Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (13 page)

She thought of Yolo. The first time she’d thought of him on this journey in a way unrelated to the stability and comfort he brought to her life. If he became sick, or say he was bitten badly by a big shark out of the novel he was reading there in Hawaii, what would she do? She’d take care of him, she knew. She could even imagine enjoying it. And surely some part of devotion was the pleasure it gave. But was this the same as loving ancestors you never saw, no one you knew had ever seen, for more than ten thousand years? But maybe these particular bones beneath Hugh Brentforth’s lake had permeated the land to such a degree that the land and the lake and the spring and the souls were one.

The next day, seeing Hugh sitting with Lalika next to the deeply wrinkled and ropy trunk of a large tree that looked like, she blinked her eyes, an old Indian man, she called softly out to him:

Hey, Hugh, I’ve been thinking about what the old man did with the water.

In fact, she had dreamed the night before that there were two burial grounds on Hugh’s property. The ancient one from which the Indian elder got the water and a much less ancient one at the opposite edge of the land. In her dream the old man had patiently walked the perimeter of Hugh’s land, holding the jug of water in his hand, until he came to a small gap at the bottom of the fence. He slid through and walked some distance into the cottonwoods. Here he stood in the center of what had been the graveyard of his tribe and of people he and his more recent ancestors had known. He knelt to pray. After praying he rose and sprinkled the water over the ground and over himself. He was trembling with exhaustion and sadness, but he was weeping with love.

In the Circle

In the circle were two young aborigines from Australia. Both very dark, one with curly black hair, the other blond. Blond straight hair was natural among these very black people. Was this perhaps the reason the English settlers were so freaked out, wondered Yolo, when they came across them? What had they made of it? he wondered. They had been programmed to think all blacks were inferior. They had also been programmed to think all blonds were superior. Yolo imagined them, the British convicts and their guards, some of the most provincial folks on earth. They must have thought they’d landed on Mars.

The two men were young, in their thirties. They had come as guests of Aunty Pearlua. The shorter of the two, with the wide thoughtful “aboriginal” eyes Yolo had seen in photographs, took the talking stick, which happened to be a small shiny gourd, and turned it over and over in his hands, inspecting it carefully. After several moments, he spoke.

We are here to represent those who are coming back from the dead, he said. He gazed around the circle of men. In our country too, for many generations now, we have watched our young men die of despair. Not knowing how to stop them from hurting themselves, not knowing why they can’t pull themselves out of the depression they’re in; not knowing what to do to exhibit an example of life. In our country, not as rich as America and with distances more vast, there have been many cases of young men being found dead on the beach or in the outback or in the towns. Beautiful young men. Some of our best.

We ourselves, both of us, were, as younger men, addicted to petrol sniffing.

Yolo had never heard of petrol sniffing. He leaned in toward the center of the circle to hear more.

What is it to sniff petrol? asked the young man. It is to forget that once upon a time we were one with our land and with our sea. That we lived mostly on the coasts, in tropical plentitude. That we went inland into the vastness and great heat mostly on journeys of the spirit. And to keep the land company. We learned what the land and the waters loved: to be cared for, to be interacted with, to be sung to. We did not map the land as the English did, on paper, we mapped the land by singing it. There was no place unknown to us. No place that did not have its proper song. He smiled, a fondness for his ancestors suffusing his face with light. Some of our songs were so filled with what we learned from and loved about our land that they might take six months to sing.

He was quiet for a little while, turning the gourd over and over again in his hands.

What did we lose? We lost intimacy with our motherland. Mother, land, to us the same.

And so to sniff petrol is to try to avoid the anxiety of that loss. And as we exit our own time, which is now, a present we cannot bear to endure, we enter into the fake Dreamtime. Only now it is all nightmare, whether we are waking or sleeping.

Thank you, Aunty, for having us at this council. He placed the gourd back in the circle’s center.

Jerry was there; it was he who had invited Yolo. Also the brother of Marshall, the young man who’d died. At the luau following Marshall’s funeral Yolo had been approached as he sat in a wicker chair gazing at the moon and savoring a large plate of lau lau and a blob of pasta salad.

Howz it? asked Jerry.

Not bad, he’d replied.

Say, Jerry had said, leaning over him, his own large plate of food balanced in one hand, we think you should join us for a circle.

Me? he’d asked, looking around as if Jerry had to be referring to someone else.

Yeah, said Jerry, you. You sat with Marshall at the end. You showed up like a bradda.

But what else could I have done? Yolo thought. After all, I’m black. To be black is to know your brotherness.

He smiled at Jerry. This has been one hell of a vacation, he said.

I can imagine, said Jerry. Will you come?

Sure, Yolo had said. Will you come get me?

Where you stay? asked Jerry.

Yolo named his beige hotel.

I can sure come get you out of
dere,
man, said Jerry, laughing.

And, as good as his word, he’d showed up with his van and moved Yolo out of the hotel and into a spare room at Alma’s.

We can’t have you staying dere, said Jerry. What it look like, a guest of our people, coming to circle from a dead hotel? He seemed offended by the idea.

Do you mind? he’d asked Alma. But she’d looked at him like he was crazy and flung open the door to a small, airy room painted white with lots of Hawaiian art, including the large framed poster of the queen, on the walls. She was as usual drinking a beer and the smoke from her cigarette lingered in his hair.

The man with blond hair took the gourd. He must get stared at a lot, thought Yolo. Most folks would assume he straightened and dyed his hair, like James Brown used to do when he was “James Brown and the Famous Flames.” Brown’s group had dyed their hair an outrageous reddish orange and against their very dark skin, almost as black as the aborigine’s, the color of their hair had expressed excitement itself.

We have tried everything, the young man was saying. Lecturing. Cajoling. Loving. Hating. But we have not been able to prevent the young from seeing the truth. That they have lost the future. Some might dispute this statement, and that is their prerogative. I’m saying this is what it looks like to the youths who sniff petrol. There they are, poor, discarded by the society that has slaughtered their people and taken their land; they might be fourteen thousand miles from the nearest disco. A bottle of petrol is the closest they will get to a plane ticket. The closest they will get to leaving their barren environment.

He paused. Studied the gourd.

I too used to feel that way. It is a miracle I am still alive. He stopped talking and sat reflecting for several minutes; everyone in the circle remained respectful and still. He continued: My older sister, who had gone away to find work in the city, came back for me. We lived in one room at the back of her employer’s house. She said only one thing: I don’t want you to watch the master of the house, my employer. I want you to watch me, your sister.

And that is all she said to me for months. We lived in silence. She worked, hard and long. She fed us, kept us clothed and clean. She drew her strength from a small circle of Nunga women similarly situated in the city, far from their folks. At first I missed my visions of freedom, the weightless pleasure of abandoning myself. I also wanted to talk, to dribble at the mouth with words as I had done on petrol. But she was like a stone.

I watched her face, broad and flat and black, as aboriginal faces are described so often in literature, and I saw how tired she was. This frightened me. For it made me think how useless her struggle was. How impossible and absurd. To try to have a life in a place your life was considered worthless. To my shame, I used to laugh at her. But it was my fear that was laughing. And she did not even look at me. She would not respond. Each day she got up off her mat on the floor, made tea for us. Left me two slices of bread. And went out to serve bread with jam, coffee with cream, bacon with eggs, to the owners of the big house that we saw no matter where we looked, standing or lying in our own small room, and that in fact blocked the sun.

When her employers and their children saw me they related to me as to an oddity. My blond hair might have gotten me points, but I remembered what my sister had said. I was not to watch them. No matter with what curiosity they watched me, I was to watch her. I understood that the fulfillment of this requirement was my share of the food, the rent. It was also my education.

For what did I see? My sister’s devotion, saving me, showed me myself. Someone worth saving, someone, in the female form that was my sister, who would save himself.

He paused.

There was no God involved, he ended thoughtfully, though the evangelicals have arrived in Australia with the same force they’ve arrived among the oppressed all over the globe. My sister embodied all that we thought lost. She had become the land, the sea, the freedom of the Dreamtime. Her behavior said: Though we have been taken from Her, yet I am Her.

He glanced around the circle, embracing everyone with his eyes. He looked at his friend. An impish look passed between them.

We’re off petrol, he said, smiling. But now we’re both inactive without coffee.

Everyone in the circle laughed.

Toward the Middle of Their Stay

Toward the middle of their stay in the jungle Armando and Cosmi invited them to dinner in the compound in which they’d received their very first meal. It was the place the two of them stayed. There was a handsome thatched dining area with a rough-hewn wooden table, a stove made out of stones and cement, and, in the corner of the ceiling nearest the huge trees that stood outside, there was a large iguana. This thick-waisted creature with its glittering eyes watched every move they made and caused everyone at the table to think of the varied critters they were sharing quarters with. Every hut, it turned out, had its nonhuman resident.

I have an iguana too, said Missy, only thank God it’s smaller than Godzilla there.

And does it watch your every move? asked Lalika.

I don’t think so, said Missy. It seems mostly to sleep.

This one thinks we’re television, said Rick, making a face at it.

Rick had been having the most trouble, Kate thought, of everyone. He could not let himself enter the world of Grandmother. He was fighting it tooth and nail. Instead of submitting, finding the “brick” or “scale of the serpent” that opened like a door into the experience, Rick turned aside. Turning aside at the crucial moment meant he was left in a kind of limbo. Laughing, crying, jumping around, disturbing everybody else’s trip.

What creature lives in your house? Kate asked him.

He thought. Moths, he said finally. Lots of moths as large as bats.

Wow, said Hugh. And they don’t bother you?

He shrugged: According to Carlos Casteneda, Don Juan said that moths are the ancestors.

Really, said Missy. But if they’re big as bats I don’t know if I’d want to see them.

There’s no choosing of who or what visits you when you come here, said Armando. It is only important that something does.

A gecko seems to be the only thing in my
tambo,
said Kate. But every time I say something or think something with any degree of certitude it makes that weird gecko sound.

It is agreeing, said Armando. Geckos always do that. You will notice that when you tell a lie or try to evade an issue it will not second you.

Everyone turned to Hugh.

I have not one bat but a family of them, he said. I just close myself up in my mosquito netting at night and hope their teeth are not sharp.

These are the creatures in whose homes you are living, said Armando. Think how patient they are with you.

During the second half of your visit notice who comes to visit you. By the way, he asked, has anyone been disturbed by the jaguar sounds?

I wasn’t so disturbed by the screeching right outside my hut, said Hugh, but I did lose some sleep listening to the men trying to chase it away. They were crashing through the jungle like a bunch of elephants.

Armando laughed. Usually a jaguar is a good thing, but sometimes it is the spirit of a sorcerer who is up to no good. That is why it was chased out. We did not send for it.

Where did you find chicken? asked Lalika, who was beginning to sleep so soundly that she heard nothing. Gingerly she lifted her spoon to her mouth and blew on the steaming broth.

Is there such a thing as jungle hen? asked Rick, seriously. He was studying his bowl, which was made of wood, and inhaling the aroma of the broth before drinking it.

There is a small farm not very far from here, said Armando. The woman raises chickens to eat and to sell. We brought chickens into the forest with us, only you did not see them.

Were they in a separate boat? asked Kate.

Yes, said Armando. They came in the boat that also brought the
platanos
and the grains.

The banana and quinoa diet is getting a little boring, said Missy.

That is why tonight we have broth, said Armando. But tomorrow, just like always, our one meal of the day will be one boiled
platano
and one bowl of grain. If you are tired of quinoa you can have rice or millet or oatmeal.

Missy made a face.

We will all be so slim, said Kate. We will be like Bette Midler in
Ruthless People.

Oh, I loved that movie! said Missy.

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.

When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else’s dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center. You would not drive a car looking out the side window, would you? Yet that is what it has come to for many human beings; they are driving their lives forward while watching what is happening along the road or even in the rearview mirror.

So on this retreat with Grandmother, not only will we observe as much silence as possible, we will also spend our time in connection with our interior world.

I find I am talking with everyone, Kate said to Armando when he visited her after the light, delicious meal. Is it a problem?

Armando had brought her a pitcher of green water in which to wash herself. It was purified water in which leaves of a plant had been crushed. She was to pour it over herself, from head to toe. The bits of leaves were to be left on her skin to dry. Armando explained to her the reason shamans knew which plants were good to use to help people heal. It is simple, he said, the plants themselves tell us. Either in dreams, or in meditation or by accident. He laughed. Sometimes you will find yourself chewing something, a leaf or plant stem you picked up in the forest, that makes you feel so much better!

This will cleanse your skin so deeply you will feel your pores breathing, he said. You will breathe with the forest. Actually all of the body was meant to breathe, naked, with the environment, he added. Not just the face.

I do not think it is a problem if you talk with everyone, he added, after showing her how to rub the medicine over her skin. Do you realize that in every group there will be one person who is afraid to go to Grandmother and one person Grandmother does not want to talk to anymore? She does not need to tell you anything more. She has told you everything you need to know. What you need to do now is listen. To accept. I have observed you with the others; they seem to talk far more than you. I think it is okay, he said. We never are sure how the
medicina
is going to work. What it will call forth. If you maintain respect for the
medicina
and for the sacred space of healing and also for the story you are hearing, all will be well.