The wind acts as cinematographer bouncing around branches of trees, large and small leaves playing with light. Light coming through the high-ceilinged windows. Light coming into your eyes. The work of clouds is another thing. A master composer of movement. Moving fast or slow diffusing the light, bouncing the ultraviolet waves back and forth between belly and earth. Clouds come in and muffle out the sound of light. Dampen the noise. High to low pressure, the jet stream, humidity, the dance of Coriolis, and 176 species of mosquito. The noise that can pierce a frayed out nervous system. Frayed out, frayed down, like frayed cotton corduroy overalls on a teddy bear wearing a straw hat. Afraid to lose. Afraid to be alone. Afraid to be rejected.
What was the itch? The compulsion? The impel-sion? The propulsion? I had picked up The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It was on the bookshelf in the great room of the hostel on the Isle of Iona. 2 trains, 2 ferries, 1 car ride, 3 storms, endless sheep fences, and getting soaked to the bone while trudging through hidden bogs on numerous occasions. The storms so fierce I thought the windows in the great room would shatter from sideways hail and winds so strong I could fall forward as they held me off the ground. Winds so strong I thought I would roll away in the little tin caravan. That or get struck by lightning.
First Helen had picked up the book actually. Are you still reading it? I spend my last few nights on the isle taking my time through Alex Haley's introduction. It was time to go home.
I had been trying to figure out just what home meant. In Oaxaca I looked at me feet. Tattoos painted on my feet, something like the calavera and calaca to understand the death I had witnessed when I was 26. But I hadn't understood the roots of the art, the culture, or the people my tattoos were expressing. Oaxaca a land of so many traditions, it wouldn't be right to try to understand it all with words.
Let it wash over you in the temescal, in the celebration of flowers and dance and costumes and music in the streets, in the loud bomb-like fire crackers going off any time of day, any time of year. In el circulo, in la danza, pray. Pray with your feet moving, singing to the drum. Pray with your brothers and sisters.
Go home, someone had advised me. If you are lost, go home.
My feet lead me next to Robert Nisbet's tombstone, in a kirkyard in Leith, Edinburgh. My Great Great Grandfather's grave. My feet lead me to Pikov a tiny village in Ukraine where my Great Grandmother Gittel Lifshitz was born. Wading through spectral remembrances of Jewish Pogroms, climbing up the Skurr in sideways wind, leaving offerings, jumping into lochs, I had a mission, a quest, but I wasn't home. I was still a runaway orphan.
Go home, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz tells me.
I get back to the states March 6th, 2020. Turtle Island. How to reconcile that this is my home, the horror that is our history, the madness that is our present?
7 months later I find myself from Zuzka's house in Southern California to my first stop after 12 hours of driving. I am sitting on a borrowed camp chair just next to my car, a little cold, a little scared by the sound of the nearby moving cattle on land that has been determined and delineated by the Bureau of Land Management. I find myself alone in Southern Utah, red earth, an open star-filled sky, full moon at my lips.