The Hummingbirds Daughter

Here is an excerpt from a favorite book: The Hummingbirds Daughter

ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.

On the big Santana rancho, the People had never seen paved streets, streetlamps, a trolley, or a ship. Steps were an innovation that seemed an occult work, stairways were the wicked cousins of ladders, and greatly to be avoided. Even the streets of Ocoroni, trod on certain Sundays when the People formed a long parade and left the safety of the hacienda to attend Mass, were dirt, or cobbled, not paved. The People thought all great cities had pigs in the streets and great muddy rivers of mule piss attracting hysterical swarms of wasps, and that all places were built of dirt and straw. They called little Cayetana the Hummingbird, using the mother tongue to say it: Semalú.

On that October day, the fifteenth, the People had already begun readying for the Day of the Dead, only two weeks away. They were starting to prepare plates of the dead’s favorite snacks: deceased uncles, already half-forgotten, still got their favorite green tamales, which, due to the heat and the flies, would soon turn even greener. Small glasses held the dead’s preferred brands of tequila, or rum, or rompope: Tío Pancho liked beer, so a clay flagon of watery Guaymas brew fizzled itself flat before his graven image on a family altar. The ranch workers set aside candied sweet potatoes, cactus and guayaba sweets, mango jam, goat jerky, dribbly white cheeses, all food they themselves would like to eat, but they knew the restless spirits were famished, and no family could afford to assuage its own hunger and insult the dead. Jesús! Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.

The People were already setting out the dead’s favorite corn-husk cigarettes, and if they could not afford tobacco, they filled the cigarros with machuche, which would burn just as well and only make the smokers cough a little. Grandmother’s thimble, Grandfather’s old bullets, pictures of Father and Mother, a baby’s umbilical cord in a crocheted pouch. They saved up their centavos to buy loaves of ghost bread and sugar skulls with blue icing on their foreheads spelling out the names of the dead they wished to honor, though they could not read the skulls, and the confectioners often couldn’t read them either, an alphabet falling downstairs. Tomás Urrea, the master of the rancho, along with his hired cowboys, thought it was funny to note the grammatical atrocities committed by the candy skulls: Martía, Jorse, Octablio. The vaqueros laughed wickedly, though most of them couldn’t read, either. Still, they were not about to lead Don Tomás to think they were brutos, or worse—pendejos.

“A poem!” Tomás announced.

“Oh no,” said his best friend, Don Lauro Aguirre, the great Engineer, on one of his regular visits.

“There was a young man from Guamúchil,” Tomás recited, “whose name was Pinche Inútil!”

“And?” said Don Lauro.

“I haven’t worked it out yet.”

Tomás rode his wicked black stallion through the frosting of starlight that turned his ranch blue and pale gray, as if powdered sugar had blown off the sky and sifted over the mangos and mesquites. Most of the citizens of Sinaloa had never wandered more than 100 miles; he had traveled more than anyone else, 107 miles, an epic journey undertaken five days before, when he and his foreman, Segundo, had led a squad of armed outriders to Los Mochis, then to the Sea of Cortés beyond. All to collect Don Lauro Aguirre, arriving by ship from far Mazatlán, and with him, a shipment of goods for the ranch, which they contracted for safe delivery in a Conducta wagon train accompanied by cavalry.

In Los Mochis, Tomás had seen the legendary object called “the sea.”

“More green than blue,” he’d noted to his companions, already an expert on first sight. “The poets are wrong.”

“Pinches poets,” said Segundo, hating all versifiers and psalmists.

They had gone on to greet the Engineer at the docks. He fairly danced off the boat, so charged with delight was he to be once again in the rustic arms of his bon ami très enchanté! Under his arm, carefully wrapped in oilcloth, Aguirre clutched a leather-bound copy of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In Aguirre’s opinion, the Scotsman had written a classic! Don Lauro had a nagging suspicion that electricity, this occult force, and magnetism, certainly a force of spirit, could be used to locate, and even affect, the human soul. In his pocket, a greater wonder was hidden: a package of Adams’s Black Jack chewing gum—the indescribable flavor of licorice! Wait until Tomás tasted that!

The ship looked to Segundo like a fat bird with gray wings floating on the water after eating some fish. He was delighted with himself and pointed to the boat and told one of the buckaroos, “Fat bird. Ate some fish. Floating around.” He lit a little cigar and grinned, his gums and teeth clotted with shreds of tobacco.

Segundo had the face of an Aztec carving. He had Chinese eyes, and a sloping Mayan forehead. His nose was a great curving blade that hung down over his drooping bandido mustache. He thought he was handsome. But then, Aguirre also thought himself handsome, though he seemed to have inherited the penchant for fat cheeks that was supposed to be the curse of the Urrea clan. He tried to remember to suck in his cheeks, especially when he was being compared to his friend Tomás Urrea. Where had Tomás’s cheeks gone? In bright light, you could see his cheekbones casting shadows as if he were some Indian warrior. And those eyes! Urrea had a ferocious gleam in his eyes—a glare. Men found it unnerving, but women were apparently mesmerized. They were the only green eyes Aguirre had ever beheld.

“You have much work to do, you lazy bastard,” said Tomás.

The Urrea clan paid Aguirre handsomely to exercise his education for them in elaborate hydrological and construction plans. He had designed a network of vents to carry odors from the house’s revolutionary indoor toilet. He had even astounded them all by designing a system of pipes that carried water uphill.

With liquid on the mind, it was not long before they found the notorious El Farolito cantina. There, they ate raw shellfish still gasping under tides of lime juice and hot sauce and great crystals of salt that cracked between the teeth of the men. Naked women writhed to a tuba-and-drum combo. The men regarded this display with joy, though Aguirre made the effort to feel guilty about it. Lieutenant Emilio Enríquez, in charge of the Conducta wagon train, joined them at the table.

“Teniente!” Tomás shouted. “What do you hear?”

“Gentlemen,” said Enríquez, arranging his sword so he could sit. “Unrest in Mexico City.”

Aguirre had to admit to himself that this soldier, though an enforcer of the oppressors, was a dashing figure in his medallions and the bright brass fittings on his tunic.

“What troubles are these, sir?” he said, always ready to hear the government was being overthrown.

Enríquez twirled the ends of his upswept bigote and nodded to the barkeep, who landed a foaming beer before him.

“Protesters,” he sighed, “have dug up Santa Anna’s leg again.”

Everybody burst out laughing.

The old dictator’s leg had once been blown off by a cannonball and buried with full military honors in the capital.

“Every year, somebody digs it up and kicks it around,” Enríquez said.

Tomás raised his glass of beer.

“To Mexico,” he said.

“To Santa Anna’s leg!” Lieutenant Enríquez announced.

They all raised their glasses.

“The Canadians,” Enríquez said, as he poured himself a fresh glass of beer, “have launched a mounted police force. They control their Indians.”

“And bandits?” Tomás interjected.

Tomás Urrea’s own father had been waylaid by bandits on the road to Palo Cagado. The bandits, a scruffy lot said to have dropped out of the Durango hills, had been after silver. Tomás’s father, Don Juan Francisco, was well known for carrying casks of coin to cover the wages of the three hundred workers on his brother’s great million-acre hacienda south of Culiacán. When the outlaws discovered no silver, they stood Don Juan Francisco against an alamo tree and executed him with a volley of ninety-seven bullets. Tomás had been nine at the time. Yet his subsequent hatred of bandidos, as he grew up on the vast ranch, was so intense it transformed into a lifelong fascination. Some even said Tomás now wished he were a bandido.

“It goes without saying, caballeros. Bandits!” said Enríquez. “Besides, we have already started the rural police program here in Mexico to accost our own outlaws.”

“Gringos! They have copied us again,” Tomás announced.

“Los Rurales,” Enríquez continued. “The rural mounted police force.”

“To the Rurales,” Tomás said.

They raised their glasses.

“To the bandits,” said Segundo.

“And the Apaches,” Enríquez said, “who keep me employed.”

They drank the hot brew and pissed out the back door and tossed coins to the women to keep them dancing. Tomás suddenly grabbed a guitar and launched into a ballad about a boy who loved his schoolteacher but was too shy to tell her. Instead, he wrote her a love note every day and tucked it in a tree. One day, while he was placing his latest testimonial in the tree, it was hit by lightning, and not only did this poor boy die, but the tree with its enclosed epistles of love burned to the ground. The teacher ran to the tree in time to behold this disaster. The ballad ended with the melancholy schoolteacher, lonely and unloved, brushing the ashes of the boy’s unread notes from her hair before turning out her lamp and sleeping alone for yet another night. The naked dancers covered themselves and wept.

Early the next morning, the men left the thunderously hungover barkeep and dancers behind and began their long ride inland, to where the hills started to rise and the iguanas were longer than the rattlesnakes. They began to forget the color of the sea.

HummingbirdsDa_ornament.jpg

Cayetana greeted that dawn with a concoction made with coffee beans and burned corn kernels. As the light poured out of the eastern sea and splashed into windows from coast to coast, Mexicans rose and went to their million kitchens and cooking fires to pour their first rations of coffee. A tidal wave of coffee rushed west across the land, rising and falling from kitchen to fire ring to cave to ramada. Some drank coffee from thick glasses. Some sipped it from colorful gourds, rough clay pots that dissolved as they drank, cones of banana leaf. Café negro. Café with canela. Café with goat’s milk. Café with a golden-brown cone of piloncillo melting in it like a pyramid engulfed by a black flood. Tropical café with a dollop of sugarcane rum coiling in it like a hot snake. Bitter mountaintop café that thickened the blood. In Sinaloa, café with boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on top in a pale membrane that looked like the flesh of a peeled blister. The heavy-eyed stared into the round mirrors of their cups and regarded their own dark reflections. And Cayetana Chávez, too, lifted a cup, her coffee reboiled from yesterday’s grounds and grits, sweet with spoons of sugarcane syrup, and lightened by thin blue milk stolen with a few quick squeezes from one of the patrón’s cows.

On that long westward morning, all Mexicans still dreamed the same dream. They dreamed of being Mexican. There was no greater mystery.

Only rich men, soldiers, and a few Indians had wandered far enough from home to learn the terrible truth: Mexico was too big. It had too many colors. It was noisier than anyone could have imagined, and the voice of the Atlantic was different from the voice of the Pacific. One was shrill, worried, and demanding. The other was boisterous, easy to rile into a frenzy. The rich men, soldiers, and Indians were the few who knew that the east was a swoon of green, a thick-aired smell of ripe fruit and flowers and dead pigs and salt and sweat and mud, while the west was a riot of purple. Pyramids rose between llanos of dust and among turgid jungles. Snakes as long as country roads swam tame beside canoes. Volcanoes wore hats of snow. Cactus forests grew taller than trees. Shamans ate mushrooms and flew. In the south, some tribes still went nearly naked, their women wearing red flowers in their hair and blue skirts, and their breasts hanging free. Men outside the great Mexico City ate tacos made of live winged ants that flew away if the men did not chew quickly enough.

So what were they? Every Mexican was a diluted Indian, invaded by milk like the coffee in Cayetana’s cup. Afraid, after the Conquest and the Inquisition, of their own brown wrappers, they colored their faces with powder, covered their skins in perfumes and European silks and American habits. Yet for all their beaver hats and their lace veils, the fine citizens of the great cities knew they had nothing that would ever match the ancient feathers of the quetzal. No cacique stood atop any temple clad in jaguar skins. Crinolines, waistcoats. Operas, High Mass, café au lait in demitasse cups in sidewalk patisseries. They attempted to choke the gods with New York pantaloons, Parisian petticoats. But still the banished spirits whispered from corners and basements. In Mexico City, the great and fallen Tenochtitlán, among streets and buildings constructed with the stones of the Pyramid of the Sun, gentlemen walked with their heads slightly tilted, cocked as if listening to this puzzling murmur of wraiths.

They still spoke a thousand languages—Spanish, too, to be sure, but also a thicket of songs and grammars. Mexico—the sound of wind in the ruins. Mexico—the waves rushing the shore. Mexico—the sand dunes, the snowfields, the steam of sleeping Popocatépetl. Mexico—across marijuana fields, tomato plants, avocado trees, the agave in the village of Tequila.

Mexico. . . .

All around them, in the small woods, in the caves, in the precipitous canyons of copper country, in the swamps and at the crossroads, the harsh Old Ones gathered. Tlaloc, the rain god, lips parched because the Mexicans no longer tortured children to feed him sweet drafts of their tears. The Flayed One, Xipe Totec, shivering cold because priests no longer skinned sacrifices alive and danced in their flesh to bring forth the harvest. Tonántzin, goddess of Tepeyac, chased from her summit by the very Mother of God, the Virgen de Guadalupe. The awesome and ferocious warrior god, Hummingbird on the Left, Huitzilopochtli. Even the Mexicans’ friend, Chac Mool, was lonely. Big eared and waiting to carry their hopes and dreams in his bowl as he transited to the land of the gods from the earth, he lay on his back watching forever in vain for the feathered priests to return. Other Old Ones hid behind statues in the cathedrals that the Spaniards had built with the stones of their shattered temples. The smell of sacrificial blood and copal seeped out from between the stones to mix with incense and candles. Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

Mexico. Mexico.

HummingbirdsDa_ornament.jpg

The pain in her belly kicked Cayetana Chávez over. She dropped her cup. She felt a cascade of fluids move down her bowels as the child awoke. Her belly!

It clenched. It jumped. It clenched.

At first, she thought it was the cherries. She had never eaten them before. If she had known they would give her a case of chorro . . .

“Ay,” she said, “Dios.”

She thought she was going to have to rush to the bushes.

They had come for her the day before. The Chávez girls were known by everybody. Although Santana Ranch was divided into two great lobes of territory—crops to the south and cattle to the north—there were only fifty workers’ households, and with the children and grandparents added up, it made for fewer than 150 workers. Everybody knew better than to bother Cayetana’s older sister, Tía. Good Christ: the People would rather move a rattlesnake out of their babies’ cribs with a stick than go to Tía’s door. So when they came from the northern end of the rancho with news that one of the Chávez sisters’ cousins had killed himself, they’d asked for La Semalú.

Ay, Dios. Cayetana was only fourteen, and she had already learned that life was basically a long series of troubles. So she had wrapped her rebozo around her head and put on her flat huaraches and begun her slow waddle through the darkness before the sun rose.

She wondered, as she walked, why the People called her Hummingbird. Was it because she was small? Well, they were all small. Everyone knew semalús were holy birds, carrying prayers to God. She also knew she had a bad reputation, so calling her Semalú was probably some kind of joke. They loved to make jokes. Cayetana spit: she did not think anything was funny. Especially now. Her poor cousin. He had shot himself in the head. Her mother and father were dead, shot down in an army raid in Tehueco lands. Her aunt and uncle had been hanged in a grove of mango trees by soldiers that mistook them for fleeing Yaquis near El Júpare. The men were strung up with their pants around their ankles. Both men and women hung naked as fruit. Some of the Mexicans had collected scalps. She sighed. Aside from her sister, she was alone in the world. She put her hands on her belly as she walked along the north road. It was three miles to the cattle operation. The baby kicked.

Not yet, not yet.

She didn’t mind being called a hummingbird.

Hours later, she pushed through the shaky gate of her cousin’s jacal. He was still lying on his back in the dirt. Someone had placed a bandana over his face. His huaraches were splayed. His toes were gray. The blood on the ground had turned black. He didn’t stink yet, but the big flies had been running all over him, pausing to rub their hands. A rusty pistola lay in the dirt a few inches from his hand.

The neighbors had already raided her cousin’s shack and taken all his food. Cayetana traded the pistola to a man who agreed to dig a hole. He dug it beside a maguey plant beside the fence, and they rolled the body into it. They shoved the dirt over him and then covered the grave with rocks so the dogs wouldn’t dig it up.

Inside the shack, Cayetana found a chair and a bed frame made of wood and ropes. There was a machete under the bed. A pregnant girl from distant Escuinapa was there, waiting. Cayetana didn’t know her, but she let her move in, since the girl was afraid that she would lose her infant to coyotes if she had it outside. Cayetana accepted the girl’s blessing, then swung the machete a few times. She liked the big blade. She started to walk home.

The sun was already setting. She didn’t like that. The dark frightened her. That road was also scary. It wound between black cottonwoods and gray willows. Crickets, frogs, night birds, bats, coyotes, and ranch dogs—their sounds accompanied her through the dark. When she had to pee—and since the child had sprouted inside her, she had to pee all the time—she squatted in the middle of the road and held the machete above her head, ready to kill any demon or bandit that dared leap out at her. An owl hooted in a tree behind her, and that made her hurry.

She came around a bend and saw a small campfire off to the side of the road. It was on the south side. That was a good omen—north was the direction of death. Or was it west? But south was all right.

A man stood by the fire, holding a wooden bowl. He was chewing, and he watched her approach. A horse looked over his shoulder, more interested in the bowl than in her. Her stomach growled and her mouth watered. She hadn’t eaten in a day. She should have hidden in the bushes, but he had already seen her.

“Buenas noches,” she called.

“Buenas.”

“It’s dark.”

He looked up as if noticing the darkness for the first time.

“It is,” he agreed. Then: “Don’t hit me with that machete.”

“I won’t.”

“Gracias.”

“This is for bandidos.”

“Ah!”

“Son cabrones,” she explained. “And I’ll kill the first one that tries anything.”

“Excellent,” he said.

“And ghosts.”

He put food in his mouth.

“I don’t think you can kill a ghost,” he said.

“We’ll see about that,” she said, flashing her blade.

The small fire crackled.

“What are you eating?” she asked.

“Cherries.”

“Cherries? What are cherries?”

He held one up. In the faint fire glow, it looked like a small heart full of blood.

“They come from trees,” he said.

“Son malos?” she asked. “They look wicked.”

He laughed.

“They are very wicked,” he said.

“I am going home,” she said.

“So am I.”

“Is this your horse?”

“It is, but I like to walk.”

“You must have good shoes.”

“I have good feet.”

He spit out a seed and popped another cherry in his mouth. She watched his cheeks swell as his jaw worked. Spit. Eat another cherry.

“Are they sweet?” she asked.

“Sí.”

He spit a seed.

He heard her belly growl.

“You will bring a child to light soon,” he said.

“Yes.”

“A girl.”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“A girl.”

He handed her the bowl.

“Eat,” he said.

The cherry juice in Cayetana’s mouth was dark and red, like nothing she had ever tasted.

She spit out the seed.

“I have to go now,” she said, “it is late.”

“Adios,” he said.

Cayetana replied in the mother tongue: “Lios emak weye.” God go with you. She walked into the night. Funny man. But one thing she knew from experience—all men were funny.

She’d gotten a restless night’s sleep with the bellyache she blamed on the stranger’s fruit. Now the morning brought increased tumult inside her. Cayetana thought she could make it to the row of outhouses that Tomás had built between the workers’ village and the great house where the masters slept. But the child within her had decided it was time to come forth, announcing the news about halfway to the outhouses when the pain dropped Cayetana to her knees and the strange water broke from her and fell into the dust.



Copyright © 2005 by Luis Alberto Urrea

Never See Me Like This Again

Like You'll Never See Me Again, click here to see video

No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.”

“A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.”
About courtship with Leslie Parrish
Richard Bach

“When you have come to the edge of all the light you have
And step into the darkness of the unknown
Believe that one of the two will happen to you
Either you'll find something solid to stand on
Or you'll be taught how to fly!”

When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it whenwestand still.

The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know:

1.Everything is part of it.

2.It's never too later to have a happy childhood.

Tom Robbins

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Anais Nin

Your eyes open and close like butterfly wings, he reached his small hand to touch my face and I kissed the tips of the little child's fingers which caused him to grin and fall down laughing. Are you a kid or a mom? the little boy asked. I'm a kid, I said. He smiled and pressed into my palm a clod of sand and wet grass, the little boy then turned into sunlight.

Neoteny

"Neoteny" is "remaining young", and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals - although a case could be made for the dolphins - because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

"The less you open your heart to others,
the more your heart suffers."

"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender."

"When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out."
Elizabeth Bowen

"The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life."
Sir Hugh Walpole

“Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep... wait for the boy who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you're just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have you.... The one who turns to his friends and says, 'that's her.'”

"So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.
In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from
me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page.

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND…

I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too."
Elizabeth Gilbert

"I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me."
Elizabeth Gilbert

“If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
Humphrey Bogart quote

“Practice random beauty and senseless acts of love.”

Character from one of my favorite movies.... princess mononoke

Watch the trailer:

Princess Mononoke

What a man knows at 50 that he did not know at 20 is, for the most part, incommunicable. The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions - a knowledge gained not by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love - the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, a little reverence for things one cannot see.



Adlai Stevenson (1900 - 1965)

Understanding and Love are not two separate things, but just one. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you cannot help but love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.


Thich Nhat Hanh

Take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you scew everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering - that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understand - there's where you'll find heaven.


Elizabeth Gilbert

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining in one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you’re banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only the burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you.
Elizabeth Gilbert

Don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine cock-eyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment, through your efforts, then olé! And if not, do your dance anyhow, and olé to you nonetheless.
Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat Pray Love

"One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: "Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever --or not?""

— Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

A Golden Compass

Forget every idea of right and wrong
Any classroom ever taught you

Because
An empty heart, a tormented mind,
Unkindness, jealousy and fear

Are always the testimony
You have been completely fooled!

Turn your back on those
Who would imprison your wondrous spirit
With deceit and lies.

Come, join the honest company
Of the King’s beggars –
Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns
And those astonishing fair courtesans
Who need Divine Love every night.

Come, join the courageous
Who have no choice
But to bet their entire world
That indeed,
Indeed, God is Real.

I will lead you into the Circle
Of the Beloved’s cunning thieves,
Those playful royal rogues –
The ones you can trust for true guidance –
Who can aid you
In this Blessed Calamity of life.
Hafiz,
Look at the Perfect One
At the Circle’s Center:

He Spins and Whirls like a Golden Compass,
Beyond all that is Rational,

To show this dear world

That Everything,
Everything in Existence
Does point to God.

--Hafiz

I wonder what they are saying...

Be entirely vulnerable and honest

breakfast in bed

This is very close to my idea of heaven. Breakfast in bed...

Tonight is a night of union for the stars and of scattering,
scattering, since a bride is coming from the skies, consisting of a full moon.
Venus cannot contain hereself for charming melodies, like the
nightingale which becomes intoxicated with the rose in spring-time.
See how the polestar is ogling Leo;
behold what dust Pisces is stirring up drom the deep!
Jupiter has galloped his steed against ancient Saturn, saying
"Take back your youth and go, bring good tidings!"
Mars' hand, which was full of blood from the handle of his
sword, has become as life-giving as the sun, the exalted in works.
Since Aquarius has come full of that water of life, the dry
cluster of Virgo is raining pearls from him.
The Pleiades full of goodness fears not Libra and being
broken; how should Aries flee away in fright from its mother?
When from the moon the arrow of a glance struck the heart
of Sagittarius, he took to night-faring in passion for her, like Scorpio.
On such a festival, go, sacrifice Taurus, else you are crooked of
gait in the mud like Cancer.
This sky is the astrolabe, and the reality is Love;
whatever wesay of this, attend to the meaning.
Shamsi-Tabriz, on that dawn when you shine, the dark night
is transformed to bright day by your moonlike face.
Rumi

Wedding Blessing

Since this blog has morphed into an Ode to Love, I thought it appropriate to put a wedding blessing upon the page.

Many of you have emailed me and asked me if I am married and if I was married to put pictures - I am not married nor have I ever been married and so do not have pictures to put up.

The Wedding Blessing

May these nuptials be blessed for us, may this marriage be blessed for us,
May it be ever like milk and sugar, this marriage like wine and halvah.
May this marriage be blessed with leaves and fruits like the date tree;
May this marriage be laughing forever, today,tomorrow, like the houris of paradise.
May this marriage be the sign of compassion and the approval of happiness here and hereafter;
May this marriage be fair of fame, fair of face and fair of omen as the moon in the azure sky.
I have fallen silent for words cannot describe how the spirit has mingled with this marriage.

Rumi

a list of favorites

I have to write a paper that was assigned two months ago and I don't feel like writing it. So I decided to treat myself to one thing that I love, I really love lists of my favorite things. So I am going to type super fast for one minte.

the thought of
living in the clouds
amazing dresses
amazing shoes (green velvet and ones with ruffles or studs)
shiny silver balloons shaped like stars or moons
flowers in every room of the house
flowers everywhere
magazines (Vogue, Elle)
antique books
cups of tea
breakfast in bed
day dreaming
night dreaming
socks knee socks
silk stockings (thigh highs with lace at the top)
garters
lingerie
travel
fuzzy coats
red wine
dark beer
warm spicy food
pizza
hot showers
hot baths with bubbles
white sandalwood candles
sandalwood incense
sandalwood soap
mountains
rivers
dry air
my camera
eye makeup
feeling super pretty
magic coincidences
thoughts of him
thoughts of him touching me
thoughts of him holding my hands
thoughts of him speaking
thoughts of him brushing his teeth
thoughts of him writing a story
thoughts of him writing a letter
thoughts of him writing a letter to me
staying in bed late
eating breakfast in bed
early morning light
reading comic books
reading books of mystic poems
writing
writing from a spellbound place
going to the movies and
holding hands in the dark
understanding
being understood
shopping with no guilt
diners
french fries
pie
coffee
yummie grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato
massage
acupuncture
Kathmandu
Jamaica
The Red Wood Forrest
Peru
Guatemala
Paris
sleeping in a castle
waking up in a cottage
waking up anywhere in the world in his arms
deep lucid dreams
writing my imaginations truth
laughter
music
not being afraid to dance in public
loving all the way.. . even when it hurts...
constant curiosity
spontaneous rituals
dream inspired pow-wows
honoring the honey heart... that is everything.

oh and going here, I have been dreaming of this place for years, going with true love (yeah I totally believe in true love, and forever and marriage and all that stuff)... the place is called
Mendicono Farmhouse it's right next to the Redwood Forrest and there is a secret garden right outside your door.

ok times up...

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.” Anais Nin

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”

“I don't pretend to know what love is for everyone, but I can tell you what it is for me; love is knowing all about someone, and still wanting to be with them more than any other person, love is trusting them enough to tell them everything about yourself, including the things you might be ashamed of, love is feeling comfortable and safe with someone, but still getting weak knees when they walk into a room and smile at you.”

FFFOUND Website

tick tock

It's late and I can't sleep don't know how to concentrate on schoolwork so my hands took me here to this blog filled no longer with my writing but quotes I adore, my page is filled with other peoples writing and I look on and wonder if that is laziness, escapism or some other thing I have not found a name for. A friend once said to me don't let your writing be a clockless therapy session and with that in mind there is this memory.

When I was a kid we lived in the sticks and there are times in the past when I talk about the double wide dusty blue trailer and this memory is a piece of that time. My father hated Christmas, he would go in his room and lock the door and when he did come out it was to lecture me on the sinfulness of the holiday that I was partaking in a pagan ritual, that the tree and the man in the red suit and the presents and lights were all symbols for a reality that he said were dedicated to the path of the horned man. But there was one Christmas I remember my father with his sad firefly eyes and velvet moustache crouching beside the tree and he handed me a wooden box, the box was shaped like a coffin and underneath the creaking lid was the most beautiful doll, a doll whose lifeless form was the same height as my seven year old body, with amber eyes that moved and blinked. I never really liked dolls, never thought they were real but I used to take this one who I called Molly, I'd take her into the woods with me and walk for hours the long way past the deer herds and panther footprints and stand still in the face of bear and on and on I'd walk her till we reached the edge of the highway and I remember looking down at her and asking her which way we should go, which way was home but Molly like all gods are silent when you need them most.

“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality...I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anais Nin

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.
susan sarandon

"WM. Perish: '...It's missing everything that matters'

Joe Black: 'Which is what?'

WM. Perish: 'Trust, responsibility, taking the weight for your choices and feelings and spending the rest of your life living up to them...and above all, not hurting the object of your love.'

Joe Black: 'So this is love according to William Perish?'

WM. Perish: 'Multiply it by infinity and take it to the depths of forever and you'll still have barely a glimpse of what I am talking about.'

Joe Black: 'Those were my words.'

WM. Perish: 'They're mine now"
-Meet Joe Black

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." - Albert Einstein

"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain signing to it - you and you alone make me feel that I am alive - Other men, it is said, have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough." - George Moore (1852-1933) Irish Writer

The Peackcock Maiden

The Peacock Maiden
China (A story of the Tai people)
For a thousand miles the Lantsang River flows, rolling to the south, bringing down a hundred thousand grains of glittering gold over the years and leaving a thousand and ten stories along its banks, among which is....

I
In Monbanja, a land of perennial green, there once lived a king named Bahkeladir. His granaries overflowed with the fruits of good harvests and his palace was beyond compare for splendor and richness, but he had no children. Both he and his queen Machena longed for a son, for an heir to succeed to the throne and complete their happiness.

And then, one morning in early spring, their wish was fulfilled. The people rushed excitedly about, talking of a strange happening. A man-child crawled out from the foot of a huge white elephant and then disappeared without a trace. Right at this moment, the queen gave birth to a healthy son which the king named Chaushutun, after a prince famous for his bravery, hoping that his son, too, would grow into a strong and brave man.

With each passing day Chaushutun grew taller and stronger. He diligently studied the arts of peace and war, becoming well versed in the arts and proficient with all weapons. His intelligence was astonishing, and his strength excelled all other men.

One day he peered into a well and by the dim light beheld a strange object in it. The wise old men said that the great King Bahmo had left a wonderful treasure there, which men for many generations had tried in vain to obtain. Chaushutun ordered the well be drained, and when this was done he descended into the well to examine it more closely. The object was a magic bow. So powerful was it that he who owned it could defeat an entire enemy army. No one but Chaushutun had the strength to bend the huge bow. He could draw it taut till it was as round as the full moon, and every arrow from it hit the target clean and sure.

One day as an evil bird of prodigious size was arrogantly wheeling overhead in the clouds, a black fish clasped in its beak, an arrow from Chaushutun's bow pierced it. The fish fell from its beak into a river, and the bird, mortally wounded, plunged down into the forests below.

Sixteen times the breezes of autumn fanned the paddy fields into a swaying, burning gold. Chaushutun was now a brave, handsome lad, with deep, clear eyes that sparkled with life. His face was more lovely than the legendary Dewawo's, and his voice was like the chiming of bells, soft and musical to the ear.

When the maidens saw him their mouths and eyes opened wide in admiration and they longed to toss the embroidered pouch of courtship at him, offer him the slit-bamboo stool reserved for their dear ones, and give him love nuts. His parents grew increasingly concerned about his marriage, and time and again urged him to marry a girl of noble birth.

The treacherous minister Mahashena, eager to increase his influence over the throne, offered his daughter. But it was of no use. Of the many beautiful but empty-headed daughters of nobles, not one could win Chaushutun's heart. His one wish was to find himself a girl as capable as she was beautiful, who could be his faithful companion for life.

One day, with his magic bow and sword, and mounted on his wonder horse, Chaushutun rode away, over vast fields, over range after range of mountains and through thick forests, to search for a girl after his heart. On the way he fell in with an old hunter named Gohagen and the two became firm friends. Together they hunted the wild boar and the flame-speckled deer, and shared the same fire. As they ate their fill of savory venison they talked of many interesting things. One of the stories Gohagen told the prince was this:

Not many years ago, Bahna, the God of Waters, with a magic weapon captured the son of Bahun, king of all fish-eating birds. In revenge the bird king caught the God of Waters while he was visiting the ocean's surface in the guise of a black fish. And just as the bird king was exulting high in the skies an arrow suddenly struck him, making him release the black fish, which fell down into a river, right into the net old Gohagen had spread. The black fish pleaded to be set free and promised to come to Gohagen's aid whenever he needed help. The kind-hearted Gohagen set the fish free.
"I admired the bowman whose arrow brought down that fish! I have always hoped that some day I will meet him," concluded Gohagen.

"That unknown bowman probably wants to meet you even more," Chaushutun added with a smile. So they talked through the night, like old, intimate friends.

Chaushutun looked up and sighed. "Ah, bright star!" he said. "Herald of dawn! So high, yet so easily seen. Now why is a beautiful and talented maid born among men so difficult to find?"

"Love never disappoints pure hearts. The steadfast and true will bring the deep-seated spring water to the surface," Gohagen chuckled knowingly.

Chaushutun nodded. He would remember that saying.

"And not far from here," the old hunter went on, "is Lake Langsna with its jade-green waters as clear as a polished mirror. And every seven days, seven peacock maidens extraordinarily fair to see bathe there. They are as fair as resplendent flowers, and the youngest outshines them all. When you see her, you will see the beauty of the legendary Nandiowala and you will know what wisdom and cleverness really mean. Come, let us go and see."

Chaushutun rose eagerly. They mounted their swift horses and soon were at the lake. They hid themselves on the lake's edge and waited.

II
The weather at noon was warm and mild, and the limpid waters of the lake mirrored the many-colored clouds which sailed gently across the sky, fanned by a soft fragrant breeze.

Suddenly, from out of the skies seven colorful peacocks flew down and alighted on the shore. Quickly the peacock cloaks were shed, and seven graceful maidens appeared, who, laughing merrily, plunged into the lake.

Chaushutun and Gohagen gazed, fascinated. After a while the peacock maidens rose from the water and, donning their peacock cloaks, began to dance. Chaushutun was enchanted by the youngest, the seventh sister, Namarona. Oh, how she danced! But all too soon the dancers turned back into peacocks, rose high into the air and flew away towards the west, and became seven tiny specks on the horizon, with Chaushutun gazing longingly after them.

"Don't be so sad!" said Gohagen. "They'll come back again in another seven days."

"Seven days! And then only a few moments! How can I stop them leaving?"

"Let us go and ask the hermit Palasi. He might know."

They went and found Palasi in his forest home. Smilingly he looked Chaushutun over. He shook his head at first, but finally gave a nod, and summoning an otter, told Chaushutun to follow it. The otter led them to the side of Lake Langsna, where it plunged in.

The waters immediately divided into two, leaving a wide, dry path. Along this came Bahna, the God of Waters himself, who greeted Chaushutun as his savior, and led them into his magnificent palace. Only then did Gohagen realize that the bowman who had shot down the evil bird Bahun was no other than his companion. After revealing all the secrets of a magic hook he had, the God of Waters lent it to Chaushutun and escorted them back to the shore. The two friends resumed their hiding place and waited.

The longed-for day arrived. The sun hung in mid-heaven and Chaushutun and Gohagen saw on the horizon a flash as of seven glittering diamonds, which came straight towards them. As they drew nearer, the dazzling orbs of light became seven peacocks, and after alighting, they again became seven beautiful maidens, who dived into the lake. Chaushutun's eyes carefully sought out and marked the youngest maiden. He had watched where she hung her peacock cloak and then, while the maidens splashed and frolicked in the lake, he quietly took out his magic hook, brought down the maiden's garment and gently drew it to his hiding place.

The maidens finished their bathing. What was their panic when they discovered that seventh sister's garment was not to be found!

Namarona began to cry, and her sisters comforted her, saying, "We will carry you home between us."

Chaushutun was frightened when he heard this, and called out, "No! Don't go!" He was going to say "Here is your garment!" but Gohagen clapped his hand over his mouth.

The peacock maidens were startled when they heard a man's voice, and took to their wings, leaving Namarona behind. She quickly darted into some thick bushes and hid herself.

After a long while when everything remained silent and motionless, she came out cautiously and began to look for her peacock garment.

"Tee-hee-hee! Tee-hee-hee!" something chattered high in the trees. It was only an impertinent squirrel.

"O squirrel, have you seen my garment?"

"Tee-hee-hee! Tee-hee-hee!" The squirrel only laughed.

"Oh, don't laugh! Can't you see I am looking frantically for my peacock cloak? I'm sure you know where it is! Won't you tell me?"

The squirrel, whiskers twitching, waved his bushy tail and pointed to the spot where Chaushutun was hiding, and then vanished into the leafy branches.

"Who could be there?" she asked herself. She looked up. There was a falcon wheeling overhead. "Could it be a bird who took my cloak?"

Swish! Chaushutun let fly an arrow and the falcon hurtled down, with an arrow through its heart. It dropped to the ground beside Namarona. She picked it up and looked about her, astonished. Still she could see no one.

"O maiden," a voice called softly, "did the arrow fly true?"

Namarona turned and saw Chaushutun, but it was too late to run and hide. It seemed a long, long while before she could find her voice. "Yes, right through the heart," she answered, in her soft, musical voice.

The two of them gazed at one another, speechless with enchantment.

Then Namarona spoke again, her face red with a rosy blush, "May I ask if my elder brother has seen my peacock cloak?"

"Oh why, O maiden, are you not at home, but here in this wilderness, looking for a peacock cloak?"

"My six sisters and I came to swim in Lake Langsna. I hung my cloak on yonder flowering bough, but it has vanished."

"I can see no houses near or far. Can you be the fairy Nandiowala from heaven, beautiful maid?"

"King Chaudekasali of Mongwudoongpan is my father. I am Namarona, his seventh daughter. You, elder brother, must surely be the handsome Bahmo or Bahna, the God of Waters. The mortal world cannot breed so handsome a youth."

"No, I am Chaushutun, son of King Bahkeladir of Monbanja. Though a thousand miles away, I sensed the fragrance of the flowers blossoming here, and came. Do not tell me the fresh flower before me belongs to another."

"My elder brother is so eloquent. He is a lovebird reciting his moving lines before me! There is no divine lotus here with a thousand petals, nor a flower so sweet that its perfume can spread even a hundred miles. The flower here showed little promise as a bud, and the poor blossom which resulted can only droop in shame. No one has ever come to water it, or caress it. Why should anyone stoop to pluck it?"

"A precious stone needs the cunning hand of a craftsman. O maiden, why are you not wearing the ring of some loved one?"

"What, I, a mere pebble in the wilderness! Who would deceive himself into thinking it a jewel! Or who would want to cast a precious ring away in the wilderness!"

As they were speaking, Namarona's six sisters appeared, anxiously looking for their little lost sister. They saw her and were about to swoop down and snatch her away when Gohagen shot an arrow into the air and flourished the magic hook at them, at which they took fright and fled.

"Fear not, lovely maid," Chaushutun comforted her, for she too was frightened. "He who protects me is my friend Gohagen, a most kind-hearted man." And then he added, shyly, "My store of food is but half eaten; my bed but half occupied. The fiery comet flies lonely across heaven. Ah, why has it no companion?"

"Alas, the sun only rises when the moon must set. People of different worlds cannot live together. Were it otherwise, my humble, poor self would gladly be a handmaid and wash dishes and feed swine for a lonely man."

"Ah, strong wine needs no fortifying! Wound not my heart further!" Chaushutun thought he could see a gleam of hope and went on more boldly. "I have journeyed a thousand miles across land and water to come here, and waited seven long nights and days to see you. I beg you to accompany me back to my home, to live with me."

"Water flows out from a jar easily but to scoop it back is hard," she answered. In truth, she had already lost her heart to this handsome youth, but she was not to be won too easily. "To go with you to your home would be enchanting, but what of your parents, the king and queen? What of your court and your people? They may not be pleased. And then how will I lift my head to eat my food? My eyes will never be dry."

"It cannot be that they will not be pleased! My parents love me well and will equally love what is mine. Your beauty equals that of Nandiowala and will shine throughout the land. All my people will be proud and happy to see you as the prince's consort."

"But my parents! They will miss me and will be sad."

"My home be yours," said Chaushutun, taking a golden ring off his finger eagerly. "Oh, lovely maid! Accept this and gladden my heart!"

He slipped it on her unresisting finger, and she gave him a jewel from her breast, saying, "In this you can always see your loved one."

No sooner had the two plighted their troth than two lotus blooms flowering on a single stem rose to the surface of the lake. The lovers thanked the hunter Gohagen and left Chaushutun's wonder horse in his care as a parting gift, and asked him to return the magic hook to its owner.

"And is it not time you returned my peacock cloak?" asked Namarona, her eyes full of laughter.

He pulled her cloak out of the bushes and gave it back to her. She put it on and, holding Chaushutun's hand tightly, spread out her dazzling wings. They rose into the air and in a flash went to his home in Monbanja.

III
The romantic way by which their young prince found his love set everyone buzzing with excitement. All agreed it was enchanting to have such a consort, as lovely as a fairy, for their prince. All. that is, save that treacherous minister Mahashena. He was furious because his daughter was rejected, and was determined to have his revenge. He openly opposed the marriage and tried to convince the king that Namarona was a witch. Meanwhile he secretly sent messengers to the king of the neighboring country of Mongshugang-Nakema, extolling the virtues and beauty of Namarona and exhorting him to send his army to abduct her for himself, promising to do all he could to help such an invading army.

At first the king Bahkeladir was reluctant to accept an unknown maiden as his son's bride, but he finally gave his consent when he saw how greatly his son loved Namarona. The queen and Namarona, however, liked each other from their first meeting and were soon fast friends. So, since nearly every noble approved, an auspicious day was chosen and preparations were started to celebrate the marriage.

Now the king of the neighboring country of Mongshugang-Nakema was a wicked tyrant, and a sensual and greedy bully. When he received the traitor Mahashena's glowing report of Namarona, he immediately assembled his army and invaded Monbanja.

It was on the very night of the wedding that the dispatch from the frontier came, informing the king that the country had been invaded. Everything was thrown into confusion. Chaushutun consulted his wise Namarona and decided that he would beg the king to let him lead the army against the invaders. The king agreed, and Chaushutun and the army departed. Soon after he had gone, the traitor minister brought a false report about the fighting, asserting that the prince's army was being driven back and that defeat seemed certain. King Bahkeladir was numbed with despair. Like a vanquished quail, he was deaf and blind to everything.

At night he had a terrible dream, so terrible that he could not forget it. He woke up shuddering and summoned all his lords and asked them to interpret this hideous nightmare. When he described it, the head priest, who was in league with the faithless minister, immediately interpreted it as the work of a witch who would betray the city.

"A witch! Where?" asked the king helplessly.

"Within the palace walls. But your humble servant dare not say more."

"In a time like this you must speak out and fear nothing," the king ordered.

Three times the head priest begged the king's pardon, as if he were reluctant to speak for fear of offending the king. Finally he spoke. "It is no other than Namarona," he said. "It is the prince's consort who has brought disaster upon us. If we do not rid ourselves of her, I fear for the consequences."

The king was greatly alarmed and did not know what to do.

Mahashena was pleased to see the king's consternation and seized the opportunity to pour more poison in his ears about Namarona. "Within seven days is the Day of Sacrifice. Let Namarona be seized and stripped of all her possessions and be executed on that day!" he proclaimed on behalf of the witless king.

The queen broke the dreadful news to Namarona and hid the peacock cloak, hoping to find some way for her to escape. Poor Namarona pleaded with the king, but he was adamant.

"Die bravely for our country and my son's sake!" was his reply.

Namarona was heart-broken. She wept and wept, longing for Chaushutun to come back and save her from this awful fate.

Chaushutun had driven the enemy back, and was even now leading his army triumphantly home, but he was still far away when the Day of Sacrifice came.

Namarona was taken to the execution ground, her rich robes in tatters. She had already a plan for escape, but, at the thought of having to leave Chaushutun, she wept profusely.

As she was led past the king and queen, she turned and begged them to listen to her last plea. "Hear me, O king and queen," she cried. Let me once more put on my peacock cloak and dance for you before we part forever!"

King Bahkeladir's heart softened and he granted her this last wish. The queen brought her the peacock cloak, the guards loosened her bonds, and Namarona put it on.

Slowly she began to dance. She was lovely to watch, the colors on the cloak flashing as she swayed. Even the stony-hearted executioner stood entranced as though his souls was cleansed and purified by the young maid's dance, and the crowds forgot they were there to watch an execution and only knew they were watching a lovely dancer. Slowly Namarona transformed herself into a peacock and rose into the air. The faithless minister shouted to the king to order the executioner to seize her, but it was already too late. She was out of reach, and soon out of sight.

"See, my lords," he shouted again in a fury. "See! She was a witch. She flew away!"

He had barely finished speaking when a warrior galloped up and ran to the king. He had brought the news of the victory. The king was still in a daze and asked again and again what news he brought.

"The prince, your son, leading your majesty's army, has routed the enemy. Our banners fly victorious!" the soldier repeated.

The king looked at the treacherous minister, who bowed his head. Everything was now clear to him. The next minute the whole populace rose and with joyous shouts welcomed their victorious army returning, with Chaushutun at their head. The court musician sang a song of welcome:

Sweet is the juice of the coconut!
Strong the shell that guards it!
We people of Monbanja live happily,
With Chaushutun the hero as our protector.
"The honor belongs to the beautiful Namarona," said Chaushutun smilingly. "It was her strategy that defeated the enemy. Come, let us ask her to accept the honor."

The king turned pale. How could he have been so foolish and done such wrong to an innocent person! How more than foolish to mistake the bad for the good!

The head priest and minister, fearful of Chaushutun's vengeance, hunched their shoulders and stole away as best they could, while the people and the soldiers bowed their heads and wept as they thought of Namarona, their princess who was as lovely as the fairy Nandiowala.

Prince Chaushutun was startled at the hush which fell after he had spoken.

"What is this?" he cried, alarmed. "What is this?" What has happened?"

The king and queen, their hearts heavy with grief, forced themselves to tell the truth. The blow fell like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, or the hiss of water on red embers. Chaushutun staggered and dropped to the ground.

Only half conscious, he murmured her name repeatedly. He took out the jewel she had given him at their betrothal, and looked into it. Yes, as she said, he could see her in it, with the hermit Palasi, her cheeks wet with tears. It was like a physical pain in his heart and he fell back again in a swoon.

When he came to he was in a cold anger. First, though, he was determined to find her again. Heedless of all pleas, he mounted his fiery steed and galloped to Lake Langsna, stopping neither day nor night. On and on, he spurred his horse, searching for his beloved Namarona.

IV
Namarona, so cruelly wronged, had left her bridal home with a heavy heart. As she winged her way home to Mongwudoongpan she thought of her loving parents and her sisters, whom she had not seen for some time. Her faith in Chaushutun's love for her was unshaken, and she knew he would not rest till he found her again. But this made her heart more heavy, for the way to her was fraught with danger. She flew over Lake Langsna and, meeting the hermit Palasi, she took off her armlet and spoke to him.

"Please give this to Chaushutun," she said, for she was sure he would seek for her there. "Tell him that if he wears it, his days will pass as though I were still by his side. But he must not try to follow me! It is too dangerous. Tell him he must not look for me!" And she turned and flew off, weeping as if her heart would break.

Chaushutun pressed on over fertile fields, through thick forests and over many tall ranges. His faithful mount was exhausted, and died. But Chaushutun hurried on by foot, gulping a hasty drink when he passed a stream and getting what game he could. It was only when he was dropping with fatigue that he paused briefly. Day after weary day he labored till he came to Lake Langsna. Thinking back to the happy meeting with Namarona, he wept bitterly. So bitterly did he cry that the hermit Palasi took compassion on him and, going up to Chaushutun, gave him Namarona's armlet. At the sight of the armlet he wept all the more grievously and became all the more determined to find her.

"From here to Namarona's home is a long and difficult road, over impassable rivers and vast stretches of shifting sands. There are unpredictable perils, man-crushing mountains and giant man-eating birds awaiting you. And should you by chance reach Mongwudoongpan, her father, the king, would still doubt your worth as your father doubted hers."

"I must go on!" Chaushutun vowed. "If I do not find her again I do not want to return. Without her I cannot live!"

Palasi was deeply moved to see such love, and such determination. He decided he would help, and called up a monkey to guide Chaushutun to Namarona's home.

The monkey led the way, on their trying and seemingly endless journey, till one day they reached the Namienkalikagan, the river which ran white-hot, enough to melt metal. Chaushutun tested the seething waters with his sword. No sooner did the blade touch the water than the tip dissolved.

Upriver and down he searched, but no ford or bridge could he find. There was no way over unless he could fly. He stood on the bank, gazing across the river with impatient eyes. Suddenly a huge black python rose out of the water, its head on one bank and its tail on the other, like a long, narrow bridge. The nimble-witted monkey quickly ran over the snake to the other side, closely followed by Chaushutun. When they were across, the snake disappeared again.

On and on Chaushutun and the monkey pushed westwards till they reached the cloud-piercing peaks, the Three Fighting Sentinels. These were three mountains which crashed against one another continuously. Chaushutun fitted an arrow to his magic bow and aimed at a crack. Swish flew the arrow, breaking a temporary passage through the shifting mountains. Monkey and man sped through this opening. Even as they reached the other side, the mountains crashed together again.

And after a long, long way they reached a vast open space swept by sandstorms and flying stones. All day they had to battle with the whirling stones till at last they reached a huge tree which blotted out the sun. Tired and exhausted, they climbed up into its branches and rested, unaware that this was the home of the giant man-eating birds. A sudden blast of wind woke Chaushutun out of his exhausted stupor. It was the bird and his mate returning to their nest. The male bird could forecast events to come in the east and the female in the west.

"Your prediction was not very accurate, was it?" the female said derisively to her mate. "I thought you said that Chaushutun would be here today! There's no sign of him that I can see."

"But according to my knowledge, he has crossed the Namienkalikagan and passed through the Three Fighting Sentinels safely. He should be here today. I am still hopeful of having my dainty morsel," the male said petulantly. Then he strained his great head. "Gawk," he croaked, "I can smell a living human!"

"Gawk! I too," cried the female. "Come! Let us go down and see."

The two giant birds flopped to the ground, sniffing now east, now west, craning their ugly necks in every direction. Chaushutun, alarmed, clutched his sword, prepared to do battle with them. The birds discovered the monkey and devoured him. They found nothing else and flapped back to their aerie.

"Oho! A monkey! That's your man from the east, is it?" said the female. "Anyway, I'm going to sleep now. Tomorrow the King of Mongwudoongpan is going to hold a ceremony to welcome and bless his seventh princess who has just returned from Monbanja. Seven huge elephants, a hundred head of buffaloes, and a hundred fat pigs are going to be butchered. Let us go there, and have our fill of bone and blood."

Soon the great birds were asleep and Chaushutun relaxed with a sigh of relief. "Tomorrow they're going to fly to my dear one's home, are they!" he thought. "If only I could steal a ride on one of them! What care I for danger if I can see her again." The thought of her made him brave. He gripped his good sword firmly and quietly climbed into the nest. He hacked off a huge feather, as big and round as a man, and stealthily crept into its hollow stump. "Now the bird will take me to Mongwudoongpan!" he thought triumphantly.

V
Next morning the huge birds took wing, soaring swiftly through the skies, with Chaushutun safely hidden, and soon reaching the kingdom of Mongwudoongpan. The bird landed, and preened its feathers, shaking Chaushutun out. He quickly made his way towards the palace. As he drew near he saw an elderly woman resting in the shade of a pavilion.

He was about to ask for news of Namarona when he saw a troop of beautiful maidens dressed in bright robes on their way to fetch water. So he said, "May I ask you, honored matron, why so many maids fetch water together?"

"Young man," replied the old lady, "don't you know that the seventh princess has come back from Monbanja and the king has ordered a great feast to pray for a blessing on her? These girls are now fetching water for the princess."

"Oh," said Chaushutun. He asked nothing more, but watched the maids fill their pails and depart one after the other till only one was left beside the well.

It was Namarona's personal maid, a clever young girl. She had filled her pails when she saw the handsome stranger staring intently at her. She thought him handsome and, pretending she was unable to lift the pails, called to him for help, hoping thus to enter into conversation with him. Chaushutun gladly helped her, and as he bent over the pails he quickly slipped the armlet Namarona had give him into one of them.

"Just as the flower which stands by the clear waters is always beautiful," he said, "so I dare presume the mistress whom you serve is most lovely. Will you present my blessings to her? May her tears be washed away and may her smile appear again!"

The maid blushed. It seemed an unusual compliment to send. She looked more closely at this strange youth and replied, "From where does my elder brother come? He speaks so eloquently, it could be the speech of a golden cockatoo from some foreign skies!"

"Yes," Chaushutun answered, "it is from foreign skies that I have come. But eloquence I have none. The only fluency which comes to my tongue is to echo your mistress's name. Take her my message, I beg you, take it swiftly."

The girl still wanted to know what lay behind his mysterious word, but she knew her princess was waiting, and had to go.

Never for one moment did Namarona forget Chaushutun. In front of her was clean green grass and fresh bright flowers, but she only wanted to see her loved one. She saw the bees busily visiting the flowers, and she felt all the more lonely and sad. When the morning mists lifted and the dew dried, her sorrow still lay heavy on her heart. She only longed to be with him again, to live together happily. On this day when her father was holding the great ceremony to bless her, she fervently hoped that the clear water showered on her would wash away all her misfortunes and bring the day of her happy reunion with Chaushutun nearer.

Her maid returned and poured the water over her. Something struck her arm. She stifled a cry as she saw what lay on the ground.

"What startles the princess?" asked her maid.

"Is it a dream? What do I see! There on the ground lies my armlet. How did it get there?"

"Your eyes do not deceive you. Indeed, it is the princess's armlet that lies there."

"I can see a fire balloon floating, but I cannot see the person who lit the fire! I can see an embroidered love pouch in front of me, but, alas, where is he who dropped it!"

"Princess, why do you talk of fire balloons and love pouches while I bathe you?"

"Girl, you must tell me where this armlet came from."

"Is it not possible I scooped it up with the water?"

"No! No! I beg you, tell me, who gave it to you?"

The serving maid was puzzled. What strange business was this? She told Namarona everything: how she went to fetch water and met a young man, and how he spoke strangely to her.

Namarona sprang to her feet and ran, barefooted, to the king and queen, her eyes bright and shining. "My husband is here!" she cried breathlessly.

Chaushutun had wandered on after the maid servant left, and then he was apprehended and brought before the king. The king looked doubtfully at Chaushutun. Was this youth worthy of his daughter's love? He could not believe that Chaushutun had reached his kingdom merely by courage and love and without a magic peacock cloak. And so quickly too!

Chaushutun begged the king to pardon him for the wrongs that his daughter had suffered, and swore that he loved her with all his heart. The king could almost believe him, but he was determined to test him. He proposed two conditions which Chaushutun must fulfil. If he failed, he was to leave without seeing the princess.

As the first test, Chaushutun had to destroy, with his bow, a gigantic boulder hindering the smooth flow of the river and causing frequent floods which destroyed many thousands of farms. No one had ever been able to do anything to alleviate this curse.

Chaushutun, before ten thousand pairs of watchful eyes, fitted an arrow to his magic bow and drew it taut with all his might. Swish flew the arrow and immediately there was a tremendous rumble like thunder. The huge boulder crumbled and was swept swiftly away by the current, amidst a roar of cheers from the crowd. The king was satisfied with the first test.

The second condition was this: The seven princesses had to enter a darkened room and each show a finger through a hole in the wall. If Chaushutun could identify Namarona's finger, then the king would be satisfied that he loved her.

The night was black as pitch, and Chaushutun outside the darkened room had great difficulty in finding any fingers at all. Unexpectedly, however, a firefly hovered in the air and then gently alighted on one particular finger. Without a moment's hesitation Chaushutun seized the finger, feeling it could be no other than Namarona's.

"He has succeeded! That is her finger!" the king exclaimed, all doubts gone. "Come, and we will celebrate their reunion!"

A few days later, Chaushutun and Namarona prepared to go. They bade everyone of Mongwudoongpan farewell and left for Monbanja on a flying horse and a flying elephant, given to them by the king.

King Bahkeladir and Queen Machena were still mourning their sorrows when their tears turned to joy. Elaborate ceremonies and feasts were held to celebrate the young couple's return. The traitor minister, fearing to meet his just reward, had left with his rejected daughter for the neighboring country of Mongshugang-Nakema.

Chaushutun and Namarona lived long and happily together. Namarona's peacock dance, now a symbol of peace and happiness, became famous throughout the land of the Tais and is danced to this very day.

Source: Folk Tales from China, third series (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1958). pp. 16-46. No copyright notice.

"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands.

Excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems" — e.e. cummings

"When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still. The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: 1. Everything is part of it. 2. It's never too late to have a happy childhood." — Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

Bjork Declare Independence Video NPR click here:

James Joyce Letter to Nora

"Irish-born writer James Joyce (1882 - 1941) lived in a variety of cities in Europe, but was always tied to Dublin, the city of his birth. It was the setting for many of his revolutionary and controversial works, and it was also where in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, the woman who would eventually become his wife. This letter, written just months after Joyce first met Nora, shows the depth of his affection."

15 August, 1904

My dear Nora,

It has just struck me. I came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me 'Dear.' I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs.

When I am with you I leave aside my contemptuous, suspicious nature. I wish I felt your head on my shoulder. I think I will go to bed.

I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won't sign anything at all, because I don't know what to sign myself.

John Keates Letter to Fanny Brawne

Recipient: Fanny Brawne (1800-1865) was first Keats's neighbor and later his fiancée.

25 College Street

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else - The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you again[s]t the unpromising morning of my Life - My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving - I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love - You note came in just here - I cannot be happier away from you - 'T is richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love." I can do that no more - the pain would be too great - My Love is selfish - I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever
John Keats

Carrie: Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they need to run free until they find someone just as wild to run with them.

Sex and the City

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Maya Angelou

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins is my favorite writer, here is an excerpt from one of my favorite books.

"The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami. However significant that discovery may be—and there is the possibility that it could alter the destiny of each and every one of us—it is not the incident with which to begin this report.
In the suitcase with the mystic unmentionables were pages and pages torn from a journal which John Paul Ziller had kept on one of his trips through Africa. Or was it India? The journal began thusly: "At midnight, the Arab boy brings me a bowl of white figs. His skin is very golden and I try it on for size. It doesn't keep out mosquitoes. Nor stars. The rodent of ecstasy sings by my bedside." And it goes on: "in the morning there are signs of magic everywhere. Some archaeologists from the British Museum discover a curse. The natives are restless. A maiden in a nearby village has been carried off by a rhinoceros. Unpopular pygmies gnaw at the foot of the enigma." That was the beginning of the journal. But not the beginning of this report.
Neither the FBI nor the CIA will positively identify the contents of the suitcase as the property of John Paul Ziller. But their reluctance to specify is either a bureaucratic formality or a tactical deceit. Who else but Ziller, for God's sake, wore jockey shorts made from the skins of tree frogs?
At any rate, let us not loiter in the arena of hot events. Despite the agents of crisis who dictate the drafting of this report, despite the spiraling zeitgeist that underscores its urgency, despite the worldwide moral structure that may hang in the balance, despite that, the writer of this document is no journalist, nor is he a scholar, and while he is quite aware of the potential historical importance of his words, still he is not likely to allow objectivity to nudge him off the pillar of his own perspective. And his perspective has its central focus, the enormity of public events notwithstanding, the girl: the girl, Amanda."

The Landmark Trust

Here is one of my favorite websites: The Landmark Trust and more places that ignite dreaming.

a dream cottage

The Landmark Trust

I found this website and fell inlove with many of the buildings, this cottage named the Hole Cottage was one of my favorites, it sleeps 2 people. I would love really love to spend some time here in this adorable cottage brimming with potent magic. I could see myself living in a house like this brewing worlds, the thought is a happy one.

"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all."
The Wind in the Willows
Ch. 1.

I knew damn well I would never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you are intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it's essential not to have any ego at all. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try and get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego, tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Holly.

"Elena" by Anaïs Nin

When she was about to come and could no longer defend herself against her pleasure, Leila stopped kissing her, leaving Bijou halfway on the peak of an excruciating sensation, half- crazed. Elena had stopped at the same moment.
Uncontrollable now, like some magnificent maniac, Bijou threw herself over Elena's body, parted her legs, placed herself between them, glued her sex to Elena's, and moved, moved with desperation. Like a man now, she thumped against Elena, to fell the two sexes meeting, soldering. Then as she felt her pleasure coming she stopped herself, to prolong it, fell backwards and opened her mouth to Leila's breast, to burning nipples that were seeking to be caressed.
Elena was now also in the frenzy before orgasm. She felt a hand under her, a hand she could rub against. She wanted to throw herself on this hand until it made her come, but she also wanted to prolong her pleasure. And she ceased moving. The hand pursued her. She stood up, and the hand again traveled towards her sex . . . Leila's pointed nails buried in the softest part of Elena's shoulder, between her breast and her underarm, hurting, a delicious pain, the tigress taking hold of her, mangling her. Elena's body so burning hot that she feared one more touch would set off the explosion . . .
Elena and Leila together attacked Bijou, intent on drawing from her the ultimate sensation. Bijou was surrounded, enveloped, covered, licked, kissed, bitten, rolled again on the fur rug, tormented with a million hands and tongues. She was begging now to be satisfied, spread her legs, sought to satisfy herself by friction against the other's bodies. They would not let her. With tongues and fingers they pried into her, back and front, sometimes stopping to touch each other's tongue . . . Bijou raised herself to receive a kiss that would end her suspense . . . She almost cried to have it end.

Hilda and Rango by Anais Nin

An excerpt by Anais Nin

The next day Rango was waiting for her at the door of her little hotel. He stood there reading and smoking. When she came out, he said simply, ‘Come and have coffee with me.’ They sat at the Martinique Café, a café frequented by mulattos, prize fighters, drug addicts. He had chosen a dark corner of the café, and now he bent over her and began to kiss her. He did not pause. He kept her mouth on his and did not move. She dissolved in this kiss.

They walked the streets like Parisian apaches, kissing continuously, making their way to his gypsy cart, half unconscious. Now in full daylight, the place was alive with gypsy women preparing to sell lace in the marker. Their men slept. Others were preparing to travel south. Rango said he had always wanted to go with them. But he had a job playing guitar at a night club where they paid him well.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘I have you.’

In the cart he offered her wine and they smoked. And he kissed her again. He raised himself to dose the little curtain. And then he undressed her, slowly, taking off the stockings delicately, his big brown hands handling them as if they were gauze, invisible. He stopped to look at her garters. He kissed her feet. He smiled at her. His face was strangely pure, illumined with a youthful joy, and he undressed her as if she were his first woman. He was awkward with her skirt but finally unhooked it, with a curiosity about the way it fastened. More adeptly he raised her sweater above her bead, and she was left with only her panties on. He fell on her, kissing her mouth over and over again. Then he took off his own clothes, and fell on her again. As they kissed, his hand gripped her panties and pulled them, and he whispered, ‘You are so delicate, so small. I cannot believe that you have a sex.’ He parted her legs only to kiss her. She felt his penis hard against her belly, but he took it and pushed it downwards.

Hilda was amazed to see him do this, push his penis down between his legs, cruelly, thrusting away his desire. It was as if he enjoyed denying himself, while at the same time arousing them both to a breaking point with kissing.

Hilda moaned with the pleasure and the pain of expectancy. He moved over her body, now kissing her mouth, now her sex, so that the shell-like flavor of the sex was brought to her mouth and they mingled together, in his mouth and breath.

But he continued to push away his penis, and when they had worn themselves our with unfulfilled excitement he lay over her and fell asleep like a child, his fists closed, his head on her breasts. Now and then he caressed her, mumbling, ‘It is not possible that you have a sex. You are too delicate and small ... You are unreal ...‘ He kept his hand between her legs. She rested against his body, which was twice the size of hers. She was vibrating so much that she could not sleep.

His body smelled like a precious-wood forest; his hair, like sandalwood, his skin, like cedar. It was as if he had always lived among trees and plants. Lying at his side, deprived of her fulfillment, Hilda felt that the female in her was being taught to submit to the male, to obey his wishes. She felt that he was still punishing her for the gesture she had made, for her impatience, for her first act of leadership. He would mouse and deprive her until he had broken this willfulness in her.

Had he understood that it was involuntary, not truly in her? Whether he had or not, he was blindly determined to break her. Over and over again they met, undressed, lay side by side, kissed and caressed themselves to a frenzy, and each time he pushed his penis downwards and hid it away.

Over and over again she lay passive, showing no desire, no impatience. She was in a state of excitement, which exacerbated all her sensibilities. It was as if she had taken new drugs that made the entire body more alive to caresses, to a touch, to the very aim. She felt her dress on her skin like a hand. It seemed to her that everything was touching her like a hand, teasing her breasts, her thighs continuously. She had discovered a new realm, a realm of suspense and watchfulness, of erotic wakefulness such as she had never known.

One day when she was walking with him, she lost the heel of one shoe. He had to carry her. That night he took her, in the candlelight. He was like a demon crouching over her, his hair wild, his charcoal-black eyes burning into hers, his strong penis pounding into her, into the woman whose submission he first demanded, submission to his desire, his hour.

The drug of love was no escape, for in its coils lie latent dreams of greatness which awaken when men and women fecundate each other deeply. Something is always born of man and woman lying together and exchanging the essences of their lives. Some seed is always carried and opened in the soil of passion. The fumes of desire are the womb of man's birth and often in the drunkeness of caresses history is made, and science, and philosophy. For a woman, as she sews, cooks, embraces, covers, warms, also dreams that the man taking her will be more than a man, will be the mythological figure of her dreams, the hero, the discoverer, the builder....Unless she is the anonymous whore, no man enters woman with impunity, for where the seed of man and woman mingle, within the drops of blood exchanged, the changes that take place are the same as those of great flowing rivers of inheritance, which carry traits of character from father to son to grandson, traits of character as well as physical traits. Memories of experience are transmitted by the same cells which repeated the design of a nose, a hand, the tone of a voice, the color of an eye. These great flowing rivers of inheritance transmitted traits and carried dreams from port to port until fulfillment, and gave birth to selves never born before....No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, burried treasure..."

Anais Nin Exerpt from "The Four Chambered Heart"

One more poem by Walter Benton

ENTRY July 26
The thin sketal moon reminded me - - - and the sharp
electric stars, when I walked to meet you.
And meeting you, your face - - -grim and implacable ---- reminded me.
And the studied way you controlled pleasure, even when we had drunk ---
danced, heard swing music: even when you read my new poem to you.
All these reminded me. A month had passed ---
a month, by the gaunt red moon like the mark of an incandescent thumbnail
Your mind's cosmetic lay frightfully upon you; muddled your eyes
and settled on your mouth. Entered your skin like acid.
How will you be when you have fully torn the rainbows off my eyes?
Ah, we will be poor then, you and I --- sorry and wrong, alone and poor ---
for all our righteousness and love we may have found in others.
Yes, I will be poor - - - what else not having you can mean to me?
And as for you - - - all the things you cannot ever be, you are
only because my love is like the magic touch of stars. You wear my love,
and all who see you say; how beautifully his love becomes her!

Poems by Walter Benton

Because hate is legislated . . . written into
the primer and testament,
shot into our blood and brain like vaccine or vitamins
Because our day of time, of hours --- and the clock-hand turns,
closes the circle upon us; and black timeless night
sucks us in like quicksand, receives us totally ---
without a raincheck or a parachute, a key to heaven or the last long look
I need love more than ever now . . . I need your love,
I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink
Because slow negative death withers the world and only yes
can turn the tide
Because love has your face and body . . . and your hands are tender
and your mouth is sweet ---- and God has made no other eyes like yours.

thoughts tonight...

I feel human and out of sorts... Far away from center... Ask me what I would like and my answer would include that: I crave fire, sacred love fire, coupled with devotion, I intend magic and deep communing, a relationship that is permeated by a rowdy bliss and I would like to feel lustful and daring with him whoever he may be out there in the wild wild night. There are times when I care about being with a great love, one who I can touch and feel on many levels of being, someone who is deeply interested and interesting, a love who encourages me to expansiveness and being and doing the work. A love which chooses to worship, play and adventure an entire lifetime, diving ever deeper into the sacred irreverent ecstatic dance of the universe.

Ahhh, I'm too bookish for my own good. That said I just really want to be able to tell a story... a story which springs from the heart, my heart, the heart of the world.

Dear Goddess...

"Dear Goddess, you psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains: Bless the insanely poised creators out there with lucid dreams while they are wide awake. Provide them with their own spin doctors, and vacuum cleaners for their magic carpets, and solar powered sex toys that work even in the dark. Give them a knack for avoiding other people's hells, and a thousand masks that represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not psychotic stalkers. Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river, or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn."

Prayer channeled by the magnificent astrologer Monsieur Rob Brezsny

wild

"In his book The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Robert bly says that to be wild is not to be crazy like a criminal or psychotic, but "mad as the mist and snow." It has nothing to do with being childish or primitive, not does it manifest as manic rebellion or self-damaging alienation. The real marks of wildness, he asserts are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown."

"Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won't give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won't end if we can find them."
- Martin Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar

"The Swahili word kule means "in between" or neither -this-way-nor that. Kule people are highly valued, according the Beauty and Truth Laboratory Researcher Russ Crim, because they are unbiased but not apathetic. Their passionate objectivity allows them to imagine a common ground that in the best interests of both sides in a conflict, thereby promoting an organic form of harmony."- Beauty and Truth Lab

The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others- in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees." -Marcel Proust

The Secret Order of The Red Rose

Crow flew high above the forest watching the cave beyond the stream, over the years he had seen shaman and medicine people make their way from their earth world and into the mist of this one. These walkers between the worlds would move with reverence leaving no trace of themselves behind. As Crow swooped in perching above the cave he felt a rumble shiver up from the cave and observed the mist unfurling a group of four hooded women who entered the grove. The tallest and oldest of the group pulled a cross from inside her dark robe, crow leaned in closer stretching his neck and tilting his head. Etched upon the cross was an incription he could not decipher and a flower. The elder held out the cross to which the women clasped at all four points. And they spake in melodious unison, "We the Order of the Red Rose bound by secrecy through all times, committing our selves to the Light will seek until found the Savior who has been hidden from us, we vow to protect the way of the Saints and all that is Holy and Pure, restoring order to our realm. So be it. Blessed by the Holy Ghost." And they moved forward through the river. Unlike the shamans or medicine people they did not pay homage to the fast flowing water or leave an offering under the old oak, the tall crone walked in a straight line carrying the cross with the red rose before them. The crow did not cry out yet he knew what they were after at least he had his suspicions and he paced back and forth his feathers flapping in agitated grief, he standing at a cross roads and not knowing how or what to choose.

The Pan Pipes Play...

He named her Swan because the very air held her feet as if winged. She moved toward him each night with a fluidity and uncommon grace and Pan the great goat god felt the glow of his testicular astrolobe quiver and give rise to the ecstatic proportions of her spherical astronomy. With each nightly visit his music morphed and transformed from the haunting refrain of a forgotten god to a prurient sound causing the mayhem of a girl fevered with bliss. Pan watched his girl, his Swan swoon and move and dance and bend tossing her hips from side to side in shimmying arcs of crescent wonder, thrusting her pelvis forward with each blow of the Pan pipes and she spun round and round breasts glistening, heated, damp, rising ever bouncing orbs in the moonlight.

Here is your writerly compatriot... So sleepy after work.

creature of the night

During the day she ate less and less and Crow wondered if his charge was going through a metamorphosis, if at some point she would begin to display powers of some kind, if he would then be able to strut proud and fearless through the forest. But the girl no longer clamored for wild berries or honey combs or even pods of chocolate. As the crow's eyes were opening with the dawning of light she was falling into deepest of slumbers and he worried that she unlike him might be a creature of the night.

goat god's invitation into the mystery

One night while Crow was sleeping and the moon was full our dark haired beauty could not sleep. She twisted her hair with jasmine flowers and climbed down the banyan tree and into the silken air of night. She wandered to the Great Mountain, the place the Crow said she must have been born, the place he found her. She touched the earth smiling. The crow had warned her to never wander the forest without him and to stay far away from Great Mountain. He had seen strange beasts and wand bearing mortals from the earth realm find their way into the hidden forest when the mist was curling thick through the underbrush lacing the air with damp spells undone. She sat on the her birth rock and felt a kinship with the large stone, felt a joy take hold of her as she sat upon it. She curled up against the rock listening to the heartbeat of the mountain, of the forest, of the joy all around her when suddenly her reverie was interrupted by a haunting note. A lone melody and tactile refrain entered her ear and pulled her attention upwards. Throwing her better instinct aside she began to climb the wooded mountain, the sound drawing her ever nearer to the source of the refrain. As she reached a small clearing her heart pounded harder, the land flattened and sitting at the entrance of a fire lit cave was a the most unusual creature she had ever seen. He was covered in thick fur, had large curling horns, the face and hands of a human but the legs and feet resembled a faun or a goat. He played what appeared to be a reed instrument with rapt attention not seeming to notice her yet the young beauty could not help herself, she moved closer. A curiosity older than time moving through her pulling her onwards toward a destiny she like the rest of us in our own unique human stupor cannot fathom. As she stood facing the creature she recognized him as a god; not because he was half man and half goat but because of the intense awe she felt. A wondrous adulation slid up between her legs igniting a feeling she could only describe as a heated glow, the feeling between her thighs was in itself almost unbearable to contain, the sensation of heat and light traveled sliding up into buttocks into her sacrum and unleashed itself into the very matrix of her spine blossoming in wonder at the crown of her head and into her eyes. She could feel every note pounce and drop into the well of her being and still he played. She could see that this man, this goat, this god was himself comprised of music too, each atom circling a nucleus of light all the while ringing a trickster version of truth, yin and yang stalking one another in the eternal dance, an invitation into the mystery. "Be you maiden of nymph?"the goat god asked, the girl detected the trickiest of smiles making a glint upon his face but she did not know how to answer. She was stunned into stillness with the multitude of scents wafting from his fur. He stood up, his playing now stopped and he towered tall above her. The goat god moved closer, she smelled the deep humid of him. His stink was a heavenly multitude of wet leaves, dark earth, rosemary, chocolate, frothy mead and something else... a deeper scent which she did not know but wanted to taste upon her tounge, a ripe bitter scent rimmed with the flavor of salt.

feasting on her fragrance

The girl continued to grow each day as all girls do, she grew away from childhood at a rate the crow considered to be improbably inhuman. As her dainty hands sprung around the moss and twisted vines of the crows nest, her legs shot out and down dangling over the edge of their tree top abode. But speeding faster than her arms and legs was her hair. Long dark cables twisted and swathed through branches, clinging and snagging in it's journey downwards. The crow did his best to keep the mouth of his stretching beast filled. From his beak and claws he tempted her each day with a veritable feast. She devoured wild flower honeycombs the crow had cajoled from the queen bee's lair, she munched upon fat hawthorn berries and she arched towards the large cacao pods he dangled before her open mouth which she reached up and snatched from him, ripping the husks open with the shiny talons growing from her tiny hands. Her eyes glittering, growing large as wild saucer moons as she bit into the pulpy fruit smiling at the crow, resting her thick black lashes against his soft neck, he cooed and hopped around untangling her hair from the branches below.

The creature grew at an amazing rate, the crow tilted his head in wonder at the round orbs of her breasts topped by budding nipples which were filled with the colors of hillside roses and steaming creme of cocoa. A soft mound of hair sprang between her legs which began to give off a scent, her female scent was of morning dew and crushed forest leaves. As the girl slept during the late afternoon the crow inhaled the fragrance wafting from between her moist tan thighs and he sniffed deeply into the circular dip of her belly button. The crow began to shiver with the approaching dread that he might one day not be able to contain this girl he wanted for his own.

Once upon a time beneath the foot of Great Mountain, a crow found a baby human whose tiny face was covered in tears. On closer inspection the crow saw that this baby was laughing, the child was laughing so hard her face was the color of a beets innards, her nose was running and her little fists were pounding into the ground at a hilarity unknown to our dark winged friend. The crow looked around, there were no humans to be seen or even known to venture into this part of the world and as the child laughed with ever increasing abandon the crow had another thought. He thought, this human who laughs in the face of it's immanent death pounding her fists against the Great Mountain must not be a human at all but some kind of spirit being who possibly escaped from the loins of the gods. The crow picked the child up by her black hair and carried her to his nest in a banyan tree rising above the clouds. The crow thought, with this child one day I shall be king of the world.