Creative People

I'm one of those people who’s learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to. An open hand holds everything.

Grasping is suffering.

I am a metaphor looking for a meaning. There are no metaphors, only observations.

I acknowledged kairos - the shuttle passes through openings in warp and weft threads, making things happen, creating new forms, new fabrics inside my word loom. The shuttle voice allowed me to recover, preserve and interpret tales.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Drifting some said. If I had one red cent for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis. Settling down was not an option.

I am a compass without a needle.

Yes. I could bid on blessings. I’d sacrifice pre-linguistic symbols and create silent metaphorical abstractions. My linguistic skills would evolve into love into discursive logic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic iron and copper paintings create a secret symphony of ancient stories in a Spanish cave.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstract explains my small empty self to anybody anything by virtue off who I was, am, and will be.

Life is a palimpsest. A game of experiences we get to play.

country of amnesia

We'd like to say hello to all our friends in China.

They cannot read this because 50,000+ internet gremlins block it from their bleeding eyes.

Words like June 4, democracy and freedom are scrubbed.

Today the Country of Amnesia says to the 1.7 billion sheep:

ATTENTION COMRADES!

June 4th, 1989 did not happen. Collective brains were wiped clean. Just blend in. 

Leo remembered hauling buckets of night soil shit to fertilize fields near his straw and mud hovel in the Gobi.

It was the price he’d paid for quest-ioning Authority at Beijing Normal U.

- Why do we have to read Mao’s little red book? It's mush for pigs, he’d asked Authority.

- Because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

- This shit stinks.

- Here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He escaped to Australia.

Living in exile with silence and cunning he burned through levels of existence.

Survivors heard a voice screaming from a classroom: Quest-ions are forbidden, said overworked, underpaid and undersexed Chinese teachers named Authority and Social Control.

Ask at your peril. Anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a quest-ion with confidence is shamed or silently beaten into silence. We will murder your family.

You will be condemned to a Reform Through Re-education Labor Unit near the Gobi.

Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day.

Conformity breeds conformity. Get in line and shut up.

whisper

There is a Native American legend that says, " If you have a secret wish, capture a butterfly and whisper your wish to it. Since butterflies cannot speak, your secret is ever safe in their keeping.

"Release the butterfly, and it will carry your wish to the Great Spirit, who alone knows the thoughts of butterflies. By setting the butterfly free, you are helping to restore the balance of nature, and your wish will surely be granted." 

brainwashed

One day it happened that a senior female Chinese university student majoring in English found the courage to say, I don't speak-talk English. My English is poor.

I have no self-esteem. I am too shy.

I am afraid of losing face if I make mistakes in front of a foreigner.

My parents, peers and teachers in socialistic group-think (Oh, George Orwell, where art thou?) reality taught me, or perhaps a better word is brainwashed me into believing, heart and soul that if my English isn't perfect I shouldn't try, especially in front of foreigners.

I’ve learned the less I do, the fewer mistakes I make and the less criticism I face.

I feel safer. I am a robot.

Autonomy and independent critical free thinking are anathema in my comfortable world.

On the other hand, give me a cell phone and I can set world records for text dial-a-log.

Especially when I am sad, lonely and bored.

I know people in the West use the Internet to seek information. Here it’s about entertainment.

I love chat rooms and the TV idiot box where I can give away my consciousness.

cross a border

I’m sitting in the air conditioned nightmare of an office and the maintenance chief comes by and tells me a little story.

He’s worried. He’s married to a woman from Mexico living here illegally. She migrated to the Pacific Northwest supporting herself doing migrant labor. Picking fruit. Delicious apples.

They met through friends, dated and got hitched. She doesn’t speak Engish and now they pay a lawyer BIG BUCKS to handle her immigration case getting exercise jumping through INS hoops and she’s preparing to head south and the chief’s afraid to death she will cross the border and never return.

In Mexico she broke down after her first husband, depressed about lack of work, sat down in front of her one night, opened a bottle of rubbing alcohol and drank the whole thing. He started foaming at the mouth, went into spasms and died in her arms as his liver broke down. 

That’s why she left.