A break-away breakfast launched us down the road. Seven and a half hours to go 450 miles, including a stop at a Subway shop in a small town in southern Georgia (Unadilla). There we found a booth in the shade because the early spring sun was hot down here. Two nice African-American women waited on us, one even gave us a brand-new and still-warm apple pie turnover. Delicious. Two white men came in, tieless and in shirtsleeves, one wearing a white smock, the other with a stethoscope draped around his neck. They got Subways without pie and set near us in the sun. They were talking about medical problems. A family of five entered, all wearing flip-flops and with a red tilik on their foreheads indicating they were devotees of Shakti. Mother wore a long silk dress with a dark red banner draped over her shoulder and wrapped around her body. We wrapped ourselves in our car again, air conditioner on, radio on, and disappeared into the blur of traffic.
North Florida seemed quiet and old. Things move slowly out here in these woods down close to Gainesville. We went for a long walk in the dusk that never ends, walking slowly with our friends, walking in a timeless land. We passed through a thin place somewhere along that dusty trail and vanished into another space. It was a chance to be together in the dream-time, walking under the camellias and kumquats with the smell of honeysuckle under an old lavender sky. Later the moon took over the night sky, repairing a worn-out world of old trees out of swaying Spanish moss and fresh green lariope.
Next morning was a fast trip in a hard rain down to Tampa for a Cuban meal in a restaurant that had a far more auspicious reputation and decor than its food turned out to be. Later the rain intensified and we reached for Sarasota cruising down a river that was called I-75. The traffic was mostly double length semi-trailers, all of whom were going faster than my 85 mph. Finally, after the rain began to pool on the road, creating hydroplaning problems, I slowed to 55, then was just got off the interstate for protection. I had thought we were driving through a dense fog, but found that was just the moisture blown into the air by the trucks. Supper with friends was a fancy shrimp creole.
We awoke in a bright blue world to strange birds calling, grass lushly growning, astonishing flowers and domesticated trees. This is what it is like to live in a city. Of course, the people who do live here don’t think that way, they feel they live way out in the suburbs.
In to see the great Sufis. Much ado. People coming together who normally would not be seen together; people of power, people who know, people of knowledge, prayer and purse. Esoteric words, exotic glances, hints of what is to come, someday soon, maybe, maybe not.
Then the great leader slowly enters, tottering, nodding, tapping with cane; smiling and casting visage of awe . . mama bird bringing manna from heaven.
He carefully sits and slowly speaks: “. . . what we think of as being the world is only a fragment . . . God is a potentiality that becomes a reality through us. . . get in touch with your not -yet devoloped potentialities . . . the greatest need on Earth is a sense of the sacred . . . there are no boundaries to your being . . . . what is that secret yearning that you really want to be . . . ”
The Havana Sandwich Shop in Atlanta is what Cuban food is meant to be. Well worth the 474 mile run out of Sarasota the next day. Home again later that night, back up on a secret ridge high in the sky, with happy puppies, far from the rain, egrets. and palm trees, far from nice Cuban spices and food, far from mama bird, back in the blue mountains. The thermometer reads 43°, it was 27° last night. It is winter again.
Outside, tonight though, the first peepers call out, practicing their synch out of the mountain mud as a late February moon rises red, and climbs up over Onion Mountain to join the stars.
