South of Mandalay Part 3

An eight-car train from Yangon to Mandalay rumbles past. Lonely whistles blow. Ain’t nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Horse cart traps jingle jangle hoof tarmac music, prancing and dancing along dirt paths - On Comet, On Cupid, Dasher and Dancer.

The peripatetic facilitator of English, Courage, Creativity and Fun is here until 12 February on a three teacher team from Mandalay. 

He arrived in early December to prepare the English program for 365 G 10 students. Two additional teachers will arrive for one month. He’s here for the duration.

His sleeping room is spacious, light, leaf shadows. He salutes the sun and burning stars every morning through leaves of time.

Food in the family kitchen prepared by a smiling auntie is delicious; spicy curries, chicken, fish, pork, fresh veggies, soup, rice, fruit. Everyone is soft and attentive.

Native barbarian speaker focus is English exposure; Writing, Reading, Listening and Speaking with respect enabling Courage. 

In addition to text stuff  - artists, writers and dreamers explore and discover their infinite beauty and potential with Creative Notebooks. SOP. Mind map yourself. How to be more human.

How did I grow?

Chess lessons, strategies, and tactics improves their critical thinking skills, planning, logic, accepting responsibility for their actions, visualization, time management, and teamwork.

Learn. Play. Share. 

Students live in sepearet dorms at the school. They’ve come from distant Shan state villages and Myanmar areas. They are their parents’ social security.

The school has an excellent reputation for matriculation results.

Segregated classes. Walking on campus, girls shield their faces from distant boys. No social testosterone distractions.

Zero gadgets.

They study Burmese, math, history, physics, chemistry, science, biology and Magic and Potions from 6-11, 1:30-6, 7:30-11 p.m.  Sonorous voices echo daily.

They leave school one day a month with parents. Freedom.

South of Mandalay Part 2

A thin stick broom sweeping world dust cleans perception.

Two doctor brothers own the fifteen-year old school. They speak good English. Friendly, resourceful and gentle. Their parents are also doctors.

Zones are under construction - new rooms and a kitchen for foreign teachers near the dining room. A gym and library are being built between long two-story buildings with eight classrooms per level. Old trees prosper. Crows and dogs scavenge garbage.

Men and boys hammer, saw, dig, carry lumber, bricks, rebar iron and mix cement.

Boys shovel dirt from trenches.

Women shoulder excavated dirt in bamboo baskets.

In the shade of 300-year old trees girls sort piles of plastic water bottles and Styrofoam containers.

Crows watch with disinterest.

Kitchen women sitting in a sacred circle talk about life,

love and their emotional well being while peeling onions.

They live longer.

Uprooted bamboo are planted against cinder block walls decorated

with brown and green broken glass shards to prevent education from escaping.

Tree branches hacked into rough art forms pierce blue sky.

Fear & Curiosity converse with gestures. Do something you’ve never done before.

Trust, love, friendship.
Communicate. Learn. Imagine.
I am a rainbow.

This school reminds a ghost-self of rural schools in Sichuan, China.

Broken windows, trash, rough cement passages where sewage smells like success.

Painted platitudes and Odes sing on the roof.

Learning in Paradise !

Cement shells, paper exams plastered on windows.

Faded green paint. Wooden benches.

Worn wooden floors. Blackboards. Chalk n' talk.

Cover your mouth when you erase the past.

Ghost-self meditates with sleeping tigers.  

South of Mandalay Part 1

Fog shrouds trees before dawn on a chilly December morning.

Mornings are fraught with mist as an orange burning orb rises over forests and rice paddies.

Crows caw sing wing wind songs above monks chanting sutras at a pagoda. A bell reverberates.

Leaves dance free from The Tree of Life.

This raw, direct immediate experience reminds a traveler of Phonsavan, Laos near the Plain of Jars, long ago and far away in the winter of 2013. A Little BS came of it.

Here at 5:45 a.m. below trees with yellow leaves,

100 grade ten female students with dancing flashlights trace a dirt path.

They've escaped the comfort of hostel dreams.

They dance toward classrooms and a cavernous dining hall for rice and vegetables.

Hot soup if they are lucky. Mumbling voices scatter singing birds.

Female student voices reciting scientific lessons at 6:15 a.m. echo from classrooms at the Family Boarding School.

Dystopian wrote memorization. Utilitarian. Repetition. Learning by heart. It’s not about learning. It’s about passing the exam and marks. Vomit the material.

The wisdom of the heart is deeper and truer than knowledge in the head

They drone on huddled, hunched over wooden benches in jackets and yarning caps with swinging tassel balls. A bundled teacher scratches white words on a blackboard

Today is the day of my dreams

A narrow garden of hanging pink, orange, purple, white orchids reflect shadows before scattered light sings. An office girl sprays H20 diamonds on petals and green leaves

A distant solitary bell reverberates
Monks chant sutras at a pagoda

Flower

process is more alluring then product

Dimmi - tell me your secrets ... fundamental laws of nature ... synthesis ... geometry + shadow + light

Barthes - photographs attract us because they are pensive, they think

ideas in living laboratories

*

History, war, and violence screwed us, said Rita. Human genocide animals massacred 1.7 million out of 11 million between 1975-1979. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need. They eat, sleep, plant, harvest, fuck and sit around.

They are soft and kind. They have a good heart.

As Buddhists they visualize a positive future with good education, health care, quality medicine, job opportunities and community strength.

They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The lesson is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing staring humans. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone. Zap said Rita.

Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. Let’s pretend to be someone else in life’s play.

Whew what a mouthful, said Tran, an amputee from Vietnam, Yeah spilling sounds and metaphors, the human condition reads history and weeps, time history is a play, create memory history and re-write it. Your memory is the world, said Omar, And the world is a village.

Everything I need is here.

Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.

Question?

What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were all. Her hands were water air soft gentle sensations. Learning sensing and feeling is her physical way. She engaged all her senses. Touch is her essence.

She knew your pressure points. Soft, medium or hard, she said. During her meditation we considered this fragment. We discovered immediate direct experience with structure form and literary vulgarity.

We slow down inside a labyrinth contemplating a lotus growing from mud.

A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive. They write naked, in blood and in exile.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Burma

abundance

"Terrorism is the art of fear." - Salman Rushdie

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Mandalay, Burma

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Dear one I am here for you. Love, compassion, joy, freedom.

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Contradictions - the lost writings of Kafka.

"Stay at your desk and listen.  Or don't even listen, wait for it to bother you ... Don't even wait, be quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it with writhe in front of you in ecstacy."

The nature of experience. What can writers do?

Celebrate abundance. We live in an abundance beyond our needs ... the abundance of plant, insect and bird life supplies beauty and marvels and enigmas ...

abundance of energies astonish, delighted, entranced ... sensibilities & energies ... we have to entertain the people about us, to support & empower them to accompany them when their paths become painful ...

travel reveals a deeper reality than the one we find at home ... a person in exile is always home

 "A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second." - Salman Rushdie