We crossed a dry wash and climbed up a low butte to her ranch. There was a white-washed clapboard house in disrepair, a chicken coop, a pole barn and other outbuildings. We left the horses untethered, and gathered in HippyChick’s kitchen. “I’ll get you some chili, and you can take a shower if you’re interested - and frankly, you should be.”
There was some smalltalk, mostly between HippyChick and MouthBreather, as we took turns in the shower, and ate the excellent chili with glasses of cold well water. Melpomene was calm, but alert and not ever a big fan of smalltalk. She picked up a wooden stick displayed on the hearth. It made a hissing sound, and she dropped it.
HippyCheck said, “It’s just a rainstick, love. It has a soul, you know.” Melpomene wanted to take it apart, but HippyCheck told her “You can’t dissect magic.” That was just the sort of crap Melpomene would say, so she shut up.
Finally, when we had settled down, and the conversation was becoming sparse and forced, HippyChick looked at me. “The roan is different, isn’t he?”
“She. Her name is Thalia. She is a warrior from another world.”
“She’s not going to believe that shit.” Everyone ignored MouthBreather, as usual.
HippyChick spoke to me. “You have powers that I can sense. There is a group of us who have been studying together for 60 years, and we have discovered a link between the spirit and the material world. We started in the sixties. We dabbled. That is the only fitting word. There was no discipline or even seriousness. Alan Watts and Zen, Hinduism sodomized by capitalism, Wicca, mescaline, we tried it all. Everyone else gave up, but a handful of us kept studying, year after year, failure after failure, until we found a nugget of truth in the black sand. Watch this.”
HippyChick lighted a sand candle in a saucer on the kitchen table. She closed her eyes and intoned in a deep voice: “Ommmmmmm.” She opened up her hands and then abruptly formed two fists. The candle flame went out, and Melpomene started laughing out loud.
“Quiet, Melpomene,” I said. “Ma’am, you have in fact discovered something of crucial importance. Melpomene was amused only because our young girls in their first communion dresses” (this was a fanciful translation of our childhood initiation on Shaula) “would have considered your control over fire to be as trivial as an eye blink.”
I relighted the candle on the kitchen table, and drew the fire up into a crude, animated three-dimensional portrait of HippyChick. I vibrated the air near the image’s mouth, and her doppelganger chanted: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.”
Just to illustrate a point.
HippyChick merely smiled and said “Sometimes superficial complexity disturbs a deeper truth.”
I was troubled by this comment, but continued: “I was not aware that humans could even access this ability, until MouthBreather here showed some promise on his pinto.”
“Jake, my name is Jake,” MouthBreather insisted, though nobody cared.
“The feminine life force has been suppressed so effectively for so many centuries, I am amazed that you have advanced as much as this. You should be proud.”
She told us that during the UN speech, the county sheriff turned blue, and was taken care of by the local cowboys. She and her coven had studied peace and mindfulness. “I don’t want any part of a war against human beings, but if you are going to bring down the machines, I will be at your side.”
Melpomene felt we would surely have little need for snuffing candles, but she kept the thought to herself.
I have come to realize that humans do not wish to hear truth. They prefer tact, so I obliged, “We will probably not need your assistance, as this is dangerous work, but I noticed that you have a pickup truck and a horse trailer parked outside. Would you let us borrow them? We urgently need to get to DigiRam’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.”
“I will not.” HippyChick glared at us. “I will, however, be willing to drive you there. I’ve been laughed at for 60 years, and I don’t give a damn. We were ridiculed for believing in peace and love. I may be a child, but simple spirits are guileless, embraced by Gaia. Maybe your strength is a weakness. You need me. I’ll call my friends, and they will meet us there - the last freak-out of the freaks!”
I could see there was no use arguing with her, so we loaded Thalia, Melpomene’s sorrel, my white filly and MouthBreather’s pinto into the horse trailer. HippyChick started loading her Appaloosa. I told her, with infinite patience, that she should be an adviser, a military adviser, and that she was a little old to be playing footsoldier.
“Do you want the pickup, or not?” So the Appaloosa came too. The 1987 F-350 two-tone (gold and white), crew cab pickup was not going to win a beauty pageant, but I liked her looks. What cybernetic frontal lobes would predict an invading army arriving in a duct-taped pickup, pulling a stock trailer? Dissemble.
Once again, the fourth rule of the Warrior Ethic: Thrive. Everything was falling into place. Well-fed and clean, we were riding in a golden chariot to meet the enemy. What dharma could have suited us better?
The fifth rule of the Warrior Ethic is tightly coupled with the fourth: Cherish. I took a moment to send out a wave of love to my fellow warriors. We were joined in battle, back to back, and I was proud to call them friends.