Teamwork

Let's have a meeting! Yes. English teachers unite!

Get dressed and take our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Collect one piston-driven fountain pen filled with green racing ink.

Remember water. You've gotta have H2O where you go. It's gonna be a hot one. Seven inches from the mid-day sun.

Pedal to a class tomb on old campus surrounded by luscious green trees straining to light. They are a canopy of welcome relief. Rose petals wither on the ground.

Smile and greet your compatriots, your stalwart educational guides. Take a seat. Look around. Engage your senses.

Gaze out the window toward the lake. It is shimmering. You hear scraping. What is it? Local workers are building a wall. A new great wall. Exciting. History in the making. How do they do it?

It's simple. Materials and raw labor.

Ten village men and women - who do most of the heavy lifting - bags of cement, trowels, shovels, a few plastic buckets, water, piles of gray bricks, empty drums for support, some boards and a couple of wheelbarrows.

Step 1. Build rickety scaffolding using drums and boards. Remove the old steel fence. Discard to side.

Step 2. One team mixes cement and water. Shovel into buckets. Another team puts bricks into a wheelbarrow and pushes it to a dumping area.

Step 3. Men wait for women to hand them bricks and buckets of cement. They slather on the goop and align bricks. Brick by brick the wall goes up. It blocks the green sward, blue lake and wild flowers.

Only the sky is safe.

Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.

It's never going to be finished. Art is like that. It's so beautiful you feel like crying.

Someone steps to the podium and starts speaking - using exquisite language - about the value of education. Cost benefit analysis. Profit and loss statements. How we have a huge responsibility to our shareholders.

During a brief moment of silence you hear a shovel, a trowel and laughter.

Another day dawns in paradise.

Passing Through

Begin this day at dawn.

Pashupatinath Hindu cremation ceremony along Bagmati River.

Shiva is the destroyer and creator.

Wood pyres. A woman kisses her shrouded husband goodbye.

Light his fire.

Fire is the beginning and end.

Fire is your rosé flame.

Stir his bones.

His ashes flutter with death and mortality.

Silence. Solemnity. Serenity. Grounded and transient. Flowers. Offerings.

Glorious color dancing fire.

Return to Source.

Tibetan energies. Joy. Laughter.

This joy – new beginning – transformation.

Empty / full.

At this very moment they look and leave.

Abstract metaphorical language.

Non-attachment.

Ink whispers secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation. Balancing precariously on the edge of an abyss.

Young boys stare at a writer. The blind lead the blind.

Everything is Under Construction at the Source.

The vast self.

Existential awareness.

Cessation of sensation and perception.

A walking meditation.

Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.

Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.

Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.

Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.

Literary fiction expounds historical truth.

The necessity of that moral choice.

Bookends of Bhaktapur. In between 90 years/moments. 90 breaths.

Non-attachment.

Sitting.

Awareness of energies.

Fleeting impressions. Images are visual stories.

Illuminate expand invent.

Passing Through

Ambivalent

Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.

A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.

A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.

An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point.

Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

The Language Company