I wrote this while on the train to Prague 3 days ago... Much has happened since then... but I-ll start with this... I am in a train rocking back and forth in the Czech Republic between Plzen and Prague where old meets new. My dear friend Anna Wolfe is singing to me. Her music brings me to both places and now she will always be here... but her music tells me she has been here before. Her spirit has been everywhere... this I know. I look out foggy windows to piano and violin as old stone farm houses encircled by flushes of mustard nod to and she is waving a magic wand... dusty...grateful and brilliant. Fat sunflowers are bending to touch the dark brown earth and I am touched and held as a winding river chases this train catching, feeding, being. We stop at some small village station. Life comes and life goes. I watch and wonder... who why... has there been joy or pain... and she is singing of life and death and lucky pennies and blessings. Low drums thump to dancing ghosts in clay villages where peasants have held heads high and proud watching armies come and go in velvet revolution. Trees flash and blur between red roofed lives... my own Picasso. Some tiles missing. Oh so beautiful, that absence. Flower boxes bursting make cracked windows invisible and the wind is caressing her... such bliss... amidst broken simple houses. She sings of winter of long black coat and I am reminded of siting around a white table under a sole white light eating babka, speaking in Polish and English sewing crisp bills inside the cold satin lining of black wool coats which were stacked into brown paper wrapped boxes and sent with love and hope and hope and love to those who lived inwindow boxed hopeful houses not far from here. Two voices sing in my head. One new and very old... a gentle lullaby. And one old and very new in thick foreign tongue sings about a black eyed gypsy she is calling me.