One River

Greetings,

One key to survival in the jungle is to be silent. Patient. Move slowly.

A stranger goes for a bike ride on a dusty red potholed road. Very common, these roads. It runs parallel to a river.

Locals stare and then forget. They are busy trying to find food.

He's been been on this river before. The river in the world and other places. It winds past simple bamboo thatched homes. There are one, perhaps two rooms. Wood floor. The rear opens to the river. They have wells for drinking, washing, bathing. If the home's on stilts, the lower area is for hammocks, resting in the shade, family gatherings and eating.

Palm trees line the road. Plastic bags litter the river and adjacent patches of dry unproductive soil. He sees one garden. It's large and fenced off with barb wire, wood slats, fragmented sticks and string. The vegetables are bright green and strong. 

Rare middle class glass and brass stone homes scream "We are rich!" They are monsters with stone front yards, weird plastic toy animals, high cement walls, sharp lancer fences and imposing gates. Protection from whom or what? Bored butterflies? Machete wielding lizards?

Metta.

They discuss love and space travel.

Bliss Salad

Greetings,

Ah, spring. Let's begin with a delicious Blissful Salad food poem recipe. Directions for making something.

Gather and prepare the following:

• feta cheese
• bacon
• green peace
• olives
• lettuce
• tomato
• cucumber
• Khmer herb mustard
• olive oil dressing
• garlic bread

Work your culinary magic. Enjoy. 

Metta.

He has been carving for two years.

Carry On

Greetings,

The Australian nurses leave tonight. They fly "home" to family and friends after three weeks on the ground.

Some, certainly not all, pack their Cambodian "humbling life changing experience" in their hand luggage.

One wonders, "how can I get my entire humbling, lfe changing experience into this very small bag?" Her question may trouble her for a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year or the rest of her short sweet life. It's her experience.  She knows it's impossible to check it all the way through. She has to to carry it. 

She gets it ready. She assembles it on the floor along with fragrant toilet articles, clothing and soft silk scarves. Her experience contains a poor village near Siem Reap. She knows and loves everyone because she lived there. She took care of the people. She cried herself to sleep every night. In the village are thirsty, hungry, exhausted, sick children, women and men. One woman alone takes care of 16 children. 

She puts this one little village and everyone into her bag. To utilize space she discards everything else. 

She saves weight because there is no clean drinking water. She throws in handfuls of cooked rice to give them nourishment during the long flight to Sydney. 

She doesn't know how many will survive. She's finally ready to take her personal humbling, lfe changing experience home.

Metta.

Dream street

Greetings,

I am dancing down the final farewell sing Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble down 20 words. Write one true sentence. 

Twenty little words. Twenty quick painless mini-stories about the 60-year old man last evening in the BLINKING LIGHT. An American or European, retired, a widower. Smoking, drinking a beer. He wears a drab flower print shirt. Alone. He calls someone.

Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He greets her, grasping both her hands expressing a deep gratitude, welcoming her. Back into his life. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love - his salvation from loneliness, sorrow, suffering and the pain of living.

He hands her the wine list.

'Anything you want. It's yours.' He is eternally grateful to know her. Receive her. 

'I want your heart,' she says. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation.

After a romantic quiet candlelight dinner they return to his hotel. They will smell and taste and laugh and sing and dance with each other for dessert. She will trace his spine with her fingers. He will rest his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat. Hearing the thump-thump-thump of the muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arteries. They will hold each other until dawn sweeps dream street.

For one night they know peace inside their healthy loving mutually beneficial addiction.

Metta.

Authorized to speak truth

According to me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

1. truth is classified. The source of truth concerning Everything is classified. Ossified.

Yes, I am authorized to say, with complete anonymity that truth is filtered, it is compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified. It hides inside a deeply buried locked black box. The key is classified. The key is not on a social network site designed to distract.

The key is, for the Time Being, a woman somewhere in India carrying the world on her back. She's the key. 

2. truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke. The big joke, the laugh track. Your tears speak streak truth, mangling truth.

3. truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia well said, (he was authorized to speak) - "Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides." 

4. truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source.

5. truth will provide more than 1 billion people with access to safe drinking water.

6. truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people worldwide who cannot read. Woman are 2/3 of this number.

7. 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.

8. 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 love. A sledgehammer.

Metta.