I Can't Take My Eyes off Egypt

Egypt: Been there done that Egypt.  It was in the mid 1990s shortly after terrorist had bomb Luxor, killing several tourists.That i ventured forth to this magnificent part of the world to pay my respect to cheops, Pyrmids, say hello to Spnix and be tottally awed by the far flung momunmts strewn across the dessert which rendered me speecless and small in light of the history that exists in this part of the world.


So as i watch the day to day movement of the Egyptian people in the streets of its three major cities, i can not help but to reflect on Selma Alabama. In Selma we had a preacher, In  Egypt  the Pharohes are emerging from the sands of time, and calling out to the current Pheroah mubarak to let the people go. Further The entire region in that part of the world is turning over the sands of time. The last vesstiges of thousands upon thousands yeas is being overtuned. Its similar to Europes Midevel Age,  moving to the one of englightenmetn. Another anolgy i might offer here is that the movement of people is the same as the movement of the earth when she can not longer take the pressure she erupts and an stunami or earthquake or wild storm or torrental rains, or tumoltous floods occur. Its all about energy what humans produced through our thoughts and behavior and when the circuts are overloaded the whole shit  blows apart.
And then we might want to look at the situation in the Middle East as a sign post on the road heading to 2012 -- the end time as we say, which for me simply means the end of life as we have known it to be for a long time. We are all  a part of and witnesses to our collective evolutionmone people living on this planet, that most recently lost its direction and the Poles sightly moved, causing air control personnel to cancel flights. Did you hear about this?

Its wake up time folks.all the boarders and all the differnces we hold as evident truths are being are being melted away by the heat of terror --- the terror or war, the terror of poverty, the terror of religions, the terror of govenments, the terror of ourselves. We are all in this togehter, and as such we are the change we are waiting for.

Happy Sunday, y'all or Monday, depending on where you are in this world.


Peace.

Moi, Mahmoudah

My Past, Present and Future Lives

It was the beginning of October. I had recently celebrated another birthday-- a bench mark year. As a gift to myself, I decided to have a psychic reading conducted by a woman who sets up shop in New York City’s Union Square Park, located in Manhattan. As we were getting started, another customer stopped by. He was an Indian (as in India). The psychic asked him "Where have you been.  I was here looking for you earlier?”  

Soon the three of us were having a spiritual gab fest. When it was my turn to share, I took them on a fast track of all the roads I’d taken on my "spiritual journey", beginning from the time I was five years old when I began astral traveling.  I continued running through the trails and errors of the faiths I’d delved in, as if they were pools for me to swim in. I shared that when I was twelve years old, one summer my mother had signed me up with the Fresh Air fund, and I was sent off to all Jewish camp that was strictly kosher. I had no idea why they didn’t serve bacon for breakfast. And as far as what borsch was, I didn’t even want to know the answer. I starved for the two weeks I was there.

I was the only colored person in the whole camp, I chimed. Colored was an old fashion word, of course, but somehow it seemed to work in the moment. Timing – history being the arbiter of my way of placing me somewhere, in the world and specifically in America, when certain words such as Colored had applied to my race..

But in spite of my cultural/religious shock that summer of years ago, I tell the Indian and Psychic “Once I had wanted to become a Jew and before that a Roman Catholic,” I added. The latter was at the time I had a best friend named Marion Leatherberry who was a Catholic and a few years older then me. It was the singing of choir that had most inspired my desire to convert to this religion. The music sounded like it came from heaven, I had thought. 

In my adult life, it was Islam and then Buddhism to which I belonged to for the longest periods.

Veering bit off the track of our conversation, I shared, “Well, my father was from Jamaica. I think. Because I had never actually met him, or rather I was so young when he died, I don’t remember him at all, but my mother told me that my father was a West Indian man and a Moslem. I just assumed that meant he was a Jamaican. “So that made me both.  I had once supposed.” I continued, “I was never a Christian you know." I said this with such fervor, as if having not been baptized placed meat best in a special Believer category, or at worst an Agnostic.

As I continued to speak, I noticed that the Indian looked at me curiously. The Psyche who was seated next to me in an identical beach chair to the one I was in, which she sets up in the park for her readings,  slid her eyes sideways over to me after I had shared,  “Now I channel an old woman.  I call her Wela.”

It all began in 2000.  I was home, sitting at the head of my bed meditating, asking whomever to fulfill my needs. I started rocking back and forth. My body began lifting off the top of my mattress.  I began to speak. At first the words sounded tiny as if were coming from a long, long way, and filtered through the mesh of a short wave radio.   My mouth felt as if it was full of cotton. I was mumbling foreign sounds -- a polycot of some sort. After days of being downloaded the American English language I usually speak began to come through. The voice coming out of me though was not mine.
 
The Indian listened intently, as I shared my adventure. He looked down at me, curiously too. He had a half smile on his face. I wasn’t sure what it meant.  When my story telling was over he proceeded to speak in a quiet reassuring voice, as if he were bringing me down from a window ledge I was about to jump from. In his British English, tinted with his native lingua, he said, "I have something to tell you -- they are telling me to tell you this. Your guardian angel is the Goddess Durga.   She is here to guide you on your spiritual journey." My mental response to this edict was: "Who in the world are you? Who are they? I am already on my spiritual journey brother man." 
 
The Indian man continued speaking to me. I watched him cupping his right ear with his right hand, as if he were listening to someone stationed at a command center somewhere out in space.  "Ah, they are saying that you must set up an altar in your home, dedicated to the Goddess Durga.”
 
 
Hearing this, I felt a bit shaken by what was taking place in the park. In that this convergence of three souls, our timing of being the park at just the right moment and running into one another was no coincidence.  I had looked for the Psychic, earlier. Hadn’t found her. So I left there, to take a sweater I had bought at the store, Anthoropolgy; when I had walked back through the park the Psychic was there. And then this Indian guy who had walked out of the ethers showed up, presenting himself as the messenger of whoever; all of this took place in the spin time it takes for evening to turn into night.

In the dark, the three of us continued to talk about things mystical and esoteric -- seen and unseen. Thrown into this mix of my thousand questions to the Indian was "Are there any correlations to this Goddess Durga and other belief systems, say ancient Egypt’s pantheon of gods and goddesses – Isis, perhaps? 
 
The Indian replied, "As a matter of fact, there is.”
 
"Good ", I responded and then immediately, I swan back to my memories of having a spark of enlightenment, during my visit to Isis’s temple. Sharing, “It was amazing...."
 
The Psychic was ready now. Her tarot cards were stacked on top of the T.V. dinner table she customarily unfolds and plants firming on the dark grey stone pathway, to conduct her spiritual readings for anyone like me who is brave enough to walk up to her,  take a chance on hearing about their past, present and future lives, costing only for twenty dollars. 
 
"Shuffle the cards?’ says the Psychic in her lovely yet powerful voice, baring a close resemblance to the sound of my strict eight grade music teacher, Miss Walker’s voice. I assume the role of the obedient student and do as I am told. Then the Psychic seamlessly moved back to the private conversation she and the Indian were having a moment ago.

I grabbed hold of the pile of stiff as boards, hard to shuffle, hand-size tarot cards with indecipherable symbols printed on one side. I laid them back down on top of the metal table top when I am done.
 
"Now cut them with your left hand,” the Psychic slipped this instruction in between her conversation with the Indian. I obeyed. Time ticked on. We were completely shrouded in darkness by now, three of us silhouettes, in the Park, lit from behind, by the bright lights beaming from the store fronts across the street, on the west side of the park.  Suddenly I blurted out to the Indian, who was still receiving messages from the Beyond, "Who is this 'they' who is speaking to you? “ 

I stared up into his dark good looking face, barely able to make out his features. But the whites of his eyes sufficed as they stared down at me like two 25 watt light bulbs, the kind you put in your refrigerator. He offered in a slightly dragging holy murmur, “It is now.  Your duty. To worship. Goddess Durga.” He went on to explain that she is my protector, that I was to learn about her and to tell her what my needs are.

“She will help you.” He then instructed me that I should pray to her only one minute a day for what I want and to keep a spiritual journal. “Never stop. Never go back. Adding, “You will live a very long time. You will not have a future life here,” (meaning on this planet).  Your past lives are over..."

”It’s a big universe out there”, I thought. 


Moi, Mahmoudah

Mad Women: My Take on Tyler Perry’s “Colored Girls...”

It was Friday, a balmy Fall afternoon and the opening day of the Tyler Perry new movie, “Colored Girls”, an adaptation of the choreo-poem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” I had seen the stage version written by Feminist playwright, Ntozake Shange when it was first produced at the New Federal Theatre in New York in 1976,

I am not a Tyler Perry fan per se, but I have seen a few of his movies. My reason for going to see this particular one was inspired by my great curiosity as to how he had adapted Shange’s seamy seminal work to film, centered on five Black women living on the edges and in the pits of America’s dispersed ghettos (New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco Baltimore and St. Louis) -- each one suffering mental anguishes and physical abuse from men, and myriad turmoil laden on these urban landscapes thirty years ago. Whew.

In the stage version, each woman is identified by a different color of the rainbow and the color brown. The through line of all their stories is told through dance and poetry:  their allusions of grander past lives in Ancient Egypt, their dreams of being safe in love and their fears of living in isolation in this life time.

It was about a month ago, when I caught the tail-end of Oprah’s interview with Perry and learned that he’s the second most influential man in Hollywood, after film director James Cameron, of “Titanic” and “Avatar” fame.  She also mentioned an Island that he owns. My!

In the interview, Tyler talked about the creative challenges he faced in translating the complexity of Ms. Shange’s work to film. He seemed very humbled by this,   in terms of his responsibility to respectfully deliver Ms. Shange’s masterpiece to the movie going audience.

Tyler Perry phenomenal success is grounded in years of catering to a specific audience (predominantly black woman) who have invested in hi s plays and more recently, his movies.  Evidence of this is when I arrived to the Regal Cinema in Brooklyn, where the majority of ticket buyers were females from teenage girls to senior citizens.  Very few men came.

There were no male performers in the choreo play. For the movie the male characters are fleshed out and euphemistically thrown up on the screen. Collectively they are bad news: the crazed war veteran slash, wife beater, slash drug addict slash child killer slash, prisoner, a two-timing/thieving boy friend and the undercover homosexual husband, all of whom are intertwined in story lines the women share in woeful and wishful soliloquies, cultivated in the slangs and colloquialism, true to the times in which the choreo play was written.

                As for the lovely young female actors, each one gave believable performances The stand out talent for me was British actress Thandie Newton’s portrayal of the sexually uninhibited/free woman who uses her mind and body to transgress the mental pain of her having been molested by her father when she was a girl.

As for the well-seasoned divas of stage and screen -- Loretta Devine, portrays   a woman with a big heart who helps other women in their struggles with men, and at the same time holds her heart in her hands, for the man she sleeps with and who steals from her. Phylliscia Rashad character holds the keys to all the apartments in the building where she is in charge. She plays the imperious bearer of tough love and is nosey. Disappointingly, Whoopi Goldberg’s   characterization of a conjure woman was a stretch. Particularly given her noteworthy genius of having craftily morphing into other people in her long career. In this role she seemed to be caught between a hard place of w Pentecostal Preacher Woman and the rock of a Santeria Priestess.  There was no where she could run, we h45 character veered between someone who is as crazy as a bed bug and the concerned mother of her daughters. Perhaps she was on the verge of nervous breakdown, as her spasmodic rants, repeatedly cried   out to no one in particular “Elohiem”, (Hebrew for God); a term which I speculate went way over the heads of most of the audience in the theater. 

In Perry’s  reveal (camera overshot)  of the kitchen table abortionist, it seemed to me that he was making a different movie then the one I had been watching for almost two hours. He had obviously made a huge creative leap back to the past, while completely overlooking that we are living in the 21^st Century.  Clearly his  choice to have   kitchen table abortionist who’s’ doctor bag is filled  with macabre tools that look like something a dentist in the 1800s used to pull teeth ,and which  she sterilized with home made booze ,was incongruously ludicrous. The actor in this role (I didn’t recognize) seemed to have seeped out of the Sci -Fi channel.

The production budget for set design, left no detail unturned, in particular the huge, shadowy and well-appointed bedroom located in the chilly and unhappy home of the Noir Riche bitch astutely portrayed by Miss Janet Jackson.  The backdrop is where she and husband are having a heart to heart about his sexual attraction to men.  The perfectly made king size bed, serving, I felt, as a land mine the couple dare not tread.  This gorgeous set, gave a nod to the set design style of the classic Film Noir period of films made the 1930s. Great work!

OMG, in another well appointed atmosphere, I almost chocked on my popcorn while my eyes popped and were then glued to the scene as I watched Miss Janet Jackson, who plays a women at the helm of a fashion magazine.  She is standing in her high rise office and high heels, amongst her trembling staff. The visual is was all too familiar: Jackson knocking  off of Vogue Editor Anna Wintour,   who was previously knocked off by actress Meryl  Streep,  in the role she played in ‘The Devil Wears Prada” – or was it Willamina Slater , played by Vanessa Williams in "Ugly Betty". 

Signing off,

 Moi, Mahmoudah

Murders In Tuscon

It’s January 14, 2011. I woke up at 5am this morning. The sun wouldn’t come up till 7 something. I stared into the dark. I thought about the recent tragedy that took place in Tucson, Arizona last Saturday. I didn’t catch this news breaking story on the day of the shooting. I didn’t catch the name of the shooter whose picture is slathered all over the media.

Over the week, I’ve taken in the face of this man and the tragedy he orchestrated in bits and pieces and sound bites. It was purely by happenstance that I had tuned into the televised memorial service while searching for something intelligent to watch on TV, when I saw President Obama on the screen. I stayed there and watched the offering of his elegant eulogy for the victims of this shocking, but not unusual crime in America.

How this particular shooting has a bit of celebrity to it is clearly because a United States Senator was seriously wounded, and which has hit the pulse of Americas in unimaginable ways around the issues of our constitutional right to bare arms. Arms being the operative word here, causing me to think of my arm and yours, and how our limbs are in reference to killing machines.

Anyway, in my silent soliloquy this morning, my thoughts shifted over to the parents of the shooter. I tried to imagine the incomprehensible darkness they must be sitting in right now; the questions they are asking themselves --  the what ifs?  The shock of what occurred, has undoubtedly caused a shift, alternating from sharpness to fogginess, I would image.  Invariably their world and ours has been turned upside down. That what has occurred to these people is happening to all of us. That we are inseparable; that one person’s head chatter affects us all. Further, the back tracking in our memory bank, might take us to that fork in the road many of us have come to in life, that maybe we should have chosen the other one, rather then this one that day on the way to the beach last summer?

One friend said to me about the murder that took place in front of the supermarket, “It’s scary.” I agree. Daily we are bombarded by choices -- what to wear, who to see, what to eat for dinner -- should we order in or go shopping for food, could be the next news breaking story.

Invariably we are all a part of the bigger question of what occurred in Tucson last week. It would behoove all Americans, I believe, to beg ourselves the question, why must we carry guns?  They’re killing us…

Mahmoudah Young,

Brooklyn, NY