A professional stranger shows up
Among whispers and smiles
Old man with bamboo staff
Coughs, walks, sits, fills his pipe
Voices decipher
Plain cloth officer cleans glasses
Empty white paper
A girl loving geography
Lights four sticks of incense
Family shrine, morning ritual
Gratitude and impermanence.
Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.
Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.
Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.
It’s the hardest thing a person can do.
She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.
They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles, gold lame Apsara dancers, 232 species of black and red butterflies, 1.5 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry, Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups, crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks, begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks and whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage, narrow boned white oxen pulling carts, 14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness, letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered, Where have we been, Where did we go, What did we see, Where are we, How do we feel, Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?
They’re trapped in SEA.
One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.
The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.
Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.
Here we are.
Mai's hearing evaluation.
Anthony from NZ came, he met, he talked, he promised, he took her out, he tried to seduce her, he failed, he left. Mai is resigned to her former life, massage and laundry scrubbing under the paternal gaze of her older sister who sits in perpetual admiration of her mirrored reflection.
How does her awareness and disappointment register in her POTENTIAL for unrealized dreams?
How does her silent resignation and understanding comprehend lost chance, all the complexity w/o expectations?
Even in the false dream of star rain they had to move a wooden toy pawn, the salad bar in silence welcomed cool air from a brown river, children pressed noses to a rolling window, laughing.
An archeologist skips through star puddles into 8th Century excavations.
Freedom sings stones, selling a Blue Pumpkin to a Cambodian land mine amputee w/o a left leg selling DVDs to fat tourists talking with their mouths full.
An Enfield rumbles in Pokhara spinning the Wheel of Time, rejoicing in miracles, small ones.
Sit in meditation.
We do laundry by machine, said Language Animal.
3.8 billion years ago a black hole captured a star the size of our sun. It sucked the star into its empty mass. The star exploded the black hole. The escaping energy created, released streams of light we see today.
At that moment 20 raindrops trusted intuition.
To travel is to feel.
Indonesia asked you to return. Two years ago you said thank you. Goodbye to all that.
Orchids remember you.
The apple tree you planted at Gardenia is growing. Roots buried deep below blossoms lie fragrant with memory.
In and out dialogue.
Discover what speaks to you.
I am an old dialect of Kalapuya tribes. I respect the spirit energies. I hear with my eyes and see with my ears. I understand your love for the spirit power guardian. I am an ancestor speaking 300 languages from our history. Now only 150 dialects remain.
A hunting gathering people, speaking Pentian, we numbered 3,000 in 1780. We believed in nature spirits, vision quests and guardian spirits. Our shamans, called amp a lak ya taught us how seeking, finding and following one’s spirit or dream power and singing our song was essential in community.
I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. They are dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.
I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked along many paths of love to reach me.
My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, your balance - your weakness and your strength. I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pounded their ceremonial drums. I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest. Wind accepts your breath.
I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spreading like dreams upon your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they say, “someone has returned.”
I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet-throated song you hear without listening. At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.
I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you gently remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood.
You carry me through my forest. Your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.
I am the cold rain and wet snow and hot sun, and four seasons. I am yellow, purple, and red, blue, and orange flowers from brown earth.
Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.
I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility with respect and dignity and mindfulness.
I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.
Silence is everything. I am one with everything. A singularity.
All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, forms, symbols, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.
Everything floats away. Mu. Nothing. Maya. Illusion. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, and texture feeling regret, loss and a death of the spirit? I witness sad lost blank faces. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.
I never hear laughter as I pass through life with my Dream Sweeper Machine.
What does laughter sound like?
What color is sound?
This is my Beauty. Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.
I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing with my revolutionary evolutionary soul.
I feel like screaming.
The dancing hall inside the Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon.
They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.
I dance to escape the tyranny of life. I use my dance to express life. I’ve danced all my short, sweet existence.
The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisperdance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots below the surface of appearances in deep burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life.
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