Ice is the theme.
Willona Sloan, Curator & Managing Editor of Black Coffee & Vinyl selected one of my ice images for the January edition. Cool.
They feature high quality Sound, Art, and Words.
Check it out. Share with friends.
A Zen monk related a story.
“Before becoming a monk I was an English teacher in 8th grade at an Experimental School south of Chengdu in Sichuan, China. One day I held up a walnut. What is this?”
They answered in Chinese.
I wrote “walnut” and “metaphor” on the board. “This walnut is like a person I know, very hard on the outside. They are very safe and secure inside their shell. Nothing can happen to them. What is inside this shell?”
“Some food,” said a boy.
“How do you know?”
“My mother told me.”
“Do you believe everything your mother tells you?”
“Yes, my mother always tells the truth.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s good, but I wonder if mothers always tell their children the truth. Why? Mothers and fathers protect their children and keep them safe. Now you are developing as a more complete and mature human being. It’s good to question things and find out the truth for yourself. Do you understand?”
Some said “yes,” others nodded passively.
“This walnut is a metaphor for the self. A symbol. The self that is afraid to take risks because they are “protected” by their shell. Maybe the reality is that the shell is empty. How do we really know what is inside.”
“It’s a mystery,” said a boy.
“That’s right, life is a mystery. How will we find out what’s inside?”
“You have to break it open,” said a boy with poetic aspirations.
“Yes, you or I will have to break open the shell, our shell, break free from the shell to know what is inside. That can be a little scary when we are conditioned and comfortable carrying around the shell every day isn’t it?”
“It’s our self,” whispered a girl in the front row.
“Very good. It’s our self, this shell and the mystery. We have to take risks and know nothing terrible is going to happen, like trying to speak English in class.”
“If we don’t break the shell we’ll never feel anything,” said another boy.
A girl in the back of the room said, “it means it’s hard to open our heart. It’s hard to know another person and what they are thinking, how they are feeling.”
“You got it,” I said. “We’ll never experience all the feelings of joy, love, pain, sorrow, or friendship and miss out on life.”
This idea floated around the room as I juggled the shell in my hand.
“I know people who grow very tired every day from putting on their shell before they leave home. It gets heavier and heavier, day-by-day. Many carry their shell into adulthood. It’s like wearing a mask. They look alive but inside they are dead. But eventually, maybe, something important happens to them at the heart-mind level and they decide to break free from their shell and see what’s inside. They say to themselves, ‘This shell is getting really heavy and I’m so tired of putting it on and carrying it around. I’m going to risk it.’”
I smashed the shell on the table. It splintered into pieces. Students jumped with shock.
“There, I’ve done it! I smashed my shell. Can it be put back together?”
“No.”
“Right, it’s changed forever. The shell is gone.”
I fingered small pieces of shell, removing them from the nut.
“See, it’s ok. Wow. Now it’s just an old useless shell. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s history. It will take time to remove pieces of my old shell. Maybe it’s fair and accurate to say the old parts represent my old habits, behaviors, and attitudes. It happened. From now on I will make choices using my free will accepting responsibility for my behavior. And, I know nothing terrible will happen to me. I feel lighter. Now I can be real. That’s the walnut story.”
“Well,” mused a sad serious poetic girl named Plath, “I believe every living object; seed, flower, tree, and animal has an anxious soul, a voice, sexual desires, a need for survival, and feels the terror at the prospect of annihilation.”
Language dreams.
Weaving A Life (V4) - paperback and/or Kindle
Dark, a tour guide for Get Out, a Cuban travel company, visited Never-Never Land in 2009.
He met Strange, an H’mong man among men speaking excellent English. His nickname was Wandering Buffalo.
He worked with UXO, the Unexploded Ordinance Organization demining land in the morning and teaching English afternoons. He developed a soccer team.
Dark and his co-founder cohort Thor, a Viking singing sagas while invading Ireland helped Strange.
They established soccer team funding to take the Lao team to an international football event in Havana with caviar, cigars, goat cheese and noodle soup.
One week before leaving Strange died.
Dark and Thor made the Lao kids’ dreams come true. They went to Havana by steamship.
In 2012 they created BS offering English education to H’mong students in memory of Strange. Memories are strange.
Dark called Wick his best friend in Beijing asking for teaching help and setting up the school. Wick, a 55-year old Cuban trained lawyer and former financial analyst on Walled Street arrived.
Wick and Dark enrolled H’mong kids, used Sharp Cutting Edge texts and developed community awareness.
Dark did the marketing and publicity - embassies in China, Mongolia, South America and international companies. He filed NGO non-profit charity application documents in Greenland to facilitate Ice-9 donations.
After eighteen months of self-induced torture at BS Wick accepted a teaching job in Ulan Bator, Mongolia with yurts and steppes. Big money at a private school, he said, I need travel money for Uruguay. Try Patagonia, said IT, fresh off the banana boat.
Dark advertised for a volunteer teacher.
In the summer of 2013 Wick went to Ulan Bator, confirmed his new big money job and bought seventeen boxes of textbooks for elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced students at BS. He shipped them back by raft on the Mekong.
IT arrived in August. He met Dark in Luang Prabang overlooking the wild wide wet Nam Ou River and rolling green hills.
Dark was nervous about the situation and teacher transition. It was his baby. He’d invested his time, money and efforts in BS. He needed to feel secure in his choice.
He practiced micro-management with high anxiety.
It’s going to be ok, said Prophetic. Relax.
Dark left for Papa New Guinea seeking Mama Guinea and baby Guinean head hunters and cannibals while leading well heeled British tourists carrying clean drinking water through dengue malaria infected jungles, 5* menus and 300-count Egyptian linen.
IT began a new adventure at BS.
“To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.”- Celine
*
I facilitate English, the language of barbarians in Yangon, Burma.
Ah bliss. I salute the sun every morning from the 8th floor balcony with twinkling stars, flocks of crows and silent burgundy monks clanging gongs.
Wing song.
Bamboo grows strong. Resilient.
Laundry dries faster than a speeding sparrow.
*
One small life chapter began in Phonsavan, Laos a sleepy, dusty enclave near Vietnam. Laos is the most heavily bombed country on Earth. A planeload of bombs were dropped every eight minutes, 24-hours a day for nine years.
The Plain of Jars wars and scars.
Survivors and archeologists say the jars were funeral containers holding bones of relatives. Jarring fact.
Truth is beyond a shadow of reasonable healthy doubt they were drinking vessels of GIANTS.
I know. I was there 4,000 years ago.
A book entitled A Little BS is what happened more or less.
Tell me a storybook about Burma. Your first time was in 2013. How long were you there?
All fucking day.
No. Really is an adverb.
Five weeks. I was the first teacher in and the first one out. They bled teachers after I left.
Why did you go?
To grow. To experience a Montessori learning environment at an expensive private school in Mandalay. See how things worked. On the ground. Wander around. Scribble words. Make images. Meet kind, curious, smiling people.
(Alarm bells clang)
A private school sounds dangerous. I spell uh I smell money. Cash for kids.
Education is a busine$$. Profit before people.
Didn't you learn this lesson in 2008 for a year at St. Laurensia near Jakarta when you helped 4th graders develop social and moral character with humor and curiosity?
Private school, parents rule fool.
Yes, however I needed to see Burma for myself, analyze the management and system. Connect with smiling people. Learn, laugh, grow, glow and flow with the go.
Trust and verify. That's what I say.
And you say it with clear pronunciation.
Make it new day by day make it new.
The school had 700 kids from Montessori (3-6 years young) through grade 9.
That's big money. It's a numbers game.
Yes it is. Don't ask me how much. Big.
Bigger than the infinite sky?
Almost. The financial bean counters wore out abacuses. Click-click. They'll raise tuition next year. The Burmese Managing Director lived happily ever after.
I love fairy tales and fragments. It’s all I trust.
He hired Dr. Scary Snobson as principal two years ago to open the facility. He had a Ph.D in Reports and Updates. He loved organization, management, forms, protocol, procedures, paper and administrative drone head duties.
He recruited former Peace Corpse teachers to get foreign faces and mouths in front of spoiled rich kids and parents. Marketing 101. He practiced Hathaway yoga and invested his princely salary in offshore rice paddy accounts near Burmese refugee camps bordering Thailand and Bangladesh. He was thrilling and running scared.
Did he run for fun?
He ran in the tropical sun for sums. Kids in = count cash. Numbers numbed wealthy Burmese wallets. Pay here. Drop kid at classroom ABC. Minders/babysitters/Burmese educators in training will take care of them until you pick them up at 3. If you're late we sell them to China. A boy is worth $3500 in a one-child Orwellian culture.
I have two boys, said a Burmese parent. Do I get a discount?
It depends on their passing a physical with Nurse Dull, said Dr. Scary. Let me ask my passive Xaimen wife. She's very proud of her green card. She talks like her mouth's full of marbles. She believes in acquiescence.
You mean the sad-eyed, lights on-no one home, space cadet reactive one wearing the cheap floppy Chinese hat, Gloria Swanson sunglasses and magic slippers inherited from her grandmother outside the gate-less gate standing lost and forlorn Monday-Friday mornings as horrendous traffic spewed noxious hydrocarbons into faces of emotionally deprived children and struggling nanny slaves dragging children’s suitcases of books and carrying cheap bright plastic baskets of food while parents, wearing diamond and imperial green jade jewelry necklaces yakked on imported cell phones walking their kids to classrooms in the tall gleaming metropolis of a school?
Yes. Her marble mouth machine droned her official mandatory sequence. Park here. Drop off here. Parents ignored her.
That's her. She's his baby. Her attention span was shorter than an apology to Burmese parents of neglected children about the hidden cost of grandiose theoretical classless plans. Read the fine print. You paid suckers.
Sounds like the blind leading the blind. Where did they meet, these educational super heroes?
They mated at the Day Grow Country School in Manila. She was head babysitter. He ran a doctoral marathon between Tainan and Rota.
What does she do in this improbable profitable scheme?
Yeah-Yeah is the bureaucratic stone face of the Macaroni Monti Sorry Money Story program.
She hired thirty female Myanmar university graduates for the Monti Sorry program. They signed a five-year - no option out contract - same as teachers were required in China. She and the good Doctor sold the Burmese Managing Director great expectations of wealth. The school paid a discounted rate of $3,500 for each teacher's training and certification program. Sublime slavery. Yeah-Yeah took her cut.
Is she a certified Monti Sorry trainer?
No. She learned the methodology in Havana ten years ago. She's not certified for anything. She’s a little fish out of water.
For three months the local teachers have been training from scratch. Yeah-Yeah goes through the motions. School started on May 20th. Now it's on the job training, learning and laughing plus six tedious hours on Saturday. They watch videos featuring an OCD state side teacher, create materials and practice lessons. They "graduate" next year after being certified by a real Monti Sorry woman in the states of confusion.
Smells like a shell game.
Teachers make $200 a month. The average Burmese makes $804 a year. A SIM card costs $300. One percent of the population has Internet. 26% are unemployed. 16% do not have electricity. If local teachers are late thumbing a fingerprint after 8 a.m. at the admin office the school charges them 25 cents. Live and learn fear school.
She and Dr. Scary run and mismanage (if intimidation, fear and stupidity is management) the Great Educational Scam Machine. She reminded me of Chinese teachers in Fujian schools screaming, Just blend in. I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears!
Welcome to my nightmare, said Yeah-Yeah.
She invested her princess sums in offshore rice paddy accounts near Burmese refugee camps bothering Thailand.
Why did you leave?
I'd witnessed enough of the dystopian Kafkaesque-like suffering. The teachers' apartments resembled prison cells. I've more useful things to do with my time, energy, love and compassion.
Give me a urine sample.
Yeah-Yeah in her infinite wisdom minus kindness and compassion expected me to write a lesson plan for the Kindergarten experience in the library.
You're joking.
It was Friday, June 8th, 2013 at 1:17 p.m.
I'd taken the geniuses to the bibliotheca for thirty minutes. They found books, sat reading, looking at pictures and sharing with friends. She wandered in and sat down.
I see you brought the kids to the library.
You are very observant.
Where's your lesson plan for the library?
You're kidding.
At 3:10 p.m. I gave seven-days notice to Dr. Scary. Here's my lesson plan. Probation is a 2-way street.
Good for you.
Yes. Life is too short for this nonsense. I shredded the truth with kids. I helped you. We helped each other grow. We walked slowly. We danced. We sang. We discovered sharing. We meditated. We had fun. Now it's time to ride my elephant through jungles back to Cambodia.
I left a sewing machine and umbrella on an operating table in the teachers' cellblock. I departed Burma without delay. It was a close shave.
That's another story about creativity, independent thinking and free choice.
Yes it is.
Share Article