Journeys
Words
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact

Entries in education (379)

Saturday
Jun112011

truth has few friends

Namaste,

Take a plane to the airport. Take a taxi across the sky. See Himalayas. Open your window. Breathe deep.

Truth will provide more than 1 billion people with access to safe drinking water.

Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people worldwide who cannot read.

Woman are 2/3 of this number.

Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day.

Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world having no access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools. Truth is a fatal disease, like peace, love and blindness.

Truth is a sledgehammer.

This is the Truth Channel. Your eyes lie. You cannot eat technology. Truth has few friends and they are suicides.

Metta.

Tuesday
Jun072011

small village life

Namaste,

The incomplete yet fulfilled specific concrete hard red brick hammering echoed across a green Nepal valley.

It wasn't a hammer. It was a machete. A man chopped trees. His son trimmed branches. He severed sections into four-foot long pieces. His mother stacked them, wrapping them in bundles.

They collected wood all day. They rested at noon. They ate rice mixed with vegetables and potatoes. They shared expensive bananas. They drank water from a stream. They napped in shade. They carried the wood up mountains on their backs and home before dark.

Yellow eagles circled overhead. An infant cried in a brick home. Children in blue school uniforms wearing ties walked home along a red dirt road. Laughing.

They passed a small wooden tea shop overlooking a valley. A 20-year old girl worked at her sewing machine. She sewed large hearts into a white bed spread. The lace pillow cases with hearts were finished. Marriage bed dreams. 

Her parents had an arranged marriage. Her father is an electrician. Her younger sister ran away. She married a boy from another caste. He is a cook in a tourist town. They had a baby. Her older brother studies hotel management in the city. Another brother is in high school. 

I have a 1% chance of meeting a guy with a good heart, she said. 

Metta.

Give her a sewing machine and she'll change the world.

Saturday
Jun042011

moon room

Namaste,

Nepalese people live in your pocket, ala small Donegal villages.

Get a room. Water and electricity are extra.
No electricity? No problem. Have more dark erotic secret sex. Produce more children.
They will light up your life.

Here is a bucket. Get in line.
Here is a pail, an empty water bottle. 
Why pay for plastic when you need water?

Elicit electric.

Here is your cage.
It has a wheel. Get on the wheel.
Begin running. Run forever.
How long is that?

Run until the green light comes on.
What does green mean?
It means stop running.
Rest.

Metta.

 

Wednesday
May182011

Myth

Namaste,

As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, the hero's journey is the space within the heart.

AUM. A - a waking consciousness. U - dream consciousness. M - deep sleep. 

The manpower investment training wheels in Nepal is slight to non-existant. Young future immigrants move to rich countries. No manufacturing. Woman manufacture babies for export. Import everything from outside. 

A Nepalese man named Thor below a hill station sits in the hot sun. He picks up a medium size stone. He places the stone on a larger stone. He raises his hammer. He smashes the medium size stone into fragments.

He pushes the fragments into a pile. When I have a big pile, he said, smiling, someone will collect them. They will put them on a truck and sell them in India. This is my life. 

Teams of starlings wing below fast moving clouds above rolling green hills, farms, rice paddies, snow ranges.

An old woman departed a distant valley. She carries a 40-pound bag of sand on her back up steep ragged slippery slate steps. Step by step. The meshed rope blazes into her forehead. This is my life.

A babbling Chinese tourist walks past the man and woman. This is the best day of my life.

Metta.

Friday
May132011

Untouchable

Namaste,

In another dramatic, exciting, heart stopping, palpitating, effervescent, totally complete silence, the entire country of Nepal, (NElectricity Power And Light) decided to have a general strike. Everything is shut down. Locked steel shuttered businesses decorate main street. 

There are 36 castes here. Give or take 100 sub divisions. A caste is a traditional hard core socially cultural belief and practice bestowing style, honor, privilege and status to selected humans born into a specific family. Anthropologist and pathologists consider this invention a specialized branch of the value based Angiosperm.

How do you spell discrimination?

"Muluki Ain (1854) divided Nepalese citizens into two castes "the caste whose water is allowed to remain pure" and "the caste whose water is defiled". Chiefs of the various castes were entrusted with sorting out issues related to their own castes.[1] The heads of Kamis (blacksmiths) and Sarkis (tanners and cobblers) were called Mijhars. Similarly the head ofDamai (tailors and musicians) was called Nagarchi." Read more.

As Shiva, a female ear hearing specialist explained, "People are striking to abolish the caste system. They want equality."

"Yes, said Vishnu her friend, "They want to be a musical blacksmith cobbling a life. They want to walk empty streets selling hot delicious cinnamon flavored pastries. They want to develop and profit from vast mountainous snow capped high altitude regions of pure air in never-never land. They want to tan their hide or hide their tan. They want to impersonate Elvis after dark.

"They want to be a brick boy in the Kathmandu valley. They want to be a free person in a free country."

Three strikes and you're out.

Metta.