Birth and death

Greetings,

One birth. One death. This is the reality here where it all happens up close and personal. Community.

Jasmine gave birth to a baby boy around 12:30 a.m. 3.9 kilos. It's her and Kunn's third child. I am on the balcony around 6 a.m. and hear him crying. Tears and lungs, breath, release. He's amazing and small. Sleeping after his nine-month water world journey. Every day is a new birth day. 

I walk down the dusty path, across the so-called "Highway of Death" to Jasmine Lodge.

People are gathering to celebrate the passing of Jasmine's grandmother. She was healthy and happy. Sheslipped away during the night after 84 years.

Friends and relatives gather under a pavilion to pay their respects. Some visit the Buddhist monk making a monetary gift, hands in prayer. He ties a small red piece of yarn around their wrist.

The ceremony will last three days. Women teams prepare food, chop vegetables and fruit - cook and simmer huge vats of rice, soup, fish, and meats using logs. Smoke curls through bamboo meeting music and the melodic chants of monks in song.

Tomorrow will be a procession to the monastery for cremation.

Metta.

Chinese kids Take the stairs

Greetings,

Yes, it's true, this passionate desire for pressure to pass exams in Chinese schools resulted in millions of children dying today in a stampede to escape their teachers after evening class. Stare at the stairs. 

-It was raining, said the authorities. Blame the rain.

-The rain had nothing to do with it, said a survivor, age 10. It was a death trap.

Chinese educational tools.

The provincial education party leader was fired. The principal of the school was fired. The parents of dead children can't do a thing because they are willing victims of the system. They have absolutely no power. How can the system fire parents? They have no idea how we run the institution. We brainwash the students and their parents.

-Mandatory study from 6:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week, said the system.

-This is your DUTY as parents, said the system.

-As students, your DUTY is to pass the exams. 60 is heaven. 59 is hell. Learning is secondary. 

-We have developed safe and secure schools for your children, said the system. Look at our safety record. Look at the substandard construction materials and cost-cutting measures we have implemented to save money. Look at the bribery and corruption we've developed and nurtured to manipulate everyone from the bottom to to the top to create the finest, safest educational facilities in the entire world. We pay everyone off. 

-As you know from our long history the value of human life is worthless, said the system.

-Our rigid educational safety standards includes spotless bathrooms, expansive sports halls where students are required to sing silly patriotic songs about the motherland, dining halls where they eat the same mass produced rice and stringy green soggy vegetables day after day, dorm rooms where we pack 8-10 students into rat cages, an empty useless library and lots of slippery tiled stairs which, in the event of a fire, panic, epidemic, plague, tornado, hurricane, typhoon, and earthquakes - remember Sichuan and the shoddy buildings that killed 8,000 kids - become death traps. 

If you protest the death of your child because of our negligence we will:

1. evict you from your home
2. remove you from your plush paper pushing bureaucratic job
3. send you to a re-education labor camp on another planet
4. make you pay a fine
5. hunt you down

Your teacher loves you.

The school, to prevent disorder and broken social harmony by distraught parents grieving over the unfortunate and unforeseen death of their young children, will hold a one minute of silence memorial tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. in honor of our loyal and patriotic students who perished in the latest tragedy in their pursuit of good grades and academic excellence.

May their untimely death serve as a reminder to all of us to remain vigilant and steadfast in our common purpose of command and control procedures.

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

Synecdoche

Greetings,

A prospective home owner walks into a house with a real estate agent. There are numerous small fires burning.

"I really like this house," she says. "But I'm really concerned about dying in a fire."

"Yes," says the agent, "It's a big decision, how one chooses to die."

Synecdoche, a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman concerns life, choices, dreams, art, relationships and death.

Always making choices.

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Weist, Deirdre O'Connell.

Give a man a match and he's warm for a minute. Set him on fire and he's alive for the rest of his life.

Read more...

Metta.

Dysfunctional decisions

Greetings,

After the kind man flew away from the archipelago on short notice with years on his extensive resume, for a new job in the Middle Eats to pay life's support expenses I returned home from his fare-thee-well dinner of delicious grilled fired fish and giant prawns swimming in garlic to find a medium sized cock-a-roach scurrying in from the back garden heading toward the dark safety of bags and boxes in a spare room.

A room filled with Turkish delight, a sweet gooey substance made of nuts, berries and flakey pastry. A room resplendent with bird songs, echoes of silk warbling blues riffs, improvisational bass lines and the sweet smell of a flute.

A room filled with sad, lonely spoiled crying children. Dysfunctional family futures.

A room dancing with the autocratic sensation remembering how he perceived his past decision late last year to decline a doctor's advice and proceeded with a dangerous medical exploratory option to check out the source of his internal distress. "No anesthetic," he said to Doctor Death. 

How this decision almost killed him. How this decision at that microscopic moment inside time, oh time, such a valiant teacher, an educator, how this decision cost him vast quantities of flood blood. How he claimed he saw and felt a warm light swarming him, flashing along his skeleton bathing him. How he needed transfusions. Lots of transfusions. Understanding by design. A frayed fabric. A needle dripping volunteered slavery.

Why do simple medical problems escalate into a life threatening crisis? Rash misunderstanding of how and why the human body says one thing and the ego intellect extinguishes flashing emergency lights, ignoring warning signals? 

Being a Super Hero has it's risks.

Plant a seed.

So it goes.

Metta. 

 

Feeding Warmed Over Death

Around 9:11 a.m. on a fine soft morning promising to be tropically hot by high noon and after washing three green long sleeve cotton teaching uniform shirts and hanging them out to dry, stabbing a tall beautifully formed naked bamboo pole into the back garden brown soil next to a strong climbing pink flowering plant needing support under dancing green, blue, yellow, white, and orange Tibetan Lung-Ta prayer flags, watering ten orchids on the front porch gathering early sun and visiting with sparrows I watched a middle-aged Javanese woman working for a family across the street feed soft rice to an old woman sitting in her wheelchair, feeling the sun on her wrinkled face.

We are all death deferred.

So it goes. Finished with the feeding program the Javanese woman gently wiped the old woman's mouth. placed the spoon in the bowl and wheeled the woman back into the room out of the sun. She closed the brown door.

The old woman said, "Thanks for the food, the warm sun and your love."

She closed her eyes and dreamed.

Metta.