adapted so much quicker to living off the grid. It’s weird. I was so sure I hated the way school was when I was little, but for some reason, when I had kids that age, I unconsciously started repeated things that happened to me. It’s sad really. My sons were the ones who had to teach me that it’s ok to cry in front of other poeple. They said they had learned it from their friend’s dad.” The bearded man searched for the other man’s eyes. “That got me to shit, if you know what I mean.”
“That’s a good example,” the short men said from where he munched almost touching elbows with his friend.
They spread the fresh black mulberry jam on the cornbread with a small beeswax polished spatula and ate the rest of their food in silence. The day was getting warmer, and the neighbors had disappeared up one of the trails into the shimmering woods leading the obsequious donkey. Lila brought them more coffee, and the bearded man asked her, “you guys need some firewood, right? My son said to tell you he’d drop off a load the next time he borrows a truck.”
“That’s worth much more than breakfast,” Lila mused.
“How many do you think?”
“Oh, we usually leave that up to the guest,” Lila replied.
The men gave each other a strange look, like they were happy and sad at the same time. In a flash I could see they were remembering a time when greed had overrun the natural urge to be generous in their lives.
“Everything was delicious,” the short man managed to grunt. “By the way, what are you doing working at this hour? Aren’t people your age either sleeping or playing around outside?”
“I’ve been here for about six months. I want to learn how to cook, and it gives Silvia a chance to get away sometimes. Anyway, I like getting up early.”
“Wonderful!.....Is Silvia not around today?”
Lila peeked at the bearded man before answering, “she’s doing a vision quest up at The Vines.”
After a moment’s silence the bearded man affirmed loudly, “the corn bread was amazing!”
“My boyfriend grew the corn,” said Lila. Both men nodded.
As they stood up, the short man moved more slowly and slumped over.
“How’s Uni, by the way?”
The short man suddenly looked like he was going to cry, and the bearded man put his arm around him, half smothering him under his brown blanket.
“She’s got such a great attitude,” the short man whimpered. “....You know we won’t live forever, but at least she has her wits about her. It’s been wonderful having this time with her while she’s sick.” When they reached the bottom of the steps, loping awkwardly with their arms still around each other, he turned to his friend and said, “I needed this. I rarely leave the house. Thanks.”
They hugged deeply and then walked separate ways, enjoying the buzz of strong coffee and close friendship. When Lila passed by to clear their table, she paused, looked at my collage, smiled, and continued what she was doing. I ripped and glued and scribbled some words with charcoal from the cook stove, to the sound of Lila singing and banging pots and pans inside. After a while she brought out a wood fame attached to a screen wrack full of freshly sliced tomatoes and laid it out propping the corners on stones to dry.
“If you don’t mind keeping an eye on the place, I’m gonna run down to the market and get some sugar and yeast. I’ll probably take an hour or two, if that’s ok with you. You know how to make coffee and all that, right?” Lila asked, as if we’d known each other for years.
“Yeah. Go ahead. I’m happy to just stay here.”
I had no idea what would happen. Dancing with the unknown seemed to be the guiding philosophy of this place. I was starting to get the sense that no matter what happens, everything remains as it should be.
.......
It’s humbling to be an adult and try to start anew. I noticed feeling defensive, knowing how obviously uneasy I must have looked without solid ground beneath my feet anymore. It’s like crashing a party of magicians and sages who all can communicate telepathically and have multiple superpowers. Of course I didn’t know what to do. There’s nothing wrong with that. All my life I was used to the message: “You had better this. You had better that.”
“Otherwise what?”
I could always go back. The highway is right there. That’s always an option, just like you can simply put down this book. Nothing’s there to stop us. To help manage my fear, I told myself, “I’d rather be lost with a bunch of strangers than pretend to be found with a bunch of narcissistic idiots.” I still wanted something to hold on to, like paying extra money for certified organic, even though it would still be organic without the certification. Similarly, I can invest my energy in how well I will handle a future situation, but it’s still the present moment.
Playing with the art supplies was therapeutic. It helps me see things as they are. Everything falls by its own weight. All this free time around other people with endless free time was unnerving. It’s easy to while away time complaining with unhappy people around. “If only he would do this, or if only she would stop doing that. If only I could get out early and stop by there on my way back.” Otherwise what? Otherwise I’d be feeling like I do now. That’s what eventually calmed me down. It’s already done. This is enough, enough, enough, my fingers caked with rice juice, strips of paper, and a pinch of rich soil from the calendula plant nearby.
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