Seamstress

Away from ice girl’s eyes wet season life shimmered in green rice paddies. Beauty, creativity, dance, and music described sensations. Sensations rested between an object and a concept. Stimuli engaged disquiet.

How do you manifest this waking dream, asked ice girl.

It’s all process, said Leo. Any explanation is a well dressed mistake.

Across town a seamstress returned to her guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the market inside a dark labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux pas silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls.

Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.

She evaluated serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universe process was selecting fabric; measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, and ironing.

Needles inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as threads danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost.

Thread followed their conversation securing 1,001 small mirrors. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number. All explanations have to end somewhere. Cut.

Ice Girl in Banlung

weave voice

You returned, they exclaimed with a secret JOY.

Yes, she says, my dream of you is unfolding. She caresses silk threads on her loom of time. Your sensitivity and serenity calms me, he says.

It is before dawn. The Mekong river is water. Fog obscures distance. She stands at a window looking for him. He is on the river. His net flies over still deep water. Threads and knots of jungle vine land on the surface. They sink into silence.

She hears the Mekong sing. She returns to the source.

Sleep. She dares dreams, aware of voiced whispers in silence. Silence becomes her sense of desire. She follows desire . Gratitude, her awareness, calms her tortured heart.

A leaf leaves the tree of life.

Transparent water bowls sing. A purple lotus grows from mud.

She is at her loom. Her pattern begins with purple silk. This is her base. She runs threads through thin lines of balance. Twin bobbins spin out golden threads for new diamonds.

Weaving is her meditation.

Her voice. Her heart-mind, hands, fingers, and feet.

 

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.

TLC - Ankara Knife

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner.

Inside another series of interlocking blades was a Cambodian landmine museum. It revealed Geiger counters, radiation blast suits, screwdrivers, shovels, hi-tech metal sensors, fertile green rice paddies, farms, fields, 1,000 Angkor temples built with laterite stones by 300,0000 slaves in the 9th century, 6,000 starving overworked broken hearted pachyderms, topographical satellite survey maps showing extensive ancient agricultural irrigation systems, statistical charts, refugee relocation centers, rehabilitation co-pay deductible insurance policies, cremation ceremonies, and bereaved starving survivors accepting the loss forever of two million genocide family members.

1.5 million lost strangers disguised as tourists talking with full mouths spilled desire, fear, regret, ignorance and superstition while rappelling through nouns and verbs near stilted bamboo shacks inside submerged mangrove forests resembling Monet paintings replete with jungle vine hammocks, floating villages in a floating world, charcoal cooking fires, naked begging children, amputees, short term Australian nurses discovering dehydration in Siem Reap slums, laconic robotic Khmer teachers making $40 a month, 269+ orphanages with 12,000 orphans, a butterfly farm with 232 species and a silk worm weaving center in Stung Treng, Ratanakiri empowering fifty singing women threading thick and thin yellow salvia protein based fibers on spindles and looms near Son Le Tap Lake, the largest in Asia.

tai dam weaving village