Make it new

Greetings,

Yes, well, he said, here I am patrolling another planetary manifestation.

It's a random act of kindness to find the "correct" letters to say this.

Some humans take themselves way to seriously. Hang around listening to some of the anxiety and fear and trepidation and...

To express the sensation. How do you express a sensation? Is it an expressed gesture, a fleeting momentarily lapse of reasonable consciousness? Perhaps a main manifestation of the young girl watering the dust. Now as sunlight filters through the palm trees casting long shadows, golden rays.

Did I ever tell you I am a dust collector? It's a fact. Of life. I've collected dust in many places - in Vietnam, in the Sahara, climbing toward Drepung outside Lhasa one brilliantly frozen morning, in Korla, a well known far Western crossroads oasis along along the Silk Road where yellow is the original color produced by the silkworm's saliva.

The swirling red January dust here in Cambodia is a sweet deep rusty red. The path is a watercolor, traced by bike and motorcycle treads, grooving new tributaries of passage. Walk softly as if your eyes are on the bottom of your feet.

Metta.

Leaf's First Day

Greetings,

Ah, how the yellow leaf departed branch,

over dawn's fields toward dusty path

filled with singing love laughing trust children
snapping, crinkling, edges severed inside wind's fierce shudder,
dancing, twirling, spinning silent free

such a small snap, explosion, echoing, release this letting go
on a slow methodical day bright with experience, a focus of tonal notes
extended, expanded, slow and steady
as a leaf dances sensitive to frequencies, vibrations

an interpretation of truth

Metta.

 

Amazing New Dream!

Greetings,

Wow, seems like just yesterday we were all cruising into the final lap of a decade's year and here we are approaching a new beginning. Fresh senses, a renewal of heart-mind awareness with clear vision and gratitude.

2000-2009. Just a bunch of numbers times 365. Hmm.

Let's see. In 2000, I was living in Hanford, Washington, teaching tennis and writing. On September 1, 2001, I left the states of confusion for six months to live, travel, collect material and write in Morocco and Spain. Then the 9.11 fiasco, debacle, horror. 

I returned in March 2002 living in Eugene, Oregon, teaching and writing a memoir. I received 50, yes 50 beautiful rejection letters from literary agents. They knew a) they couldn't make 15% flogging it to publishers and b) it wasn't mainstream material, so they passed. Ce' la vie.

I shifted focus and energy to working on A Century Is Nothing and moved to Sichuan, China in 2004 to teaching English. By June 2007 it was in manageable shape and I contacted Iuniverse about self-publishing. I moved to Turkey to teach and work on final revisions. It was published in late October.

It was amazing to see the opus slide out of the brown wrapper. Thud! on the Ankara table with the face of the young Chinese girl on the cover. Her eyes held all the secrets of the world. The stories didn't belong to me anymore. They never did. I was just a conduit to bring them into being. A process of discovery and joy.

An amazing decade.

May everyone dance their love, beauty and inner vision free from desire and attachment.

Metta.

 

 

Prom Rath Wat

Greetings,

I've been sitting down in Siem Reap for a week and it's delightful after the hysterical hustle of Saigon in particular and Vietnam in general. 

I've been exploring Siem Reap on foot, hearing and speaking with a variety of tourists and travelers and settling into the pace and rhythm. I will visit the Angkor Wat site and multitude of 7th-16th C. history, art and spiritual wonders down the road.

An orphan girl at a Christmas party.

Siem Reap population is about 130,000, a far cry from the 8 million in Saigon so you can appreciate the lack of motorcycles, noise and chaos as previously written. There are also 7.99 million fewer hustlers.

Minus small guesthouses and hostels there are approximately 110 hotels and 10,000 beds. Inflated stats say there is a 60% occupancy rate. Tourism is down due to world economics, tighter travel money, and small yet significant regional internal and border troubles. So it goes.

The Angkor National Museum was amazing. An excellent introduction into the Khmer culture. 

Angkor National Museum...

My first Cambodian photography gallery is of Prom Rath Wat, a serene temple complex in Siem Reap. Enjoy.

Metta.