<< aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper? >>

it is coming to the end of my time at sundance.

my time abroad has been extended by one month which puts us square in the middle of this story. it is ten weeks now that i have been gone, and as of today i have been away for longer than i have ever been away before (again).

this has been an amazing, and an unexpected stay at sundance where the sounds of nature just about drown out the sound of the prayer call from the nearby town. it is pretty here and still, and everything waiting there for me to just discover it, and a lot of it i did. many days i prayed for rain so i could stay in the dining hall, MSN'ing or putzing, instead of being out in the world trying sometimes too hard to "discover" it. i stood ambivalent on top of turkey and was very pleasantly surprised in dug-out little churches with faded paintings. some days i overnapped. i hiked. i walked. i trudged. i chased the chickens.

i learned the words: honesty, hope, faith, courage, integrity, willingness, humility, love, justice, perseverance, vision, service. daily i fed the black cat a bit of cheese even though i know i probably should have not.

i had the hugpounce emoticon sent to me -- these two yellow smiley faces, and one creeps up behind the other, pounces and hugs. crazy kids these days and their fancypants animated smileys, but i did appreciate it. i am far from home.

i did little things that are good for my soul and my karma, i really did, but i feel i deserved to be bitten by that dog. leave it at that.

and i have healed. and although i was so swollen that for a while i had no lefthand knuckles, i have healed now and i have learned a new song on the little blue guitar and it is very much fun.

and littler things. like being able to ride the highway buses, and when it it time to move on i will be able to buy my own ticket, orient myself, and make my way to the cave cities of cappadocia.

i have acquired a taste for creamyrich halvah, but you still can see my bottommost ribs. that is how i like it.

the flowerbeds have been upturned by hand and shovel now and the earth is wet. today you can see the water running off the land, through the tall grasses and over the feet of the contented ducks, into the creek that flows to the sea but runs backwards when the moon is rising. it is close to nature here: you can see the actual cycles. i am a little sad to be leaving.

yesterday a bird flew smack into the window of my cabin and was stiff and motionless on the ground when i went out to see what had happened. she was tiny and very fine, soft feathers, on her back in the wet leaves. i sat over her for a long time wanting to do something but of course there was nothing to be done. this morning her body was gone when i checked again. maybe she was just severely stunned. maybe the cats got to her. anyways time for me to leave sundance now, and what i have done here i have done.

a hemingway's breakfast

this morning Edith Piaf came singing through the glass windows of the kitchen into the dining room as i ate breakfast with the cats.

sounds

ruchan's girlfriend produced and shared a big bag of sunflower seeds and for half an hour you could hear people crunching them.

now the sound of rain.

jigs, double jigs, hornpipes, reels and airs.

be reminded

efandim: a tale of rescue and pepperoni

here is everything i know about the man -- his name was fatih -- who rescued me last week from olympos after i missed the last shuttle bus out of the fardown valley and tried to walk out up a dark forest road under a full moon, with bats flying around my head, screeching birds and howling dogs echoing, and the sound of power saws tearing through firewood or maybe tearing through the arms and legs of victims like me, found lost and wandering and taken back to dark, wooded cabins with dirt floor basements.

fatih did rescue me. i wouldn't have made it out otherwise, though i intended to try.

he had to be rescued himself.

he drove a little honda motorbike whose headlight went brighter or dimmer depending on the engine speed. he would drive me up to the highway provided we could stop for him to get warmer clothing first.

zooming back down the gravel road we hit one pothole straight on and the bike shuddered. then we went around a tight corner and the back wheel gave a little bit and the bike chain came off and became caught in the metal frame and bent the gears of his bike and mangled everything. the chain was totally jammed, and two of its links had split, and the little tools fatih carried in his saddlebags could do nothing.

he phoned for a friend to bring other tools and we waited. luckily i'd brought more layers because i could feel the cold air pouring into the valley, moving past me and down, as the night settled in.

we moved the bike off the deserted road. every car that passed -- about one per ten minutes -- slowed down to see if we were alright. we waited about an hour for fatih's friends to arrive, another hour and a half for them to effect the repairs.

one old man with glasses on a string around his neck and a tiny little cell phone parked his car in the shoulder and waited with us the whole time. he let us wait in his car that had plywood seats with thin ratty cushions overtop. when fatih's friends arrived he produced a ratty set of rusted iron tools from his car and offered advice. only when he saw that fatih could start the bike and that it worked was the man satisfied that we were set to go.

by this time it was nearing midnight. by this time i'd long missed the last highway bus to get me back to sundance. luckily mehmet was just an hour from where i was and was heading to sundance the next day, so he came and got me and we went together that night. fatih gave him directions. in the meantime he took me to his house. he would have let me stay there overnight if i needed to.

"do you like eggs?" he asked once we'd gotten his kitchen warmed up. "and pepperoni?" they were organic eggs, the yolks very yellow, given to him by a neighbour, and that hard dry sausage that stays out on the counter.

his house was tiny but it sat on a big stone patio and overlooked six thousand square metres of fruit trees and vegetable gardens stretching down the hillside. he used to work for a pharmaceutical company, he told me, but he'd had it with city life and he moved out to the country. hard to give up many things but he said he'd gotten used to it. the only thing, he said, was that he missed his son, who stayed in ankara for university. but when we got to his house there was no one waiting for him and you could tell no woman lived there.

the stove was in the centre of the room. the tv was off to one side. there was a radio. there was a backgammon board. no oven, just a gas range on top of his washing machine. his laundry was spread out on the sofa and the desk to dry. there were bottles of cleaning supplies behind the sink. on top of the microwave, there was a plastic container of perfume.

his bedroom door stayed closed. the floor was tile. he offered me his own slippers.

we ate on a plastic table he brought in from outside and covered with a cloth -- omelet with pepperoni and lots of butter, yoghourt, a salad made with red peppers and hot peppers, bread which he toasted whole loaf on an electric griddle, honey.

he drinks a turkish kind of tea with bergamot. mo had a cup too when he came to get me. then it was off to sundance and safety.

this is all i know about the man who rescued me -- that, and that he rescued me.

just the facts, ma'am (3a) : the building with mosaics

the most impressive building in the ruins of olympos is forgotten, now, dug out and restored only in 1992 and known simply as the "building with mosaics." the building with mosaics is deep in the forest. you get to it by walking down a long stone walkway.

who can trace the canyoned paths
cattle have carved into time,
wandering from meadowlands to feasts?
layer upon layer upon layer
of autumn leaves are swept away --
something forgets us perfectly.

it used to be a two-storey building with a courtyard. now it is rubble. the tile mosaics all lie smashed and broken on the ground. the domes and arches that held up the second level are broken too.

the mosaics are done with very small square tiles, fitted into swirling or angular geometric patterns, gummed onto big slabs of stone. they are caked with a thousand years of dust and dirt, and grown over with grasses.









very neat.

that is what i tell myself. truth is i walked right over something important, didn't even notice. i would have missed it if i had not read the informational plaque on the building's other side. it said: the floors of the building with mosaics once were decorated with motifs of vines, as well as birds. i had not seen any birds in the tiles. so i went back and looked more closely and there they were.

living is easy with eyes closed -- a theme of my time here at sundance.

the stone walkway carries you out beyond the building with mosaics, taking you past a creek where reeds grow tall and where frogs sing as the sun goes down, back to the main site.

just the facts, ma'am (3) : olympos

there are ruins everywhere in turkey but the coolest ones yet have been the ruins of the city of olympos, which is a twenty minute bus ride up the road from sundance.

it was so big i had to go see it twice, and even then i could have spent more time there. the city starts at the water's edge and goes back from the beach, buried in the forest. parts of it go up the hillsides. at the top there is an akropolis.





the trees eternally overgrown. everywhere, dead wood snaps beneath your feet, the sound of it, dry like it is bonedead since forever. every step makes dry leaves rustle elsewhere as if something is following you, always out of sight. sometimes the wood is bright white and fresh where the trees are cut out of the way of the path, sometimes old and dry and grey, as if the forest grows over every year and has to be pruned. water collects everywhere, mucky leaves floating, and mud; a stagnant pool at the bottom of the monumental tomb.

in the forest you are always walking on rock -- small broken up cobblestones or big blocks of stone tossed and the corners and edges chipped. big stone columns far removed from any structure, tossed there or broken and spilled down from buildings higher up. tons of grey stone quarried and moved, and undone like nothing.



and the awful roman temple that i remembered as having had stains on the altar -- this was the first time when i visited it in the whispering forest after dark -- but in fact there was no altar, nor an altar with stains, when i visited it in the daylight. still, this would have been a deathly structure once upon a time, presided over by cloaked men, chanting from under hoods, dark tapestries that allowed no echo. now the sun coaxed the leaves up through the pieces of the collapsed ceiling.

<< powers and princes of earth, and you immortal
lords of the underground and afterlife,
jehovah, raa, bol-morah, hecate, pluto,

what has a brilliant, living soul to do with
your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac
and troughs of smoking blood? >>

on the other side of the river is the necropolis where the flies still buzz and the flowers seem to grow brighter. someone had gathered a bunch and put them inside one of the broken open tombs. already they were wilting. soon they would be dry. then dust.

you can't see the whole ruin site at once except from on top. each part of the ruins is sunk into the forest now, linked only by trails littered with rock.



white and yellow flowers grew in the dirt collected in the stones of the city wall leading out of the ruin site. the valley where are the ruins of olympos was full of hostels -- pansyons -- the Lemon Pansyon, the Orange Pansyon, even the Canada Pansyon. other than the people at sundance these are the only people i've seen in weeks. there were hammocks stretched out in the trees and children in swung them. people in traveller's gear and speaking german and french and english, strangers, a girl in a shawl of earthy colours and boy who had her bag while she slipped it over her head -- and thinking that might soon be me, but also knowing: that << no one knows what's gonna happen to _anyone, except the forlorn _rags of growing old: and anyway i wrote the book because we're all gonna die >> ... walking back up to the bus station past shops with gourds hanging in the frontyard trees, then onto the bus and up and out of the valley, making one stop for more passengers at a little restaurant where they were arc welding over customers' head as they drank tea beneath.

gentle creature, be careful with your heart

<< i know where i can find you :
in someone else's room >>

today i am sad.

evidence of cyclicality

yesterday the dining room doors open and butterflies sunning themselves on the leaves of the plants inside the windows. today, evening comes, soft rain over sundance.

people arrive each day, as the season comes in. an avocado stone rooting in a cup of water on the marble counter.

the black cat with pieces torn out of his ear, and tiny grey hairs that poke through around his eyes. my wounded left hand healing.

most all the lip balm i brought with me now used up. only part of one stick remaining. two hair elastics lost. time to restock on chocolate.

already, summer shoes -- the ones i have now are to last me through september. blue nylon pants, which have lasted since my early days in the rave scene, wearing through now because i wear them every day here. i am going to fix them with bright yellow thread, then kill them in the desert.

songs under my fingertips. in a notebook, the word: believe.

astrid kerr who tells me now she has her burning man ticket. my playa-sister bec who writes: gentle creature, be careful with your heart.

you can call me flower if you want to (2)

"just like that bird" goes web 2.0 -- and not a moment too soon

check out my new label widget on the left. it uses font sizes to show the relative importance of each of the labels in my blog. visually note the relative importance of "dairy products" and, say, "istanbul."

they don't show you this on youtube.

i had an about hour to kill after visiting the church of saint nicholas in demre last week, before i had to catch the bus to tekirova via finike. i wandered up the street keeping my back to the bus station and found a park that caught my eye for having an as-yet-uncorroded bronze statue that i decided to go check out. then i noticed that the tile patterns in the park's sidewalk were interesting in their own right and sat down on a bench to copy some of them into my notebook.

up to me comes this kid with a monkey face and he starts making monkey faces at me and running around me and saying things. he was maybe five and had his shirt tucked into his pants. and then a girl of maybe six came over, and another girl of maybe seven, and they stood there, and the younger of them said:

"where are you from?"

"canada," i said.

she stood there and kind of shifted her weight from one foot to the other, bouncing her head side to side with it, and the monkey kid kind of danced around, and a few more kids drew near. and as the two girls talked to me i could see kids in the playground start drifting over.

the smaller girl reached up to me with a sesame seed in her fingers, twisting back and forth on her feet. i took the seed from her, still in its shell. knowing what i was doing i put the whole thing in my molars and crunched it and swallowed it. she and her friend squealed, causing more kids still to gather and chatter in turkish. and the girl stuck her chin out with a sesame seed crosswide in her teeth to show me that you had to bite the shell away first, then you spit the rest of the shell away, pta.

"it's perfectly good cellulose," i explained.

"where are you from?" said one of the boys.

and the girl kept handing me seeds and i'd eat the whole thing and then some of them started handing me just chewed-open seeds, damp.

and all this caught the attention of the older boys on the basketball court and they started to come over too. the one that carried the basketball as they started to come over was fifteen, maybe sixteen, into puberty at any rate, and caught my gaze with his and i panicked. nowadays you don't just have to worry about being swarmed: they record it on cell phone cameras and post it to youtube.

"where are you from?"

so i told them and told them and one of them said, "football?" and i said, "no, hockey," and they started listing soccer players one by one and asking me if i'd heard of them, which generally i hadn't.

"paris hilton?" said one from the back.

"oh yes," i said, "paris hilton."

they wanted to know: how old? married? children? fenerbache?

and all the while the monkey kid kept dancing around and poking at me until finally i grabbed him by his belt end and everyone else laughed and the kid pulled back and i pulled until his belt buckle broke and he fell flat on his can, and everyone else laughed more, and monkey boy got up and picked up his belt, shouted some rude-sounding things and gave me the finger and left.

but he didn't leave all the way: he just stood off at a distance and circled and kept looking and me and gesturing. i kept trying to coax him back and finally another kid chased him down and brought me the belt and i tried to fix it: it was fixable, you just needed pliers to do it. monkey boy's dad would be able to do it. i gave the belt back. i said i was sorry. soon monkey boy was patting me on the shoulder, no harm done. his pants had an elastic waist anyways.

the older kids showed me their english books and pointed to the questions they'd been assigned that day. and they asked me what i'd been drawing and so i showed them and they started trying to read the pages, and one of them came across a sentence describing the statue of mustafa kemal attaturk and one of them pointed excitedly and said, "mustafa kemal!" and asked me if i knew about him.

"cumhuriye," i said, which means republic and which strangely is one of perhaps 50 turkish words i know, and they liked that.

they asked where i was staying i showed them the stuck-on olive oil labels on the front of my notebook -- "Laleli: Burhaniye, Balekisir." and they asked where was i going tonight and i told them i was catching a bus to Finike, and they discussed, and next thing i knew it was decided that they were going to walk me to the bus station and soon.

so we set off towards the bus station and one kid of maybe thirteen kept tugging at my sleeve and saying, "time, this way," and he kept tugging at me when i would stop to write bits of poetry in the others' school textbooks. the bus station was about five minutes away. it was dark by this time and only the older boys were left. when we arrived the oldest talked to the owner of a nearby candy stand and procured for me a chocolate wafer bar, which he handed to me after pulling open its wrapper.

"turkish," he said.

then a bus arrived and the boy who'd tugged at my sleeve pointed to it and read for me: "fi-ni-ke." i hustled to give about three of them my email address and one of them took a picture of us all with his cell phone camera, and each one of them shook my hand and i stooped to let them kiss me on both cheeks. i got on the bus.

the same kid as before yelled at the window: "paris hilton! paris hilton!"

the bus pulled away and the kids all waved from outside, as the people on the bus looked at me and out the window at this gaggle of turkish schoolchildren in school uniforms. then to finike down the long black road. when two buses pass each other here on the highway they flash their lights and honk their horns.

my life in art

this is what the dog (not the dog that bit me, another one) thinks of my guitar playing:

mucho peynir

notice the can on the left says Beyaz Peynir, Net 17 kg.

peynir is cheese. so, 17 kg of cheese.

easter greetings

easter greetings to my loyal fans.

grandma, this one's for you :


this is the first picture you see when you go into the church of saint nicholas -- very impressive. it is painted on the inside of a stone arch about six or eight feet across. this painting is from about 300 AD -- very old. over time many of the paintings of saints have been vandalized and had the eyes scratched away. but that is life as a saint for you.

rojine, this one is for you:

overnight there was a foal born here, a baby horse, un petit cheval. horses have their babies on nights of the full moon, when there is more light. this little guy does not have a name yet. ce petit cheval n'a pas encore de nom. but he was able to walk and run as soon as he was born. mais il a pû marcher et courir depuis le moment de sa naissance. i remember when you were as tiny as this little foal. you kind of still are. this little baby horse is big enough to carry you on his back. ce petit cheval bébé est assez grand pour te porter sur son dos. that's his mom, with him.

there are about eight horses here -- you can see two more in the distance -- and there are hoofprints set in the poured concrete floor of the stables where they eat.

mehmet, my friend in turkey, is gone from sundance now but ruchan has just arrived, who i met during my very first days here. that seems like a long long time ago. the black cat here is his cat and it's very touching to watch them say hello. the cat has moved now to sleep by the stove -- he gets as close to it as he can and stretches his paws underneath the stove belly where it is warmest. then when he is warm he goes over to the cushions where it is soft.

life is good for many of the creatures here, and i hope the same is true for everyone back home. i will see you soon.

skylar

OH! i nearly forget. there is a word "rojine" in turkish! maybe there is the same word in persian, i don't know, but in turkish rojine means the first light of the day, right in the morning when the sun is still hiding over the horizon. the sunrises here are very pretty.

just the facts, ma'am (2): demre

day 2: demre, or kale.

when i got back from demre, birthplace of saint nicolas the miracle-worker, mehmet said to me, "now you are a pilgrim."

i surprised myself by answering top of my head, "dude: we are all pilgrims."

the church of saint nicholas at demre dates back to the 4th century BC. it has been wrecked, ruined, ransacked, and rebuilt. it is small and architecturally mismatched. my guidebook said it was a plain disappointment compared the the magnificent mosques of turkey.

but i did not think so at all. it was understated.

it was about faith. the church is a dim, cold little building, now mostly dug out from underground. the floor tiles are crooked. there are chunks missing from the walls, and columns that go to nowhere. it gives the impression of greyness, not colour, and stone, not precious metals. but it made me say wow: in particular the serenity of the faded colours, paint directly on grey stone and crumbling plaster.

i said to myself: unless this place was severely more impressive in the past, you must have had to have faith to come and worship here. it was humble.

faith is strange. faith can be used to keep the bottom on the bottom while the top stay on top. but you can also think of faith as being just one part of a triad -- faith, doubt and determination.

they keep the saint's earthly remains in this church. is that faith? everything in nature indicates that when you die you become food for the worms and the millipedes, and the trees that grow over you and the birds that live in them. here was this dusty grey box filled with sand and bones, with a stinking ashtray next to it.

some of the stone walls were painted, the colours faded now. to see the sad faces of the saints: is _that faith? islam does not allow icons.

there was an inscription in Russian: oh measure of faith and image of humility, oh teacher of abstinence, reveal to thy flock that which is the truth of all things. is _that faith? there is a saying here that to enjoy sweets, not to abstain from them, is a true sign of faith. meanwhile the sculptor was unfamiliar with the russian alphabet, the carving rife with spelling mistakes and malformed letters.

the walls were made with long thin red bricks and mortar spread between. there was almost more mortar than brick. the plaster was falling away although every now and then you'd see the scratched-in outline of what looked like a greek cross, and that hinted that once maybe the whole wall was painted. but mostly the decorations were simple.



outside in the courtyard, stone carvings, broken, collected, piled up:




and this carved stone in greek:



most interesting to me were the tile mosaics in the floors:



and this unexpected pigmented motif:


all told: morbid, dusty, dim, cold. in that way it was just like churches today, just more ancient. and i don't know why anyone would risk persecution to go there and believe. except, i suppose, faith -- and that itself was impressive. the sarcophagus was not. i am not sure i'd ever want to venerate some relic, although, that said, these days i'm finding it hard to leave some things behind.