The Egg, the Dove, the Golden Dress and the Magic Key

The Queen of Bohemia delights in the garden eternal in her Little Piece of Paradise. She sits among the banana trees with her trusty animals and all the little children listen to her tell lots of stories.

She even tells them the story that happened long ago of a little peasant girl who once upon a time became a Queen. But this Queen had a hard time living in her desert kingdom. War, death and destruction had destroyed her home. Terrible demons tormented her and badly wounded her. And the biggest wound was a hole in her heart.

So she sojourned to the land to the south. A long journey that first brought her down, down to the great city near the bottom of the earth and then back up to an island near the middle of it. To her Kingdom by the Sea and the garden. There the gardener fed her fantastic feasts of the finest plants from the garden, and flowers brought her to a magic place of the other world. From out of her dreams in this other world appeared entire new worlds, because every day the Queen sat peace in the garden, quietly fishing by a well.

Until one day she fell asleep and she fell into the well. Deep down she fell. The well swallowed her up into the darkness, the terrible darkness, and she felt the terrible fear overwhelm her as she could barely see the light above her.  She worried what was awaiting her in the darkness. What beast would leap out at her? She had battled so many demons in that old kingdom, could she find the strength for yet one more battle here? She breathed in and out. She felt her feet touching the earth at the bottom of the well. Her body and mind were posed and focused for battle. Her hands reached out in the darkness. Within that darkness appeared an egg. The first thing that arose from the egg was a golden dress that radiated like the sun. The next thing to come out of the egg was a white dove, fluttering toward the light, and the third thing was a tiny, magic, golden key. The Queen put on the golden dress, the dove alighted on her left shoulder, and The Queen's hands held the key close to her heart. It fit perfectly the hole in her heart. A golden, peaceful light permeated her being. All is well. All is eternal. Water began to flow into the well, rising up until it reached the top, overflowing, delivering the Queen back to the surface once again.

All the trees and flowers in the garden started blooming.  The Queen started blooming too, like a hibiscus blooming the world into creation. The Queen bloomed into creation and eventually she expanded so much that she left for the stars, because she discovered that amidst all that creation, she was there at the center all the time. She was the jewel in the lotus. A bright star in the night sky.

She's up there now today, and is also now a book on a shelf. Her story. The story is still told to little children as the Queen lives on with them in the Little Lotus so they can all find their way to the stars one day, too.

Bohemian Breadfruit

There is a boatload of breadfruit coming in. I can sit on the couch out on the balcony that I got free from the Christiansted freecycle and stare for an hour at the breadfruit tree's amazing, enormous leaves, like huge green fans, so identifiable by their jagged edges. So very healing, for the sight of the tree arrests all thinking, stops it in its track. Breadfruit is healing to eat too, loaded with fiber and protein. It was a super food for slaves, brought over to the Caribbean from the East. In Tahiti it propelled the Bounty into mutiny because of the preference to care for the plants and provide it water over the crew. Tonio peeled a breadfruit and boiled it for me. I mashed it up like a potato, threw in what other herbs were growing in the garden - oregano brujo, rosemary and bay leaf. While cooking and tasting it I had a sudden overpowering impulse to add gorgonzola cheese to the mix. I have tried to be vegan since age 19, however, at 45 the passion and powerful urge for cheese that my body and Dutch DNA have overtakes any prolonged vegan attempts. I decided to honor my Bohemian mother who obsessed over gorgonzola,

and named the dish Bohemian Breadfruit. Perhaps it was her spirit nearby, eager for retroactive healing of the ancestors and a craving to taste gorgonzola one more time. Now it is a clear comfort food, cooked in her memory, and mashed potato substitute, a healing food that grows smack out o the backyard. I'm eating as much from the garden as possible. Going to heal myself with whole foods and juices, yoga and stories. I had my biopsies on my cervix last Tuesday and will hear the results in another week. A friend said any lesions will have to be zapped off with freezing. “Don’t be a fool," he admonished me on the phone. "You have to get this taken care of. Natural stuff won’t cure it. You know how Bob Marley died right?” I didn’t know, but my friend related the story of Bob Marley's spot on his toe that expanded despite his prayers and that the cancer spread and killed him. “He died of stupidity,” my friend said. My female doctor, however, said she had proactive patients who forewent the typical treatment, focused on whole foods and less stress, and the tests came back clear. So by doing nothing but meditating, practicing yoga, growing and cooking my own food, hanging the laundry out on the line in the Caribbean sun, hanging out on the beach and floating in the sea's soft salt water, making art and supporting my kids in their school and life, by returning to motherhood, to the home life, stopping too much work, that is the key. And I believe I will be healed. I believe the yoga and the stories and the garden all heal. I'm becoming a good cook, too. What my kids rejected repeatedly for years as "too healthy," get gobbled up by my adult friends and Tonio. My goal is to grow most of what I eat, so the recipes include lots of gazpacho and pesto. I had a dream a few months ago in which a voice in a dream said, "Spanish vegetables will heal you." You really can't go wrong with gazpacho. Not just that it's such a great word to speak and weave into nursery rhymes, but it's a colon cleanser and infusion of vitamins for sure. Chopping up the celery, green bell peppers, green onions, cucumbers and hot peppers is a meditation in itself. Blending it down to a puree then slicing avocado for a garnish an act of worship, an offering to Krishna and the gods (can't wait for the yellow flowers on the trees to start bulging with fruit.)

Of course my body is not the only thing to heal, but my heart as well, for my little sister's December 29 suicide hangs over me like a dull drug, a ghost knocking at my practice door that wants to be heard, its story told so that we can all cross over to the other side, so that we can all be at peace and rest. The healing stories we tell are for all of us so that we can continue living, lest the grief and loss and sorrow swallow us up completely and dump us out on the other edge of a river of death. I found a coconut in the garden that reminds me that she is still alive somewhere. She is reborn somewhere out of the soupy depths of our psyche. There is the agricultural society's myth of one thing dying; returning to the fecund, dark depths of the earth; and then it is recreated as something else. Usually it's somebody who dies, the head is buried and a coconut tree grows from it. The evidence is in the face in a coconut. I believe. That is all that is required. To believe. I feel her, too, in my yoga practice, her face arises, comes out of my body, urging me to tell our story. So I work in the garden, cook up a few recipes and write. It's amazing how much progress Tonio made in the garden, all by sitting on the edge of an old paint bucket and digging it up with his machete. I stopped by the Virgin Islands Department of Agriculture and picked up some seedlings from Wayne, who has a marijuana leaf symbol on the side of his black sunglasses and dreadlocks down to his thighs. For $2.60 I got four watermelon plants, five swiss chard, five mustard greens and five celery. I wasn’t sure if any of this was going to mix with me according to ayurveda but I figured it was the most healing to grow things and cook with them, walk in the garden and show my kids the lemon grass shoots, the smell of the bay leaf and the touch of the dirt than anything else. Of course it's all good survival food in case things collapsed tomorrow in one economic meltdown. “Come down here!” Tonio waved to me down at the garden this morning. He had driven the car down to the garden and opened up the back hatch. There fidgeted four wiry chickens, struggling over each other and pecking inside a black mesh bag. The dogs gathered around as if they all knew a new baby had arrived and there is now more competition for attention. Sergeant Pepe nipped at Jupe. “See, he jealous,” Tonio said. So my dream came true. To have a yoga farm and to have chickens. Of course I said, ”You can teach Paloma and Hondo how to care for them.” Now we just need a goat, to mow the lawn of course, like Google. That will have to wait until later.

"Cholo gave to us,” Tonio said. Tonio's Puerto Rican friend Cholo stops by occasionally. A walk with him in the garden and he identified all the trees in the garden: soursop, custard apple, lime, coconut, banana, mango, bay leaf (put in rubbing alcohol and good to massage into the scalp for headaches.) My daughter and I visited Cholo's house in Glynn once, when he had a tree full of carambola fruit to give away and we were still looking for a place to move to. Tonio said, “There a good place next to Cholo. Cheap and lots of land to grow!” My daughter loved looking at houses on the internet, so wanted to come see the house. Of course we ended up in one of the worst neighborhoods in St. Croix. Run down, lots of garbage around. Paloma was afraid to get out of the car. "Lock the doors," she said. But I coaxed her out, locked the car door even when Tonio said it was fine, and waded through Cholo’s outdoor mess of metal, car parts, an overturned boat and cages of chickens. Turns out he raised his chickens for cockfighting, which is legal on St. Croix. He reached in to touch one of the chickens through the cage and it gave a good swipe and there was blood on his hand. Another chicken was blind and a pet to Cholo now. It is my secret plan to convert him from cockfighting, and I figured my dream to have chickens came true, and it’s mystically tied up with being a rescue mission. Getting juvenile chicks out of there before they have enslaved and savaged.

Regardless Cholo is a great guy, a simple fisherman who gives away more food than he sells. I made gallons of carambola juice with what he gave me. He gave Tonio a bed of sweet peppers along with the chickens. “We grow all these peppers and, like gold, you watch, people buy." I wonder if my penchant for gardening will turn into anything professional rather than merely survival. Around here you can throw anything in the back of your car and sell it on the side or the road or in the K-Mart parking lot. We shall see. Because I'm writing the memoir AND I created seven new collage art pieces this full moon weekend. Didn't I just say I was slowing down? Yes, I'll just stick to cooking and yoga and storytelling for now. Which reminds me. Today there was an article I read about 150-year-old newly discovered fairytales have been published. Never before seen. There's a wonderful new Turnip Princess to read about, a prince, an old woman, a young woman, a bear, a curse, a magic nail in the cave wall. Such excitement to find new fairy tales! Those images bump around in my body's flesh like a pinball machine, bounce off of the skin and muscles, leave a little bit of psychic residue behind for me to absorb into the heart and cough out as a dream, a word, a thread of imagination and insight into this world and existence.