Hope Married Exile

Hope was a tribal woman. She had many choices and chose Exile. They married at the Cathedral of Dreams and danced through fields below Spanish mountains. They reached an edge of the Mediterranean.

“There’s a big world out there,” she said pointing over the sea.

“Yes and that’s only the top of it. Shall we share an orange?”

“Yes.” Hope smiled at real and imaginary worlds past the horizon where one reality edge met another reality edge in a singularity.

“We will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit.”

“Delicious.”

Hope birthed a girl named Patience. It was hard raising Patience. She was a test for Hope and Exile. Patience gave them the test first and the lessons later.

Exile was a free wild bird and Patience tested his love. She tested his stability, honesty, devotion, and his way of constructing a world inside a world, a universe inside dancing phenomena. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker. Patience grew to admire this ability.

Together they evaluated their respective character traits and perfect imperfections. Patience tested his trust, his ability to let go and forgive with gratitude and generosity.

Patience handed them finite illusions of fear, anger, jealousy, ignorance and desire. Sitting together in meditation they created a diamond mind reflecting 10,000 things.

They lived on the edge of a forest. The old forest, seeing an axe handle approaching, said, “Look it is one of us.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double-bladed laughing axe. Streams of splinters blasted into air. Exile chopped. Hope carried.

“Patience never dies,” he said.

“She will live forever because she is magic. I felt it before she was born. She was a stream of light floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” Exile said. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will learn how to project her spirit energies. She will be a wise healer.”

“He was at the cemetario today,” Hope said.

“Who?”

“The nomad, the forcestero.”

“And yesterday as well," said Exile. "Wonder why?”

“No why. Visiting spirit sources. Emotional connections. Renewal. Affirmations.”

“Indeed. They will be out tomorrow with the full moon.”

“Clearly.”

Hope and Exile danced in a meadow under the moon.

Light pierced being. Humans did not see them floating and dancing. They were protected by light. Their energies were free from physical being. They were spiritual beings in a human world.

“What you perceive as fantasy is the product of your imagination.

What you perceive as reality is also the product of your imagination.

Without imagination reality is nothing.” - G. Seto

They released their temporal bodies and floated down to the Rio Guadalete to connect with water. The water was clear, cold and refreshing. Following rocky paths it flowed in a rush of sound from dark gray Sierra Mountains. Flowing flowers released scents. Rose water sang through fresh turned soil, olive and cork trees, forests thick with pine, fir, evergreen, pinsapar, maple, and trees without a name.

Bare trees pointed at pulsating white stars.

“Look there,” trees said, pointing thin arms into the sky, “there, there we are.”

“Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” said one, pointing in another direction, “there we are.”

“And there, and there.”

The wind listened as stars telling star tales containing star trails across the emptiness of sky whispered secrets about magic inside a vast vacuum of silence.

Hope and Exile were light.

"Hope is the last thing that dies," whispered wind.

A Century is Nothing

her eyes are the world

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows. 

One joy was selecting the cover photograph. The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality.

Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the other side.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared.

She had no way to know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words and singing and dancing.

His laughter and smiles were a relief for the kids after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn't want to be prisoners 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, fear and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers followed oxen in rice paddies.

Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

A Century is Nothing

invent a god

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf could do a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle."

Ahmed the Berber read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said a child, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," a child said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Earth on 9/11.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

brainwashed

One day it happened that a senior female Chinese university student majoring in English found the courage to say, I don't speak-talk English. My English is poor.

I have no self-esteem. I am too shy.

I am afraid of losing face if I make mistakes in front of a foreigner.

My parents, peers and teachers in socialistic group-think (Oh, George Orwell, where art thou?) reality taught me, or perhaps a better word is brainwashed me into believing, heart and soul that if my English isn't perfect I shouldn't try, especially in front of foreigners.

I’ve learned the less I do, the fewer mistakes I make and the less criticism I face.

I feel safer. I am a robot.

Autonomy and independent critical free thinking are anathema in my comfortable world.

On the other hand, give me a cell phone and I can set world records for text dial-a-log.

Especially when I am sad, lonely and bored.

I know people in the West use the Internet to seek information. Here it’s about entertainment.

I love chat rooms and the TV idiot box where I can give away my consciousness.

nahuales

“My family, while emotionally cold, distant and abusive yet well-intentioned, kind and loving were dysfunctional, trying to understand my vagabond spirit nature. They had no choice in the matter and by now they’re used to receiving strange word-strings full of mysterious symbolism and tragic truths from diverse twilight zones. I transmit between crystals and gringsing decorated with universal binary codes.”

“Really now?” said Mary.

“Yes, I gave my folks a world map for their anniversary. They loved it, inviting friends, neighbors and strangers over for trivia games using postmarks, stamps, decals, flotsam, thread, needles, bark, cactus fiber, beads, charts of tributaries, topographical maps, animal skins, hieroglyphics, and Tibetan prayer wheels with Sanskrit characters.

“They caressed burned broken shards of Turkish pottery, Chinese bamboo brushes dripping blood, torn out pages from esoteric Runes, Paleolithic fertility symbols, vitreous unusual writing, and one of my favorites, a Quetzalcoatl image full of written narration based on the oral performances of Central American myths."

“Fascinating,” said Deirdre.

“Yes, I gave them Olmec nahuales shamans containing animal powers dating back to 1200 B.C. speaking their wisdom. They blended the spirituality and intellect of man with the ferocity and strength of the Jaguar to create their nahuales. Their soul required an animal medium to travel from the earth to the heavens and into the underworld.

“Additional cultural reminders were beautiful blank black mirrors. Some displayed faces others contained scripts written backwards with stories of people, geographies, forbidden objects, and a box called Pandora." 

A Century is Nothing