Shanghai Interrogation

The boy soldier was silent. 

“What’s that for,” the female Public Security Bureau official said pointing to the typewriter on the table.  

“It is for writing letters.” 

They have reservations about letters. Letters, they wonder, looking at each other with jaundiced eyes. Black eyes streaked with exploding blood vessels full of fear and suspicion. 

Letters indicate political insurrection, dissent, forced labor, mandatory abortions, propaganda, civil unrest, turmoil, revolutions, tanks in the street, torture, solitary confinement and executions. 

They see party leaders wringing their pale hands, nervously pacing forbidden cities past stone lions, conducting top-secret meetings trying to figure out what to do, how to put a face on all this. How to manage and manipulate disinformation rivers, how to control floods.

The boy soldier and his comrade save face by maintaining blank, stoic expressions.

They suspect I have connections. Maybe I am a plant, a party member sent to check their unit. Assigned to monitor their methods, their questioning tactics, their subtle use of intimidation, their implications to control and influence peoples' lives for the good of the state.

For all they know I am a subversive. A word terrorist.

“Letters. We will keep an eye on this one,” she said to the soldier.

A writer in Shuangliu, Sichuan, China. 

Animist

Namaste,

The chunchiet animist people of Ratanakiri in remote northeast Cambodia bury their dead in the jungle. Life is a sacred jungle.

Animists believe in the universal inherent power of nature in the natural world. The Tompoun and Jarai, among many animist tribal people in the world have sacred burial sites. 

This is the Kachon village cemetery one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok river from Voen Sai. The River of Darkness.

It is deep in the jungle along the river. You need a local guide and a translator speaking the local dialect.

The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site.

The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell. In their spirit story dream the shaman meets LOTH, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief says sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy LOTH.  It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.

After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, carve wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a festive week long celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village. 

Metta.

 

Chaco Canyon

A kid in the tribe said, Tell us a place story.

Down washed out rocky New Mexico roads is another magic place sixty miles from Aztec.

Chaco Canyon is twelve miles long and one mile wide. It is a complex Anasazi Pueblo culture community nation from the mid-800’s A.D. until a fundamental shift left it abandoned around 1115 A.D. due to overused land, a lack of trees, drought, and failing crops according to anthropologists. 

It was the social and economic center of life, an American Cradle of Civilization in the San Juan Basin. A huge wheel of life reflecting the pueblo world view.

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 A.D.) which is four stories high with 600 rooms and forty kivas. A kiva is a sacred religious area. A kiva is 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 talk about history and legends.

There was a raised stone bench and 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 the sacred symbols on the interior stone pillars.

Chetro Ketl, 1020 A.D., had 500 rooms and sixteen kivas with a large plaza. Ketl is of great interest because of its great kiva and remnants of carved birds, prayer sticks, arrows, and discs.

Pueblo del Arroyo had 280 rooms and twenty 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 beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. Seashells, copper bells, and the remains of macaws and parrots suggest they traded with Mexican cultures, perhaps the Toltecs.

Chaco Canyon was a spiritual center for ritual and ceremony as journeys became pilgrimages. They were in direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos; mountains, cloud, thunder, air, earth, sun. This immediacy allowed them to feel, connect, contact power and mysterious joy.

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

myth stories

Namaste,

the stories we live
comprise the mythology
of our lives
and in that mythology
lies the key to truth and mystery

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.