Creative People

I'm one of those people who has learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to.

I am a metaphor looking for a meaning.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Floating. If I had a penny for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis!

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. Shamans experienced visions for the tribe. Oral transmission said a Griot.

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

Life is a palimpsest. Trade security for adventures.

“There are two stories in the world,” I said to the Moroccan as we carried boarding cards through the Casablanca terminal. “A stranger arrives in a village or a stranger leaves a village.”

“Yes,” said Omar, a blind writer overhearing their conversation, “we might add there are also stories about love between two people, stories about love between three people and stories about the struggle for power. Stories are about characters revealing emotion through dialogue and action.”

He handed me a pile of yellow papers wrapped in rushes.

“A gift for you. It contains a farrago of evidence. Keep it simple.”

“Thank you.” Where do I find you?”

“In the caves south of Ronda. It’s a long walk.” He disappeared into Baraka.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation, A Memoir

Human beings and creatures flowering and dying in the void.

A Griot

Greetings,

One day I write “Blues Music Story” on the board. I discuss the African Diaspora, history,slavery, working on farms for little money and how they gathered to make music at the end of long hard days.

How the blues manifested as men and women left home on an economic migration for better jobs just like China now. How the blues allowed them to express their feelings about loss, separation from family and friends. How it's a “feeling, emotional, deep in your spirit soul,” music.

I pulled out my blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a chochin,” in Mandarin.

“Want to hear some blues?”

“Yes!”

I blew some sweet slow stuff and then picked up the tempo and blasted rifts and wailing train whistles. Gave them a real sense of the music.

When you're a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates the oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales; considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of myths and legends - or a magician, soothsayer and Adept this comes naturally.

“You see. I am merely a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

Then we did a lesson about how to make a sandwich.

How to assemble the ingredients; bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce.

Suddenly, new music began. Everyone ran to a window.

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building towering above a gated community filled with designer homes, wild tropical green blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo's, sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs and swimming across flooded streams of dreams.

In his right hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal. He was on a bridge between the stone age and the iron age. Tap-tap-tap. Music flaking dust. He started singing an old village song remembering his family and rice paddies, feeling the wind carry his song.

A young girl using a broom made of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm creating a symphony.

Metta.