Mahling, Burma

Learn. Play. Share. 

500 grade 10-11 students live 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. Don't let school interfere with your education.

                                    The Wild West Village - 2.5 hours south of Mandalay - pop 10,000

Horse drawn cart traps.
One traffic light. Two motorcycles is a jam.
Green for go.

Twenty minutes away on foot, an extensive traditional market covered in rusting PSP sheets is a delightful adventure  - returning to the source of community, dark-eyed local curiosity, street photography, laughter, and a floating babble of tongues inside a labyrinth of narrow uneven dirt paths.

Footprints on stone and dirt meander through forests and mountains of oranges, apples, bananas, red chilies, green vegetables, thin bamboo baskets of garlic and onions, farm implements, varieties of rice, clacking sewing machines, basic commodities, steaming noodles, cracking fires, snorting horses.

Sublime.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.

The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended handheld iron pan scale.

A white feather sits in the other pan. Balance.

Twenty-six varieties of rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.

Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A happy ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.

Mekong Blue

I visited Mekong Blue, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center in NE Cambodia.

Fifty women are trained in a six-month silk weaving course. They plant mulberry, harvest, dye and create silk textiles. It is a UNESCO award winner known for superior quality, creativity and originality.

Mulberry leaves everything behind. Worms eat the leaves. Their saliva makes yellow cocoons. Saliva becomes a protein and stronger than steel. They boil silkworm cocoons to extract raw yellow silk. One thread is 300 meters long.

It is separated into soft and fine threads.

Women dye the threads using natural materials:

banana (yellow)

bougainvillea (yellow)

almond leaves (black)

lac insect nests (red and purple)

prohut wood (yellow and green)

lychee wood (black and gray)

indigo (blue) and coconut (brown and pink).

Women also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on silk threads prior to dyeing and weaving. It is called HOL with 200 motifs.

The center improves the women’s quality of life. It breaks the cycle of poverty through vocational training and educational programs.

They have a primary school with thirty-five kids and two teachers. Everyone receives lunch. It is the single biggest employer in town after the government.

That’s so cool, said Rita. Need some ice?

Mekong Blue

Published in:

Grow Your Soul

Literary Agent Orange

Rip my heart out. Build the tension with cinematic pace. Then en masse in a dramatic climax they escape the clutches of the evil manipulators. In the falling action they join a safe community women’s shelter based on healing, recovery, regaining personal strength, dignity, self-respect, empowerment.

         They learn new job skills like cutting and selling ice.

         They learn how to weave. They discover their life needle leads a story thread. They take control of their life.

         They form love killer groups and hunt down men and women who betrayed them. The women kill them with love and compassion. The denouement is their brutal REVENGE. Best served cold. Calm, detached and honest. Short fast and deadly.

         BUT, said agent alliterated, I’m pretty. I’m pretty busy reading obscure vague query letters and synopses filled with vowels, consonants, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, tough love, mysteries and dime store romance, not to mention salacious graphic comics.

         Get to the verb. Get to the action. Establish a scene. Paint a voice. Develop characters, narrative, structure, plot, thematic unity, setting and multiple marketing platforms from recycled manuscripts. Pulp. Keep me turning the page.

Make the characters want something even if it’s a drink of water in the middle of the Gobi. Everyone needs water. Leo can tell you about the value of water in the Gobi.

         You mean, said Ice Girl, writing is like standing on the edge staring into an abyss called civilizationwith Leo, a courageous noble savage cannibal wearing an alarm clock around their neck committing sewer side with absolute free will above shimmering blue pools of incandescent liquid molecular frozen particles with brave stone cold clarity immobilized at heights of illusionary immaculate freedom seeing their immortality, their deepest fear in ROOM 101 alongside brave OTHERS unflinching in their love, compassion and goodness, this infinite potential?

Destiny in eternity? Where all points end at infinity? Where eternity plays with time? Before jumping they yell, People think art is easy. Tell them it’s like jumping off a 12 story building every day. JUMP!

         Yes, said the agent. I know it can be heart breaking. You develop your wings after jumping.

         You don’t know the meaning of heartbreak said Ice Girl. I’ve buried more people than you’ve published. Once I witnessed an old man wearing a rainbow knit cap write Eternity on a paper napkin in Planet Paradise, a coffee joint in Eugene, Oregon.

He torched Eternity with a match. His tired traveling blazing eyes watched Eternity burn to a cinder. Black and white ash and dust fluttered from his fingers. He mumbled incoherent incantations about fate’s joke, meaningless life, existential choices, irony and consequences. Something like that, said the agent with vague ineptness. Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

         The burning seer burned his inner light. He walked into a world trailing ash, feeling wind in his heart. Sun burned his retinas. Tides of time in the long now ebbed and receded where the event horizon blurred his cognitive facilities.

He lapsed into a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence talking to shadows, ghosts and shamans. He approached the point of universal consciousness with mind-at-large where fiction memory dream and imagination are the same thing. He confronted the endless abyss. He jumped. He saved himself, said Ice Girl.

         Go on, said agent. The publishing world is a crapshoot. A casino. After expanding the narrative angle give me mythical evil, cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers and politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime.

world is a village

Red clouds on a soft day. Japanese kamikaze snappers.

Rivers and sensation perception. Small people big voice. Orange monks. Women oranges.  Street love.

Serenity of sitting one afternoon in Boua Mon's village. Paper village.

The world is a village.

In this real zone dust dances with laughter. Women gossip, cook, swaddle infants. Joy and connections away from Disneyland myopia circus.

How it works in Laos. Unspoken. Men make the rules. Women take care of the home.

Below the surface. Subtitles.

Women worship in temples, men sit around drinking beer.

A village maintains the other world.

Morality, ethics, behavior.

You don't leave the village.

Everything I need is here.

Symbiotic symbolic relationships.

Meditation awareness.

Gentle undying nature.

Once upon a dream there was (is) present.

Ink said, hello now a few words in simple English hilarious. 

move like a river

Move like a river, rest like a mirror and respond like an echo.

Create like a God, order like a King and work like a Slave.

Laughter and Orphan and characters are dazzled by the embroidery.

Help others be more human.

Clean ears of years, tears and fears after four months of hearing V road grime.

Clear hearing channels. Auditory clarity.

Silent orange robed monks pass through.

Roll along a mist river before dawn. Silver surface is quiet.

Nails trim voices, blue cotton fabric discusses threads.

A girl with bamboo baskets of sun oranges balances her long walk from a truck near boats as women pray for sustenance in fog light. Her destiny is uphill past rising smoke, villages, cooking fires, warmth, hot noodles, steaming steps in rhythmic fashion she continues...

The road is made by walking.

The void of substance.

Boua Mon - weaver, 32, once eclipsed since we met at her village loom. Absorb her illuminated smile, grace, centered way.

In her absence everything possible or improbable happened. Ghost-self dreamed her into being as Anita butterfly skimmed the joy of exile. A man on his yellow bike waved, smiled, and rode away. Afternoon sun decorated green mountains.

Shuttle music and hospitality with Boua just sitting as she weaves, aligning threads, sharing food, incomprehensible women conversations. Her smile is radiant.