The Ukulele in Italy and circles around the Colosseum August 10, 2008

William found a ukulele in the Mission District of San Francisco, and he brought it with him on our journey in Italy. I recognize that bringing a ukulele to Italy is akin to ordering Penne alla Veronese in Hilo, Hawaii.

During our Italian tour, we stayed on an organic farm near Sora, between Roma and Napoli, and one night we sat on stumps encircling a hillside campfire under the starlight with our new friends and the matron of the family. William brought out the ukulele and strummed soft chords while I blew bluesy harmonica melodies. He was playing the ukulele out in public for the first time on our trip. Conchetta the donkey seemed enchanted by the ukulele music, nuzzling her head into William’s arms whenever he played.

The next day, we left the farm and rode a series of infrequent trains churning slowing in the direction of Perugia. We climbed narrow metal steps of Trenitalia cars while loaded with bags and carefully carrying the ukulele by hand. Sitting in my seat on one train ride, William’s orange and grey backpack, the kind with zippers and cinch straps and mesh pouches all over, rested on the seat facing me. He placed the ukulele delicately atop the bag.

I removed my glasses and stowed them in one of the mesh pouches of my own travel backpack. I placed my feet flat against the train floor gliding along the track and the verdant earth beneath it. Elongating my spine and sitting straight and upright, I felt a space of air between my lumbar spine and the slouching curve of the hard train seat. I placed my hands in a mudra with right hand fingers overlapping the left ones and thumb tips gently touching. Softening my eyes to a half-lidded gaze, I directed them at the green cloth-covered train seat in front of me. I traced my breath with the finger of my aware mind three times. Then, I heard a loud Pop! and I felt something hit me in the leg. I broke from the meditation and peered around me, startled and confused. Bending over and looking underneath the seat for clues, I found a curved, rectangular piece of wood the size of a finger, stained dark on a two sides.

Suddenly, I understood. The ukulele … had exploded. All four strings hung loose from the busted instrument, snaking askew and dangling limply in the air, attached only at the pegs. The fret piece had jettisoned from the base of the ukulele into my leg.

This ukulele incident serves as an apt metaphor for the effect that I tend to manifest in others. When I get close with someone and let the energy flow, changes happen: deep, resonant, life-altering changes. Feeling the heightened vibrational force that emanates from my being seems to bring about a moment of crisis. If the person is wound up very tightly, moving through life rigid and sharp, he either loosens up and attunes to his specific heavenly vibration, or he pops, like the ukulele.

That’s right. March to the beat of your own heart; boldly achieve the divinest dreams; release fears and doubts into a slipstream of courageous manifestation, or feel the unbearable strain of restriction and tension. Evolve or explode. Become the color of your brightest light, or I’ll shatter your world. This is why they run.

I was dressed to perform for the Gods and Goddesses of Rome. I wore a form-fitting belly-exposing halter top, a handmade red skirt with long, thin strips flowing and flaming down my legs, a newly-acquired deep red Afghanistani belly dancing belt with rows of jingling silver coins swinging in a cacophonous row around my hips. Forest green wool legwarmers covered my calves. My eyes were accented with black and white swirling lines and blue sparking shadow, and my lips shined fire alarm red. Sparkles of bindi glimmered from my third eye, the outside corners of my eyes, and the space centered just below my bottom lip.

I arrived alone in glittering performance regalia at the Colosseum just before sunset and found it closed to the public. Peering into the locked gates, I decided to walk reverently around it, circumambulating the ancient stone complex in a counterclockwise direction. After I completed the circle, I returned to a raised rock platform where a man dressed in red and yellow Spartan wear was standing earlier.

After ascending the platform in view of the Arch of Constantine and the marble statues perched atop the colonnade on the hill, I laid out a blue cloth and placed a black hat on top of it, faced upward to receive offerings from the public, and I positioned my egg-shaped glow poi on the cloth, one on either side of the hat. Kneeling down in front of the cloth, I lowered my eyes in silence with hands pressed together at my heart. Using conscious breath, I consecrated the space, focused my intent, and merged with the spirit of spectacle, courage and grace so deeply infused in the aura of the arena.

My hands and arms drifted upward in a fluid snaking motion, tracing the path of the wind and reaching for the impossible blue of the soon dusk sky. I stood upright and breathed deeply with marble deities gazing toward me. My belly dancing belt jingled as I swayed and moved my hips in circles and figure eights. I traced the corners of the stage with motion and flow from my fingers and toes.

I caught the gaze of many passers by and foreign visitors and Roman citizens, who slowed to a halt to watch me undulate and shake and beam light through my anime green eyes and seductive smile. I shimmied shoulders and swung pendulums of glowing rainbow light in pinwheels and corkscrews, weaves and butterflies.

I noticed that a young man with dark matted dreadlocks and Mediterranean olive skin seemed particularly captivated by me. He was dressed in black and earth tones and carrying an army backpack, and he sat down on the grass to watch me intently as I performed my devotional dance. Soon, I slowed the lighted poi to a pause and kneeled at the cloth, bringing my hands together at my fast-beating heart and gave gratitude to the ancient spirits witnessing and encouraging me in my creative display. As I wrapped the blue cloth over my poi and hat, heavy with Euro offerings, the man who was watching me approached with a confident stride and a gaze so focused and penetrating, I wondered if he knew me. We began speaking in Italian and switched to the English after I told him that I was from San Francisco most recently and he told me that he hails from Riverside, making us California neighbors.

“I love to watch you dance,” he said. “What are you doing here in Roma?”

“I’m here to do this, perform dances of beauty and joy, and to soak in the majesty of Italy. I just arrived a few days ago,” I explained.

“I’ve been living here in Roma for a year now. This city is magnificent,” he proclaimed as he surveyed our surroundings and motioned his hand in a sweeping arc.

I noticed that he spoke with an unusual cadence, either from talking in Italian all year, from the beaten path of street life, or from a mind scattered into particles of light so many times. Perhaps, all of the above.

“Listen,” he said, “ What are you doing stasera?”

Before I could initiate an answer about my plans for the evening, he leapt from the platform like a leopard on the lookout and said, “I’ll be right back. I need to go. I’ll come back. I just need to run around the Colosseum.”

“What?”

He explained in a fast clip, “This is what I do, you know. I run in circles around the Colosseum. I need to go right now and run. Will you be here?”

I said, “I’m leaving momentarily.”

“Okay, well I’ll be back,” he yelled to me as he ran.

Like the ukulele conveyed, running has been a fairly common and plausible reaction from someone at the threshold of getting close to me. However, this dusky encounter in Roma was the first time someone ran in circles around the Colosseum at the prospect of an evening together with jade.

I collected my performance tools and packed them into my bag, rising and sighing with the soft, pulsing energy of the Roman arena gods. I stepped off the platform and strode along the street toward the ruins and statues of the Imperial Forum, my hips jingling and ringing harmonies with each step as the blue light of day slipped into the dark mystery of la sera.

I Feel at Home in Italy August 10, 2008

[I wrote this shortly before I discovered Damanhur and became fluent in Italian. After that, everything changed, and it all made sense. ]

I feel very much at home now that I’m back in Italy. I feel at home in the glowing, verdant heat of the Mediterranean sun, walking past red clay hued houses with omnipresent green window shutters. I feel at home when I hear the lyrical language rolling our in a river from Italian mouths. I feel at home amongst the crowds of fashionistas and famiglias, clamoring onto metros and slipping past each other along narrow, medieval back streets.

In most ways, it makes no sense that I feel at home in Italy. Italians and I, we are different creatures.

Italians seem to speak Italian in an endless stream of passionate, often complaining, coffee-fueled conversation. I speak words with a slow even tone, and my speech is meticulously sparse. In the order of familiarity with languages, Italian ranks a distant fifth after English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and French.

The Italian women seem to wear tightly fitting, newly purchased, seasonally fashionable designer clothing and insensible shoes. They stress their ankles while balancing on heels raised to sharp points, and they squeeze their toes and the balls of their feet into constricting elfin tips, strapping them in with wire-thin straps that slice red lines into compressed flesh. I wear a pair of black, clunky, ergonomically sound sandals with fat supportive straps and curved soles, and I have been wearing the same two sets of traveling clothes for over a month.

The Italian men seem to sport short, closely-clipped haircuts, and they demonstrate little variation on the clothing theme of designer suits and tight pastel T-shirts with form-fitting jeans. I am usually drawn to shaggier types with goatees and eyebrow piercings, roaming around shirtless through the woods and dancing with bare feet.

The Italians seem to wear expensive sunglasses and carry fancy designer handbags. I carry a twig of dried sage and a rose quartz pendulum with me in a more functional than fashionable traveler backpack.

The Italians seem to eat a steady diet of bready and cheesey foods with generous portions of meat and gelato. Most of their vegetable intake appears to have been heated for days and stirred into soups and creamy sauces. I only eat raw things that grow on trees, nibbling on organic fruits and sprouted almonds and the occasional bowl of lettuce leaves and tomato slices drizzled with lemon and olive oil. I eat bananas instead of ice cream. I turn down chocolate pieces and tiramisu in favor of baskets of fresh figs.

The Italians seem to drink plentiful bottles of wine and café all day and dessert liqueurs made from walnut and artichoke after dinnertime. I see them feeding their children liters of brown, syrupy cola. Invece, I drink clear, clean acqua minerale in a steady stream from dawn to dusk, and I delight in wheatgrass, goji berry juice, fruit smoothies and freshly pressed vegetable juices, which I have not found anywhere in Italy. I feel like I’m the only fire dancer and raw foodist in the entire country.

The Italians seem to eat first thing in the morning and sit down for huge dinners late at night. I fast for fifteen hours a day. After drinking water for many hours after awakening, I break my fast with dates and fruits, and at lunchtime, eat a generous salad. For dinner, a peach or two – well before sundown – will usually suffice.

Smiling, dancing, yoga and silent meditation do not seem to be priorities for the Italians, who tend to display a cool, disinterested gaze while sitting around for hours in cafés and on public steps, talking with each other fast and nonstop. The Italians seem to be eternally occupied with their cell phones. I abandoned mine in America months ago.

The Italians seem pretty attached to Roman Catholicism, whereas, I take what I like from a grab bag of esoteric mysticism, Buddhist traditions, and pagan naturalism.

The Italians pride themselves on their cars, while I am only interested in hybrid cars and biodiesels and favor vintage bicycles. The Italians love film and opera; I prefer handmade books, acoustic music and live drumming. We find common ground on the inherent value of the Vespa.

In a few ways, the Italians and I do happen to agree. We adore paintings and mosaics and delight in open piazzas and public spaces. We may be eating entirely different things, although we honor the divineness of fine, organic cuisine and love to cultivate, prepare and eat it slowly, lingering in the magical theatrics of each meal. Italians and I, we value generous stretches of leisure time and afternoon napping, and I find many of them still close up shop between the hours of 13,00 and 16,00. We all enjoy public nudity, and I’m happy to see that throwing off clothes outside happens casually here, if only at the beaches. Italians love life. They adore amorousness and form warm connections and immerse in delicious beauty, like me. Viva Italia!

Saturn and Uranus dancing in orbit July 14, 2008

When I met Jason, he was on the road. Literally. He was driving across country from Dallas to Seattle in a crème colored Volvo, and he had parked by the Embarcadero in San Francisco to see what the crowds of sweaty youth and metallic punks were doing on the street. I had just emerged from an all-day festival of punk rock music with heart pumping and ears ringing. We connected through City Lights and Berkeley vegetarian fare, and he crashed my dormitory and spent the night in my roommate’s bed while she was elsewhere.

When we met, I was in living on an all-women’s floor in a university dormitory. I was rooted and disciplined, tethered to a semester schedule, digging into reading assignments and engaged in abstract intellectual exercise. He was nomadic and free, following the winds of nature and the tides of heart-mind, chasing synchronicities like fireflies and forging temporary autonomous zones left and right. Over time, we became passionately intertwined, in the intricate, entangled way that only two Virgos can create.

After we disengaged our life paths, after a long period of silence and distance and geographical separation, I went to visit him in San Diego along my road trip from San Francisco to Houston. I recognized that we had effectively traded places. He was ankle deep in phonebook-thick photocopied graduate school readers and student assignments to grade, every waking hour filled with task and responsibility, projecting himself forward in a scholarly trajectory toward an advanced ethnomusicology degree. I was gliding around with all my worldly possessions piled in the backseat of a hybrid car, with no agenda except traveling the world, converging with liberated beings and taking naps every day. In a moment of alignment, I visited the undergraduate music class he was teaching, and he invited me to play the third movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique on the piano to demonstrate a rendition of musical form for his students.

Over the days and nights and years we made our lives together, we moved in a dance of polarity and exchange, our paths swirling around each other in a tight double helix. I taught him how to make lists, enjoy libraries and solve differential equations. He taught me how to rappel from a tree, embrace polyamory and travel with a backpack on a shoestring budget through Central America. We subtly infused each other with the lessons we had yet to learn and ways of being we had yet to be. With some time and space apart to germinate and grow, the seeds of change we catalyzed in each other have activated dynamically.

My Cave Life in Göreme Turkey April 28, 2008

I’ve had a lot of unusual housewifely experiences while traveling and being a house guest, and one of the most bizarre ones has been vacuuming the volcanic tuff rock dust off the wall-to-wall lattice of Turkish carpets in my cave.

I actually find very little opportunity or obligation to perform housewifely chores around here, which is not what I would have expected from the gender dynamics of a traditional Muslim town. Whenever I work at the travel agency, the chefs at the family restaurant next door prepare a çok güzel salata for me, gratis.

Ekrem has a devoted worker named Mehmet who hails from Sanilurfa in eastern Turkey near Syria. Mehmet seems to play a role somewhere between Ekrem’s superhero sidekick and indentured servant. He knows very little English and doesn’t read or write. He does everything with a smile, unless he’s wrangling or chastising the animals with ferocity, and his eyes widen with aggression when we are martial arts sparring. Mehmet goes to the horse ranch every day to care for the horses and prepare them for riding. He gets sent on errands and shopping trips in town and comes to the cave to do the animal feeding, gardening, wood chopping, cleaning, dishwashing and food preparation alongside Ekrem, whom Mehmet clearly reveres. When Ekrem and Mehmet are making meals and maintaining the cave, I ask Ekrem if I can do anything to help, and he usually answers something like, “put on some music,” or on rare occasion, “wash these strawberries.” Oh, how I luxuriate in the graceful ease of cave princess life. When I requested a basin to wash my laundry, Ekrem sent to whole load home with Mehmet for his wife to wash so I wouldn’t have to use my hands. When my socks were drying, Ekrem insisted on buying me four new pairs at the pazar.

I find that Ekrem serves me attentively and thoroughly, taking me anywhere and everywhere I want to go, always giving me a ride back home to the cave in the evenings, stocking the place with kilos of the foods I eat, preparing salad for twenty and setting aside a special portion for me every time with no salt and less oil, even insisting on pouring me clear glass tulip tea cups of hot water instead of me serving myself. I stopped attempting to pay for the produce we were buying at the market or covering restaurant bills when I understood that doing so would always be ineffectual and might even been considered offensive to the Turkish male sense of pride and generosity and masculine responsibility. This kind of care and treatment is new and unusual for me in comparison to the laissez-faire way of America boyfriends, with whom I usually found myself in the role of provider and server, doing the majority of the food purchasing and preparation and the stocking of household items, taking care of bills and the cleaning of dishes and things, coordinating trips and outings, doing most or all of the driving around town and on road trips. After a period of anxious adjustment to this new dynamic, I’m allowing myself to happily relax into a place of femininity, to learn and understand what it feels like to be deeply taken care of in a relationship.

The days here in Göreme are full of moments and idiosyncrasies that are amusing to me; some because for their of curious juxtaposition of masculinity and femininity, some that are just plain funny. I once cut a breakfast grapefruit with a meat cleaver that I am sure hadn’t seen the inside of a citrus fruit before.

Analogously, Ekrem was sitting in his former rock church turned cozy ranch house with me and a collection of visiting cowboys. He wanted to cut an apple, so Mehmet searched for a knife and handed him a huge, razor-sharp one fit for cutting through scrub brush or slaying a crocodile, and Ekrem proceeded to gingerly peel the apple with it. That same night, one of the cowboys had the hiccups, so his friends had him stand up, bend over, and sip water from a glass upside down. The process initiated an eruption of laughter, and the antidote worked – his hiccups were cured.

One night at our friend Hassan’s ranch house, we were gathered around a buffet of barbequed meat and a tomato, garlic and green pepper salad. A candle with an overly long wick was burning while sitting on a shelf carved into the rock. Ekrem examined the wick of the candle critically, looked around, picked up a nearby pair of garden sheers and trimmed the wick with the shears while the candle was still aflame.

Ekrem has a cell phone. So, not only is he a traditional Turkish cowboy talking on a cell phone while riding a horse, he is a traditional Turkish cowboy talking on a pink cell phone while riding a horse. When someone teased him about it, Ekrem explained that the store only had pink phones in stock for the model he wanted. He said he should switch to a different color phone, and then we all agreed that the pink one was perfect, actually.

Ekrem wears a red and grey striped shirt with the world “flight” printed on the back. This carries a particular irony because he feels scared of flying in airplanes. He’s only been on one plane trip in his lifetime, to Morocco and back, and he swears he’s never doing it again. I observed, “Most people won’t get anywhere near the horses you ride, and even experienced cowboys won’t ride them the way that you do, without a saddle, rearing into the mountains and out in the winter snow. Most people fly in airplanes all the time. Yet, you are scared of flying.” He said, “Yes, I will ride any kind of horse, it doesn’t matter. If I fall off, I’m only two meters off the ground. Airplanes, how high are they? Eight thousand meters? No way.” His reasoning makes perfect sense.

Ekrem wears a black jacket with the word “puzzle” printed on the back. He is a puzzling creature, a living paradox. He possesses the innocent curiosity and dynamic enthusiasm of a child. He is also his grandfather’s legacy, a wise and weathered man planting grape vines, prescribing folk medicines, complaining about litter on the roads and horses eating his fruit trees and hot air balloons landing on the gardens. He talks and tells tales, mostly about horses, in a stream of nonstop Turkish with his friends, who orbit around him like satellites around a star. When he is alone or with Mehmet, they sometimes sit together silently, like tranquil monks in a cave drinking tea. Then, one of the horses will give a whinnying kick or create a commotion, and they’ll hop up and yell toward the corral with fierce commands to settle down.

Ekrem’s friends tell him that he is an exceptional and special being and so am I. They observe with wonderment, “You are a Cappadocia cowboy. She is a wild American girl from China and Italy. How did you two find each other?” Well, we didn’t exactly find each other. I found him. I came here to Göreme in the middle of nowhere, Turkey by following my intuition and tuning into the synchronous signs along my path of worldly wandering. We wouldn’t have met any other way. Though Ekrem intends to travel overland to Egypt and India, he’s not likely flying to America or flying anywhere. He was born and raised in Göreme, and he loves this place eternally. His friends warn me not to take him away, insisting that they need him here. “Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere,” I assure them. This town revolves around him, and as I am with him, this town revolves around me now. Ekrem’s horse ranch and cave serve as frequented social hubs where a current of visitors come to gather, share tea and meals. Ekrem’s store sits in the center of the village, across the street from the most frequented bar, and it’s the only one open past midnight. He knows just about everyone here, and they admire and respect him like he’s the town sheriff. His friends are the owners of the most prestigious and beautiful hotels, restaurants, bars, carpet and jewelry shops, travel agencies and the hamam, and they teach me Turkish and offer me jobs left and right and adore having me and my dancing free spirit around.

I often find myself the only woman amongst a gaggle of born and bred Turkish men, smoking, drinking and carousing together. “Why is that?” I ask them. “Where are all of your girlfriends and wives all of this time? Where are all the women here? What’s with this place?” One of them answered, “The women stay in the home for the most part, and I do go out with my wife and my family sometimes. We go to restaurants together or out on walks. This place, though,” he said, referring to the Cave Chalet, “is our place. It’s special, just for men.” So it seems, not only have I been invited into the boys club, I have been invited to live in the boys club and to be served like a queen. Amazing.

Some of our friends call the cave house “the Museum,” since it is carved near the heart of the Göreme Open Air Museum, the most visited spot in town, a collection of thirty-three rock churches dating from the stone age with layers of medieval mosaics and red ochre paintings. I notice this synchronicity of informal place names, as I refer to my parents’ house in Houston as “the Museum” or “the Chi Museum,” because it houses a priceless collection of my artwork and has the hands-off austerity of a museum environment. When I first came to the cave, Ekrem said to me, “This is your home. Treat it as you would your parents’ house, like a place to come back to always.” I have two museums to call home now: one in Houston, Texas one in Cappadocia, Göreme.

I love living and sleeping in a cave. I sleep on cushions and blankets within the heated radius of a coal and wood burning stove. My dreams are lucid and clear. I awake with the dawn and feast on grapes and channel inspired words, writing in a continuous stream. The cave is protected from outside electromagnetic radiation, so cell phones don’t work, although there is a fine stereo and satellite TV for watching bizarre Turkish comedies and critical soccer matches. Being in a cave carved into tuff rock is kind of like hanging out in a geode, like sitting in the palm of magnetized earth energy, a powerfully healing habitat. I intend to create a space in the back cove for massage and Reiki, a perfect shelter for renewal and release, enveloped in the moist womb of mother earth. I wonder, if grapes from the garden that would normally wilt in six days stay preserved for six months in these caves, then what kind of effect do they have on human bodies and longevity? How long will I live if I stay here? Could I possibly get any younger? I’m already nineteen for the tenth time.

Cave life is very nice. We host giddy dinner parties nearly every night, serving organic salad with greens from the garden, parsley, dill and mint leaves, and homemade tomato aubergine güveç cooked over an open fire under the stars. After dinner, we gather in a circle for folk dancing to rhythms played on drums and spoons, thumping and clacking, turning and snapping late into the night. Once a pack of sixty Spaniards came to drink and dance, play music and sing, alternating between boisterous Spanish ballads and step dances and Turkish folk songs. If one culture could match the level of enthusiasm the Turks have for dancing, music making and revelry, it’s the Spaniards. Our Spanish guests delighted in the cave party scene and praised my belly dancing and spoon castanets. I found myself in the strange situation of dusting off the coating of Italian from my Spanish skills to translate flirtations between my Turkish men friends and the Spanish women, insisting to the most beautiful of them that they stay past midnight, dance more and go out with us to a local bar for all night carousing.

Some things about me are absolute anomalies here. I am the only person in this town and maybe this whole region who has an Apple computer. I’ve had several people request to buy my MacBook from me outright or to have me bring them one from the US. I sense a potential business venture. Also, when I moved into the cave, I increased the amount of books here by three hundred percent, bringing in The Rough Guide to Turkey borrowed from an American student named Rainbow studying in Istanbul, an English translation of the Koran gifted by my local friend Hasan after I told him I went to pray at the mosque, and my signed and dedicated copy of La Chiave Segreta dell’ Amore, a book on sacred sexuality written by Nautilo Miglio at Damanhur. The only book Ekrem had in the cave before was a three hundred year old military manual with diagrams on shooting with precision, written in Arabic and handed down to him by his great-grandfather. Ekrem has a family house in town where he stays most of the time and all winter long, and perhaps he has a few more books over there. However, nowhere in my circle of connections could I imagine walking into a home and finding just one archaic and incomprehensible book instead of piles and full bookshelves. Such is the culture here in this cowboy town carved into caves, where the locals largely disregard literature, writing and book reading in favor of oral traditions, talking and storytelling. Horse riding is a language. Histories are woven into the colors of carpets and sagas are shaped into clay pottery. Gardens are libraries; fruit trees are magazines. Pool playing and backgammon are acts from theatre scripts. Drinking tea is poetry.