blindness

I stepped outside of myself and saw a blind man going down life’s street. Neither of us had seen each other before. 

Dressed in rags, he stooped under the weight of a torn shouldered bag. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff. He had no left hand. In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle, adjusting his way around it.

Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide open eyes. They were changed to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes.

I remembered, If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark, or a blind man crossing a bridge is a good example how we should live our lives, the enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in existence.

He continued scraping his staff against steps leading to shops and worked his way along a long concrete wall. At the far end sat a beggar in rags made from boiled books.

His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him.

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!”

“Sorry. I didn’t see you.”

“This is my space! Keep moving you fool. Pay attention.”

bells

A distant bell rang. Another bell answered. 

“What day is it?” asked Raven. 

“Today,” said Orphan, “It is the day of the bells. The Day of The Dead. Celebrate life! It’s the first day of the rest of our lives. Ring low, ring high.” 

“How sweet it is.” 

“Balls of fire!” 

“Why do bells say sing ring a ding dong?” 

“It’s a code. A signal. They are calling us on a quest-ion. A journey. We will engage fear, trauma and imaginary terrorist threats of unknown origins. We will discover trust and love, companionship and community. We will evolve into our real authentic universal being.”

“What kind of journey?”

“Who knows?” said Raven. “We’ll find out. It’s the only way. Step by step. Breath by breath. The road is made by walking. Every heartbeat contains the universe.”

“Is there more than one way?” wondered a child turning a compass without a needle.

Seeing, not watching. Active awareness.

Ghost speak

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said a foreign teacher. 

“We know so much and understand so little,” said a bright Chinese girl. One of eighty in a class tomb.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.” 

During a moment of silence they heard an authoritarian female voice yelling in Mandarin from another room. “The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A ghost passed brown faced women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Single girls mopped cement passageways from dawn to dusk. Dutiful daughters swept floors staring at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent and hairline fractured straw mattress bedding. 

China is the entertainment capital of the world!

He passed retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured strategic rows as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes painted the city’s rising dust. A ghost they never imagined floated past, an apparition they dreamed in their wide eyed wonder.

A peasant woman collected cow manure in broken reed baskets. She carried her load to a road, spreading it out with a hoe to dry in the sun. Instant organic fertilizer.

Ghost speaks the language of silence. This comforts them. His inability to articulate his passion and suffering illusions witnesses a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s incarnate garden. 

The meaning of meaning was obscured by clouds of anger, fear, desire, jealousy, ignorance, and attachment. They waved him away.

They cast him into deep water. He replenished his spirit. His motivation and intention was clear. 

molecules

Readers may find your work interesting, especially the part about Americans being transparent.

I used to work where there was a nuclear reactor and knew a lot of physicists there. They were trying to reduce fifty-five million tons of leftover radioactive material like Technetium-99 from seeping through the water table into the Columbia river.

Others developed hydrogen fuel cells for alternative energy sources. I’ve never met a physicist working with detergent.

Wow, I know TC-99 and it’s deadly stuff. They’ll never get rid of it. They’ve created a hell of a problem for future generations. Anyway, yeah it’s pretty cool working with these detergent molecules. And now we’re here.

He took a breath.

Did you know that the world is made up of 98% helium and hydrogen? Well, the remaining particles of atoms, a very small part, is life and inside these atoms a very small part of that is intelligence. The rest of the pyramid is garbage. Tell your editor to take that out! He laughed long and loud.

The amazing thing is how many people don’t know it or get it. The natural law is for things to get messy. That’s why people clean, to rearrange the molecules in some form of order.

They think they are in control of it. They are afraid of change. Things happen which are outside their control or plans of the creator. It expands the evolutionary process.

chakra

“We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time,” the Phoenix healer said from the Valley of the Sun. After 911 her body work client list expanded faster than the universe.

People fought to see her, absorb her hands, feel her strength releasing their anger, insecurity, frustration, confusion, sense of loss, and latent repressed hatred as she delved deep into tissues finding the blocks. Blocks of time’s compressed soul fire. Blocks of tension. Blocked chakra energy lines.

She opened them up. She rekindled their basic spiritual fire, their love, healing them as best she could under the circumstances. She let them go. It was hard demanding work. She was exhausted when she got home for tea and a soothing herbal bath.

He explored Cadiz. It was founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir trading amber and tin. The Romans established a navel orange base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey, and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies. People developed agriculture as growing populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. More land and crops, more food, more children required to work soil.

Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000 year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed built roads, establishing communities to satisfy impulses for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanding their nation state.