Tall Tale

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 *

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer my delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames. I join my muse spirit in the Department Of Wandering Ghosts.

I sharpen rose thorns for my work. My muse, bless her heart, uses the thorns to make a comb. She weaves on the loom of Time. I feel sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. I pull my hand away with a thorn embedded in my finger. Old human flesh dissolves.

I’m filled with wild passion. A mind-expanding drug of wonder, delight and freedom increases my awareness of infinity without pushing me into psychosis. My power is a medicine, a sacred connection to Gaia after years of paying attention.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping a captured insect with thin microfilaments. The spider recycles her old web on the periphery hauling sustenance to the diamond center where it vibrates in a soft breeze. Does the spider intend to create the web to catch an insect? Does the flying insect intend to discover the web? Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to create and sit with meditative patience, another instinct is to take risks and move.

My serenity is not bought over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons cut from old magazines. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting Beauty in my heart. I experience myself as a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing my fear, doubt and uncertainty, shattering myth. Lightning bleeds off the charge. I am an unemployed fortune teller. I am the soft sand of sleep-dream calming a tortured heart.

Abracadabra!

My feminine muse hurls her lightning bolt even unto her death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a small short reprieve. Her tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

A Century is Nothing

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*

A child painting with smoke on mirrors blasted light, “Hey. That’s what the Greeks believed. Everything was beauty and order.”

“Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, seven musical notes. Beauty originated with them didn’t it?”

“You got it,” said the painter. “Hey, you know what? I think we all need to take the day off and be creative.”

“The present moment is eternal reality,” whispered a child. “We live in the eternity of the instant.”

“It’s about process not product. How we learn not what we learn.”

“Whew, that’s deep!”

“Yeah, we’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes.”

“Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else.”

“Fools speak the truth.”

“Fools are everywhere. We dance or die. If fate doesn’t make you laugh you don’t get the joke. Truth value meaning is in the mystery.”

“Tunkashila is grandfather’s spirit. It’s wisdom and calmness,” said children in a sacred circle. “It is the way of the warrior. We are all warriors.”

Rose listened with her heart-mind. She knew others were not ready to receive the wisdom of children. Their terminal existence validated life memories where wheelchair rubber met the road.

The children were spiritual warriors with distinct vibrations and energy frequencies. The future would be a scary time for generations unaccustomed to their authenticity.

Rose knew it’d be a beautiful decision putting the disability act in their short sweet Ghost Dance - maybe in the rising action leading to an epiphany or in the falling action with heart-breaking catastrophic transformational awareness. Cut. The end. Cue applause.

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” said a child with reported speech. Their wheel of life played tag with crazy wisdom.  Mu-shin, their state of “no-mind” blossomed where thought, emotions and expectations did not matter.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? Where do I park this empty vehicle? I have poems and stories to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

“To sleep, perchance to dream.”

“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

world dust

I’m broiling on the balcony of my Tacoma tree house. Getting down and dirty after years away from the typewriter.

Covered in world dust and needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine.  It transforms life energies by weaving adventures. Threads follow needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler and literary outlaw.

I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth. I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe. I write with passion and vision. Short fast and deadly.

My mirror reflects everything. It absorbs desire, anger, ignorance, passion and suffering.

Beauty has no tongue.

I’m confident and self-reliant exploring the human condition. Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes. Dreams dance reflections.

Mirror reveals emotional trust, wisdom, peace and love with truth and compassion.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

Your mask eats your face.

My mirror is dust free.

Creativity dances in language.

Language is oral, gestures and graphic.

Oral and gestures dissipate.

Symbolic graphic is constant.

This awareness enlightens you after years of wandering. I have been here for 1,000 years so I can only imagine what they are going through.

Everything you know is a lie.

Keep a diamond in your mind.

To feel better, clean my heart, purge old fears and improve the quality of life I climbed down to donate a pint at The Blood Bank. Good old hemoglobin.

Suffering from cancer, a hospitalized child I will never meet, know, or love needs platelets more than I do. It’s been sixty-four clicks of Earth’s rotation between donations. It’s the best re-cycling program on the planet.

Give the gift of life that keeps on giving.

My calmness meets a scared mother pacing sterile emergency rooms at Sacred Heart Hospital wondering if her daughter will receive essential ingredients in time. 

A solemn-faced, stressed out cardiovascular lab tech with his personal set of challenges and opportunities, said to her, “At this moment we have no matching donors. We’ve released a global search engine to see what’s available on the market. People are selling short to cut their losses. It’s all about supply, demand and the fear of poverty. Scarcity. There are indications of further interest rate cuts to stimulate consumer confidence. We have no immediate indication of a stimulus. We will keep you informed.”

The mother doesn’t need to hear this prattle from a white lab coat.

Fingering her bone prayer beads, skeleton heads shake, rattle and roll. Fingers caress thorns. Everything happens by accident on purpose in her life, speaking of destiny, fate and chance. Life for her and millions in the land of the free, home of the brave and broke is free will versus random chance.

Everything’s already happened. People need to experience it while confronting their shadow and alienation, loneliness and loving community in a corrupt, cynical, hysterical greed-based world where people try to Control their fear.

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

ART

Listen

I am a person who listens for a living.

I listen to wisdom and beauty.

fast wing

subtle light

shadow
little wing

magic 

light dance song bird

kitchen girl is pregnant with hope
save me baby

spill ink
take a line for a walk

Loom Of Time

You returned with secret joy
Yes she says my dream of you is unfolding

She caresses silk threads on her loom of time
Your sensitivity and serenity calms me he says

Before dawn
The Mekong is water
Fog obscures distance
She stands at a window looking for him

On the river
His net flies over still deep water
Threads and knots of jungle vine grace surface
Sink into silence

Hearing the Mekong sing
She returns to the source
Dreaming voiced silent whispers
Silence becomes her desire
Gratitude her awareness
Calms her tortured heart

A leaf leaves the tree of life
Flutters like a heart beat

Transparent water bowls sing
A purple lotus rows from mud

At her loom
Her pattern begins with purple silk
Her base
She threads thin lines of balance

She spins out golden threads for new diamonds
Weaving her meditation

Her voice
Hands fingers heart-mind