Character

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” said a kid with a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute in Zurich.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s another cool thing he said." ‘I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice. You can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly or you can unravel the weaving back to the mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with honesty and courage.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” said Rose.

“I can read and write,” said the children. "We also love drawing, singing and dancing.”

“Reading and writing is power. Dance is life. Perfect. Let’s go together,” said Rose.

Downstairs at Sacred Heart a translucent mother saw her grief reflected in Beauty’s mirror. “This is my worst nightmare,” whispered her heart-mind.

Rose said, “Afraid to face the truth adults run away. They run away carrying their fear like a heavy bag of bricks. They are afraid to see the beauty, strength and dignity of Death and letting go.”

“Why?” said mother.

“They stay away because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing. The child’s spirit is pure energy. They have the strength to let go. Adults find Death a scary thing so they run away.”

“I see,” said a gardener trimming thorns below a tree house. “I know Death’s beauty and wisdom. Metaphors and mortality exist with initial memories. Memories are figments of our imagination. I am a dreamer in nature, bigger than the universe, in never-never-cuckoo land. I am a witness collecting evidence that tells no lies. The deeper you go the deeper the bliss.”

“I live with suffering,” said Rose. “I am a pain sponge.”

The gardener said, “I administer thorn pain. I ask strangers if they desire suffering and awareness. I distribute thorns to the needy greedy. I am very busy. Demand is high. My thorn supply is infinite. I am authorized to administer inoculations in life’s weaving process. Weavers prick themselves in the process of creativity. Their blood is part of the dye.”

“Fascinating,” Rose said. “Your silver tongue doesn’t fool me. You’ve seduced and satisfied more emotionally starved women with your tongue than you can recall. I inhale suffering and exhale love. We are all Death deferred. Be grateful.”

“To know Death one has to live. To live one has to die,” said the gardener. “I meditate on the process of death. I remember the future.”

Rose’s departure created a vacuum.

The trapped mother realized her ice reality. Concise crying crystals reflected clarity. Suffering from fate and free will she danced in flames seeking her SAVE key.

Hearing a child say, “I need help,” she received a blessing.

A child whispered, “The ending is the middle.”

“The middle is the beginning,” said a child. “You can start the story anywhere.”

“We are all orphans sooner or later,” said Rose. “We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.”

Death and the gravedigger agreed. “Everyone comes to us.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Grow

draw poem
breathe zen
explore calligraphy line
play shape shadow
imprint experiment
love future

synthesize beauty
form truth dream imagine
creativity
color destiny

adventures
nature sings
ink poetry
adaptation song music laughter
potential

meditation
delight process
weave thread
needle leads a conversation
draw doodle paint

storyteller senses wisdom
focus fate
touch now
jazz improv intensity
emotion

motivation intention
formless
blues spirit intuition

wander
dancing down all the days
live moment

tranquility
salute sun smiling intention meaning
beauty white butterfly sunlight
waves & particles
walking meditation

edges
existential theatre of absurd
stars decorate your hand

flame your life

feeling sensation
meaningless universe
value, quality of life, excellence

calm mind move body
point, line shadow color
wushu movement balance composure
observing vs seeing
Beckett - futility of words

random chance
magic day

Grow Your Soul - Prose and poems from Laos/Cambodia

Kandinsky

Fishtail Mountain, Annapurna Range, Nepal

Wassily Kandinsky, the painter, had the ability to see sound and hear color.

In 1911 he founded "The Blue Rider" school in Munich, taking abstract painting to another level. Magic.

Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908-1922.

..."Synesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet."

..."If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white."

..."Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras and "thought-forms", many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky's belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today. Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world: "Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."

Ice Man

Script

“The future is in garbage, I’m telling you. Be a trash collector and find all kinds of cool, interesting stuff people throw away,” said one. “They buy it, use it, forget about it, get bored with it and trash it. I’ll start a recycling center. We can exchange old stuff for new stuff. Like blood.”

“That smells nice,” the garbage collector said to the sage burner.

Yangon, Burma

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

ART

Yangon, Burma

Plant A Seed

"I have captured the light and arrested it's flight. The sun itself shall draw my pictures."

- Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) One of the fathers of photography.

*

“Sounds like you’re fishing again,” said a patient kid, “with a line long enough to hang laundry on. Anyone here know anything about reading palms?”

“I know what I don’t know. Mine are too small to read.”

“Mine are deeper than water carved canyons,” said a voiceless voice from a formless form.

“Ain’t that grand? Water stone. Yin yang. Gestalt. They sustain each other in a correspondence. The lifeline marries the heart line.”

“Do you see a connection?”

A child with dyslexia spoke, “It’s tough. I’m trying to learn 1,100 ways letters are used to symbolize the forty sounds in the spoken English language.”

“You mean to say, or say to mean,” said a child, “it’s difficult for a learning reader to connect verbal sounds with the letters or symbols that spell that sound?”

“Absolutely. Maybe that explains why there are ten million children in this country with severe reading problems.”

“Show us where the sound of speech has no alphabet.”

“Good on ya. Was it William - the kid from Kansas who lived in the Burroughs - who said language is a virus from outer space, a form of control? Where is he?”

“They took him away for treatment,” said Rose. “Some lab coat rat said he was delirious and firing a Colt-45 at an apple on his wife’s head in Mexico. William said hallucinating improved reality. Reality makes you crazy. It’s empty, dull, boring, tedious and filled with inconclusive abstracts.”

“He ate his Naked Lunch.”

“He dreamed with his eyes open?”

“You got it backwards. He was fast asleep with his eyes open and he woke up by closing his eyes. Everything is a meditation. Everyone is a Buddha. You are a stream-winner.”

“Connect the dots forward.”

“Figures,” said a kid, releasing cost benefit results scribbled on an artificial medical insurance form with a co-pay deductible.

“Some people never learn. They get older sooner and smarter later.”

“You change subjects faster than the weather,” said an observer. “How are we supposed to stay on task here?”

“Buy a ticket,” suggested a kid.

“Are you a ticket taker or a risk taker?”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks and suffer greatly.”

“Anybody have any spare change?” asked a panhandling waif on an aspirator with wealthy aspirations.

“Hmm, I see a faint star at the conjunction of the head and heart life lines. Does that mean anything?” said a kid fingering green palms approaching Easter Is-land on a bamboo raft.

“Depends,” ranted a child orator standing on a soapbox. “Do you mean faint as in non-distinguishable or feint meaning to throw one off a socially agreed upon tacit path implied by pretending to understand anything while processing information with a deft movement?”

“Yes,” philosophized a child with the wit of Camus, “it’s a sublime paradox, this absurd metaphorical life theater. We have aspects of knowing. We know so much and understand nothing. We are affected, infected, rejected or injected by how we feel not what we think we understand. Life is short and sweet. Art is long. Our lives are works of art. It’s not so much that there is something strange about time. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”

“You’re just saying that,” said a voice.

“Sounds like a description of the food they serve here, speaking of strange,” one resident commented to no one in particular.

“No lie flutter by,” sighed a Monarch’s wings in Greek.

“What’s that have to do with the conservation of angular momentum and a parabola?” queried a child spinning wheelchair tires on a tennis court and making a racket while performing real alignments for friends.

“Do I love you because you are beautiful?” said Rose, “or are you beautiful because I love you?”

“Both,” sang the Greek chorus.

“You get what you pay for,” said a kid ironing words with grit, perseverance and discipline.

“The map (words) is not the territory (perception),” said a child reading The Dictionary of Symbols. They shared a story about dance.

“Dance is a process. Becoming. Shiva symbolizes the union of space, time and destruction. Dance is an ancient form of magic. People wear masks hiding their transformation. They seek to change their dancer into a god or demon. Dance is the incarnation of eternal energy.”

“Well all right then,” said a kid dancing in their death mask. “Let’s trip the light fantastic.”

“You get the face you deserve,” said a makeup artist. “Your mask eats your face.”

A couple of engaged children practiced lines in a theatrical play.

“I thought you’d never get here.”

“Sorry, I was delayed.”

“Obviously. Are you staying?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know, you’re such a mystery child to me.”

“You talk too much.”

“Cut!” yelled a director.

“Was it the line or the delivery?” said a kid.

Rose said, “Welcome to Earth. Hello babies. It’s round, wet and crowded. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You may make it to 100 if you’re lucky. There’s only one rule. Just be kind.”

Laughing children in wheelchairs gathered at a starting line outside the hospital.  

“Ready? Get set. Go.”

They raced to the Denver Art Museum to meet Tibetan monks arriving from Santa Fe. They worked together for a week creating an intricate Kalachakra Wheel of Time sand mandala. Plant a seed.

ART