Affected

"Keep your hand moving," whispered the writing teacher to 80 robots. 

The foreign teacher wearing Tang Dynasty clothing filled with dragons, yin-yang balance, a Phoenix rising, a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains while emperors danced with concubines inside Forbidden Cities' red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams dove into silence beside abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss was a manifestation of phenomenal superior detective analysis and forty questions of the soul marking marketing examinations at 7:00 p.m. followed by utter exhaustion.

We escaped the sterile Chinese university on mountain bikes, singing, “We know so much and understand so little.”  

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” bright star Leo said. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’”

We sharpened sticks on stones carving paleo-Leo-lithic cave paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name backwards for future historians and archeologists to get the gist or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, “English On Line.”

Being hunters-gathers we salvaged assorted garbage mired in mud. We created a semi-permanent temporary recycled art project on the canyon bottom. 

We assembled statues using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, lost feathers, sharp needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, dried condoms, fractured leaves, bird calls and worn and torn useful Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa, Tibet.

In nature they drilled for cauliflower.

tomorrows

they laugh.

what do you see? i see a man carrying one red brick. he’s looking for a place to put it down. he is confused. he had no idea his day would involve carrying a brick AND making a decision. 

he needs a woman to tell him what do. this is rare because men, in his culture, are the boss and tell women what to do. usually they tell them to lie down and get ready for the big thing. 

he is confused about loss. his wife wears the pants. she is the now. 

i see an exuberant extraordinary solid particle cow patty land-mine in the middle of sunday’s broken pot holed road. it’s a steaming green mountain. 

it smells like an art project. it will be discovered by a speeding SUV leaving a trace of aroma past sweeping weeping women. it will spread itself over the entire olfactory landscape.

it will create new tomorrows. 

the village barber had a customer. a white haired war veteran. he’d fought against Thailand, Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge. he didn’t talk about it. he survived and that was his conversation. his legacy. 

he sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. he saw a thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. a long mole resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung down from the left side of his chin. the mole saved him from the Khmer Rouge executioners. they were superstitious peasants and said he was the Devil, an evil spirit. they’d let him go.

a housewife in a rural village. her task is sweeping dust into piles of dust outside her bamboo shack. she has all day to complete this arduous task. repeat.

dust to dust. dawn to dusk. poetic ramifications in the theatre of the absurd. a housewife has a house. she is a wife. she has 10 children. having children is her DUTY. sex for her is nothing but a DUTY. she is a duty free outlet. her price tag has expired. everything must go.

many children gives her mother and extended family someone to love and play with and yell at. yelling at kids here is abNORMAL and healthy. it nurtures their self-esteem and neurotic adolescence with punctuation marks.

her husband is sleeping. he loves sleeping, eating and making babies, because he doesn’t have to carry them around for nine months and experience hormonal feelings. he sleeps forever dreaming of a hammock in a bamboo forest.

naked children play with trash. they set fire to the forest.

fire is their great fun and games besides Yelling and Whining. 

one day

One day I went to the market with my brother and grandmother. We scavenged for food. She looked for money. My stomach comes first. I found a rope. It smelled like food. It tasted sweet. My brother found a piece of sugar cane. He is older, smarter and faster and needs the energy. 

My grandmother sat down at life's intersection. She held out her begging bowl. 

At dark we went home.

Thank you for your attention.

SPIRAL

Greetings,

In Hue, Vietnam the Healing The Wounded Heart Shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets from Nepal are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization working in Nepal and Vietnam.

Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love. At the SPIRAL workshop in Hue they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. 

All net proceeds from the handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries not based on piece work. Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

SPIRAL raised $82,000 in 2010. 

Metta.

it's all mine

She wore a permanent tear imbedded on her left cheek. She is not smiling.

She said, Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt?

Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-( They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

On the mean old street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky. 

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Metta.