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.

Chunchiet Cemetery & Spirit Story

Greetings,

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. 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. 

New tombs have cement bases and carved effigies with "modern" gadgets like cell phones and sun glasses. Never out of touch. See your local long distance carrier for plans and coverage in your area. The future looks brighter than a day in a sacred and mysterious jungle.

See more...

Metta.

Fire talks

Greetings,

What's louder than a group of Khmer people? Another group of Khmer people. Get used to it. Volume. Noise. They love distractions. They live, eat and breath distractions and noise. They love talking over each other. Listening is hard work. Silence is known for killing people. Fear of death is a one long conversation.

They've been traumatized by their long past into the immediate present grasping the future. It's a time machine, a time warp, a consciousness warp.

It is curious to see with complete clarity the FIRE inside the cement stove in the simple local java and tea shop at 0615. Orange and bright dancing red flames consume kindling. It heats water for tea and java. Reminds me of a winter stove in Lhasa warming a room with joy.

Words crackle, spit, dance with laughter's sensation of heat.

Piles of kindling are stacked between cement slabs like orphans waiting to exonerated.  

It's a male thing. The men are over 40. They are survivors of The Dark Years.

All the men wear fresh pressed shirts and long pants. They have jobs. They talk about life: business, jobs, paper, kids, wives, weather, facts, opinions, big plans and ghosts. They eat fried bread, drink brown tea and java. Their spoons create music with glass. 

1.7 million ghosts dance through their silent conversations. No one talks about it. They prefer to talk about the now. The future. Ghosts live in the past. Leave it there, said one man. Half our population is under 30, said another man. They have no memory of the past. Education is the key, said another man. Yes, said another man, We missed our chance.

The only chance I had, said another man, Was to run and hide in the jungle. Look at my hands. Now I spend my days rewriting history.

A human is a kind of conversation. Many humans live lives of quiet desperation. Fire knows this fact.

Metta.

Kill the dog

Greetings,

In Baghdad, Iraq they sent out dog killer squads. They liquidated 58,000 stray dogs in three months. Point and shoot.

This morning before 6:00 a.m. in a small sleep southern Cambodian river town the frustrated alpha simian male next door to a guesthouse finally had enough of his barking mongrel, one of many roaming yapping and screwing in the street.

His wife was sweeping (a national sport) around tables and chairs in an open covered room of computers where students visit in the afternoon to connect. The dog was a nuisance, like her kids and husband. The dog ran around yapping, causing her and her husband anxiety. Rising anger exploded when her Tarzan grabbed a big stick and started beating the dog.

It didn't take a humane society expert to know by the sound of the beating and canine screaming that the dog was doomed. This orchestra of rising screams, fear, panic, anguish, and whimpering rose, climaxed and dropped dead.

Neighbors ignored the reality. His wife swept. Life is short, nasty and brutal. The law of the jungle.

Neighbor dogs, sensing death, howled in their chorus as orange and black butterflies danced at dawn.

Metta.

Hanford Plutonium Waste

Greetings,

Speaking of energy, waste, consumption and a deadly beautiful mess, here's a new story from the New York Times on the Hanford Nuclear facility in Hanford, Washington. Scary shit.

I've blogged about this before. I lived in Hanford in 1999-2001. One Sunday an engineer friend took me out for a six hour tour. I made images. A gallery is on the sidebar. I used material in my literary memoir, A Century Is Nothing, and have included an excerpt. 

...After she left to explore the Snake he went to buy stamps, specifically images from the Hubble Space Telescope with names like Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

He launched into a brief but stimulating discourse with the young unarmed postal worker woman about how amazing and beautiful were the colors and definitions of the galaxies mentioning how incredible it is to consider, even begin to glimpse them while trapped inside a federal building five short miles down wind from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor where fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste seeped into water table levels near the Columbia River.

Department of Energy teams dived into, under, and through Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth snaking, roaring past abandoned nuclear plants as radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W.II was flowing 130 feet down, down toward water tables.

Fascinating. He turned another fragile yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence or T.S.E. “It’s called Technicium, TC-99,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations, and D.O.E. think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations. Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and their children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

NYT story... 

Hanford Watch...

Metta.