What is it to be a female gnome

Notes for a short screenplay

Actors: female model playing female gnome,

surfer

Format: Stills and videos edited in with mostly voice overs.

Female Gnome: What is it to be a female gnome?

It is to place your hand down

And feel what is beneath you in the ground

To touch a stone and know from where it arose

How time shaped it as rivers and winds flowed

To hold sand in my hand

I can tell you stories from ancient plateaus

And mountains ranges long ago

Stories that no one will ever know

I can feel an earthquake as it occurs

Anywhere on earth

I can sense gravity with its variations and alterations

I can sense magnetic fields frozen in stone

From ages when the earth changed her mind

About where and how to place

The north and south magnetic poles

But my soul is different

It is made out of silence

The kingdoms of silence are my domains

The treasures of silence are my possessions

The beauty of silence is my heart’s blood and my home

Let me teach you what it is like to have inner silence so deep, so complete a thousand years could pass by and it would seem like no more than a mere moment of time.

If you want to understand my beauty and to feel my love, then these three things must be done.

1. Become the night sky watching stars pass before your eyes. Feel that the stars’ movements occur within the space and in harmony with the rhythm of your heart. Feel that bliss and serenity with its peace of being one with the universe.

This will not be easy. I’ll tell you right now that among gnomes human beings are a joke and a source of laughter, creatures who like to clown around. Your race is a total disaster. There is not a trace among your teachers and masters--not one embraces the beauty of the universe. Show me this embrace, this oneness, this grace.

Ah, I can see it in the depths of your eyes and in the lines of your face. Surely, you are from another place.

2. 2. For a gnome, every tree and every stone has an inner life of its own. Discover this for yourself. I’ll give you a hint—every piano, every guitar produces notes as sounds in the air. Put together, they form cords, songs, and symphonies.

A stone, a mountain, a plateau, a tree—they too sound as notes and songs. But their vibrations do not carry through the air. They are more subtle, sometimes frozen, sometimes like an earthquake, even you notice them unfolding.

4. Mountains and continents are harmonic systems. And the earth sings her songs to other planets. If the human race learned to listen into the silence, it would know how to sing along. Sing for me a song for the Earth.

6. (see ending poems)

8. Humm. Not bad, not bad.

3. Finally, what is love for a female gnome? Like all true love, it is to be one with another.

I am going to teach you now and give you my heart. Like the silence beneath the ground you will find it very dark. And like all love that is divine you must for a time turn your back on mankind and embrace another way of being, a female gnome‘s way of seeing—let go of the self you know.

As one of your teachers once said, “A seed must first fall to the earth and die before it can bring forth new life.” Simply accept the silence in my heart, open to it, make it your own. Let go into the silence of a stone, of a mountain, into the silent heart of the Earth. My entire purpose here is to teach you to listen without thoughts intervening.

(pause)

There, you have done it. You feel what I feel. Everything within you is within me and everything within me is within you equally. Separation has no meaning here. This love is beyond all fear—it flows free as the stars above and grows naturally as the leaves of trees. Through silent sharing heart to heart, we shall never be apart.

Eons of time for a gnome like me are no more than rings in the wood of a tree. Still, I desire, as doe this women you see, to cross over the boundaries of the self so that love can fulfill its deepest dreams.

Two poems:

Song for the Earth

May peace be upon the Earth

May Her beauty

Be within me and radiate from me

May I shine with Her light

May She shine from my eyes

May I speak from out of Her silence

May She resonate from within my voice

May I merge with Her lands

May She flow without ceasing through my body and my hands

May I never be separate from Her:

From Her forests and Her mountains,

From Her lakes, Her rivers, Her seas,

From Her silence and Her mysteries.

May every breath take me deeper within Her wisdom

And may I always share in joyful Celebration

With all those who are close to Her.

To My Beloved

When the stream falls asleep and dreams of rain

When the mountain forgets its mass and weight

Its cliffs towering

It roots running deep

And walks among the stars

Listening to their songs in the night--

I sit against a redwood tree a thousand years old

The smell of the forest drowsy in my bloodstream.

I sit within a circle

My back to a stone placed five thousand years ago

I reach back with my palms

And feel its tough endurance

The lichens clinging to its rough surface

The stone rests so comfortably

Within a quiet peace

Its pulse throbs faintly

To the temperature changes of day and night

The seasons, the ages, the eons,

It still holds conversations with other times.

I dream with the stream, the mountain, the tree, the stone

Till I awake within your heart to discover--

For this purpose was I created:

To love you

And to celebrate together

The stars giving birth to light

The dark womb giving birth to the stars

I am no longer alone.

The gust of wind

Its ebb and flow

Holding its breath and letting go,

The waves of ancient seas

Memories sinking down

Into limestone

Metamorphic and igneous rock

Outcrops twisting and blending,

Driven by the winds of time--

These transformations, as are my own,

Are woven into one Song

In the silence of the night

By the beauty within your heart.