If I grow up I die

Being nine Lucky helped 4th grade geniuses become more human.

Engage-study-activate.

Everyone had fun. Students learned that whining was boring and useless. Smart ones knew without understanding. They knew what they didn’t know.

Kids shared Socratic discussions. They explored and expanded creative imagination journal writing, cross-disciplinary art, chess and teamwork development projects. They built and flew kites.

They practiced good manners and treated everyone with respect.

They focused on developing character: zest, courage, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, fairness, generosity and integrity.

They shared soft eyes, relaxation techniques and meditation mind maps. They accepted personal responsibility for learning and exploring the process of becoming.

He assisted them to develop critical thinking skills outside imaginary social and educational conditioning traps. “I am here to help you make mistakes.”

One day a young teacher kid said, “We need challenges, Teacher Lucky.”

“What kind of challenges?”

“We need hardship and deprivation.”

“Yes,” said another teacher, “we need to take more risks.”

“How do you develop courage?”

“Through failure. We love to fail better."

“Correcto mundi. Welcome to The Think for Yourself Academy. Everything we do is an experiment.”

They planned, designed and constructed an elaborate high-risk rope and creeper vine obstacle course in jungles challenging body, mind and spirit. Teamwork skills blossomed like orchids.  

*

Residents near his garden sanctuary passed a tall green spiky cactus stretching arms into bluebird songs. A nanny carrying an infant memorized the echo of white cat paws trailing flip-flops. Faustus, seeing through innocent eyes rode behind his pedaling Chinese father.

A laughing skipping girl negotiated freedom.

A beggar wearing broken shoelaces studied pavement.

A man spinning in his labyrinthine puzzle struggled with an activated cell phone in worn green baggy shorts hoping the call would save him from loneliness, boredom, alienation and metaphors like death.

Children in pink pajamas collected brown leaves and fragrant yellow-white hibiscus flowers.

In Bahasa sun a middle-aged daughter spoon-fed her mother in a wheelchair. Swallowing love her smiling mother remembered when she did all the feeding.

Improvisation

I am a calm lunatic.

Edited a hard copy of Ice Girl in Banlung.

Everything is a meditation - eating, sleeping, sexing.

Hungry girls go to bed. Women pay small. Men pay big.

Sex is a job. Raising kids is a duty.

An adventure in emotional distance with wisdom mind.

The big general picture (or) specific, concrete, precise details to see character.

"Information on life and hope" at a wat.

Popular lyrics "I am sorry."

A character's viewpoint on their experience. Internal monologue.

Intuitive improvisation is the mark of genius.

Projections of our own faults and weaknesses. Fear and disgust.

Discernment = spiritual power

Journalistic fiction.

The mercy of social revolution.

The mercy of social insight.

Exiting - writing, photography, travel.

After all the gadgets, electronics, "consumption".

Bill Evans - find, establish the simple point, the center. Start with the solid. Then expand.

Melody, harmony, rhythm.

Jazz improvisation (core)

I am a short story.

You are a novel. 

learn in burma

Give us the fifty daze M-F 5:30 a.m. short van trip to CAE, the private school in Mandalay where you helped 10th graders become more human with humor and curiosity. July - October 2015.

One class from 6-7, another from 7-8.

Four male teachers left starlight and climbed into the van. Three were morose. Too early.

Their dialogue mentioned sleep disorders, international menus and the quality of their shits.

One Black guy muttered about Kuala Lumpur fast food choices while cursing mosquitos and smashing them on windows.

The others talked about teaching adventures in China.

Exciting.

Yeah, I’m going to miss them like you miss a rock in your shoe.

I understand your student-teachers rearranged desks into groups to facilitate sharing. You played jazz, blues and classical music. They drew and colored their dream in creative notebooks. Daily.

Yes. Head – hand – heart.

I reminded them their creative notebooks would sustain them for years, long after the textbooks gather dust. Long after they vomited material to pass a test. Get marks.

Give me specifics.

My room was the only team-building configuration. The other teachers maintained rigid rows of wooden benches where students hearing a dull lecture stared at the back of someone’s head.

The Black guy mumbled. They replaced him with a dour scholar from Papa New Genie.

One British teacher lectured from the book and played cartoons.

A drawling American teacher projected The Star Spangled Banner lyrics on a screen and had the class recite words.

You’re kidding me. I wish I was.

You could hear the parrots…”Oh say can you see…”

Our team-groups shared ideas prior to discussing diverse topics improving their speaking confidence.

In his final class Southern Comfort had them singing “Jingle Bells.”

Boughs of folly. Oh yeah.

My geniuses played a round-robin chess tournament the final two days. Great fun.

They’d practiced chess every Thursday and Friday for a month. They focused on tactics, strategy, activating pieces off the back row, castling, attacking through the center.

They developed critical thinking skills, planning and logic, problem solving, accepting responsibility for their decisions, respecting their opponent and sharing ideas with friends.

Life skills 101.

Mindfulness - TLC 67

They met on the Metro. Lucky carried an aromatic red rose through green sliding doors. Z sat in a permanent change of scene.

He inhaled fragrance. He handed her the rose. “Here, for you. Everything we love dies.”

“Infinity is behind us, eternity is in front of us.”

“Nothing behind. Everything ahead.”

The National Director of Barbarian Natives at TLC resigned after pressure from Sister #1. Her father Sir Franchise was King of The Money Tribe.

The National Die Rector was wishy-washy. Making personnel decisions was a stressful heartless job. Native barbarians were transferred to Siberia with Tundra Dragon and his consort Phoenix rising from ashes of self-pity, loathing, shame, guilt and fear to regenerate, reinvent and reincarnate themselves with critical thinking skills, social intelligence, mindfulness, courage, humor, gratitude, curiosity, fairness, integrity, diligence, perseverance and discipline wearing liberal amounts of delicate compassion.

Players wrote themselves into the story. They invented plots. Plots invented players with assignations, fake artifices, palace intrigue and three-act Greek plays featuring desperate insecure and courageous thematic holistic variables.

Greed and betrayal discussed intention and motivation.

A, an, the - old article men in teahouses reading newsprint verbs whispered syllables out loud memorizing lies, myths, Soma mine disasters, political denial, unaccountability, football results and obituaries. One reader said, “Thank God. Death hasn’t found me yet.”

“Don’t worry,” said Death, “I’m busy with others. Patience. I’ll get back to you. You can begin living the rest of your rare days meditating on the process of your death. Impermanence and non-existence.”

“Tell that to the guy selling fire and knives in Ankara.”

“I will,” said Death, “when his time is up and only then.”

Bursa mountain winds seeking plains became strong, sudden and slashing. They flew across thermal bath waters after plumping mist into rain’s arranged marriage. Spirit-winds reached back circling prey without saying anything of value or meaning joining relatives and strangers floating inside fog moisture captured from distant seas like dancing children, circling, spinning out from nothing, evolving from the center of their stillness, caressing flayed onion skinned fragments inside Zeynep’s black book where people didn’t reallylisten know or care in Comabodia  - an imaginary country trapped between Nam, Siam, and Laos  - swimming with 2,000,000 genocide ghosts spreading superstition and repressed violent DNA psychosis while sleeping with wide open eyes struggling with regret, low grade anxiety, big FEAR, swallowing happy Xanax pills, wearing huge magnificent watch this time machine on thin wrists in a witness protection program using a false identity theory.

Hand-me-down my walking stick, said L. Here you are, said Z. Let’s go.

Travelers arrived in a village on the Marmara Sea. Olive orchards dressed hills. A white butterfly skimmed blue sea. It’s wings created a breeze around shadows sitting in shale shade. Feet caressed geology. Waves washing the shore day by day rolled millions of pebbles creating a gentle musical interlude.

Rinse and repeat.

Ocean waves. Earth peoples.

The soft propaganda machine selling media’s tired old lies broke down. Desperate neglected broken-hearted ADD people fingered a remote or mobile.

Tribes in remote jungles created fire with Leo. Spirit-winds sailed smoke signals across oceans, seas, tributaries, rivers, bays, fjords, streams and inlets to Anasazi, Navajo, Apache, Hopi, Tiwa, Cherokee, Ainu and Tibetan ancient ones. Flying clouds acknowledged ethereal messages.

Imaginary fears of poverty and starvation gripped humans.

Beauty dispatched monarch butterflies skimming over a cresting white wave tumbling above blue water lapping land.

The Language Company

 

Life lesson #5 - TLC 49

What is life, said Lucky.

I’m a big seven as in seven, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator. Your life is not a test or a dress rehearsal. If it is an actual life your invisible friends protect you from ignorance and fear with courage.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It’s the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

It’s pouring like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver passenger van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress a dry writer polishing words by using his intelligent hose running wealthy water over rain. Cleaning. He gets a free shower.

He ignores me. I am a tool.

Grandmother sits on our austere 1924 colonial dark-brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong offering Buddhist monks handfuls of rice. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

My grandfather stares at rain, forming lakes.

Daddy’s very busy. He disappears for hours drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for cash. A poor girl from a poor family in a poor country needs to make a living poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever? Maybe that’s the answer to your life quest-ion.

Survival with a capital S.

After the rain when it's dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and burning candles she incinerates plastic garbage. Yeah. Yeah. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It's a sweet smell let me tell you. Like when Duvall in Apocalypse Now said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. That smell. What's the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery service. What’s another mouth? She manages home, kids and cash. I’m worth $3,500 on the stolen kid market in China. My older sister would’ve been aborted. Bad luck for her.

Mom ignores me. I am a tool.

She’s super busy doing her gentle mother routine. Later, she squawks. She's a soft kind later.

Parents and teachers and millions of lazy humans here love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life value.

Milling around is an art form with style. Art transforms life.

Lao are soft and kind. We have a good heart. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera in a gentle breeze.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you alone. Zap like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

Nature’s a great teacher. We are nature’s tools.

For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg after discovering a landmine in paradise. 

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom a dreaded lethargic tedious disease.

Boredom is fear’s patience.

Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get a life and accept personal responsibility for choices and consequences.

Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam are alive with unexploded ordinance, amputees, superstition and ghosts.

Existence is one long perpetual distraction. Say what?

You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it. We breed, work, get slaughtered and mill around. We are told to blend in to survive. My mom taught me this hard cruel life lesson. She reminds me every time I open my mouth to express an original freethinking idea. That’s what parents and teachers teach us by example and they have extensive Life Experience - another amazing teacher.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, courage, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you develop self-control and courage?

By failing. Fail better. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Life is trial and error and taking risks. Daring is not fatal.

Thanks for life lesson #5. You are the future of Laos.

You’re welcome. I have my junior philosopher’s badge.