Intermittent Heart Flurries

May your heart be light. Be light about it.

Open it.

Can you see the mountain? The great mountain?

Yes, the sharp stones are covered in green with white snow below a blue sky.

And the clouds?

Yes, they are thin, light and flying. 

Faint?

Clear and you are a strange travelling creature of the nature world this wandering whirling dervish Chinese monk from along the Silk Road now on the western edge, the fringe of a long silk carpet woven on the loom of time.

Yes, it is a magic carpet.

Kirkus Discoveries - Novel Review

Here is the Kirkus Discoveries review of my novel, "A Century Is Nothing."

A CENTURY IS NOTHING
Author: Leonard, Timothy Michael

Review Date: JANUARY 18, 2008
Publisher:iUniverse
Pages: 590
Price (paperback): $29.95
Publication Date: October 29, 2007
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-595-45292-7
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: FICTION

“It’s story time,” writes Leonard as he launches into an epic of acrobatic writing and meaty, hard-won whimsy, where the fault lines are love of knowledge, truth and crazy wisdom.

Meet Omar, a peripatetic “blind prescient” of Tuareg Berber extraction, and Mr. Point—“poet, shape shifter cosmic clown and a bit of trickster”—as they go about this roaming, picaresque adventure through time and space in a world of miracle and wonder. Though Leonard is very much his own high-octane writer/conjurer, readers will sense flashes of Gerald Vizenor, Ken Kesey, Red Grooms and even Seamus Heaney’s soul-stirring word bombs as he meanders along in his subversive way, his sidelong take on the pageantry of existence, the bite of the human condition, hither and yon.

Leonard’s characters are after authenticity and attentiveness—love, laughter, old tales, an intuitive awareness of the spirit world—and he gives their quest both panache and seriousness of purpose. Each vignette is sharp and provocative (though at times the author can be too boogie-woogie by half: “I ask you to keep an open mind…In the event of a water landing your mind may be used as a flotation device”), whether he is describing a practice room for flamenco dancers, the Senate Steroid Committee, the insular suspicions and occupation patrols of Northern Ireland, a nuclear energy dump, Spanish street forms, 110 million unexploded land mines buried in 68 countries or the angels singing for the dead from Vietnam to the Twin Towers.

He coaxes the solemnity of Tibetan Buddhism from a man inking prayer flags and takes a fling at explaining the vagaries of chess tactics. Always, though, the story is on a mission to celebrate all that is worthy—cave paintings to tapas bars—and to remember, as a ghost whispered, that “[a]ny day above ground is a good day.”

A great, sprawling story in the lofty pursuit of mindfulness.

Enjoy and many thanks for giving it a read.

MK 54 is ironing

May this find you well, happy and dancing as spring slowly matures inside deep soil.
 
After I finished ironing - a real passion - two raw silk shirts, one black, one red and six cotton ones, I vacuumed and mopped the wooden floors. I opened all the windows so the fresh air could practice drying the surface.

Then I recorded MK 54. It deals with the Chinese Lunar New Year travel mess and a quick history lesson about Bursa, a city where I sit down and dream near mountains and the sea.  

As well, new images from a nearby coastal town are available in Emotional Silk galleries. After seven months in the cold landlocked capital it was wonderful to play near water, collect wave washed pebbles and smell sea air.

Book

Yes. A great word when it needs to escape the vocal structure of your sunrise.

And then, while wandering around D&R, you see your little book, the experimental temperamental opus libre on the bottom shelf so you pull it out and make an image with the ever present Leica D-Lux 3. It's about exposure. Evidence of the publishing circulation system, or, simply said, a small miracle. Papyrus between cardboard.

The Chinese girl looks lost and bewildered. "What am I doing here in Asia Minor?" she wonders.

"How did I end up on the cover of a book written by a blind man?"

Seed

You find a seed shop, plants, flowers and a one-eyed cat begging to be scratched.

Winter snow coats golden domes, spires and mosques.

Seeing through peacock feathers, two children make & throw snowballs below a sliver of blue laughing moon

a sky bird song

cold dawn, clear light

winter shadow

big snowfall - white flurrries obscure peaks 

bamboo refraction in water.