language animal

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. 

Kalapuya

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.

escape the tyranny of life

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. 

one night

don't go to sleep
this night
one night is worth
a hundred thousand souls

the night is generous
it can give you
a gift of the full moon
it can bless your soul
with endless treasure
 - Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi

translated by Nader Khalili
from Ghazal 947
Fountain of Fire

Blindness

Curious beginnings determined her artistic sense of form, coloring stories of her eternal village, the other world. Cutting, planting, harvesting, complete slow rhythm of life. Her skill shined with every new expression as her heart sings.

Her simple direct feeling is all sensation.

Art enables her this beauty. She describes what she draws. Her words fly through forests with resplendent peacocks, birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line. Turn a blind eye.

Blindness listened. Blindness heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

So. Blindness danced on through late yellow faltering light penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts.

A bike bell rang. A young girl sat quiet watching the V girl do her toenails. Cutting, and trimming, lemon/lime soak, cuticles, translucent before applying a silver hued glossy glean. Nail by nail.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight crying tears of silence. A van labeled UNIVERSE filled with blank faced white Europeans trapped behind glass held their rampant desires and expectations on laps. Fidgeting uncomfortable languages floated into inner ears. Assaulting their long painful strides navigating yesterday’s regrets tomorrow’s fear and today’s dead lines.

Blindness practiced Tai-chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged blue ink for a dark shade of green. A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered empty secrets.

Elements of silence said farewell. A series of eyes investigated decompression while swallowing fresh yogurt with peach slices near afternoon’s languishing empty promises intent on discovering new, make it new day by day. Explanations have to end somewhere.

In her village, the other world, the one she never left, Blindness threaded new beginnings on her loom waiting for pressure and tightness between notes feeling sunlight dress saliva beads blending a weave, texture and design saying hello Beauty.