~~T.S. Eliot

A life is not a thick, black linear time line that etches itself bit by plodding bit across a personal landscape. Last week weaves itself into this one. The past holds the possibility of the present and memory remains fluid moving backward and forward …not a stationery entity that describes the past, but one that creates new realities whether we are ready for them or not. As time has moved on for me, and I am becoming old, time has become a presence without days. It has become less and less important to sort through events chronologically. What comes into the perceived march of days instead is a weaver’s hand …colors of a departure and events of a return …strands of my life throwing themselves through the warp of the loom without the narrow conception of the order of days …weft colors that show up here … fade to nothingness …only to resurface in another place. The shuttle works deftly …sometimes so quickly in the heat of gathering what might easily fall into disuse …sometimes slowly with care and thought. The shuttle never stops as I am stretched taut upon the loom until one day I will be all of one piece …a finished work of texture and color in all dimensions until another pattern using the strands of the last will come into its place for the next.

My journey with aloneness began in middle age. Early on I asked myself a lot of questions about the march of time. What would become of me in death? Would there be a funera l…would anyone cry over my ashes? Would anyone remember me? Time alone in a middle space where one day flowed without chaos into the next brought me to an empty clearing without questions that would change nothing. I will live. I will die. There is nothing beyond that fact that troubles me …not the absence of a pot of flowers on a grave …not words said about me after my death. I have grieved so hard and long for losses through what I understand in this reality as eternal death and worldly separation that I am relieved that no one will go through that for me. I have accepted that I am subject to a natural process congruent with all living things and will die perhaps unheard, perhaps unseen. Each day I am open a little more to growing beyond the force of my own drives even though this relinquishment is one of the most difficult I am making …just to allow life as it is to take me in and on.

My mother once told me a story. A four-year-old was sitting on her lap. The little girl turned to her and touched her hair, “Miss Louise, why is your hair white?” My mother replied, “Because, dear, I am old.” The little girl thought for a moment and then asked, “Miss Louise, how do you get old?” How do we get old indeed?

All we know of time is that time passes. What do we know of what carries us along into life? All we can know is that life is good. The flowering quince outside the kitchen window is blooming in the sun in what we have been taught is morning. What else is there to know about time?

It was the middle of August. Hot sun… hot, heavy nights. Lovely August. In the middle of the night… just before the light came… Barb’ra took a quiet journey completely by herself. She took her secrets with her at the zenith of crickets singing out their hearts… the time when the earth has burst forth… the time of the first falling leaf we have not noticed that floats onto the still-green grass. It seemed so “just like that,” but perhaps it was not. How do we even pick apart the scientific practicalities of bodies gone wrong? And what are the mysteries none of us know until it is our time?

If she must be described, Barb’ra was a geographer. She had “been,” early on, a rarely unemployed actress in New York City who refused to apply for “fat” parts… worked on those off-Broadway stages when others sat home and worried about how they would pay the rent. She had always felt bad that she had been so miserable at math. A desire to master math is what took her back to school for geography.

We were different. Geography had made her a traveler solid on the topographical surface… strange juxtapositions beneath the earth… rocks and reasons for the growth of cities. I liked to wander around… a senseless thing as if the air could tell me about the mysteries of such places. Yes, there were basic itineraries… a guidebook that I felt could turn into a poisonous snake in my hand if I used it too, too much… things secondary to the mysteries of the air. We had decided to meet in India… both now separated in far flung places since her time in China. We complemented each other as we went here and there. Neither of us particularly enjoyed the Taj Mahal experience. We took a few crappy pictures in the smog and groaned inside as a gazillion guides flashed lights through the colors of the semi-precious stones. The colors might have been beautiful if craning to see them wasn’t Taj etiquette. We ended up having a deep conversation in the park… the world renowned, white marble testament to love at a livable distance, thank God. We would both enjoy other places of brightly-colored stalls in the mysterious alleys of evening with monkeys stealthily climbing the drain pipes up to the balconies of the apartments… and we would enjoy the healthful administrations of Ayurveda as often as possible.

Barb’ra loved the unusual place. Places like Estonia and Bulgaria were at the top of her list. She and her father, who had been unwell for some time, paddled around in the Great Barrier Reef. He would die in little more than a year. Sickness and discomfort were never reasons not to travel. Her greatest wander wishes had been Antarctica and a belated honeymoon in the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia.

One year ago on Halloween Barb’ra had gotten married to Marion. They had discovered that they had been soul mates just like that and glided easily into marriage after Barb’ra’s whirlwind in China. Fairness in life is often a delusion we comfort ourselves with.

Barb’ra and I communicated almost every day. She called me two days before in her hospital bed. She didn’t have her computer and lamented that she couldn’t see my new hair cut. Sick or well… life went on as if nothing had intervened to keep her down. Barb’ra would want me to tell this story about the two of us traveling together… the kind of memory that she cherished as a prelude to the next wandering around.

Today 48 trains are running late in India.

It’s now 11 o’clock at night… and we are sitting in the train station. We’ve wandered around medieval Varanasi in the muck avoiding the broken sidewalk and shards of the cheap clay masala tea cups used once and smashed to the cobblestones in the narrow alleys. We circle cow paddies and dog shit… piles of garbage… and a Noah’s Ark of every conceivable animal. We visit the ghats and saddhus of Varanasi all day. We follow dead bodies covered in bright, shiny shrouds for their ashy sail down the Ganges… watch as the wood is weighed, bought and piled up. Some bodies are burned with expensive sandalwood and others with simple acacia logs… but they all end up in the same meandering river.

Still, no train… and, then, the train is canceled.

Another train (late) is on its laborious way. I’ve just returned from the unspeakable toilet to fish money out of my underwear to pay for our train tickets. We’ve had to figure the exchange quickly from rupees to dollars because we’ve run of out local currency. We’ve frantically thrown together the mix of currencies we have and bought tickets from a fat, oily scalper in a spotted suit who sports gold, wire-rimmed glasses and a handlebar mustache. He tries to get us to buy third class tickets. We raise our voices in protest. I am on the edge of throwing a fit. Barb’ra is not nice and uses her universal word with a lexicon of meaning in the inflection, “Lordy!” We will not travel third class in India! We will hold out for second class or find another hotel. We pay twice the going rate of a first class ticket. We are determined to move forward tired, dirty and cranky as we are.

We take our places on the cold, dirty benches. A lump of wool is next to me on the bench. It moves. It is a person. I move closer to Bar’bra. We begin to distinguish rats as big as puppies running along the tracks and boldly on the sidings. A huge rat scurries near Barb’ra’s foot and galumphs into the sewer. She moves closer to me. Cows walk down the train steps and on to the sidings. Two dogs get into a vicious fight next to me. Any closer to Barb”ra and I will be sitting in her lap. The fog that smells of burning coal grows thicker until we see the lights of the train coming as if through opaque pea soup… and, then, humanity in all its forms begins to rise up and the wool cloaks that have sprouted heads with turbans, legs and arms… saris and dhoties descend upon the slowing metal giant whose wheels and bogies screech and shudder to a halt on the bare rails. It is a monster thing that has seen its better days. Bar’bra and I make haste onto the train and down the aisles… throw ourselves onto the beds as if we have found life preservers and have been saved from drowning at sea.

The blue curtains are dirty and torn. The floor is filthy… the windows spotted and blurry. They bring us suspicious new bedding that is, at least, white. We share the coupe with an Indian couple and their child who will be kind to us the whole night. It’s only 10 hours and we will be off before we know it.

It’s now 14 hours later on this rumbling, drafty, dirty train. We get to laughing over nothing until we think we will roll on the floor… then we look at the dirty red floor and refrain and start laughing all over again. We order egg omelet sandwiches. We are so hungry that they are the best food we’ve ever had. We wash them down with masala tea and then coffee made from an electric kettle the Indian couple lend to us. I’ve taken off my boots to put my feet on the bed. We’re taking pictures. We are in high spirits until Barb’ra screams, “Paula, there’s a rat crawling on your boots.” I shriek, too, and the creature runs away. The Indian husband asks what is wrong and shrugs his shoulders, “Oh, a rat,” he tells his wife. His wife goes back to sleep. We are just beginning to settle down and the thing peaks its nose out from under Bar’bra’s bed this time… and the shrieking starts all over again.

It’s now 17 hours later. Heavy from exhaustion… with our shoes and boots back on against rat bite, we arrive at Tundla. The porter hoists our heavy bags onto his head and carries them up the three flights of steps to the train terminal.

But, before the porter arrives, we walk past the third-class car. The stench envelops us… the hard benches, the dirty people disembarking, the windows broken. Seventeen hours in a car like that! It’s a train from hell to some other hell defined by poverty.

I’m a little ashamed at last night’s entitlement and pray a silent “thank you” for my second-class ticket. I say a second prayer of thanks for Barb’ra… that I had a good friend to travel with through this long night. I shudder as I head away from the third-class train cars and wonder about karma.

We will have a lot to talk about on that bench about karma in the park at the Taj Mahal. Both of us share our strange stories rich with unexpected meetings of familiarity and the people we have wandered through in worlds not blessed with the comforts of daily living.

Barb’ra will leave me in Udaipur. That night, I’ll eat tandoori paneer with peppers so hot my head will be aflame… I’ll eat it alone in my room on the balcony overlooking the fairytale lake… drink fresh lime soda on the lawn of the bar across the road later that night. I’ll miss her as she is waiting in Delhi with a stomachache to go home for a reunion with her friend, lover and soon-to-be fiance. He has been e-mailing her about their reunion for days. I’ll anticipate a reunion all my own some weeks later. It will come. It will be wonderful. But her fate, will not be my fate, and I will continue on my own in life just as I did in India. India was a little story of what my life would soon become again.

And, now, much later, her fate is not my fate again. I am living and Barb’ra is dead.

द्वि Hermione

Hermione… I had met her in the tattered, rented house I lived in next to the deep rincon with the uninterrupted, wide view of the sea. I had small parties later that spring with food I’d never even dream of cooking these days… fried chicken… potato salad… cherry pies. I had found that curious Spanish village after the barely spaced deaths of my mother and husband. I had remembered an airport. I had remembered the road out of that airport. I had proceeded to the end of that road in a stick shift I could barely drive, turned left. That is how I found that village on top of a mountain. That is how I found Hermione.

Her dry humor clicked with my dark, subterranean Romanian one. Even through all of her falls, knee replacements, detached retinas, surgery, chemotherapy… we did just that… laugh… and sometimes we even laughed at all of what happened to her.

Hermione came to China when she was 80. We tried to figure out how to get her up on the Great Wall. Two peasant men appeared. We put her in the wheel chair. They rigged up a pulley with a rope. That’s how she got up to the ski lift. She managed the running jump into the car and out. My heart was in my mouth. So was hers. She got herself up there. She came. She saw. She conquered. She took pictures… and then, she fell down. Oh… no!!! She got up, dusted herself off and crowed a laugh. I learned a lot about growing old that day.

I had known the salient facts of Hermione’s life. Sometimes they came out in an honest irony… sardonic and tinged with bitterness. She had known sadness and how it is when things don’t work out. She put her life to rights as far as any of us can when she moved to Spain and just continued laughing. I had asked her, “Why Spain?” I asked her that many times. She discarded the layers of that answer one by one with the years. The last time I asked her she told me that they had been filming Don Quixote in a field of lavender… and she decided. It was the fragrance of that field that tipped the balance. I think of that field as the essential “ah-ha!!!”moment of why she came to Spain.

Years came and went. I’d travel through, first from the West and, then, many years from the East. The timing was always right. I got there for lunch and off we would go with my bags unpacked. Hermione was my Spanish travel agent… always finding me a place to stay and providing me with her fine, neatly folded, striped, heavy cotton sheets from London soft from years of use and Spanish sunshine. She would see me off early in the morning in her schoolgirl’s white cotton nightgown that ended at her ankles. She’d send a lunch along with me. In it would be something sweet and “naughty.” I’d laugh hours later when I’d eat it and imagine that inverted whistle of hers when she had within her sight a “naughtiness” of chocolate or a ginger cake. I always said the same thing when I left, “You be sure to be here when I get back.” I did not say that when I left this last time. I drove away through the mountains around Granada and beyond. I felt empty and helpless…

… no more Hermione. She was an institution in that curious, Spanish village… an indomitable British lady in a flowered dress and funny hat with opinions on everything. She’d laugh when I would say that to her. There will be no more practically falling out of her bedroom window to harvest the figs with a cloth basket attached to a long pole. No more giggling with Hermione over long lunches where she would wrap up a prawn or two for Lola and before that, Chuckie and Lola… no more spring drives through flowering almonds and a stop along the road to take in their fragrance…no more reminiscing about far-off places… a childhood in India… a trip to Nepal with her aunt… school in Darjeeling entirely made up of boys… a worrisome trip to Africa across the Mediterranean during the war… our getting lost on the way to see Tina Turner’s last concert… eating a hot pot of scary, odd sea creatures that set our mouths and heads ablaze in China.

I loved Hermione a lot. Memories may fade a bit… the reality of her may have left us, but the memory of that love between friends will remain… that blessing that I met her… that fact of the gumption she encouraged in me to free myself to have the life I’ve lived.

त्रि Bones

I am walking to this sunken, Spanish garden of dust and flowers… bones and cactus. I sit down on a bench next to two skulls of goats… their horns intact… jaws with teeth still embedded… a grimace. There is an emptiness in bones that I have not realized before. Was that only a moment ago that I was sure-footed? And, now, not so sure of anything

Emptiness. I’ve passed the dusty, blue wine bottles just around the corner on my way to the garden… bottles waiting to be filled… fulfilled… or not.

Bones are empty, too, in different ways… empty of flesh… void of eyes… wet noses with flaring nostrils that have dried up and fallen away… fur that fluffs up under the jaw that has blown onto a bush in the desert hills where no one passes by in the glare of the mid-day sun. Empty… silent… without intimacy, hunger or pain… the life before the bones that has spirited itself away.

These bleached memories lying in the desert… clues about what lived here… the dry rustle of scorched shards under my feet that lead me up a path I have not walked before. It is a warm day in these foothills. The locust scream in pity. The blue bottle flies hover around my head landing on my nose and buzz in my hair. The water splashes in the fountain… and then, the skulls… the horns… the grimace of yellow teeth beneath the prickly green cactus that reaches its arms toward the clearing, sky.

I wander around in my thoughts about the bones. How do these bones that will not be ignored inform me? Is it something about time? Is it something about loss… a separation that catches along with the dust in my throat? Are the bones a beginning or an end or just a natural cycle? Is there peace and completion in the crackly fragments? Is there life in these dried skulls and is that life a straight line or a circle?

चतुर् Moksha

And, now, time has passed yet again. There are no walks under a blue sky. Winter has come.  There are leaden skies. It is the time of cozy indoor lights, quilts, hot cups of oolong tea… the introspection without tears… and what can only remain… the pit of missing that comes of separation.

The fire has burned. The purification is complete.

Will two new babies cry against the bondage that is karma and be taken into their mother’s arms for comfort? Or has the final salvation been found in the heart of a force we do not understand? Is all that is left of them their ashes… and memory? Will we see them again in a distant place? Will we visit on a bench in the park near the Taj Mahal or climb on The Great Wall again and feel a strange familiarity in those places? Will we sail down the coast of Africa or find ourselves living in igloos… laughing with each other as we slide along the ice?

I bought the lentils and, out of nowhere, the ham bone appeared. The butcher gave Hermione the ham bone for the dogs …she gave me the jamon-laden bone for the lentils instead. She pulls it out of the refrigerator that stands in for a cavern. There it is in her kitchen of mayhem …the meaty thigh …the long leg and shin …the knuckle and hoof. She hands me a saw, a cleaver and a board and I get to work. Out comes the soup pot. The bones thump in the pot and the lid rattles on the seat in the car that has an orchestra of strange clanks and whines all its own as I bump down the road …my own bones rattling.

Evening comes …the long Spanish twilight. I fill the pot with water, an onion, carrots, celery and parsnip …the bones …fat, jade laurel leaves. I cook it up for hours. I take out the bones and soggy vegetables …strain the broth in a clean tea towel as any well-taught Romanian …cut off the meat and, then, it’s the middle of the night. I go out into the night before I fall into the bed with regret that the warm darkness is almost gone. The moon has gone away, but the stars cover the heavens. I shiver. I can smell the petunias mingled with the perfume of gardenias …hear the crickets …watch the eerily shining eyes of some feral creature on the craggy ridge above the patio as it watches me.

The sun blazes up out of the sea in the morning …I make a cup of coffee with rheumy eyes and cowlick while skimming off the fat and put the broth on the stove to heat again.

It’s time to make bread. I bless the unmeasured amount of whole-grain flour that I thoughtlessly throw into the bowl …add a little salt. I wave my hands in blessing over the fresh yeast and sugar. I watch it proof. It is the yeast of abundance. The fragrance is just what the earth gives up in things unseen. I throw it into the well of flour and water and begin to knead. It’s cardboard, crumbly texture transforms itself into a satiny lump. I work in toasted walnuts and pumpkin seeds. I cover it and let nature do the work of bread …wash my hands …have another cup of coffee over the sea …pinch off a dead petunia here and there.

I cut up fresh celery, onions, parsnips and carrots into a dice …saute them in olive oil to release their flavors …add sweet paprika at the end. The pot is boiling …now, the picked over lentils …then, the vegetables and chopped parsley and cilantro …salt and pepper. The bread has raised a second time. I form it into lovely oblong loaves and slash the tops in three places. It springs to double. It bakes to crusty richness.

It is the time of steaming, fragrant lentejas …a very Spanish meal. I clean the glass on the table. I’ve ladled the soup into the cheap, white soup bowl on matching dinner plate. I hack off a piece of bread from the oven. Next to it is a dish of fresh Burgos cheese, a sliced tomato with olive oil and globe basil from the pot on the patio, olives cured with oregano, thyme and garlic. I eat the cheese and tomatoes with the steaming bread …drink a glass of palomino fino. The heavy drapes are drawn against the sun, but I can see the side of the mountain through the kitchen window. The clumps of dry grass blow in the hot wind, but the craggy rocks are unmoving.

~~Planting

…one geranium became two …and then, two pots of petunias …a variegated ivy …and a gardenia plant. I wheeled the cart to the back of the viveros to the aviary to hear the canaries sing on such a cool night with the sea breeze blowing right in through the front door. The canaries sang, but the pots of thyme, globe basil and mint took wings and flew into the cart. I bought a big bag of dirt and took everything out to the car …but something drew me back …it was the bright pink Gerbera daisy …and then, a soft yellow tuberous begonia.

I collected pots from here and there to plant them and dug around the ornamental fig …fertilized the asparagus ferns …weeded and pruned …watered and swept up …looked down at my grimy hands. It was late when I finished …the last of the twilight just before Saturn appears in the southwestern sky. I was tired. I sat among the pots …imagined evenings of watering the flowers and picking off the wasted petunias …the fragrance of them at night …and the gardenia, too. I drank a glass of gazpacho …ate a piece of bread for dinner …looked far out to the small patch of sea …the long shadows disappearing with the last of the light …the darkening mountain…

….and, suddenly, there was Saturn.

~~Walking

….the morning light comes late …then the sun …the heat is not far behind so I pull on only the essential and am off down on to the road and into the campo. The path winds down dusty roads and narrow ground between the grasses. The branches of the wild pomegranates hang heavy with fruit …their tiny fists of ruby jewels burgeoning against the tawny skin. The retamas blancas wave their willowy forms like spirits. In the spring their white flowers smell so sweetly, but now their green has faded …their diaphanous arms drawn into the umber landscape. There is one wild fig with its green globes nestled in the ruffled leaves. It grows in a circle, its leaves touching the grass …a lady with a long skirt sitting on the  ground. The wind snaps through the tall clumps of reedy spikes as the crickets join in. The swallows soar and dive.

A friend has told me that the fragrance in these hills comes from a plant like Artemesia. I hunt for it and find that it is exactly so except it is a moss green and pointy to the touch. I stoop to pick a bouquet. A column of ants cross the path …one column going …one column coming. They are hauling bits of grass and seeds. They are so busy they often crash into each other like bumper cars at an amusement park. They are hilarious …but the relentless sun won’t wait and I am on my way.

I cross a field of ochre grasses …Queen Anne’s Lace and overgrown wild fennel plants …jagger bushes …everything going to seed. It is so quiet …and then something rustles in the bushes. Is it a quail? I learn to walk by quietly …maybe one day I’ll see it. I trudge up and down the stony path past carob bean trees …and through a passage of tall cactus. Once there was a fox cavorting below in the tangled grasses with a lone palm tree growing on their edge. He leapt through the air in a natural freedom of movement, bushy, red tail with the white spot of fur at the tip disappearing quickly into the close cover of the ground.

I hear a sheep bleating across the rincon and notice the mud shed for animals built to the edge of a house. A dead tree stands on the edge of the facing hill …the background of its thorny branches, the blue sky. Up …up an old road past crumbling stone walls and an abandoned cortijo at the top of the hill. I exhale. In the space of one breath, my body seems to run down to the sparkling sea of diamonds. I feel light and my feet don’t touch the ground …but my body has not run …only walked into a neighborhood of white stucco houses where it catches up with the essence of me that ran ahead.

All is quiet on the beach road …the restaurant persianas all shut up …the curtains of beads hanging from the open doors of the white, stucco houses barely moving in the breeze letting in the last coolness of the night air and the smell of jasmine …it is so early for Spain …

…but there is a venta that is open, a guarantee of coffee con leche and media tostada with olive oil. I stir the coffee. The tiny spoon clinks on the china saucer. The slice of toast crunches as I bite into it …crumbs fall on the blazing white paper table cloth.

….the breakers roll to shore. In the distance someone is walking on the beach.

~~Bailando

Sometimes I take a flashlight and creep down the rutted driveway. It’s midnight and I go to the beach to walk along the paseo by the sea. The Spaniards are just coming out for dinner at the restaurants before they go to the clubs. The younger women are in bright high heels and miniskirts …their long hair streaked blond. The older women are dressed nicely, too …all tawny pomegranates like the trees of wild fruit I’ve seen on my morning walk. Soon they will be dancing.

I want to dance, too, but in Spain I am not with the Nubians or the Bedouins I’ve wistfully just left who pull older women to their feet and dance away the night to avoid the impropriety of dancing with the younger women or the newly married. I drive by the clubs …Mandala …Lua …L’Incante …I feel a longing look that changes my face. The Latin beat is in my heart, but my body moves in a cadence known as walking …not dancing. I park by the sea and walk past women selling cheap beach jewelry and henna tattoos and Nigerians selling knockoff DVD’s …the map to Africa and the smoke of sandalwood incense drifting up from their eyes. There are beach fires …the smell and glow of pungent pine wood …the little blue lights attached to the tips of fishing poles that will let the fishers know they have caught a sea bass or a hake …the laughter of families out on that beach …fishing revelers who will be out there until morning.

Music from the clubs comes out on to the beach. The wistful look is still on my face …then, I throw back my head in laughter at what I think I don’t have. Who was it who said I cannot dance?

The dance begins in my head …thoughts that samba away into a percussive conga line by the side of the sea …until I am finally dancing up the darkness of the driveway …bailando …bailando …feet that move …hips that gyrate …turn and sway …dancing until the last pirouette in the star-spattered blackness and my tingling body falls into bed and sleeps with the ruby jewels of pomegranates scattering from my hand.

It’s early in the morning …still black as pitch. I return to walk along the sea as the light comes …the clubs are closing. Families and friends weave along the road like refugees turned out with unbelieving looks on their faces. The women wobble arm and arm on sore feet …they turn to kiss the men on their cheeks …the men laugh …throw their arms over the shoulders of the women …a torrent of staccato Spanish endearments. They are having fun …this, their month at the sea.

We are all cats here, one sort or another, with eyes that flash only after midnight.

Spain …an August full of nights.

 ~~Arising 

“Each day is a new day, and each minute is a new minute and a new opportunity for the renewal of life. If we do not renew ourselves, we become heavy and stagnant. Every day and every moment that we accumulate more experience and have more contact, we become more worn out mentally and physically. Only by knowing how to renew ourselves can we face the future with freshness and enthusiasm. Renewing ourselves means getting rid of contamination from various sources connected with the different levels of life. The concept of renewal is important.

Renewal is easy; you let nature do it for you. But you don’t need to wait for nature to recycle you; it is better to renew yourselves each day and each moment rather than wait until we cannot do anything but accept the cruel fact we do not like. We should do our best to renew ourselves, including recycling our negativity.

Do not stay in one place or one time.

Nothing stays the same.

Wash away all the poisons that you have accumulated from your culture and religion and be a happy child.”

~~Hua-Cheng Ni
~~excerpts from The Power of Natural Healing

The body is like an unfettered boat. It drifts with the current until it bumps against the shore. The heart is like a cracked piece of wood. It does not know whether it is to be chopped up or smeared with oil or perfume.

Hong Yingming

It is the middle of the night. There is no separation between sea and sky. It is black, a dark expanse …the first thing that ever was. No stars …no moon. But sound. There is sound …the waves crashing to the shore and there is wind… wind soughing through the sieve of date palm fronds …a crackling sound in tune with the sea …a counterpoint …a reason to listen. There is nothing else.

Time passes. Out in the northeast drift tiny lights …they grow slowly, feinting and bobbing in the darkness …the void of no separation in the night without moon and stars …in the wind that sings an evocative harmony with the sea. The lights glide …intense little points of brilliance hanging in the darkness …fairy lights dancing suspended …an intended ballet of long lines and nets and traps that slowly disappear into the darkness.

The first light comes …a gray intimation that insinuates itself upon the firmament. There is light …then, shades of pink and coral and azure lighting a separation of sea and sky from beneath …an horizon … the natural drift of the eye … the place the heart falls off the edge of the earth …the place we bump, unexpected, upon a shore in the pale morning light.

Still unseen, the sun illuminates the imperial, dark clouds that roll up from over Africa …stately warriors that beat silent drums winding the first stories of truth from the darkness back in the time of the void …bringing them into the light for all to see …but none to hear …Africa. The sight of them suspends an intake of breath in the air …a hummingbird of breath in the dark that is leaving, in the light that is coming.

The sun explodes above the clouds, its red surface blinding …triumphant … master over the light that it brings …the darkness that it conquers. The sun is unstoppable without knowing. The sun knows nothing of time.

The light touches the clouds …the warriors recede …now they are women dancing in a circle around the sun, their arms are raised above their heads clothed in magenta and fuchsia and coral and blue. Just as quickly they dance away to the south taking the wind with them. It is quiet. It is clear …the sea, shades of navy and turquoise. The tide has gone out and the waves lap to the shore as if they have tucked nighttime thoughts away shyly and with care. The mourning doves roost singing their woeful song …sandpipers sip water from the pools that have gathered …sparrows peck at the last of dates on the palms.

It is the beginning of the day. Hearts beat near. Hearts beat far away. Hearts beat together. Hearts beat alone. The heart begins a journey with the light of the day, too. The heart is as unknowing as the sun. The heart knows nothing of time. It knows nothing of what the day will bring. It only knows how to go on and on.

There are beachcombers who have come carrying their unknowing hearts, invisible, in their hands. They have taken off their shoes and leave footprints in the cold, wet, salty sand. They pick up little shells left behind by the waves and tuck them away …little broken shells, translucent and pink … sometimes purple …larger shells, perfectly formed… the colors of the earth …striped umber and cream.

My sensuality
Incarnate witness
To my spirituality,
I want to live,
And live,
Fulfill a litany of desires
Recited in the beating
Of my heart
But, for tonight,
I am cloistered
With the spiritual sister
Who never traveled
Beyond the convent wall.
She rests dark and quiet,
Centuries beneath the ground.
We say rosaries of different lives.
In her cell,
We meditate.
Dreamless,
Sleep.

                                                                                  ~Arcos de la Frontera

 …and now, after many years, I have returned to El Convento in Arcos …another journey with a spiritual sister very much alive. I know almost immediately that all of our travels up and down the narrow country roads of Spain …through green fields and flowering trees …past white villages with dogs sleeping in the sun …has brought us here for these few moments that we have spent in the Spanish sunshine of the morning on the top of this cliff just before we depart.

Semana Santa in Spain …last night we had stood in the cathedral square waiting patiently for the “paseo de los desfiles” …the candlelight procession of the Virgins and Jesuses through the steep, Moorish streets. The band had gathered. The tall wooden doors of the cathedral creaked open. The downpour started.  We walked down the narrow street to the old convent, the rain softly pelting the slippery cobblestones in the dark singing its own soft song of steadfast supremacy over human rites and rituals. Nature had its way. Secretly, I smiled, my thoughts divided between the freshness of Spring rain and the lockstep of the costaleros who had gathered to carry the Virgins and Jesuses through the streets of Arcos where once there surely had been a minaret with a muezzin calling people to prayer.

Children had come through first. They wore robes of white …the purple pointed hoods covering their faces. Angelic mothers carried innocent babes in their arms, their tiny faces covered by the Lilliputian purple hoods. The priests came before the illuminated paso, the wooden platform carrying the Virgin bedecked with Holy Week flowers that would be carried by the costaleros, unseen figures doing a solemn, burdened lockstep. The priests had been imposing round figures in handmade, white lace vestments …purple satin tied about their thick middles. Their eyes glowed fire behind their purple hoods. Silver crucifixes flashed in the candlelight and in the soft glow of Spanish lanterns perched on the corners of the stark streets.

Soon we would all be winding through the narrow, cobbled alleys with their whitewashed walls and small doorsteps as if we had returned to a Holy Week of the Middle Ages, a worn tapestry, a pageant of tiny stitches hanging in the dusty hall of a crumbling castle …and, just then, it had rained, the austere moment giving way to mayhem. Umbrellas popped open and the young penitents transformed themselves into the mischievous children of Arcos …all arms and legs running up the steps of the cathedral before their hoods would be soaked in the downpour. We moved on.

Morning comes with the golden light of Spain peeking through the heavy curtains and the cock’s crow. The wind whistles along the cliff. Bess and I drink our cafe con leche giggling through breakfast, but I know she is thinking her own thoughts as I am thinking mine. The pigeons soar on the wind and roost in the natural spaces of the dramatic yellow cliff that Arcos and the two of us rest upon. Some fields are green with spring wheat, others a rich brown from the new tilling. The mountains we had crossed yesterday are watchful as if they are dark, distant monks inscribing the life of Arcos in an illuminated manuscript hidden in caves and grottoes. The bell tolls in the church tower …so, there has been a death in Arcos this Holy Week, Bess tells me. She creates a John Donne moment in a Hemingway Spain of civil war long past,“Ask not for whom the bell tolls” …our old brains stumbling over the refrain. Is it “for me” or “for thee?” It doesn’t matter. We all know for whom the bell tolls. I listen long to the end of the sound as it fades across the fields.

The moments of the Spanish morning pass …each one sufficient …each one folding into the next one …distinct and yet, the same. It comes to me that I have returned to this place unconsciously to say good-bye to the last eight years of my life. I have come full circle. I had first come to Arcos eight years ago with a heart full of grief and had decided to move on as I sat behind the wall of this convent with the lights of the fair so far below in the new town. It had been difficult to make that decision. It had been daunting to leave those I had loved in that life behind …but I had always had the house to come back to …a house of memories …a garden of moonflowers.

I have wandered since that time …the wander lust a lantern in the dark that lights my narrow path, the roots of me grown deeply within the still forest of myself, but I had returned to the old life over and over like the dog chasing its tail. Now, the few vestiges of my life are scattered about the world …some in a room with scuffed walls behind a padded lock. I carry its key, a mysterious charm. In Arcos, I have finally let the old life go. Yo soy libre. I am free …free of the old life …its joys, its sorrows, its indifferences, its intimacies, its common expectancies. This is my life. My body is my home.

I leave the terrace of the convent room …take a last look at the fields through the rejas of the open wooden doors of the window. I have no tears at parting. Bess and I make our way down the steep streets. It is a lovely walk. Everyone smiles and speaks to us, “Hola,” “Buenos Dias.” We smile and return holas and buenos dias’ back.

The Guadalete River flows along below …emerald as if trees had learned to swim. Bess, always the fisherwoman, points out the fish swimming in the lazy water. We are excited to see the dark figures wiggling around in the fish lives of their awakening Spring. Bess has captured my longing for a new beginning at fishing again …an awakening Spring all my own. I am thankful for her friendship all over again.

In the new town, we search the streets for the lot where we had parked the car. We are “perdida” and have to summon a taxi to drive us around in search of the little, dust-covered blue car. The driver gives us his direct, Spanish view about the lost car, “If you didn’t pay before … then, you will pay later.” I give him my view, “Life is an adventure.” We laugh …he overcharges …and then we are gone down another road, the wind from Arcos whispering, “Hasta luego.”

I did not look back.

I poked its flesh with my finger …firm. I looked at the eyeball …clear and plumped, not glassy. I smelled it …sweet as if it had just come from its bath in the sea. There was no good reason to discard this fish. To waste this wonderful fish would be a sin …a crime against the little fishes that cannot help being caught, after all …and the brave men who sail forth every morning before light with nets they have carefully mended. So, here I was in my kitchen over the sea …a dull knife. Slowly, I made the first cut along the belly.

Spring Festival had brought me to my encounter with the sea bass. I had gone to Wu Zhou yesterday, the “finest” Chinese restaurant in town …little China …home away from home. The staff remembered me …the woman who lives in China.  “How many years have you lived there now?” they asked. I wished them a happy Spring Festival and asked them if they had “jiao-zi” …dumplings for the first day of the Year of the Dog. There were no dumplings!! They pointed to the menu. I ignored it. I’d have green vegetables and fish …forget the dumplings. I asked them what kind of green vegetables they had. The waiter pointed to the list in the menu again. Everything was brown …bean sprouts …bamboo shoots …mushrooms …soggy brown vegetables in tins that had lost their bite long ago. Things weren’t going well. I asked them if they had “you cai” or “you mai cai.” They said, “No” in a voice that resounded like the chop of a cleaver. I was disgruntled. They are Chinese …of course there were green vegetables in the kitchen. Who were they trying to fool? “These people must be three generations removed from China,” I said to myself …and my prejudice hung like a slip, but I continued to mumble over the entrees.

I thought the food might be okay, though. I ordered hot and sour soup and a dish to please Western tastes, “Ants Climbing Up a Tree” …at least I’d have crispy fried noodles and minced pork “climbing” up the little broccoli trees …a GREEN vegetable. I was all set for the Year of the Dog. What came was an insipid soup that needed “cu” and was hardly “la de.” No vinegar …no hot stuff. And then …the “piece-de-resistance” …the ants. What was this uninspired slumgullion they brought on a sizzling, iron platter? It had exactly two shrimp …fake crab and the almost non-existent noodles? Packaged noodles!! The waiter slopped it around as it sizzled in oil that spilled over the sides …yuck! It was a seafood version of 1950’s chop suey. I asked for rice …it was hard and lumpy. I drank my TEA. I asked for the bill. The waiter asked me, “Would you like COFFEE?” “They have waited on too many British people in this restaurant.” That was the expletive under my breath.

I asked myself a question that I ask a lot these days about separation. How had these Chinese people allowed such a separation between their work and themselves? I thought I knew, perhaps, what they needed …a big tour bus of Chinese people who would make the place noisy and happy. It needed people who would debate for an hour what to eat …ask a million questions and go nose in the kitchen. That would bring out the GREEN vegetables and, perhaps, dimsum and a spicy Szechuan fish as well!! We would all be one happy family at the Wu Zhou Restaurant by the side of the sea.

I was left to wonder about my plan in the car as I drove along the stormy sea …a terrible day …rain, rain, rain …huge puddles on the beach road. A disappointing Spring Festival. I made a left frowning and double-parked outside of the fish monger’s shop …the little sea bass jumped into butcher paper and holding my finger up for people to wait, I dove into the car …and that was that.

The poor little fish. I had gutted it and scraped off the scales, but had I filleted it, there would have been nothing left. I dredged it in flour, salt, pepper and cumin …fried it in a bit of olive oil. I made a small potato with paprika …sautéed a dab of spinach and steamed a bit of broccoli. Finished, I sat down for my Sunday lunch …my petite holiday meal and a half glass of Rioja. There were white caps on the windy sea, fresh and alive. The sun shone through the clouds. A fishing boat sailed by. I ate my fresh little fish in happiness and, as in China, spat out the bones …in China and Spain there is no fear of fish bones. I left the dishes in the sink and cleaned a melon instead, a “piel de sapa”…a reasonable facsimile of a rough green melon called “ha mi gua” in China and ate a piece as I looked far out …dreaming …dreaming. I finished my meal with a tiny cup of bitter coffee as black as midnight and a flat anise biscuit …not too sweet.

I mused along with my coffee. It is true what my favorite of the “Four Old White Guys of Sociology,” Georg Simmel posited. We have gotten so far away from the source of things as they were that we have lost our connection. We pick up our stiff styrofoam package covered with plastic wrap …the disgusting, sodden pad of paper below that soaks up the aging drips of a fish fillet. Our bare fingers crawl with the anticipation at having to pick it up between thumb and forefinger to wash it under the tap and get the dead white flesh into the pan. We know we have some relationship with this fish. Long ago the association was clear, but now the whole matter has become murky. We are spacey and confused. So harried with modern life, do we ask? Where did this fish come from? What did it look like? And, more importantly, when? How much worse is this packaged pestilence than cleaning your own fish, really?

I know that this fish was caught on Saturday morning …in the sea one village over …in a net. It was a little silvery, sleek fish with a rare, greenish-black eye …sharp gills …smooth scales. The men who caught it eat ”jamon and queso” for lunch washed down with Estola that they drink straight from the bottle. They have rough, big hands from hard work …faces that are sunburned. They are men with full heads of hair streaked gray. They smile and flirt with the women …keep their hands to themselves, but tell other stories, perhaps, when they’re standing around with each other and have had a few too many. On Sundays, they go to church, but not before they’ve eaten churros and hot chocolate with their kids at a café on the street. They drink brandy with their morning coffee and smoke cigarettes before they sail off. Sometimes, they drown and don’t come back. Most come back and go home to their wives and children…read the newspapers …eat good food …watch the football match. Their stories are the story of how I came by my little fish.

Some people give far too much thought about the acquisition of fish, perhaps. On the other hand, those guys, Msr. Simmel included, had their armchair points as the servants lit their fires in their libraries in the dimness of late winter afternoons and pondered over books about the world without really having experienced travel to much of it. I’ve left that world behind, too, although I miss the debate of it sometimes.

My day worked out in the end. I’ve had a Happy Spring Festival!!! I’ve cleaned and eaten my holiday “fish” in the Year of the “Dog.” I’m as happy as the “cat” that swallowed the “canary.” Chun Jie Kwai Le!!!!

Now a nap  …a walk by the side of the sea …a lovely, quiet Sunday afternoon in Spain.

Cadiz streets so narrow …we clamor through the reverberating alleys of cold stone like horses, footfalls echoing …galloping …heads stretched forward …winter scarves like manes. We stride along to seize every passing second as we nibble tiny, rose-scented, Arab pastries …as we pass an old shoemaker shop. Isabel stops us up short. Shoes hang on the wall …impossibly high, orange high heels …work shoes …delicate, pointy-toed boots. The shoemaker taps with his hammar bent over in the low light as he talks to a customer. A ceramic virgin hangs on the wall along with 1950’s-style version of a naturally endowed women in a brassiere advertisement …a caricature of what we’ve made the sacred and profane.

We are on the way to the Royal Academy of Hispano-Americans of Cadiz. I pass through the paneled, thick-carpeted portals of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery for the second time in my life. The walls of the room are covered with famous paintings of surgeons and doctors. There are a small group of old academicians, all the color of dusty books. A picture of King Juan Carlos presides over the dais of red velvet and gilded gold chairs. A shortish man, bald and bearded presides, joking all the while as he sits in his important chair with the academy’s gold lavaliere around his neck.

We are there to hear the composer, Jose Luis Greco, talk about his music and his new opera about Alesandro Malesfina, the explorer. A pianist plays …a contralto sings. Jose Luis Greco has lived a colorful life. He has been jailed in Mexico. He cuts through the superfluous to the essence of things. I can’t keep up with the Spanish that goes rat-a-tat-tat and find out only later that Jose Luis Greco is the son of famous parents, Jose Greco and Nila Ampara, the flamenco dancers. I am transported to 1957 and the Ed Sullivan show …Jose rapping out a dark, secret code in cadences that require my attention to tell me that Spain will be part of my future. I shake Jose Luis Greco’s hand …have the two sentence conversation with the artist in passing. He looks very much like his father …now dead …his mother now dead, too.

Juan and Isabel take me to tapas bars. We hob nob with the Gadetanos …drink fino …eat anemones. Juan says anemones taste like a wave …and, of course, they do.  We return by way of the bridge back home to the house in the tiny cul-de-sac of Juanita, the mother-in-law …Pepe the housekeeper …the sweet-faced children who smile as quickly as they cry …my little second floor room in the back of the house that still smells of canvas and linseed oil. Juanita and Isabel cook at the speed of light. I clean up. We eat bocarones, hake, tuna, paella, and hake eggs that surely could not be cooked more perfectly anywhere else, but in this house in the cul-de-sac. We smear the bread with cremasita from the Extremadura and bitter orange marmalade. We sit in front of the fire.

China comes to the door in the form of Pin, the owner of the Chinese restaurant in town …we have tea and all tumble through Spanish, English and Chinese as the children all roll on the floor and fall asleep on the sofa.

The time comes to leave them.  I cry. They laugh. I laugh, too.

Cindy, my sweet Cinderella will-of-the-wisp friend, and Felix, her boyfriend, have come to visit me from China. I pick them up at the bus station at some godawful hour. They are happy just to eat, sleep, walk on the beach. I cook piles and piles of gambas and fry a huge pile of fish flavored with cumin that they eat for dinner. At breakfast I cook more gambas, heat up roast chicken, rustle up oatmeal, eggs and vegetables washed down with juice from the frutas del bosque and cafe con leche. They eat the sweet arm of the gypsy along with the gambas. I laugh …amazed. They inhale the food with smiles and compliments. Later, the two of them will attempt to make a Spanish tortilla of eggs, potatoes and onions. I lay on the sofa and supervise. I earn the title of “La Reina de la Cocina” …the Queen of the Kitchen. We begin to name call …Felix, “the Prince of Admiring Old Grandma’s and Maps…Cindy, “the Princess of Birds and Seashells.” They start cooking at 6 …at 9, I’ve had enough …and go out there to be the scullery maid and send them off to bed …do their laundry as an excuse to be out in the cold on the terrace …to look into the blackness of the nighttime sea.

We eat the tortilla and bocadillos with Spanish ham and cheese at the side of the road outside of Guadix in view of a mountain and head off toward Granada. We stay in the pension that Felix suggests. It is the same one Ralph and I stayed in 12 years ago. They give Cindy and I the same room. I am quiet …say nothing at first …but then tell her. She asks me how I feel. I say I don’t know …I really don’t know. I would tell her if I did. We talk late into the night …girl talk about her life …I try to capture her dreams and give them back to her. The next day they leave to visit the Alhambra …take the bus to Seville. She will send me text messages for awhile. They will stop, of course. I’ll call worried and discover the reason.  She has been staying with illegal Chinese “immigrantes” in Salamanca. I’ll have a fit, but she will go home tomorrow to dumplings and noodles made by her mother leaving Felix behind to study. She says it’s what she wants …her mother and green vegetables. I start to cry and tell her I don’t want to leave Spain. She says, “Paula, why are you crying? We are going back to CHINA. She says Gao Li will make dumplings for me.” I smile and tell her I long for a cup of jasmine tea.

Back by the side of the sea, I wander through a tiny village in the evening looking for the country doctor Ahmed. I ask the residents, “Donde esta el medico Ahmed??” No one knows. Somehow I find the house from my hairdresser’s description, “You know, it’s kind of high up …a big beautiful house with a surgery in the back.” His name is not Dr. Ahmed. It is Ahmed El-Ribaidi. He is an Egyptian. I ask him in Spanish if we can speak English. He says, “But, of course.” He probably speaks a thousand languages. He is a tidy man …no receptionist, a state of the art computer. He is addressing a letter to a doctor. He stuffs in a medical report and puts on a stamp that he pulls out of his pocket. In five minutes, I am laying on a table. He is giving me a sonogram regaling me with stories of his trip to China, showing me various ducts and organs. My medical problem is real, but a small one. He tells me what to buy at the pharmacy and sends me on my way …both of us are laughing.

…and then there are Hok, Lok and Xiu …Hermione, Muriel and Puy, like the three Buddhist monks in a Chinese version of Stone Soup. They are running around trying to get their visas to come to China. I don’t know how Hermione, now 80, will make it, but I have the presence of mind to shut up …this trip is important to her somehow. Can anyone challenge the indomitable nature of “Britishness” born of colonial India and Africa in a bright flowered dress and a funny hat? Between times, Puy rattles on in Spanish about my need for lymphatic drainage as she pummels my body and Muriel goes on and on about my damp in the form of trapped energy as she sticks needles in me. Finally, I agree with them both. Everything they say falls in line with what El-Ribaidi has told me. No matter how much I try to pull myself in to the tune of the universe, human, I still fall by the wayside. Yes, I tell them …I’ll do everything you say …after all, their advice is practical and comes of their love and professional concern …these Isabels and Puys, those Hermiones, Muriels, and El-Ribaidis …but mostly, I will listen more closely again to the still voice of the universe living in the deepest part of me

I reward this insight with the poetry of Bei Ling that I read in the space of an evening. He is an exiled poet from China …arrested and jailed …rescued through the efforts of Susan Sontag’s call to Bill Clinton. Muriel, the sensing and sensible Irishwoman fluent in all things Spanish and ancient Chinese, has gotten to know him during his visit and has shared her thoughts with me. We have had the marvelous conversations that are so valuable that life offers up only once in a while.

The early night of rest in the comfort of poetry has given way to morning. I lay here and dream of a little, rented apartment with a terrace and a postage stamp of a garden with pots and vines …a Spanish color and fragrance coming into my life. I opened the persianas this morning and started writing …the fishing boats went out in the dark again under the bright light of Saturn that faded in the eastern sky with apricot and navy colors over a still sea that linger long waiting for the lazy sun to appear. I have made the transition in this short space and realize it is time to return home to China …to dark, winter skies over the mysterious little blue-green mountain …dusty streets …noise and bustle …smells …characters written, stamped, engraved, painted, brushed, etched …the curious little China life I have grown to understand as my own..

Spain travels with me in the flowers that fall out of a book …in the bright scarf I’ve bought that reminds me of sunset and green leaves …the people of rich lives who “melt the stillness of an ice cube” …who make me dream of empty, narrow streets under a blue sky…

…”Waiting is time’s kind gift.”

I have made it only as far as Madrid.

I fling stuff anywhere …the sound of the heavy, veteran, Moscow coat as it slides crackling like winter’s long past autumn leaves scuttling against the conservative flocking of the wing back chair. I like that sound, too. I splash water on my face in the pristine bathroom …beige and white like the “muzak” I have absorbed as I walked through the hotel lobby. I run out to dinner. It’s 11 p.m. I am starving …gobble up fish and salad, Manchego cheese and melon and wash it down with table wine, fall into deep sleep …and sleep and sleep and sleep. I wake up with a sledge-hammer-to-forehead headache that has reduced everything in my brain to broken pieces. I can feel them rattling around in there …the same sound like tiny glass pieces that shift back and forth in a cheap kaleidoscope.

“Da wu” …heavy fog and a budget South American airline I had never heard of had brought me to this used-up state. A Beijing winter fog of moisture and pollution had suffocated us, the terminal-weary travelers, for hours. I had wired myself with cup after cup of coffee from an ubiquitous world-wide coffee chain, the bitter, international curse. The fog just hung there like a predator with a low, gray growl.

My wait had been fun for a time. I sat with the Russians who were flying to Novosibirsk. Most were women. They wore cheap, ugly Chinese clothes and magnificent furs …gauche boots laced up the back through fake gold eyelets, the rawhide remnants of the laces bouncy as they walked. The women had dyed, incredibly red hair, the color of fall apples …some bleached blond, dry and flyaway …strange haircuts …bright red lipstick or none at all. They held bouquets of half-dead white roses given to them for the journey. They were tall, mostly mountainous women …magnificent gaits  …exotic birds each one …absolutely uncaring about anything except their own presence. Underneath I felt that they would be kind, thoughtful …shrewd, well read, darkly analytical …the women of Siberia. I wondered if I could sneak on the plane and strike up a conversation …wondered if they would tell me dark stories about the underbelly of China. But, the announcement came. They would be heading off, the Chinese accent said in translated English, to “New Siberia.” I wanted to scream, “Novosibirsk” to avoid the reality of anglicized everything. Instead, I muttered “Novosibirsk,” under my breath and remembered Siberia in wistful silence …the people of Siberia living in that vast cold space of forest shamans wearing felt boots and the reality of few possibilities.

Confused staff from my “airy-fairy” airline choice had led the six of us around the airport to various drafty locations for seemingly no reason at all. We finally boarded a completely different aircraft that would stop in Russia to refuel. Then, they had changed their mind and said, that with only six passengers, we had enough fuel to go “directo.” The flight would increase by over an hour now …almost 14 hours. They had lied. We would stop off in Barcelona to refuel adding still another hour. My hope for the a school-girl’s laughing lunch of chipirones with Hermione at a chiringuito near the sound of the sea would be another day off. (It would be Hermione who would later refer mockingly to the flight as my “airy-fairy” airline choice).

I had no shame. I made a bed on the plane’s floor next to the emergency door and vibrated in the draft as I slept praying that bolts and rivets would remain in place. I awoke a cripple …staggered to one of over 300 seats with maddeningly stationary arm rests while all the staff snored in cushy first class.

Later, I had many discussions with “el capitan” about my lodging for the night through the flight attendants who informed me that “el capitan” was tired as were they …and that “el capitan” had made his decision …no lodging, no meals, no arrangements for the connecting Spanair flight. I kept my sarcasm to myself and smiled sweetly as we discussed over and over how we could best solve “our” problem. He relented finally and I made my way through Barajas with a Spanair representative who had only caustic comments about the euphemistic term “airline” that the six of us had suffered.  She had given me the customary Spanish kiss on both cheeks and assured me that Spanair would take care of me before she had left me to be taken to an airport hotel, magnificently boring and clean.

~~

My headache feels the need for coffee …lots of coffee with hot milk. I use the Telebanco machine in the lobby first, a lens of memory coming into focus from the night before. People walk by. No one cares. No one notices. The machine whirs, then spits out Euros with a click …click …click. I like that. It’s far better than the bank in my neighborhood. There, I key myself in and am treated to the nosey stare of the bank guard strolling over to see how much the “lao wai” is taking out.

I should see breakfast coming, but I walk to the dining room in a blind spot of soft carpet and oil paintings of castles on the walls. I am not prepared for the emotional avalanche as I sit down to breakfast …the things I have not realized that I miss about the West are shocking. The common dining room created for a convention cast of thousands is so clean. The tables are covered with two fresh table cloths, the napkins starched, the cutlery and goblets brilliant, the china sparkling with garlands of subtle pink on a navy blue, patterned background. I fall into the rhythm of a Western lockstep with the each sip of good coffee, each bite of whole-wheat toast with fig jam and the taste of excellent cheeses with membrillo. China grows distant. For a moment, I have lived nowhere but in Spain …China a dream subsiding into red mist. Then, I notice the sprigs of bamboo on every table. China comes flooding back just as quickly …dusty red lanterns …curious alleyways …the glare of headlights in the evening smog. China is everywhere, even in this starched table-clothed oasis. My feelings for China are still inexplicable …my pleasure in Spain, defined and clear.

I’ve sorted out my Western/Eastern life with a host of Chinese cab drivers, some drunk, some sober, their clutches stripped and motors choked with sludge, grinding up bumpy Mountain Big Street. Most are curious about the lives of foreigners and seek to find some common ground. I have become equally curious about them …so, there you have it, as much as I complain, I have joined the discussion. I tell them that when I am in China, I long for Spain …when I am in Spain, I long for China. I tell them that this problem is a big one for me. They laugh. They are knowing with countryside wisdom. How could anyone go live in Spain when they have experienced life in China?

~~

I am not so sure, as I sip “Fuensanta” out of a dark green bottle “mas grande.” The mineral water is soothing. Soon, I’ll take another nap in the bed of blinding white sheets and matelasse before heading to the airport. It occurs to me that I am moving past middle age and I don’t know where I will end up …well, that’s not true. I’ll end up in the same place everyone else does. It is the space between I wonder about. A kindly relative has written me lovingly. She says, “I hope you will find what you are looking for.” I consider this sentence over and over as if, in those simple words, there must be an eternal truth that I should repeat like a mantra to make it so.

The truth of my truth is that I am not looking for anything in particular. I am just looking. An incredible array finds me …farmers selling radishes …the fragrance of unexpected petunias …wild honey on a drive through the mountains …blue sky, bluer sea …graffiti …slippery vomit on the street …pollution so thick I can’t see beyond the next block …the taste of orchid tea …dirty children begging on the streets …a smile from the “hulu” maker as he sells me a skewer of candied crabapples …the perfidious with the unctuous smile ready to pounce …the confused with the heart locked up so tightly that loneliness and unease are its ultimate companions …the loving with the clear look in the eye …a shepherd girl singing in the rain to her flock among wildflowers …the beautiful and the ugly mixed up together insisting that my consciousness change …that I rearrange my foundations without destroying them. I try to change nothing I see. I try to change nothing that changes me. If anything, I find a state of mind about my own life and my relation to the people and things that find me …I describe and describe and, in so doing, forgive myself for living life with judgments. I strip away, like layers of an onion, those things once so important …the things and ideas I never really needed. What remains of my needs, whatever they may be, are sometimes met in ways I could never have imagined …sufficient …moment by moment …an act of faith.

Today, they tell me that, in Germany, unemployment figures are the worst since the war. I have begun to worry about DongDong whose intelligence often matches his name in English. His parents spent tons of their life savings to send him to study and work in this Germany. I think of him in his job cleaning up table scraps in a restaurant …a job that no one wants …speaking a language he studied for ten years that sounds like anything but German. Freezing Germany. Perhaps he should come back to work in China where I hear, this morning, that they will corner the auto market in ten years.

The dollar is okay, mas o menos, today, but still way down and the Dow Jones is a little less than it was a week or so ago. Commercials tell me that I should live out my dreams in Greece. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. Hard to tell. I have rewarded my return from western Spain with scrambled eggs, toast with Honey of a Thousand Flowers and cafe con leche. I feel that I am deserving of my small breakfast pleasures …the market news …a quiet breakfast bundled in a blanket.

I left  late yesterday after a sad, last breakfast in a cafe bar with Juan, Isabel, and the two little spoons, Ignacio and Esteban. The people running the cafe bar are from Juan’s village in the Extremadura. We ate our mollenete toasted with slices of jamon, the mollenete spread with tomate frito and drenched in olive oil. Juan and Isabel visited with the owners, and I had a last feast of the eyes, the hams hanging from the ceiling, Extremadura sausages, the wooden bar, the small tables with low stools for chairs, the bright yellow …Spanish sunshine painted on the walls. I bought the local cheeses and wines to take to back as gifts, and I was on my way with tears in my eyes. Isabel gave me practical advice with kisses on both cheeks, “Don’t cry.” Juan hugged me with that look of his so full of village wisdom, Spanish sunshine …dark shadows.

I set off in the pouring rain and promptly got lost in Jerez. I backtracked along the road construction and soon I was traveling down narrow A-382 in the downpour. The fields have given way to a delicate green. Just last week, the fields had glowed umber in the cold sunshine of winter’s Spain. Yesterday was the Day of Andalucia, a holiday, and I had to follow a long line of traffic, but I was in no hurry, preferring to see the countryside …rolling fields that billowed like sails with old cortijos on their rises …imagined how it might be to look out of a kitchen window at all of that emptiness of field and sky. I passed groves of walnut trees, mountains, lentisco coming alive to green in the rain. The fields gave way to olive trees and mountains as far as the eye could see and, before I knew it, a little regrettably, I was already in the mountains before Granada. I could not imagine why there was no traffic. I whizzed through and quickly discovered the reason on the other side of the mountains …snow …lots of snow… 

I had possessions …a nasty cold …and a shiny, new blue, teenie-tiny car no bigger than a postage stamp. Traveling up the mountain, I downshifted as much as possible, but felt as if I should open the door and use my left leg like a scooter to keep the car going. It would be a long afternoon. I slowed to a snail’s pace. The snow drifted from the devil’s strip and only one lane was open. Sometimes I followed the snow plow. Sometimes I followed the Guardia Civil for miles. Sometimes I saw horrible accidents …a car completely overturned in a ditch …a truck that jack knifed in the wind. After I saw those, I started to sing silly kindergarten songs, “Oh, the horse stood around with his foot on the ground.” “Mother Gooney Bird had seven chicks, seven chicks had Mother Gooney Bird.”

Calmed, I allowed myself to enter the portal of the blinding white world. Umber rocks peeked through the white blanket resembling ancient Moorish, bearded men frozen in time like Lot’s wife as they had tried to flee Granada and had turned around for just one last look at paradise. The howling wind sang their bitter song of flight …lost courts of oranges and myrtles growing beside gentle fountains and flowing waters. The trees stood guard as if, over the long years, they honor this sight mourning with tears of snow. I wished for boots and a warm coat …a walk in the mountains …needles of cold in my toes and fingers …snowflakes on my tongue …a fire. 

I stopped at a secret honey place in the Sierra Nevada Mountains instead. I parked the car and walked through the slop of slush into the shop. No one was there. Who would be crazy enough to stop there in this weather? The proprietor was sleeping in her huge 4-wheel drive vehicle …now finally rich from selling honey and pottery at exorbitant prices. I saw no honey, but she said she had it. We hiked around to the side of the shop. With my impractical shoes I stepped into her deep footprints and had a look. She rooted around for some minutes and …there it was …Honey of a Thousand Flowers. She was a little insulted when I asked if sugar had been added …something Isabel and Juan had always warned me to ask when buying honey in Spain. A sharp, “No,” was her response, “Pura.” But, suddenly helpful, she gave me a weather report …snow all the way to Puerto Lumbreras and rain towards Almeria. In an hour I would be out of the snow. 

I passed into the rain of Almeria Province. The branches of the pink almond blossoms wept out onto the road heavy with rain dripping the scent of almonds into the muddy, flowing ditches …finally, I was in the desert and then by the side of the wild sea. It was late. I found a shop still open by the sea and bought a half loaf of fresh bread …and then, I felt like I was a “queen in the parlor, eating bread and honey.” Do you ever wonder about the miracle of honey? The current neurotic prognostication about honey is that its inflammatory nature is poisonous to what we have begun to think should be our eternal bodies. Probably true if you eat a teacupful. But, what don’t we know about honey? Honey is a sensual mystery …the fields of flowers, sunshine, the tiny bees, the thick brew of earthy colors that the bees in their labor deposit in the dark community of the hive, the layers of aroma differing in each clear or smoky jar …try to imagine a forest, a meadow, a mountain of a thousand fragrant flowers …

lavender rosemary chamomile calendula
dutchman’sbreeches woodviolets purpleclover
daisies peonies trillium wildroses iris pansies
petunias narcissus jackinthepulpet valerian
daylilies geraniums alyssum bergamot
orangeblossom magnolia moonflowers lobelia
nasturtiums oenothera thyme speedwell mint
starofbethlehem hierbaluisa yarrow nard sage 

The trip through the snowy mountains of frozen Moorish faces and along the sea that did a raucous dance of waves ruffling wildly as if it was a gypsy’s flamenco dress, is already a memory. This evening the weather is still cruel. I hear castanets in the wind howling out of the sea as the electricity goes off and on. I have not ventured far today and, now late, the dreary day has faded. Perhaps I should light a candle in the darkness that has become absolute in the absence of the comforts of evening light made by man …but, my mysterious gift from the snowy Sierra Nevadas is an elixir in a simple cup of poleo menta tea sipped in the dark with a slice of lemon I picked from a tree. The steam rises. I breathe in …a thousand flowers under my skin. I breathe out …breath of a thousand flowers …the enchantment of an afternoon as the light begins to leave, a sleepy wandering …one eye open …one eye closed, dreaming of the bees.

~~Deng Ming-Dao
~~On Knowledge

It’s morning and I am sitting over breakfast in my cave. I never open the front shutter in the morning, because I don’t relish the thought of my neighbors clomping by with a full view of my hair standing on end, braless in an old lumpy sweater. I have already washed the last of my bedding and towels that I can wash and hung them on the rickety drying rack in the Spanish sunshine.  I’ve begun to pout about this rented apartment with no view of the sea. I’ve begun to feel trapped in this place on the first floor where people walk by the pool …sandwiched in with no view but the blinding white apartment block across the street, mostly shut up, because it is winter. I sleep all over what feels like a kind of  Spanish Florida of this rented apartment with no view of the sea. I started out sleeping in the preferred small bedroom …the neighbor next door snored through the cheap walls. I moved to the more imposing master bedroom and gave that a whirl …didn’t like that because I couldn’t read in bed …the lights with the quaint dimness of a Europe long past. After a hail storm one night, all the lights went out and woke me up …I stumbled to the living room and slept on the sofa. I guess you could say, I have been sleeping around.

I have been sitting over my tea this morning. The jasmine pearls have opened in the clay pitcher I make tea in …a perfectly glazed, common brown pitcher that has perhaps known a lovely summer’s day sangria for two. I have drunk three times from the unfurling leaves and, soon, limp and tasteless, they will end in the plastic bag from the grocery store that I use for garbage and have a dead tea leaf walk to the basura. I drink my tea from a cheap glass. Sometimes, I hold the glass next to the bridge of my nose against my cheek for the warmth and the scent of the jasmine secretly travels through me like a powerful dream. Dreams …that is what I want to tell you about …my dreams. The landscape of my hours of unrest have resembled my sleeping throughout the house …frightful chaos …I am never still in the dark world. I pick fading roses in places that just don’t seem right …I live in houses of terrible construction that are in imminent danger of falling apart …sometimes several at a time. Sometimes I don’t know which one I am living in. I never live in the old fairytale house with the pitched roof and the two towering trees, but I see it in my dreams.    It has a tattered roof and nothing is as it seems. A terrible wind blows and I know the shingles will blow off the house, but I don’t feel a sense of relief that it is sold and gone.

Old lovers trail through the empty house …they look at me with disdain and won’t speak. Friends die and I am shocked at their passing. I have three cars and they are all breaking down. It costs so much to fix them, but they are mine and are dragging me down. It’s Christmas …I go on a date with a man I can’t remember …a prom in a local suburb. I wear a strapless, yellow chipao. I am comfortable in the dress, but the gloves are ugly until I discover they are inside out …on the right side they are black and suddenly I am no longer wearing yellow, but black. My date doesn’t work out. My mother, father and grandmother have a walk through this dream. Secretly, they are spurring me on …helping me to put the pieces of my life together. I go out with another man …a kind of slight, non-discrept fellow… my mother asks us to go to St. Mary’s. I say, “I didn’t take the Romanian lines. It was just too sad, the passing of the generations. I never had any children.” The slight man takes all of this in …my yellow chipao/black clothing date …what I say to my mother …he gives me sidelong, knowing glances.

I travel to Mongolia with a dead friend‘s son and his partner. They are going there to be doctors.. We sleep in a motel in a Mongolian strip mall with a bank. Somewhere in the dream they disappear, and I am changing money at the bank. I always have the wrong money in the wrong country. I can’t change anything.

I am going to be married. I visit the apartment of a younger man …a lover to tell him I am getting married, but I don’t end up telling him. Suddenly it is the day of the wedding. I have no dress …I think that maybe I will wear my old wedding dress, but end up with an ugly white dress like a flour sack with hand cutwork at the bottom. I don’t have a wedding cake, and I need to bake brownies. It’s all too much …its just too late.

My friends visit me in China and Spain …there is always something wrong with their tickets …their connections. I live with strange families.  I am always packing and unpacking …sorting and throwing away …sorting and keeping …moving to another chaotic place. I always get out of the old place in the nick of time.

I moved through my days just like a snail leaving a translucent trail …a sad, incandescent  purple and turquoise as I walked by the sea. I am still often tired from “the year of the furrowed brow,” that year of resigning jobs …writing endless, boring reports …repairing, then selling a house …negotiating a job in China … sorting through the things of my life, saying goodbye …

 …and, then, there have been these nights of chaos. Should I even wonder why I am tired? I stop the useless interrogation of myself about why I am the way I am and muster up some courage instead.  I had a day of a thousand small creative acts beginning with searching for a biological specimen in the refrigerator …a zucchini!!! I cut off the bad parts and made a zuchini bread without a recipe with a lemon I picked from Hermione’s tree and a nutmeg I bought from the sweet, Moroccan spice merchant in the market. As I walked on the paseo yesterday, I began to look for things as my mother had been so conscious of …the tiny, inconsequential things that gave her life meaning. I had an appreciation for her task. Before I saw the tiny, yellow wild flowers like snap dragons near the sidewalk and the pots of snake plants outside of a restaurant, I passed by a pile of dog shit, a discarded orange key tag, an angry red graffiti penis ejaculating along the wall of the paseo …the jetsam and flotsam of peoples’ walking lives near the sea. As I walked along, it came to me that I have not let go of my old life. I know I don’t have it anymore, but I hold on to it by the sorting out, the discarding, the keeping. Have I given away too much? Need I give away more?

I fell into a peaceful sleep that night. Near morning I had a dream. I was driving through the desert. It seems like it might have been sunset. The desert was alight with red and purple fire and there were deep shadows in the canyons. On a bluff there was a huge pino piñonero …an umbrella pine of the Mediterranean. It had just been planted. Its powerful branches had been pruned. They were bare. But within itself I knew the tree was so alive …it was merely waiting for rain …and then it would grow majestic …first the fragrant branches …then the full shape …the wind singing its will-of-the-wisp song through its branches.  Some time today, I will eat the tiny mandarinas of winter’s Spain …just like my mother who gloried in “the beauty of tiny oranges upon a painted plate.” Later, I will go to a local restaurant with Hermione and have a look at the waiter over lunch. He is young and tall, his handsome looks surpassed only by his winsome sweetness …a spirt alive that  he will pass on to me through his smile and his kindness.

In the meantime, I wait for rain.