E' cosi'

I could feel blood pumping through a mosquito welt below the middle knuckle of my left ring finger last night when I cracked the front pages of a new chronicle of sorts, and it reminded me that it's time to chew the fat a bit.  Whoo, where to start.  I guess at Renuka's place where I met Gabriela and Krishan and Francesco, my new clan of cousins.  We shared a room dancing with bugs and beetles, with a wood-burning stove, high up in a desert mountain white trullo cave, big old tree in the bathroom, and a trip to the toilet meant a squat into white rocks with a smart little hole at the bottom.  I ended up leaving early to hitch-hike up to Blera ourside Rome, middle of nowhere land, a rolling green pasture place, big oaks I think they were, rarely an olive in sight - THE CIR it was called.  And we took off all our clothes and walked barefoot in the forest for days and days and ate big heaping handfulls of nuts and grapes dripping with seed sacs, dirty as soot, bits of hay in our hair like little pups, and I remembered for the first time in years that big, big love that makes the world go round.  I had forgotten how to share so much.  I left there feeling like I had grown somehow younger.  Caught the train toward Napoli to then catch a bus to the mountains of Avellino, and came very near to being robbed by a group of 6 men - smartly saved by a new friend who caught what was happening just before it happened.  Back to city life.

To put plainly what happened in Avellino, there was a sort of worker uprising, me and 7 others, a strange abuse of time and expectation, I arrived and was made minion to a dirty confidence from the proprietress about the others because I was the only one who spoke Italian.  We were all unsure of what kind of sad pitting us against eachother was being plotted, but nevertheless I told her we had rights, we were there to work for her but also as volunteers of our own accord, and that if her treatment and mess couldn't be different I would be leaving in the morning.  "Come vuoi, come vuoi!"  So I did.  Me and the Norwegians and the Canadians, all of us setting off for a bus stop in the fog of dawn, uphill, not really knowing where we were going, just knowing we weren't staying there.  I called Francesco and Gabriela,  and oh, God, incredible love.  They cheered and said, "Come!  Come to Bari!!!  We wait for you here!" I was so, so excited I could hardly stand it.  They met me there, Franchy with his mustache and suspenders and Sicilian black hat, dapper and musical and so alight, Gabby with her slender, dark figure, yellow creamy eyes, shouting, "Rebel-Rebel!", and Adriano, too, curly-haired, a baby, a man who sings like Elton John at the piano, and we flew back to the house for what has now been the most gorgeous revival.  Franchy lives in a castle, and all of us, even him, don't know how he got it.  Enormous sweeping veranda, Patrizia was there waiting, we lit the candles, sang Magnetic Fields songs, broke the hammock from too much weight and poor Franchy got smacked in the head with a pole.  It's been music out the ears, making food, Der Amerikanisch Freund and recorded poetry listening parties, radio-era story-telling.  I have been here for days, eating it all up - and soon we start the hitch hike up to Firenze for the 3 day Festival della Creativita'.  I'm then passing to Salerno for more farm work.

Spoke with my mom last night and it's gotten really bad.  It seems she thinks I have an accent of some sort, which, I guess didn't surprise me because I can feel in my mouth that something funny is going on in there, and can't think of English words as clearly anymore.  Anyway, the bigger reality is: I am scared.  I bought my ticket back to the states.  I don't know what it means to come back to that place.  I feel so at home here and am frightened everything will just be the same like I never left; so then what does any of this mean - did it even happen?  I have been perfectly content to move about freely without anyone telling me where to be or what to do, and came to the realization that I have to do this all the time - that coming back to a place is really just a means to get me out of there again.  I don't think there is anything that makes me feel more sane.  I had forgotten so much about myself before I came here.  I found it again.  And I don't want to lose it.

This is all.  Talk soon.