A ghastly evening with Linda's new-age hippy mates, Peace and Willow. They've just been to Nepal to visit a hermit in a hut. He's lived in his hut as long as anyone can remember with only a goat and a daily throng of new-age hippies for company. He knows the secrets of the universe. This knowledge has enabled him to live in a hut for forty years with only a goat and hippies for company. Peace, née Graham, showed us photographs. The hermit had a gap-toothed smile, leather skin and avaricious eyes. I asked whether the knowledge they had acquired would permit Peace and Willow to move to a hut in Nepal, preferably quite soon. Before they became old-age hippies, in fact. Linda kicked me under the table.
Peace and Willow have a shop. You can picture it before I say a word. A window display of dream catchers, crystals, perfumed candles, i-ching sets and groovy picture books. Under the counter, away from view, are the cannabis seeds and dried kratom leaf. Why they bother to hide them when Dutch Passion is an industial concern and sells its seeds in the Exchange & Mart is something of a mystery. I suppose some, maybe most, of their customers are housewives with an interest in mock-spiritual toys and a dread of all drugs but alcohol.
Willow does something-or-other massage, reiki or shiatsu (isn't that a kind of poodle?) or something of the ilk, which she learned in an afternoon from one of the shop's picture books. She sent off her fifty pounds for a certificate and is now a qualified practitioner. The certificate is framed in her therapy room, an old store room at the back of the shop. It is an impressive document indeed with ribbons and gold seals, but I could have made her one for less. She now teaches other hippies to do whatever she imagines she's doing.
Linda and Willow were friends at school, at which time the latter was known as Angela. Linda went off to university; Angela stayed behind and got a job as a counter clerk at the post office. After her first year away, Linda arrived home for the summer, head full of Plutarch and Cicero, to find that Angela was now Willow, vegetarian and self-proclaimed hedgerow witch. She still worked for the post office. Her new boyfriend, Graham, had been to India and, in the few weeks he was there, had become an expert in all things spiritual. He had karma, man, and, like, spiritual values. His speech had many implied commas.
Graham and Willow marched. Linda thought there might be some common ground here, at university she too had marched, but Willow's marches were all about the evils of anything new, whereas Linda's were about the unfair treatment of the working classes. Linda knew as much about miners as Willow did about nuclear power, so they had more in common than they realised.
** Too tired to finish this tonight. **
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Dendrite | October 18, 2009 - 12:01
Linda visited often through the spring and occasionally stayed on overnight, sleeping on the divan that Peace had shipped from India, to help Peace and Willow with shop work which had accumulated a steady patronage of young regulars with renewed fascination in all things from the sixties. They traveled from local burgs and municipalities and stood in line outside, wrapped in Hopi blankets and knit caps, to hear Peace speak on matters political, spiritual, and otherwise sublime from an oversized chair that was installed on a raised platform in the rear of the store. From behind this chair Peace ran a nearly opaque qualcut cannabis side business which alone paid the rent and utilities note. Linda learned from Willow how to throw ruins and make personal inferences from the color, cut, and clarity of crystals, and so eventually offered her own consultation services at the end of the long glass counter of pipes and tracts.
By the time spring emerged from a beautiful winter, Willow had been able to resign her post office position and devote her days to massage/relaxation therapy then recommend her customers (patients) over to Linda for consultation and intervention services, which was a new line they developed from procedures in wiccan rites that had been updated to attend and address interpersonal issues faced by busy contemporary women. Eventually, and within let’s say one year as things move quickly seemingly with little thought or consideration, the small shop had to arrange customer visits for massage, consultation, and intervention services by special appointment and the still growing groups of university students enamored by the lectures of Peace and occasional guest orators, including the hermit who has been flown in from Nepal with his actual hut shipped in place and re-installed next to Peace’s lectern, were moved to the line forming at the rear door. Peace had since abandoned the direct-to-street cannabis trade and now works with Mexican partners and various suppliers, cutters/dryers, and dealers. I happened upon Linda at a newsstand yesterday morning and asked her half-joking if she would consider giving me a private reading. She turned to me and said, “He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.”