Tuesday Poem - Karoo Moon by Ruben Mowszowski

karoo moon

Arrival

You are in a train, dozing as the poles race past, the koppies
behind them moving more slowly, the mountains hardly at all.
You drift off. You wake. Deserted station platforms. Occasional
sheep. A car overtakes. You are in the car. The blur of bushes.
The sameness in your life. You slow down. You stop. Between
the bushes, red earth. Look deeper. The divisions between mind
and matter blur and then dissolve. You are here. You have always
been here. You are stone.

The warm heart sinks into the land
which rises to embrace you with your countless lives
demonstrated by the fossils in the rocks
that have led you to this present time.

How far back shall we go? To the ships with white sails that arrived
three or four hundred years ago from continents once joined? Or should
we go to the very first moment of cosmic expansion and what then?

Time here, if there is time, is all of time. Time space and form,
mantis hare and moon, are but different aspects of one face.
Earth and sky interpenetrate. Some people talk about a deeper
breath. There can be sadness not related to anything one knows.
Language fails.

Go to the veil. Here with eland blood in ancient sedimentation is
perhaps the greatest exploration of mind ever undertaken.

Time

The clock on the church steeple has stopped at 11:30 am and no one
has noticed.  The woman walking down the dusty street has hardly moved.
In some invisible aspect of itself the town is hurtling away and
time is stopped or slowed down.

The dusty streets and unentered houses hold a strange silence. You wake
to the sound of an owl. Dogs bark. You sleep, you wake. The stones are
still stones but no longer dead or inert. They radiate an inner life,
the unseen spinning, the hills shimmering with an invisible light.

Time comes in waves. Sun sinks, moon rises, hare stops,becomes stone.
Moon dies, sun rises, sinks, moon is reborn. Does the lizard know that
to which we are blind, or do we too have a gland, atrophied now, which
feels time as a dimension of a rock or a tree?

To put the matter in time we tell it thus: four and a half billion
years ago the planet forms, a billion or so later is life. Now skip the
rest till we get to recent times: two hundred and fifty million years
ago a glacier melts and a basin is revealed. Africa is as yet undisclosed
but the basin we can see from the train, or out the window of the car
on the long black road.

But the koppies, you say. What are they? Ah, my friend,gather closer
round, for we are talking secrets of the land.To the dispossessed the
moon was male and so was the sun. This is the body of the earth and up
there – yes, turn your head – in that star-struck sky are the daughters
of the rain. Now reach down and touch her gently. You too she feeds.

The sun and moon were not always thus
whisper the rocks. Time’s motion is a recent thing.
Far from here in the south by candlelight
the dispossessed, taken chained and bound,
tell the secrets of the land to one who writes it down
and dies. These stories are still carried by the wind
that was once a man and then a bird
in the koppies, in the caves.

The sun comes, the darkness goes, the sun sets, the moon at night,
the sun comes out, the moon decays, goes painfully away and is reborn.

Yes, but there is death, you say. Time’s measure is the finite life.
Without death time does not exist. Where is its home? you ask.
In the pool the hamerkop whispers. In the pool wherein fall the stars.
Beneath the surface a death is falling into life at the same time as
the silver surface captures the shooting star.

Where there is death there is life.
Where the void is, there is time.

Space

Copernicus was never here, nor Newton, nor Galileo. Never gone the
long history’s people, the space long known where the distance of a
star can be felt as easily as a mother’s waiting embrace. (It can be
ascertained with the naked eye from it’s fixity relative to a mountain
by a man who can run a buck to exhaustion.)

Long before Einstein, the people here, later dispossessed, were painting
relativity and space-time on the rocks. The paintings work like a holograph:
the observer provides the mental light for paradoxical journeys through
fistulas in time.

The projection of the stars, themselves projections of some other sort,
in the silence of the night animate tortoise, buck and hare. Descartes
divided mind and body but here sight faster than light penetrates the
hardest stone.

Once a deep compulsion drove springbok to trot
oblivious to obstacle and attack toward the west Atlantic shore
where they drank the water and died by the million
along thirty miles of coast. Some say it was overpopulation
or too little space that activated an ancient impulse ignoring
disasters on the way. If so, the desert might heal us of that affliction,
wake us out of the trance that sends us unswerving
toward the precipice in our own apocalyptic time.
The healing is not imagined. The chest expands, fills with breath.
Breath is thought, wind formerly a bird. One soars,
finds unity with the stars.

We can see it in the shimmering rock and eagle wing – they interpenetrate.
Go to the images. Stand close. Watch them separate.

Form

The long straight road, the railway line, koppies, a cloudless sky,
pumpkins on the iron, emptiness. That’s one version of it.
Or, where there are sudden storms: a gentle cow with wisps of
breath, or if it is male, then hail, sometimes on a sunny day.
In the distance lightning fetching those, now stars, who pick the
flowers of the rain.

The movements of stones gripped by ice are recorded on the pavement slate,
each scratch a single act in time too large to comprehend with senses
geared to a single life. Sandstone tells of periodic floods,
giant reptiles dying into mud. Layers of slate suggest rivers of clay.
Magma bursts like a woman’s flood. All  of history leads to
where we are now, early mammal-like reptiles they were, we say
to avoid the embarrassment of us being they in one and the same moment of
unified time, immigrants from the north in the middle Permian.

We talk rather of what the farmer saw: a frozen buck wakes, shakes off
cracking ice, a lizard’s eye tells it when its warm enough, thick mud
walls and shutters keep out the heat, snakes, lions, strangers, the
dispossessed.

There is another story told in wind
of wind that was once a man then bird
dropping bloodstained feather into a pool
among the daughters of the rain
ostrich becoming ostrich again
while sun thrown up into the sky
reshapes the moon that does not die
for ever, but reborn gathers souls,
and clouts the hare and splits its lip
for doubting resurrection of the dead.

Form and time, time and space, when we leave the car beside the road,
interpenetrate. Preserved in sediments of rock, and rock itself from
bacteria deep within, when we lose ourselves in the larger time,
we are the fleeting moment in its trancelike state. The dispossessed,
more than those who brought the sheep, know that wind was once man,
and birds living matter in flight.

A world at odds with what we learned at school, their images take us
into a world denied, and sadden us who have been made blind or who
blind our children to the realm.The interpenetration of our separated
things is the clue to what’s represented here.Behind the fixity of
form, an Eden, monstrous often, evokes longing for the exiled home.

But if rock and rain and plant and sheep are one and the same, where
is the structure that guides them to their form? Not DNA – in the
larger time it too is born and dies – but memory perhaps, the thoughts
and histories invisible to our senses that draw  us to our destinies.

The present moment, marooned, scars the stone,but thoughts leave no
apparent residue.Is that why the car goes past and doesn’t stop?
It’s the Karoo my dear. There’s nothing here.

Born as bacteria in the rocks we unable to grasp the picture
except with tears. The paintings tell it all. As long as you don’t
interpret them.

Spirit

The church spire pinwheels the cosmos which spins around the
unmoving town built on shale of dinosaur bone and ancient
plants. The silence of the night is punctuated by the windmill’s
cry. Water from deep down is directed onto dust and great
landscapes rise and fall echoing an history embedded in the soil.
In the surrounding hills the owl and the jackal are about, and
the wind of the stars and the sleeping town speak to each other
in the enfolded night.

The wind pump turns, refracting light onto the stone wall of the
dam. Emptiness is not empty here but what fills it has no name.
Dry, the river but water speaks through mint, as does the owl
through perforated shell, the jackal through feathered carcass
and the farmer’s gun through the stuffed eagle in the town’s
museum.

It is speculated that the images on the stone
when the dispossessed were in their ecstasy
separated and took form in space
through which they passed into the death.
Not the death we say is at the end of life
but the ocean of light in which rocks now rest.
The same melt of space from the dying ice
is around the farmer’s house and the eagle in flight.

The eland are gone and we marooned among cars but here
where form becomes time, mind penetrates the hardest stone.
For the road and the railway are our lives, but for the veil the
two worlds would meet.

Here is a world of spirit in stone. The penetration of it in mind -
the dissipation not the passing through – is what I mean. Here is
the time of the early race played out in landscape unbounded by
form. Here, carved on pavements of stone, are the secrets
longest known.

According to modern physicists, we are constituted of dimensions
infinitely small for which we have no senses, or at least none
of which we are aware. Perhaps one day our parietal eye
stimulated by a reborn sun will allow space-time to bathe us
more apparently.

We are born in silence and reborn in silence. To become the
veil means to abandon road and railway, to empty time of time.
For the destination is the departure and not beyond. The rocks
are our teachers. The rocks, the windmills, the tracks of small
animals in dry river beds, the scent of mint.

Ruben Mowszowski

I spent time with Ruben Mowszowski when I returned to South Africa earlier this year. His crisp writing and hungry-yet-careful eyes on the world wake me up to new ways of seeing. Ruben lives in Kalk Bay, the same salt-licked fishing village as my dear friend, ceramic artist Katherine Glenday. 

One late afternoon in January, we sat in an enclosed courtyard garden in the shade of an old syringa tree, eating olives and almonds and talking about travel, children, desert spaces, esoteric philosophy and astronomy. . . I was thinking back to some of that conversation two weeks ago when I posted David Wagoner's poem The Silence Of The Stars with its images of the Kalahari Desert and the !Kung Bushmen, ears tuned to the not-so-distant songs of stars. 

I've long been drawn to desert spaces. We walk and listen differently in them. This past week I've been in New Mexico with two dear friends and - two nights ago - a  very full moon. We have wandered the high desert landscapes, from deep rift valley to mesa-tops. It's impossible not to feel connected to the stars out here. 


I used to say I found comfort in the knowledge that no matter where in the world we are, we all live under the same sky; I still feel this, though recently there's been a key change. . . I've replaced the word 'under' with 'in' which allows for a whole new experience. 

We live in the same sky. 

I invite you take a swing on a pendulum and visit Ruben's website where you can enjoy his penetrating and poetic essays. In Karoo Time Machine Ruben witnesses a project to build the largest telescope of its kind in the Southern hemisphere. . . 

(And thank you, Ruben, for permission to post Karoo Moon here)

Stephen Inggs - Terra Incognita I (from the Palimpsest series - 2005)

Handpainted gelatin silver emulsion on paper, Edition 2/20

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill.

 Helen Lowe is this week's TP editor with an important and challenging poem - VA Hospital Confessional - by New Zealand poet Brian Turner. 

This Land Does Not Give Easily

"Where are the ghosts? 

The people of Northern New Mexico call Ghost Ranch Rancho de los Brujos, meaning Ranch of the Witches. There are stories of six-foot tall 'earth babies' covered with red hair howling in the night, and a ghost cow with wings. . . " (guide brochure)

I spent much of today at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu -  Georgia O'Keeffe country. It's not difficult to see why she chose to live and paint here; the New Mexico mountains are as remote and as yielding as sleeping bodies. They seem part animal, part human and part something altogether 'other'; tough-skinned, hard-nosed, they glow and glower, heave and dream and breathe.

Amongst the clustered buildings at Abiquiu, I was surprised to come across a dim, blessedly cool adobe library. Four small rooms were lined from floor-to-ceiling with books; two fell into my hands from a shelf in what I imagine might be the least-frequented, Eastern corner of the room. Books find us. I opened Desert Notes - Reflections in the Eye of A Raven and began reading. . .

 

    "The land does not give easily. The desert is like a boulder: you expect to wait. You expect night to come. Morning. Winter to set in. But you expect sometime it will loosen into pieces to be examined. 

    When it doesn't you weary. You are no longer afraid of its secrets, cowed by its silence. You break away, angry, a little chagrined. You will tell anyone the story: so much time spent for nothing. In the retelling you sense another way inside; you return immediately to the desert. The opening evaporates, like a vision through a picket railing. 

    You can't get at it this way. You must come with no intentions of discovery, You must overhear things as though you've come into a small and desolate town and paused by an open window. . . "*

". . . When I first came into the desert I was arrested by the space, especially what hung in a layer just above the dust of the desert floor. The longer I regarded it, the clearer it became that its proportion had limits, that it had an identity, like the air around a stone. I suspected that everything I'd come here to find out was hidden inside that sheet of space. 

     I developed methods of inquiry, although I appeared to be doing nothing at all. I appeared to be completely detached. I appeared to be smelling my hands cupped full of rocks. I appeared to be asleep. But I was not. Even inspecting an abandoned building at some distance from the desert I would glance over in that direction, alert. I was almost successful. 

      Towards the end of my inquiry I moved with exquisite ease. But I could not disguise the waiting. 

    One morning as I stood watching the sun rise, washing out the blue black, watching the white crystalline stars fade, my bare legs quivering in the air, I noticed my hands had begun to crack and turn to dust. . . "** 

      */** pages xi & xii - Desert Notes - Reflections in the Eye of A Raven by Barry Holstun Lopez 

Before leaving, I walked this labyrinth ---

Tuesday Poem - Persephone

                                     In darkness Persephone walks

                                     the earth flinches

                                     with every absentminded footfall.

                                     She does not speak, she listens,

                                     and listening, hears her rough soles

                                     smooth and cut, chip and polish

                                     her surrounding plateau of shadows.

                                     Every forward step she takes,

                                     she makes the dark earth tremor.

                                     Persephone walks - and on and on

                                     and on she walks. And when

                                     - pre-dawn - she stops

                                     she finds she's standing still

                                     on solid ground; so strange

                                     and dark a land she knows

                                     she's not been here before

                                     nor felt the restless press

                                     of moths mistaking her presence

                                     for a candle; how slight

                                     their quiet antennae tracing

                                     the contours of her face,

                                     her heart - each passing wing,

                                     an eye; each eye, a question

                                     hovering.

                                     CB

Hello friends. I'm still on the road/in the air, making my way from North to South and East to West with a glide, a lunge, a swoop. My suitcase has taken itself off on three independent adventures since I left home in late March. It's showing signs of wear, must surely have a story or two to tell? Right now, 'tis 'here', 'tis all. I've enjoyed being without it more than I've enjoyed being with it; cumbersome thing, baggage. Next time I go anywhere, it'll definitely be with a whole lot less 'stuff'. 


This has been a time of acceleration and quietude. Two mind-altering, heart-opening conferences later, I find myself in a new landscape. Everything and nothing is the same as it was this time a month ago. Everything and nothing is different. 


As often seems to happen, we're tuned in to the same frequencies out here. Computer time - when I've had it - has been pretty much all work-related this past month (I'm way behind with correspondence and haven't been able to read, comment or answer comments in yonks - apologies, apologies). Reading around the blogosphere this evening, I'm not surprised to discover moths are a theme this week. I arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico last night and - as if in response to some faintly-whispered cue - we're being visited by moths. And I mean flocks of moths - flittering, fleeting, fluttering, floundering dusty-winged moths. Along with Marylinn, I consider them messengers. If you haven't read her post titled 'Attributes of the Moth', pop over to her blog where she has written about them as only she can.

". . . When I looked into what moth brings as a totem I found: the ability to perceive with clarity, strong healing abilities, protection for traveling between darkness and the light, finding light in darkness, metamorphosis and, in common with the phoenix, rising from the ashes, in moth's case of the flames to which it is drawn. . . "

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill.

 This week's editor on the hub is Alicia Ponder with Helen Lowe's poem Fey. . . and, guess what? Yes, you'll find moths there, too.

Tuesday Poem - The Silence of the Stars by David Wagoner

                    THE SILENCE OF THE STARS

                     When Laurens van der Post one night
                     In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen
                     He couldn't hear the stars
                     Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
                     half-smiling. They examined his face
                     To see whether he was joking
                     Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
                     Who plant nothing, who have almost
                     Nothing to hunt, who live
                     On almost nothing, and with no one
                     But themselves, led him away
                     From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
                     And stood with him under the night sky
                     And listened. One of them whispered,
                     Do you not hear them now?
                     And van der Post listened, not wanting
                     To disbelieve, but had to answer,
                     No. They walked him slowly
                     Like a sick man to the small dim
                     Circle of firelight and told him
                     They were terribly sorry,
                     And he felt even sorrier
                     For himself and blamed his ancestors
                     For their strange loss of hearing,
                     Which was his loss now. On some clear night
                     When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
                     When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
                     Are between sirens and the jets overhead
                     Are between crossings, when the wind
                     Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
                     And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
                     Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
                     I look at the stars again as I first did
                     To school myself in the names of constellations
                     And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
                     I can still hear what I thought
                     At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
                     Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
                     The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
                     Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
                     My fair share of the music of the spheres
                     And clusters of ripening stars,
                     Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
                     Still tending ever tone-deaf creatures
                     Through their exiles in the desert.

                     David Wagoner

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill. 

This week's post marks the beginning of Tuesday Poem's third year.  Zireaux is today's editor on the hub; welcome the ways in which he pushes the boundaries of what constitutes poetry. . . Zireaux has chosen a 'clip' - a conversation - between Australian TV favourites, Kath and Kim. He writes '. . . Ideas are not what poetry is about. Poetry is spoken music (some might say written music, but I'm less convinced of this, unless we equate reading with hearing, which seems a stretch)' and '. . . I can't help but feel that by isolating poetry, by assigning it to a particular habitat, we're neglecting an abundance of poetic forms -- in the deep hydrothermal vents of literature, in the ice caves, in the teeming jungles of planets beyond. . . "    

                    

". . . The deep hydrothermal vents of literature, in the ice caves, in the teeming jungles of planets beyond. . .' Ah, poetry! Thank you, Zireaux. 

   

Cactus Maps & Sundials

Tuesday Poem - The Poets' Birthday - TP Collective

THE POETS' BIRTHDAY

The shyest sparrow's supplications in the early evening trees

are a careful arpeggio - each note liberates a flotilla of leaves
fleeting, indeed, left scattered as archipelago in a dew-grass sea.  

The song's begun: feathered entreaties lift from every hedgerow, every

field, join in one great arc of beak and wing and downy plume --

brief benediction for the worker trudging home, a heart-lifted pause

at day's end. Summer's pages fall. Leaf by leaf, they shorten days,

strip bare the trunks, spill forth a concertina of split, sagging plums,

crimson globes -- Demeter's heart strung low against the blue note 

sky. Furrowed fields lie flat beneath the tramp of corn-fed feet.

The scene is set, two candles lit, another year opens a window 

through which we pass in streak of silver, burst of wheels' screech, breath

of horns' bright blasting. Inside, the chink of glass against china,

bubble of laughter tossed from one guest to the next draws us

to its warmth, the blissful promise of shared experience, swells

the soul's bright plumage. A winking flame copies itself on the clean

slope of the knife before it passes. The reflection flickers: and beyond 

the window frame, a final guest hesitates in mauve-hued shadow, ghost 

of Keats maybe, listening still, reticent, reluctant to eschew 

autumn's arias or chorus. And hear now, along the bay, 

the pulse of song ticks out again in joyous iteration, a boy kicks 

a ball against a wall, a sole finch adds bebop syncopation. Gabble, 

and its consistency of warm honey dampen the tenor, the tune -- best

left out in the tang of sharpened daylight. Shadows unwilling to retreat

stand shoulder-to-shoulder and beat the day's thrum chanting come, cold,

come, dark, come firelight, we too have our part. Gladly, watch effulgence fade,

into this gentler glow of murmured crackle and spark-fed thoughts. Each year

is gathered and falls away in a clap of digits, up from nothing to where

we find ourselves surrounded. It's come to this: the riffle of breath, the winking

flame. One is out, then the other. Stay with us, poet, it's time to start over.  

A global birthday poem written line by line by 26 poets from six countries and 12 cities over two weeks - from Tuesday April 3 to April 17 2012 - in celebration of Tuesday Poem's second birthday. 

The Tuesday Poets are (in order of their lines): Melissa Green, Claire Beynon, Saradha Koirala, Janis Freegard, T. Clear, Catherine Bateson, Renee Liang, Elizabeth Welsh, Alicia Ponder, Tim Jones, Kathleen Jones, Helen McKinlay, Helen Lowe, Eileen Moeller, Orchid Tierney, Susan T. Landry, Keith Westwater, Belinda Hollyer, Harvey Molloy, Bernadette Keating, Andrew M. Bell, Michelle Elvy, Catherine Fitchett, P.S. Cottier, Helen Rickerby, Mary McCallum.

Unable to post this year: Sarah Jane Barnett, Robert Sullivan, Zireaux, Emma McCleary 

                                            Editor: Mary McCallum, TP co-curator

This synopsis of the poem's process from Mary McCallum. . . "Tuesday Poem is two years old, and The Poets' Birthday is a magnificent way to celebrate. It kicked off on April 3 with a line from Boston poet Melissa Green and has been criss-crossing the globe ever since like a digital marathon, with all the adrenalin and excitement you can imagine it generating. 

The posts were twice a day, usually around 8 am and 6 pm NZ Time. As soon as a poet had logged into the TP blog and posted a line, s/he emailed the next poet on the roster to pass on the baton. 

I love this image of the Tuesday Poet hard at work, it comes from our own Susan Landry in Maine: '... sitting in her bathrobe in Maine, hair sticking out in nine different directions, coffee cup rings marking her desktop...' There is something very familiar about this.

Claire Beynon contributed the poem's second line from Ibiza, Spain, ten hours after Melissa Green posted, and Saradha Koirala from Wellington, New Zealand, came up with the third. And on it went.  We passed the baton around the world from Dunedin to London to Canberra to somewhere in Italy to Seattle to Auckland to Maine and many other places besides. And look what came out! A poem about song and celebration, light and company. 

Mary was quoted on Beattie's book blog last week as saying: 'It's an exciting process watching the lines go up one by one - seeing the thinking behind each line: the language, the line-breaks, where it's left for the next poet to pick it up. It's like watching one poetic mind at work with each poet acting like one of the many competing voices that a poet hears as s/he writes: 'break the line there' 'no don't' 'rhyme it' 'don't you dare' 'how about plums to echo plume?' 'what are you thinking?' and so on.'

We are once more delighted to raise a glass to our remarkable bunch of poets and devoted blog readers who come together in this place once a week to enjoy and celebrate poetry. We are a community built on trust, generosity, flexibility and a mutual obsession -- and long may it last. 

Happy Birthday! Ra whanau ki a korua!"

Please join our celebrating poets - click on the quill to visit our Tuesday Poem hub and from there be transported to each of the poet's blogs. . . 

Tuesday Poem - Setting The Record Straight

                             SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT 

The stations of the cross

should number seventeen

not two times seven; three extra

added onto the Resurrection scene

would lend courage to generations

of grieving mothers. 

The story should not end 

with Jesus coming back to Life 

from Death only to be taken 

again, stolen by angels 

right before his Mother’s eyes.

What of Mary 

after the Ascension?

Mary should be shown

pacing stone floors with rage

and longing, walking desert dunes

on bare, blistered feet, twisting

silk into countless useless knots,

embroidering her loss

into the spines of chairs.

Yes, Mary should be seen,

lying awake at night, wondering

about God and Gabriel,

not praying but waiting,

waiting for the simplicity

of sleep, for her wordless

sorrow to rise.

CB

This week sees our Tuesday Poem community continuing the magical process of creating a collective birthday poem. Please click on the quill - you won't want to miss its unfolding. . .  

This is where I spent the closing hours of Easter Sunday - Es Vedras, Ibiza. . . . . .  

_/\_

Homesick Waters

Zara Neale Hurston* - Santa Eulalia, Ibiza

I came across these words etched into a glass door on a little-used side entrance to the conference centre; easy to miss as the words appear and disappear according to the time of day and the angle of the sun's light.

My days here have been full-on. . . high on the stimulation side, with a rush of input and accompanying call to solitude for rest and processing in between. The programme comprises lectures, all-day workshops and fine, engaging company. . . forget about getting any (outward, at least) preparation done for the paper I'm preparing for Phoenix. Something's incubating, that much I know. I walk home contentedly from the conference venue each evening accompanied by the soft-edged moon (she'll be full this Friday), the welcome smell of warmed citrus and the island's stone. I'm good for nothing but sleep by the time I get back to my apartment.

This week's Tuesday Poem is just about ready to post (dedicated-if-slack co-curator that I am - and this is our birthday week ; ( ) and will follow this one. Meantime, I'm just wanting to put a hand out and say howdy. One thing I do do each morning is read your blogs while I have my breakfast. . . There are some rhythms one simply must uphold!  

* Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Thank you, Google. . . ) 

Drain cover - Santa Eulalia sidewalk

Gracias

    Barcelona. 

It has taken two days to get here. When it comes to travel, New Zealand really is on the other side of the globe! A long journey at the best of times, this one ended up being quite a bit longer. Ten minutes prior to landing in Frankfurt we learned that Lufthansa's ground staff were on strike and as a result all connecting flights with that airline had been cancelled indefinitely. I was fortunate to be offered seats on two Swiss Air flights later than morning - the delay meant 'losing' a day in Barcelona but had I not been re-routed, I might have missed out on Barcelona altogether. 


Always amazed that airports work as well as they do, I was nevertheless not surprised to find that my re-routed suitcase hadn't been able to keep up once my itinerary had been changed. It went missing somewhere between Frankfurt, Zurich and here but will likely turn up before I leave for Ibiza first thing on Friday morning. Meantime, I'm enjoying traveling light, and let me tell you it's a whole lot easier making one's way across a city with a handbag (whose modest stomach holds my travel docs, a hairbrush, pencil, journal, glasses and lippy) and one small, lighter-than-usual piece of hand luggage (containing laptop, camera and a handful of books). I took a bus from the airport to Plaza Catalunya where - a little whelmed from lack of sleep and the excitement of being here - I spent about twelve dilly minutes scampering up and down escalators in a huge family-style department store searching for a replacement toothbrush and t'paste, knickers, plain white singlet and shampoo. . . What more would I need? (And what on earth had I packed into my missing 20 kg suitcase? We make such pack-horses of ourselves, don't we, wandering about with our weight on our backs.)

These pics show the view from the bedroom in the apartment I'm staying in. . . How curious to cross miles of ocean and land to visit an ostensibly foreign place only to discover on arrival that everything has a ring of the familiar about it. Everything. The apartment. The language. The city smells. The stone lions and metal minotaurs. The full-throated, unselfconscious sidewalk conversations. The different timbre of this city's laughter - which makes me wonder. . . Is the colour and texture of our laughter and our tears affected by the language we speak? Does sound inhabits our body in language-tinted ways? (I'm curious to hear what you think?). 


Unashamedly wanton when it comes to weathered surfaces, I love this city's muddle; its brickwork and cracking plaster, expressive wrought-iron balustrades and soft, loaf-shaped roofs (tomorrow, Gaudi will render me speechless, I know it). . . 

And then there's beautiful, gracious Marta - a writer, colour therapist, architect and sacred geometrician - who has welcomed me into her home; complete strangers only till the moment of our meeting. Can lives and lifetimes converge in a split second? Neither of us speaks the other's language and yet last night's conversation could not have held more, nor been any richer. Something's afoot (when is something not, I wonder?). It's the middle of the night and the neighbourhood's asleep. How good it is to see Northern hemisphere stars through my bedroom shutters; they seem plucking distance away. Light sentries of the night, I like to think they are keeping watch, minding their own business, yes - and ours, too - high above the clay-tiles, the Jacob's ladder scaffold of chimneys, television aerials and tilting satellite dishes. 

Right here, right now, I am indescribably happy.