collecting dust

One day he climbed through the center of Bali inside magical light past an extinct sacred volcano at Lake Batur carrying spare ammunition, a small portable machine, a map carved on narwhal bone, a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper, codices or painted books and texts on bark paper called Amate, and cactus fiber including animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

His hair caught fire. Gathering flames he lit a piece of bark for guidance. He mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm rich with antioxidants. He applied this to his skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

To become clay he created clay. He needed dust. He collected dust and minute grains of mica. Teams of gravediggers, weavers, butchers and typists explored rain forests, jagged mountains and impenetrable jungles collecting dust.

Hunters dived into, under and through massive Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth, snaking past abandoned Hanford nuclear plants where fifty-five million gallons of radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W. II slowly seeped 130 feet down into the ground toward water tables.

The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations and Department of Energy think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations and Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the chaos of their well ordered scientific communities.

Tribal survivors ate roots and plants garnished with entropy.

Survivors passed through civilizations seeking antiquities. They reported back with evidence sewn into their clothing to avoid detection at porous India-Tibetan borders. They severed small threads along hemlines, Chinese silk gowns and Japanese cotton kimonos. Their discoveries poured light rays into waterfalls rushing over Anasazi cliff dwellings into sage and pinion forests.

Survivors arrived at a mythopoeic part of their journey. They reflected on the unconscious residue of social, cultural, ethical and spiritual values.

They needed masks. They needed to understand the underlying mysteries inside death masks. They confronted the realm of spirit. They bought masks in open air markets on their pilgrimage. Masks signifying the dignity of their intention thwarted demons and ghosts. They became spirits dancing in light.

Everything was light in their shamanistic interior landscape. They let go of the ego, Ease-God-Out, detached from outcomes, eliminated the need for control or approval, trusted their spirit energies, and remained light about it.

Inside light with slow fingers and long thin ivory nails they turned clay into pots. Spinning spirals danced on a wheel of time. They finished throwing them, used them for tribal ceremonies and smashed delicate clay pots to earth. They exploded into the air creating volcanic ash coating everything in a fine dust. He dug into the soil of his soul. He scattered raw turquoise stones on a trail of sacrificial tears, on a long walk through seasons and countries.

A Century is Nothing, Subject to Change.

Chaco Canyon

Anasazi creation stories echoed on the wind.

In the Plains Indian culture, Trickster is the bad news messenger capable of speaking any known or unknown language. The Trickster is vain and deceitful, obsessed with sex, loves to make pranks, falls in and out of trouble and always recovers their stasis. Trickster taught me Keres, the language of the Pueblo, the middle heart space between earth and sky.

Languages are my specialty. Lost tongues.

Down in the southern province of Suhag in Egypt where King Scorpion lived 5,300 years ago I worked with archeologists discovering clay tablets recording taxes on oil and linen; a special material ancient Egyptians considered ritually pure under the protection of the goddess Tayt. The hieroglyphics, line drawings of animals, plants and mountains revealed stories of economies and commodities.

In Nevali Cori we found 9,000 year old shards of pottery depicting dancers.

“These images,” said a team of metaphorical diggers, “reveal a fictional common ancestor created as a way to integrate their community.”

A camel hairbrush cleaned pottery shards. “Anything else?”

“Well,” said one digger on his hands and knees, sifting dust, “we surmise these images established a collective discipline in their community. See how the figures are holding hands? What do you see now?”

“I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space,” said Omar.

Down washed out rocky New Mexico roads sixty miles from Aztec is Chaco Canyon. It is twelve miles long and one mile wide. It is a complex Anasazi Pueblo culture community nation from mid-800 until a fundamental shift left it abandoned around 1115 due to overused land, a lack of trees, drought, and failing crops. It was the social and economic center of life, an American Cradle of Civilization in the San Juan Basin. Their physical wheel of life reflected the pueblo worldview.

They were master builders constructing stone villages and six large pueblos of multiple stories with rooms larger than previously known. They began with simple walls one stone thick using mud, mortar, rubble, and the veneer of facing stones. Later they used large blocks of tabular sandstone chinked with smaller stones set in mortar and later covered with plaster.

The largest of the big houses is Pueblo Bonito 800-1200, four stories high with 600 rooms and 40 kivas. A kiva is a sacred religious area, a circular room without windows with a smoke hole at the top where the men of the village would climb down a ladder to sit, smoke, and share history and legends. There was a raised stone bench reserved for the “Speakers.”

Once a year to prepare for the Earth Renewing Ceremony, the Masked God Society would whitewash the interior walls of the kiva and repaint sacred symbols on the interior stone pillars.

Chetro Ketl, dating from 1020, had 500 rooms and 16 kivas with a large plaza. Ketl had a great kiva and remnants of carved birds, prayer sticks, arrows, and discs.

Pueblo del Arroyo had 280 rooms and 20 kivas. The Kin Kletso Pueblo, built in two stages around 1125 had one hundred rooms with five enclosed kivas.

Chaco was an advanced social and trading hub. Raw turquoise was imported from distant mines. People made necklaces, bracelets and pendants. Seashells, copper bells, and the remains of macaws and parrots suggested they traded with Mexican cultures, perhaps the Toltec.

Chaco Canyon was a spiritual center. Journeys became pilgrimages. Residents were in direct contact with elemental cosmos life: mountains, clouds, thunder, air, earth, and sun. They were connected with mysterious truth and beauty.

At one time 10,000 people lived in 400 surrounding settlements. They developed 400 miles of engineered and planned prehistoric roads connecting their communities. 

A Century is Nothing

go up river

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up the Tonle Srepok River.

The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. I weave after ice.

Animist village people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy local woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony healing sacrifice. She’d smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Village people are superstitious and trust her.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust down river in Banlung.

One prolific business in town is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the one east west paved artery are huts and shacks of rough brown wooden slats and rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125 cc engines, and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Village shaman.

freeze a memory

vote for me. i have power and money.

wear a sad i am lost and angry face. in public.

life screwed me. 

i had no chance.

well i did but i didn't know what to do with it

so, i succumbed to my family and social

lack of inner strength and self determination.

my secret name is passive, beauty and gratitude.

i am a character in an asian play.

A story for Grade 4

“Many world tribes love to look back. It’s all passion and illusions of suffering. A genetic molecule of fear, doubt, uncertainty, surprise and adventure. A childish innocent curiosity lives in the present. As people age they want & need the past.”

“Living in the past is time consuming,” said a genius kid.

“Yes,” said a teacher, “Focus on your needs not your wants. Your need for freedom and freedom from need. Needs manifest a desire for a memory or a ghost or a regret. We are all passing through. Humans look back to see if they see in their vivid reptilian imagination their ghost.

"A ghost from a family or friend looks for clues at their personal ground zero. They’ve evolved from distant galaxies. Java man was discovered here 40,000 years ago. Accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance today. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t let school interfere with your education. See you tomorrow.”

A wandering teacher lived in talking monkey zones. They eat rice. They drink water. They fuck. They breed. They wash one set of clothing and hang it on bamboo. They burn down the forest. They breed, work and get slaughtered. They harvest brooms. Shamans bring rain. Tropical downpours allow people the luxury to wash cars. They use faint energy looking behind them wondering, all the wondering and wandering and milling around. 

Food is cheap. Let’s eat mantra. This has nothing to do with simians. It has nothing to do with the two women sitting in a dark warung neighborhood food joint near a private school.

The warung faces a tall cinder block wall. Chickens, goats and cats prowl, peck and forage through garbage. One woman sits in a deep meditation. Her friend parts her hair looking for insects, cleaning her scalp. They take turns cleaning and inspecting. This genetic behavior is repeated in zoos, jungles and rain forests. Chattering storytellers play the gamelan pounding out 40,000 year-old tunes.

Heal people with music. Music is the fuel.

Males wash toy machines and study accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. They play chess waiting for passengers. Checkmate, said Death.

They visit the warung to chat up girls while eating spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, green chilies and deep-fried snacks. One explorer creates a Brave New World. They forge new futures with cold, detached logical intention. They create an assessment on process in a data based star cluster.