Voices

Greetings,

A man's voice from magnified speakers echoes down river on new year's day. He talks about what ifs and maybes. Exhortations about the dire need for clean drinking water, sanitation, education and medicine.

What is the significance of new year? Another day, another opportunity for talking animals to discuss, share and elaborate on gaseous topics like:

• how to mill around without causing damage to the environment
• how to wear a yellow "HELLO" cell phone t-shirt without a license
• how laughing orphans fill up a wheelbarrow with lost dreams
• how perpetually distracted humans face unpleasant facts
• how loose tongues are required to discuss, share, elaborate or mystify a woman slicing limes
• how three foreign female educators chew nails and contemplate new programs in circular fashion
• how humans will never escape 'art'
• how teams of ants try, try, try to maneuver a large piece of sugar candy up a steep cement mountain
• how an experienced bicycle traveller from Holland named Harold helps at the grassroots level to improve children's quality of life in Cambodian orphanages and Burmese refugee camps. How he eschews large organizations working directly with the people. 

How bullet points fly to a target.

On new year's day, the woman in her blue pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, candles, candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling dogs, baboons, balloons, clouds, clones and clowns.

She turns on the TV. She turns it really LOUD. Her daughters, 4, 6, are entranced and captivated by the visual circus. They never read books. The idiot box allows the kids, servants, tuk-tuk drivers, husband and foreign guests to give up their consciousness. Another diversion, another day, a new year day. April Fools!

New day, new diversion, people pretending to be busy.

Angkor Wat Hindu dancers in gold silk lame dresses with towering headdresses perform ancient dances. Apsara fingers, delicate movements. They celebrate seasons, fertility, rice, fish, nature, courtship, and joy. 

She is frail, about 80 with silver hair. She sits in front of her house. Her left hand rests on a cane. She wears a beautiful purple sarong with golden threads and a white lace blouse. Her daughter trims her hair above the left ear with shiny silver scissors. The woman's smile illuminates her tranquil face.

Metta.

Japanese explorers among others

Greetings,

Tomorrow is the BIG new year day here in the kingdom. I am a shamanic camera. SNAP!

It is morning. The four Japanese tourists left on 125cc motorcycles for a day in the country. The man had long gray streaked hair and wiggled his bare feet when the authoritative diminutive black haired elf woman spoke. Food was more important to her than conversation. Nodding her head in agreement helped her chew.

They agreed on everything. This helps them avoid losing face. Losing face is the worst thing in the whole wide world in their culture.

Her female friend was bigger than an exploding astroid eating space at the speed of sound. The man talked with his mouth full of pliable eggs. Another woman hiding behind big dark sunglasses appeared. Everyone talked in staccato preparing plans to have a grand adventure along the river, through flat countryside filled with land mines far away from Tokyo. 

An arisotocratic French couple sat in front of the lodge facing the river. He was 40. Fat and morose. He blamed everything on her and she cared less and less. He covered his mouth while speaking with her blocking his deep unconscious emotional secrets about guilt, desire and fear. She was 32, wore new brown Birkenstock sandals and picked her toenails out of boredom. Sex was their glue.

Wearing biased blinders they comfortably ignored small brown faced humans as they traveled through Asia.

A Swedish man in a safari hat with his conservative white checked shirt tucked into his pants asked another Nordic man how to work his digital camera. He ran across the street, took a photo of the river and mountain and ran back to show his friend. He was very excited. 

Five bored tuk-tuk drivers sat across the street in their chariots of fire playing with their cell phones.

A foreigner's girlfriend had a simian face. He rescued her from a bar called The Heart of Darkness. She knew how to peel his banana. She deserted him. She ran to the market to find Boredom, her secret lover.

"I love Boredom. I can't get enough Boredom. It's a genetic necessity. Goodbye." He returned to The Heart of Darkness to find a temporary replacement. Life is a temporary condition.

Metta.

Sappho, the Greek lyric poet of Lesbos

new year boredom

Greetings,

It's the new year here.

People get together, celebrate, travel home for three days to their village if they have cash and places get cleaned up. Everything increases in cost; food, transportation, quietly depressed bar girls, medicine, education, laziness and boredom. Boredom was cheaper last week in a free market economy. 

In front of the ornate French colonial court house teams of boys chew up old soil removing dead tree trunk roots with crude effective Paleolithic stone tools slabbing the area with miles of bland red tiles. The amount of stone work is tremendous. Across the street at a government building boys slap a fresh coat of white paint on pillars. Women weed a grassy plaza featuring a huge seagull. It needs a coat of paint.

White shirted men supervise garden teams and completion of tall heroic patriotic statues at an intersection. 

Boys rapidly pave a huge swath of land in front of a new grocery store with red tiles. The owners brought in outdoor fern planters and steel shelving for consumer goods no one will want.

Frantic men salvage gutter weeds and wild grasses for their livestock before someone chases them away. A young girl tries to focus on copying texts under the watchful eye of a private tutor while adults with a lack of focus and direction distract them with meaningless chatter.

Countless people with nothing to do practice the endless art of milling around. They practice the timeless art of pretending to be busy. They pay more attention to see if anyone is watching them than to what they are actually doing. This is an unpleasant fact.

Across the street from a small place where I enjoy noodles, carrots, spuds, eggs and fine green tea, boys in straw hats protecting them from a blistering sun create four new rooms with high brick walls at a primary school. No windows. Window dressing. A new year, a new wall. 

Metta.

Vietnam

Turkey

Shaman - Vietnam

Soft eyes

Greetings,

It's a slow news day here in the capital of Happiness. For those of you who missed or avoided the impact of a recent meteor shower in the constellation Nimbus filled with stardust, here are the five ways to improve Happiness.

1. Be grateful. Write letters to someone who helped you in some way.

2. Be optimistic. Visualize an ideal future. Describe this vision in your journal.

3. Count your blessings. Write down three good things that happen to you every week.

4. Use your strengths. 

5. Practice acts of kindness. Helping others helps ourselves.

Metta.

Red Power Dust

Greetings,

Once upon a time there was a little river town. Zak was recharging his laptop and noticed the wires from the power unit attached to the unit attached to the plug processing energy from the Nebula galaxy was exposed, open and subject to disintegration. Like humanoids. It needed replacing if he was to maintain warp speed through the universe in his space ship.

He went to a taxi stand. It wasn't a taxi stand. It was a place to practice patience as drivers ran around flagging down cycles with passengers yelling "Pen, Going to Pen!"

When the car was full they left. To make more profit the driver, a dark thin man in a frayed t-shirt gave Zak shotgun. The driver arranged yellow pillows in the middle to sit while driving, operating the gas, brake and steering. A woman slept in the driver's seat.

They escaped river city and discovered the one single road under construction. 

They bounced, shuddered and sped along red dust roads in waves of tropical heat. The road was holding a convention of road graders, dump trucks, steam rollers, gravel, crushed silver rocks, ruts, canyons, pot holes, detours and red dust. Earthmoving equipment dusted red pressure.

Impatient black glass tinted 4-wheel drivers blasted impatient horns to alleviate boredom and abundance of red dust. Drivers remembered swallowing dust when they were poor, hustling any and all possible economic resources to improve their quality of life.

Red dust obscured Earth. Zak imagined traversing central Africa following herds of zebras and gazelles across the savanna. It was thrilling, this sensation of movement through billowing red dust.

The city was Pen and filled with ink. It's famous for a massive killing field, a museum with photographs of 2.5 million murdered humans and lonely bar hostesses filing their nails waiting for a rich hammer. A miniature Saigon. Groups of cycle men hustled taxi passengers. "Yeah, yeah," they yelled. 

He found iOne, a derivation of a fruit called Apple. The young sky shy lady helped him select a new 60W power adapter. It came in a hermetically sealed black box. "This is perfect for my space ship and universal explorations. Thanks."

He paid her in Leaves, a well known and universally accepted form of currency. He went to a used bookstore. The owner was asleep. His son played a virtual reality computer game behind stacks of dusty leaves.

He found three tomes, Lolita, The Orient Express and an unofficial autobiography of Bruce Chatwin, a travel writer. Pen had gleaming pagodas, parks, wide open plazas and historical triumphs in the form of cement people conquering land, sea, and hunger.

He tried to visualize Pen being empty of life. Humans were not allowed to stay in 1975 when a military group invaded. They forced the entire population, maybe a million, to vacate the city. To become peasants. To practice the art of socialism. Nine years before 1984.

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

Everyone ran away from the city into the countryside to escape terror, famine, death and execution. He tried to wrap his mind around this historical reality and comprehend the totality. The entire city was deserted and very quiet leaving ghosts and memories. Year Zero!

He saw a very expensive white U.N. jeep on a Pen street. It had a secured flag on its front bumper. The driver wore a bush hat and clean pressed khaki clothing. On the rear of the jeep it said, "World Food Program." Zak didn't see any food. Where's all the food, he wondered.

He went to the fancy Lucky Market supplying the massive N.G.O. population.

"We Have Everything You Need, Want or Desire," sang advertising. Endless aisles of food products waited for foreigner customers. Zak left after 30 seconds and returned to the taxi stand.

The driver hustled passengers. It was a challenge because the cheaper mini-van taxi business was nearby.

The driver sat on his yellow pillows blasting south through red dust, creating a fake orange sunset near wild mountain waterfalls and dense jungles passing emaciated pure white oxen dragging primitive wooden wheeled carts filled with lumber, bamboo, watermelons, red bricks made of red dust, and human cargo wearing colorful red, green, blue, purple Kroma scarves filtering dust from their respiratory system.

Inside the river galaxy he recharged his space craft.

Metta.