We shared no spoken language but she held me and stroked my face, my tears, with her humanity and strength. A gifted moment. We sat in her Father’s Garden, thick woven cloths on crusts of soil under the shade of date palms, beside rows of carrots and greens, desert dunes all around us. My new Moroccan friend offered me Moroccan crusty pizza filled with vegetables fresh off the hot earth fire. And tea.
2020 has been a year like no other for most of us, ‘unprecedented’, the word floats around like confetti, but an accurate word. I was fortunate to squeeze in a two-week Moroccan writing and travel adventure in March and just scrambled to fly out on the last day as Morocco closed her borders.
As we travelled from Tangier to Chefchouan, then Fez to Café Tissardmine in the desert we explored the elements, directions, colours and the soft and rugged landscapes, green flatlands with the sweet scent of orange blossoms and trees laden with large round fruit, patchwork hills, craggy cliffs and grey mountains with glimpses of snow.
In the desert as the sun descended across the great sandy expanse, I listened one night to a woman and her surprised acceptance of God. In the distance outside our rammed earth walls the teenage boys from the village kicked a soccer ball around in the dust, and a motorbike revved and did donuts around the desert pitch. My new writing friends and I gathered on the rooftop around one of the enclosed gardens, muted browns, cinnamon and cumin colours all around and the dull green of Australian eucalypts, planted in the compound, small gums and wattles, and olive trees.
‘What else can you do in the desert, but accept, Inshallah, trust, be?’ she said.
I watched my father die, one breath, another, pause, last breath? Inhale, soft rattle, my 17-year old self stood beside him, the youngest of four with my mother and my sister-in-law too, all gathered, we waited, inhale, exhale, another and another, a pause, a breath…
Here, not here. Alive, dead. Simply experienced in sad wonderment.
Later my mother told me that she had experienced his soul leave his body. I don’t recall that we really discussed spiritual matters before, but she made her simple statement and opened doorways that I wanted to explore.
My father’s death reminded me to look at the moon.
‘Mary, come outside and look at the moon,’ he used to say. He called both my sister and I Mary, sometimes Mary-Anne or Mary-Rose to distinguish us.
In Morocco I watched the desert moon expand and contract in the starry heavens, and wrote about my father’s death. It was so long ago. I looked north and east and south and west and Venus welcomed me each evening. I sat under the Milky Way, saw the ram, the Virgin rose as the night slept on and Orion and his belt of stars three strong, watched over me. I was told the Southern Cross was visible and a guide for the nomads, but I could not find her.
I talked with another woman as we sat at Café Tissardmine, beside fossil remnants and sand under a thatched shelter, of the three deaths and the shaping, the shaping of my life’s path. Unexpected but welcome tears, water gatherings, formed and gently slid. I greeted them, tears of love. Golden threads. I straightened my spine, lighter, and breathed; my last breath not near.
Three years after my father died, all the way down the mountain in Victoria, a man, a mountain man, held the silence as I turned away from him and looked out the van window and didn’t see, did not know, was my mother gasping her last breaths?
Who phoned me, my eldest brother?
‘You need to come as soon as possible.’
It was the mid-1970s and my boss gave me $100, a detail I never forgot, a gift, a bonus, after only a few weeks’ work, waitressing and housemaid duties on the mountain. I couldn’t engage in the fun, the party nights, but I skied and the mountain held me, nature’s gift before the next death.
Another recently departed friend joined me on my morning desert walk across the dry riverbed that holds ancient fossils, past the well and up over to the date palm oasis. A felt presence, my elderly wise friend was smiling, loving me being in the desert, adventuring, writing, and living fully. She lived more than 90 years traversing spirit worlds, alongside her earthy meanderings, she saw that colours everywhere were alive; she wondered why others could not see what she perceived all around her. She lived with angels. She gifted love, and was impatient for better politicians, better awareness, and better care of our precious earth. We had written together on many Sunday mornings in the bright light beside the Pacific Ocean in Australia. She walked beside me that morning in the soft dunes.
Back home in Australia, quarantined for two weeks I mused on some of the writing prompts in Morocco – the 8-pointed star, and the 5-pointed star. I thought about Da Vinci and the human form, arms outstretched, earth below heavens above, chakras, squares, triangles, contractions, expansions, and interconnections.
I looked out from my deck into lush Australian sub tropical greens – spider web on leaf green, drooping paperbark green, soft lacy jacaranda green, velvety geranium green, welcome home green, hint of green on the snake by my compost bin.
The desert, sparse, rocky, sandy, wild, harsh, and comforting in some strange way that I am yet to fathom, was also reckless, calm, and introspective. It left me creaked and cracked open, also yet to fathom. And yet even before I left Cafe Tissardmine, I longed to go back to explore more of that cracked open glimpse.
Now I miss the evocative early morning call to prayer that echoes across Chefchaouen blues, reminding me to re-member the sacred.
October 2020
