Heart Wisdom

Mahling Township, Myanmar (Pop: 10,000)

2.5 hours south of Mandalay, another village.

Fog shrouds trees before dawn on a chilly December morning.

Mornings are fraught with mist as an orange burning orb rises over forests and rice paddies. Crows caw sing wing wind songs above monks chanting sutras at a pagoda. A bell reverberates.

Leaves dance free from The Tree of Life.

This raw, direct immediate experience reminds a traveler of Phonsavan, Laos near the Plain of Jars, long ago and far away in the winter of 2013. A Little BS came of it.

Here at 5:45 a.m. below trees with yellow leaves, 100 grade-ten female students with dancing flashlights trace a dirt path. They’ve escaped the comfort of hostel dreams.

They dance toward classrooms and a cavernous dining hall for rice and vegetables. Hot soup if they are lucky. Mumbled voices scatter singing birds.

Thirty-five female student voices reciting scientific lessons at 6:15 a.m. echo from classrooms at the Family Boarding School.

Dystopian rote memorization. Utilitarian. Repetition.
Learning by heart.
It’s not about learning. It’s about passing the exam and marks.
Vomit the material.

Delicious

The wisdom of the heart is deeper and truer than knowledge in the head.

They drone on huddled, hunched over wooden benches in jackets and yarning caps with swinging tassel balls. A bundled teacher scratches white words on a blackboard

 Today is the day of my dreams.

A narrow garden of hanging pink, orange, purple, white orchids reflect shadows before scattered light sings. An office girl sprays H20 diamonds on petals and green leaves.

A distant solitary bell reverberates.
Monks chant sutras at a pagoda.
A thin stick broom sweeping world dust cleans perception.

Ephemeral

Red sun white waves

blue sky green islands
Floating world - Ukiyo-e

Imagination

Observation
Experience
Posture
Attitude

Instinct
Star trails
Moon
Dancing ocean waves

Orange sun crashes into blue green
Infinity whispers WHAT IF
Orange processes earth's rotation

Puppy shits in sand
Serious Chinese eyes study sand footfalls

Distant white sail
Water glistens light ephemeral
Twinkling

Grow Your Soul - Prose and Poems from Laos & Cambodia

ART

I discovered an engraved Zippo lighter in a dusty Saigon history museum cabinet.

“Most people are born alive and then slowly die. I was born dead and then came to life.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” said Laughter Therapy, an antidote to the illusion of suffering.

I rolled snake eyes in life’s crap game. Reptilian id brain matter shredded old skin and identity theories. Retinas discerning space-time energy as light wave particles travelled on microscopic fibers to the cerebral cortex where data is received and analyzed for meaning. Meaning is a truth-value. Interpretation.

“Truth has few friends and they are suicides,” said Fernando Pessoa author of The Book of Disquiet.

Overloaded synapses crashed in psychotic bliss. Interpretation demolished nonrenewable resources in space-time fourth dimensions. You enter another dimension beyond sight and sound.

My hourglass sand approaches empty. I reversed it catching up to fiction-memory and truth-story. Weave on.

Leaves left winter’s tree in an airborne tag dance. They do not fall far from the Tree of Life. Frayed Tibetan Lung-Tao prayer flag horses beamed air current prayers. Perception and sensation ceased. I dissolved in the wake. Up.

“Time is a flock of nightingales,” said Albert Einstein. He added one plus one - “Experience is your education. Everything else is just information.”

A pulsating vein needle sang disconnected photons.

A three-act Greek play craved characters.

Her daughter in intensive care sang, “I feel free,” while carving her death mask.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Laos

We Gave Them Everything

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles, gold lame Apsara dancers, 232 species of black and red butterflies, 1.5 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry, Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups, crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks, begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks and whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage, narrow boned white oxen pulling carts, 18 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness, letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered, Where have we been, Where did we go, What did we see, Where are we, How do we feel, Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in SEA. One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

The Language Company

Burn your fear

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Manipulated by the collective unconscious and a pervasive system of socialization control mechanisms, consumer sheep were happy. The subtle influence of right wing conservatives and media addiction bought idiots. Facing their mind-numbing daily grind with heart breaking choices sheep needed someone/something to Control them.

Accepting responsibility for their freedom was scary.

Intelligent centered ones feeling gratitude and empathy in their heart danced with Death. Everyone lives and dies.

“You work, breed and get slaughtered,” said an Asian child with a junior philosopher badge.

It’s essential to die once while you’re alive. Get it out of the way.

*

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it. Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, and paths, destinations obliterated through discovery, reminding memory. They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences.

Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry. Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice. Voices of reason, comedy, and tragedy are skintight drum stories.

They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, and illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road I gifted the brick to three Asian women in Saigon. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it. It took all three to carry it.

They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome. After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening. People need to break down before they break through.

Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART