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.

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.

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.

Untouchable

Namaste,

In another dramatic, exciting, heart stopping, palpitating, effervescent, totally complete silence, the entire country of Nepal, (No Electricity 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.

Fairyland

Namaste,

The Electric Fairy waved her magic wand. All the lights in Nepal went out.  
Ha, ha laughed the Electric Fairy.

A business man with an Olive food joint in a small tourist town near a lake below Annapurna crammed with:

18,543 restaurants,
69.306 money changers,
456 trek clothing stores,
283 travel agents,
32 adventure companies,
19 boarding schools,

8,032 comatose, dulled out, dumbed down students
dreaming of better Indian educational/employment futures

27 female Tibetan refugees selling their recycled sidewalk dreams,
401 guesthouses,
8 dance halls,
1 jazz club,

3 supermarkets,
numerous mom & pop shoe string ops,

52 barber/massage shops,
9 bookstores,
6 bakeries,
85 wandering oxen,
3 tailors,
2 shoe repair experts,
1,208 anxious lost tourists,

and 50,001 bored residents with very short economic attention spans said,
I will buy a $15,000 gas generator to solve this energy conundrum. 

When it ran out of gas the Electric Fairy laughed ha, ha, ha. Now you see it, now you don't.

Metta.