Cycles

Namaste,

The cycle of existence.

A person creates subjective reality and illusions. People feel pure joy with compassion, gratitude and forgiveness. Your center is clear and unified. No past regrets, no future fears.

The Chinese-Tibetan puppet leaders in Lhasa ordered monks to increase 24/7 patriotic education classes in all monasteries. Re-education through reform, ideology, propaganda and control.

It’s about power and control, ruling through fear and intimidation. The Chinese after looting and destroying monasteries in Tibet and mainland China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden.

They recruited Tibetan monks to live and work as spies and infamous informers. This system proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and capitalist running dogs. It was a practical peoples campaign of fear and suspicion creating paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns allowed to live and practice who resist or question this form of subtle patriotic education risk imprisonment, torture and death. They well know what has and continues to happen to liberal monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi prison outside Lhasa.

There are two kinds of suffering, said a girl weaving wool carpets in her yurt on the Tibetan plateau below bare brown mountains. Suffering you run away from and suffering you face.

Metta.

88 seconds in Nepal

Namaste,

Namaste means I salute the light (god) within you.

 

It is the daily Hindu greeting between people with your palms and fingers together raised toward your eyes in a blessing. Smile. 

 

He visited Nepal for 88 seconds. First was Bhaktapur, outside Kathmandu.

No traffic. No pollution. Cool fresh air. Limited electricity access. Daily power outages are the norm. Ironic considering Nepal has the second highest water volume energy source on Earth.

 

It is an ancient town, filled with Hindu temples, daily rituals, ringing bells, flowers and incense offerings, old hand carved wooden windows, brick homes, brick streets, tiled roofs, pottery, yogurt, vegetable and fruit life street market squares, amazing flowing sari and shawl rainbows, gentle people. It's on the old trading route from Tibet to India. 

 

There is no home plumbing. If you need water you go to the community well after dawn and before dusk. You drop your plastic container down brick shafts. You haul it up hand over hand. You pour it into narrow necked brass or copper urns.

 

You drop it again. You haul it up. Repeat until urns are full. You carry them on your hips through narrow brick alleys filled with friends and families. At home you filter it.

You boil it.

You drink it.

You use it for cooking, washing clothes, brushing teeth (a popular outdoor activity) and bathing.

Recycle, reuse, refresh. You return to the well.

Women and girls do all the water hauling, heavy water lifting and daily manual labor. So it goes. 

Metta.

child labor

Namaste,

190 countries celebrate World Day Against Child Labor on 12 June.

1.5 billion children labor around the world.

2.14 million child workers in Nepal are in industries, service and agriculture. 

In Nepal 600,000 children work in hazardous jobs. Half of the child workers are 10-14. Fifty-percent are between 5-9. 

12% work away from home.

Poverty and illiteracy are the primary causes.

Let's celebrate! sang 1.5 billion children.

Metta.

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.

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.