I’m on the west bank of the Nile River in Asswan , there where the desert of ochre sand arrives… near the “strong water”, the stream that indomitable comes from the dam, stronger than the wind and so difficult to go up.
Sacred ibis on the rocks…invisibles!
Eight sacred ibis height and grey welcome the people from the granite reef, small isles surviving to the waves…peace is absolute: a kingfisher freezes flying in the air, a chirp of swallow precedes his flight… far away the sound of the drums of the fair…today is Friday, their rest day! A water-pomp turns on breaking the silence, noisily it pumps the water from the Nile to water the fields. After sailing the whole morning now we stand at the side of the bank, fastened at the rock we have just finished to eat and we can completely relax.
At the bow…sailing to the strong water
I lie down at the bow, bathing in the sun, I lift my eyes to the sky and sea an hawk flying over, but it’s not alone…there are ten of them going with the draughts and they make me feel a strong sensation to be protect by that auspicious fly while a motor-boat goes downstream full of tourists busy at bath in the sun on the iron roof…they sing…is a happy day…”oh Alele,oh Alele” and clap their hands to be all unite in that rhythm, at least today…
I’m so far from all “our” problems, I’m in the limbo of perfection of nature, around me only the blue of Nile, the waves of the motor boat are breaking against the desert sand bank that melts forming many thick and white little bubbles. I’ve overstepped the door of changing without realizing it, the boat rotates and with it its shadow, it doesn’t worry me changing position…soon it will be as once and I’ll be able to bath in the beneficial rays of the sun.
Mooring… near the desert sand
I’m not in a hurry, I’ve not to go anywhere, I live in the present as a spectator happy to exist. It is so rare cease to desire and manage to taste the “diluait”, the “from now on” in Arabic language! Nobody depends on me and I can have a good time only allowing me a glance at this golden sand… from the top of the hill that dominates me it arrives up to the Sahara desert…without interruptions.
Mohrad, my felucca pilot sleeps under the shadow of the boat awning, now only the noise of the cordage that stretches fills the air (really too battered…I can’t call them sheets or shrouds at all!) The water is very deep in that part of Nile therefore very clean too, for seven hundred kilometres Nasser lake is unpolluted … every now and then a carp jumps out of the water to eat a smaller fish.
Captain Mohrad
Ancient stones, ancient unchanged banks, ever the same since thousand years….we need this, we need to come back with our heart maintaining in the meanwhile our technology, we need to feel sated with nothing…even only with the creaking of a balm-cricket.
I remember when during the week end I went to visit my mother to Nice … when I had just arrived her thought was already sorry for the fact that I would have gone away. She didn’t live the present but only the future! What a mistake not to be repeated! How many times I had to rectify this inborn tendency of my DNA!
At Nice with my mother
Wisdom is leaving wind sliding on the skin, eyes filling of what is surrounding them to catch all the wonders of the moment, suspending anxiety taking deep breaths in a ideal day of feast as today.
A felucca moored to the bank not far away from ours, hidden by a down it is possible to recognize it by the high side of the birchen “mast” with the sail stricken upright.
It’s Friday: a little rowing boat with two Nubian on board in their Sunday clothes is passing: they go up the river towards the music, they go to the village where rhythms, dances, sings e plunges dressed into the Nile are expecting them.
A Nile’s view
Many years ago during my second journey in Misr ( Egypt), the ancient Mishraim of the book of the Giubilei (Jubilees), maybe in 1998 we were moored more or less at the same place when swept away from the stream a small rowing boat with nobody on board passed in the whirlpools…the pilot of the felucca Mohrad hoisted the sail and made a board to arrange for its recovery. He took it to the bank just while the fisherman out of whose hand it was slipped out… was coming out of breath: he was trying to reach it running on the bank even though he know how difficult it was to defeat the Nile in such a match…Mohrad delivered the boat to that pair of frightened eyes and they sat together on the bank smoking tobacco cured with honey in the “shisha”, the water pipe, talking about the happening and laughing at the avoided danger. That boat represented all that which this man owned, it was his life! The solidarity of the one who has nothing and neither aims to have more had created a new friendship…with no name and title that boat should own to somebody to which served, soon it should have been recovered, no matter who was the owner… in any case he should turn up in a short time!
Sailing on the sacred river
Small drops of wisdom…During one of my journey on the Nile I asked a pilot of felucca why he never bought an engine to use in spite of the oars during the absolute calm or to go fishing. Hearing his answer I feel ashamed of the superficiality of my question…
He told me: “I never thought to buy an engine for four good reasons. The first is because it costs, the second because it need to be fed, the third because if it breaks I must have it repaired at Cairo…but above all because if I buy an engine I needn’t anymore a friend who helps me to row and …whom I speak with?”
Yes, what are we alone: less than nothing….!
I’ve never had a love or a sex story with an Egyptian even if once I was surprised by the desire that took me totally unconsciously. Mohrad is reminding it to me speaking…yes, is true, I’ve been knowing him for eight years. Every time at my arrival in Asswan I looked for him, first of all because I trust his way of behaving but also for his knowledge of sailing and of Nile’s sandbanks….but never giving myself to his desires, moreover for him legitimate!
The Nile’s water is so cold!
I remember a bath in the sacred river: in june, hot for the sun I had thrown myself in the cold waters soon deep, I’d seen him plunging from the prow of the felucca moored one hundred and fifty meters far from where I was…then nothing more and…I had felt my legs suddenly seized and then seen him emerging at my side….after collecting myself from the fright I’d seen him going out from the water totally naked with his body that was bursting of good health. Nothing to say he had just everything in the right place and then I felt my desire doing his way inside me to be then suppressed by the cooler reasoning. Even now he asks me if I want to do a three day crossing in felucca from Asswan to KomOmbo with him….maybe to try again and again…without knowing that this very evening, coming back on board of the ship, I had made up for by myself the desire that he had made me feel, I had enjoyed that emotion in a solo voyage…
When the sun goes sleep
The Changing: cross a door…what a lot of symbology… Sometime I ask me how many ideas it hides and if the meaning of the word “door” is common knowledge. The scribes identified it in hieroglyphic with the symbol of a star with six points, two ideals opposite triangles: what is up is equal to what is down.
Two triangles….
It served to represent Seshat the lady of time, the wife of Toth the great mathematician inventor of writing, of numbers and of the beginning of time.
Toth to please the desire of Tefnut of loving his son Geb created for her a parallel world, pushing with the help of Anubi,z the moon in the earth’s orbit he put in action its natural magnetism and actually created a space-time formed by five days more, intercalary days (epagomeni).
At the Mammisi in Dendera you can see it at the top of his est wall
He had created time and on the Earth “Tawi” in those five days the first humans would be born: Horus the Great, Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nefti. The admirable Architect of the new world, Toth the master of time managed to create, formed by space and time, a new earth and his wife Seshat is the way to reach it: she is the door of time, the door of Toth! Through the woman mankind can come into the world, in this world.
Seshat:her pointed hat with a star… she’s counting years
So every time you’ll admire a woman with a star hanging on the head, described while she is counting the years on the stem of a palm you know that she represents the first door, the first changing. In our imagery today we call “stargate” the door through another dimension!
We are not allowed to know which are the motives that could have brought to such a choice …but since the time of ancient Egypt the story is always that… we come unaware on this earth for a short time, are we then subject to rottenness for love? To return then if justified in AmDuat at a star, at the door.
To renew ourselves we take advantage of this transit, to return equal, to love each other again, to meet again in our new thousand shapes sure to recognize each other in the end always?
To the sons of a great love has been given the possibility to live, to be, to exist if not in that originary dimension at least in this. And how do we live it: making war against each other, trying to abuse one another, feeling one superior to the other. There is no life that values more than another life and our life is made of that few time that flows implacable. We shall recover our present, with the teaching of the past and the dreaming of future, trying at first to recognize ourselves and immediately afterwards go towards the other us, forgetting the evil, the grudges, the desires of possession and overwhelming, the fears, the discords…winning our self essential being made of doubts, politics, power. The sooner we’ll manage to be upright with our will, the earlier we interrupt our judgement, that moreover doesn’t belong to us, and…the quicker we’ll manage to be free to be.
Sailing
When a child will surprise us with is capability of love we’ll know what is the age to which refer to be different, since immediately… since before then! Never identifying ourselves in anything…not to run the risk of loosing the opportunity to be part of the totality…As soon as possible…to improve generation after generation deleting the debt of time…towards a dream of freedom…against all the obstacles, the illnesses, the incomprehensions, the narrow-mindnesses, the impositions… responsible of making us regressed.
Free to love one another …forever!
We all should manage to live the sacred fire, to feel that sensation made of truth that can make us overcome our fears, letting us come out into the open, happy to learn to overcome, to live sure in being…getting round dead angles and obstacles with the strength of determination, of consciousness of what is made respect. To the interpreters of life…that’s whom we should resemble to…to artists, actors, musicians…to them who let them be permeated, who let them be a go-between!
It’s not so easy…we come from a culture heavily conditioned by money and by dogmas hence by politics…but right acknowledging it let us take a step forward!
Money, power of accumulation that produces chaos in the world…it hadn’t ever existed in the egyptian culture, ancients exchanged goods equalizing their value to bushels of corn (n.b.: paintings of the journey at Punt in the site of Hatshepsut New Reign 1450 b.C., west bank of Tebe,Luxor) and, still keeping relations and exchanges with peoples that already made use of it, they’d never struck money, until they didn’t reach the decline, in connection with the Persian domination first (600 a.C.) and Ptolemaic and Roman then.
http://www.maat-ka-ra.de/english/bauwerke/djeser/dj_portico_2_hall_punt.htm
http://web.tiscali.it/Hatshepsut/punt.htm
Although the granges could be filled with corn or beer, these were always goods subject to decay hence to utilization. Conquering other lands they couldn’t be used as a shifty instrument of power…actually corn is equal everywhere and, ended the domination, it maintains the same value as before. With money, on the contrary, it was fixed a subjection, and , in the conquered people that had managed to accumulate it, a will to not watching the ruler leaving for having no value cancelled.
No money no dogma…the ancient inhabitants of the sacred banks of the Nile when conquered new lands didn’t try to convert their peoples, they didn’t impose their knowledge raising statues or sacre sites on the annexed lands. They conquered lands but didn’t subject peoples binding them at a money exchangeable currency or at a dogma…simply because they haven’t got any!
The Pharaone offers Maat: equity,truth,…order (eka)
The knowledge Maat was the rule and it wasn’t possible to impose…symbolized by a feminine figure with a feather it was the expression of the serenity necessary to human soul.
Without imposition there was no way better than an other, it was impossible to produce chaos fixing what was right and what was wrong, equity was a rule, the truth was its way of advancing…the “rudder”, symbol of fragility of such conceptions.
At the Louvre Aile Suilly 18 ,window n.1 : Maat
It was necessary to know intimately before using, knowing how to give value to every single thing as part of totality, to teach without classifying, to distinguish without giving preference…knowing how the most hidden truth can makes itself evident not through words but through sensations.
A shiver runs across my body…I know I’m in the right.
