That's Saffron

Every day is like its own opera, slicky little mushroom tongues, and grease fingers, black water vertices, billy goat nut foraging, and I want to, I really want to commune more, but this is where we are, crumpled in the pocket like tissues, and I try and save these moments, to remember them all, for sharing, for YOU!!!  So let's go.

I am alone in a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, a home colonized by 34 ROOMS.  I cannot believe it myself, it's just me and Sebastiano the farmer, who has, in a short time and to his credit, passed on a wealth of knowledge regarding the foraging of wild herbs, things I thought were weeds until we threw them in the pot this week.  The scope of his 7-roomed library is so astounding I am trying to ingest six books at the same time before I leave in a week.  I will admit that when I arrived I asked if I might sleep in a different room, every single night, in all seriousness, you know, just for fun, to which he muffle-throated a polite no.

The first day he drove me up to the hillside of a mountain, unloaded me and the dog, along with two baskets and a bucket, and said, "I'll be back in three hours."  So I wandered, collecting walnuts with ice pickle fingers, stopping for pauses of incredible wind and the tying of scarf tighter around head, when I found an abandoned stone house, the only things inside being two old mattresses and a picture of the Blessed Virgin.  It made me so content, finding this abandoned place, I stayed there for some time, slacking off, kicking dust and smelling things.  The next day, he left me in the woods again, this time on another piece of land to forage for mushrooms, or the wet leaf pockets hiding the little moon hats, but it was raining cats and the hillside was chocolate milk drizzle, and steep.  (I did think it a bit cruel of him to leave me in the roary rain like that...)  I had collected so many delicate fungi when, coming down the hill, I was spun onto my backside and slid all the way down, toppling the basket, over and over like a damn football, and me, following uncontrollably behind it, thrashing and smearing each one into the mud with my own rear end.  When I finally hit a soggy halt, I stood up and cursed that damn hill to high hell like my grandma taught me to do when you banged your knee - curse that chair!  I had to listen to The Magnetic Fields immediately following.

Later in the week, we started the mixing of a certain goo that we blessed onto the fields in little drops with our hands, like the Pope annointing an ocean of heads.  The stuff is pure hummus (the rich earth part of soil), and has to be prepared at just such a temperature, exact measurements into pure spring water, and must be dissolved by hand, creating a swirling water vortex, breaking it, then creating another vortex in the other direction, for an hour.  Looking into this black abyss water with my arm down the center, back and forth, over and over, a curious mind goes ducking under a big sky of pictures (life can feel so long sometimes!), memories I had completely forgotten about, holy little statues.  I have loved immensely.

Now here there are some effects that I should mention about Sebastiano.  He is owner of this land, plus many other pieces chunked over the world, South Africa, etc., the whole thing disgusts me to be honest, and there have been a few conversations where I have had to consciously bite my mouth for fear of ziplines that could have me kicked to the curb.  Sometimes, working for him is a little like swallowing this Chinese Medicine tea I was getting in New York when I was having kidney problems and dreaming too much at night and was prescribed a froth of tree barks, beetle nests, and seed pods.  The stuff looked like coffee, seemed delicious, but once settled on the mouth it was a hearty series of gags, every retching sip.  He is an elite hunter-gatherer with a sniffer like a Bassett, and scampering through woods behind him, trying to maintain pace with those rubber boots whisking ferns, I contemplate this tall-handsome-Clark-Kent who reminds me in moments of a Phillip Morris advertisement from the early 80's, smoldering cigarette and helmet hair, and I get the solemn sense he enjoys being boss, it brings a certain pleasure to give out orders, a sport, really, having someone take care of him.  Like a pup throwing his own tennis ball.  Some days I walk in the door so beat it feels like I am dragging myself behind me, and will be caught, mid-stair, "Rebecca, make us lunch, I have some emails to write."  Dinner, too.  Everyday.  When we finish a meal he gets up and leaves the dishes on the table and tells me to clean it all.  And this is the most disturbing thing I have strangely gotten used to here (the culture around domestic stuff is slightly different, dark ages).  If I were a man, I don't believe he would expect this cleany-washy-cooking when I come in from working in a field or on a mountain the whole day.  (And for doubters, it's not just foraging, it's a lot of muddy hauling, hiking, lifting, and building.)  It's not like the worker uprising on the last farm.  I'm really quite alone.  It's a little foreign to feel incapacitated in this way, and I really don't like it.

Luckily, there is a wonderful character around these parts I have taken to studying because he is fascinating.  If I didn't have to condense these little chapters for the purpose of painting a swift picture of it all here, I would write a book just on this man - Saverio.  I first encountered him while following Sebastiano on the tractor as I drove the Panda.  We had just gotten into the village when I saw a short, dark, and bearded elder man jump out in front of the tractor.  His black hat was sort of smashed and looked inside-out, jean jacket all wet, and he was clearly drunk.  At first, I thought he was a bum, but then I see him get Sebastiano to turn off the tractor and talk to him.  So I'm just waiting, running the motor, watching, and the guy starts to yell and curse, gesturing all the big Italian gestures, "Are you out of your mind?!"  "Do you take me for an idiot?!"  "I don't friggin' know!!"  Sebastiano is yelling, too, but it's so wimpy in comparison - this guy is honestly kicking his ass.  When they are finally done, Sebastiano tells me we are turning around to follow the guy.  As he's turning the tractor, the guy comes to the window of the Panda and drunkenly, flirtatiously, replete with eyelash, slurs:  Ciao.  Saverio.  As we exchange introductions, I am enthralled, secretly excited at this sousy mystery man with the power to turn us off course and slap Sebastiano with the kind of sense I wish I had the guts for.  We go back to the house, where, adjacent, there is a worksite on Sebastiano's land.  Saverio exits his rickshaw, jumps atop the roof of the remodel, and starts screaming at the top of his lungs, throwing things at the workers, mocking them grotesquely right up in their faces, grabbing little tools and seems to be attempting to shove them inside people's noses.  He's jumping up and down like a monkey now, a monkey with a bone in his hand, and his tennis shoes are making hell on the aluminum sheet of a stand-in roof, while Sebastiano tells me, Go...take a sack and find some corn or something, for the pigs, just fill it.  But the corn pile is right next to the tantrum zone, so I am now front-row-center, loving this whole thing, mainly because I'm the only non-male-non-Italian there, so there is a feeling of immunity somehow, "Whew, glad that ain't me..."  But just as I start having this gloaty little thought, who should he come for next??  That's right.  He looks me square through the eyeballs as I'm squatting on the ground trying to grab up the corn cobs, somewhat hurriedly now as I see him hop off the roof and head straight toward yonder me, still the lunatic rage, and I stand, perhaps instinctively from the desire to defend my nostrils.  Only when he gets to me, he stops, reaches out to touch my hair, all booze, and gruffly, tenderly, whispers, "Rebecca, sei arrabiatta?"  (Rebecca, are you angry?)  Me?!  No, I am not, I reply.  Are you?  He smiles and pats my face like Brando, "Parli bene Italiano."  (You speak good Italian.)  Then he cheats towards the audience a final tableau, walks to his rickshaw like an emperor... and blackout.

Incredible.

But all clever small talk aside, things continue to flicker behind masks upon deeper currents.  I have been thinking a lot about ego these days.  I'm so sick of the thing that seems to reside where I least expect or want or even am conscious of.  I don't ever want to be 'clever', to be a clever person, and the ego seems to thrive within this coil.  Taking myself off the interweb seems to be the first step in getting closer to spiritual authenticity, to my own lifelong relation with creativity, for the things I map for future endeavor seem like they could happen so much quicker if I weren't wasting my energy in other directions.  I've removed myself from facebooking and myspacing and soon think I will shut down this blog as well.  The cost is too great, and only for me am I speaking, toward a loss of personal honesty.  I can thrive in (perhaps too many) moments on the imaginary plane of my own experience.  Whatever it's worth, this is the direction I am intent on.  We'll see where it takes me, this is all I can assert.

And it's already October.  And I'm going to be honest.  I haven't changed my clothes in, perhaps, weeks.  I brought two pair of socks with me and now wear them together daily, grabbed a sweater from the free box on the last farm, boots from a flea market, and of course the mud pants - this is the uni. The persimmons are jumping off, grape leaves getting browner, tomatoes hanging on for dear life, and all around us, fields and mountains turn greener, wetter, muddier.

This reminds me to tell you:  I bought a ticket to the United States of America.  I am comin' home for the holidays!  Come December, let's DANCE!!!  Maude has already snared me into some kind of San Franciscan Pier 70 dancing duet before I break off toward northern Cali and then Oregon, en route to the great Emerald megalopolis.

Until then, ragazzi, near and far, I send wishes on the wind for you and yours, that when we meet again all is right in the world as ever it was.  I love you around the moon and back.