one morning Elf sat near a fire in Laos.
silent barefoot Buddhist monks wrapped in orange walked past accepting alms from women.
tourists scrambled pointing and shooting.
a woman in white using a cane approached a corner.
her staff tested curb height. she hestitated. she stayed on the street feeling secure and balanced.
she passed a fire.
May this find you celebrating life holidays with friends, family and complete strangers in beauty and mystery. Elf trusts your 2011 was filled with blessings and peace.
A traveling Elf completed 84 days at a private elementary school in Vientiane, Laos.
29 teachers taught Elf how to focus and pay attention.
Kill the television and distracting electronic gadgets, they said. Laughing.
They taught Elf about Character. Trust, fairness, responsibility, citizenship, and respect.
Elf cried and thanked them.
Elf feels great returning to Luang Prabang. He will investigate new teaching ops in the new year.
Funny seeing all the neurotic Europeans dazed and confused. They wander Disneyland. Lost and looking. DOING the Southeast Asian circuit. In-out. Bye bye.
Tourists find. Travelers discover.
Collected the Mystery 21-speed bike from the bus station. Had four months of grime and dirt sprayed off. Oiled.
Spin them wheels. Excellent rolling elevations. Taking his time quickly. Expanding the adventure indeed.
May all your adventures in 2012 be light and love.
I found a temporary room at an expensive private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care color spectrum zonal theory filled with young lovers in their emotional zombie reality of lies and uncertainty.
Downhill from the hospital a crying man waiting at the Metro station held a cardboard hospital chart and paper package. An orange paper folder discovered papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis, a definite definitive defining medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying, a wife, uncle, someone he loved.
He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to collect him and his package of fear, loss and regret transporting him down the line. Home. Where he’d spill the contents on a table surrounded by friends and relatives sharing his tale. Loss and hypodermic needles of pain, pleasure, desire, sloth, envy and assorted fabulous conversations laughed.
A bird pressed itself against a thorn to make herself sing.
A stranger passing the hospital smelled wild roses. A bird sang. He whistled. Bird answered.
The bird’s song were short sharp sounds, a trill, long deep vibrational throated mysteries, harmonic scales, warbling.
“Now I know why the caged bird sings,” whispered an orphan child scrambling across mined fields next to her Cambodian bamboo home.
The man and bird carried on this musical conversation until the bird was satisfied the stranger knew the music. It flew, singing.
“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.
tomorrow is national day here in laos, said orphan.
big deal, said a little red rooster. cock-a-doodle-do.
ain't nothing but the blues, said a sallow shallow faced female teacher. a skin teacher.
i dance. i drink beer. i hunt foreigners. it's a job.
rooster crowed. cock-a-doodle-do.
orphan said, it was blatant child abuse and he was one pissed off kid. i tried to murder his attitude, his free spirit.
i was trapped in my chair. he was trapped in the relationship. he learned how to be a pain giver, an efficient manipulator. he carried his heavy bag of neglect, emotional pain, shadows and independence into through and out of relationships. he distributed gifts of emotional suspicion.
he practiced the ancient art of abandonment. loving and leaving.
i finished doing my wheelchair time. i posted bail. i was released on my own recognizance. i stumbled, adjusted, and found my balance. i renewed my sense of self determination and self reliance.
i walked on the curvature of the earth. a simple walking meditation. a kinhin.
my kensho was a liberation and a loneliness.
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