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Advent, and Lent, these two times of waiting for winter and waiting for spring, are my favorite "holidays" or seasons because they demand a spiritual focus upon the two mysteries of life: birth and death.

So it has been a special pleasure that my mother has asked me to come up on Sundays and accompany her to the convent church down the street from their house.

Even though I am not a Roman catholic I am always intrigued by their worship, and the prayers are quite similar to any Christian church, "we" all say

as.it.was.in.the.beginning is.now and ever.shall.be world.without.end

and read from the scriptures and so forth.

The one big difference is the question of praying to saints. Protestants, of which persuasion I was raised like cattle fodder for the cannons of the reformation to slaughter the papists while they slaughter us and we ignore the real enemy the saracens crusade crusade crusade, ahem... did I tell you one of my ancestors was the Xian king of Jerusalem? In the eleventh (12th?) century. Yes. His name was Baldwin. He was an uncle, not a grandfather BTW.

Where was I? Oh yes, "protestants" (protest protest) do not ascribe to praying "to" saints. Yet I in my own little path and carrying the cross of intellectual curiosity that has been laid upon my shoulders I have noticed in this land that I love as much as America is Mexico a fascinating mixture of ancient native American "indian" gods with Catholic saints for example Tonantzin ("Our-Lady-Mother") previously an honorific title for an earth goddess worshiped before 1520 at the hill of Tepeyac in the valley of Mexico is now an honorific title for the Mother-of-God the virgin of Guadalupe worshipped since 1530 something with her son baby Jesus at the hill of Tepeyac in the valley of Mexico. There are other examples but I won't start listing them here since my purpose now is only to mention not to catalogue.

Mention only to say that 1) as a protestant I have psychological difficulty praying "to" any saint in lieu of to God, but 2) my immense and intense respect and love for the Mexican people has led me to doubt my own hard-hearted limitation and I have come to believe that even while they are praying to St.Jude Tadeo for example with the flames coming out of his head or to Saint Francis whose statue used to wander around from church to church in the colonial ghost town of Real de Catorce and tens upon tens of thousands of people now pilgrimage there every October sleeping out in the streets and leaving trash everywhere (where T's grandfather used to have a ranch on the holy peyote mountain of Wirikuta) well so they are ALSO praying to God as well as to and through the saint and that that is the whole "secret" of intercession but still Still STILL there is this pesky little protestant devil that whines in all the voices of my puritan ancestors only Jesus can intercede etcetera etcet etc....

So it was a great personal relief to me and my human psyche the inventor of mythologies that I heard one day several years ago the seven words: "well will you pray with me then" after I had complained to her coffin, silently, that I did not feel right praying "to" her instead of "to God"; and then I heard the seven words inside my own little brain, not much more than an hour or two after I had touched the reliquary holding the mortal remains of St.Therese visiting the convent church down the street from my mother's house during her American tour (the dead saint's American tour, not my mother's).

Of course I am deliberately confusing pop-culture terminology with religion. "World Tour" indeed did you get a t-shirt printed saying that? No, only a postcard or two that the nuns were busy rubbing on her glass box around the dark wooden sacrcophagus where she rests sleeping, hidden, until judgement day okay. Ahem amen in the unconscious mind everything leaks into everything else, and that, in effect, was what happened in my unconscious. To hell with heretics burnt at the stake and all other communist opiate of the people I want a resolution, not a revolution, and so I heard the words. None of this is fictional it all happened BTW dear reader I am quite mad you should know.

Well, tranquilly so. The madness of poets and knights who say Knee. ("Bring us the shrubbery!")

Only once before in my life have I heard words come to me like that "well will you pray with me then" no only once before. I do not usually hear voices unless someone is actually speaking. Nor do I usually hallucinate except when I am asleep and dreaming. Usually when I write or draw or paint or make a film or video the ideas arise linked to things I see and hear in the world around me or maybe in a book or another film and the words take form within me in a longer, half-conscious half-emotional half-intuitional process of selection and editing and writing and re-vision. Three halves make a whole if you have a quarter-eraser and you use it twice.

But then, twice in my life, seven words have popped into my brain like Athena springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. One moment I was just sitting there, first looking at a book, or the second time at the computer screen, and the next moment, I felt the words. Not quite heard them, I knew they were in my head, but they popped directly into my consciousness without any process of extended arousal and development and revision, almost Almost ALMOST as IF someone had spoken between my ears.

The other time... the first time... I was like twenty one or twenty two in the library at Grossmont College looking at a picture book of Yagul and Mitla and Monte Alban, and I heard/felt in something like my late (RIP) grandmother Nell Jane and her sister Caroline Duston's voice, "oh Daniel you and your Indian capitals" yes.

Both times the voice has felt distinctly feminine. Very shekinah muselike. My personal mythology explains it as the voices of my ancestors. T my love, the last woman of my life, would call it my guardian angel (except in Spanish angel de la guardia). Oh yes we little human monkeys always demand explanations, or denial.

The first time I was quite frightened that I was going mad and about to enter into schizophrenia because I was right about the perfect age for it, but the "voice" never came back until thirty years later and I haven't "heard" it since. I feel it near as close as my own heart beating and my own brain buzzing and whispering because I know it is a process of "my" "own" psyche but it ain't spoken since that day three or four years ago in my parents' house.

Fork all these quote marks you know what I mean.

I am sure I wrote this down somewhere before so please forgive my repeating myself. It is just that going to the convent church yesterday with my mother and T and brother and niece again reminds me of it.

So anyway and that's all about how and why I am so fond I am of St.Theresa and very happy my Mom asked me to go to mass with her Carmelite neighbors during lent because I am grateful to her and to that church and those nuns for helping stimulate me to resolve my particular protestant dilemma. I don't need to worry about praying to the saints. No. I am praying with them. Wa ina mim al muslimin. I too am among the faithful.

It doesn't matter whether she did it or I did it or whether that's all pagan hallucination no no no none of that matters because the fact remains that my personal resolution, the seven words, came after visiting her relics. Inspiration is a psychological phenomenon. And I knew exactly which "non-fictional character" my creative mind was speaking when the words said "with me then" oh yes.

Sister E, when I told her the story, said, "Oh, that sounds just like her."

I ain't a writer for nothing. Nor a reader, neither.

Cackling carcajadas. Oh, no. I ain't not for nothing.

No.

(And you, David, just shut up and pat yourself on the back for reading all of this shit without screaming out more than ten or twelve times at how brainwashed I am to believe any of this anti-libertarian religion poop.)

A pile of books sit thrown away in the trash. In a ripped open cardboard box next to an overflowing trash can on the side of the busy street. I am drawn to the books like flies to dead meat. Look through them. They have been set out, separately from the trash can, and are all still clean, although somewhat tossed around and mixed up with crumpled paper. Books about Apaches and Maya, Blackfeet and Hopi. All in English. Take some of them.

in the corner the letter