Something Like Olivia

 

A DEEPER NARRATIVE

Our own Buddha with us in distinguishable form during our lifetimes, Thiền Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh went from his home in Vietnam to speak at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1966, and just like Odysseus leaving his Ithaca, Thay did not know he would not be returning to his home for many years and would thereafter be in exile–and his for double the twenty years of the Homeric epics. He came while millions were being slaughtered in Vietnam and his homeland destroyed over and over as they worked to rebuild it, only to be torn down again, and yet he was not allowed to go back to his work for Peace because the governments didn’t want it. He, auspiciously for us, had to seek asylum in France and bring to the West how for the first time to truly put our feet on the earth (and how to make it other-wordly kind of legendary that reverberates beyond our bodies and lives, not limited to dead historical), and how to actually breathe to be fully alive and how to generate joy in this very moment, and from there enter the doorway to a different way of Being, step into the realization of this reality, most importantly while also in the face of the other values against life around us as they grip onto that hard, all-is-separate, punishing reality and scream for it as loud as they can, purposefully echoing it through the consciousness of the media to amplify their ploys for attention and “power” to harm. 

Thay’s huge, eloquent statement of Peace is a vastly important element of what must happen, the very different core that has the ability to deliver the before unimaginable. It has heretofore been blocked by history, and so there is no stopping now. This is the Moment.

This seemingly passive, soft, gentle, kind, compassionate, seemingly unassuming Peace is a demonstration of the very different core of Being completely stilled in the eternal missed by culture in the Songs of the Homeric epics, The Divine Comedy, purposefully removed from the Hebrew Bible out of fear, and is alive throughout a huge, powerful lineage of art pointing to the what and how of an immense flipping over of culture. But we don’t value Peace, ‘we don’t want it, it’s not exciting.’ ‘Brute force and screams of anguish are more exciting, rage more feminist,’ has more power because it can cause more damage, and so instead, the masterful art comes with this inspired answer across the millennia. These far truer Powers are delivered from within an eternal stillness, connected with the eternal and in all that IS arrived here through mindfulness, diligence, concentration, and insight, as Thay shows.  Because this also answers to that which the art is anciently and immediately holding, it is an immense culmination in this Moment. The conditions are here. It takes breaking past a culture locked in its own fears. As most can see, that is happening now. 

 

ALIVE AND CARRIED DEEP INSIDE THE ART

The entire Homeric epics, while Achilles fights for his ego (as Trump does), and Helen tries to make the narrative about herself and an untrue story of “love” (even trying to say she loved Odyseus while she tried to get him killed, just as Taylor Swift repeats endlessly without internal growth, just trying to force the false narrative), the realization of the inner core in actuality shows that we aren’t what we thought we were at all when we were acculturated into that belligerent thought: just appearances, living displaced from our lives, and if that core is empty, our well-beings are very much in danger. That eternal stillness is missing from where wisdom and healing come. The Inner Being is actually a Place of deepest Peace. Recognizing it and bringing that back into life is of utmost importance. From there pours wisdom not acculturated, not damaged, the Place from which the voices of the master artists were coming where the greatest inspiration could come, and the symbol they were showing of this: the Inner Being of the feminine. The feminine and the ‘Place of Peace.’ This is because she is this in her purest state. 

What took refuge then in these discoveries there in the South of France has been other-worldly, where these legends washed ashore before, from Mary Magdalene to The Count of Monte Cristo (and sculptures of Jesus like Odysseus), come in on these waters just like Thay’s ‘boat people’ pushed off rejected from other shores, then the footsteps here are the mark of the hands of a fate and brilliant world literature—necessarily, pushed to being subversive of brutal power-hungry history—now coming to fruition from those who created in this long, powerful line with the indomitable spirit of how to get past the loud minds that need to tear down. 

Art is not peripheral as it seems when categorized as entertainment. It speaks of life itself and the most brilliant left a trail of how to break it open. It is an absolute miracle that it culminates here and that the master artists have left this trail of wildly inspired eternal words. To recognize is to know one has to break it open.

 

 

ITHACA

In 1977, the year John Mayer was born, the Grateful Dead played at that same Cornell in Ithaca, NY, what many said was their most memorable show ever. This year Dead & Company returned there for a fire-on-the-mountain performance on a beginning return sweep of their “final tour.” If you know the Odyssey, you might have recognized when Bob Weir on his own showed up with John Mayer in Paradise Valley, Montana to play stripped-down on-fire acoustic sets, just the two of them. It was Homer’s Eumaeus, with seemingly very little to offer outside a brutal kingdom, helping Odysseus take back his rightful place in a culture that doesn’t know the difference of the internal. It looks unassuming. They look like no match for the culture as brutal as it is. But, as we know from the path of art, this act is actually wildly formidable. And this is for a very important, unseen reason: it breaks open the sacred and the divine back into that closed, abusive culture. 

And so this appearance in Ithaca is the return into the kingdom, not even making a loud noise in the press. Recognition of the internal is a wild thing.

This masterful, inspired art in Dead & Company is the fate, the lineage of music, to break back open culture to the forbidden divine when our culture has been long and hard closed to everything truly alive in all the forms of Being. 

There’s only been this one thing missing that could break it open, it is also that which has been most adamantly withheld in the suffering, separated world as “sacred” and “untouchable,” the forbidden, that which you absolutely cannot do: one isn’t supposed to touch what is already held as sacred and therefore off-limits, that which is held within religion. The further crime, more dire, would be to do it as a female. As in their Genesis, one is cursed as a female. But strangely that is exactly what has happened to open it. Within the powerful art is the milieu of the truest voices that must be heard, free of danger, by being delivered directly to the Beingness, now that it is here. 

It’s just as real as the Moon is real. And is without human coercion. It doesn’t just happen for one starlet. There’s a big reason why Beatrice and the Mona Lisa are ‘ordinary’ real human females.

Penelope doesn’t have any value to the Suitors except what they can gain from her position. That’s the female position in society. The Trojan War is begun by the Goddess Eris throwing in apples into a contest of beauty, The Judgment of Paris, and surface appearances win–and thus ten years of war. Love, therefore in that culture, is based on surfaces and they have the hard task of learning what it really is, the purpose of the epics. It is what is inside that isn’t known or valued. That’s a very tricky thing for a culture that can't tell the difference of the internal. And just now, the dwarf planet named for the Goddess Eris is at 24° of Aries, the house she entered in 1922, between two world wars. She’s also conjuncting my Rising Sign of the critical 29° of Aries.

And thus the story is about what true identity is.

Penelope’s true identity is not known to the Suitors. Odysseus’s identity is not known. That’s why they take advantage to gain position and wealth and to take a kingdom that isn’t theirs. And therefore Eumaeus’s true identity is also not known and is underestimated. He’s actually the eternal, stable foundation of culture beneath the war. He’s ‘just in a band that’s been around for over fifty years.’ 

By not knowing internal and eternal value, he is considered peripheral. 

Taylor Swift borrowed fame from true artists. The difference is internal, and no one noticed her trying to kill the heart of the Song to make it only about herself, her lies, and a fake, forcibly imposed life. 

This is immense. What is going on in our culture looks immensely formidable: the open and visible abuses celebrated. World mythologist Joseph Campbell, a long-time friend of the members of  the Grateful Dead, looked at the world’s mythology and said that when you break open the feminine, everything comes with it, so immeasurably so that it will seem like it's uncontrollable. It’s got the ‘right’ terrified of their “importance.” They reach back to Jerusalem, and now even WWII Germany, to give themselves a grounding in mythological and historical significance. This breaking open means Black comes with it. Transgender. The Earth comes with it. Music comes with it. Hugely so. Everyone speaking at once, everyone having a voice. Everyone mattering. Everything that was deemed “other” for so, so long, and killed for it. 

And so everyone looks at Eumaeus and says, “He’s just an old swineherd,” next to the violence which is considered audacious, when actually he is the one in culture with the most hard-won, time-worn wisdom and from the eternal, holding on to the realness that has to be the basis of culture. That’s been side-lined by the abuses. He is leading to the true realization of the feminine. Wisdom hasn’t mattered in quite a long time. The Suitor’s “God” is themselves. Money, power, and control matter over Beings. All because we don't know what Beingness is. We horribly, mistakenly, rely on surface appearances and expect a different outcome other than slaughter. We value or disvalue based on surfaces. Homer shows: that will get you killed. His song is about how to break open those dangerous values to what truly, truly matters.

This is why Taylor Swift has been allowed to go on for so long with immense, harmful lies and a false identity and no artists saying a word with her flaunting influence, ‘power,’ and money from fans. Is she a victim? Nope, even though she and the unwitting press present her as such. She plays the press as the fool. The artists have been praising her to no end. She continues her abuses and lies and furthers them and is praised in the media for being a ‘rule-breaker,’ copying others word for word, and not an abuser. When an artist does speak, like Katy Perry’s warnings, Taylor screams ‘victim’ as narcissists do, always perceiving and positioning herself as the victim to her own crimes, always considering herself removed and above everyone else and above all else, special, enabling her to do to whomever what she pleases and expects it to be seen as cute, even as in the press, admirable and feminist. She tries to call this abuse ‘love.’  

 

Even Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, John’s close friends who witnessed the lie against him first hand–one foot in front of them–have praised Taylor and shown up to all of her public displays of borrowed facades and manipulations, knowing exactly what she did and continues to repeat–and will likely never stop repeating the patterns that have worked for her publicly, as it’s all she’s ever done. 

 

Outright blatant plagiarism and personal harassment work for her. Why would she stop? She makes millions doing it with endless attention and ‘power’ over the media to print whatever she says and pretending it is her own. That is what she deems as ‘powerful’--to lie and get away with it.

 

For the artists, there is no sense in punishing fans. Although the fans have gone along with hate as “justified inner pain” projected onto boyfriends they believe were real, they couldn’t have known it wasn’t true. They could not have known they were lied to for the length of her career. 

 

Too, there is the underlying fact that Taylor borrowed fame from artists illegally and against their will, copying copyrights at whim and more dire, invading John’s personal life that was not open to her, because she was demanding that fame.  

 

It wasn’t about the art. That’s her personal ‘powerful’ weapon to manipulate attention and money to buy 50 million in NYC where John first spoke to me and try to move into the neighborhood of The Olive Tree Cafe where the miracles of that trip were showing themselves, where he first played to me “A Face to Call Home”– and the miracles that would continue there in 2023. These artists simply bring it back to the focus of this entirety of what is happening. This is about masterful art, not weaponry, and its true ability to transform culture. But there is more, much more, and the pivotal, huge turning point.

One might say, well, in the epics Helen doesn’t get punished. But what Helen wants more than anything is fame. And unassumingly so, next to that Penelope in her internal chamber looks pretty pointless and powerless to the unwitting observer who is not participating embodied in the aliveness of the Song. This eternal Song, as Homer shows of the pent-up energies in the underworld, is a different kind of fame—that which Helen can never have and it eats her up inside because she does not know deep, eternal wonder or Odysseus’s love.  

Take Natasha Weir, for example. Bob is going to go back to her forever. So what quietly was/is the center of the Grateful Dead?

As feminism broke open to now uncontainable within culture, as it has with Beyonce, Katy Perry—beautifully compassionate feminism—Maren Morris, Miranda Lambert, Carry Underwood, Cardi B, Lady Gaga, and Ariana Grande, for example, you get a cultural pandemonium. ‘One’ is no longer just white or male. 

THIS IS HUGELY EXCITING. What is the next step? To break it open to the divine, the absolutely forbidden to Beingness and whose hope is very long carried in the art. 

It isn’t the kind of instant fame as ‘John Mayer’s girlfriend,’ as Taylor was trying to force beginning in 2008 and is still trying to force on John publicly, even repeating the plagiarism and personal invasion of Speak Now, a hollow scream of pain. John could have easily handed that kind of fame to me and I probably would have had a much easier life. I wouldn’t have been alone. My books likely would have sold, gotten press, etc. I wouldn’t have been treated as invisible or worthless by people. A lot of people poured out their hatred on me as if I don’t know what’s going on.  I couldn’t go back to teaching college. I had to watch everyone else be “successful” and have money because I was taking this different path, learning how to breathe, learning how to live within the contemplation without fear or longing. I had/got to watch other people live out what I had written. But when John knew he wasn’t going to be manipulated by Taylor in 2010, and Taylor saw that too, she knew she could target me ‘in the background’ and use and taunt me as source material and as a target no one would notice or even care about. I was a “nobody.” That’s how much Being she saw. 

 

This isn’t that kind of “fame” or story. John isn’t that kind of guy and never was. He has always seen further. It isn’t the kind of transactional tabloid fame. That would have been easy to sell in May 2010 before Taylor could strike. 

But it was her kind of greed to strike and to strike again. That’s her spirit, or lack thereof.

This is written by fate breaking through, the very hands of the Cosmos writing past human ‘laws’ against BEingness in form. Female doesn’t stop at form, but the feminine has been denied Beingness in form. 

If we can PROVE that Beingness from the hand of the eternal art, we can break culture back open to eternity, to the eternal, to the sacred, to the divine in form. Culture, then, cannot withstand not being transformed, with BEingness holding the most value, no matter what form it comes in.

That is why it is of utmost importance to prove Beingness. Beingness will give insight no matter what color of skin or sexual orientation. That is where the eternal opens in us. It opens the value and wonder of Being alive. The symbol of that gate is feminine, and it opens everything back to life again.

SOMETHING LIKE THE MOUNT OF OLIVES

Here are the written miracles.

In the legends from the South of France, as I was writing before, there was a green sprout on La Madeleine’s tongue, the natural coming to speak, when she was found to be buried in the tomb of Cedonius with the message of  710 on the written note, which is my birthday 7.10. Cedonius is known for the words coming from Jesus’s tongue, too, of him speaking my name, to go wash in the waters of Shiloah found in John’s name and the year he started out in music, John 9:7. 

 

Taylor is trying to release Speak Now again on 7.7, the year John was born, and at my birthdate, plagiarizing my letters to John and still trying to force a false relationship, and by using his close friends of the time.

In the Hebrew Bible where the feminine and Beingness, all of the Earth and nature and the Cosmos’s animals were cursed from extreme, brutal narcissism as a huge, suffering cultural path, the prophecy of my name is written in their own words.

My name ‘Shiloh’ is written in Jacob’s prophecy in the Hebrew Bible’s Genesis 49:10 as his dying words:

“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, 

nor a lawgiver from between [his] feet, 

until Shiloh come; 

and unto [him–always the choice of an exclusive pronoun] 

shall the gathering of the people be.”

Genesis means ‘to come into Being.’ This is where Beingness was forced to be unwritten and forgotten–what Penelope is told to do to “remember.” But this prophecy is what he knows must happen, and the meaning of the name is within their writing. 

This prophecy is the basis of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, which starts with referencing this verse right above the front door–or the eternal gate. (I published this in “Until Shiloh Comes’ Cosmic Flow Tapestry in 2018. Taylor Swift plagiarized it, making it about herself in 2019.)

My last name is in the prophecy, too, with ‘Richter’ meaning ‘judge or law-giver’ in German. (Uranus, the awakener, is conjuncting my Natal Saturn, long-term judgment, deliberation, this year and next, in the house of the body, earth, and Venus. Taurus symbol is of the bull, a symbol of the feminine which is referenced in Penelope opening her “vault” to retrieve Odysseus’s “bow.” The MUSIC is the awakener.)

My middle name, Lynn, is the flowing waters. It comes from an English surname which was derived from Welsh/Gaelic llyn meaning “lake, waterfall, or pool.” 

Michelangelo’s Pietà shows that waterfall into Jesus. 

The flowing water is also where Dante meets Beatrice in the Divine Comedy at the rainbow of 7 (colors) and 10 (paces), my birthdate.

Jesus says my name when he talks about the healing waters of Siloam in John 9:7 (‘Siloam’ is Greek for Shiloah; ‘97 is the year John started out in music), which is the flowing waters from what has historically been called the Virgin Spring in ancient Jerusalem. 

In the La Madeleine legend, Mary Magdalene was placed in the tomb of Cedonius, this man healed of “blindness” when he washed in these waters of Shiloah, linking my name and John’s to the legend of Mary Magdalene from 710, my birthdate, in the South of France where the legend was shifted away from where she could not Be in Israel. The flowing waters then appear at the mouth of the Rhône. 

La Madeleine was buried in the tomb of Cedonius so she could be “identified” to the ‘blind’ that needed to be ‘healed’ by Jesus.

The waterfall is corrupted into a stench and fetid waters in the Inferno where there is fraud and betrayal in the feminine, starting from the tears where the feminine was slaughtered at Knossos, Crete, where Homer’s Odysseus first goes on his journey into the war, a signal to the cause of the war at the corrupted feminine, the monster in the labyrinth.

Michelangelo breaks open the flood on the Sistine Ceiling right across from this prophecy.

Bob Weir’s name is where the water of that flow is regulated: “A weir is a small dam built across a river to control the upstream water level. It is used to regulate the flow of water in streams, rivers, and other water bodies. Unlike large dams which create reservoirs, the goal of building a weir across a river isn’t to create storage, but only to gain some control over the water level.” 

In other words, how it gently flows or floods.

His name is very much like Virgil taking Dante by the waterfall through the Inferno showing him what has happened to cause hell on earth. 

The lyrics from the Grateful Dead’s “Here Comes Sunshine” include the line, “Wake of the flood, laughing water, forty-nine,” the year of a flood, but also the number of the prophecy. The Grateful Dead released their album Wake of the Flood in 1973, the same time as my dad’s album Face to Face with the portrait of the suffering Jesus on the cover painted from Michelangelo’s Pieta.

Archeology in Israel now shows that at the city of Shiloh in ancient Canaan, the temple that held the Ark of the Covenant, and from where the musician David was chosen as king, first had a layer of pig bones and pomegranates, both symbols of the feminine closely associated with Persephone and Demeter, like the mystery rites between life and death. His son, Solomon, the poet of The Song of Songs, or Psalms, and who built the first temple of Jerusalem, was also known for keeping worship of the feminine.

Homer’s epics are centered on this turning at the feminine, just as it happened in the ancient Levant which the Hebrew Bible documents openly as slaughtering those who adhere to the feminine, the Queen of Heaven, and The Mother of All Living Things.

Up from these flowing waters of Shiloah from ancient Jerusalem is the Mount of Olives. Odysseus had built for Penelope a bed made of a live olive tree. It is the symbol of this “Place of Peace” and his intimate knowledge of her. 

Likewise, The Mount of Olives is known as “as the place from which Jesus ascended to heaven.” 

This flow of water leading to the sexual meeting with the Venus, as it is in the Odyssey, is also in the 36,000 year old cave drawings up the Rhône at the Ardèche in the South of France. 

On The Mount of Olives in Jerusalem is the Church of Mary Magdalene, also like the epics and continuing story of Mary Magdalene.

When I was first coming to know John, and when he first spoke to me, I visited the Olive Tree Cafe on MacDougal St. in NYC in July 2010. When I walked in it was the same atmosphere, even the very same movies showing in black and white, of a place called Crystal’s in Texas from my childhood where I had fallen in love with old movies. 

When I would return to the Village in 2023, it was on the discovery of the miracles with author Willa Cather and this being the true neighborhood of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The prophecy also contains my birthdate: 7.10.70 as 7 x 7=49 and I was born on the 10th.

My name upside down is the numbers 407145. It contains my birthday and the numbers of the Hebrew prophecy at the beginning and end 4 and 4+5=9, with my birthdate 71070 in the middle. It also contains the year of my birth, 1970: 70 19. My name contains the place of my birth, Ohio, and the goddess Io, the goddess in the form of the cow which is signaled in the Odyssey at Penelope’s “vault.”

My birthday 71070, upside down, OLOIL also spells out Olive Oil. John has said that his first celebrity crush was Shelley Duvall playing Olive Oyl in Popeye. (I used to be called Olive Oyl because I was very thin as a child.)

I was born in Bethesda Hospital. The Pool of Bethesda is where Jesus performed the miracle of John 5:1-18, “Get up, pick up your pallet and walk.” This is down from the Mount of Olives. It is the place of St. Anne, who gives birth to Virgin Mary.

Jesus spoke my birthdate when he said to forgive, “I say unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven. 70 x 7. 

That’s also the year John was born: 77.

Translations of ‘Shiloh’ from Hebrew are “The One to Whom it Belongs,” “Place of Peace,” “an epithet of the Messiah,” and as Shiloah meaning “Sent.”

Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance shows an etymological root of Shiloh (שלח) to be “shalah” meaning to “be happy, prosper, be in safety” and “to be quiet and at ease,” which is a description of a state of Being. 

This is the state of internal Peace of which Thich Nhat Hahn taught in the South of France.

That is the same etymological root in the name of the goddess Asherah. 

Like my name, Beatrice connects to the etymology of the name Asherah, the ancient goddess: אשר “ashar”, meaning happiness or blessedness (1 Kings 10:8, Psalm 32:1, Isaiah 30:18) (abarim-publications.com).

In the Odyssey, Penelope is Odysseus’s ‘Place of Peace,’ happiness and safety just as the goddess and the Queen of Heaven are described in the Hebrew Bible as in their experience in Jeremiah 44.

“Shiloh” has been taken to mean the “Second Coming,” “Parousia” in Greek means “being present, presence, from para + ousia ‘essence.’ from on, genitive ontos, present participle of einai ‘to be’; It is the awakening of the realization of Beingness.

The Odyssey shows this recognition of the Second Coming at the feminine by Odysseus(who is recognized by his Inner Being, or thus made divine) that was denied by the Hebrew story. To them, it cannot be human. It always must be.

 

The state of Being that Thay shows is very much that sense of Peace, security, and abundance described with the Queen of Heaven documented in the Hebrew Bible and experienced with Jesus.

In describing the meaning of the name Asherah, Abarim Publications shows that ‘Asher’ is a part of Shiloh, and ‘Shi’ a part of Asherah: Closely synonymous to the relative participle ‘asher’ is the relative prefix ‘shi.’

“This female divine figure was always associated with trees. . . . LXX translated the word Asherah into Greek as also grove [ . . . ]  groves [ . . . ] trees (Asphodel P. Long).

I live next to the Lincoln National Forest, and which Taylor Swift copied for Folklore. (I used to teach college Folklore.)

Asherah is shown to be associated with Eve in the way the Hebrew Bible was written: Scholar Jenny Kein writes, “Adam names his wife Hawah or Mother of All Living Things (Genesis 3:20). Considering what we now know about Asherah, it should be clear that at any time in the second or early first millennium BCE, when a woman is called ‘Mother of All Living Things,’ the text must have something to do with the great goddess Asherah.” 

In that sacred grove, the Garden of Eden, is where Asherah/Eve is expelled, just as Asherah’s name was removed from throughout the Hebrew Bible, and her altars burned as in 2 Kings 23:15. 

And so Jacob knew what he was prophesying when he said “Shiloh.” The greatest artists across the millennia knew it as well.

In the path that I have been writing of the art here is how it has come to fruition:

In the article “John Mayer and The Revenge of The Count of Monte Cristo” I wrote about how the scribes of the Hebrew New Testament didn’t know how the female story continues of Mary Magdalene, and so she naturally and by the currents of fate arrived by boat, even from a boat just like that surfaced in her hometown of Magdala the year John was born, onto the shores of where she could live as legend and in Presence in the South of France, in contemplation on the top of the mountain in the Sainte-Baume in the Bouches-du-Rhône in this contemplative state of Peace, or natural BEingness. 

In order to live through what was happening with Taylor Swift’s huge lies, impersonation, and plagiarism of my writing to John, I moved to the mountain heights of the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico where I have written all of this.

The arrival of that mythology is also the place where the Count was robbed of his life based on lies and imprisoned, what was happening with John and the belief in the lies in 2010. There at the same place is the statue of Jesus at St. Veronica, “the true image” on her veil, that is also so reminiscent of Odysseus coming ashore at Ithaca.

In December 2010, after John’s public humiliation from Taylor Swift’s lie that he ever dated or had a relationship with her, John appeared at the Village Underground in New York City, right where I had been by the Olive Tree Cafe and tweeting him the summer of 2010. He played “A Face to Call Home” for the first time. He played in on Friday, 3 December 2010, and I heard it the next day, the very day I was photographing a fountain made of birds in flight on the San Antonio River at a historic former convent school, just as happens with Magdalena in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for Archbishop, and what is the revelation of her identity in the Archbishop’s “grove,” but which I did not yet see that miracle at the time.

I just knew that day that he loved me.

I am writing from the sacred groves of Willa Cather’s enchanted New Mexico where Magdalena in the Garden in Santa Fe was by the flowing water and surrounded by birds alighting to her . . . 

That Cathedral and Garden are on the street where in 2008 at the beginning of all of this, I walked into Willa’s 1925 photograph taken on the balcony of La Fonda Hotel.

That hotel had just opened in 1922–the year my grandfather was born, (then my dad ‘44, brother ‘66, and John ‘77–and why Taylor fixated on ‘22 from John’s lyrics, “It’s been a long time since 22.”). It was the year Willa said that the world split apart, the year Eris moved into Aries . . . I would go stay at the hotel 100 years later in December 2022 right after discovering that Willa’s work in New York City is the source of Breakfast at Tiffany’s before my trip to New York, just as her journey by my mountain in 1912 before she published the beginning story, “The Bohemian Girl.” 

The day of me first walking into her photograph, where she has in fact placed herself as the door of the cathedral, the very meaning of the Sistine with my name, was the weekend of 10 February 2008, the day John was performing “No One” on the Grammys with Alicia Keys. I had just that day been photographing the oldest church in the US (from the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s passing). When I visited in December 2022, it was upon the passing and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. (Audrey Hepburn’s first leading role of Roman Holiday, came out upon her inauguration.)

And when I got to New York City visiting where Willa wrote it all near Washington Square, I realized by looking at the inspiration of her neighborhood and her writing there, that that street in Santa Fe, San Francisco St. between the hotel and the camera shop and the cathedral at the end, which was the inspiration of her Magdalena in the Garden, was also then her realization of her “Coming, Aphrodite!” (1920), a main source of Truman’s plagiarism for Breakfast at Tiffany’s but brought stunningly back to the beauty of spirit by Audrey Hepburn.

 

Her realization of La Madeleine in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was what she was writing towards in “Coming, Aphrodite!” seven years earlier. 

And so as I stood there in the West Village, where all the miracles happened in coming to know and fall in love with John in 2010, I realized that Willa’s photograph of herself in front of the cathedral in Santa Fe led to me walking into her photograph, precisely into a camera shop, and the furthering of the iconic photograph of Audrey Hepburn on Fifth Avenue in front of Tiffany’s, and the realization going further, as she intended, as signified in the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop.

The miracle of John singing “A Face to Call Home” there at the Village Underground, Willa’s neighborhood, coinciding with the fountain of birds in flight that day for me had come to this fruition, miracles in Greenwich Village.  

Audrey’s iconic scene, photograph, on that street is from Willa’s writing, and not Truman’s. It’s the very difference of the plagiarism and Audrey’s spirit breaking through. She was seeing very far ahead to when things COULD BE SPOKEN, and here it was coming true in the most unfathomable ways.

In Santa Fe then, in 2008, I had walked into an iconic photograph–not just of the secret Willa was photographing right in between those stories 1920-1925-1927, but since George Axelrod was giving back the stories and credit to Willa from Truman Capote’s plagiarism, and with Audrey Hepburn to carry it, I was also walking into the iconic photograph that would become Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At the beginning of writing to John I wrote to him about writing a screenplay sequel to that movie.

That street in front of the cathedral in Santa Fe, San Francisco St., points to the West Coast where the Grateful Dead would begin, and this literary journal in ‘57, just ten years after Willa’s passing, and the year of the arrests for Bob Dylan’s friend, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which has begun there in that neighborhood in New York City, which of course, was very much speaking out for Beingness.

What a way to fall in love there in the West Village. Holy Smokes.

And so in Willa’s 1925 photograph I walked into a camera shop directly across from where Willa was standing, photographing herself in front of the Cathedral and Garden of her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop where she has Magdalena, a very human la Madeleine, being embodied in an abused human female, and inspiring “an architect of days that haven’t happened yet.”