I slept great in the hay shed. With my lightweight sleeping bag zipped up all the way, and my cotton hoody lying open under my head, none of the itchy hay touched me. It was soft and comfortable. Morning light streamed between vertical slats of the wood walls, casting ivory stripes across the beige pile of hay, which stood almost as high as the roof, between me and the entrance.
The only window was near my bed, its shape so jagged it may have been cut with a hand saw. Between several pairs of my clean underwear, still hanging there since I’d met Cas two days before, the greenery of the Darro gorge greeted me, stirring with life.
Dreaming had continued the biography work from the day before, making the personal history of government collage. Not the average dream, this one carried its visceral demands into waking life. In my sleep, I discovered how Shame had embedded shackles into my sides, a mechanism used to control me. This shame girdle was harder to take off then any technology I knew of. Here’s how it works: When the stomach relaxes, the shame girdle tightens like a corset. Once the device is installed, allegedly to protect one from looking foolish or fat, it powers itself with itself. When the poor victim, wearing this spiked thing boring into it’s waist, remembers that their shame is supposably being prevented by Shame, the shame girdle is recharging. In the dream, I was stumbling along with this metal contraption tearing at bleeding wounds around my entire torso. Something drew me into a dense forest. Making my way along on all fours, I made it to a jungle clearing where a magical voluptuous woman was seated cross legged in the center. I knew instantly she had the medicine to heal me, what could release me from these painful stabs which tracked me everywhere I went.
She sat on a cushion of animal fur, melded together with tendrils of plants around her magenta skirt, its many layers of decadent ruffles lifted comfortably about. She was topless, and her tanned oily body was graceful and voluminous. Below dozens of necklaces and a few scarves, her breasts appeared ready to nurse. Below that, her belly hang loose, feminine, fleshy, and beautiful, wide like the roots of a tree steadying her slender upright shoulders which extended upwards. Her earthy figure seemed to sway and dance, even though she was still, her curved leading to completion, every breath a new adventure, being draw upwards yet unmistakably connected to Nature. Her face looked indigenous, regal features and dark eyebrows and nostrils. Her tangled windswept hair was knotted with flowers, an homage to all that is gentle. She did not look at me, but she seemed to know I was there and that she was helping me by just being herself. Eyes closed, her mouth formed an almost indiscernible smile. One hand rested in her sensuous lap. The other was lifted like a frond of coral hardly waving in a motionless sea. Some subtle mood none but she could know entered her palm and her open fingers, her whole gesture sensing only this.
To be honest, I don’t know if this woman really exists. Nevertheless it is clear to me that she understood the significance of all the symbols born through her jewelry, brocading her ears, neck, and wrists. What does it matter if she is real or not, if the wisdom of these sacred symbols belongs to her? Isn’t that enough, wisdom and a witness to behold it? Meeting this feminine goddess is how I learned about backing, but first let me tell you what the medicine woman showed me next in the dream.
Just as we do every time we look at someone else’s body, our soul’s posture emulates theirs. The medicine woman showed me how to relax and breath, focusing on aligning the core with gravity, to distract me from remembering the shame girdle, thus allowing it to recharge. There was no price to pay. No pang of regret. No addictive rush. No pressure to maintain. Just the releasing of tension on the breathe. This made me think suddenly that I had seen many women like this before, stomachs hanging out freely, shameless as could be. I used to quickly look away, and Shame would quicken its grip, keeping me safe. Now it hit me. “Safe from what?” Breathing and using the images of my all my beautiful sisters, the shame girdle dropped completely off.
The dream shifted. I was disembodied now, voyeuristically traveling above this shamaness watching how she lives. She goes on solo retreats in to the forest, and into the desert sometimes. She rows her boat, dressed in a long hooded cloak to her own misty island, where she owns nothing at all. She laughs when something is funny, and she cries when she see feels sadness. She does nothing when something interests her. What is there to do in such cases? What better way to please than to simply be pleased? She has a partner and some children, although she’d be fine if he leaves. He is beautiful too, also hairy, and wears jewelry. He holds the kids’ hands and kisses his wife’s belly, like a farmer sniffing the compost pile in the spring. He solemnly puts some of it on his tongue, tasking a bit of the rich dirt, so a wave of reverence overwhelms him with the thought, “how lonely life would be if the Earth was not alive and with me, if she were merely a form.”
Wiggling out of my sleeping bag, I stretched my arms wide, embracing the tepid Mediterranean air, the exact temperature and texture as healthy skin. “What a bizarre yet intense dream!” I had never believed in channeling, spirit animals, voodoo, and that kind of stuff, mostly because I had no personal reference point to grasp on to it. All I knew was that the visitation by this plant-covered lady had changed me more than most interactions with regular people ever do. Wearing the loose pants and t shirt I slept in, I decided to try it out. I curiously stepped outside to join the bright beams of light filtering through the dappled foliage of tall poplar, pine, and eucalyptus trees, sustained by the gurgling steam outside the shed. In the shaded privacy of the steep hill leading up to the field, I practiced what the medicine woman had taught me. I let me belly hang, dropping my flesh down through the soles of my feet. The solid ground beneath seemed to respond with a bounce to the added weight of letting myself fall. Automatically this drew in a fresh breath of air, which my abs quickened to hold. Other slight adjustments were made, as let my body, not my mind, lead for once. Ahhh! This may very well have been the first time my feet ever really touched the ground.
.......
That is how I discovered ‘backing.’ I had been very uncomfortable for a long time, with the Shame machine constantly gripping me every time I started to relax. Jungle lady had showed me a new way of being, and a new way of changing as well. How backing works is simple. It’s basically the opposite of fronting, which we are all used to dealing with regularly on the path. As you know, fronting is when people pretend to be other than, usually better but not always, than they are. Fronting is manipulatively behaving in a certain way to try and control how one is seen. Well, turn that around, and it’s backing. Backing is when you completely accept yourself so much that you don’t need any recognition, and then you start doing for somebody else what will set them free. This can happen in close proximity, or at a distance, through visualization. If the person you are backing suspects that you are helping them, you give them 100% credit for how they are doing. No words, personal relationship, or even eye contact is necessary for backing. Simple examples of backing are: staying quiet and just listening to others at a meeting, dancing joyously in a non-promiscuous way, or installing uplifting art works in a public place without attracting anyone’s attention while you’re going it.
I had much more experience with being backed myself than with backing, having just come to know about it. Others had backed me for a long time, I suddenly realized, before I knew what it was. You might even think, it’s a bad idea to put this in writing, in case it gets used as black magic. Of course that is always a risk, but when you see what happens to black magicians in the long run, it’s not very tempting. Anyway, access to information isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, despite all the hype it gets because of internet technology. We have access to limitless information. So what? That still doesn’t explain, nor make meaning of, any of our experience. But I digress.....
When I realized ‘inanimate objects’ were backing me too, that was probably the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me, but we’ll come to that later. First, there’s one more term I want to mention, and that is ‘to gleam.’ Gleaming is something people do with the throat, sort of talking, extremely positively, with energy. It is a mixture of laughing, sighing, and humming (without one’s face nor ones lips moving and not making a sound).
I first observed the effects of gleaming, not in a dream, but at the Cafe on one of my first days in the village. There was a couple sitting at one of the tables eating Spanish tortilla, local cucumber spears, and wood fire roasted red pepper and eggplant escalivada, with olive oil and salt. They had come down from the road, the woman seemed a bit annoyed. Her shoes were only made for walking on pavement. The guys seemed annoyed too, but I couldn’t tell what his problem was. There are many things which would appear seriously wrong here to the average person.
Many followers stop at the Cafe. You can see how threatening the atmosphere is to people on the path. There are no signs advertising familiar brands. They worry about the hygiene of the place when they hear the food is local, not thoroughly pasteurized and then frozen, vacuum packed, or canned in phthalates or aluminum, until just prior to consumption. Most disturbing to them of all are the people around here. Topless men, women who don’t shave, kids out in broad daylight when they should be in school, all of them wearing unique outfits. The followers aren’t sure whether they should like them or not. Is being a hippie back in style? The villagers are taking it easy, yes, but they are not hippies. The hippie movement never fully reached Spain. That was during the Franco years. (Spain did house the largest and most viable anarchist movement in all of history, however). People here express themselves according to their own taste, making the Cafe’s patrons from the road anxious and fidgety. Sometimes it is unclear whether someone is a follower or not. The foolproof way to tell is if they talk especially loudly. Most followers talk most of the time, at least during the time they are interacting with others.
“I must say, this tortilla is delicious,” the woman in the polyester dress proclaimed.
“I know I’m surprised how good it is. I don’t think I would have stopped here though if I’d taken a closer look from the road.”
“Why is that?” the woman asked. She might have her own reasons.
“Well, those guys who just passed and walked under the bridge, the three together. One of them had dreads. They really sketched me out. They looked like drug addicts to me, and I bet there aren’t any cops out here if anything happened. We must be twenty kilometers outside the city. But I don’t mean to worry you, sweetheart. It’s just my nature, being a man, to think about these things.”
Just then another customer arrived, this time from the woods. Coming across the field was a tall, strong man, built like a Swiss mountaineer, wearing white pants, a white linen shirt. He had a stubbly shaved head and face and carried a well worn stick with a pink scarf tied to the end made into a bundle. This was a very bad sign for the followers. This guest didn’t come in a car. He must be homeless or have his license revoked. Probably on drugs as well.
The toned middle aged man smiled as he passed the open window to the side of the kitchen and then entered the terrace and approached the olive wood bar. I met him on the other side, and both of us smiled. Then he leaned against the side of the window and turned squinting out at the view of the road, the people dining, and the shining arch through the overpass.
The man at the table called out, “the food is delicious! We’ve never eaten here before. Have you?”
The man in white smiled, nodded and politely responded, “yeah, it’s always good.”
“Say, I was just noticing there are no power lines around here. They must run on solar panels or something?” He talked as though I wasn’t standing right there.
“They have a bicycle powered generator here,” the tall man said truthfully.
“Wow! See honey, this place is not so bad,” said the lady. “They should make better steps to get down here though.”
“Maybe you should wear different shoes.” The husband had really put his foot in it this time. The woman gave him the look of revenge. The happy diners’ mood was crushed. Tall man was still relaxed, sitting down at a table next to them.
I came from the kitchen were I had been watching all of this. “What would you like?”
“Oh, maybe just some water, please. I actually just came to bring you these mushrooms. They are very rare this time of year, but it rains more up where I live. I just harvested them this morning.”
“Where do you live?” barged in guy with the goatee at the next table. He couldn’t resist.
“Let me tell you a story,” the white pants man wheeled around in his chair, light radiating off his every motion. He gestured to where the couples shiny car was parked. “When I was one month away from graduating college, now let’s see, this was over twenty years ago, I drove by on this highway. I have been here ever since.”
The guy continued to eat tortilla, putting the eggy potato on a slice of Lila’s bread, as though he needed something for his mouth to do while it wasn’t talking. His wife was listening closely.
“You mean you didn’t finish school?”
“I’ve been studying in the real school, the school of everyday life!”
I could see this comment really pissed the couple off. The man with the goatee swallowed prematurely and seized his opportunity.
“You see, that’s what drives me crazy about places like this. You want to have fun, relax all the time, avoid having responsibilities. The thing is, having responsibilities is the best thing in life. Then when you sit back at the end of a long day, or at a party with other people who work hard on the weekends, you have something to feel good about.”
“Every moment of every day of my life is a party.” Tall man said, not at all flippantly.
“Give me a break,” I could see the couple’s thoughts for a moment, but the didn’t say anything. It did seem a little over the top, even to me. The wife turned back to their table. The man asked me for the check. Returning to the kitchen, I wrote up a plausible itemized receipt and brought it out to them.
That’s when I saw gleaming for the first time. With such a good view of all three of their faces, I seemed to watch it in slow motion. The couple looked sour. Tall man was smiling into the sun. Then he glanced at them and gleamed. Almost instantly both of the follower’s faces softened and lit up, even as they were still looking down, preparing to leave. The woman turned again in her metal chair, and the husband also looked up, his face much handsomer now. Tall man did not move his face in any odd way, just the customary half smile. But energetically, he blazed at them, and they both smiled.
“What the hell was that?” I asked myself. To my astonishment, tall man then turned to me. Quietly I felt the humor and the comfort of his good wishes for me. A feeling better than any I had known in awhile trickled to my toes. Before things got weird, it was over. The couple left, and I asked the gleamer if there was anything he needed in exchange for the mushrooms.
Gleaming can come about in reverse as well, by causing someone else to do it, but this is much more advanced. Rather than just gleaming at someone, giving them a little vicarious blast of unity consciousness, it can be provoked in them. Feeling it is even more powerful then receiving it. To do this, one must either be incredibly selfless, or trusting, or both. For example, allowing someone to see you when you are extremely vulnerable, without burdening them with needing to take care of you, often inspires people to gleam. Humor, humility, and radical honesty are other ways gleaming can be drawn out of people. That’s enough philosophizing for now.
.......
Despite all these new things I’d recently learned, I was still mopey that morning. As I went through my morning routine of watering the plants at the Cafe, making coffee, and having something to eat, I stewed.
“Will Silvia mind that I’m here?” I didn’t have any friends, besides Lila. I didn’t have anything special to offer, just to wash dishes. At Miguel’s I used to wake up every morning in love with life, my heart pounding. Now I was self-absorbed again, after weeks of blissfully perceiving everything but that. That in itself felt like a failure.
“Is that really how life is supposed to be, feeling exalted, patting oneself on the back for being of benefit? Do I really long to give back, or do I just miss that heightened peace of mind? What sort of twisted logic is that?” It’s not that I hated myself. Overall I had succeeded in all the things I had pursued in my life. In this new paradigm those things didn’t seem as worthwhile. I reminded myself I should be grateful to be in a situation that challenged me.
When Lila arrived to take over serving lunch, I decided to finally do some exploring on my own. I went to the pool Lila had showed me and hopped around it. Following the trail on through the pines, I began hiking briskly, ascending many bends. The bumpy trail was narrowly visible, winding between mostly all conifer trees. The dry reddish brown needles were large and poked the skin of my feet when I stepped on them at a certain angle. After about fifteen minutes of mounting the hill, I reached a spot where the trail gave itself to a wide stand of boulders on top of a straight cliff. For the first time since I’d arrived in the village, I could see far. Rising majestically above the quilted fields, arid quadrangles of creamy colors, caramel, mustard, and wasabi, were the mountains. The Sierra Nevadas parted the skies, perfectly white as a snowshoe hair. I had never seen them look so big! Only 100 or so kilometers away, the erect snow covered island benevolently overlooked the melted valley below, suckling from the mounds of this white crowned thrown.
“It’s been here all along, so very different that what I’ve been seeing!” I was reminded of the theorem that dimensions can only be perceived by one greater than themselves. “It’s all about power isn’t it?!” I snorted a laugh out loud, all of a sudden amused that I had spent several days wondering if I belonged.
“People want the power to be comfortable. Human comfort is like mold. It can only grow in a small margin of conditions, not too hot, not too cold. Manipulating memories to condone the past, managing potential possibilities, for ourselves and others, to dominate the future, we have the power to be comfortable. When controlled just so, comfort can expand, growing exponentially, like a dark gray fungus, until eventually it devours itself.”
I gazed in wonder at panorama in front of me. The old city of Granada was hidden by wooded foothills. The foggy outskirts of the town were visible in clusters around it, like gray chipboards surrounding the hard drive. I enjoyed the scale of the crisp mountains looming over the squalid plains. It was one of those moments when it’s obvious that the good in the world dwarfs the virus of human catastrophe.
Shining brightly in the adversity of unfaltering cold, the white peaks towering above me heralded another kind of power. It is the power to take it. The goal of life doesn’t have to be comfort. We can use our power for other means as well. All my life I wanted to aim bigger and bigger guns at the world, to shoot it up with my love. “Can’t I just be the girl?” I realized. “Even if it makes me uncomfortable, like those mountains? All this beauty and meaning. I can just take it.”
Finally I was getting a taste for living in the wilderness. Going off the path if fine, but I needed grounding. Getting my bearings was just what I needed. Also, the hike got my blood pumping which is always good. I chuckled as I turned to go, glancing one more time across the Vega and up to the peaks and then rejoining the trail. “I’m such a typical American after all, always feeling like I need to do something.” Thankfully the mountains had told me otherwise.
Just as I entered the woods, a large bird flew overhead, until it’s shape was erased by the blinding sun, scorching the land, evaporating Spain’s tragic history from the parched earth.
“The Moors, then the Anarchists....How many times do the good guys have to loose?”
Whether we like it or not, we are all anarchists, even those still on the path. Government only works when people do the right thing. When they don’t, which is often, the government punishes us. It’s not the government’s fault that things went wrong. The problem is that people don’t believe in anarchy. When you’re an anarchist, you might as well be a pacifist, and if you’re a pacifist, why not be an anarchist?
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