La Gitana en mi Sangre

The Gypsy in my Blood

I was going to keep it all private and then I told handfuls of the right people. I only told my family the day I was leaving. I wanted to hold it close, to let my soul and God have their own private…

Spain adventure.

It has been a week. I am in Andalusia. First stop Sevilla. Jet lag was gnar gnar. I started my period three days in and it’s 103 degrees. Hot blooded.

These are not exaggerations…

I have only eaten, for all of my meals- wine, cheese (real cheese), bread (real bread and I have not eaten real bread in like 10 years or more), olives cuz they practically spoon feed them to you at every stop, smatterings of meats and amazing things from the sea. I have not seen one piece of kale, not even in the supermarkets. I finally stumbled upon a little health food store and bought some chlorella to balance it all. Oh and a peach.

I had ice cream for dinner tonight. And more bread.

I am letting go. I didn’t come here to push my rules onto Spain. I want to know what is true about my rules.

The cathedrals here are overwhelming. So much God in one place. I wept in a pew. Everywhere I look Jesus is gold plated and weeping tears of blood under halos of the Virgin Mary shining light upon his pain. I would be weeping pain too if a palace erected in my name was built upon a mass grave of the people of the old ways.

I look up into a stained glass face and can’t help but fall into her grace. Where is your light inside of me, Mary? For my pain?

Yet I know that I cannot see myself when I am inside the crystal ball. Disorientation is a sacred direction.

A man in his 70s randomly stopped me and told me he could see that I was sensitive, to let the Gypsy song under the cobblestones slow me down, to cry my heart out and fall in love. Then he hugged me, took a drag of his cigarette and that was it.

Hay mucho Gitana en mi Sangre. She came to visit me when I was in a fit-full sleep at 2am. Who am I really?

I have been binging Flamenco. I want to die on the stage in a puddle of tears at the end of each show. I want to devote myself to this dance. It’s like I finally found my people. I took a class today from a woman in her 60s who has been dancing Flamenco since before she was born. Apparently, like playing the harp, it is considered one of the most difficult dances in the world to learn. Of course I would want to try this now.

But what about my life? I can’t just commit to art.

All I want is to commit to art. Every pore in my heart, wants to ooze art. But the voices. So many voices. Too many choices. The great privileged burden of being human.

I am not on vacation. I need to say that. The voices get louder away from home when it’s not a vacation. This is not a distraction from a life I don’t love. Something called me here. I don’t want to create stories about it, seek, or have expectations. Yet here I am with a heart packed full of hope that the one voice, under all those other voices, has a true song. I mean- what if I am wrong?! All wrong. Hmmm.

I don’t really want anyone to know where I am ever again, do you ever feel that way? I want to sit on a mountain and pray -quietly, forever.

Yet, I needed to presence myself here on the Iberian peninsula. To make it all real.

So, hi! I am in Spain on a “random” impulse that rose from my bones less than a month ago and filled my body with something I have never felt. So, I listened - Hail Mary.

Love brought me here. I am going with that story.

Like it takes me anywhere, has taken me everywhere that has made me who I am. Land shapes me. Like maybe, just maybe, I shape the land for those who will walk after me. Do you know the stories your footprints will tell long after you have been washed back to sea?

Well anyhow, I am a bit out of my skin. A little off the chain inside my brain. Shira is not in control. It’s always way past my bedtime. I am spending money like I won the lottery because it’s Europe. But the olives are free.

So there. I am here.

I love you. Whoever reads this.

Please now go ahead and unsee it all so I can disappear. But send me a prayer- ok? Ok.

—>

UN POEMA…

I hear her chanting the old songs

From under the worn down cobblestones

La Sangre de la Gitana runs hot and strong

Like Pele’s new Earth being birthed from a primordial moan 

A foot stomp calls her ancestors to the first dance

To tell the story of an incorruptible romance 

She sways her hips in a long lost underground barrio

They entice each hungry soul into remembrance

That the people of the wild heart always know the direction to go

Whichever way the warm winds of Iberia blow

“There is no wrong turn my child”- she sings

“There is nothing to repent

There is only my -hustlin’ for this blessed life- bosom

For you to lay your head in and inhale the scents

Of jasmine, myrrh and frankincense.

Look what their God has done to the people all running past life in a hurry 

Steppin’ on the cobbled cracks deaf to what is buried below as they scurry

To a palace to pray to something far away 

And that bar to numb the pain, that claims to serve the manna in the old way

But how can that be when the foods of land and sea 

Are now taken without the learned hands of praise

That used to uphold the laws of sacred reciprocity

And therefore the one truth that you are forever loved

If you sit still long enough to hear what is under 

The grandiose tabernacles built by wreckless kings ruling through fear

You can feel the rumble of a people who still dance in the only cathedral

Where all of your prayers are blessed to come true 

No trees need be taken down for your knees to bleed on the back of a pew

You will never want for great walls of gold 

when all the riches of this life are remembered inside your soul”

I wonder what Jesus would think about this lavish desecration of his original prophecy 

I believe I heard him singing with La Gitana, I believe Jesus is a gypsy

—>