Writing is a river with many tributaries.
Photography: intuitive, creative impulse, timeless, presence, aura of death, a diary, essence.
The Divine Comedy. A romantic dreamer wanders Earth.
Act. Find the truth. Emotional honesty. Don't be afraid.
Dance is freedom. Movement never lies.
What I want to report is that I've done nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.
What is your myth - the myth in which you live?
"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." - Upanishad
This is a work of literary journalism.
It’s fucking hysterical.
Now and then mean the same in Ratanakiri, Cambodia animist jungle languages.
Leo is incognito and invisible perusing the Wild West. It is replete with wandering literary outlaws, animists, shamans and 25,000 natives. Rambunctious young Banlung cowboys and cowgirls dance 125cc machines through spiraling red dust.
How long have you been here, asked a 12-year old girl cutting and selling ice along a red road.
All day. I started in China. I walked to Vietnam. Then Laos. I’ll stay here awhile. We can talk.
Ok, she said, cutting crystals. Is a day long enough to process a sensation, form an impression? Is it long enough to gather critical mass data about the diversity of the human condition in this total phenomena?
Yes, said Leo, If you slow down. How is life here?
I work, I breed, I get slaughtered, she said. This is my fate. My fate is a machete slashing through jungles. Fate and random chance are two sides of the same coin. Yeah, yeah are two of my favorite lazy words. Especially when I am talking with illiterate zombies ...
They are same word but I spit them out twice at light speed. You accent the last consonant, drawing it out like a sigh, a final breath, a whisper. Y-e-a-hhhhh. It’s crazy English believe you me. Impressive, eh? I can also say OK twice fast with a rising sound on the k sounding like a which means I understand without admitting meaning or personal truth-value. It’s vague. Why be precise? People love conversations using abstract metaphors. Ok?
Ok. Address the very low literacy rate, said Leo. Hello, literacy rate, how are you? she said.
I am well thank you and speaking with improved elocution. My English is getting better. The more I see the less I know. I open my head, heart and mouth.
Someone said literacy means reading and writing, said Ice Girl.
I doubt it, said Literacy. Who needs reading and writing? Humans need food, sex, air, water, stories and red dust. Hope is in last place. In fact, hope may be the greatest evil because it’s a myth, like evil.
Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said Ice Girl, sawing cold.
I thought you said eating and fighting, said Literacy. You must be fucking crazy. My survival depends on eating and fighting. Reading and writing is for idiots. Millions never learn how to read or write, let alone scribble stories. No chance. No money. No tools. Education is a waste of time.
I see, said Ice Girl. When I write my stories filled with immediate sense impressions and precise details they lose their magic. They are like ice. Ice loses its essence. It reverts to a primal form. Existence precedes essence. It’s lost between heart-mind-hand-tool-paper. Spoken stories lose their edge ...
Too many people talk out their stories. Magic is lost in the telling. Lost tales float around looking for ears. Talking kills magic and mystery. Ghost stories. World tribes memorize chants, rhythms, songs, tales and star trails with a side order of red dust. You never hear a kid say, Let’s take the day off and be creative.
Other looked on with pure heart awareness. A woman named Raven (Corvus Corex) shared a talk story.
One day I returned to the Taos Pueblo. It was over 100.
Dry dusty silent heat.
“Find something that speaks to you,” said a Tiwa Native American woman.
I walked past their cemetery where 150 women and children died when the church was burned during a Hispanic and Pueblo revolt in Taos after the American occupation in 1846 by U.S. forces. Wooden crosses scarred by sun, heat and dust stood in haphazard rows on brown ground. Plastic flowers. Names of children and elders chiseled in wood. A black and white rosary draped on a small cross marked a burial ground.
“Due to shortage of space we bury the new dead on top of the old dead,” said the Tiwa woman.
Hard soil. Wooden crosses stood at angles in the heat. White black and brown crosses faded in sun. Names, ages, children, parents, flowers, and rosaries slept inside a small adobe wall. The old bell collected dust in the burned out charred remains of the church steeple.
The screams of the trapped women and children echoed as the attackers poured their modern civilization of guns and religion into the church. One moment it was quiet and then you heard children screaming and there was no place for them to go, no chance.
“We left it that way,” the Tiwa girl said to pale faced visitors standing silent seeing. She disappeared, a vapor of spirit, a reminder of where they were and how they’d come to this place in the dust below sacred mountains and sky.
Of all the pueblos in New Mexico the Taos Pueblo has the most magic, the deepest significance. Power. It sits on hundreds of thousands of acres, all sacred Indian ground, sacred forested mountains, with sacred rivers and lakes. Adobe brown buildings stand stacked on top of each other to the sky. Blue doors. Wooden ladders. Red chilies hang in the sun. It is a hieroglyphic of habitats of ancient homes, fortress and sacred living space.
A young brown eyed Tiwa woman explained their life; language, the small adobe cooking kilns for baking breads and pies, how they mixed straw and mud forming adobe buildings, maintained dwellings and the number of people living on the pueblo and those on connected reservations.
“A matriarchal society. No women sit on the fifty member tribal council. Tiwa is the language on the Pueblo and a pure oral transmission. Nothing is written down. Sacred words. Tiwa means - wee-who,” she said.
“It means when you give, expect nothing in return. When you give you open that corridor of energy for yourself and your kind or your people, your vibrations, and it is filled with goodness. Great powers or awareness are within it so that it descends upon you and places in you whatever that gift is that you’re supposed to get. That’s what giving does. It awakens placement. It brings down clarity. We are people from the Source - the center of the circle of light. The No-Form creates the form. In the Tiwa language there are no nouns or pronouns. Things have no distinct concrete existence. Everything is in motion and seen in it’s relationship to other motions.
“The power is not in words but in sounds made in saying and pronouncing words. Each of us is a ceremony, a vibration of All-That-Is. We are the vast self.”
Inside a pueblo room, a woman called Sunflower painted intricate black and white spider web designs on her pots. Her gift streamed in and out weaving geometric colors. Her brush dipped into black ink, her left hand inside the pot turned it as she etched a black line. Diamonds, circles, rectangles, a sun eye, and sun god danced black on white.
I wandered across a small stream flowing from sacred mountains. It carried water to nourish the pueblo. Healing liquid. Water flowed during the 4th year of a ten-year drought.
I visited with men and women selling turquoise, beads, arrows, water, silver bracelets, postcards, drums, pottery, sharing stories. A man and his drums made from animal skins. Beadwork. Blue sky stones.
A brown dog slept in the dust of midday sun. Crude serviceable wooden ladders extended from earth to adobe roofs to clear blue sky. Indian women sat talking under Ramada lattice poled roofs. They waited for tourists asking new questions about old things hoping to sell their work.
A tired woman from Miami and three kids passed. Blond kids wearing floppy khaki hats carried water bottles. Having the time of their lives they shuffled boots in dirt studying ants. They’d never been this far west before.
A Tiwa man told his story about hunting. Furs and pelts hung on his hitching post walls. It was cool inside his place.
He wore a t-shirt of an American flag wrapped around an Indian on horseback shooting a buffalo, “Hunting, The American Way.”
“Yes,” said his long dark face and sad eyes, “I took my boys, when they were young enough, up into the mountains, the sacred mountains here and taught them how to hunt.”
They hunted bear, cougar, rabbit, fox and elk.
“A bear. How do you kill a bear?”
“In the lung. When they charge you hold your ground. One arrow in the lung. It stops them immediately.”
“Do they fight you, do they run?”
“No, they do not fight you. They stop. They die.”
An elk head with many points looked down from his wall. Fur huge brown eyes.
“And the elk?”
“One arrow brought him down,” he said, pointing to his kill.
“How close did you get?”
“Ten feet. We tracked him for three days. We studied him well. I taught all my boys the art, the skill of the hunt. We started early that day, it was day three, we camped we tracked him for three days. We knew where he grazed, where he went for water, where he slept.”
The elk was big and eyed silent. No startled look. Black nose for smelling down wind, up wind, all the sacred mountain winds. Ten point antlers streaked with brown maturity.
“How did your boys do?”
“They learned well. I started them young. We all do but not everyone here learns as early as my boys. I learned from my father and he learned from his father. We took our packhorses left the pueblo and moved into the mountains, high in the mountains. We camped by the rivers and tracked their prints, their habits their patterns. Three days was all it took.”
“It’s the simplicity of it all. It’s the spirit of the animal isn’t it? You know their energy.”
“You become one with the animal. You become the animal.”
His bow and arrows hung on the white wall. Rock flints. Sharpened points.
“Then what happened?”
“On the day of the kill we were up before dawn. We broke camp. We moved to the river. The elk came down to drink and didn’t smell us. We were in the rushes, hidden. We were ten feet away. One arrow,” he said, pointing to the elk on his wall, “there, in the neck. He fell fast. We used everything.”
“My boys learned well. I have three of them and now they are grown and my work here is done.”
The tribe dreamed. Wood became ash. Their fire dream consumed itself. Sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peace.
She fell awake.
Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses. A morning breeze delivered rose petals at her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard at 16,000 feet feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings and blurred prisms of light.
She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle.
Her essence was joy, gratitude, truth and compassion. Pure being.
The world of appearances was heavy, grasping, suffering, desire and illusion.
Discovering her essence her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision with pure luminous light.
People seeking to know their future with wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity.
She kept her own counsel. Others would discover their own way through their personal labyrinth.
Gathering flames she lit a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She lived in 26,000 year-old paintings.
She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage into the spirit world of ancestors.
She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.
She became an angel of light.
Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness. Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self.
Fire became her driver. Sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine ate energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.
“Yes," said Omar, “Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies. People communicate with music and dance.
“I am a character in my own story,” said Omar, “a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.”
“Wonderful," said Jamie. “I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?”
“Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow.”
“Yeah," said a kid. “This Zen tale may be too much for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear.”
“Ain’t that truth? What is the sound of one hand laughing?”
Someone in the tribe asked Other to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways.
Omar wrote it down and translated it into unspoken languages.
Tourists find, travelers discover.
A dreamer with controlled imagination.
SLOW CHILDREN...words, lightning bolts - blue butterfly, white sky, green flowers, red leaves, songs of invisibility, piano shadow.
How do you spell loss?
What I called "memory" contained and entire world.
A blind painter paints from memory. A blind writer. A blind poet.
The 6th painted words of yellow laughter.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
A little voice.
a - the old monk friend in the shade reads to his 95-year old blind sleeping friend resting/dreaming in a hammock
b - the crying wailing infant gets a job as a siren on an emergency vehicle.
All an illusion of a mirage - "the soul filled with silence, an abyss in which the whole world disappears beneath the pressure of a single thought, memory, look."
Meaning and sense: meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself.
Sense cannot stay still radiating out in directions that divide and subdivide. The sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.
What does it mean to be human?
How did I grow?
What is the ultimate reality of nature?
Welcome to the freak show.
I am someone else - Rimbaud
Dancing in the ecstasy of divine madness.
Science: systematic observation, precise measurement, disciplined testing. (quantifiable statistics)
Photography: facts, subtleties, nuances...
Outer light = luminous essence, the energy of all things through the inner eye in mind. Before form is essence. After essence is clear light. In light we dissolve into our primordial nature, touching all things across time and space. These are the truths which makes us human and divine.
The world is complex and meaningless.
Hyohakusha - "one who moves without direction." Basho.
Conversations with a ghost and ghost-to-be.
Share Article