The Queen in the Well

A Modern Fairy

 Tale By Sydney Solis

Once upon a time there was a Queen who lived in a castle.

The castle was deep in a vast forest, surrounded by a great garden sitting high up on a mountaintop.

The castle, however, was in ill-repair.

Where once a well flowed with wine, it was now dry. Where once a garden bloomed with trees of golden apples, it was now withered. Where once the great halls of the castle were filled with gold, now it was darkened and covered with vines.

What had happened was that long, long ago the Queen and King had had a great wedding ceremony in the great hall. Golden rings were exchanged with vows of deep love.

The Queen’s three most faithful servants raised three golden cups in honor of the Queen and King. "Long life, love, joy and faith."

But just then, the Demon King and his legion of demon warriors attacked the castle. They swept through, destroyed the castle, kidnapped the King and stabbed the Queen in the heart.

The Demon King cast a spell on the castle, turning the three faithful servants into trolls. Everyone else vanished.

The Queen survived, and the trolls carried her down to the dungeon, where they watched over her. Magically, she recovered.

But her recovery had taken many, many years. It had taken so many years to heal, in fact, that she no longer remembered the King. She no longer remembered that there was anything but the dungeon or anyone else except her troll servants. And all she could remember was the face of the Demon King.

One night the Queen had a dream. She dreamed of a well. And in the deep, deep well there was a man. There was something beautiful about the man, she felt.

When she awoke from the dream, she asked her troll servants, “Could there be such a thing as a well and a man inside the well?”

“Absolutely not. There is only darkness and the Demon King’s sorrow.”

But night after night, the Queen would have the same dream of the charming man in the well. Her heart would feel a pang of excitement, hope and mystery, something she had not felt in a long, long time. This feeling brought back a memory, something she could not quite put her finger on. Yet she felt it.

Meanwhile, the King had finally, after years of intense battle, defeated the Demon King. Because of this battle, the King had acquired certain powers. He had the power to see far away. He had the power to shape shift, and he had the power to become invisible.

After the Demon King was dead, the King’s heart instantly felt for the Queen. He used his power to see far ahead, back in the forest, on the mountain, in the castle, in the dungeon, and there he saw his beloved.

He raced back to the castle as fast as he could. He did not understand what had become of the castle and was saddened for his Queen. He saw the place where so long ago life held so much promise and was now but a heap of ash.

He rushed through the decaying halls and flew down the steps to the dungeon. The trolls were asleep. The King called to his Queen.

“Queen, Queen, it is I,” he said.

But the Queen was frightened by his sudden appearance. She screamed, the trolls awoke, and the King fled in confusion.

“My poor Queen,” he thought. “She must be so broken.”

The King went back a second time but the trolls spotted him instantly and had only to show their nasty teeth and claws that were like sharp knives for the King to think of another plan to reach the Queen.

“My Beloved must be reached by not so ordinary means,” he thought.

The King again searched the castle. He discovered, buried in dust, the rings that were exchanged. He found the three cups. Then he set them about the castle. He went to the well, climbed down it and changed himself into a frog.

That night, he slipped into the dungeon while the trolls were sleeping and whispered in her ear, “Queen, Queen. Did you know that there is a well outside this castle? And that inside that well there is a great treasure?”

The Queen stirred at the thought of the well. Just like her dream. Could there be such a thing? She wondered. She awoke and looked at the frog.

“Queen, Queen, follow me up the stairs, you will see for yourself! There is a well with a great treasure in it! Come! Come!” And the frog hopped up the stairs and out of the dungeon.

The Queen tiptoed past her trolls and climbed the stairs cautiously. She looked about, and in the darkness saw a great light.

“That is the door,” the frog said. “Go to the door and you will find the well.”

“Is there really such a thing? Like the well in my dream? Like the man in my dream?” She asked.

She moved toward the door, but the trolls suddenly appeared.

“Queen! Come back! Do not go! Come back to where it is safe. No, there is no well. There is no man. There is only sorrow beyond there!” And the Queen went back with them to the dungeon.

That night the Queen dreamed of a golden ring. The frog came again, snuck past the trolls and whispered to the Queen.

“Queen, Queen, come! Did you know that in this castle there is a golden ring?” the frog asked.

The Queen stirred. “Just like my dream. Where? Where is it?”

“Up these stairs,” the frog answered.

Again the Queen climbed the stairs. She saw the light in the darkness. She followed the frog a ways further, and there she spotted a golden ring. She picked it up and a memory rushed at her heart, a flood of love, as she remembered the face of her beloved King. She remembered the moment they exchanged their vows of love for each other. A tear swelled up in her eye.

“Could it be true? That my beloved exists?” the Queen wondered. But she dropped the ring.

The trolls, however, had awoken, and once again they coaxed her down the stairs with the words, “No. Forget about it. Stay with us where it is safe.”

The next night the Queen had another dream. She dreamed of three golden cups.

The frog came again and the Queen stirred.

“Queen, Queen, did you know that farther on in this castle, farther than you have gone before, there are three golden cups?”

The Queen rushed up the stairs, saw the light, walked past the ring and found three golden cups. Instantly, her memory flooded back again. She remembered her faithful attendants, the joyous toast and the face of her beloved.

“Could it be real? My beloved is real and that I have my faithful friends? My beautiful castle and garden?”

But the trolls awoke, and the Queen again went back with them.

That night, the Queen had another dream. She dreamed of a bright light in the middle of darkness.

The frog came to her and said, “Queen, Queen, did you know that there is a well outside the castle and that there is a great treasure in it?”

The frog dashed up the stairs flew outside, went down the well and transformed himself back into the King. But the King made himself invisible and returned to the castle.

The Queen immediately rushed up the stairs, rushed past the ring, past the three golden cups and suddenly she heard the voices of the trolls.

“Come back Queen! Don’t go! It’s too dangerous!”

But then she heard another voice, “Keep going, my love. It’s true. Believe it. Believe in your dreams. There is a well with a great treasure. You will find it. Go now.” Then the King returned to the well.

The Queen dashed to the bright light, hesitated before its radiance, then pushed herself outside. She saw the frog sitting at the edge of the well.

“Follow me,” the frog croaked.

The Queen looked deep into the darkness of the well. She saw the little frog and she pursued it down, down, down spiraling steps. She came to complete blackness, as the light above had become nothing but a tiny hole. She could not find the frog.

“Frog, frog where are you?” She cried out in fear.

Just then, a great light appeared behind her head. She saw her own face lit up in the water below. And upon her head was placed, a great golden crown. It’s brilliant light filled the whole well.

“Here I am,” the King said, as he stepped from behind her and stood next to her, gazing at their images and radiant golden crowns reflecting in the water.

The Queen remembered everything. Her heart overflowed with joy, love and faith. “It’s you. It’s really you, the man from my dreams. My King. You have returned.”

The King and Queen came up from the well. The spell lifted and the entire kingdom came back to life. The well bubbled up wine. The trees bloomed golden apples. The vines receded around the castle as it was restored to its golden splendor.

The trolls returned to their human form as the Queen’s most faithful attendants, and all of the castle’s people returned out of thin air.

They had a second wedding. The King and Queen exchanged rings and vows of love, the three servants raised their golden cups and everyone lived happily ever after.

Backwards We Spell Japan

Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters of our names spell JAPAN. We always knew that. We children always knew that our father is Dutch and that he is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. It was during World War II. He was born on the island of Java. Before it was called Indonesia. Before, when it was a Dutch colony run by the Dutch East India Company. One captain Straub was our seafaring ancestor who married a princess from the island of Madura.
The Dutch traded coffee and sugar, quinine and indigo to bring back to the motherland, and tea that grew on plantations cleared from the jungle. My father lived on tea and sugar plantations, with my Oma, his two sisters, and my grandfather Straub, a mechanical engineer who kept the plantation machinery going. He starved to death in a forced-labor Mitzubishi tin mine POW camp outside of Tokyo. I know him only as a charcoal drawing on white paper hanging above my father’s bed.
“Those dirty Japs,” Mom always says. “Thank God for the atomic bomb.”
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp because Mom tells everybody. The people with blank faces at St. Ambrose Church that mom forces me to attend, to my neighbor Leslie’s mother, to Lou the skinny milkman who nods and nods and nods.
“They don’t know about the dirty Japs, Patti,” she says to me. I tell Mom about the Holocaust we are studying in school. Gritty black-and-white films of shriveled corpses bulldozed into pits, Jews’ hair made into rugs, their skin into soap. “Tell your teacher your father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says. I do. My teacher stares at me bewildered.
“Is your father Japanese?” No, no. I shake my head. “Is he Jewish?” No, no. I can’t speak. I feel it stuck in my throat. My family is in the wrong concentration camp.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We go to the K-Mart, Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. With Mom, who chases down blue-light specials for cheap blue-and-red plaid shirts.
“Come on, kids, hurry!” she says running.
It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. August 6, 1976 in Boulder, Colorado. We stop at the snack stand for white hoagie sandwiches with ham and lettuce and mayonnaise. Mom orders water, but Nancy pleads for Icees, and Mom thinks, and then says OK. We hold the waxy Icee drink cups with polar bear triangles on the side that Albert cuts out and mails in for free cheapo gifts. The Icee cups full of red slush that make it easy for Nancy and me to shoplift red fingernail polish in.
“$4.95,” the girl behind the counter says. She is bored, with blond-feathered hair. She glosses her lips with a sour grape Bonnie Bell lip smacker. She stares at Mom’s nose, broken in 1943 when she was kicked by a horse. Plastic surgery wasn’t too good back then and now her nose looks like someone mashed a wad of silly putty on the tip.
“Do you know what today is?” Mom asks. The girl shrugs. “It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. When we bombed the Japs.” I press my face to the glass, watch my nose leave a crescent of steam.
You know, my husband is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says, fishing through her big, black secondhand handbag. “If we didn’t drop the bomb, none of these children would be standing in front of you.” We suck our Icees, bite the straws, shoulders hunched, backs turned. We disappear into our own fantasy. We are not here with Mom. Not with this moment.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says. Mom can’t find the money. She can find the car keys at the bottom of the bag, along with the broken lipstick containers, cracker crumbs and dried lemon slices swiped from restaurants. She can find the coupons, the dry felt-tip pens, the spare Kotex that will catch her diarrhea that suddenly comes on out of nowhere, because she ate too many tomatoes or drank too much black coffee. The diarrhea that drops in small brown bloodstains behind her after she quickly pays the girl, then shuffles to the bathroom at the back of the store.
Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. We wolf down our hoagies sitting in the yellow and orange snack booths waiting for Mom. Nancy is the oldest, older than me by six years. Then came Albert, ten months later. Irish twins, my father says. Then came me, born late, the day after Christmas, 1966. And then Jeanie, two Februarys later. Mom says we were accidents. Four 10-pound accidents. She could have found somebody rich, married Liberace, or Onassis, or somebody else, she says. But she asked our father to marry her, and she got us.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We are packed in our house together, like the thousands packed into the concentration camp, in the monastery at Ambarawa 7 where Dad lived for three years as a little boy. We are packed into house that has no dining room and no family room. Jeanie and Albert are together in one bedroom, Nancy and me in another. Then Mom and Dad in the big bedroom. But Mom is everywhere. She is in the oversized painting of fishing boats washed on the shore, mysteriously without fishermen, hanging crooked in the living room. She is the collection of pen-and-ink caricature drawings on the wall, her oversized head looking like a young Johnny Cash with long hair, her hand posed with a writing quill. She is the innumerable scattering of out-of-date books, astronomy, chemistry, world encyclopedias and communist China film strips grabbed from the free box at the Boulder Valley School’s discard sale. She is the neighbor’s trashcans that she digs through, searching, pulling, hauling things back to the house, old wood, broken mirrors, or locks with no keys. She is the popcorn-yellow paint in the kitchen laced heavy with gray cobwebs and pork sausage grease splatters, the pork sausage grease saved in a coffee cup that smells up the kitchen, smells up the house, fouls my heart. She is the cut up clothing laying all over the floor, on every floor, in every corner, heaped like refugee rag dolls, along with the piles of records, ripped up hand bags, old cans of blue paint. The blue paint she painted the outside of the house without finishing the job, the blue paint that streaks the back of the bathroom door, that is all over the porcelain toilets, all over the scuff marks on the tips of her shoes.
We know our father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp.
“Scrape your plate,” Mom always says. “I should put you in a concentration camp and let you starve.” That’s what Mom says at the dinner table while we stare at the trash piled high on the fake wood table -- the elastic cut off from Dad and Albert’s old underwear, the coupons glued together with spilled milk and mold, the thimbles, newspaper clippings, nuts and bolts, the unwashed dishes, dirty knick knacks from garage sales, the dusty plastic flowers falling out of a dented aluminum tea kettle.
We eat Mom’s cooking, eat chipped beef that was boiled in a plastic bag, or chew green peppers stuffed with white rice off of chipped plates and drink from faded, plastic glasses that once had pink and green beach scenes on them. Mom found them last week at a garage sale for a quarter.
We hold Mom’s cooking in our mouths, peppers stuffed with rice with no flavor. We wipe our faces with paper towels when she’s not looking and unload the mouthfuls in them. We slink under the table. We try to escape. I pick through the broken cookies at the bottom of the wooden cookie jar, brushing off the tiny bugs and old crumbs clinging to them.
We know our father was a child survivor of a concentration camp. How he starved. A 10-year old boy, taken from his mother and sisters and put in a camp for old men and adolescent boys. The Jongenscamp. Surviving on clothing starch, snails, grass or scraping the ultra-thin layer inside a banana peel, or filling his belly up with the compressed straw that was for the guards’ pigs, or drinking from toilets in the dark of the night, or crouching by the bamboo fence and waiting for something to eat, for something to crawl under the fence and into the camp – anything -- rats or snakes that he grabbed by the tail and whipped to break their backs and eat them raw.
“Look at this!” Mom cries. “Look at this last drop of milk you have wasted! Sit back down here and drink it. People are starving to death!” Her mouth is a rectangular slot of false teeth lined with shiny wire, clenched, carving lines deep as dry old cheese into the corners of her mouth. All I see are her waxy pink-gummed false teeth that slide out of her mouth and sit in a glass of water that is never changed. The glass of water on top of the rusting medicine cabinet in the bathroom that Mom, using her zigzag scissors, pasted over with sticky contact paper of sailing ships. I see the false teeth, yellow hunks of food stuck between the teeth, floating and trying to escape. They sit in front of the mirror dimmed by years of white toothpaste splatter where I stare at myself brushing my teeth with my blue gun toothbrush. I am thin, thin, skeleton thin, knobby elbows, tall for my age. My Dutch white face, heart-shaped with wide Czech cheeks and a pointy chinned, is shocked by my dark brown hair that I hate, stick straight like Dad’s. With my green-brown eyes I stare. I don’t think. I don’t feel.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. I see Dad sitting on the rattan couch that was once new from American Furniture warehouse, now covered with layers of unsewn, unmatched tattered fabric that was on sale at So-Fro Fabrics for 35 cents a yard.
Dad sits alone on the couch listening to Madame Butterfly. The part where she finds out that Pinkerton has a new wife. A cone of sandalwood incense burns He has taken pills for his migraine headaches. The headaches he gets every day to some degree. Sometimes bad. In the middle of the night, waking up sweating. From remembering something. Or thinking of it. He takes codeine, amatriptaline, bottlesfuls. Their yellow-brown plastic containers sit next to his bed on the bed stand next to the picture of Jesus that glows in the dark. The empty containers fall, roll under the bed. Some tall and thin, other fat and big. With long pills, yellow pills, round white pills. When the headaches are really bad he goes to the hospital and they stick a needle full of Demerol in his neck and he sleeps for days.
Tonight the headache is bad. Dad took many pills. He is slow. I walk up behind him and without a word gently place my hands on his head. I ask God why. Why? Why do people suffer? Why did my father have to go through hell as a child? Why did he survive?
My hands run like seeping water through his hair, gray, greasy, limp. My hands pull his hair, just like the nurse he had in Java. She knew just where to twist and pull a section of hair to make a headache go away. I pull his hair. Pull out the tigers and snakes roaming the jungles of Indonesia, when it was the Dutch East Indies. Pull out the pain, pull out the war, pull out the headache that will leave Dad in bed with a wet washcloth over his eyes. Unable to move, drenched in tears and sweat, unable to hear in the darkness of his room or go to work at his job as a mechanical engineer beneath fluorescent lights in a yellow brick building in Boulder.
My fingers push on his muscles, the bulging tight muscles in his neck that connect to his head, that surge into his eyes, forcing them closed, unable to watch Star Trek or Buck Rogers or the Project Blue Book episodes that we have seen so many times we know the dialogue by heart.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says, searching for something, alone in the kitchen as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them. “Rocco moco poco pup. Shit, dog house.” My hands pull Dad’s hair harder.
“Shake your hands,” Dad says in his thick Dutch accent. “Shake the pain out of your hands. Get rid of it.”
I shake and I shake.
“Cat, rat, trap, dog dump,” Mom says as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them.
At midnight, Dad vomits in the bathroom. Vomits in the toilet that is always clogged with Mom’s diarrhea that is caused by her weak bowels. Because the doctors cut her fistula when she delivered Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie, all 10-pound children.
“They ripped my guts up,” Mom tells the woman at the K-Mart check out counter. “Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters spell Japan.

Back in Action as Summer Explodes

The Queen of Bohemia’s transformation into Agent Garbo is complete. Her new mission is received and understood. Along with her new identity she has a new outfit too, complete with wig and sunglasses, and she frolics in her compound hideout ready for action, fully confident with the knowledge that things will never be the same. So she is ready. She knows beyond the shadow of a doubt what is coming. And she’s not afraid, for she understands the instructions, that there is never any light without shadow, so don’t forget the shadows. And don’t linger too long in the light, because then the shadows are deeper and a little harder to climb out of then. Just hang out somewhere in the middle, watching both. And don’t forget where they both come from. She knows; she has no control. She just goes along with the assignment and listens for the instructions from Mother. And the best part is that she knows she is not alone. Slowly everyone and everything falls into place, like stars falling into alignment as the universe spins its vortex and opens the door to eternity for all to witness. I finally got my computer repaired after six months of issues, a reason why I couldn't post new blogs. The electric here is extremely volatile, so ultimately it ate my Mac’s motherboard in January right after my sister died. I then switched to using my son’s computer, but its motherboard, too, succumbed to the fluctuating current, as did my daughter’s. That left me with an I-pad and an I-phone, which I obsessively typed up lots of poetry and memoir on the beach to get over my grief of such difficulties. Amazingly I also and conducted limited business as the I-Pad was old (2 years, ha!). Yet the I-pad was the latest casualty of the WAPA hit squad, dying on the Monday morning before I picked up the two computers that I ended up repairing or replacing from repair shops. What strange synchronicities! What severe frustration! But I figure that after so much bliss that I have experienced in my life the effect here in duality is that one always makes the shadow. It's expected and accepted. All those dark, difficult things in life are not to be denied but allowed and moved with down the river of time and yoga and meditation help navigate and teach my mind to temper its reaction to the difficulty. Certain things about living here on St. Croix can periodically get my goat and drive me nuts though. The electricity problem and expenses are real, as is slow Internet, which drives my son mad. Today it is completely out. Additionally, the phone service interruptions and dropped calls can make doing business difficult and tempt me to indulge in screaming fits. At some point, after being here a year and a half, I get a little nuts over the potholes, insanely stupid death trap of roads and bad drivers. I get tired of the bored, bad-attitudes of people in these dreadfully void of soul stores we have to shop at, such as K-Mart and Plaza Extra. The monstrosity of American bane architecture is exemplified in its parking lot culture translated down here Caribbean style mess, and I avoid it most days. But other times I must venture in for things I can’t get elsewhere. The cultural attractions are absolutely wonderful, but the library is all but dead. But there are pockets of wonderful people and some interesting things to do. Poetry readings pop up here and there, and there are some spectacular food and wine events. And of course I live for Art Thursday, and had a high point of my life, at the Maria Henle Studio in Christiansted with my first solo exhibition of photo and paper collage titled, “Order from Chaos.” It was the recognition of a dream achieved, and felt like my birthday, received by friends, art afficionadoes and tourists alike in the sheltered walls mottled by Hurricane Hugo some 22 years prior. Even though the rain outside dampened turnout, I was in bliss with my babies hanging on the wall, my Bohemian ancestors beaming with pride and nodding from the spirit world in approval of my dedication to the cause for art. Even so, briefly I thought of leaving. I can’t take it anymore, I thought. I need civilization! Intellectuals! Lower living expenses! The ability for my kids to ride a bike somewhere! But when I think of having to return to the concrete, car insanity of white America with its racism and hatred and materialism, when I think of leaving the night and morning sounds of birds, crickets, lizards and frogs, when I think of leaving the lush green palm trees and ubiquitous glimpses of turquoise blue water, I know I can’t leave. Living so close to nature has changed me for good and my heart is woven into its fabric and pulse of creation. This summer time is exceptionally full - the greens and basil all thicken from the rains, avocados and other fruit begin to weight on the trees and pull the branches down. Summer's fullness is felt as the goddess heavy with life and fruit here, as things heat up and mosquitoes flourish, and the flamboyant trees all begin to explode red and gorgeous. The avocados are getting large, the lemongrass is thick and the eggplants, tomatoes and peppers are all coming in. Passion fruits drip on the vines wound around the carambola tree. Beets too are coming in and ready to dig up and eat. Beets are my next food to work with. And I will miss the chickens! They are my pets! When I first arrived I loved this little island, settled in to work on sustainable living and prepare for the fast-approaching economic collapse. I have succeeded in that respect: I have a lovely home on an acre with loads of fruit trees. We just got a couch from a moving sale, so now we are not sitting on beach chairs any more. Tonio has materialized a prolific garden here in less than three months. I have so much basil and greens I have to give them away, and everybody is sick of pesto. Next thought is to start selling surplus and trading with friends – as the world is going to need it. I enlisted Cholo and his beat-up truck to drive out to the East End and pick up a free chicken coop from the same people who sold us the couch along with two American laying hens – Huevos and Chiquita. They are happily scratching around the yard, gorging on centipedes and cockroaches. I am reading a lot about raising chickens! But I must stay put, develop roots - deep roots. Into the depths and see what's there. Considering there are bank runs going on in Europe and the financial outlook is dire there, I remember why I came here in the first place and why I left the US mainland. This is a good place to ride out the economic collapse and social unrest. The King and I predicted this more than two years ago. First I checked out Argentina and learned how they survived the collapse. Then settled on St. Croix because A) there is abundant agriculture to live off of. Food scarcity is a real issue when oil prices skyrocket. B) Few people even know where St. Croix is, so it’s pretty much off the radar. This is a great place to escape to and start a farm and ride out the collapse! C) You won’t freeze here. Some people in Maine and the UK are freezing to death because they can’t afford the heating oil or it’s scarce. Of course we get hurricanes, but so does the US! Along with tornadoes, fires, earthquakes. I have learned to adapt my lifestyle to simple needs and eating. I don’t buy apples or spinach anymore. They don’t grow here and why would I buy them when I have such a plethora of exotic fruit here to eat and other things grow bountifully here. I have a whole menu of my original recipes that I can cook with produce from my backyard. Caribbean Gazpacho Avocado lime soup Pesto on cheesy croquets (gave up being vegan. Cheese spirit won't let me go!) Breadfruit potato salad with Gorgonzola and herbs Asian stir-fry with mustard greens, chard and Chinese cabbage Curried Pumpkin The Aunt Jean – passion fruit and carambola juice Limeade Bush tea Coconut muffins I have succeeded where my childhood failed. My mother’s idea of cooking was microwaving an egg. She never showed me how to cook, other than how to open up a box of frozen Banquet fried chicken and shove it in the oven, or boil a plastic bag of pink-flaked chipped beef. I do remember her teaching me to cook one thing: hamburger. Because it was zero carbs and she was on the Atkins diet in the early 80s before it became a huge fad by the late 90s that my late husband was on. So my mother taught me to cook only to diet, not cook to live. And that’s what I really wanted. To eat and cook to live. And to eat and cook to live as a family with others. My father cooked fantastic Indonesian food and gave me foolproof instructions on cooking rice perfect every time: 1 cup of water and 2 cups of rice. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer until done. He taught me to make “super eggs” a fried egg sautéed in lots of butter, the yolk delicately bathed in spoonfuls of melted butter until done. By high school I became a vegetarian at my Hare Krishna sister’s behest, and along with that came bulimia. Yet I cooked non-stop. A lot of it was fudge made from recipes culled from Better Homes and Garden magazine ads for condensed milk. I passed it out to my friends backstage during our theatre productions en masse. But I cooked all those things alone. I remember once making a vegetarian Thanksgiving and worked all day on a tofu turkey. I labored to make crepes from scratch, getting white flour all over my clothes, and baking a cheesecake. My mother had gone to her Unitarian Church’s feast for lunch, however, and was too full to eat my food by the time I finished that late afternoon. I sobbed at the edge of my bed, until my father came into my room and said he would eat with me. No other family members were around. My youngest sister was in a group home by then, my older siblings gone. I yearned for family, for community, to eat and connect. When my late husband was alive I had a lovely garden and had a Mormon friend whom shared my passion for home and cooking. We made homemade carmel corn for Christmas presents, canned jam from the French strawberries from my garden. I made eggplant Parmesan from scratch with the eggplants in the garden in my Betty Crocker sized cherry-cabinet enormous kitchen. My husband couldn’t understand though why I wanted to make bread from scratch or anything else when it was available cheap already made from Costco or another store. I said it mattered to me to make my own. But ultimately I acquiesced, cutting down an enormous, red amaranth stalk that grew towered over the front door of our suburban home. But I yearned still to connect to my food. There is something about connecting to the food we eat by growing it and making it ourselves. So I do that here in St. Croix. My kids occasionally help cook, but there are not so interested and preparation can be lonely for the King has been on extended absences which make doing everything myself overwhelming at time. My son will dice up onions or garlic for me, my daughter stir the homemade mac and cheese roux. They are not fond of my breadfruit potato salad or quinoa stir-fries, and they are slow to like the guanabana fruit and mustard greens from the garden. I silently prepare food for them, proud of myself that I can now make from scratch enchilada sauce, barbecue sauce and taco and chili seasonings. No MSG! No corn syrup! And at a fraction of the cost. So silly we all think we have to go to the store and buy it in a can or package! No trash to throw away, no disconnect. It’s remarkable that we have allowed corporations to take over our food supply, package it up and we have to buy it back. We sacrificed great skills for convenience and novelty. Now America is obese, sick and broke, disconnected from its source – food and the nature it came from. Yet my old life I always bought those packaged products. Never shown how to make them myself let alone that it was possible. Now I see packaged food in the stores and it seems so odd. I remember that first time I noticed how odd packaged food was, standing in the long lines at Disco food store in Buenos Aires, having had cooking and baking lessons from our tutor, Laura and beginning to make everything from scratch. My backyard food has more prana – life energy – because it’s locally made. There really is a difference you can taste and notice. Friends who come over and eat love my cooking. Tonio gobbles it up. He says there is always too big of servings. Americans eat way too much, he says. No wonder they are fat. And no wonder the world is starving too, we eat more than we need or that is our fair share. Such strange gluttony seems to have been subliminally programmed into our value system to our detriment and the planet’s but not to corporate profits. I’m getting ready to leave for the mainland. It will be nice to eat at an Indian restaurant and a Chinese restaurant I trust. A real Middle Eastern restaurant (a food truck just opened up here with great shwarma!) and other variety of food. But I'm a little afraid too. The frenzy of the mainland will likely be depressing. I will miss my simple life. Ultimately I believe when the collapse comes we will all be forced to return to what matters: love, family, the earth and our relationship to it. Instead of the world’s resources and food owned, packaged up and sold to people via corporations, we will reclaim this for ourselves and find our freedom once again. Obesity will vanish, as will depression, ADHD, eating disorders and other problems, as we reconnect to our vital threads of meaning and awe in life. We will heal as once again we will have a relationship to our families, food and environment. For it is the simple things in life that give us the most joy. It is the memory of these joyful and meaningful life episodes that we carry with us to the grave, and that satisfaction and contentment reflected on the deathbed is what sets our souls free at death, rather than bound for another karmic leftover of unfulfilled desires and lingering fears.

Reborn, the Queen Hears the Depths and Speaks with the Fish

The Depths have spoken to the Queen. She feels the presence within. It is the world revealed from within. The Queen is reborn anew, as the depths have opened to her and revealed its secrets. The radiance within is beheld with great awe and respect, as it is witnessed in every tree and flower, creature and ray of the sun. All of life is vibrating with the voice from the depths; everything that is becoming is surging into form. What a beautiful realization that is, and there is peace. Great peace, and everything shimmers with the silent voice from the deep, infused with its power and mystery and image. The image of the feather-plumed serpent, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the return of Durga and Kali. The evolution and revolution of humanity in one big giant yawn as the whole universe is pulled into balance once more and prepares for another great cycle of endings and beginnings ahead. My little Yoga Farm's official name is the Twin Birds Yoga Farm, St. Croix, USVI. In addition to my regular yoga and meditation practice here, I have been juicing a lot and eating from the garden. Spicy mustard greens from the VI Agriculture are blossoming and I have a ton. My first batch I juiced was just too spicy - like drinking wasabi. I held my nose and it all went down. And my colon cleaned out a few minutes later! This time I harvested the outer leaves and added a bunch of apples and mango juice to sweeten it up. My son still thought it was too spicy but I thought of it as a Green Mary, my drink name. Instead of Bloody Mary, get it? I have also been making tons of pesto from the trimmings in the garden, using nutritional flakes instead of parmesan and then topping it on a bit of goat cheddar and a piece of bread of Malba toast before popping it into the toaster oven I got at a garage sale. My son loves it. So does my friend Hariyah, who is in the Storytime Yoga teacher's training. Truly my little yoga herb farm is taking root. As I relish and recognize that I have made my dream come true and that I am living my own authentic life. There is such great deep peace and satisfaction in knowing that and being content. I am deeply present and joyful here, and all fear and worry subside. For a big shift is that sheltered here and unplugged from the insane commercial world, it was easier to cast out that other or critic that always lurked in and haunted the backside of my consciousness. It has been dispelled, left in the U.S. mainland where it belongs with all its self-loathing and sadistic citizens and misogynist magazines.I am the swan in Amsterdam, reclaiming my European style that respects art, nature, culture and philosophy over football and NASCAR. The garden is ever blossoming and more crops will come in the next few months. We OD'd on breadfruit. I gave a lot of it away to the school and there was so much it started rotting on the porch. A lot is frozen. Maybe next year I will try making bread with it, but for now I have some great Breadfruit Salad with Gorgonzola and herbs.  Tried an amazing fruit Tonio called, "Corazon" which tasted like a vanilla custard. He had lovingly protected the giant fruit with lots of seeds like a true heart, and the way held it in his hands it felt sacred indeed. The King came for a visit. That's why it's Twin Birds Farm, for he is my twin bird. He tried with us the Guanabana, or soursop Tonio brought in too. It's become easier and more habitual to eat out of the garden. It's an adjustment, and I do still breakdown and my body revolts and craves salami and cheese, but there is a clarity that comes from eating from the backyard, in rhythm with the moon and earth's cycles. A harmony and center location on the axis of the world tree where every second is revealed as shakti. And I do believe that things will collapse economically, most likely overnight one day soon. Everybody who hasn't been prepared is going to be like a poodle in the bush and have a very hard time. Really it's not about not having food but it's about losing your identity that is wrapped up in a false matrix that is the hard part to leg go. The death of the ego is profound and difficult. Yet I died early. Got it over with. It's not easy to take risks, give up your favorite foods and conveniences and desires, but I got an entire new life instead. It's simply liberating, and I believe I did it because I embraced my dark side. Just read my Facebook posts an you know I fling my shadow out there every day for me to honor and make conscious, lest I fling it out on some poor other soul like vampires usually who are not conscious do.  I have a  new myth emerging from my body. It has been evolving over time, starting with the mermaid that I hoisted up out of the sea after an arduous struggle in a dream years ago. And now here in St. Croix, the healing waters, the sublime ocean sinks in where there was only dry Colorado desert. The fish is there, swiring around the roots of a tree in my body. Tonio brought a fish that Cholo's son caught - a big, tuna-like fish. Cholo had been camping out at Salt River for two weeks prior to Easter. What satisfaction to eat a fish that was caught directly from the sea. It's like the fish spoke to me. I feel it is evolving from out of the watery depths of my body and second chakra. Upward dog pose is now evolved fish pose; something is emerging and evolgin in me. Something new and wonderful. I'm glad I took the risk and died to my old self. That I die every time I sit down to meditation and cut the thinking, cut the ego and merge with the depths. And from those depths I find firm footing on the Mt. Meru that came from the water. Truly our bodies are our subconscious minds, as the body is 75 percent water, and the primordial turtle, fish or makara monster that comes up from those emotions, moving forth from the pelvis, as life calls us forth on the surface, that libido pulsing on and on and on through us in the universe. That divine romance of Shiva and Shakti made sacred union at every moment of creation. The water that existed with only sky came into consciousness and formed on a mountain or a turtle's back. This reptilian instinct, our instinctual, intuitive selves rise out of that watery consciousness, escape the predators from the deep, appear as a bubble entering a dream on dry land as we used our fins and shoulders to lug us to safety. And as we took wing and evolved into birds, we now reunite reunited the bird of the spirit and mind with the frog and fish reptiles of the deep. There is the sacred alchemy. This listening in on the depths and trusting that you know and hear the instructions.  So I am reborn. In taking my retreat I have been taking a memoir writing class  online. What delight to tell my story and revel in poetry and words. I am excited that I will be also having my first art exhibit at the Maria Henle Studio here in St. Croix May 17, 2012 as part of Art Thursday in Christiansted. I've been making collages for years, and my friend Tina Henle, loved them and asked me to do a show at her studio. We have really connected on all things yoga, art, nature and politics. A great partnership is brewing and I'm excited to return to my poetic and artistic roots. It's as if the 9 years are over. I started out with Mythic Yoga and did Storytime Yoga as my children grew. Now they are teenagers, and I'm growing up too - going back to the child I was who wrote and wrote and wrote and make art and practiced yoga, meditated on the depths and reported back about it through her art and poetry. What a satisfaction to declare that "I am a Poet! I am an Artist! I am living my life courageously and on my terms!" My daughter and I attended a poetry mixer in St. Croix. It was wonderful to know poetry is revered here, and among locals. There was an intellectual set in which I read a poem, and my daughter read a poem too. We left before th body set came, as it promised to be racy. But the calibre of talent and passion that emerged from people was astounding, and it was so much fun to mingle with poets and those who love words and literature and art. I loved Especially the political poems bursting from women, as St. Croix is going through economic pains that all feel and the oppression is giving way to freedom. The past Queens of the Fireburn are calling you forth. It's time to make a stand. It's going to be a feminist revolution. I can feel it. The watery depths tell me so. To hell with the banking industry who will take my rental property at the foreclosure sale May 3. My defense is that I was had. It's all a big scam. I say I'm still waiting for my bailout from Ben Bernanke, who failed to help my late husband with a bailout when his business ran into a liquidity problem before he killed himself. Bernanke gave European banks freshly printed up cash by trading dollars with Euros back in September when they had a liquidity crunch of dollars. Why does a U.S. citizen not get this same deal? U.S. citizens don't even have a clue that it happened and what it all means.  Why did McDonalds and Harley Davidson and more get free cash?!?! A Fed audit exposed that. Where is the taxpayer represented in all this? banks win win and taxpayers lose, lose. It's all a scam, a lie, and it's time to resist. Political action is on the agenda for me as I believe that St. Croix should be independent, and I've wanted to leave the U.S. completley for some time now.  I continually write a steady stream of letters to the Avis calling for revolution and people's rights. They publish them to great response. So I am not afraid. Even though the electricity on St. Croix ate my third Mac and I resort now to using an I-Phone and I-Pad to write, I do not waver. I'm merely annoyed. Durga and Kali urge me on to fiercely speak out in the name of women, children, families, truth and justice. Great stuff happening. Stay tuned. The Earth is about to hear from the depths. What else is there for the Queen of Bohemia to do?Because when she spoke with the fish it gave her a new name: For she is reborn as Agent Garbo.

Future Shock and Island Hopping

The Queen of Bohemia decided that nine years was long enough to be outside the dream that the rest of the world was dreaming. At the behest of her prince and princess, she allowed the little box to penetrate the castle. She allowed the magical gadgets of the mechanical Gods to occupy their little hands. Actually the real reason was that she was curious. What is it really like? What do the people outside believe? What story is the Squid spinning a web of delusion and sorrow? Maybe there is some art out there amidst it all. Certainly she received the news -o-the-world via her magic box the Jin related to her each morning, but sometimes the quiet was too much. Maybe there was something missing. She was curious, and so she decided to do a little sociological study and observe the situation outside the kingdom and see if it had changed since the first King died so long ago.

 I’ve never seen a reality television show. I’ve never seen Friends or The Sopranos or Dancing with Stars or Survivor or Who Wants to be a Millionaire. OK, I did see a glimpse of the latter, but I thought the questions were too stupid, the drama and boring interludes unworthy of my precious time that is usually spent working or with children or ten thousand other more interesting things I can come up to do with my time. I cannot imagine voluntarily sitting through a commercial. Zombies. Zombies I think are the only ones who could do that, in my opinion. In actuality I have watched very little television in the nine years since my husband died. We sold the four TVs that dotted the house. I welcomed the quiet from the scattering noise of the television he would turn on after work. The quiet in the evening that used to be penetrated by reruns of Law and Order. We had this game of seeing actors reappear in different episodes and remembered which ones they were. I thought Sex in the City was trite and stupid. No wonder those whiny American women dind’t have a man. What self-absorbed skeletons, I thought. So out the televisions went. I loved the quiet, and only went over to my father’s house to view the Olympics or see the presidential debates or catch a glimpse of the Japanese tsunami and earthquake footage. I did get Netflix some time ago and watched a few episodes of Weeds when I was sick a month ago and was tired of reading. I identified with the main character who was widowed and would collapse a lot in the face of obstacles. But I lasted six episodes before I felt the plot line was a bit silly and the characters unbelievable even though I did agree that all that Suburbistan is the source of America's malaise and lack of imagination and the biggest reason of why I had to escape it. But since the anniversary of my husband’s death is March 23, I thought I’d check it out again.

Plus Tonio really needs it, to watch baseball or the news in Spanish or know what time it is. Just looking at the remote makes me anxious. I can’t channel flip because it seems to be a thousand channels and one hundred of them seems to all be shopping networks. Twiggy London fashion showing me her elastic waistband pants. I do stop at Montel and his juicing infommercial channel. He has the psychic Sylvia Browne on as a guest. She seems so odd-voiced and looking, and I can’t believe the panel of people who want their future read. “Will I be successful?” Browne’s answer is unintelligible and I don’t know how to turn up the television volume. Who sits through this? I decide to read Pablo Neruda's Cien Sonetos de Amor instead and my kids take over with full finesse to figure out the remote. I also broke down and got I-Phone, since my son was crying for it. I needed a phone for Tonio and my daughter needed one as well, so the price was right for its safety and technological educational functions as well as better service at the house. I was shocked at the I-Phone’s abilities. An Alvin Toffler Future Shock moment for sure. “Does it take soil samples?” I asked the sales woman, waving it over the counter like I remember from the Star Trek episodes I watched a child. “No.” “How about diagnose illness?” I waved it over her body.

My 14-year-old son was hanging out in the corner, pretending he didn’t know me. I drop things a lot, so we got a military-style ultra protective case with a clip on so that I could wear it on my belt and alleviate about ten hours a week from my schedule that is devoted to searching for my cell phone around the house or digging for it at the bottom of my bag while driving. It's positively Borg. Am I am in danger of being sucked into conformity? I spent the afternoon researching mild endocervical dysplasia on the web with the I-Phone, since that was my result of the biopsy. No worries, the doctor said. We’ll see you back in six months. I’m to rest, boost my immunity system, start juicing and be proactive. I had been going crazy eating from the garden, but as usual, I got bored of that. My body craved cheese and I went bizerk eating it for a while, even broke down and got some gourmet salami. Then my face broke out.

Back to the garden of eating. I pruned the tops of my basil this morning, the first day of spring, and made some great pesto. All other plants are too small, so I will venture out and load up on vegetables at the farmer’s market this evening. I’ll start juicing, blending and remain low key, in retreat in my garden paradise, content to write, do art and hang out with the kids on the beach this spring break. Sun drunk, my friend said it was, that lethargy after an hour of so on the beach. I am sun drunk indeed, relaxed and ever healing in my own way and time. I was able to get off island for 36-hours and fly to St. Thomas to meet the King for a lovely escape. A 20-minute flight on the little sea plane over turquoise water flown by pilots in khaki shorts. I never liked St. Thomas for it's hit you over the head tourism and zombie shopping American style. But the water from our hotel room was calm and gorgeous with boats bobbing on the water as the lighted jewels of Charlotte Amalie twinkered on the hills across the bay.

Sex is such a rejuvenating experience. I laughed and cried through half of my 124 orgasms. Tantric training was the best investment. It had been two months since I'd seen him after all. Love heals all. Really I think sex is the best medicine, wringing out every stale piece of toxic energy stuck in the koshas and body cells, bringing in fresh prana to penetrate the cells. What a world we would live in if we all just had more sex, all the soldiers trapped in America's wars would come home, rip off their rusty blood-stained armor and fall into the arms of the goddess every time, making the world anew again instead of destroying it. And now I sit and write and hang out with the kids for spring break, making plans for our trip back to the mainland this summer. I reborn and healing in every way.

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.

Eternal Thoughts from the Garden Divine

It rained hard last night and was actually cold. The sound of rain pounding on the roof woke me up and so did the breeze. The early mornings after a rain are the best. Everything is so fresh in the air and I wake up to the sounds of the earth calling. Rising out of the earth, the sounds of animals and birds flood the bush with their voices. I remember that sound from the yoga farm I stayed at with the kids in Argentina. How the sounds of twinkering animal voices pulled me from the twilight of dream sleep and into the outer world. My son said while on the yoga farm, "Hey, we don't fight so much here." True. How can one be upset when one is in the garden divine?

I pushed my freshly made bran muffins made with garden bananas onto the kids to some success before Tonio drove them to school. Then I sat down to meditation on the balcony over looking the garden. My alter is a wooden vegetable crate I brought back from Argentina. Some people bring back souvenirs from their travels; I bring back vegetable crates. It makes a nice little table. I have a bell, some candles and a picture of the shri yantra. I typically practice Buddhist style with no particular thing to gaze at, but I felt the desire to meditate on a yantra and that was the one that popped up to me. In meditation, just to sit is the work. To watch my busy mind take pauses and begin to grasp some strength and clarity that comes from the practice is enormous. I start to carve away a lot of clutter, a lot of chatter and weight of ideas. The fear has disappeared. The purity of the moment comes through and it permeates my being and prepares it for peace to enter. Yoga practice moves the energy of the morning, and it is all a sacred act to set the day straight with a foundation of deep anchoring in the body. And at 45, a regular yoga practice keeps me well, pain free in the body, and looking pretty darn good. And that is joyful. Things have been so joyful and peaceful since moving here. It is a shift of energy 1000 degrees. The bizarre drama of the past two months, even the whole transitional year in St. Croix, disappear as a closed book. Now I begin again. I will sit down to create an outline of my memoir after I warm up writing here my journal of the Queen of Bohemia in her St. Croix kingdom. With Tonio the shaman man/gardener providing food and wisdom. “This is my entertainment,” he says of gardening. It is my peace and healing. Tonio farms armed with a machete, digging up the soil and planting seedlings for a vegetable garden he cleared from the oregano brujo. He made a special area for my kitchen and medicinal herbs around the plantains he planted. He planted the shoots of lemon grass in a row, and parsley and lemon balm will follow. I'd like to plant tumeric and ginger eventually. We transplanted the racau, which is like cilantro, and it seems to be hanging in there. Tonio saved seeds from a passionfruit we got at a friend’s farm, and we now have passion fruit seedlings growing in pots too. He even saved the seeds from tomatoes I planted from seed that I got from a hardware store. They were so plump Tonio liked the variety and saved the seed. So that new generation growing in the garden now. The rain was good to bless and drench the newly planted tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and basil. “Gracias a dios,” Tonio will say, kissing his hands and lifting them to the sky. The unemployed should find such solace in doing such simple things aligned with nature. Why are we “employed” at all? Why can’t we all just hang out, do yoga, meditate, garden and eat well, dance under the stars, tell stories, make love, and worship the earth and spirit with each other? I don’t really need much else. When you are living on these types of places the whole world just drops away. It is profound. It really is a little piece of paradise, as eternity rests here in this moment in the garden. I really am creating a little yoga farm here. Starting with some herbs and kitchen vegetables. Transplanting fallen avocado pits that are sprouting into pots, doing a lot of yoga in between. Add it’s all yoga. On Sunday I brought the kids down to the garden and we prayed by the plantains. Prayed as a family for the first Sunday in our new home. We prayed for new beginnings and chanted Om Gum Ganapatayea Namaha, as I’ve been chanting that ceaselessly for days now. It is my refuge and now it is my reality. Amazing how mantra can transform your reality as it transforms your consciousness. Oh, the things you create. Watch out! I’ve been cooking with the eggplant and cabbage from the garden we picked before leaving the other house. Made a great quinoa Asian dish by stir-frying them all up. Tonio and I sat in the garden eating leftovers for lunch. He had never eaten quinoa before. I told him quinoa comes from South America and that the Quechua people ate it. It came down from the goddess, legend has it, and it’s a complete protein. Natives didn’t have any malnutrition problems until the Spaniards took over and destroyed their culture and forbade the worship of the plant. Now we worship her all over again. Worship the goddess, the earth, plants and food. We worship our bodies, our families and the deep love that springs from all of it. It’s hard for me to do anything else. My heart only wants to be in the garden, do some cooking and care for the kids. I teach an adult yoga class now for the teachers at the school. It keeps us all sane and fit. There is a science fair at school My son’s entry involves behavioral psychology. My daughter’s is about making slime with borax and glue. These types of simplicities heal me the most. They go straight to the heart - the heart of the family. All the home arts give me great peace and security. That bond and knowing that everything is going to be ok. Everything is perfect as it is and we are all here together, bonded in family, the garden and home in unity and in love.

Little Piece of Paradise

The Queen of Bohemia is in the garden. She is in her little piece of paradise. It took a very, very long time to get there. There were many terrible earthquakes, dragons and fierce fires to deal with. They nearly killed her. But she prevailed.
The difficulty was necessary. Because the difficulty nearly killed her, she was able to find the key. The long-lost key. The key that unlocked the door. For it is death that opens up the doors of life. And in between those two slips eternity, rooting up from the crack like a world tree, embracing everything in its branches.

It is time to return to writing. To telling the story. It has been a long time since I've written. Buenos Aires was a pause of personal reflection and adventure for my own eyes only. And since moving to St. Croix I have gone through extraordinary transformations. So much has happened to me in the last five months that it is a show-stopper. A hesitation to inquire into eternity and a personal testament of faith and perseverance. I survived. I stepped through the threshold. Now I thrive. What remains is for my story to be told. The whole story. The true story. And it's a good one.

I sit on the porch on the new house I moved into March 1 here in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I overlook an acre of fruit trees, aloe flowers, a pavilion, and the basil garden that my Puerto Rican farmer friend, Tonio, has started. Just over the bush I can see aqua peeps of the Caribbean Sea. It is here that I will do my healing. My healing with story and yoga. For the garden is so healing. Truly it is paradise to witness the hours beneath the palm trees and night sky. To be surrounded by nature, four dogs and my beloved children. To do nothing but slow down, harmonize and balance with nature all around, and tell the story.

I return to meditation each morning on the porch. To just sit and rest in the peace that slips in between the thoughts. I return to yoga practice on the porch as well, where a cool breeze caresses my skin and reminds me how lucky I am to be here in the body, alive, in such a beautiful place. Truly my heart has journeyed arduous and with much despair to finally reach such a place. It is as if after so many years of obstacles and struggle I have busted through to the other side. The transformation is complete. The past is gone and only remains as a wing of a story on a shelf. For I am reborn anew. A radiant bird rising out of its own fire and ashes. Phoenix of the world recreated as me in a new setting, theme and body.

So I begin. In addition to my daily gardening on my little Herb Farm in St. Croix, I will reflect in memoir on my life. How did I get here? What is the truth of my life? What needs to be told? What story remains in my body to be witnessed and expressed. It all comes out in the garden, on the yoga mat, in meditation and in the story. For God likes stories and I like to give a good show.


Tonio has started the garden. Tonio is my 71-year-old Puerto Rican farmer neighbor who used to care for the first house I rented. My absentee cop landlord abandoned him and his dog. I fed them all and we bonded over gardening and sustainable living. Ultimately the creepy cop landlord evicted him when he would not do repairs he was not licensed to do, and then when I protested, made a list of problems with the house that had not been solved and took Tonio to Legal Aid, I was evicted too. So we fled and now he helps me drive my kids to school, takes care of my car, cleans and gardens in exchange for room and board. There are four bedrooms in the main house for me and my kids and my art/writing studio and a separate cottage for Tonio. The landlady, a woman from Granada, lives down below and gives us different things, tables, waffle irons, even use of her Jeep. Turns out we can have goats and chickens after all! Tonio knows how to care for everything. He's been on his own since age 10, doing every kind of job from taxi driver in New York City to truck driver in New Jersey, to working at a local cement plant for $5 an hour. He speaks in limited English, yet is highly intelligent and skillful, especially in the ways of gardening by the moon,(you cut wood from the bush after a full moon so that it does not rot) what it smells like if it's going to rain, and what plant is good for what medicine. He knows all the names of the trees and how to care for them and cook them. He brings me fresh passionfruit from the garden when they're ripe and teaches me to make tostones with plantains. He is the shaman that I should have studied with years ago when I was in the Ecuadorian Amazonian jungle. He is so valuable to know the earth. To be directly involved with your food, from its seed to the table, is so profoundly satisfying. It is at the heart of all yoga, this sadana of practice to connect to nature and its powers and wisdom. The simple act of life and home and family all roll out from my Householder Yogini heart. I am so grateful.

In my slow poke way, I'd love to create a perfectly sustainable place in preparation for economic downturn. At least it's already started here in St. Croix with the closing of the Hovensa Oil Refinery. The Virgin Islands is in a state of economic collapse. But that's what brought me here. I knew it was all coming. This was a perfect place to weather the storm that is happening all over the world. How to survive. Here, lots of food; everything grows. Warm weather, drop-dead gorgeous landscape and ocean. Good people. Lots of challenges but I could never deal with the mainland again to live, even though I like to visit for intellectual and artistic stimulation. Gas prices are going up, but avocados, breadfruit, passionfruit, mango, bananas, limes, coconut, carambola, guava, all are within reach of my eager backyard hands. What an adventure, to live back on the land, back with nature. The peace I feel. The joy and happiness. My little family is finally healed.

Tonio got started right away. First by transplanting two plantains from his old garden back in Estate Enfield Green where we lived, to also transplanting my basil. I want to grow lots of basil for pesto. And lots of green peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers and onions for gazpacho. And of course I write about and photograph the garden. I will be writing my memoir from the garden, and I will have a show of my photographs at some point. Happy storytelling, yoga and gardening. His friends Cholo and Max stopped by to see the garden. They knew everything about the plants too and identified a few chicken sheds from behind Tonio's cottage. I'm looking forward to learning how to make breadfruit punch and juices from the other fruit trees, some so exotic I cannot pronounce their names. I want to know the stories and medicinal values of the plants, and I want to use them. Like take a bath in bay leaves from the bay leaf tree, learn how to make shampoo from avocados and aloe and make bush tree from lemongrass and peppermint.

And so the story continues. From the garden, here in my little piece of paradise.

थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया

थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया - बॉडी मेमोइर्स, थे मेमोइर ऑफ़ माय कोच्चय्क्स

The Queen of Bohemia in Monte Carlo - June 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Monte Carlo - June 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Corsica - June 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Corsica - June 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Buenos एरेस

The Queen of Bohemia in Buenos Aires - August-December 2011.

The Queen of Bohemia in Grand Central Station - New York City, New York. July 2011.

The Queen of Bohemia in Grand Central Station - New York City, New York. July 2011.

पोर्ट्रेट ऑफ़ थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया अत आगे २२. बौल्डर, कोलोराडो 1989

Auto Retrato of The Queen of Bohemia at age 22. Boulder, Colorado 1989.

थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया इन पलका दे जों मिरो - बार्सेलोना, स्पेन सप्त. २९, 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Placa de Joan Miró - Barcelona, Spain
Sept. 29, 2011

Body Memoirs: The Memoir of My Voice Part I

NOW ON WITH THE STORY....

HERE ENDS BOOK I: THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA CLEANS HER OWN HOUSE AND BEGINS BOOK II: THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA LIVES IN ST. CROIX.

TO BE CONTINUED.......

TUNE IN!

THE RETURN AND BACK AGAIN

The Queen has left the desert kingdom forever. She boarded the chariot; she took the iron horse. Now her final ride on the great eagle awaits to whisk her off to the great city. Far, far away she is going. Leaving behind old memories, a battlefield of dead demons, and a dry climate that leaves her coif with very bad hair days.

She said good-bye to Prince Pepe, left with King Albert the Good until she can send for him. She spent her last days saying I love you to so many friends and family, before finally paying a visit her court body worker to wring the stresses of her last visit to the desert kingdom from her body.

As she watched the flat, brown prairie roll by her chariot, she remembered the golden swan that helped her make it to this point. Despite the time away from her new home in the kingdom far, far away, she made it though with the help of the golden swan and voice of the King.

For Independence Day, The Queen of Bohemia will be in New York City.

I sat at the gate waiting for my flight to NYC. I awoke this morning with anticipation, realizing it was fourth of July weekend and it would be very busy at the airport. My friend, Wendy dropped me off at us air with my luggage packed for my teaching and training at Kripalu and the Omega Institute. I was ready to leave Colorado, where I have spent 36 of my 43 years of life.

I learned from my earliest travel abroad experiences in college that you have to carry your own stuff. I had it down with one large suitcase containing my Storytime Yoga bag and clothes, and two carry ons of my business and laptop, cameras and IPad. When I arrived at the vacant counter of US Air, the airline promptly alerted me that the flight was actually with United. I had to lug my heavy bags to the other side of the airport at the east, not west terminal. I was determined to leave Colorado for the fourth time! Nothing could keep me here!

United’s counter was crazy bad with a line six lanes deep. I had missed a plane four years ago spring break getting through the process of my children set up in Texas while I go to the gathering of the Joseph Campbell Foundation at Esalen. But it was so crazy I missed my plane before I could get my kids off. And I never heard from the Foundation again.

I felt panic, seven years of panic and rush swell up in me. I remembered that I am sustained by the grace of Lord Shiva. I chanted the Maha Mritunjaya mantra. I called the King. He said he would send some sailing magic my way, and that this final obstacle would not prevent me from leaving or reaching my goal.

I asked the attendant who was directing people why it took so long. Just
heavy fourth of July traffic, she said of her automated, meaningless job clothed in her drab, uncomfortable uniform. The price you pay for independence, I thought as I waited, breathing in and breathing out and observing the present.

Just then, an announcement blared over the airwaves that curbside check in was now available. Saved! I wasted no time undoing the tethers of the cattle ropes hear they use on the public at airports and lurched my way outside again to the curb. Short line! Hallelujah! Big exhale. Squat, too. Thank you King! But, oh, no. Oh, god. The man behind the counter says that my big check bag is too heavy. 62 pounds $100 fee. “Oh I'll pay it! I don’t care! Just get me on a plane out of here!” “Sorry, can't do overweight baggage at curbside.”

I said I will never fly United again as I lugged my suitcases back to the long line. I had lost my place and it had added an extra line! Doom! I thought. Just then, I received a flash of insight. A lot of the weight is my Storytime Yoga bag filled worth my mysterious objects to entertain little children with during yoga and storytelling class. It’s a heavy leather bag that was my late husband’s. We bought it in Florence in 1996 on a trip to Europe. It was one of the best times of our relationship;

After his death, I used it. I liked the weight of it and the fact that his hands held it during business trips. I kept its little lock of which I do not know the code and I kept the United Red Carpet Club red tag with his name Frank Q. Solis III scripted on it.

I stopped in the middle of the airport, unzipped the giant bag, and took out the Florence bag. Zipped up again. Bolted for the curbside check in once again. Saved! Both under weight! And the attendant checked me in all the way to New York City. I thought I had to have another step at the self-serve kiosk from there. I was so happy I could have kissed him. I smiled and thanked him so much and proclaimed loudly,” I wish you a very wonderful day, sir!” And he looked happy that he could find meaning in his automated, meaningless job he performed from his drab, uncomfortable uniform.

I made it through security no problem. A woman and her son were ahead of me She said, cute skirt and shoes, where did you get them?"

The man behind us laughed as I proudly announced that the skirt I bought from a thrift store in Boulder, a triumph of in my Bohemianesque fashion.
I said the shoes were from my friend Wendy who I stayed with before I left Colorado. She gave them to me at the last minute because I was going to the Yale Club of New York City as the Queen of Bohemia and the dress code required closed-toe shoes and covered shoulders. “You will be watched,” the Yale Club website said. I thought I’d give them something to watch!

I did not want to leave Buenos Aires and return to Boulder. Once back, it was like I had been in a dream. My hair wilted under the dry air, leaving it flat and choppy. Oh, no! I thought. I must get back to a humid climate just to have good hair! I returned to Colorado to tie up lose ends. Primarily to finish moving but also to do the third annual Mythic Yoga Story in the Body retreat at Blue Window Arts in Rollinsville, Colorado, which Wendy owns.

This year we made staffs and wands. The prior years were masks and shields. I told the myths of ancient India and contemplated them in our bodies as we did yoga and meditation. We listened to our bodies to find a symbol or myth that it was speaking. What was coming up or needed to be heard or told or dealt with. I coached them individually in the fine art of oral storytelling against the backdrop of beautiful nature around Boulder, Colorado and Wendy’s place.

One participant's story had an old man. Something about that image of the old man stirred me. A wise old man, the father, the hermit, masculine. During yoga practice this came up, as I listened to my body and asked questions.

Wendy led us on a hike in the forest. I found several sticks. I ended up with three. A first the father - a heavy, tall one that felt good in the left hand, which I painted Aboriginal with my left. The second the mother - a tall, slender one which I wrapped with rigid rap and still remains unfinished, but I thickened up the core, symbolic of that are I need to strengthen and move from more, rather then my shoulders and upper body. The third was a small one, the child. I painted it and turned it into the magic wand, wrapped with an I-Ching coin leftover from a candle as well as two wire bands, honoring a dream I had of them recently. I sculpted a little golden swan from clay to perch on a short branch that came from the stick, a memory of the faith I felt in myself in Buenos Aires.

I realized that the masculine, the transcendent, the father, Shiva, Krishna presence was always with me. A masculine support system I had never felt that everything will be OK. I don't have to carry the whole world myself. The father will provide. The Father and I are One. Always making me feel secure and sustaining me. The fear was gone. My faith complete. Holding the big staff made me feel secure. The wand manifests my unconscious desires. A wonderful retreat indeed.

I tied up lose ends moving. I no longer have to worry about Speer. My assistant runs the business end of things and I get to create. I sold my car to Wendy’s husband and am so relieved of not owning a car. Also, my ex decided to declare bankruptcy and get out of the $30k he owed me, half of which was my pre-marital Toyota Sienna Mini van that he drives around searching for real estate business in a bow tie I bought him. I saw him twice before I left. Once while I was riding a bike. And it was such a great bike and such a beautiful day, when I saw him I just couldn’t be angry. I was so happy that I was leaving for New York City, so I just gave him a big, sloppy wave and a smile. Nothing can disrupt her peace inside. Or so I have Shiva and Krishna to remind me otherwise.

I did have to hire a bankruptcy lawyer because of it and I didn’t have the money to pay my final month’s rent so I used my big deposit, clearly outlining to the landlady what repairs it should go toward.

She flipped out, threatened to evict me while in Argentina. She posted a three-day demand for rent, telling the boy across the street who was my son’s neighbor friend that he shouldn’t come around anymore because we were being evicted. I went to Argentina. Nothing was going to keep me from there. And I didn’t want to engage in that emotional pit with her either. I wished her well. Sent her calm letters in the face of uncertainty. At some point I suggested she carefully reread my original letter and she calmed down after that. Her tone changed and I figure she misunderstood something or maybe she read my blog. I don’t know.

I didn’t clean the house, or the carpets. I was too exhausted moving. I left my late husband's heavy desk that I used as an art table. I let it all go. I locked the keys in the house, and drove down the hill. So excited to reunite with my children down the road, to find the healing before the wounding. I visited Jeff Pontillo, body-worker extraordinaire, for his amazing session and helping me understand my uddiyana bandha and open my heart. It has been a return and now I am back again.

I will be with my children and do our yoga and education while traveling the world. I visited my sister at the Denver Krishna temple. They are now running the restaurant, Govinda’s. We talked about family, children, service. How mom didn’t do anything with us. She read books, wrote poetry. But she didn’t show us any basics, like cooking or how to clean something.

We both love doing those things. She said that service of children is everything. That feminism is about family. We were told in the 70s and 80s to be the super woman, when all we really wanted was a choice. We were forced to be mothers. And our mothers didn’t want to be mothers. Our mother wanted to be a journalist, not a stenographer, and our grandfather had her taken off for shock treatments to break her of her desire. But the big mistake was embracing the market economy. Motherhood, education, health, art, science. Those things have value beyond a buck. Children, life, home, good food, music, art, making love, laughing, teaching, cooking. Life is really simple and so beautiful. You just have to stop everything else and make it a priority. You have to stop the machine. And then you will learn to live and then life is just one awe-struck moment to the next.