Red dust town

Namaste,

The machine world in Banlung roared, reversed, revered and resounded with the musical machine opera.

Chugging down the street, old trucks recycled from devastating and catastrophic wars, death and suffering with bombings, genocide, insurrection, forced labor, starvation, land mines and descriptive historical footnotes blended black diesel dust, billowing forgotten memory into the breeze. It danced in swirling red dust.

The remote wild west red dust town, smaller than a city, bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of thousands in a flip flop world of opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny ate pastries and delicious yoghurt, in many flavors. Ambiguity, contradictions, paradoxes took everything for granted.

Assumptions wore Blue Zircon seeing harlequins.

Destiny rested as noon heat reflected anxieties. A bored mistress washed her red underwear in a river. The exhilaration of washing introduced her to a cloud. Lightning flashed. 

Children in red and white dusted Santa caps dragged their expectant mothers toward dusty chrome plated display cases. 

This one! This one!

On main street a happy girl of 13 sawed ice. She sold blocks of ice from a large portable orange plastic box. Her smile and pronunciation were perfect, I am a seller. 

Metta.

ice cries

Namaste,

Dreaming of ice a boy sawed crystals of clarity in a tropical kingdom. He saw but didn't see.

He stood in the back of a blue hyperventilation dumptruck with his rusty trusty bladed saw.

Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than a flowing, overflowing, flowering Mekong river feeding Asian lakes.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a hammer defining worlds into melting scientific serious sections.

His friend loaded condensation on thin shoulders. He carried melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into a waiting orange plastic box. A smiling women frying bananas over kindling gave him some money, Thank you for the cold.

Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

The woman assaulted ice with a hammer, shimmering blocks, refreshing beverages. 

Ice blocks in shadows melted latent desire. 

An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice.

Metta.

  Nam iceman cometh.

Future

Namaste,

Once upon a time there was a rural village. One hour from town.

There was a primary school. The kids were antsy, it was hot, they waited for vacation. Their families needed them to plant rice.

There was a teacher in the school. She graduated from a university. She graduated from a government pedagogic school. She found a job teaching 6th grade.

This is how it works, said the boss of the teachers.

You are new. Your salary is $40 a month. You teach for eight months with no salary. After completing eight months you receive 70% of your salary until you complete one year. After five years you get a raise. 

I'm going to have a find a part-time job to feed my family. 

Vacation arrived singing, No more school! Go to the fields and plant rice. 

60 students finished grade 6. We are free. Let's run, play and sing. 

Of the 60, only ten would attend 7th grade in the fall. Rural opportunity cost.

The other 50 played, planted, harvested rice and worked at local brick factories for $1.25 a day.

Metta.

empty ears

Namaste,

A Spanish kid said, “I’m setting the scene where place is a developing character and enhancing the tone of the tale. Anyway, while he was enjoying fresh mountain air so inherently peaceful, calm and a blessing, he noticed, way up in the high sky multiple black specks.

"He immediately recognized a family of Egyptian vultures and eagles who lived in the national park. They were practicing early morning flight on excellent thermal drafts.

"One of the largest nesting colonies of tawny vultures in Europe. While living and hiking in the region he’d seen several species: the golden eagle, Hieraetus fasciatus, Aquila heliaca, Hieratus pennatus, and Circaetus gallicus. Goshawk and the Egyptian vulture also inhabited the Sierras.

“What did he do? How did he see them clearly?”

“He got his 7x20 binoculars and focused on the predators. Amazing. There were six mature ones and young ones slowly circling on drafts.”

“Were they rough drafts?”

“Probably,” said the kid, laughing, "It got them started. Cutting creates real honest and true writing.”

“So, I’ve heard. But you can’t believe everything you hear.”

“Easy to say and hard to do as they say in China.”

“Speaking of China in Mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there.”

“What did you say?"

“Now it happened that at that moment in the empty Chinese opera one afternoon in Chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck. A group of Chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. Everyone stares at you in China because it's a human zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

“Look at the funny foreigner! He’s going to get his ears cleaned. Boy is he in for a surprise!”

“You sit back and close your eyes. She has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, some ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

“She probes your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. She flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a new wonder of the World. She swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire. While this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency.

"She touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING! BUZZ! BUZZ! as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your consciousness with a deafening crescendo. She has opened your aural chambers big time! taps the tongs again, you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat nuclear reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

“She eases it out, massages your temples, your eyes are closed, dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

“She attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away. BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! She caresses your ears, massages your temples and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. It’s all in the listening. You’ve been buzzed back to clarity.”

“Everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. It becomes a tool for emotion and expression.”

Metta.

 

electric

Namaste,

The unemployed Nepalese teacher, hustling 10 million visitors asked, "Do you know what NEPAL means?"

Big business? Economic survival? Mountains? High altitude sickness? Adventure travel? Peak experiences?
Whining, demanding Chinese?
Sitars and raga symphonic structures?
Extensive deep raging rivers?
Riding an elephant looking for extinct tigers?
An old woman collecting and loading cow shit patties into a wicker basket for home fire fuel?
Chakra, crystal healing?
A Chinese woman walking with her Nepalese lover, both measuring the ground with the eyes feeling the inevitable end of a quick painless short term physically satisfying fix?
Stoned out ragged travel casualties? 

Big fat culturally insensitive white Europeans wearing fancy expensive climbing gear as their Sherpa guide in flip flop sandals carrying the world on his back runs up the mountain, leaving them in the dust?

Young Israeli cowboys fresh from mandatory military service staring at a sacred cow shitting in the street? 15 million Nepalese women on their hands and knees mopping floors with a dirty rag because mops are too expensive?

Rolling fuel shortages because a) the government wants to increase demand b) India reduces supply?
Limited daily electricity? Nepalese must pay for electricity they do not receive. 

"Not exactly," said the teacher refreshing his lost hunger for money.
"NEPAL means Never Ending Peace And Love."

"Watch out for the land mine!" yelled a Cambodian orphan in exile.

Metta.