hello december

tomorrow is national day here in laos, said orphan.

big deal, said a little red rooster. cock-a-doodle-do.

ain't nothing but the blues, said a sallow shallow faced female teacher. a skin teacher.

i dance. i drink beer. i hunt foreigners. it's a job. 

rooster crowed. cock-a-doodle-do.

orphan said, it was blatant child abuse and he was one pissed off kid. i tried to murder his attitude, his free spirit. 

i was trapped in my chair. he was trapped in the relationship. he learned how to be a pain giver, an efficient manipulator. he carried his heavy bag of neglect, emotional pain, shadows and independence into through and out of relationships. he distributed gifts of emotional suspicion. 

he practiced the ancient art of abandonment. loving and leaving. 

i finished doing my wheelchair time. i posted bail. i was released on my own recognizance. i stumbled, adjusted, and found my balance. i renewed my sense of self determination and self reliance.

i walked on the curvature of the earth. a simple walking meditation. a kinhin.

my kensho was a liberation and a loneliness.

sound

My speech voice is missing.

I make rolling guttural sounds expressing metaphors, similes, intonations, frequencies, meaning, sense, time, ideas, dreams, relationships, secrets, my traditional family values, fear, passion, heart and sadness. Joy.

By the time I learned the alphabet it was late in life toward primordial dusk.

Late in the moment from before now and then. Late in the whisper of silent air singing from the trash collector’s plastic bottle. He pulls his rolling cart. Filled with cardboard. A muscular rhythm stirs sonomulent dust on broken stones. I see, said the blind girl. You can’t step in the same river twice.  

Possibilities and probabilities, chance and coincidence flutter finger fragments. Unknown mysterious sensations fling from my signing hands. Fingers and hands are language extensions. Blossom being. My lover visualizes me in tropical brown skin toned worlds. He imagines I will join a hearing impaired community. He’s a dreamer. I jump ahead in my story. It won’t happen. I am a slave.

Orphan Tourism

Namaste,

According to an article by Charlotte Turner, there are 269 orphanages and 12,000 orphans in Cambodia.

"Visitors see some poverty and they feel bad about it," said Ashlee Chapman, a project manager with Globalteer, an organisation that matches volunteers with local organisations.

"They want to do something," she adds, saying they might visit a children's project for a few hours, donate money and toys, "take a holiday snap and feel that they've contributed."

"Constant change of caregivers gives emotional loss to children, constant emotional loss to already traumatised children," Jolanda van Westering, a child protection specialist at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) told AFP.

Read more.

The Cambodian children pictured here are not orphans.

Metta.

Affected

"Keep your hand moving," whispered the writing teacher to 80 robots. 

The foreign teacher wearing Tang Dynasty clothing filled with dragons, yin-yang balance, a Phoenix rising, a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains while emperors danced with concubines inside Forbidden Cities' red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams dove into silence beside abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss was a manifestation of phenomenal superior detective analysis and forty questions of the soul marking marketing examinations at 7:00 p.m. followed by utter exhaustion.

We escaped the sterile Chinese university on mountain bikes, singing, “We know so much and understand so little.”  

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” bright star Leo said. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’”

We sharpened sticks on stones carving paleo-Leo-lithic cave paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name backwards for future historians and archeologists to get the gist or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, “English On Line.”

Being hunters-gathers we salvaged assorted garbage mired in mud. We created a semi-permanent temporary recycled art project on the canyon bottom. 

We assembled statues using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, lost feathers, sharp needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, dried condoms, fractured leaves, bird calls and worn and torn useful Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa, Tibet.

In nature they drilled for cauliflower.

heart day

Five things to improve happiness. 

1. Be grateful. Write letters to someone who helped you in some way.

2. Be optimistic. Visualize your ideal future. Describe the image in a journal entry.

3. Count your blessings. Write down three good things that happen to you every week.

4. Use your strengths. 

5. Practice acts of kindness. Helping others helps ourselves.