Imagine this Chinese girl

Greetings,

Yes, he said, it's almost as true as you can believe it. Her image speaks volumes of emotional honesty.

She was trapped behind the steel grate, a hard grey Chinese educational formation of her childhood. Her eyes held all the secrets of the world, of her potential and she stared at the man, a stranger, a diversion in her universe.

He held a small black machine up to his eye and she heard a click, click as the shutter opened and closed, trapping time, trapping her image on a memory card. He smiled, thanked her and rode away on his dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing, for it was later in the spring, when he decided to feature her image on a book he was planning to publish, how she'd grace a book cover, her child eyes there for everyone to see.

"A Century Is Nothing," stories about stories and the girl in some alchemical manifestation would be alive, breathing and aware of her immortality.

He'd visited her school to sing, dance, speaking strange unintelligible words. His laughter and kindness were a relief after the autocratic, punishing manner of the bored women teachers. They didn't want to be here any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability, or so they said, in Beijing, a long distant dream far away from the poor village where people tilled the soil following oxen in the dirt, mud and rice paddies. Where green stalks revealed their essence under a blue sky below the mud and meadows of reality. As above, so below.

It was a place filled with friendship, steaming white rice and childhood's dreams.

Peace. 

A Book Arrives

Greetings,

A copy of my book arrived on Thanksgiving from the printing company in the UK and I brought the box home. It was late so I put it on the dining room table. I was a little tired and feeling nervous anticipation to open it so, I thought, "Ok, tomorrow morning after feeding the sparrows, lighting incense, making coffee and rolling a smoke in the cold clear light of dawn I will open it."

It's a little difficult to adequately express my feelings when my book slid out of the box. I stared at the cover remembering the young Chinese girl at her nursery school near Yang-En the day I went there to meet and play with the kids. How she and others ran after me as I left and the stern faced matron closed the gate.

How I turned and made an image of her. How, only later while processing the image, did I see the young boy behind her making the peace sign and smiling. How this juxtaposition of her deep eyed wonder and inquisitiveness was matched by his alert, playful, smiling impish laughing eyes. And I knew it would look fine on my book so I sent it along with the manuscript. She's returned to me.

So, I opened it up and pressed front and back covers flat, like you're supposed to do when opening a new book for the first time. Then I edged through sections caressing them flat, then I fanned the pages like free open bird wings and smiled.

If you need a read, welcome.

Peace.

MK 49 is up

Greetings,

Chapter 1 of "A Century Is Nothing," is now available on Middle Kingdom podcast #49 for your listening pleasure.

Omar, a blind writer from the Sahara is your guide into the beginning of a long strange series of stories, some true, others a figment of his wild imagination.

There is an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived.

“Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

I am the thorn and the bird. The wing, feather and air. My thorn is a claw, a sharp definitive talon for tearing meat from white bones. Satisfying my hunger along the path, the way.

I am also a cognitive psychoneurolinguist. My specialty is languages. Lost tongues.

“Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities,” according to Wade Davis, an anthropologist.

Wandering deep into the Tarim Basin along the Silk Road in Central Asia I was delighted to find the Tokharin language and Afansievo culture dating back 4,000 years. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorations. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA, based on an Iranian dialect.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, once stated, “Myths tell only of that which really happened.”

Myths suggests that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth has been defined as truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories of religion based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place.

Gift a copy to your friends and they will love you forever. As long as forever is.

Peace.