Good shit

Namaste,

Lasta buys a street papaya. A Nepalese bird shits on your hat.
She laughs. Good luck!

Once, in Ismit, a wild Turkish bird shit on your hat.
Birds practice.
Tibetan traders finger prayer beads. It's belief and proof.

1,000 street children live in Kathmandu. They are between 6-20.
They need food, shelter, clothing, training, jobs. 
Glue sniffing is a growing problem.

35,000 NGO's fight each other. Who can get the most donor money?
Competition or cooperation?

Metta.

 Kids find good shit.

Sparrow

Namaste,

A man waits with a weight scale. A bag of potatoes. Cool shade. Dawn the down against red bricks.
He shines his black dress shoes with a newspaper. 
A woman in a turquoise shawl decorates stone with her whisk broom. 
A woman unfolds green stalk onions on a white plastic bag. 
Boys slap Tantric wooden masks removing yesterday. 
A light rain falls.
Sparrow wings flutter in your face. Directly. 
Their air currents support six prop jets as curious enthralled tourists press their faces against plastic glimpsing Himalayan mystery and beauty.

Metta.

Twins

Namaste, 

In the street life of Bhaktapur is Pottery Square. 250 people from immediate families make clay, create pots, piggy banks, animals, bowls, living art, dolls, bells, oil lamp bases, and cooking containers. They dry them in the sun. They slow fire them using straw fuel in large kilns. 

"We live here as a family," said a girl, 12 with her twin sister. "My father makes piggy banks. My mother moves them into the sunlight." A potter uses a heavy staff to get his wheel turning, rotating faster and faster until it is a blur. He shapes a pot. 

Finished products are sold locally, throughout the Kathmandu valley and exported faster than light.

Metta.

Kid Fools

Namaste,

Said the young Nepalese girl carrying the world on her back.

Her world is a large plastic sack for collecting valuable garbage. She uses a piece of thin hooked metal to probe piles of refuse. She has children scavenger friends in Vietnam (bundled logs and firewood), Laos (twigs and firewood), Cambodia (trash, charcoal, plastic bottles) all singing and dancing under the weight. Down all the days of their youth.

The weight of childhood is heavy. Children are not fooled. No joke. 

The girl led a traveler to the national zoo. A huge magnificent orange and white striped Bengal tiger roared near the bars. Feed Me! He dragged raw red buffalo meat into the shade expanding canines, grinding flesh.

Two sad brown eyed crying Black Himalayan bears in a cramped cold cement cage with scraggly tree trunks pressed their noses through rusty bars whispering, Please open the cage and take us back to the mountains.

A Griffon's brown elegant wing span blocked the sun flying beneath wire limitations. Oh, it said, If only I could soar again on thermals. If only I could regain my dignity and freedom. 

I have seen many people in cages, said the girl.

Metta.

Draw water. Draw your dream.

Radio Activity

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.”

The postal worker and the nomad talked over a counter while a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T Touch The Stamps” because at her precocious age, curiosity about colors blended itself toward planetary exploration developing her active imagination.

Holding a nebula in his hand he told the woman how, up in the invisible sky, are all these really cool galaxies which means we are a third the life of a 3.5 billion year old universe and she said, "That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before." 

Editor's note: originally published in A Century Is Nothing.