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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Entries in Cambodia (275)

Saturday
Jul172021

I am the arrow

Kampot river market long ago and far away

Where the bad people hung heads as a warning 1975-1979

Hungry ghosts

Old haunts discover language light zones

Paint with light

Familiar stranger

Vocal chords produce conversations magic music

Laughter’s labyrinth

Meditate on emptiness

Self directed kid

Zen arrow

Talented people hit the target others can’t

Genius hits the target others can’t see

Want

Need

Market light energies

Golden chickens

Silver fish

Lost and confused simple kind locals

Noodle mama mystery buy / sell eye candy

Shuffling teddy bear pajamas sing voice wind

Intersection of Durian fish gold fabric

Blind string man creates haunting music

His daughter leads him by pulling his shirt forward

They wander broken cement market paths

Echo lament notes drift into / through ears

Unconscious ice melts

Dead kind eyes stare at a stranger

Scribbling non-sense data...laughter's memory

Japanese tourists wear black and white cotton elephant pants

Cheaper than ivory tusks

In heavy carry-on emotional baggage

Rain quality

Market energies dance light

Community flow excellence

Relationship b/t you and your experience

Empathy

Fragments

Live a meaningful life

Hunter with optics

Breathe and squeeze

No form or substance

Excellence

Non-duality

Singularity

You are a stream-winner

Raindrops

Samuel Beckett minimal absurdity

Your begging bowl

Wanders floating world

Memory market hum

Her New World Order

t-shirt danced past...a woman with basket of bread, a woman gently slicing then chopping bacon, a woman scaling silver fish, a woman dividing coconuts, an old woman negotiating passages with her begging bowl, a man carrying bananas on his thin back,

a woman fingering REAL notes, lost humans inspecting hope despair laughter and song,

girls doing a pedicure, a woman polishing red apples,

shadows dancing with impermanence,

spoons stabbing ice, glittering silver stars on a headscarf reflect elegant universe

The world is illusion

Just sitting

Experience

One day = one year

One year = one day

 

Author Page

Sunday
Jun272021

Quality

Sitting. Doing not doing.

Quality

Past/present/future

Now is eternity

All the unhappy people trapped in vehicles

Laugh with fear, Oh no, you are the teacher (parent #2) we are the student

Forever young

We do our ABCs carefully printing LARGE and small.

Morning light rainbow diamonds dance

On the table

Afternoon light shimmers ice crystals

Lying on broken pavement reflecting

Brilliant light dissolving

Perception

Brain filters sensory data to survive

Is it safe?

Ephemeral data structure dissolves in the wake up

Man becomes rational

Experience primitive rich sparkling flood of senses as kids DO

Until normal training and conditioning closes door on other world for good

Feeling synchronicity

No cause and effect

Eye of beholder becomes an integral part of experiment

Microcosm of entire universe

Man is an atom in a molecule in a fingernail of a giant being

Einstein: see you are all part of a fingernail

Grasp the structure of the entire fingernail

Part of the pattern

It’s a comedy

Quality

Heart-mind

No Matter

Energy

Play chess with a French woman in a bookstore

Burma

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Grow Your Soul

Grow Your Soul: Poems by [Timothy Leonard]

Monday
Jun212021

Bell

Iceman rings a bell pushing orange wheel cart down Dream Street in Kampot.

He survived The Dark Years ('75-79)

No one ate ice cream then

They ate death, fear, suspicion, doubt, uncertainty

Rice and fish paste if they were lucky
He is lucky to have survived

Now he wanders the river town

Ringing a bell

Enlightenment echoes through hearts minds souls
Survivors cherish bell’s memory music




Flowers at pagoda whisper laughter
Respect love courage dignity compassion

Meditation
Poem nature symbolic butterflies

Silence

Void wheelchair fate
Wheel of Life eats anger greed ignorance

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon - Yoshitoshi


Clowns live on the moon
Flaneur - the sacred prostitution of the soul

Projections of shadow self
Time
Space
Matter
Energy

Being

You are an experiment of the universe with a free will.

Grow Your Soul - Author page

Monday
Jun142021

Tantric Eye

Living in Utopia, Leo carried buckets of night soil or shit. It was the price he paid for questioning Authority.

-why, do we have to read the little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

-because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

-this shit stinks.

-here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

He didn’t suffer from PTSD. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic. He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus.

He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth. He did not attend flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese. He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed, and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

I am a camera, he said to Ice Girl. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It was the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

It’s all small stuff, she said. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details. Checkmate, said Death.

In Cadiz, Spain a well-dressed bald man with Gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag proclaiming a 33% unemployed human statistic to collect his dog’s shit off a Roman cobblestone chessboard. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”    

“History.”

“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She’s one of 26,000 men, women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million landmines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years.

Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is ignorance.

Ice Girl in Banlung - Author Page

Sunday
May232021

Ice Girl

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." - Upanishad

This is a work of literary journalism.

It’s fucking hysterical.

Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodia animist jungle languages.

Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.

How long have you been here, asked a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.

All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.

Ok, she said, cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation, form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity of the human condition in this total phenomena?

Yes, said Leo, If you slow down. How is life here?


I work, I breed, I get slaughtered, she said. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and random chance are two sides of the same coin. Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies ...

They are same word but I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath, a whisper. Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice fast with a rising sound on the k sounding like a which means I understand without admitting meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? People love conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok?

Ok. Address the very low literacy rate, said Leo. Hello, literacy rate, how are you? she said.
I am well thank you and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. The more I see the less I know. I open my head, heart and mouth.

Someone said literacy means reading and writing, said Ice Girl.

I doubt it, said Literacy. Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, stories and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth, like evil.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold.

I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to read or write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. No tools. Education is a waste of time.

I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence. It reverts to a primal form. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge ...

Too many people talk out their stories. Magic is lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills magic and mystery. Ghost stories. World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.

Ice Girl in Banlung

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Every photograph has an aura of death.  - Barthes