it's all mine

She wore a permanent tear imbedded on her left cheek. She is not smiling.

She said, Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt?

Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-( They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

On the mean old street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky. 

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Metta.

face dust

Greetings,

Walk outside, feel the dust beneath your feet.  Walking is a luxury.

The street blends into the prayer circuit. Two large chorten furnaces breath fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings, throwing sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. They flow and shuffle. Feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The sky fills with clear light. 

A Cambodian man sits in his WW I wheelchair. His torso ends with two mid thigh leg stubs. 

A young boy in tattered clothing stands on a log. He throws a large girl doll in the air. It spins, performing somersaults. It crashes in the dust. 

He poises on the log, flexes his muscles and jumps. He lands on the doll's face. He smashes his feet dancing on the face, laughing in rising dust. 

At a different ground zero called Tahir Square a young girl referring to Egypt's backward pubic education system that depends so much on repetition holds a sign urging Mubarak to leave quickly, "Make it short. This is history, and we have to memorize it for school."

Metta.

Mr.Tuk Tuk

A metallic Cambodian loudspeaker spoke, Now here this, The tuk-tuk is leaving in five minutes, Departing for points unknown, A massive short celestial event known as YOUR LIFE will depart in five minutes. 

You are advised to assemble all the necessary documents, certified seals of approval, water, invisible guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on...you will visit the Mind-At-Large on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you, And a glossy greasy Laughing Planet guidebook with heavily creased pages. If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light or 186,000 miles per second you will discover a new sense of perspective.

You may be surprised or traumatized depending on your perception to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing the temples. You will DO Angkor. Get the t-shirt. Check it off your list. Less is more.

Please conclude all private and group discussions, disagreements or arguments with your fellow travelers to ascertain your destination. Talking time is finished. 

The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. For starters he will lose his job and have to return to his small distant isolated village where he will plant rice and provoke white cows with socialist Marxist production tools to pull the plow through mud.

The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to become a tuk-tuk driver. If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family will starve to death. This is a common problem here. Death by starvation. If you survive you win. 

If he dies you will be held in escrow. (Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment)

A tuk-tuk river driver has an easy job. An easy life. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. He makes $15-20 for the day. 

The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $2.03.

Not a single woman in Siem Reap is a tuk-tuk driver. There are 3-4 women tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh. They are as rare as clean drinking water, sanitation, hospitals and schools. Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guest houses. They are the guest and you are the house. 

Your house has many symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious lives breaths-laughs and dances where it reveals inner vision. Clean all your rooms. Take out the garbage. Explore your diverse rooms. 

Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff. You are the housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols and nothing.

A woman doesn't work as a tuk-tuk driver because: 

-it's too dangerous

-it's inappropriate

-it's foolish

-they lack the education, intelligence, drive, initiative

-they haven't broken free of deeply ingrained social and cultural stereotypes: a woman's place is in the home, producing offspring, taking care of kids and the elderly, washing, cleaning, and cooking

-their family will kill them with love and affection

Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish 9th grade. She married and stayed at home. She produced children in assembly line operations with the highest quality control standards known to modern medicine and umbilical chords.

It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers. Tisk, tisk, tuk, tuk.

Your mother was appointed to have you.

2% curiosity

greetings,

2% are awake.
98% are asleep.
this is an unpleasant fact.

today is a happy day in paradise. paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. they are ecstatic. they are laughing and running and playing and planting and harvesting and breeding and working and dying.

they blast red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks into a black sky celebrating the end of the genocide regime. someone sings, the wicked witch is dead!

it's a brave new world. except for four old dying relics on a very expensive show trial for genocide between 1975-1979 when 1.7 million people died. they deny their role. not me! i was only following orders. like the chinese gang of four. how quickly people forget. the media likes this distracting fact.

numbed silence. traumatized and anesthetized.
send in the clowns. send in the politicians and bankers. same-same but different.

paradise survivors are happy because they are alive. they started over after Year Zero. everyone now has food, clean water, medicine and socratic educational opportunities in an NGO world to rebuild their culture. it will take another generation, or 60 years given the average life expectancy to recover, revive and renew life. 

today alice in slumberland, a human pretending to be an (economically) depressed teacher said, you should just blend in. during a genocide people who asked questions disappeared. they vanished. they became extinct. asking questions was not allowed. asking questions now is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. dangerous people ask questions. people who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to intention and incentive and robotic daily comatose existence. 

intention and incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho.

a priori theory without facts or thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity is a male land mine survivor without legs. they live on ground zero. they sit near a pagoda waiting for random charitable kindness from strangers.

where are the female land mine survivors? maybe they are dead and gone. maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their needs. 

questions are forbidden said asian teachers, officials and social control mechanisms. ask at your peril. anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a question is shamed or silently beaten into silence. fear is a great motivator, forever and a day. conformity breeds conformity. 

curiosity is fatal. curiosity kills more humans than war and disease, lack of medicine and starvation.

metta.

mediocrity and cold hard survival

laughter and joy

I am a seller, said the Ice Girl

Greetings,

As dawn light savored green jungles along rivers a young Banlung woman-mother, one of many, cut ice. She sawed ice into manageable chunks as glistening elements dripped their moisture into delicious red dust. Red dust is stirred by countless women sawing and sweeping in front of their red dust covered wooden shuttered doors. Up and down the red dusty street.

Ice slides into blue plastic bags. Four foot long blocks of ice are loaded on the backs of antique battered black and red motorcycles driven by delivery boys wearing dusty baseball caps with glittering golden stars. Women in front of their shops open large orange plastic boxes to hold fresh clear frozen ice. 

Ice lives and dies every morning in a red dusty paradise. Sun streaks water. Ice cries.

After school the mother's daughter, 12, saws ice. A man sees her. What are you doing? he asked. She smiled. She is happy. I am a seller, she said. Her English is clear, distinct and filled with confidence. She bags a block of ice and hands it to a cycle man. He hands her crumbled red dusty notes.

She saws ice in afternoon heat. You are a good seller, said the man. Yes, I am, said the girl. I greet the buyer and sell, I cut, I bag, I talk, I sell. Ice is moving.

See you later, she sang playing her saw through crystals inside red dust. 

Metta.