U, The Middle Way in AUM (Om)

Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva within an OM, in a Mahabharata manuscript from 1795 by Unknown

"Taijasa, whose field is the dream state, is the second
sound, U, because this is an excellence, and contains the
qualities of the other two. He who knows thus, exalts the flow
of knowledge and becomes equalised...

Internal to the waking consciousness, and pervading the waking consciousness, there is a subtler function of this very same consciousness, which is subjectively known as the dream-consciousness, or taijasa, and universally known as hiraṇyagarba, or the Cosmic Subtle Consciousness...

Neither can the waking experiences exhaust us, nor can the dream experiences completely comprehend our being. We seem to be something that is capable of being a witness of both the states. This witness is not a party either to the waking state or to the dreaming state. We are essentially, a third element altogether, something independent of waking and dream."

- excerpts from Swami Krishnananda's Mandukya Upanishad, pp. 12, 57, 59 [italics mine] 

________

The antique wood, a rocking chair, the once attributed tradition of upright relaxation, buried in the tourist fizz of los sapos market. Cobblestone streets mark the way for foreigners blending with hip-tied drum groups, Hare Krishna propagandists and the local elote vender. The Mexican wine of a Sunday Tianguis gropes at the neck, to smother the chosen speech in a howl of awakened want. 

I shudder behind a sunglass find, the inimitable Huichol hand, weaves a metaphysical mat of mystical enthusiasm, and so we play nonstop, enlightening the mouthed eyes with a music unheard. Nightfall, we are approached by a woman of colonial smiles. She breathes a home into our highest imagining, a place to live, among the cold stone steps of vanquished need and fulfilled sight. Her place is an ideal home, with a small bedroom tucked away into the corner of an empty room, full with the comforting hospitality of a traditional sunbaked Southern welcoming. We decide to continue on, despite the whipped lure of our eyes.

Returning north, I accept the invitation of a friend to ascend the mightiest tower in the world, newly built in our city. Hiking through a golf course, I reminisce on a similarly forged path through dense forest upwards toward the Rocky mountain peaks. Then, I see it. Eye’s nearly gouged by the immensity; I prick myself. 

The conical rise extends upward towards unknown alchemical engineering, and more, an unsupported bridge unites two lower towers from the bottom-center, and direct to the very top! My friend, always acting over-anxious, rushes us towards the bridge to the top. We enter the complex, prefaced by the usual commercial dives, a mall of unreasonable hacks festering like bottom feeders. 

With an upturned stomach, I hold on as we are shot out, gliding over a glass floor, as a rudderless, engineless boat would skim over placid waters. I dare not look down. In the building, the quick mindscape turns into a flood of waning mirth, and mindless havoc beams with unintelligible delight as people squander the golden drug of shameless technology, a great phallic middle finger, flipped by the entire Western world at once! To who? For what? It is directly skyward.

My friend and I quickly exit, having passed through the immense spire of cylindrical unreality, and we pour out onto an uptown street in mid-city. The concrete jungle returns us to the fading glory of a now obsolete infrastructure. 

Ghosts of the past fly like demonic insects through the gut-smattered concrete claustration. I notice a few as my friends, and meet them. On the outskirts of the unsubtle building, a beacon of terror, an insignia of waste, we burrow through an old tunnel system, climbing out into the abandoned system of underground pathways, leading to the base of the alien tower. 

Suddenly arrested by the horror of war, the sky blasts open with the shockwaves of a thousand bombs billowing like hot nails over the soft-fingered ground. As missiles breach the catastrophic abandonment of wires and tunnels ahead and behind, I loathe over remembered imagery from Iraq, Palestine, and endless claims to vengeance on our land, born of blood and built of sand.  

________

choking cry,
the rasping imperfection in ecstatic beauty,
momentous experience beyond human conflict
in the word and sound of a throat-muted music,
the play of life
final and resounding
in a tumult of white haze
around the English nape

croaking in the sharp whispered present,
fuming dry-eyed numberless fingerings
before a trickster’s Goddess tree,
pained to an ink-smeared fire on the blistering urban horizon

sleepless,
gone into aged reason
and the ethos of undreamt madness

- excerpt from "Assimilating America-Asia" 

Lucid Remedies Affects Waking Consciousness

Lucid Dream Tea from Algonquin Tea Company is a wild-crafted sweet gale / bog myrtle. Drink 1 cup, well-steeped before bed.

The tea has the effect of extraordinary stimulation, wherein the mind is active with constancy, which is why the normal state of consciousness carries over beyond the threshold of sleep. Beware, sleep on the tea is not as restful as without.

- testimony of a personal friend

__________ 

In Monterrey, Mexico, I am living in my old place with parents. I was the same age as now, though living with them. It’s funny because my Dad is dead. My brother was around but did not talk, he was just a presence. We had to pick up someone from my old elementary school. As we drove by, with my grandparents in the truck, we saw a big new door on the school. There is a park across from us. As we drove by in the park, we saw lots of birds. They were having a feast of food from the street vendors. There was an owl, crow, peacocks, turkeys and other strange birds. As we passed by the door, a girl shared a corn on the cob with a huge black turkey taller than her. The turkey would bite a few grains and the girl would bite from the outside. She was waiting to be picked up. We went around the corner and parked behind a tricycle. I got out of the car. I walked in the park and chased the birds. There were people there waiting for the kids. The birds got angry and the people ran away. Now the school is empty, all the kids have been picked up. I crossed the street and went in the school. A big patio is caked with mud. A few kids were playing soccer there. Since I was there to walk through the school, I searched for my old classroom without success, the school changed a lot. They had new buildings with big glass windows.

With my cousin, we received some coupons from the newspaper. Mine said “Monterrey” in big, red letters, handwritten as by a child. My cousin had a different piece of paper. I looked at his.

On another night under influence of the tea, I am with a group of people in an isolated cabin in the mountain wilderness. We are besieged by a ravenous pack of wolves. The cabin is invaded completely. All we have to fight back are pillows and straw brooms. 

_________

There is slight chance that the Dream Tea may affect daily waking consciousness, i.e. in the form of recurrent deja-vu as “dream characters” and “dream figments” however in life. In these cases the recurrent manifestations which trigger a dream-life liminal state are in the form of plants and certain characteristic features of people. The following stories are two examples.

In Michoacán, hiking through mountain range. I traveled much these days, walked a lot. On the corner of a road, tall up to the torso of a medium sized person standing with small, orange flowers in the shape of trumpets. Seeing the plant became a catalyst for dream recollection, it was as if the plant had existed purely in dream, though was interestingly present in my waking consciousness.    

If you’re in Mexico, this kind of person sticks out. He was 14, but looked 8. He looked like the main character from the film “The Blue Lagoon”. He was very blonde with curly hair, a strawberry or crystal blond. He liked to dress with a loin cloth and perform fire juggling. I arrived in Palenque and was hanging out with street drummers. Among them there was this kid, playing drums with a girl. I thought she was his mother. Later on, we stayed in the same place close to the ruins in Palenque. He asked me if I could buy gas for him for his fire show. He looked to young. That girl I saw with him wasn’t his mom. I helped him. He started his show on a street crossing. I collected the money. We got money at least to pay the hostel camp site and to get burgers. It was already dark and we were heading back to our place, some cabins near to the pyramids. He told me a bit of his story. He said he was 14, and fled home to look for his brother. His brother was a drum player and hitchhiker. He started telling me incredible stories like traveling to India and practicing mantras. We were hanging around a hippie commune with Hare Krishnas so I wouldn’t believe him. He sung mantras like, “Hare Hare Hare Hare Sham Bo”. I wondered how such a young kid traveled alone. He had his own tent, all by himself. I think he would have liked to travel with me, but I didn’t offer and he didn’t ask. This is a recurring situation with many of my blonde male friends and even my Dad (who was also blonde).

_______

“A struggle to exist.
In any form, taken
whether through ideology or bread
the resonance of the painful universal cry
into an imperfect echo that was never us.”

“In the process we have transformed
and become unrecognizable to ourselves
as the mirror casting our own reflection dirties with our pathetic work
for the sick sighs that last only in the mind after the inescapable is approached
finally
with complete resolve
in the last gasp
before the drop into…”

- excerpt from "Haunted by the lack of breath."

The Story of MAY DAY Returns upon Waking

A May Day Garland for 1820 by Samuel William Fores
"Dance away my Friends, I have been the cause of all their fun by your Help and Money - Edward the Instigator!"

"This is the story of the rootless ones. Your bones already know the story, though your mind does not yet understand it. One day, in the waking world, this story will come back to you."

- from "The Witch's Child" a brilliant zine on MAY DAY

___________

In the old-fashioned aesthetics of a New Spain colony, the federal district of Mexico in the 15^th century is featured on a piece of black and white cartography. The historic document is imprinted in my memory as I glare out over the Manhattan skyline. The urban grid lies before me. I am headed towards the last line on the grid, one hundred and something street. Atop a bristling hillock in the strong spring winds, a fair temptress bounds effortlessly over sprigs of dandelion-bloomed grasses, her clothing flaps wildly as she mounts my hip in a leap of embracing lust. She’s asked me to find my way past the blistering outcrop of one staggering urban nightmare, a chaotic mess of colonial history, a Tenochtitlan of North America, sprawling in a frayed mess of abandoned wires and charcoal heat. In an apocalyptic vehicle, I brave the incendiary beyond. 

__________

Heat

"To dream that you are oppressed by heat, denotes failure to carry out designs on your account of some friend betraying you." (iDream)

__________

“as we swallowed awful breaths of meager and sinking failure

she gave it her all and courageously fit into the brew of my panic, and surprise

and we could figure the rains, as they hit charred disdain in our unfeeling dream

of croaking drink, and vile moans 

that troubled our disgraced, fugitive blame”

“as I sought out your Gaelic whispers with a charm for sage-grass forlorn

there spun a hint of deranged angst for the painful distance 

expressed in the age of a silent rasping damage

to condemn an unknowing

in the broken guilt 

that goes aimless and unforgiving

as the bellows of sorrow and the un-chosen regret

of a million graves violating the entrenched sky”

as journeys go

afraid into the wild

calls of a single space.

- excerpt from "Breathtaking Images"

Librotraficante and Biblioburro Meet on the Road to Dreams

"They’ve actually brought so much attention to our community that I think right now we really are on the verge of a Latino Renaissance. It’s beautiful, all around art, because only art can save us."

"They’re scared that we will overhaul the government through voting them out of office. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen, because what’s wrong is they’re sabotaging the American Dream for our young, and for everybody."
- El Librotraficante (as seen on DemocracyNow!)

_________

The Banned Book List includes around 90 Books, below are a few that caught my eye! 


- Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire 
- Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson
- A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, by H. Zinn
- Occupied America: A History of Chicanos
- Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology, by A. Sandoval-Sanchez and N. Saporta Sternbach
- Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems, by J.S. Baca
- Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, by J. Kozol
- Mexican American Literature, by C.M. Tatum 
- Civil Disobedience, by H.D. Thoreau

Read these books! Start Banned Book Readings! Honour and Treasure Our Diverse Literature!

________

It’s a windy spring day over the artificial green grasses of a New England suburban park. Poet Tree is angles into view through my perspective, as if seen through a filmmaker’s lens. He begins reciting diligent lines with a fascinating edge. Almost as soon as he begins, the piece is ended, though now, the cool breaths of night play over the treetop sunset. The night in this town is a life or death truth. The cut rug of hospitality has its clear lines of disillusion for everyone with bad luck. In and out of the fire escape stairways beside brick fortress alleyways, I push on past the escalating traffic to my space and time. Inside my crooked little haunt, the VCR is malfunctioning. I play classic exploitation films from the 1970s, boom and bust raw in the piercing fire of aloneness. Walking outside from my unlocked door, my surroundings foretell the great epoch of Hong Kong, known in such a film as “In the Mood for Love”. I’m outside in the Chinatown midnight and it’s as lively as mid-day. Food is still hot off the oven. One sticky-mouthed Chinaman near a heated tray of veggie-covered noodles asks about my wife. “She’s not at home?” His lazy English tongue burns upon my already branded aching, any one can see it in my eyes. A love as hot as the sun drains my blood in every instant with a magic touch, changing from burdensome to lightening in every unpredictable way. “She likes to go out, speak Cantonese with her people, be a part of her culture,” I said glowingly, appreciating his kind interest. In our apartment, as I take out the soon-broken VCR tape, my one feels behind my shoulder. “What grace?” I know. The dim, cornered light is perfect, it is her night. 

________

Movie

"If you dream that you are playing a role in the movie, something from your unconscious is about to be revealed. It can also mean you are getting to play a new role in your life and go down a new path." (iDream)

________

poem for the children of the Biblioburro 

ransomed jungles breed aphrodisiacal wonder in a donkey’s emergent and effulgent touch within the heart of a reading child…hearing the pains of their ancestors in the black print façade of their enduring minds…a helpless urge to forsake the painless tree’s shade and reason with the governmental storage of thought on fire…to bring peace to the unwelcoming hoards armed with scales and the sheer brevity of a reptilian dystopia

- excerpt from "Epistrophic Misdirection"

Icicle Melts in the Warm Heart of a Loving Dream

It came to her in a Dream…

Listen to “Atlantea” & “Dreaming is all I can do”

______

There is a recurring dream-character. She is reminiscent of a Maya girl who I once gifted a jade ring to in her home village in southeastern Mexico, however this dream-character also has very French features and darker, thicker hair braided in a massive pony tail fatter than her spine, looking like it’s exploded with sparks of static electric strands of finer hair in the shadow-cast light. I can’t completely see her face.

There is a great distance between us as she is always cast in shadow. The scene is one of an arranged marriage, however my wife is beside, and who as I reflect now, is to become my second wife in dream! During the night of the marriage, however, I renew feelings of love for my first wife, who is my dream-woman in real life, and abandon the younger girl who is arranged to be married to me on this day.

As my parents leave the scene to run an errand for the wedding services, they tell me about their recent news, where they’ve become billionaires and are buying homes in Newport, RI, which will be sure to benefit me and my new married life. I respond with ghastly sarcasm and they leave indifferent in their swamped lives of money and possessions. I take a car for my wife and I, and we head down the road. We are in a place similar to Connecticut, resembling the industrial surroundings on the highway to New York City.

Next, I find myself singing, as the foreman of a folk band. With guitar in hand, we perform songs on stage in front of a lively sit-down crowd in the dim light of a downtown music venue. This music follows me into the living room of my father’s house.

My stepmother is there alone, cleaning the house by herself. I am in the center of the room, practicing my singing. As she nears, I begin to belt out ever-higher falsetto notes, as my heartbeat intensified and began to shake my whole being in loneliness and stark presence against the mundane vacuity of house-making before me.

As soon as I stopped, she raced a remote control car out into the hall, as I shrunk into one of the rooms, which to my surprise was still made for a small child. I wrapped myself in an undersized knit blanket and while still dreaming, thought that her actions symbolized not growing out of child rearing and only participating in people’s lives through objectified play, an inverted disconnected electronics. 

(The end of the dream juxtaposes with the electronic music reference above, where electronic creativity is central to making intimate connections. The Buddha resides in all things, even your computer!)

Interestingly, my wife’s dream this same night had me also marrying another woman. On the night before we were to be married, the entire family and even she slept together with us in a living room on the floor space. She could hear me arguing with my wife-to-be about. “This is not how it should be, this is not how people love one another,” I would say. She felt the same strong emotions that I felt in my dream in the same night, of longing for true experience with one’s love and feeling a sense of loss at having to watch them become distant. 

______

Choose Art

Art is a choice, between perception and dreaming, when both are combined in active creativity.

The residue of dreaming infused with an enlightened consciousness on the positive qualities of becoming increasingly aware of and interacting with dreams as an essential aspect of life, sometimes expresses itself in life as the perception of art as "dreams" within reality.

Dreams from an Iran Brutalized until Unconscious…Still Speaking

Narrator

“For more than two years now, the Iranian state has tried to crush the dreams of freedom which arose in June in 2009. Dreams, such as those which others in the Middle East have seen come true this year.”

Pahvan Fahimi – spokeswoman for grieving mothers

“He was a child of 19, preparing to go to university. He hadn’t fulfilled any of his dreams. Who killed him? On whose orders? Why? I ask all of you. What was he asking of this country? Only peace and freedom of thought.”

Narrator

“Bahar is a student and a rapper. Like most young people, in 2009, she dreams of a different Iran.”

Bahar – student and rapper

“Like an enchanted castle crumbling it took just 6 or 7 hours to erase hope. And all those who voted for Moussavi realized it was just a dream.

The Islamic Republic has always been a nightmare for me.

…they’ve done all they can to try to take that hope from us... It will go on and on, until you scream your deepest feelings, you see freedom, and you’re no longer afraid to speak your mind. And that’s the day your hope will become reality.”

From “Letters from Iran” an Al-Jazeera Documentary

___________

This week, from March 20-23, it is Persian New Year, or Nowruz.

New Years

Happy New Years!
Persian, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese
Many in One.

May the New Year live up to its Name.

_________

I am outside of the concrete square homes that the Maya people of Xmaben, Campeche in Mexico construct as a symbol of prestige beside their grass huts, however they don’t live in them. They used to hang my hammock from wall to wall, but before sleep each night, I was visited by a local girl. A small, petite young lady with unmistakably Maya features, she used to send me sweet smiles and laughter from outside, beckoning me to join her in the night. I wanted to marry her. I gave her a jade ring and consummated our innocent feelings. In my dream, I feel as if we are married. After I leave the village, I find myself in a furnished bedroom in a Mexican city. In it, I await my other love, a Spanish woman, a few years older than I, with a gorgeous wit. It seems we have married as well. Our life, however, becomes overly domestic and soon I wait for her, to find only our empty abode. 

As the dream cycle continues, I attend a high school reunion. I am excited and confident to see my old friends from the days of superficial cliques and institutionalized learning. I tell people I married twice in Mexico. They don’t find this surprising from me, and go on to talk in their circles of indiscernible chatter. I later return home to my mother’s house in this same town. My stepfather and her watch television as usual. The television portrays ghastly scenes of war. Children, it seems of Southeast Asia, are being run over mercilessly by tanks, their bodies scarred with burn marks and ash. I react, abhorred and deeply offended by the mindless atrocities that we are witnessing via television, and my mother cries, but my stepfather watches without emotion. I leave. 

_________

Dreaming, Composing Poetry, Meditating

I pass my days
Contemplating the dead students of Tiananmen
And the Green Wave
Childless mothers silenced
Full of blood

A body
Language of resistance
Firm as the vicious fluid of life
Soft as the flesh
Emaciated with the steel of tank tracks
Or torn open in a single kill shot

Or E. Mehtari
Whose stern face became lip-bitingly serious
Upon mentioning the “trouza”
In English, rape

How he holds back tears
A fight against self-pity
The death of the ego
Asking, “where is God if not in you”
Yet, when asking you fall headlong
Into your deathless presence
Where you cease to be this body of crime

Ponder yourself
As the total equation of here
In the moment
At one
With the ground of all being

We humans
Why do some attain self-realization?
Only upon being split in half?
Sundered in shreds by our fellow man?

When did this arcane spiritual responsibility bestow devils of such wonderful emergence?
The Ahriman is certainly turning in its cemetery
Sheathed in female coverings and riot police uniforms

In these pain-ridden lands
Whose story immediately translates into our one story?

Throughout human history
In reclaiming that story
Allowing the truth to resurface naturally
As a feather, thrown with a handful of stones
Over an open lake
Thick with the opacity of crude oil

Hardening urges of those who sleep,
Still, sitting
Upright I petition the burning skin of my Love
To recede into her inmost self-forgiving

Be healed
With the same immediacy that one may feel oncoming death
Approaching with futile procession
Toward the white of their eyes

With equal subtlety
Plunging their ethereal hand
In the porous open of their now entered body

A mere passage
For the voice of all truths

For the Peaceful Youth Protestors Around the World

The Lucid Bansuri: Remembering Dreams from Cairo to Khartoum

- Create Space & Reflect -

Listen to Bansuri Music 

This is a Key 

To Remember Dream

- Reflect & Create Space -

“Our ability to transcend grief and trauma that affects our every waking moment, our relationships, our ability to connect with anyone and everyone, becomes a symbol of how this can be done culturally and globally. Down under the blanket of denial runs a river of grief so despairing that our pain is but a thread…”

Source

______

Embedded deep in my subconscious, a dream was invoked which actively combined elements of my imagination mixed with reality, as it were wholly over-arched with the peculiar logic of dream. 

I traveled to Sudan with the Sudanese friend & mentor I met while in Cairo. Together we left for Khartoum from Egypt. When we arrived, I found myself called to visit an ecological park. The city infrastructure and the park itself is strongly reminiscent of Puebla, Mexico where I recently visited. Also, the park reminds me of a painting I used in The New West of Dreams, however with features of Calgary's eastern outskirts in midsummer, with straw grass, lit beige along the side of railroad tracks unto an open field horizon. This is important, as entering through this imagery leads me into a labyrinth network of my psyche set in a past residence. In this case my Zamalek dormitories are transformed to receive me, with special emphasis on their washrooms, out of which I meet an unusually forward acquaintance who begins to accompany me and assist me throughout the city. This friend is someone who I studied with in Canada and met again in Cairo, asking him to volunteer as a part of a research project. In this dream, he takes another name as we've since fallen out of contact.

The substance of the dream lies in me going into the city of Khartoum. As I've never been there in a waking state, I create the city out of sketches of video I have from a research project I collaborated with there in June 2010. I often return to the ecological park, however my friend from Sudan resides in the city. He is the principal character in this narrative. Over tea, he emphasizes to me the fundamental error of my research, which if on the subject of refugees should not be "why are there refugees?" but instead "how do we get these people out?" One should not undermine or exploit an act of exile, as exile is often the most decisively conscious choice of all.

Now, the trick to remembering the content and substance, i.e. narrative structure and significance of the dream, as practiced in this example is that after forgetting the dream, after its sleep cycle had ended, I dreamed lucidly, where I told the story of what I went through in Sudan to close friends and family in intimate settings, and it brought me right back into the substance of the previous dream. Upon waking, the only discrepancy between dream memory and waking memory is the fact that I never traveled to Sudan, though the content of the dream itself was wholly based in waking memory.


When one is able to manipulate their psyche with regard to memory and consciousness, one finds that upon waking, the substance of reality becomes more and more resonant with principles of dreaming.

_______

and what do our ramshackle hearts smell?
close to a savage waste
as overwhelming and without choice
as drowning in the rice stew magic
of a motherless animal
eaten raw, over a lover’s fattened tummy
now screwed into all intoxication
and psychic bewilderment,
until the stare blows rhythms of ancient minds

- excerpt from "Cave Home"

Uninhabited Island of a Friendship's Whispering

On the Volga by Abram Efimovich Arkhipov

My friend shared a dream with me last night:

He said he could hear my voice in the subtle ambiance of a clear Caribbean sky. My friend had returned from the Caribbean only recently in his conscious life. In his dream, he said I encouraged him to move towards an uninhabited island.

You see, he is with the girl who introduced me to my wife. My wife is about his age, and his girlfriend is about my age, my friend and I are both of European ancestry and our better halves are both from Asia. There is an interesting mirror-like quality to our gatherings which resonates with crystalline friendship and mutual love. My friend is almost finished with school, and in the summer will travel with his girlfriend to Europe and China before they live together. This is very much how the relationship grew for my loving wife and I. After finishing school, we sacrificed our living arrangements to travel together to Mexico and return with the intention of living together. In my friend's dream, he hears my footsteps above him, beckoning him forward, to fearlessly transition into a new form of intimacy and trust within his enduring relationship and our circle of friendship.

The uninhabited island is, I think, a symbol for the unknown, a fate of complete originality, a calling to live, without regret, a life of authentic individuality. In his dream, he moves toward it, however awkwardly, with rubber scuba flippers, peddling a small boat over the foreign water. He is almost there.

The Decapitated Head of Benito Juarez

Benito Juarez, Teotihuacan and the mystery of a figure in red shawl....

- Foreground to the Dream (actually lived-in-waking scene):

It is my second day in Mexico. I had only seen this country once in Tijuana almost a decade before just for the afternoon. It is now December, 2008. I am staying weeks in Mexico City. I find myself within the confines of a Zapatista demonstration. We de-board a small local bus, I let a young mother with her child climb out before me. She is dressed in perfect fashion to the trend of social and cultural resistance that has taken places since before the states of Mexico were founded. The atmosphere is young, vibrant and inclusive as I file past a scattered group of policemen, barred from entering the demonstration grounds as per an agreement with the Zapatista movement. The area attracts a united front of Mexican youth and longstanding social activists with the international community, mostly young travelers like myself in happenstance with a resonant ground of truth-seeking and decolonization. After perusing various photo exhibits, circus acts, a music stage and a gargantuan round of booths and cultural presentations from social activist groups, indigenous peoples and the Zapatista themselves, I find my way to a high-perched bleacher to gather perspective. The landscape is cluttered with the reality of living conditions in the Federal District; over 35 million inhabitants, almost as much as the entire country I had arrived from: Canada. The houses barely top two stories as they create a vast landscape buttressed on hillsides in the myriad colors so peculiar to and likeable about the Mexican cityscape. Two Mexican guys decide on sitting only a few feet away from my high vantage point. Laughing, they start lighting a pipe. Marijuana smoke lifts into my nervous system like a cool breeze. I smile at them. Offering me the pipe, I smoke and there is an immediate realization at how strikingly different we are. The only similarity between us three is slight laughter and comraderie of place in this fleeting instant. A mixed, flowing cacophony of sound travels into our minds, bespeaking the slogan of the demonstration: Digna Rabia/Dignified Rage. I hear the Mexican language. Completely unknown to me at that pont, I am enthralled by its fascinating brevity and speed of intonation. At this point I am very high. I look out towards the mountains. In the foreground is an immense statue. How could I have not seen this before? It is a human head. I point to it and look at one of my new friends. "Benito Juarez!" He says indiscernibly, with a thick accent only spoken to someone ignorant of Anglophone ears. I am bewildered by the voice from a peer of my equal age. He knows I don't understand, "Benito Juarez!" he says again. This time I understand. An early President of Mexico. His face becomes as strange as the thickness of his accent. I am taken by his features, which seem to resemble Aztecan myth in their distinct expression. They step down, leaving me to contemplate my surroundings high up above even the neckless head of one of the country's sculpted, public icons, high above the Zapatista demonstration, high above my own mind.

In Dream: I see from this vantage point. The head of Benito Juarez is changed to my imagination for the ruins of Teotihuacan. When I visited Mexico for the first time (and all subsequent times) I never took the chance to see the ruins of Teotihuacan. The grandiose pyramids depicted in the film, "Frida" and Sergei Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mexico!" still reside in my imagination. I can see only about half of one rising to its summit. The steps are gorgeously erected with frequent cracks. A massive field stands to its side. I'm sure there must be pyramids greater in size. In the field, walking in an easterly direction towards what seems to be greater pyramids, what I sense to be a female figure, wrapped in a scarlet shawl slowly walks into an unforgiving wind out of sight.


My backyard gives way to a mythical Mexican beach

In my family house backyard in Massachusetts, I sit with my friends. There is great emotion rising unto the visible empyrean gazing back at us as a smidgeon of existence in the universe. I am with old childhood friends, we trek through my backyard, and their presence is exchanged with that of my cousins. We walk until a downslope hill flushed with a sludge and grime unknown to us. I feel it half-resemble a part of the Tar Sands in Alberta somehow. The endless sludge gathers and quickens below our feet. One of my cousins slips clumsily and knocks into an evil-looking man who seems to hold an authoritarian position with the environmentally hazardous work about us. He eyes me vociferously, changing to a stern, violent expression of cruel intention. He speaks that he will ruin me if we cause any hindrance to his work. He says that he will make my position in Canada even more tenuous and that I will risk my marriage and rights to immigration if I, or any one I know slip up again and cause more trouble. I simply slide past down an aching earth, bleeding with tar.

Next I find myself walking along an unpaved beach sidewalk in a seaside neighborhood. Broken shells lay scattered on the road. As a group of local residents approach on their way inside a house, a mythical deer shoots past me. The animal bears an impressive mane, looking like a cross between an alpaca, a mountain goat, a deer and gazelle. The animal joins its herd, trekking about nimbly. As I follow the unusual herd of unidentifiable animals beyond the horizon, the land opens up into a huge Mexican beach resort. There are electronic billboards littering the oceanfront, as international commerce is exuberantly exhibited with dominance. I duck past the hill's outcropping before the steep cliff turns into beach and follow the animals in a small grove. I feel submerged in a temporary refuge.

Peruvian Hallucinations before the Muted North African Migrant’s Story

People and Landscape of Michoacan by Alfredo Zalce

Early Dream

I walk by a dim street in Latin America, seems very much like a bus stop sidewalk eatery in Mexico or a humble restaurant in the outskirts of a Peruvian city. Immediately outside the restaurant, a man is holding a relatively sophisticated looking, tall type jar. The jar reads something about Ayahuasca. I pass by the first time, however the second time, I drop a few coins in and receive a small bit of the Ayahuasca mix that this man is selling. I sit down in the restaurant, I feel as if I am with loved ones, good friends or my wife. We sit and I start to feel a bit woozy. Suddenly, I see a classical/jazz ensemble performing their music in a relatively nice hall setting immediately before me. I am making a mental commentary on the music. The effects seem to have subsided, as expected, I tell myself I am proved correctly that the Ayahuasca that was sold had no real effect.

Late Dream

I am at a seaside café on the Mediterranean. In some ways it reminds me of a small restaurant in Malibu, California that I went to with my brother. I sit down with an unidentified young woman and a man who resembles my old friend and colleague in Egypt, a Sudanese man. He also resembles an interviewee in Sudan who was asked about his return experiences to Sudan as a returning migrant from Egypt. The man begins speaking with me in Arabic about his father, his homeland, and a story regarding his village. The story is very interesting and has many features of local history and identity related to the man and his originating village. He is telling a story about fishing. I ask him to confirm with me that he is from Algeria, he nods. Just as I begin to translate the story for the other individual present, she begins talking over both of us to proclaim her ideas about racial barriers. The man seems disinterested, and I am somewhat bereft, though only wish to convey the man’s story and practice my translation efforts in relaying a beautiful, genuine story of home in the midst of migration and conflict.

Monday Oct, 3 2011

Crash on the Mountain traveling to Coastal Vibration

Snowstorm by Jospeh Mallord William Turner

I wake slowly, as if to fade from white, in a crashed helicopter on a snowy mountainside. The mountain is immense, with drifting snow and endless depressions and plateaus that show a premature horizon, not unlike a ski hill. I walk alone, as a sole survivor down to the base of the mountain. At the base, I find a house occupied by an East Indian family who seem active in the military, as a man proceeds from the house in uniform. Though I am hurt, and look foreign to them, they barely notice as I ask for their help next to their low fencing around their estate. The lady within the grounds of the house suddenly notices me, however there is no exchange, I could be invisible. Suddenly I find a small vehicle, similar to a scooter, however powered and able to push through the snow.

Next, I am in what seems as a coastal village in Egypt or Mexico or a place similar. I seem to have lost my powered scooter, however I see them around the village in different forms. The village, in some ways, appears to look like Sayulita, Mexico or Abu-Seer, Egypt. There are children running about and I befriend two young women about my age. These two young women remind me of two young women I met in Mexico City, Mexico. One of them is more fair-skinned and the other with dreadlocks and a bit of a darker character in general. I become somewhat attached to them as they help me around the village to find a powered scooter that is available. I find one within someone’s small yard near to a river and leave the girls behind.

Next, I am in a classroom style room, however without standardized desks, and the front of the room is occupied with a band. The band is very talented, playing mathematically-timed jazz/rock type music. The keyboardist is the front man and leads the band. I enjoy the music. After the show, the keyboardist begins to speak about the music, and the audience opens for questions.

Later, I meet the keyboardist at a bar/restaurant on Stephen Ave. in Calgary, AB. I don’t order any alcohol; however he is drinking and sits beside me. I compliment him on his music and we engage in steady conversation. I ask about the inner dynamics of his music and he accommodates my questions well. I then tell him that I am part of a music project with my wife. I introduce him to her instrument, the Chinese zither, and say that I play an Egyptian doumbek drum.  He is intrigued, however when I say that we only improvise and play spontaneously he says that he can not do that, which I can understand from listening to the highly methodical nature of the music.

Sept. 30, 2011

Discolored Urban Landscape Sexualized in Youth

Ciudad by Ulpiano Carrasco

The landscape is a discolored, underdeveloped urban setting rising high up, similar to urban sprawl of Cairo, favelas of Brazil and the outskirts of D.F., Mexico, I can see out from a high rise, immediately outside the underdeveloped core are more riche developments that look more like suburban residences in Boston, upstate NY or Washington DC, then after that ring which has a certain brilliance and illuminates in the harsh sunlight much clearer than my immediate surroundings in a somewhat dim vantage point, the most outlying division is a pentagon-looking, round-shaped government-type building similar to the famous MIT hall in Cambridge, yet the building is surrounded, as are all outlying developments, with dense low-lying jungle similar to southern Mexican traditional Maya lands, I seem to have checked into the dilapidated high-rise I'm in, as it is a hotel. I'm with four others, 2 guys and 2 women my age, one of the ladies looks Provencal French with a Roma nose, the group becomes quite sexually aroused and active, altogether, I'm observing with care how they treat the French-looking lady as her naked body is mounted revealing a pointed mass of moving genitals, the group soon disperses with an air of slight dissatisfaction, I seem extremely anxious and leave the building

Sept. 29 2011