Feng Shui

Greetings,

Wind and water. And then she ran across the stream of broken stones. She drew in her book. Mind maps, star maps, life maps. She dreamed of new beginnings, new futures. Harmony. Balance.

This dream incorporated all her past present and future dreams. It was a simple village dream where a fan methodically played circular logic inside a rhythm of the saints, this blend of light, color, dancing children and escape from the tyranny of mystery inside and outside space.

Dancing ink. A well worn page of laughter on a hot, humid overcast afternoon in Amnesia. Amnesia is a chain of 17,000 chained green islands surrounded by clear blue sea. Life underneath.

Tartaros - Chaos. Primordial darkness. Cosmos birth. Gaia - Earth. Eros - Love.

The voice of water played forever. Be a rag and bone merchant of your heart-mind.

Metta.

 

Fools

Greetings,

I'm a fool weather I dance or not so I may as well dance. This is what one fool said to another fool.

They fooled around behind naked dark glasses studying human fool stupidity, volatility of desire's rampant manifestation inside a radiant energy field. Fools are particle colliders, small sub-atomic energetic expanding fields with a distinct glowing full moon dancing overhead.

Dancing fools practiced calligraphy with a calm open mind. Fools danced with silence between notes. The infinite white space is silence.

• it's clear because there is no meaning
• laughter forgets everything inside dawn's vapor
• a young girl remembers how to draw outside the lines
• a tongue quickly adapts to a violin
• colors become silent inside forests
• a wok needs heat to play the piano
• fireflies are dead relatives of stars remaining on Earth to help fools
• dancing memories create a new fiction
• sleep is popular among large groups of sheep
• destiny is determined without knowing
• a mountain and a sword create harmony
• whistling causes earthquakes
• a good fool is hard to find
• fools speak of joy and poverty's boredom with theoretical lightness
• how can we speak of joy on this dark suffering planet asked a fool
• how can we speak of anything else, said a fool. we've heard enough of despair
• 1984 is a reality in many countries where a woman carries the world on her back
• this is what some fools learned, dancing

Metta.

Away

Greetings,

Turn the page away from morning, away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows. Blacker than faces hiding inside deep dark passages watching the street. Always watching. Staring with hard deep black eyes.

Their eyes, when they lived in the flat countryside covered in lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water near groves of palm, coconut, banana trees surrounding bamboo thatched homes on stilts and naked children playing with dreams, watched deep shadows.

They watched. They never closed. They watched for enemies, invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam, wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, Apsara dancers. They were always on always ready to see the smallest cosmic movement across horizens, miles of land mined country or inside thick foliage.

Their eyes danced with waiting. Waiting held their eyes as lovers will, close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual information, data, mysteries. They cultivated patience, a necessary food. They comprehended their essential visual priorities. Watching, a national sport, is their universe.

They had a small vital responsibility living in perpetual darkness - seeing far away with telescopic acuity. Their constant vision burned up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% was used for procreation, eating, speaking and laughing. Laughing burns up calories.

Eyes practice the silent art of being silent, watching past another person during a silent conversation watching each other's back being the other. How they face the other watching beyond where everything matters infinitely. For one moment in their short sweet life. 

Metta.

 

The Careful and Amorous Project

Greetings,

We met a guesthouse one morning. She started talking. "Amorous is my husband. He's sick. Something he ate."

Careful is 31. She was born in Xinjiang, China.

In 1991 while working for Ramada International Hotels in Beijing I traveled to Xinjiang to act in a movie about a hero who dies at his post. They needed a foreigner. My Swiss GM said, "Go for it." For ten days we filmed at the Chinese National Petroleum oil fields deep in the Tarim Basin. I wrote about this little adventure in my traveling novel, A Century Is Nothing.

She remembered the film and famous scientist. He developed a new drilling technique. He died at his isolated post surrounded by test tubes, mathematical scribbles, rusty oil drilling rigs and sand dunes. Then the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department had to approve film scripts depicting famous heroes. Especially dead scientific-political ones. He's in the Chinese national scientific hall of fame.

She's a freelance magazine editor in Shanghai. Amorous is an engineer from San Detour, California. He designs financial surf boards studying the effects of wave theory using electromagnetic pulse detectors. They met at a house party in Shanghai.

"When he came in I saw a deer," she said. She was the hunter and he was the prey. She is highly talkative. He is brilliant and taciturn. They dated for a year and married last year. First in her home town of Hubai province and then in Tomorrow Land. 

They got her residency card. They returned to China and quit their jobs. They hit life's highway.

Careful remembers everything, especially the long ago past.

"When I was a little girl growing up in Xinjiang, all I wanted was a book. I grew up with mountains and rivers. One day I saw a newspaper floating in the water. I dried it out and tried to read it. I couldn't. Then, when I went to school there was a girl - her father worked with my father as a public servant - and her family was well off. She had books. I didn't like her but I pretended to so I could see her books. That's how I started to read.

"It was a real struggle for me in Shanghai. I had no formal education, but I could write. I forged a C.V. and got on with an advertising company. Good money. I was looking for the perfect love. Then I met Amorous."

"I want a home," she said. "We'll need to make a decison by May," he said. "We either return to the states or find new jobs in China." 

"Look," she said, "I'm in my early 30's. I want to start a family. I need a child."

"First we need a home," he said. "Everything's in storage."

"Ok," she said. "After we're done traveling and doing this project, we'll decided where we want to live."

"Fine."

"It was my idea this project," she said. "Amorous agreed."

The project involves using various masks and props to create mysterious, surreal images around Asia. They plan their shooting schedule, Careful wears the costumes and Amorous makes the images in a raw format.

They won an Oscar this year for:

"Best Supporting Partner While Traveling For A Year in Southeast Asia While Working On A Crazy Yet Meaningful Artistic Project In Diverse Exotic Locations Using Bizarre Masks and Costumes."

Metta.

Careful in Lhasa, Tibet.

Careful in Cambodia.

Julia wakes up in Cambodia

Greetings,

Julia is from Stockholm, Sweden. She is 36-years young. She was married for 10 long angry violent years to a Black man from Atlanta.

We met at a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties. 

She opened up. "I don't know what I'm running away from. I don't know what I'm running toward." We talked about the amazing passages inside Angkor temples, being an allegory of her travels.

- One door opens and one door closes but the passages can be a bitch, whispered a traveling ghost.

I suggested she'd evolved as a willing victim of old lies, how she'd believed the old lies from the authority figures (family, husband, boss, friends) in her life. How she'd believed, in her heart, the old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others. How her new day in Cambodia, this beginning, offered her new opportunities for awareness and growth.

Like other humans, to become real, she'd eventually face her deep multiple fears. Plural. It was either that or keep on running scared. Wild animals on her trail.

"I want to cut all my hair off." It was long curling blond movie star mane quality hair. We went to a salon. She was naturally nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off. Julia felt lighter and more free. She altered her outward appearance, releasing old anxieties.

By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors, a complete symbolic gesture, Julia realized how she felt was more important than how her stone cold colleagues back in stone cold freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path. 

One day Julia went far away to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel a temple's influence on her consciousness.

She visited My Grandfather's House and the village school. She bought them a water purifier. She bought them a battery so they'd have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from temples she stopped in a village and met some children.

The next morning she invited me to join her. We stopped at a shop where she purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We rolled through the flat countryside passing simple bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and working. We were far away from the big bright town filled with happy white tourists doing Angkor.

Julia talked a blue streak...unloading all her honesty, hopes, and dreams well mixed with anxieties and fears.

"I feel good doing this," she said. "I've never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger. It was shit. Way too many problems and conflicts. Now that I'm in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I'm beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better."

We turned off the paved road onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home on stilts in a field. Half-naked kids played. Old women and men sat in the shade. Julia met the kids and a young mother.

"Here," she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and paste, "these are for you." The kids and mothers were amazed. An 80-year old woman, a former Apsara dancer performed some quick movements.  Julia copied her to the delight of everyone.

We left. "I'll be back," Julia yelled as kids ran behind waving. 

"I now feel more fulfilled," she said. We stopped in a small market village for coffee. Young girls selling small colorful bamboo paper birds descended on us. "Buy something?" 

Julia met Rita, second from the right. Rita's 14 and in the 5th grade. Rita learned her English selling to foreigners at the temples after school. "I saw a leader in the girl's eyes," Julia said as we rode back to the city. "Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow."

The short version is that Julia had to modify her dream for the girl. "Let's be practical," I suggested. Finding a Khmer English teacher for $80 a month was like finding clean drinking water.

The next day Julia bought a brand new pink bike for Rita. A bell, basket, the works. It said, 'NEW STAR' on the chain guard. We went to a bookstore and she bought a whiteboard, boxes of markers and 20 basic English books, picture dictionaries and story books. We loaded them on a tuk-tuk and rolled to the village. 

Rita, her family - they raise pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market, older sisters hustle wealthy tourists hoping to get a boyfriend and get out - and friends were waiting for Julia.

"Here, Rita all this is for you," said Julia. "The bike will help you get to school, the temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English here." Rita smiled. "Thank you."

Rita jumped on her bike and pedaled through dust, broken leaves, around the house. Julia spread the books out and all the kids explored new images, words, ABC alphabets and color. Julia exchanged email and postal addresses with Rita. 

"I feel real good about this," Julia said as we rolled through Cambodia. "Real good. I've made a small difference in a young girl's life. I am so grateful."

Metta.

Julia and kids...